Blog Intro
I am not a writer. So I am letting you know now that my grammar may not always be correct and I will most likely have a typo or two in every post. I included a blog section on the website in hopes to share some of our journey, recipes, skills and more, but since starting the website this section has always felt intimidating to me. With so many excellent bloggers out with great content it felt a bit overwhelming. Well, I’m throwing caution to the wind.
Hi, my name is Julia I live on a community called The Farm that was established in the 70’s, if you are curious about The Farm Community you can find more info here https://thefarmcommunity.com. I was born and raised on The Farm and am now building our homestead here with my partner Joe. We set out to build our home which quickly turned into a homestead. The more we work, the more we learn, the more we know we are moving in the right direction to provide as much as we can for ourselves, source as much as we can locally or from small businesses. So as I said our journey began with the house. Joe being a carpenter set out to do as much of the work as he can on his own and now years later we are not finished but the house is beautiful and will be amazing, each step feels even more amazing when you put so much of your own work into it, We have finished out the walk out basement into a wonderful living space. How built a shed to house his woodmill that we expanded this year to included enough roof space for a 10K solar system to run our home and some outlying buildings.
The Animals on the homestead. I hear many people say it all started when they got chickens but in our case the goats came first, I quickly realized there was more to goat ownership then meets the eye and I quickly began to research everything I could on goat care. I continue to learn and do research and have found a passion for goat husbandry. This year I completed the Master Small Ruminant Producer program with our local agricultural college and was happy to learn more about small ruminants and happily surprised that I already knew a lot of the material in the course. We love the addition of goats for milk, land clearing and entertainment. A couple years after the goats we decided to add an LGD (livestock guardian dog) after finding an ad for dogs available 45 min from us we picked up our first LGD a female we named Samara on Christmas Eve 4 years ago. The following 4th of July we picked up our second LGD a male we named Nanook there have been some big ups and downs in owning LGD’s and I hope to go over that more in depth later. During this time we picked up our first chickens from a friends we only wanted a few but everyone told us that we’d loose some so we went to a friends and bought 6 chickens that were about the age to start laying, a few weeks later and we got our first eggs. We now have a flock of 17, 16 hens and 1 rooster. Currently we have chickens for eggs but hope to soon add some chicken tractors to use them to help clear and fertilize pasture along with the goats. in 2016 or 2017 we added honey bees, this admittedly has been a struggle for us we have yet to harvest any honey, despite that we still have one hive and are continuing on hoping to at least have amazing pollinators on our homestead. We have an older cat that has lived here in a shed since before we moved here and a younger cat who helps us keep the mice population down around our out buildings. That’s our little animal farm in a nutshell.
Along with the house we have used wood produced from our own mill to build the goat barn which is still a work in progress, we have a little rental trailer which we used to live in before moving into the basement level of the house, the wood mill barn, a couple small tool sheds, and our large garden space.
We grow and produce what food we can from garden and our animals, I have studied herbs for years and have begun to grow medicinal herbs for my soaps and for our own use. On the homestead I make soaps, sourdough bread, herbal & bath products. before the homestead I spent years making jewelry and other crafts which I occasionally still make and have for sale.
This is my first introduction I could go on but will stop here for today. I hope this has begun to give you a little insight to our life here and please don’t hesitate to ask me any questions.
