Family, land and a new chapter for an old property

Lucky Ducks Farm began long before it had a name.

Our home was built in 1890, and in the 1970s my grandparents, Ray “Ducky” and Velma Weidlich, moved here and raised their five daughters.

For our family, this was never just a house. It was where everyone gathered. My cousins and I spent countless hours running through the field, eating grapes from the vines, playing around the property and hanging around the old barn.

It was our own little community—a place where family was always nearby and you grew up surrounded by people you could love and trust.

My grandfather, Pap Ducky, was a hardworking man who loved growing his own food, fixing things and working around the property. You could often find him in the barn or underneath his lawn mower working on something.

My grandmother, Nannie Velma, brought a different kind of strength. She was incredibly kind and, in many ways, was the glue that kept the family connected. She helped make this house the place where daughters, grandchildren, cousins and extended family continued to gather.

Pap helped shape the character of the land.

Nannie helped shape the community around it.

And I still joke that I can remember the ice pops tasting the way the barn smelled.

The name Lucky Ducks Farm is largely a tribute to Pappy Ducky, but what we are building here is really a continuation of what both of my grandparents created: a place centered around family, hard work, generosity and people taking care of one another.

Bringing the property back to life

Years later, my parents purchased the property hoping to renovate it and turn it into a bed and breakfast.

They quickly discovered just how much work comes with a house and barn that have been standing for more than a century.

I eventually bought the property from them because I wanted to keep it in our family, preserve what my grandparents had built here and prevent it from becoming an overwhelming burden for my parents.

There was plenty of work waiting for us.

The barn was deteriorating badly. We replaced the roof in 2020, and I’m convinced that if we had waited much longer, we might have lost the building altogether. The house required major repairs as well, including structural work, reframing and significant electrical upgrades.

We knew restoring the property would take years.

But while working on the buildings, we also started looking at the land differently.

The sunflower field that became a garden

In 2020, we planted roughly 2,100 square feet of sunflowers for our wedding so friends and family could celebrate with us here at home.

Creating that field required bringing in compost, improving the soil and putting a tremendous amount of work into the ground.

After the wedding, we looked at everything we had built and thought:

Why turn it back into grass?

So we turned it into a garden.

What started as growing food for our own family gradually became something much more serious.

Like most new growers, we learned plenty by making mistakes. We fought weeds, dealt with deer and pests, experimented with different layouts and learned what worked—and what definitely didn’t.

Over the years I started studying small-scale farming more seriously. Books such as The Market Gardener and The Lean Farm, along with mentors and firsthand experience, changed the way we think about soil, permanent growing beds, efficiency and how much can be produced from a relatively small piece of land.

Our goal is to work with the property rather than against it.

We want healthy soil, clean water, responsible growing practices and a productive ecosystem that supports life around us. We continue working toward organic methods and better stewardship as we learn and improve.

That philosophy has gradually led us beyond vegetables into chickens, beekeeping and other ways of producing more of what our family and community can use.

Discovering gourmet mushrooms

One of those paths led to fungi.

I had always been interested in mushrooms, but watching Fantastic Fungi opened an entirely new world to me. It made the role fungi play in our bodies and our environment much more accessible and pushed me to keep learning.

As I researched gourmet mushroom production, I started paying closer attention to what was actually available in grocery stores.

Many specialty mushrooms simply didn’t look particularly fresh.

I learned that gourmet mushrooms often don’t travel especially well, yet much of what I was finding had traveled considerable distances before reaching local shelves.

That made me wonder whether there was an opportunity to produce specialty mushrooms much closer to the people actually eating them.

That curiosity became another important step in turning Lucky Ducks Farm from a family growing project into a real farm business.

As the farm develops, our offerings may include specialty mushrooms, seasonal produce, eggs, honey and other locally produced goods, based on what we can grow and produce well.

The farm that helped inspire DuckDrop

The more we learned about farming and entrepreneurship, the more we started looking at problems worth solving.

One of those problems was something my wife and I experienced ourselves.

We had talked for years about buying more of our food from local farms and small businesses. But when we actually tried to put together everything we wanted, we realized we might need to visit four or five different locations.

We wanted to support those businesses.

It simply wasn’t very convenient.

At the same time, operating the farm gave us a better understanding of the other side of the problem. Small producers already have plenty to do without each one having to build their own marketing, ordering and delivery operation.

That realization eventually helped inspire DuckDrop Local Delivery.

Lucky Ducks Farm and DuckDrop are separate businesses, but they grew from the same belief:

Local producers and local families should have an easier way to connect.

Lucky Ducks Farm will be one of the farms represented through DuckDrop—not the only one.

We want customers to discover and support the other growers, bakers, roasters, makers and small businesses around us too.

For us, success isn’t about becoming the only local business people buy from.

It’s about helping create a system where more local businesses can succeed together.

Something worth passing on

My grandparents created something special on this property.

My Pap Ducky brought the work ethic, self-reliance and connection to the land. Nannie Velma brought the kindness and sense of family that made this a place where everyone wanted to gather.

Our generation is working to preserve that legacy, restore the property and give the land a new purpose.

We hope what grows here eventually includes more than food.

We want this property and the larger Lucky Ducks vision to create knowledge, skills, opportunities and something worthwhile for the generations that come after us. We want young people to see that learning useful skills, growing food, building businesses and helping the people around you can strengthen an entire community.

Lucky Ducks Farm is still very much a work in progress.

We’re restoring.

We’re learning.

We’re growing.

And we are incredibly grateful to the family, friends, mentors, local businesses and community members who continue to believe in what we’re building.

Lucky Ducks started with family, land, hard work and people taking care of one another. We’re building its next chapter around good food, strong relationships and a stronger local community.