The following is an overview of our farm progress at the end of 2021. For those of you who don’t know me, I am a widow and grandmother of retirement age. Eight years ago I bought a country property in the mid-south 300 miles from a large metropolitan area and two-hours away from a large city and one hour away from a small city with a hospital and medical specialists. The closest town has two gas stations, a pharmacy, a medical family practice, and two grocery stores, some fast food places, and a few other family-owned businesses.
The property had a very old barn which was used as storage, a water well, electric power, and lots of acreage, but no septic system. The sellers used the old pipe to the woods system but they put in a new septic system as a condition of sale. The house was old and needed a new kitchen and another bathroom before we could move in and I splurged on a whole house backup generator. The other updates are done as we can afford them and they are still ongoing. My oldest son, a truck driver, moved closer so he could help me when he was not on the road. Eventually, he moved on to the property permanently.
My goals in moving out to the country were to: (1) be more secure; (2) become less dependent on buying from stores, (3) have room for my kids and other family members to come to if and when things fall apart for them, (4) learn skills to develop cottage/home business(es), and finally (5) learn to be more self-reliant so I could live in freedom and independence. It has been lots of hard work, with some failures. But over the years, we have gained confidence in our abilities and acquired new skills. Everything we have done has been on a very tight budget and everything is paid for in cash; I have no debt. This is a summary on how we have developed the farm over the years and where we are at the end of 2021.
Year 1: After the house was made livable, the first thing to be done was to fence a half-acre of the back yard for the dogs; at that time I had 5 small dogs, a stray red tick coon hound and one feral kitten which came out of the woods. The coon hound had 6 surprise puppies. She was so emaciated even the vet didn’t realize she was pregnant! That brought us up to 12 dogs; we eventually gave most of the puppies away, but kept two.
Next came a chicken coop and fence around the chicken yard. A neighbor down the road gave me a bunch of hens, a rooster, and a couple of ducks. I had never lived in the country nor had I raised chickens before; thus I lost 5 hens the first six months due to inexperience and predators; a fox, raccoon, owls, and hawks. Since…