We Bought a FARM! (sort of...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rva4Np_G0Ck
This is by far the biggest piece of news Old Redding Farm has ever announced! And it’s going to be stressful and challenging but also really exciting! WE ARE MOVING!!
We have been farming at Old Redding Farm for 2 seasons, and living here since 2015. John has put in an ENORMOUS amount of work building it up from a normal suburban backyard into our small farm. We have built a 10ftx20ft barn, a window made out of recycled windows, three chicken coops, an apiary, raised garden beds, arched trellises, blueberry patches raspberry and blackberry patches and even a high density fruit tree orchard. It will be hard to leave it all behind, but here is why we are doing that.
In Redding where Old Redding Farm was born, we are on a 1.8 acre lot. Our town controls through zoning regulations how many animals can live on a lot this size. Those regulations are 50 small animals (our chicken flock) 5 medium size animals (our alpacas) and 1 large animal (something like a cow or horse but we do not have those animals)
We have been outgrowing these regulations for a while, our chicken flock fluctuates as we hatch babies and sell them, and sell mature laying hens, and re-home roosters, but we occasionally end up over that 50 chicken cut off. Even keeping that number of chickens we have never been able to keep up with the demand for our farm fresh eggs. In the summer months we set up am honor system self service egg cooler and even packing it AS FULL AS WE CAN with 8-10 dozen eggs, sometimes the eggs are sold out in just an hour, and then we won’t have more for several days while we build up another supply. Then in the winter as egg production drops we do our best to keep our “regulars” in eggs but never have any to spare for our neighbors or friends and family.
And for those of you who know our farm well, when I mentioned above that we are allowed to have 5 medium sized animals, you might of thought, wait don’t they have 7 alpacas? Yes, we do. So between our chicken overage, our egg shortage, our alpaca overage, and our desire to someday have male alpacas so we could come say have baby alpacas, as well as the EMUS on the way!!! We knew we needed to move. We needed more land to let our animals stretch out, and we would like more space to grow our flower farming business and continue to grow more of our food!
We have been casually searching for a new piece of property all along. Knowing that in addition to wanting more space for our farm animals we also have wanted to be closer to family. And when we say closer, we mean WAY closer, like, living on the same piece of property as them. So in the Connecticut market multi house properties on large amounts of acreage are EXPENSIVE. So that’s why when the new Old Redding Farm popped up for sale, we knew we had to jump. There is a house and a guest house (and maybe another house in the future!) as well as 40 acres!!! The houses need quite a bit of work so we are going to be hard at work getting them ready and building back up the spaces for all our animals, but we think this opportunity is really once in a life time and we will be able to live all together forever.
We are so excited to continue to grow and share our farming journey and very happy to get to do it with family close by. We will share tons more about the new Old Redding Farm as we get to work on it, so keep on checking back for updates!
The long term and short term plans for the new Old Redding farm:
Short term:
1. Get the house “working” by working what we mean is make sure there is working plumbing and no leaking pipes, flushing toilets that go into a septic system that works, electricity throughout the house that is safe, and sufficient to run all our power needs, and have a heat system in place. The cottage is in pretty rough condition, and we will not be winning any design awards with it in its current condition. But we are not going to tackle any of that right now because we want to make sure that all of our extra income is going towards the farm and getting that up and running which brings us to….
2. Set up a short term alpaca barn, and chicken coop/run. We want to get our animals over to the property as soon as we can. We like to be around them and our friends who will be living at the original Old Redding Farm have said they would help out with the animals, really we want to get them moved over with us as soon as possible. The reason we are going to do a short term barn and pasture is because the long term plan is to clear a lot of the trees/forest that is on our land and pasture the alpacas back further into the property, but that is a very expensive process and can’t be done right away, so we will be running the alpacas in the run for the time being.
3. Fencing. We need to keep everyone we love safe. We will need to get either a physical fence or electric fence up and running for the dogs, and we will need to fence in the temporary pasture for the alpacas. This is a new area that we won’t be familiar with so it would be very bad to have any of our animals get loose on this new piece of property. We’ve got to keep everyone safe and secure and that means fencing!
Long term:
1. Clearing land: This is amongst the most important thing on the entire list. Having 40 acres of woods would be nice, but for what we want to do it isn’t the most practical or useful. We want to run our alpacas on nice pasture which means we need sunlight to hit the ground and help to grow grass. We also want to grow our flower farm as well as continue to try to grow more of our own food. All of these things need sunlight and that means we are going to need to clear some of the trees. Some of the land is designated “wet lands” which means we won’t be able to clear within 100 ft of that area, but we want to get some nice clear flat pastures set up to graze our animals, and farm. It would be great if we could have enough space to set up a rotational grazing pattern which is better for the land and the animals.
2. Build another window green house! The window greenhouse on the original Old Redding Farm is what really launched our youtube channel, it helped us to meet a ton of really amazing people, and it brings us huge amounts of joy. We only use it for a few months out of the year, but it is during the ever important seed starting season, and we will definitely need the space. The window greenhouse we are planning for the new Old Redding Farm is going to hopefully be even bigger and even better! We would love to film a 10 part video series on the new build where each video clearly explains a frequently asked question we get and if someone was to watch the whole series they would be able to build their own with no questions or concerns
3. Perimeter pathway: Because this is an important one for the family that will be living at the farm with us, it is pretty high up on the list. Our family is imaging themselves walking and running and biking along a path that circles the entire 40 acres. We think that would be great to help them accomplish. Also looking further into the future, some day it would be nice to let people come to the farm and take an alpaca on a walk and if we could have that walk take place on our own 40 acre loop it will make it safer and easier.
4. Build a HUGE-ASS barn for the animals. Wood is SO expensive right now and we are starting to look into the cost and value that a steel building would bring to the table. It would be nice to have a huge barn that John wouldn’t need to take the time to build. We are imagining a big barn, big enough that we could run as many alpacas as we wanted, and maybe even one that’s big enough that we could have a designated boy area and a nursery area. It’s going to be a REALLY bit barn! This is of course, like everything, subject to change since we might decide at some point that it makes more sense to have a series of smaller barns. But right now, we are thinking a big honking one.
5. Chicken village: as you may or may not know, we have A WHOLE LOT OF CHICKENS coming our way. We are imagining a set up of our chicken village where we are going to have maybe 10 or 12 different breeds of chickens set up into individual breeding flocks made up of 10 -12 hens and 2 roosters. This way when we are growing out our chicken business we can sell hatching eggs that we will be true pure breeds instead of barn yard mixes. We will still have our rainbow egg layers which will we will keep and sell eating eggs from and those will be in larger coops and runs near the village, but the village is going to be a whole designed neighborhood and we are really excited about it.
6. A flat bright flower farm: Getting pretty low down on the priority list but really this is important to us. We want a nice place where we can grow rows and rows of beautiful cut flowers. We are growing out dahlia tuber collection and are so excited to be filling our new town with fresh flowers.
7. Last thing on the long term list is to address “the big house” This house is a MONSTER. It is over 3,000 square feet and three stories high! It is 4 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms. Pretty much every inch of it is in need of some work. We aren’t sure what we are going to do with the house. The current resident of the house is a raccoon so we are going to need to serve some eviction papers to that guy sooner than 7th on the long list, but beyond that, this thing is a beast. We hope that someday the town is open to us tearing it down and replacing it with a MUCH smaller single story house for Catherine’s mom but right now really all it is, is a bunch of question marks.