Introduction

This is my first official blog post so please pardon me if it takes awhile to grow and seem as polished as some of the other bloggers out there. I am going to start with a little background information.

First of all let me introduce myself. I am a wife, mother, sometimes farmer, gardener, daughter, daughter-in-law, and friend. Probably the same as many of you who may read this. I grew up in the country as an only child, adopted by older parents, and went to a very small rural high school. My friends all grew up on farms and while we were rural we did not have a farm per se. My dad gardened and had bees, we had apple, peach, and pear trees. I grew up eating produce out of the garden and my mom made almost all of our meals from scratch. I had always been fascinated with animals and the livetock side of farming, but it would be many years after I got married before I explored this side of things.

Fast forward 12 years and we bought our first house about 4 miles from where I grew up. The kids were old enough to join 4-H and I had small gardens at the last 2 houses that we had rented. We started off slow with a couple of rabbits and a small 20' X 40' garden. Things went well and the next year the kids decided they wanted to do chickens. In 4-H there is usually an option to do a breeding animal or a market animal. The market animal is usually sold at the end of the county fair and then you have the winter to recover and decided if you want to do that animal again or maybe get serious and start breeding. Well, after we sent the chickens to the freezer I decided that I kinda missed having them around and we already had a coop and fresh eggs would be great. So I found chickens on Craigslist and we went out and bought about 8 from a guy way out in the boondocks.

This led me to researching chickens so that my kids could show them. I ended up deciding that I want Buckeye chickens. We bought some from a breeder at the Ohio National and I bought some hatching eggs from a breeder in Kentucky. Then I bought an incubator at the National. Then I decided that we needed another coop to keep the Buckeye's seperate from the "mutt" chickens. We eventually ended up with almost 80 chickens and 3 coops. Then we put a bunch of them in the freezer and I sold some and we got them back down to a manageable number.

During this time I started reading more and more about conventional farming practices and learning about real food and I decided it was time to get back to my roots. We now have a small flock of about 20 chickens, 3 Nigerian Dwarf goat does, and 5 rabbits. I hope to add a mini cow sometime soon and really knock the garndening out of the park this next season.

I am going to stop now and post more about me and our family over the next few weeks. I'm not sure how many people will end up reading this, but my goal at this time is just to share some humorous stories and maybe help other people out there who want to try their hand at farming and other homesteading type things.