Our Little Slice of Heaven

For years, we had been dreaming about our farm.
In November of 2006 that dream came true. We bought an old 1800's farmhouse that we named Cloverleaf Farm.
We are located in Effingham, in the hamlet known around here as "Taylor City". For over 100 years the Taylor family has called this home.
Our family farm is small, just a bit over 2 acres, but it is big enough for us. Come weeding time, 2 acres is too much. 2007 was our first season. We did fantastic. We grew tomatoes, corn, lettuce, beans, carrots, squash, pumpkins and herbs. We realized that the next season the gardens would have to be much bigger. What produce we didn't sell for money, we wanted to can and freeze for us for winter. The herbs were dried out, and used for our herbal products. We knew that for the 2008 season, we would specialize in heirloom and organic produce.

Living a Life of Self Sufficiency

We wanted a self sustained life. We wanted to leave the mainstream world behind and realize a dream of living off the land as they did 100 years ago. We soon realized we had a few things to learn. We spent most of 2007 checking out books on self sufficiency at our library. Although it was "research" for our new life, it was fun to learn about growing more food organically, and raising animals. We read books on sheep, goats, pigs, and cows. I wanted goats for milk. I could use the milk in my herbal products. I could also use it to make our own yogurt and cheese. We could sell it at the farmers market. Michael wanted pigs for meat. He wanted Tamworth pigs. Finding Tamworth pigs turned out to be harder than we thought. We also did some research on the internet. Luckily, we weren't the only ones, and there are books out there to helpNext season our gardens tripled in size. We offered more heirloom fruits, vegetables and herbs. Our neighbor is renting us (for a bushel of corn) his field which will gave us almost 4 acres total. This gave us more to sell. We started selling at The Wakefield Farmers Market, and did very well. It aslo gave us more to can. I spent that fall canning, dehydrating and freezing vegetables for us winter. We made a list of foods that we couldn't grow and made a "winter survival list". We wanted to stock up and then hunker down when the snow started to fly. For the most part it worked. We only had to shop once every three weeks or so.