the “real” grumble farm (A RECLAMATION)
emphasis on farm; sub-emphasis on grumblE
You may or may not know this, but the idea or visualization for "Grumble Farm" first materialized ten years ago in the form of a made-up fantasy in my head.
I dreamt it up when I was at one of the lowest points in my life, riddled with depression and anxiety shortly before my cancer diagnoses back in 2015.
Because I was so unhappy, so unhealthy, and felt so incredibly "stuck" in that reality, the idea of "Grumble Farm" became a happy place that I would escape to in my mind during moments when I thought I was quite literally going to die.
Whether I was having a panic attack from behind the locked door of my body piercing studio, crying quietly from my hospital bed, or bed-ridden at home with a literal bag of shit attached to my stomach, I would close my eyes and imagine an alternate reality where I was happy, healthy, strong, at peace, and completely free from all of the systems-in-place that I began to realize were playing a huge part in keeping me both mentally and physically ill.
This vision was a beautiful meadow at golden hour with the sun low on the horizon. In the meadow, there was a modest and humble country home, a peaceful garden, and a small handful of happy and beloved farm animals like chickens and goats.
The only people in my meadow were my Mom and my partner (at the time), and then there were my two darling pugs, Jonas and Chloe; although there were other pugs, too. Young pugs, old pugs, big pugs, little pugs, fawn pugs, black pugs. Just a sweet, cute, funny little grumble of pugs all frolicking around in my meadow, making me laugh and laugh and laugh.
In my fantasy, I grew and raised my own food and spent most of my time working with and creating clean, nutritious food in "The Grumble Kitchen", untouched by anyone else's nefarious and corrupt corporate interests regarding the food I depended upon them for.
In my fantasy, I never, ever had to show up for a shift at a job as an employee, a meaningless and replaceable cog in the machine of somebody else's vision and dream at the soul-sucking expense of building my own.
Instead, in my fantasy, I was gifted with the ability to spend my time as I pleased, doing the things I loved and that brought my mind, body, soul & spirit nothing but inner and outer joy - growing and cooking my own food, tending to and caring for my animals, creating art, reading, writing stories, cultivating and nurturing a meaningful community of like-minded people, resting, and simply being - always, always in nature.
But the most important part of everything about my fantasy was that I never had to be separated from my pugs again.
I never had to leave them unexpectedly for an emergency hospital visit for myself where I wouldn't be home again for months at a time, afraid that I would never actually return.
I never had to leave them to go and sit trapped in a tattoo and body piercing studio for 9 hours that brought me nothing but misery.
I never had to leave them for anything at all, and I was free to spend as much time as I wanted caring for them and making sure they were having the best experience ever during their short trip on earth.
And so, I started to call my fantasy Grumble Farm.
Whenever my Mom and I were together during these hard times and I was feeling sick or anxious or depressed, we would talk about Grumble Farm together to keep me in one piece. To keep me getting out of bed in the morning. To give me something to hold onto when it felt like there was nothing at all and I was endlessly adrift at sea, choking from the salt water filling my lungs.
My Attempts at “Faking It Until I Make It”
Over the past ten years, I've been trying so fucking hard in various ways to actualize this dream - to bring that vision out from my head and into my physical, tangible realty and surrounding environment. To climb "up" from the bottom, and to create something from nothing.
My first attempt at extracting the Grumble Farm dream from my mind was starting Grumble Farm Pug Rescue and Re-homing Assistance, which I eventually "launched" on a whim at the end of 2017 in a desperate "fuck it" moment after my pug Chloe died unexpectedly in a tragic accident.
The motivation to start rescuing was partially due to being so sick and tired of only "fantasizing" about Grumble Farm, and not making an active effort to make it a reality in my life; but also as a way to honour Chloe's life and channel my grief into something meaningful.
Oh, Chloe… my forever Queen.
Not long after I decided to start, my pug rescue efforts quickly snowballed, and all of a sudden I found myself caught up in the all-consuming whirlwind of the dog rescue world. I accumulated an insane amount of debt and blew up my long-term relationship as a result, but I did end up surrounding myself with dozens upon dozens upon dozens of pugs full-time, which is kind of what I had been fantasizing about (just maybe... not quite like that. I must have sent up my order wrong or something - definitely a "careful what you wish for" kind of situation).
When my partner ended our relationship unexpectedly on New Years Eve in 2018 - black-out drunk in the middle of the night, by packing a bag and driving away in a taxi while I cried locked in our bedroom with 7 concerned little dogs - my pug rescue efforts inevitably came to a screeching halt. This was ok with me, because I had no more available credit to rescue dogs with anymore, and I had become completely unable to care for myself due to the around-the-clock commitments of dog rescue. In time, I came to understand why he left (but never the way he chose to do it).
But, that meant I had to figure out what I was going to do next, and what was to become of "Grumble Farm Pug Rescue" without rescuing anymore.
Oh, Jonie. What are we going to do now?
It took me about 6 months after my partner left to rehabilitate, re-home, and transfer my last remaining rescue pugs and owner surrenders - some of whom were with me, and others of whom were with foster families I had placed them with. By May of 2019, I dropped the "pug rescue" part of Grumble Farm's name on Instagram, and returned back to simply Grumble Farm.
In an attempt to re-build some semblance of financial independence outside of my common-law relationship (with my own three little pugs in tow - Jonas, Fern and Ivy), I started advertising breed-specific pug care services, because I sure did know a lot about them and their care at this point. This was kind of crazy, because I had moved out of the home I had lived in with my ex and into a sort of sketchy low-income apartment in downtown Calgary that had a "2 pet limit".
Seriously - I was sneaking 10-15 pugs in and out of this fucking apartment for almost the entirely of 2019.
And that's what "Grumble Farm" ended up becoming as I shared about Jonas, Fern, Ivy and friends - whether in our weird little apartment, or bombing around the city together in my Mazda 3 for walkies (the original "pug-mo-bile").
On the side, I had managed to find a job as a poolside breakfast server at a super douchey hotel down the block from my apartment; the person who hired me was actually one of my walking clients, who just-so-happened to be the food and beverage manager there.
I served there from 4 am to noon, leaving all of the pugs alone at home in my apartment. When my shift finally ended, I would run down the block home - ripping my serving apron off on the way - before sneaking everyone out of the apartment building (two by two, like Noah's arc) and loading everyone up in the pug-mo-bile to disappear into the forest for a hike. Then we would go home, cook dinner together in "The Grumble Kitchen" in my tiny apartment, and I would wake up and do it all over again.
“I’ll be right back, stay quiet!” I would say to a rotating grumble of pugs as I stepped out my apartment door at 3:45 each morning to go to work.
My job as a poolside breakfast server ended up blessing me with short-term disability benefits after a three month probationary period.
Qualifying for these benefits through my "employer" - the hotel - enabled me to take the time I needed to undergo the ileostomy reversal procedure I had to cancel when my ex had left me a year prior, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to take the time off to recover on my own.
I underwent this ileostomy reversal procedure in October of 2019, and received short-term disability benefits until March of 2020, giving me about 5 months of paid medical or disability leave.
“Calgary’s Crazy Bag-less Lady” is what I captioned this photo when I shared it on Instagram to announce the success of my very long-awaited ileostomy reversal procedure.
Since this was the first time I was able to fully slow down, I devoted every moment I had to figuring out how I could actualize my original dream of "Grumble Farm".
At the time, I had JUST reached the once-coveted 10K followers on Instagram, and I wanted to find a way to turn Grumble Farm into a business beyond just "pug walking and sitting services" in Calgary - because after everything I had been through, the last thing I wanted was to return back to the grind of survival, working as a poolside breakfast server while sneaking dozens of little dogs in and out of my small inner-city apartment.
I wanted to find my meadow.
I got to work sharing content about my life post-cancer with the pugs, and created a make-shift website selling custom dog bandanas online. However, my short-term disability benefits ended in March of 2020, and I was scheduled to go back to work serving fried eggs to Jersey Shore looking dudes lounging hungover at the pool. I was panicking, because I felt myself slipping into a similar situation to the one I was in when I was diagnosed with cancer 5 years prior.
“Healing does not mean going back to the way things were before,” I chanted to myself each morning as the date I was scheduled to show up for my first shift back approached - a quote by Ram Dass that I kept framed on my bedside table while I was undergoing “treatment”, a baby bottle of chemotherapy sitting on my hip as it slowly dripped poison into my veins.
Two days before I was to don my stupid striped apron to return to work at the pool, I was laid off due to Covid lockdowns and transitioned onto EI (or CERB - Canada's "Emergency Response Benefit" to Covid). At the very same time, Jesse rolled into my life in a bright orange Jeep Renegade, and quickly became my lockdown boyfriend. As the pandemic craziness got more and more intense, and I lost all of my pug walking and sitting clients anyway, I decided to sell the pug-mo-bile, packed up Jonas, Fern, and Ivy in Jesse's bright orange Jeep, and moved to the Kootenays.
This chapter of Grumble Farm’s story was when the things I was sharing were most in alignment with my original vision and dream. Somehow, I had managed to ride this wave of finally escaping the city and landing in the middle of a relatively untouched forest at the edge of a pristine lake in the middle of a wild mountain valley. We were fishing and exploring and I had never felt more free.
Jesse was into photography and videography at the time, and the pugs and I became his subject matter. We did photoshoots and created YouTube videos and other content for Instagram and social media together, and I felt a hundred steps closer to my original fantasy of Grumble Farm, even though we were still just renting a delapitated little apartment that didn't even have a backyard. That didn't seem to matter, though, with all of the wild land around us - the entire Kootenays was my meadow.
Not long after our big move, I hired a designer to create digital graphics and a brand for Grumble Farm with a little logo and a website and an online store with merch and little pug-related accessories, and that's when I launched Patreon, too.
This era for Grumble Farm eventually peaked when Jonas died and we moved to the cabin property, which was an ODDLY accurate manifestation of the logo I had originally created - a little log cabin perched high up on a hill in a deep mountain valley, facing a vast, sparkling lake.
For the nine months we lived at the cabin property, I was living in a dream. I was living my dream! My little Grumble Farm fantasy. Even though it looked a bit different - we were still just renting, couldn't afford our own land/home/property, couldn't build a chicken coop, couldn't plant a garden, couldn’t buy goats... and also, Jonas didn't live long enough to follow me there to live it with me...
...it still felt like the closest I had EVER been to finding my little meadow, and I perceived it as a well-earned gift from Jonas and Chloe’s spirits above.
We love you, Mama. Here’s what you’ve always dreamed about…
I woke up every day with tears in my eyes I was so happy and grateful, and the content I was creating with Jesse at that time was the closest I had ever come to being in true alignment with the original vision in my head of what Grumble Farm both looked & felt like.
Until Jesse's brain tumour diagnoses at the beginning of 2024, when we had to let it go and I watched my dream fall through my fingers like sand and disappear, back into the fantasy that lived in my head.
This is when I set off on my Nomadic Pet and Farm Sitting Adventure last year with Fern and Ivy, taking care of other people’s farms, barn animals, and rural properties while they were away. I vlogged the entire adventure, hoping the continued sharing of my pull towards chasing the dream of rural farm life would reach and resonate with more people than it did.
And while the results of my efforts on YouTube fell painfully short of my expectations, the skills I learned from taking care of other people’s farms proved to be invaluable. This work allowed me to align with the true vibration of my own dream life at the “real” Grumble Farm, blessing me with a deep sense of the freedom that I simply cannot live without. And one day, I hope I can apply everything I learned to the real Grumble Farm.
EMPHASIS ON “FARM”, SUB-EMPHASIS ON “GRUMBLE”
The above story illustrates how, over time, the emphasis of my content online has primarily focused on the “Grumble” part, and never really too consistently on the “Farm” part. And this makes sense, seeing as how I still haven't found a real farm to share about, and Grumble Farm’s audience quickly became saturated with pug people as I shared about the pugs.
But with the pugs successfully “taking over” the original Grumble Farm vision over the years, the sharing of my journey towards the dream of finding my little farm with the pugs also faded into the background - along with the underlying values that served as the foundation for it.
And lately, I've been feeling called to return to the original dream since the name first popped into my head as a fantasy I would escape to during some of my darkest hours through healing from cancer: a real farm that I lived on with my pugs as a big "f*ck you" to the system that had made and kept me (and so many others) so incredibly sick and dependent in the first place.
Moving away from the city and over to the Kootenays with Jesse & the pugs back in the spring of 2020 was a huge, momentous step in the direction of attempting to chase and achieve the original Grumble Farm dream.
But as someone deeply in debt and on disability, it's continued to feel impossible to actualize the fantasy of buying land and starting a little farm/homestead.
Instead, I've tried to do my best to live in alignment with my values of freedom - time, location, food, medical, financial - and the lifelong pursuit of things like slow living and self or community sufficiency, from within the confines and limitations of the various rentals that Jesse and I have lived in so far with the pugs.
This desire for this freedom-based, “return to the land”, off-the-grid-inspired lifestyle does not come generationally to me, and hearing "aspirational" stories of other people quitting their corporate jobs, selling their homes and "moving to the country" to start homesteading isn't actually aspirational to me, it's a little bit frustrating.
I was born in Toronto and spent my entire young adult life accumulating debt, navigating various mental and health issues, and struggling to stay afloat in Calgary - which is why it's always felt I'm starting from the bottom with nothing and nobody in pursuit of building it (except for Grumble Farm's Patrons & online following).
However, just because I'm continuing to chase an unlikely dream with close to nothing doesn't mean I'm willing to give up on it. And if I end up on my deathbed without ever having actualized the “real” Grumble Farm - at least I'll have peace knowing I never gave up on myself, against all odds.
The “Real” Grumble Farm: A Reclamation
It's clear to me that my heart lies with sharing about my ongoing journey towards farming, homesteading, self-sufficiency and rural living, and I intend for the things I share moving forward to better reflect my long-standing aspirations towards this lifestyle. And I mean, who knows - maybe continuing to share the pursuit of it a little more clearly is what will finally make Grumble Farm real, one day.
So here’s my Grumble Farm reclamation declaration - to the internet, and to the universe at large:
I WANT TO GROW AND RAISE MY OWN FOOD ON LAND I OWN ONE DAY WITH MY BELOVED PUGS BY MY SIDE, AND I WANT TO CALL IT GRUMBLE FARM.
Is that clear enough?
While I don't plan to stop sharing about Fern & Ivy in my vlogs, writing, and other online sharing, I do plan on reclaiming the original vision for Grumble Farm - a real, tangible place where I imagine inviting you over to snuggle whatever pugs I have with me at that time, cooking you a farm-grown meal in the Grumble Kitchen that we get to enjoy together while listening to the cows moo gently off in the distance, and laughing about just how wild and weird and beautiful this experience on earth is.
And I hope you still want to join us as the pugs and I continue our march forward towards the original dream ❤️🧡💙🌿
Thanks for still being here,
P.S. If the idea of the “real” Grumble Farm doesn't resonate or align with your values or lifestyle (farming/homesteading, agriculture & holistic animal husbandry, the pursuit of self/community sufficiency & sustainability, and the burning desire to experiment with living off-grid-ish), and you'd rather only see the “pug stuff” - I've decided to start a brand new IG page specifically for Fern and Ivy called @thegirliegoos ❤️🧡 While I’ll still be sharing about Fern & Ivy (along with any additional pugs) through Grumble Farm, The Girlie Goos will be our dedicated “pug page” now 🥰
