The Leap from Dreaming to Living: How Our Farming Adventure Began
Welcome to Patch of Heaven Farm! A year ago, our dream came true and we moved to a small hobby farm in southeastern Wisconsin. Since the beginning, I have inconsistently shared farm updates. Looking back, it’s become clear that the adventures out here on the farm are just too good to keep secret! So to celebrate our first anniversary of moving to Patch of Heaven, I decided it’s time to make the “Farm Updates” an official blog.
Reflecting back on the past year, I am overwhelmed by all that has happened. One short year ago, we were an average, working middle class family living in a suburban subdivision in a small town. Now I look out the window of my 100-year-old farmhouse and see my sheep grazing in the pasture alongside the broilers in the chicken tractor as the hens and kittens meander through the yard and the pigs grunt in the distance. So how did a wannabe country girl and a city boy from the Chicago suburbs turn into hobby farmers? It all started with a dream and some chickens…
Summer Vacation on the Farm
Every summer, just before the 4th of July, we packed the family car and made the seemingly unending trek from Wisconsin to western Kansas to visit my grandpa’s family. We always left at bedtime and drove through the night. (Anyone who’s ever traveled long distances across the midwest with 4 kids crammed in the back of a car knows why my parents sacrificed sleep to drive through the night.) The torture of the drive was quickly forgotten as we turned down the dirt road that led to my great grandparent’s farm. Fields of wheat rustled in the wind as far as the eye could see. Dad recanted stories of our teenage Grandpa driving the same roads looking for rattlers. We slowed down a bit as we passed the old white country church and heard about how proud Great Grandpa was that he had helped build that simple church as a young man. And finally, the farm.
The dirt drive ran alongside the tree lined yard surrounding the giant, white farmhouse. Once past the house, we could see the quonset, barns, garage, and the chicken coop. Queenie, Great Grandpa’s dog, was always the first to greet us, followed quickly by the rest of the family.
My brothers and I with my great grandparents on their farm in Kansas.
Gathering eggs with Great Grandpa
One of the many highlights of our time on the farm was gathering eggs. Each morning, we grabbed our ice cream buckets and headed to the coop to help Great Grandma gather the eggs. Back in the screen porch, we carefully cleaned and boxed the eggs, which Great Grandma then sold. Time on the farm was spent riding on tractors, exploring Great Grandma’s massive garden and even helping to catch and butcher chickens for dinner. We baked, cooked, visited with family, shot off fireworks, and went to church. Our family trips to Kansas are some of my finest childhood memories and, I daresay, where my dreams of farming were born.
Harmless Daydreaming
Fast forward a whole lotta years to the subdivision. Years after my husband and I were married, my farm dreams had not faded. He was a city boy and, while he knew nothing of farming, he still humored me whenever I talked about the farm. “Someday, when we get our farm…” was a frequent conversation starter. He’d smile and nod while I went on about all my plans, secretly believing it was all just harmless daydreaming. With three young kids, we were not in a position to up and buy a farm and he figured it was not anything he’d need to truly worry about for a good long time. And then came the ordinance change!
It All Changed With a Chicken
Our first flock!
Word spread quickly in our neighborhood when the Town Board officially approved the ordinance; “Backyard chickens are allowed ... No more than 5 female chickens may be kept. The keeping of roosters is prohibited.” Suffice it to say, I was elated! I don’t recall the exact timeline, but to my poor husband, I’m sure it felt like about 37 seconds until we had a brooder full of day-old chicks living in the basement of our modest tri-level home. As they grew, we realized that a Rubber Maid bucket in the basement was not going to be suitable housing for our new additions for very long, so construction on a larger brooder box and a coop began.
That first little flock was an incredible learning experience for the whole family. Everyone worked hard to keep the flock healthy and happy. We learned about brooder temps, protein percentages, and various potential chick illnesses and how to be on guard for them. We built nesting boxes and roosts and carefully calculated what day to move them to their coop and when they may start laying eggs. Each spring a new flock appeared in the bucket in the basement and grew to move out to the coop. One year, we even raised a batch of meat birds (illegally) in the back shed. We were starting to feel like “real” chicken farmers who kind of knew some things!
Chicks in the basement became a spring tradition.
Learning, Growing, and Still Dreaming
But as is always the case in life, there were challenges. We lost almost an entire flock to a dog massacre. We learned that flightless birds can actually clear a 10-foot fence. As we continued on our journey and added new flocks to our backyard, all of the chicks did not always survive and some older hens disappeared. Despite those sad moments, though, the entire family was discovering that we all rather enjoyed our small little snippet of farm life. The chore of caring for the birds was relaxing and fun. J and I loved creating and building and adding on or improving the coop. “Someday, when we get our farm…” started coming from the whole family. The kids had conversations about their pigs, or sheep, or donkeys and J confessed he’d always thought it’d be cool to have goats. Still, we were zoned for 5 hens and were already seriously pushing that envelope. For now, our livestock wishes and farm goals would have to remain dreams.
Dreams Come True
In the spring of 2020, J and I headed out for an afternoon adventure away from the kids. Along our journey, we turned down a country road lined with fields. As we drove along, I rambled on about my love of the area and how peaceful and content I felt being back on a road with no lines and green fields as far as the eye could see. We passed an old white farmhouse with a dirt drive and I screamed, “See! There! THAT is the kind of place I want to live!” He smiled and agreed it was beautiful. My bliss faded quickly though, as I knew it was out of reach. There was no way we could ever afford a place like that. Our house needed way too much work to even consider selling yet. We couldn’t make the kids move school districts. The list of why it would never work grew along with my dismay. So I turned my focus back to my dreams. “Someday, when we have our farm like that…” I continued, and we kept on down the road.
I sometimes wonder how hard God laughed at me that day. In that moment, we had no idea that just a few short months later, we would stumble back upon that old white farmhouse. I had no clue that when I agreed to go see the farm, (sure it would never work out and that it was probably a dump inside), that it would be everything we were looking for and we would fall in love instantly. I would have laughed you out of the room if you told me my teenage son, who had said we were forbidden to move, would silently walk through the farmhouse, smile, and tell us to buy it. We never imagined we could fix up our house in the subdivision and sell it in 5 days. But there we were, not 5 months after that afternoon adventure, moving into our very own, Patch of Heaven Farm.
Living...and still dreaming!
Sheep in a minivan…yep, that actually happened.
Each day out here is an adventure. We are truly living our dream! In the past year since the move, we have:
Added countless chickens to our flock.
Driven 2-½ hours in a snow storm to pick up sheep in a mini van.
Built new pens in the barn to house said sheep. (And rebuilt the pen when the ram broke through the first one.)
Driven across the state to pick up our first litter of hogs.
Dove into the world of raising broiler chickens.
Experienced the joy of raising barn kittens.
Not to mention the fencing and the pastures and the shelters and the gardens...and we’re just getting started. Now I walk into my own big, white farmhouse carrying my basket of eggs, and conversations start with, “The next thing I’d like to do on our farm is…” After all, dreams really do come true, as long as you don’t stop chasing them! The adventure continues!
