First Things First

It has been one month since we’ve moved back to Michigan (we were in Virginia for a while, that’s a story for another time…) and things have been happening. It has felt like we are making slow progress, but nonetheless there has been progress! The property we purchased in April is about 50 acres with half being pasture and the other half very dense woods. It is completely vacant, meaning there is nothing on it, no water, electricity, buildings or even fences. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us! Through the past month we have begun the steps to building our life, our homestead, and our small business.

First things first. Growing our own food and food for others is priority for us.

We collected the cleanest, largest 4 dozen eggs at Polyface Farm (Swoope, VA), brought them home to Michigan, and put them into an incubator. After 3 weeks, 33 of the 42 eggs hatched. The chicks are now in the brooder growing swiftly. They will soon go out on pasture.

We picked up a few pigs from our pig guy. Parker milled the lumber for a pig training area. I learned some building skills while assisting Parker in building the shed. This is the first development on our property! The pig shed is where the small pigs will go immediately and where they will be trained to electric wire. Next, they will go out into their paddocks in the woods and pasture for the majority of their life.

We turned an old garden shed into a temporary brooder with wood shavings and heat lamps. This is where we house the baby chicks for their first 2-3 weeks of life while they develop their feathers to withstand the outdoor weather. We had 150 broiler chicks delivered and are growing rapidly. We built 2 Salatin-style chicken shelters (more building skills for me) for the pasture. This was an intricate task! Now we have a safe way to have the chickens out on pasture for majority of their life and they are still protected from predators and weather. Every day we move the birds to a new area of pasture. The birds just got out there and they are loving it! We are very excited to see the impact they will have on the health of the soil.

Parker has been busy milling logs into lumber with our new Wood-Mizer portable sawmill. This machine is a centerpiece of our homestead and it will help make many of our dreams come to fruition. Wood-Mizer is top of the line when it comes to the portable sawmill. It was well worth the 12 month wait after ordering. We were highly impressed when we received the 3 hour training at Wood-Mizer Headquarters when picking up the mill. The company itself and the engineers who designed this sawmill were intentional in making it an efficient, precise piece of equipment. The sawmill allows us to turn logs into quality, dimensional lumber that is better than what you’d find in most lumber yards. The possibilities with the sawmill are quite endless, we are excited to put it to use!

With plants started in a friend’s greenhouse in Virginia, we transplanted 32 plants and planted many more seeds in our first ever garden! I have never planted a single vegetable or flower and Parker has never grown anything successfully (other than the easy ones - tomato and squash). This season will be a season of learning and growing in the garden for sure. With a little bit of everything - tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, celery, lettuce, kale, beans, herbs, flowers and more, we are excited to grow more food for our nourishment.

There is a good amount of scrubby scotch pine trees encroaching on our pasture. These trees are fairly worthless, they spread and grow fast and there is not much we can do with them. We decided to have them mulched down with a skid steer and a forestry mulcher attachment. Rather than spending hours and days of our time cutting them down and clearing the brush, the forestry mulcher made quick work of it in just one day! We liked the idea of the forestry mulcher because it allowed for the woodchips and mulch from the trees to go back into the ground to build the soil. We will go back and plant a few trees of more value to us, such as oak (acorns for the pigs!). Now we have more room for pig paddocks, pastures, and building space.

Of course, when you buy a piece of property there are a lot of little (yet big) things to figure out and get settled. We have acquired an address! This is, honestly, very exciting for us as we have never had our own address and mailbox since we got married 4 years ago. As people always say, it’s the little things that bring the most joy. We have also begun the process of the nitty gritty things like taxes, insurance, correct zoning/property class, etc. We’ve gotten the property surveyed so we can eventually put up perimeter fence. We have met our neighbors! Parker grew up in this small town, yet there are people he has never met and people that have also recently moved here. It has been fun to establish new relationships with other locals. Having connections with other people is vital in doing what we do. We enjoy participating in the barter system. We have found friends of ours that are willing to barter with us. We can use their trailer to get a load of woodchips and they will enjoy some fresh meat or rough-cut lumber - both parties benefit! In the first month, this has already helped us immensely.

We still have a long way to go. We always will. But that is what is so exciting about this journey. We feel overwhelmed with excitement, pure joy and a little stress to finally get to do what we’ve been praying for. If you read this far… thank you for following along with us.

- Lauren