It's amazing all that happens in three and-a-half years. Since before we got married, Milan and I have been working toward having a "real" farm here at the 100 acres on Caves Highway.
We started with basic clean up in January of 2007, five months before we said, "I do". We both love our big (48' x 72'), old (circa 1900), dairy barn and were sure it would be a snap to clean it out and make it reception-ready. A new east-side foundation, a new roof, about a dozen new footings beneath the floor, umpteen boxes of miscellaneous junk from probably the last five property owners, a good 40 yards of decades-old animal dung, who knows how many no-longer-baled bales of hay, a zillion "minor" hammer-and-nail repair jobs, not to mention just the general dirt and dust of the ages... well, that was just the beginning. We took out the stalls on the west side aisle, leveled the hard-packed, pitted ground and laid 1" rubber mats. We removed the wood shop and another small room, the purpose for which I still can't figure out (small, dark, low, hard to access?). And then, we decorated.
It turned out amazing, and our wedding reception will always be an incredible coup of an event for so many reasons. Both Milan and I remember having the best day of our lives that day, trumped now only recently by the birth of our son, Jack.
The frenzy of preparing for the reception kicked off a slew of farm improvement projects that just kept snowballing into bigger and grander plans. We bought a tractor, a tiller, and a ripper. Fence wire, fence chargers. Another tractor, a horse trailer (okay, so not exactly farm related), a 24' flatbed, a 16' mower. The plan was to renovate the long-neglected pastureland. Milan planted several strips of test cover crops, which we watched grow and bloom last Spring, right around when Jack was born.
Enter Jack on the scene, and the pace of renovations slowed considerably. Actual dirt moving and fence-building turned into Milan spending a lot of time reading and researching how to proceed with a truly viable farming operation. Sometime last Fall, it all came together: we would raise chickens! Meat chickens, for now, with egg layers a possibility in the future.
From there, the path became a little more direct. We've learned more than we thought we would ever know about chickens -- the animals themselves, conventional raising and processing (wow, scary!), and how to raise them organically and on pasture. Our first batch of 100 little chicks arrives next Wednesday, and we'll be ready! Milan's down in the shop right now, welding and building their brooder, which will be placed out on pasture from the moment we pick them up from the post office.
If you had told me when I first picked up a shovel in January 2007 (to start moving out those 40+ yards of dung) that in three years I would be a mom and expecting 100 little chicks next week, I would have looked at you wide-eyed and dumbfounded. I'm sure I would have laughed nervously and maybe even secretly wished you to be wrong (I still don't think of chickens as glamorous, and I do miss what I sometimes wistfully remember as a more "glamorous" life not as a farmer's wife). But now, I wouldn't change a thing. I'm excited to see how this goes -- our first, real business venture together! We look forward to sharing it with you.
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