A Snowy Tour of the Barn House Homestead

We had our first Arkansas snow of the year -- we will get two, max, usually -- and I thought It was a good time to give you a tour of the farm as it stands right now.

This is the home I love so much. Now that it has snowed, I wish the roof could be white all the time.

We have a large outbuilding that is going to be used for a combination of a shop and an office/guest quarters. This is a project we have not done much with so far. 

You know you are insane when you are taking pictures of your fences.  I am so proud of all that fencing work!

Here is the animal paddock, With the chicken tractor in the back and the two goat houses in the front. We will have a proper goat barn later, but goats are not that fussy.

This is our house from the back. Not yet painted back there. The elevated area is the pool that has been turned into a play deck. Underneat that deck, something crazy is going to happen,. Not sure what yet.

Here are the Haman beehives. I scraped out snow from the entrances after I took the photo, but they are on screened bottom boards, so plenty of air gets to the bees. The girls maintain the hive at a contstant 90 degrees inside.

Still life of fence and 1970s lawn chair.

This is the other outbuilding and we are not using it yet. Heck, I still haven't cleaned it out. I think it will become either my honey house or a special barn for birthing doelings. It is close to the house and I can monitor it easily.

Side view of the house. Little deck off the living room and kitchen lets out into a small dog pen. We will probably use that dog pen to help our does get acquainted with our livestock guardian dog. 

Here Come the Animals!

My son with a herd of Nigerian Dwarf Goats. He really loves them.

In fairness, the name of this blog should be 1,300 Feet of Fence. I named it before I was done fencing, and, well, I was 333 feet short.

It has almost been a year since we bought this place and began our homesteading adventure. The first year has been about repairing the house, though that still continues, and getting the land ready for animals and food production. We sectioned the land into family living, garden and orchard growing, and animals. It has been excruciating to wait an entire year to get the good stuff, but we have tried to take it slow and be totally prepared.

The land work involved several friends. My heartfelt thanks to Eric Francis, Dave Ragan and Mike Thompson for coming over, digging in and getting sweaty with me. Thanks also to my young paid farm hand, Justin the Rocket, who helped me stretch some of the most difficult sections of the fence, including parts where he had to squeeze between two trees and I, um, couldn't fit. My thanks, as well, to Judith Murray, fellow beekeeper, ex-colleague in journalism, and a person who is really generous with her time. Judith helped us paint a couple of sides of our house, and did a darn good job.

In the summer, the family finished painting the front and one side of the house. It now has a really nice red-barn look, and we are looking forward to finishing the painting in spring.

 In fall, I planted nine dwarf apple trees to begin our orchard.  In winter, I put the final touches on the fencing, creating a gate for the paddock and building houses for baby goats.

Now we area ready for everything. I have food, shelter and watering devices for the chickens, goats and livestock guardian dog. The place is about to be jumping with heartbeats.

As I write this, we are within a month of receiving two bottle-baby Nigerian Dwarf goats. A local goatherd, who, incidentally, is neither high on a hill nor lonely,  has about six does that are nearing the end of their pregnancies, and we hope to purchase from her the doelings that will become the core of our small dairy operation.

Daughter 1 with new doeling.

I don't know of anyone else in central Arkansas who raises Nigerians, which are known for having a very high butterfat content and tasting as good as or better than fresh cow's milk.

Nigerians are smaller than the average goat, but not as small as pygmy goats. They are bred for dairy, rather than for meat or fiber. We plan to start with our two babies, raise them to the age where they can be bred (a year or so) and then start milking the adult does after 18 months, when they have had their first litter of kids (more babies!). The little bucklings will be sold as pets, and some of the doelings will increase our herd, while others will help someone else start their own dairy.

Daughter 2 with the baby.

 We thought for a long time about going straight to an adult doe and milking right away, but we wanted to really learn about caring for goats before we dealt with the added issues surrounding milking and dairy operatons.

More thanks are in order for the goat mentorship I have received. My mentors are three wonderful ladies:

Pat House of north-central Arkansas told me a lot about how her goat farm is situated, and helped me understand how to raise livestock guardian dogs with my goats and chickens.

Linda Brittain of Cadron Creek Farm allowed me to visited her Nigerians with my family, and has answered countless questions. She has been my go-to mentor as I figure out how all this stuff works.

And Dianea Fay of Allen, Kansas, helped me decide whether to purchase a mature doe or, as I ultimately chose to do, work with baby doelings and take my time building torward dairy.

Perhaps even before the baby goats arrive, we will be driving up to north-central Arkansas to pick up our livestock guardian dog, who has already been named Gandalf, despite the fact that I have not even met the dog.

One of these beautiful LGD pups is ours!

 Gandalf is 75 percent Great Pyrenmes and 25 percent Anatolian Shepherd, and he is running around eating puppy chow right now, and getting the feel of his goat barn with his eight littermates. Both breeds were developed as livestock guardians, and most goat farmers I talk to use a cross of the two breeds to protect the herd. I gather that the Pyrennes are more likely to stay with the herd and guard them closely, and the Anatolian is more aggressive in its protection, looking to find trouble at the outskirts of the property. If we are matched with the puppy I am expecting, he is mostly white with two black ears and a random black spot on his head.

And then, of course, are the chickens. No farm is complete without laying hens! We drove all the way to a little town near Jackson, Mississippi to purchase an amazing chicken tractor made by a former plastics engineer.  He has been making them for many years, and has perfected the design. The tractor has a built-in watering system with an insulated tank for water, which gravity-feeds a set of chicken watering nipples through down-sloping PVC pipe. There is also a built-in feed hopper that sits outside the tractor. The hens have to eat through the fence, which keeps the food from falling on the soiled ground within their coup.

Chicken tractors are popular because you don't have to use litter inside of a building and clean it out periodically. Instead, you are moving a coup on wheels from spot to spot in your yard, offering up fresh grass and bugs to graze on, and eliminiating the chance for the birds to tear up any one area. On weekends and summer nights after Gandalf has grown, I'll let the hens range a bit and mess around with the goats. By using the tractor, the nutrient-rich litter is scattered along the ground, and the grass is protected from being stripped clear. Think of a long, heavy chicken wheelbarow, and you have the idea. Here are some pictures of the coup, which has corrugated PVC for roofing so the coup stays rrelatively light, and excessive heat does not transfer to the hens.

Here is the super-tractor, at the home of the man who made it for me. This is an amazing piece of engineering.

Alas, we have no chickens yet, because this is a bad time to find them. They are moulting, generally, and not laying, or at least not laying as much. Very few chickens are up for sale when it is cold. We plan to buy grown hens or pullets, which are young female birds that are about to start laying. There will be no roosters at Barn House Homestead. For that matter, there will be no male goats, either, except for a few weeks after birth. And when you get down to it, about 98 percent of the bees are girls, too. Girl power, here on the farm.

Beautiful Wyandotte at the State Fair.

My coup has room for eight birds, and we don't want to piecemeal this and get two here, two there, because chickens, especially when kept in close quarters, can be pretty mean to newcomers. So we are looking for a small flock of roughly eight birds. Our favorite breeds are the Buff Orpington, Easter Egger (not recognized as a breed yet), Barred Plymouth Rock, and Silver Laced Wyandotte. We would not look askance at a Rhode Island  Red, either. We might end up with two breeds, for all I know, but these are the birds we are looking for. In spring, locals will start offering birds again and we can launch our flock!

Welcome to Barn House Homestead!

I have been working with my cousin, Kalynda Haaf, on a logo to market the food products we will be producing at the Barn House Homestead. (Hey, how do you like the name?) We are already producing honey, though our volume should jump next year with more attention paid to the bees, and less, say, to replacing crushed water pipes. Next up will be eggs, laid by small flock of hens, followed by  milk and cheese, produced by Nigerian Dwarf goats.

The image you see above is a work in progress --pretty close to completion. We are working on a version for dairy and eggs, as well. I really love the work Kalynda has done on this project, especially since the two of us have not actually met.

Kalynda based the design on the actual front of our barn-shaped house, which looks like this:

Kalynda is the bilingual grandaughter of my father's sister, and she lives in the Netherlands, while I live in central Arkansas. She has been a Facebook friend of mine for years, and we hope to meet in the next few years, Kalynda is a talented designer and has her own business in the Netherlands.She is multinational, with both of her parents having spent time in the US and The Netherlands.

She speaks both Dutch and English, is delightful to chat with, and does really nice visual work.

Here is Kalynda's site: Haaf Visual and while you are there, check out that beautiful owl logo she made by my I am an Arkansas Public School Teacher FB page. Nice!

Here is another treatment of the logo that we plan to use to promote our eggs:

If you need some graphic design work, contact Kalynda throuugh her website, or find her on my Facebook friend list.  She is hoping to come back to the states for a visit and, last I heard, even contemplating an internship here in video production. Perhaps your design job could help her accomplish that goal!

The Call of the Open Spaces

The author with burn pile and a couple of bee hives in background.

The gateway drug was beekeeping. A friend took up the hobby a few years ago, and he made it look so fun and doable. I helped him check the hives on a fall day, and suddenly, I had to have my own. I took a beekeeping course at Penn State University online, ordered some equipment and I was ready to go. Just two hives -- no problem, easy to handle.

A full frame of honey I took off the hives in spring, sitting on the handmade Mexican tile in our kitchen.

Except, today I have both of my hives and his four hives, because he is moving to New England. You can't do six hives in the big city, and you can't drive four of them across the country in a little VW. In the city, they only let you have two hives, and they want to tell you how many frames you can have on them. You also have to worry what your neighbor thinks of them. Or you are supposed to. I never cared. These are my bees, they are legal, and they are here, making your life and your crops possible. Deal with it. I wasn't long for the city.

Me with the hives my friend gave me as he prepared to move.

The city also limits your number of chickens. I didn't have any, but I wanted some, and I didn't want any rules about them.  Lastly, the city recently declared that hoofed animals were off limits because some lady had a pet pig that upset the neighbors. In short, the city has terminated our relationship with food. You aren't supposed to want to make you own honey, or grow your own crops, or slaughter a chicken, or milk a goat. You are supposed to forget about our culture's roots and just buy frozen foods and snacks.

And there was this other thing -- a perverse financial situation. I did too well at work, I guess, or at least I did the last two years, which led to a breathtaking increase in my child-support obligation, during a time when, actually, we were having a terrible year in the business, and my wife was very sick, disabled and running up medical bills. I want to warn you, this next paragraph is going to look like opportunistic whining, but it's an important part of the story, and it will be over with soon. Bear with me.

To put it plainly, our child support doubled.  I didn't fight it, because I couldn't afford to, and because I was advised that it would not help if I did.  So on short notice, I went looking for $1,000 of monthly savings (ouch) in our budget.  We could no longer live in our modest 1,900 SF home in one of the city's less-expensive neighborhoods. One day, things were fine, and everything was in balance. The next day, the court was, essentially, telling me it didn't matter that I had a child by my new marriage, and we needed money for him, and that it didn't care that new child support for my first two children made me unable to afford my modest life. Also, it did not matter that the kids were quite comfortable with their mother, living in a much larger, nicer home than ours, and with a lot more financial privileges. And it didn't matter that we spend a lot of time with these kids, and spend money on them, feeding them, loving them. Everyone is treated like a deadbeat parent, no matter how involved they are. You consult the table, and there is no cap on the table. It just keeps going up and up. Alright, that's all that I will ever say on that subject. You just needed to know how this got started. Everything will be positive and life-affirming from this point forward.

Here is about half of the trees that were logged off our property. Free!

We did some very quick soul-searching, and what found there in our souls was a desire to move out "to the country" somewhere and find a place where we could live less expensively, yet have more. More land, space, rights to grow and raise things, more helpful neighbors, more small, locally owned stores. We wanted to pay less, yet have a better quality of life, and build a homestead where our children could find out how food is grown, how animals are raised, and how you act like a proper neighbor. We wanted to make goat cheese and beeswax candles and listen to tree frogs at night.

Seedlings camp for the night in the new straw-bale gardens.

In terms of a home, we were searching for a needle in a haystack. The house had to cost less than our current one but offer a lot more. It could not be in Little Rock or anywhere in Pulaski County, because the proximity to the urban area and workplaces made real estate too expensive. And it had to have at least two acres because I was going to grow a large garden, build an orchard, keep a lot of bees, have a shop and raise egg-laying chickens and milk goats. Right away we figured out there were no more than 10 properties in a four-county area that would even remotely qualify. And really, in the end, there were only two. And we would have to fight to get their prices down so this would work.

The first was a 1920's farmhouse in Fountain Lake, (Garland County) right across the street from the high school campus. We were so interested in this place that we actually paid for an inspection before our offer. We were excited and looking forward to yelling "Cobra Strike" for the local high school team, even though we are pretty sure they don't say that. We were chatting up clerks at the local Sonic and taking our son down to the creek. The needed repairs were massive, a corner of the house was in the flood plain, and we priced our offer accordingly. And it was promptly laughed off. The seller actually rejected an offer that was higher than their stated selling price for the package of land we wanted. The offer price mysteriously disappeared from the realtor website.

That was around Thanksgiving, and we had our heart set on that old place. My wife was devastated and wanted to take a long break from the search so she didn't have to think about it during the holidays. On my own, I studied the last three or four properties on my list and took a realtor to visit them. After seeing some of the most horrifying property in central Arkansas, we arrived at this barn-shaped cedar house in Bryant.

Beans spouting on the new property.

It was situated on three acres, backed up to the railroad tracks, and had a very large outbuilding to one side and a smaller one to the other. Hastily, we arranged for my wife to see it the very next day.

The siding was mossy green from years of algae build-up on the cedar, and the driveway was covered in dried mud. Huge oak trees hung over the front, and the back was deeply shaded by a million pine trees. The roof was covered with wisteria vines creeping over from the back. You could see some actual holes in the roof with pine needles stuffed in them.

Here is the realty photo with the mossy green siding.

In the back was one of the largest pools I have ever seen, completely decrepit, with several feel of frozen, dank water and a dead bullfrog suspended within. The pool was surrounded by a wild castle of privet and overgrown landscaping, but no fence or rails.

Sexy pool after it drained itself, but you get the idea.

The place smelled horrible inside and had been essentially abandoned by the person who was living there. Both furnaces were condemned, and the owner was running around in coats and wool caps. The water main had collapsed and water merely trickled. The carpet smelled like a dog that had died 20 years earlier. Bats were living in the attic and bees were making a hive behind the front window. A hole in the master closet wall -- hidden by furniture --  was full of leaves and pine needles, and it was large enough for a raccoon to walk through. Squirrels were running through the walls and rats were running through the basement leaving gifts. The outbuilding had broken windows, its electrical service had blown down , there was a giant crack in its foundation. a window was busted out and the place was full of the decrepit supplies from about six area firework stands. What do you do with boxes and boxes of old fireworks punks, miles of string lights and six cash registers?

But there was also, amid the crap, this totally custom-built house with gorgeous bones, tons of handmade Mexican tile and a large space behind the house to run and play, with plenty of land left for animals and gardening. It was this mythical country oasis, right in the middle of a city, and close to our jobs in Little Rock. A little research showed that Bryant did not limit bees, chickens or goats and you can even have burn piles. My city alderman turned out to be a friend of mine. Several friends live in this little town and were incredibly encouraging and welcoming.

To buy the place, we would have to get in a short-sale. That is where the property is sold for less than what the seller owes on the loan. No payments had been made by the occupant in months. Further, we would need massive repairs and would have to finance them into the deal -- a renovation loan -- and almost no bank wants to mess with that. The place had 3,000 square feet, with about 1,000 of it in a two-room basement where water had seeped through the concrete block walls for decades.

My rough ideas for the place.

So, of course, facing all that, we bought the place, banking on a series of miracles to pull of the deal. And as I sit here, writing this, every one of the miracles has come to pass, with one exception, and I think that one is going to come through on Monday or Tuesday.

The house after tree removal, new roof and the power-washing of the cedar siding.

We closed the deal in February, 2015, and began a contractor-led renovation, then we moved in early May, renting out our old home so we didn't have to sell at a loss. We have been here almost six months, and only now are the cosmetic improvements starting to happen. First, we had to replace all water service, gas service, nearly all the HVAC, re-roof the place, put in new toilets and get the critters out. The patios on both sides of the house had badly sunken due to improper drainage. We corrected all the drainage issues (and of course, now it hasn't rained for three months) and covered the sunken stone patios with decks. I have been slowly building a 1,000 foot farm fence with gates and paddocks for animals, orchards and gardens. That fence and its progress have defined this adventure for me so far.

As for the giant pool, it would have cost so much to repair that we would have little money left over for other improvements. So, we came up with the idea to build a large deck over it, and even left a trap door so we could go under the deck to clean the pool drain, if need be.

As the pool deck was being framed. Note the trap door.

Completed deck after I sealed it. 

That, in short, is how we came to own the Barn House of Bryant. And in the stories that follow, I will tell you how we are transforming it into Mills Park Farm.

Stone patio in front of our house after power-washing.