The Farm

Our 14-acre farm is located in Tyrone Town­ship, Michi­gan, which is in the Northeastern-most cor­ner of Liv­ingston County, just south of Fen­ton, Michi­gan. It was named after the county Tyrone, within the province of Ulster in North­ern Ire­land. It’s still a rural town­ship, with the near­est gas sta­tion being about five miles away. Fen­ton pro­vides us with a shop­ping area for gro­ceries and some chain stores, along with quite a few inde­pen­dent busi­nesses, which we like to fre­quent when­ever pos­si­ble.  We live on a dirt road, but within ten min­utes, we can be in the park­ing lot of Trac­tor Sup­ply or Target.

My hus­band and I were mar­ried on 19 April 2008, and we knew we wanted to get out of the city. We both worked in down­town Detroit, lived right on the city bor­der, and we wanted some space between our­selves and the neigh­bors in which we could grow a gar­den, keep some ani­mals, and build our­selves a home­stead. Being able to develop our self-reliance skills was a grow­ing inter­est in our lives, and we decided that one of our require­ments in a new home would be that it sat on at least five acres.

We ended up see­ing this house and prop­erty at the last minute one day while look­ing at some other places, and it just ser­e­naded us into mak­ing an offer. It also helped that our son loved it and signed the word for “please” when we asked him what he thought of the place.   It was fur­ther north than we had tar­geted, and more prop­erty than we were expect­ing — in fact, we were a lit­tle ner­vous it might be too much for us! We chuckle at that notion now, and given the oppor­tu­nity, we’d go fur­ther north and seek an even larger plot of land. But we are really quite happy with what we  have, and grate­ful to be enjoy­ing it ever since we moved in at the end of Sep­tem­ber in 2008.

Our house was cus­tom built by the pre­vi­ous own­ers in 1993, and is a one-story ranch with a full base­ment. It faces the south­east, so we get plenty of sun­shine through­out the day. We sit 1/8 of a mile off of the road; our house can­not be seen from the road, and we rather like that.

The prop­erty had an exist­ing pole barn and two lit­tle out­build­ings (one being the chicken coop), as well as a fenced gar­den, which has proven to be very valu­able, given the dense pop­u­la­tion of white­tail deer that inhab­its our area. We would not har­vest much from the gar­den with­out that eight foot tall fence! It was made with old power line poles that were cut into shorter lengths and recy­cled as fence posts, with wire mesh fenc­ing all around. The util­ity com­pany is in the process of replac­ing lines in the winter/spring of 2010, and we have asked for any of the old poles they replace. We are hop­ing to use them to expand the exist­ing gar­den, add an over­head enclo­sure to the chicken yard, and cre­ate a goat yard.

The pre­vi­ous own­ers had kept hon­ey­bees, and they left behind two active hon­ey­bee boxes. We are going to be start­ing our bee­keep­ing careers in the Spring of 2010 — honey doesn’t get much more local than your own backyard!

We have six dairy does and a wether in our goat herd. We will be expand­ing our herd by breed­ing these girls for good milk pro­duc­tion, and the result­ing abil­ity to make deli­cious cheese! Next spring, we expect to have sev­eral baby kids bounc­ing around the farm.

Our vision for the farm includes not only pro­vid­ing our own fam­ily with food, but we also hope to pro­duce enough to cre­ate a small farm busi­ness, sell­ing farm-fresh eggs, respon­si­bly grown gar­den pro­duce, honey and honey prod­ucts, and goat’s milk arti­san cheeses. I was laid off  from my job due to the poor econ­omy in March of 2009, which has been both bless­ing and bane. I have more time to pur­sue our home­steading activ­i­ties, but our abil­ity to fund those ven­tures has been lim­ited. In order to cre­ate an addi­tional source of income, I am also pro­vid­ing web­site devel­op­ment ser­vices, with a focus on small fam­ily businesses.

My hus­band is quite handy, and so we are really for­tu­nate, in that he can repair or build just about any­thing we need. We share an inter­est in build­ing our respec­tive skill sets, whether it involves farm stuff, house stuff, cars, com­put­ers, hob­bies, etc., and learn quite a bit from one another. We are work­ing hard to pass along these skills to our son.

If you have any ques­tions for us, please feel free to use the Con­tact Form to send us a message.

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