Storm tips RV, injures couple
Jody Rhodes looks over the damage to her neighbors’ RV at the Oak Forest RV Park in far East Austin. Powerful storms earl y Monday knocked over the vehicle, forcing emergency workers to cut a hole in the roof to get the couple inside to the hospital. The storms knocked out power to thousands and dumped 8 to 9 inches of rain in some areas.
In 2006, Anita and Jim McHaney were in an urban rat race. Retirement was still years away for the couple, who were working as a nurse and engineering consultant in Houston, but they’d already sketched out an ambitious second act that would boost their retirement savings and get them out of the city.
Their plan: Retire and bring in extra income by selling fresh and pickled produce at farmers’ markets. They spent their weekends scouting out properties before buying 10 acres in Robertson County, about an hour and a half northeast of Austin, and naming it Berry Ridge Farm.
“We’re country kids,” said Jim McHaney. They’d both worked to “get the heck out of the country and go to the big city,” and now they were yearning to return to their roots.
When Jim McHaney retired in 2013, the couple started growing their first crops there — kale, col- lard greens, beets — which they tied with twine and sold by the bundle at a Saturday morning market in Brazos Valley. With just the two of them tending the farm, it was physically exhausting work. Still, they had early success.
“We’ve been selling out every week,” Anita McHaney told a local paper in 2014. They found their land was particularly conducive to growing root vegetables — “you would not believe the beets we grew,” Anita McHaney said. The only crop they struggled with, she noted, were cucumbers.
Selling pickled produce had always been part of the McHaneys business plan. Pickles were a “value-added product,” Jim McHaney explained, that could be sold on a incident