Building a Basket Business and Community From Our Backyard

It’s where we grow food, raise chickens, homeschool our children, build chicken coops and Gathering Baskets, and welcome people into our greenhouse to learn skills that used to be part of everyday life. Somewhere along the way, it also became the place where a little business—and an even more unexpected community—started growing.

And all of this is happening alongside our regular lives. I still work in a busy ER, and my husband comes home from his own workday and often heads into the workshop to build chicken coops.

Some days I go from the noise and urgency of the Emergency Room to baskets waiting to be engraved, chickens that need tending, something in the garden that needs harvesting, homeschool work on the table, and a greenhouse that needs to be set up for the next workshop.

Sometimes it feels like I live two completely different lives, but somehow, they’ve become part of the same story.

When I first started making Gathering Baskets, I was building maybe one or two a week completely by myself. I would go to the store for materials, come home and cut every piece, drill the handle holes, cut the hardware cloth, stain, engrave, package each basket, and tuck a little welcome card inside before sending it on its way.

As more orders started coming in, I quickly realized that doing every single step myself wasn’t going to work anymore. But instead of moving the business somewhere else or hiring people in a traditional way, I started thinking about how I could make it work with the life and space we already had.

And somewhere along the way, I started inviting people in.

Now, once a week, I have what I call a little basket-making morning. A few people from our community come to our backyard and help with different stations—drilling handle holes, cutting hardware cloth, staining, and getting pieces ready for me to assemble, engrave, and package. In exchange, they can earn a little extra money or sometimes choose a Gathering Basket of their own.

Pictures on Monday …

We make coffee, usually have something homemade to snack on—often sourdough—and work together for a couple of hours. We talk, laugh, and get to know each other; somehow, a job that I was once doing completely by myself has become another way of gathering people together.

I don’t think I ever pictured a basket business looking quite like this. But I also don’t think I would want it any other way.

When Our Backyard Became a Place to Gather

The same thing slowly started happening with our greenhouse. I never had a big plan to turn it into a classroom or a place where people would come to learn. It started with my first sourdough workshops and my desire to share some of the traditional skills I loved. Then people started asking if I could teach other things—canning, gardening, chicken keeping, wood woodworking—and before I knew it, those conversations were slowly becoming classes.

The children’s woodworking workshops grew in much the same way. Our backyard started becoming this little place where people could come to make something, learn something new, and spend a couple of hours working with their hands.

One of my favorite parts is seeing how genuinely excited people are to learn a skill that I know. There is something really special about watching someone make their first loaf of bread, preserve something themselves, or watch a child proudly carry home something they built with their own hands.

And our children aren’t separate from any of this. The business, workshops, garden, and homestead have naturally become part of our homeschool. My youngest son helps me set up for classes and engrave baskets, and during children’s woodworking workshops, there are even times when he’ll show another child how to use a tool he’s comfortable with while I’m helping someone else.

They gets to watch his dad come home from work and build chicken coops, and they sees me make something with my hands and figure out how to turn an idea into a business.

They are growing up around gardens, chickens, woodworking, preserving food, and people coming together to learn from one another. There are a lot of lessons happening here that don’t necessarily come from a workbook.

Somewhere Between the ER and the Backyard

None of this means we’re living some perfectly slow homestead life. I still work in a busy Emergency Room, and I can spend a shift surrounded by alarms, people, urgency, and everything that comes with emergency medicine, then come home to baskets, chickens, homeschool, sourdough, sawdust, and whatever needs attention in the garden.

Balancing those two lives is probably one of the hardest parts of all of this, and we definitely don’t always get it right. I learned that particularly well when I went home to Brazil for three weeks and left my husband responsible for keeping up with the baskets. Let’s just say we discovered pretty quickly that our system still needed a little work.

There are days when baskets are waiting to be engraved, homeschool isn’t finished, the garden needs attention, the greenhouse needs to be cleaned for a workshop, and dinner still needs to be made. Sometimes something simply has to wait until tomorrow.

And the thuth is, none of this would work without our family. My in-laws have been such an important part of this journey. They help with the kids, step in during worshops, lend hand when I need it and somehow continue to support all the new ideas I come up with it.

There are so many things happening behind the scene that never male into a picture or a post. This little business may have grown from an idea I had, but it has taken the whole family, adjusting, and believing in it to make it possible.

But I think that’s also part of the story too.

More Than a Basket Business

The more this little business grows, the more I realize that what I love isn’t only making things. I love helping other people discover how good it feels to make something themselves—to grow food, preserve something from the garden, build something with their own hands, keep chickens, or learn a skill that generations before us probably wouldn’t have thought twice about knowing.

Those things are part of our everyday life here.

We garden, keep chickens, preserve food, raise and butcher some of our own meat, make things from scratch, and keep learning how to become a little more self-sufficient. We’re certainly not doing everything ourselves, and we’re still learning all the time, but there is something incredibly satisfying about knowing how to do some of these things with your own hands.

Somewhere along the way, I realized other people were craving some of that too.

People who came for one workshop started coming back for another. Parents brought their children. People who shared an interest in gardening, chickens, woodworking, sourdough, or preserving food started talking to one another, and some of those conversations became friendships.

I thought I was building a small business in our backyard. I didn’t realize I was also building a community.

We don’t have a big farm, a commercial workshop, or a beautiful studio somewhere in town. We have a suburban backyard, a garden, a greenhouse, chickens, a home workshop, a homeschool table, and a family figuring things out as we go.

And maybe that’s one of the things I hope people take from our story. You don’t necessarily need acres of land, the perfect setup, or an entirely different life to start growing some of your own food, learning traditional skills, making things with your hands, or becoming a little more self-sufficient.

So much of what we’re building started simply by using what we already had.

Maybe it can start right where you are.

Thank you for supporting our small family business, for showing up, learning with us, and becoming part of this little community we never expected to build.

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