We Moved Into Our Farm House!

It’s been a LONG TIME COMING, but we finally were able to move into our new house last Monday!

Eight years ago if I had known how hard it would be to get to this point, building every bit of our farm from the ground up, launching the farm business with essentially no capital, learning all the lessons and having all the heartbreaks of having livestock and of course living in a 300 square foot tiny house with a composting toilet and no dishwasher… well, I don’t think I would have left the comfort of my 9-to-5 salaried job.

But, ultimately I’m glad I didn’t know so I did take the leap. It’s worth it.

Thanks to all of you, who have supported and patronized our business to allow us to get to this point.

We still have plenty to of projects to finish in the house, the new fridge and washer are being delivered this week (was supposed to be last week!), but we moved our old fridge into the laundry room last week and have slowly been unpacking things we moved over time our tiny house, plus lots of things that had been in storage for the past 5.5 years when we sold our house on the Southshore.

It’ll be awhile before everything is unpacked and organized, pictures are hung, all the furniture is in the guest rooms, etc., so in the meantime here’s a few moving in pictures!

Oh, that goats. Come hell or high water we are finally sorting off the market bucks TODAY and moving the doe herd down to the end of the farm. They’ll have two weeks rotating through those fields and then we’ll move them into the field with our new house for fall kidding. I’m expecting the first fall kids around November 9th.

It’s DRY in the chicken pastures this week. It’s a bit of a challenge to decide how to handle the tall forage in this dry weather. We had already cut in front of Flock 2 before it really settled into this bone dry pattern and in their scratching and pecking and dust bathing, they’ve really turned it into a dust fest!

Flock 1 has a grid that has partially bush hogged, but then we risk them laying secret nests in the tall forage. Certainly not much is growing back in this weather, but hopefully this increase in humidity and overnight dew will help a little in that department. More plant surface area for dew sometimes means more moisture that the soil can suck up… it just depends how fast it evaporates versus dripping down!

The cattle are in one of the best fields this week, even though overall the forage has slowed down so much. And it’s always lovely to see them in nice grass with the backdrop of the feed silos and barn stacked with hay. There’s something very quint essentially farm-y about that view.

It’s also wild to think that this land was just overgrown with brush and weeds after being planned as a subdivision. Something like 11 houses were built in 2007-2009, and it went through two developers before “failing” and the land being sold to the family we ultimately bought it from. We are biased, of course, but we think it’s much better as a farm than a subdivision!

Now that we moved out of the tiny house, we don’t have this group of feeder pigs right outside our door to give my kitchen scraps multiple times a day.

I was about to carry my bucket with a few days worth of cooking scraps across the farm on my walk when I remembered that the feeder pig’s 650+ pound father could probably handle eating all the scraps himself and I wouldn’t have to carry it, since he is currently situated right by our new house.

The feeders seemed pretty disappointed when I went to visit them empty handed though!