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Welcome to the Happy Homestead Farm!

In the Spring of 2016, we bought a log home on 10 acres near Kalkaska, Michigan and began turning it into our Happy Homestead.  Our goal was to move away from subdivision living and into a more self-sufficient lifestyle in the country.  We wanted to create a life that would enable us to connect with the land, and our food, on a deeper level.  We had previously grown a small backyard garden and enjoyed harvesting and preserving the food that we grew ourselves.  We wanted to expand to larger gardens, including a healing garden where we could grow plants for our salves, chickens, honey bees, and whatever else we might decide to add along the way.  We set out to create our own homestead and the little log home on 10 acres in Northern Michigan seemed like the perfect place to do it.

The first year on the homestead we were able to enjoy our own organically raised root and plant vegetables, herbs, eggs, and honey, all on our new land.   It was an amazing reward for an amazing amount of work.  That first year was full of projects...and more projects.

Our first project was constructing a brood box for the the baby chicks where they stayed cozy in the dining room while their feathers grew and we built the chicken coop and run (read about move-in day here).  We cleared enough land to plant our first vegetable garden (the Hive Garden). We created the Healing Garden with many of the plants we use in our skin care products and began growing Calendula, Chamomile, Comfrey, Yarrow, and St. John's Wort to name a few. We crafted a hoophouse from cattle panels and built cold frames out of salvaged windows to extend our first growing season into early winter. We also introduced our first colony of bees into a hive within a solar powered electric fence that we hope remains an effective bear deterrent.

In our second year, we added another, larger garden (the Hill Garden) and built an addition onto the garage to store feed and equipment.  With the expansion of the farm, we were able to produce more crops, eggs, and honey than we needed ourselves and began selling our harvests to others.

We're frequently asked about what we're working on and how things are going on the homestead so we thought it was time to start a blogsite to post all the happenings on our small Northern Michigan farm.  We hope you enjoy reading about the Happy Homestead!

Take a peek at some photos from around the homestead here.