We’re heading down home… to your farms! Urban, suburban, or rural — whatever you’re growing and doing, we want to see it.
Welcome to the Down Home Farm Tours series. To see all the farms and homesteads featured in this series, click here. If you’d like to be featured, please read here for guidelines.
Welcome, Pipe Dreams Meadow!
Today, you get to meet Pipe Dream Meadows in rural Indiana. Heather and her family are making the most of their one-fifth of an acre homestead. I’m sure we can all relate to enjoying “poultryvision” through the window (read below if you don’t know what I mean yet). Heather blogs at The Homesteading Hippy.
What is your name and the names of your family members?
We are Karl, Heather, Ka, Neeko, and Lil Bit.
What is the name of your farm/homestead?
Pipe Dreams Meadow.
How long have you been farming/homesteading?
Going on 4 years.
Share a brief description of your farm/homestead.
We live in a little rural town. We have a backyard homestead on approximately one-fifth acre of land.
What are you raising, growing, and doing?
We are gardening and raising ducks, chickens, rabbits, and two nigerian dwarf goats.
How did you get into farming/homesteading?
Watching “Super Size Me”, “Fat Head”, and “Food, Inc.” made us really think about where our food was coming from and what we were eating.
Any future plans?
Our goal is to be totally self sufficient within the next three to five years.
Do you have any funny stories to share?
When we got our first chickens, they were two older hens I got free from a neighbor. We had never really seen them up close before, and our children loved watching them peck around in the dog kennel (we kept them there until we built a coop 🙂 ). Our youngest, who was three at the time, told his father, “I don’t like watching the chickens… can you get me a chair, though?” The best thing about that was being able to say for two weeks, “no watching the chickens until you finish your school and chores!” We still love our “poultryvision” to this day and will spend hours just enjoying the outside watching them peck around.
Any sad stories?
We had a new batch of chicks that were doing just fine until one night, all but nine of them climbed in the feeder at once and suffocated each other. It was so sad! We started with 25, but wound up with only nine. We called that the “food war,” thinking they had fought over the feed.
Let’s Tour Pipe Dreams Meadow!
(Wardee: In the captions below, you’re hearing from Heather as she tells you what is in each picture.)
Our Girls… the survivors of the “food war”.
Hubby milking our goat.
Nellie, the kid. To fall completely in love is to own a goat. 🙂 (Wardee: That is SO true!)
These were our newest babies in early spring.
The front of my garden in the spring.
Our Pekin ducks.
(Back to Wardee) Thank you for sharing with us! We hope you enjoy your free thank you video, our gift to you. Plus, feel free to display the following graphic on your site. (Right-click and save to your computer, then upload to your site and link to this farm tour post.)
Would you like to be featured?
Are you a homesteader or farmer at any level? You don’t have to live in the country, you don’t have to be doing everything.
Being on the journey is the only qualification. We want to see what you’re doing, no matter how big or small.
Click here for submission guidelines for the Down Home Farm Tours series. We’re excited to hear from you!
If you’re selected, we will share your farm/homestead pictures and stories in a dedicated blog post, plus you can add the featured graphic to your blog or website. And, we’ll give you a free thank you video of your choice!
Please give Heather and Pipe Dreams Meadow warm welcome in the comments! Be sure to visit her blog!
...without giving up the foods you love or spending all day in the kitchen!
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I love Pipe Dream Meadows!! Heather and her family are great friends, and I love coming over for a “poultry therapy” session (coffee + chicken observation + time with my best gf = stress relief!). And she inspires me (some day I want to have our own li’l homestead…for now i’m stuck in a rural town with poultry prejudice and can’t have chickens!) and is always a great source of info. Not to mention a really great friend (:
Nobody ever told me how relaxing it is just to watch chickens scratch and peck. I could watch them all day long.
I too remember watching chickens as a child, and now like Dawn stuck in a rural town and can’t have chickens! Wondering why a town would have a anti chicken regulation, it does not make any sense to me.