As I mentioned in my first post, we live on a small farm (around 36 acres). I wish it were 3600, but 36 is honestly more than I can handle at times. Like many “bi-vocational” farmers, my husband has a full-time job, so I manage the farm most of the time. We’ve had this place now for over ten years. It’s hard to believe that it’s been that long.
I grew up on a beef farm, and my husband always loved animals. Pretty early in our marriage, we decided that the suburbs were NOT for us: just too many people, too close together, and many of them with very different worldviews and priorities than our own.
To make a long story short, we got out. We found some “for-sale-by-owner” land with a fairly large c. 1969 house that needed some work. In some ways it’s still a work in progress, and it probably always will be. No matter what we do, this won’t be a “gentleman’s farm” or a fashionable neo-Victorian mansion. We’ve built barns and outbuildings and fences and done lots of work, but it’s a practical, functional place. Most homesteads and small farms are, although the magazines would have you think every farm but yours is either elegant and brand-new or quaintly picturesque.
This place suits us and provides some of our food. We have a garden that provides a decent supply of vegetables, and an old pear tree and some plums that really produce heavily about every-other-year. In the past few years we’ve added some figs that are doing well. I hope to get a decent crop for the first time this year, and we’re trying to put in more pears and some apples (they don’t always grow very well here). I prefer the wild dewberries to the domesticated blackberries, so there’s no need to grow them, and my family doesn’t really like peaches, which DO grow well here.
As for animals, we have a real menagerie: cows, goats, sheep, rabbits, chickens, dogs, ducks, horses, donkeys, and a few cats. I still keep a herd of around 40 goats. At one point, we had a kidding season where we had 94 kids (with all the triplets and quads), and I told my husband that we had to down-size; that was just too many goats. We were bottle-feeding over 20 kids, and I couldn’t keep up with it. We are going more toward cows, as they are hardier and (in general) need less care than the goats. We also have about 20 wool-sheep, but I’m downsizing those, too, because I can’t shear that many anymore. We had some pigs, but the sow was so aggressive that we finally got rid of them. She was a great mother, and always had a good litter, but she’d just about come over a 4 foot fence after you if she heard one of her babies squeal. It wasn’t safe and it made selling the babies a dangerous proposition. We’ll probably just get a couple of barrows and raise them for meat. We do have two small ponds, and have stocked one of them periodically, but that pond has turned over twice, killing some beautiful catfish each time. Still, it’s a source for water and provides the occasional catfish and a few perch.
So that’s our set-up, and we’re constantly refining it and making it more practical and easier to manage. It’s amazing how much difference ten years will make in what you can and can’t do easily.
Right now I’m listening to the thunder and waiting for the deluge. We just put the goats in the barn, after having to go and rescue a blind goat who’d wandered over to the neighbor’s somehow. The two ponies can get in their lean-to. The sheep have a shed, and the cows, donkeys, and other horses will go to the woods. Three of the dogs are up here with me. The lights are blinking already, and we may be on generator power before long. The lights blinked again. I’ll say goodbye for now.