Step 1: Buying the Farm

The dream suddenly started to feel real on March 26 when we signed the papers to buy our farm. We will be living on 5 acres in Nicholasville, just south of Lexington, KY. Chris is happy because it has a beautiful suburban looking front yard with a rich carpet of green (blue?) grass. And in the back is space for enough gardens to put veggies on the table year round, an old playhouse that will make a perfect chicken coop, a work shed that can easily be converted into a dye studio, a barn with enough space for animals and a wood workshop and about 3 acres of fenced in pasture land. The whole property is fenced in with the 4-board wood fencing that is so popular in Lexington.

The house itself is move in ready. The upstairs bedrooms will need to be repainted-- right now they are painted in the colors that kids picked out (pink, blue, red...) but Chris really enjoys painting walls so he is looking forward to doing the painting! I love the colors that the downstairs rooms are painted in- sage green and light yellow- so all it needs is to be filled with all our stuff.

We have a few chores that need to be done outside before the farm is ready for animals.

1- right now the fencing is ideal for horses but will need to be lined with wire mesh fencing before its ready for sheep. The gaps between the board planks are big enough that a sheep might be able to escape, or at least gets its head stuck.

2- we'll also need some electric fencing to divide the pasture in half. that way we can have the sheep in one part while we let grass grow on the other part, and then swap. Hopefully this way we can keep grass on the ground and not have to spend as much money on hay during the summer.

3- the playhouse will need to be converted to a chicken coop. We should just be able to put in some roosts and nesting boxes, patch up the screen in the windows and cut out a chicken sized door w/ a ramp

4- we need to decide where to put the pig pen and how exactly we want to set it up

5- one of the first things we want to do is put in the gardens. We have a bunch of seeds ready to be planted but first we'll need to till the earth and mix in some compost. Thankfully Kentucky has real dirt not the awful red clay we are used to in NC so hopefully digging in it will be a bit easier!

6- the dye studio/workshop is just about ready to go. I'll need to put in some work surfaces but I'll probably just use boards on top of saw horses (which is what I'm using now). Before winter we'll also need to insulate the workshop and eventually I'd like to run a water line under ground to the studio. Right now a garden hose will work but I'd like to have a water line in place before winter-- there is nothing more annoying than getting ready to work and then finding out that the water hose is frozen solid!