this is a story about love, and a brave choice to pursue a dream to create a place to celebrate love + joy
When we got engaged in 2020 we began to tour wedding venues, but every time we left with the feeling “I want to get married at our own venue, on our own farm”. So, we decided to wait to tie the knot until we could do it at our place. However, at the time, we were living on Vancouver Island where real estate prices for farm properties was way beyond our capacity. Nevertheless, we told everyone we met about our dream but the sentiment was usually “sounds great but good luck with that”.
Then, in August 2023, we came to Cape Breton for the first time together for our friend’s wedding and discovered why tourism Cape Breton’s slogan is “your heart will never leave”. We fell in love with Cape Breton, and Cape Bretoners more specifically. Just as we had been, we told everyone about our dream and the response was “you should move here and do it”.
After the wedding as we were driving back across the causeway and we said to this island we had fallen in love with, “we’ll be back as soon as we can”. Well, you’ve got to be careful what you ask for because within a few weeks of returning to BC Percy had a time-sensitive job offer from Nova Scotia Health. So, with 2 weeks notice we packed up our stuff and started driving east. We left Nova Scotia on September 3rd and returned October 28th.
After house-hunting over the winter we bought our farm in the spring. 12 acres, 1 house, 1 barn, and 1 incredible view - all in need of a lot of love. We moved in and set about getting the house into liveable shape and planted 5 acres of sunflowers into the field that had been rented by a local farmer for 20+ years.
When the flowers began to bloom we opened the farm for a sunflower u-pick in August and welcomed over 1,000 people over the course of about a week. It was the most joyful time of our lives so far.
In the spring of 2024 we launched a crowdfunding campaign to help us raise start up capital for the farm - and were overjoyed and so grateful when we hit our $20,000 goal. This is truly the farm that community built, and we are so excited to share with our community the spoils of our work that was supported by their generosity.
Between us we hold many different identities and lived experiences. We are a part of many communities who have long showed incredible resilience in the face of oppression and because of this we know that it is impossible to survive without joy. It is impossible to fight the fight that is required to change this world without periods of respite, without periods of rest and without moments of joy. And we also know that there are important things that we all need in order to find those moments - community, opportunity, beauty.
It is our dream to create a place where every member of our communities can come to celebrate their love, mark the important moments in their stories, take a break from their lives, and be nourished by flowers, food, and good times. It is our dream to create a place that heals the land and the people, that contributes to the ecosystem and the community. And in many ways, that dream has already come true and we are so grateful and excited to continue to build Ager Lane.
xx Clary and Percy
