Our Farm

People often ask me if I always wanted to be a farmer/own a farm/have farm animals. My answer is always no. I had dreams of living in a neighborhood with family and dogs. My husband and I have lived near our current farm for years and walked and ran by the property, often saying that if it ever went up for sale we would buy it. We loved its small amount of land, its pond, and the large, old trees. However, the barn and animals never factored into the daydream. One day we were about to head out of town for a trip, and we saw the for sale sign. We called our realtor and asked to see the property, putting an offer on it electronically as we drove on our trip that evening.

There was a house on the property, built in the 1830s, and our original plan was to keep it but to have it renovated. When we returned from our trip and heard that the house was ours, we started the demo ourselves and scheduled to meet several renovation companies. We found, after several meetings, that it would take a multi-year, expensive plan to get the house where we wanted it, so we tore it down. During excavation, we found that there were more issues we hadn’t even planned on that would have increased our price like those HGTV shows where they call the owners with “more bad news”… like the 7-foot, uncapped well full of water right under the living room floor.

We met with our builder, repositioned the house so our back windows looked out onto our pond, and the building began. We put up a garden and walked from our then house which was only .25 miles away to work on it. We had someone come to replace the siding and pour a concrete floor in the barn on the property but later learned it was in terrible shape and it, too, was knocked down and replaced. There is still one garage building on the property that was here when we purchased it. The barn we had built is bigger and has insulation and water, which are nice improvements.

Well, once you build a nice barn, you have to fill it, right? We moved into the farm in February 2020, right before the pandemic, and proceeded to get our first 9 chicks. Our daughter had come home from college to attend class online due to the pandemic and my husband and I were also working from home. We three attended “chicken breaks” throughout the day so that batch was handled quite a bit and it shows in their interactions with people.

That summer we added our first four goats to the family, followed by a cat. We love it, here, with so much nature around us, but where we are still so close to neighborhoods and other creature comforts we appreciate. It is definitely home.