I decided to skip last week's post as we were living in complete chaos. Last week, Austin and I packed up all of our belongings and moved everything across the great state of Wisconsin to our new farm. Last Thursday, I signed over the deed of my first home to the new Buyers, and then became officially homeless for a few hours while I drove across the state to meet Austin in order to sign the deed for OUR new home!
We spent this past weekend starting to unpack and getting settled, so I thought I would share a little bit more about our new farm and projects we have already started!
The farm sits on 5 acres with a house, machine shop, garage, and old dairy barn.
All of the animals made the trek just fine and are getting settled in. Ellyeska is learning what deer are, as we have deer in the yard on a daily basis, but I think her verdict is that they are good creatures to leave alone, as now she doesn't get excited and want to bolt over to meet them when they come into the yard.
The cats are loving all of the southern facing windows, large window sills, and high places they can curl up on for their daily afternoon naps. They must be settling just fine, because they are up to their old antics today, trying to open kitchen cabinets and the door into the basement to do more exploring.
The chickens were forced to endure a 3-hour car drive in Ellyeska's old dog kennel, but they surprisingly travel very well. Their coop has been one of the first things we have started working on. The picture below shows a warm, early winter day, but the farm is currently under about 2 feet of snow in some areas!
We cleaned the back half of the coop (the L part that sticks off to the left), and have added a platform for nesting boxes, a ramp up to the boxes, hanging waters, lots of bedding, and a tire swing. I found an old tire in the main barn and figured the chickens might like it...eventually :) The only concern we have is that the last 2 days, we have noticed smashed eggs in the nesting boxes. We are thinking the girls may either be a little too big for the boxes, or they have not quite figured them out yet. Their old nesting boxes were quite large and they could freely turn around in them, these were in the coop already, and are much smaller, so Austin and I might be working on expanding the size of these boxes to make the girls more comfortable. I'm going out to collect eggs after I write this post, so wish me luck!
Another exciting thing happened last night...Austin and I ordered more birds! We have never raised birds from chicks before, as I got these ladies when they were pullets, so this will definitely be a learning experience for us!
We decided to get 8 new laying chicks, 3 layer pullets, 4 meat chicks, and 4 ducklings! The chicks and ducks will be getting delivered between next week through end of June. We are thankful to have a bit of time in between getting birds so we have time to prep the rest of the coop and make sure they will love their new home!
Another big project we will be starting this weekend is building a custom bed frame for our bedroom. Austin and I currently have a queen bed, but realized we would love to have a bigger bed so we can be comfortable with all of our fur babies....yes they usually sleep with us, especially since we will be expanding come June with a new puppy! We got our new California King yesterday...and it's huge and comfy!
Austin drew up the plans for the bed frame as we want the frame to double as the box spring as well as have a storage cabinet and head board. I will be taking pictures of this project as we construct it this weekend and update in next week's post.
The farm is so peaceful and quiet. At our old house, we were settled on the corner of two busy roads, so traffic noise was a constant, but even though we are situated on a county road now, the farm sits on a hill and the traffic noise is almost non-existent. And maybe a total of 30 cars go by during the day. Being so far remote means a lot of wildlife! There has been no shortage of wildlife on and around the farm.
In the last week, we have seen raccoons, opossums, bald eagles, turkeys, deer, and coyotes. We have two juvenile deer that come on the farm each day, so this summer I definitely need to build a fenced-in garden! The ridge that runs adjacent to the farm is FULL of wildlife, and I am excited to see what else comes strolling through.
The Weber Hollow Homestead is actually starting to feel like reality, instead of a dream. This farm is truly our little slice of Heaven and we CANNOT wait to share with you all this new journey, but for now it's time to get to more unpacking!
-J