Fox and the Buck Farm: Month One

We closed on our 16 acre property on 3/31/23. We didn’t get to move in until 4/4, but we’ve been hard at work since then! Keep reading for a break down of our big picture farm goals and what we’ve accomplished so far.

Our Goals

If you’re new to this adventure, this post will catch you up. Its a little difficult to fully plan out a farm when you don’t actually live on it yet, but we did the best we could with our tight timeline. Once we moved in we were able to clarify a few fuzzy parts and adjust others to make sense for the land we have.

Our big plan is to become a destination for our region. We want to have seasonal products for our visitors to come enjoy starting with flowers in the spring and summer, pumpkins and corn in the fall, and Christmas trees in the winter. We’d also love to host community events on the farm and really become a fixture in town.

Year Zero

Since we’ve only been here a month and have had no time to acclimate or prep the farm land, we’re counting this as year zero. We’re throwing a bunch of noodles at the wall and seeing what sticks. Over time, we’d like to be a no-till farm, but this year we tilled in the growing beds to save time. It will mean more work for us with weeding and cultivating the land, but we had to get our foundation set in record time.

I’m growing a small amount of a large variety of flowers to see what thrives on our land and what doesn’t; what sells, and what people gravitate towards. I’ve been taking a ton of notes and lots of pictures to document the process so that next year I’m not wracking my brain trying to remember what we wanted to keep and what we did not.

This season I’ll be using one of the four 60’x40′ flower beds to plant pumpkins. This is for a few reasons. I don’t realistically think I’ll be able to fill all 4 beds with flowers since I had so little time to start seeds in advance. Using a bed for pumpkins allows me to focus on growing better quality flowers instead of rushing, and also lets us take the season to feel out the space. Pumpkins will take up a lot of real estate and we don’t want to haphazardly place the field to realize they don’t work well.

You Pick Flowers

This summer, we will have a few weekends open to the public as a test run for our U-Pick operation. I want to work out the fine tuning this year so that next season its smooth(ish) sailing. We plan on having 2 price points for flower picking. A small and a large bucket. The small will be enough to make a beautiful bouquet for yourself or a loved one, and the large will be perfect for small party arrangements. Think: baby shower, bridal shower, birthday or anniversary celebrations.

Christmas Trees

We ordered 920 Christmas tree saplings to start our Christmas Tree Farm. These are a long term investment. Christmas trees take anywhere from 6-8 years to grow to a “cuttable” size. Its hard to predict how many trees we will need so far down the road… not to mention margin of error for trees lost to disease, pests, the elements, etc.

The idea with this portion of the farm is to plant in a constant rotation. We started this year with just shy of 1 acre of trees. Next year we will do another plot, and so on until our 1st planting has matured. Once those trees are harvested, we will re-plant in that area, continuing the cycle.

In the meantime, we will source similar breeds of tree to sell as pre-cut on our farm to establish ourselves as a destination for Christmas Trees. I’m looking forward to watching this play out!

Pumpkins and Corn

We will be planting our fall crops in the next week or so, with plans to sell them this year. My goal is to have a “U-Pick” pumpkin patch… but I’m not sure the visitor cutting a thick ass vine is practical 😅 So we’re gonna see how this one goes and modify as needed. We may end up cutting the pumpkins and either staging them in the field to be “picked” or just setting up a shopping section where they can browse away from the field. The corn we’re planting is decorative only. Think glass gem, Indian, and broom corn. More for displays and wreaths than eating. I’m very excited to see how this crop grows on a small scale!

April Progress

Phew. What a month! We kicked so much ass. The first week we were here I started somewhere around 3,000 seeds in the basement. I set up shelves and grow lights and went the soil blocking route. It was a whole lot of learning since I’ve a) only started seeds once and b) never soil blocked anything. Overall it was a success, with only a few flowers not surviving.

We also bought a tractor! My husband is totally in his element. He loves driving that thing around brush hogging land and moving compost like he’s been doing it forever.

Our Christmas trees were delivered weeks earlier than we were expecting so I ended up having to plant almost all of them by myself. My husband and I laid out the field, which took SO MUCH LONGER than we thought, and then it was really up to me to finish. I got after it, though, and planted them all in 1 week, maxing out at 120 trees an hour. It was extremely demanding physically and emotionally and next year we will absolutely do things differently.

We also… you know… moved in to our house. Got used to a completely new section of our state. Dealt with two young kids who were very confused. An elderly dog who was simultaneously thrilled to have so many new smells and pissed because all her old smells/sleeping spots/resident animal friends were gone.

Its been a hell of a month. I’ll probably never catch up on the sleep I lost. But I’ve never, ever felt this hopeful before.