Briarpatch Farm in Mississippi

This group seems to be the right place for a rookie like me to make my inaugural post. John S. was the first person to ping me after I joined on Monday, and I thought that was very neighborly of him. My reason for coming here was to check out the forum for the Public Radio show, The Splendid Table. If not for clicking on a link on that show’s website, I might never have even found Gather.com.

John said to bring on the pet stories, and he had no idea what he was asking for, so I’ll tell you. I live with my partner of almost 24 years, on a rescue/homesteading/crazy old lady farm in central Mississippi. We left Houston in 1995 and moved back to family land to try to build an organic vegetable farm. A year later, Dee, my partner, had a major heart attack and that was the end of the vegetable farm plans. I am working full time, and Dee is now collecting social security and doing as much as she possibly can to take care of the farm animals and upkeep. We take in all the dogs and cats that get thrown out on the country road we live on, plus all the others the neighbors and family call us to come and get. Usually, this is only dogs and cats, but we have also rescued goats, geese, and most recently a 4 day old colt when his mother died. They told us he would die, but he didn’t, and now he is a beautiful 15 month old Palomino Tennessee Walking Horse.

We have chickens for eggs, and a pregnant Jersey cow that is just about to ‘freshen’, so we will have more than enough dairy products. I was against getting the cow bred, but Dee loves to milk. She considers milking her way of communing with the universe, or some such horse hockey. I didn’t want her to take on so much work, and believe me milking a Jersey twice a day and dealing with the milk production is a lot of work. It will be helpful to have the excess milk to feed to the chickens, cats and dogs. We are not currently growing anything because we got behind on fence mending so can’t keep the chickens (or horse, or cow, or donkey) out of anywhere long enough to grow a garden.

We built our own house, and are still building it! This is a long term project for two old women, especially paying for it as we go. But it is nice not to have a mortgage. We are aiming to be completely off grid some day, but for now we are still connected to the power grid. We have our own rainwater collection system which we designed and built. This is our only source of water for the house, plus we have a small pond for livestock watering. The house is double wired and we have a small solar power system and battery banks, which is currently out of service for a repair. The panels are mounted on a platform, on the roof of a small shed that shelters the batteries, inverter and charge controller. We made a bad choice in using landscape timbers for the supporting structure, and they rotted off at ground level. We won’t make that mistake again. We heat with a wood cook stove, and we cut and split all the firewood ourselves. Thankfully, Mississippi has a short winter.

In addition to the heart attack, Dee is a two time survivor of cancer, so she has regular health problems that crop up. With me working full time, some things just take a long time to get done and we are often putting out fires and killing snakes just to live another day. Things like getting the firewood cut before the cold gets here or having the chicken house cleaned out before the new order of baby chicks arrives are what keep us mostly running to catch up. The baby chicks arrived last Monday and the chicken house needs another day to get ready, so right now the chicks are in the house in a very large cat carrier with a drop light. Actually, since we had the strange cool front show up, it is just as well, because the nights have been too cool for week old chicks to be outside anyway.

We don’t have children, but we did take in a distant cousin after Hurricane Katrina, so she could get back into school immediately. She is still an occasional visitor to the farm, and Dee has a huge extended family that lives all around us as well. Both of us are Master Gardeners, and have a lot of ‘hands on’ experience with homesteading and I moderate a very long standing Yahoo group on that subject.

Well this is getting towards a thousand words, and I have only sketched things out. But I expect to stick around here so I can flesh out the story later on. Thanks for asking, John S. Bet you’re sorry now! lol