Our First Farm Animals!!!

Y’all!

We can officially call our land a “farm”. After years of talking and dreaming and planning, we finally did something a few weeks back that feels like the first step (of many) towards the future of our land.

Oops, of our farm.

Over on Instagram last month, we talked about getting chickens, and PJ even took the kids to the store to look at them (they were obsessed). After talking about it more, we decided to hold off on getting them for the time being, as we didn’t have anywhere to put them right then (and chickens didn’t really fit in line with our 2021 word of the year “simplify”). Also, at the time, we weren’t really spending as much time out at Holiday House as we are now. We’ve been spending almost every night out here for the last few weeks and our mindset has started to shift a little. Okay, a lot.

Things that seemed like they would be impossible before, suddenly seem doable. And honestly nothing has really changed but our desire to start living a little differently. Holiday House, and now the farm, now seem like a realistic endeavor for many reasons, some of which we’ll share at a later time, but for now, adding sheep and even chickens doesn’t seem as impossible as it did before, and I think it’s because we finally just committed to spending more time out here than we used to.

Because our house in town is pretty far from the farm, the idea of staying at our townhouse 24/7 and then driving out to the farm to take care of animals every day didn’t make sense logistically. The animals wouldn’t get the care they needed to thrive and the eventual farm would suffer because of it. There would be no realistic way to do this thing the right way unless we were 100% committed to the land, to the animals, and to the new lifestyle we’re slowly inching towards. SO, we decided to make small changes to make spending the night out at Holiday House more enjoyable (more on that in future posts).

(Showing the kids and our cousin’s daughters the sheep)

We plan to have a few fences built on the farm so we can keep most of the animals together while they add nourishment to the land. The guy PJ hired to build the fence for us called PJ yesterday and said we are on the schedule for this Monday (!) which is about a week sooner than he originally said, so we’re now even more excited about the whole thing. We both know contractors sometimes fail to meet their deadlines because, well, life happens, but we’re hoping everything goes smoothly with the fence building so we can hurry up and move these babies into a bigger pasture.

Look how cute they are!! Don’t they look a little like baby deer? The brown ones are a mix breed of Katahdin and Mouflon, and the all-white one (with a brown eye patch) is full Mouflon. The Katahdin (named after Mount Katahdin in Maine) are apparently some the easiest sheep to take care of- they require no sheering and very little maintenance and are super adaptable. PJ loves the brown coloring and how “wild” they feel, whereas the white one is a little more tame.

For now, before the bigger fence is built, we’re all enjoying coming up to the little fence every day as PJ feeds them, and trying to pet them (key word: trying, as they run away from us every time we get even a little close to them. Hoping they warm up to us all soon!). It’s funny how having a few “farm animals” out here changes the feel of this place for me. Before, when we first bought it, it was just a bunch of overgrown grass with a ton of possibility. Now, after PJ has been creating roads (yes, he is digging out roads himself with the tractor!), bush hogging and mowing, clearing a few trees to make way for more trees, building a small pond, and fixing up Holiday House, our farm is starting to actually feel like…well, a farm.

And it feels great, friends. And we love it out here so, so, so much.

PS: We need names! We think we have one nailed down for the white sheep, but we really want to let the kids name them. The only problem with that is, every time we ask them what we should call them, they just keep saying their names should all be “Sheep”. TBD on if that name actually sticks.