Our Story

Matt and Angela in the London Eye (2013) 

    Today I want to introduce the Johnson Homestead crew and share our backstory. At the helm are my husband and I. Matt and I met at a birthday party and never looked back. We were married in 2009, right after I graduated with a Bachelor's in Sociology from the University of Utah. College graduation was the only thing on my horizon for a long time growing up, so we spent a few years "floating" afterward. Matt joined the Army Reserves within a year of us being married, a mutual decision between us to help him get through college. I started working at a call center that paid decently enough to get us by, but I knew from the start I couldn't stay there forever. I stayed there while Matt finished boot camp and found a job that wasn't for him, and we rented a house that wasn't ours.
    Matt was deployed to the Middle East, and that launched us into the next phase of our life. I knew I needed to stay busy while he was gone, and my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, so a few changes happened rapidly. I moved back home with my mom within a month of Matt being deployed (I had no way to contact him first - this happened pretty rapidly and pretty spontaneously). I also enrolled in school to complete my Master's Degree, with the goal of finishing within the 12 months Matt was gone. That was a tremendous workload; I was working from 6-2:30 every day, then doing homework until about 8 or 9, but it paid off. Matt returned home safely a year later, and I graduated with my Master's Degree in Management and Human Resources shortly after.
     My degree opened up new doors and a better job, and Matt was able to afford the pay cut to take an entry-level job in Psychology while studying behavior health. This opened new doors for him, too. We were able to buy our own house in 2014 right as the housing market started getting crazy in Utah, and although we only had a .20 acre lot, we knew we wanted to maximize it. We'd been together through financial trouble while in school, through deployment to a harsh and hostile environment, through my mother's illness and subsequent recovery, and through a series of temporary living arrangements that never let us set down roots. Each of those left an impression.
    Our first year in our house, it was too late in the growing season to do much, and we were too broke from moving to change a lot. We began doing a few updates in the house and grew some things in planters, but we didn't have a successful harvest. The second year, we got chickens, which led to better fertilizer, which led to better gardens. That's where it all started.