We Bought a Farm! Now What?

OK, so it’s December 15,2022. It’s cold and rainy and I just walked out of the title company with a “Best Day Ever” gift bag from my agent and the keys to the quirky cottage I just bought. Now what? Go home and finish working? That is exactly what I did! I was a bit nervous about going over to the house to see it as the owner!

The next few days were spent cutting back all the bramble canes reaching all over the driveway and property like giant red tentacles. These things were everywhere! Next order of business was to rip down all the dank and dreary heavy drapery that covered the few windows that were there. Letting some light in made it a bit cheerier for sure. Cleaning and removing trash took over the coming days. While these little things were being accomplished, the bigger plan of where and how to build a place for the flock started to percolate.

There was so much debris on the property so I started creating dump piles sorting out the metal. My brother and his wife came down and helped me create a fire ring and we began to burn yard waste and started dragging trash out of the woods. It was just incredible what we found. Several old well tanks, a truck cap, piles and piles of old vinyl siding covered in vines, a basketball backboard, pipes and what seemed like a few kitchens worth of pots and pans!

The end of the driveway had two large steel posts cemented into the ground where a rusty chain was used to block the driveway. My brother and I spent an evening pulling these posts out with his truck and this started to make the farm feel a bit more welcoming.

The most prevalent trash around the entire property was plastic rotisserie chicken containers. Evidently the previous tenant fed the foxes on the property, and we collected several hundred of these containers! It’s a running joke now as they keep appearing after we get a bit of wind and they emerge from the leaves!

**Debris that was collected from the property**

Since this property was a parcel of a larger property that was held by a family for more than one hundred years, the property records with the county were pretty sketchy. After trying to acquire definitive information about boundary lines and markers, I decided my best course of action was to order a means and bounds property survey. With some additional research and adjusting to the sticker shock of what this would cost, I signed a contract. Now the wait. It was the holidays, and these companies are quite busy. At this point all we could do was research the best type of fencing and start looking at costs and places to get the supplies.

The survey company made several trips to the property and this process took a while. After what seemed like forever, when I pulled into the property on December 30, there were boundary markers with orange flags on them! One of the surveyors was still there and when I asked in general how far the property went back, he told me past the small creek and I was shocked! Wow, it was so much bigger than what I had ever imagined! I ran around the perimeter ecstatic and took pictures and just beamed. Wow, just wow!

After a few more walks around the property, it still seemed like a dream now that I could see the property lines. I got back to work cutting bushes and vines to widen the driveway so we could use an area behind the house to park. This is when I encountered my first accident using a power tool. Somehow while using my hedge trimmers to hack back bushes, I ended up hitting my right index finger. At first I didn’t think it was a big deal but then… the blood started gushing! There was so much blood, and I was there alone, which was a bit scary. I grabbed a roll of paper towels and jumped in the car and headed back the mile to our home. After getting home, I decided right away that it would require more than I could do at home, so I drove myself to urgent care while the wound continued to bleed through seven layers of paper towels! Long story short, it was a very difficult wound to deal with due to the excessive bleeding but, after 4 hours in the treatment center, I left with 14 sutures in my fingertip and a big splint. It was still oozing blood which was concerning but at least the faucet of blood had stopped! My first thought was how I was going to get through my first live cashier shift on what would be one of the busiest days of the year for grocery stores, New Year’s Eve? How could such an awesome day go from amazing to so challenging? This was my first kind of wake up call that having a farm was not going to be all happiness and rainbows! I didn’t let this gruesome injury stop me and I made it through my 9 hour cashiering shift with a lot of ibuprofen and grit. I also picked the hedge trimmers back up a few days later and continued the arduous task of trying to tame this crazy place!

Now that we knew the boundaries of the property, I could start planning where to put the flock. My idea was to have them along the left side of the property adjacent to the vacant land and in a place where I could see them from my future farm office. Just the idea of a farm office with a pasture view seemed unreal! I paced off a general idea of where the fence lines would go and found a place tucked amongst a few trees where I thought the run-in barn could go. I spent many afternoons and evenings walking around the property and picturing how this could work. I picked up some little flags at Home Depot and started marking off what would become the pasture. I consulted many friends and family for pointers and ideas and really wanted to get this right since we were building from scratch.

After a few weeks of deliberation, I came up with the plans and began finding suppliers. I ordered a run-in barn to be dropped on the property but at this time of year, they were not building many and inventory was sparse. It looked like this could be the thing to prevent us from making our March 1 deadline but I kept pushing and asking. In the meantime, I ordered a bunch of gravel to build a parking pad and to build the base for the area where the run-in structure would be placed.

Since we were in such a pinch for time to get the fencing in, my husband offered to take off work and rent an auger to see how much he could get done. My brother also stopped by one afternoon to assist and through patience and lots of perseverance, all the holes got dug through lots of roots and rocks. It was an absolutely grueling task but the weather was epic for the month of February for Maryland, Almost no rain and temperatures stayed in the 50’s during the days for the most part. It was surreal to see the farm coming to life day by day!