Serenity Gulch Farm

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.

Welcome, Serenity Gulch Farm!

Today’s featured farm is Serenity Gulch Farm run by Sherri and Keith Cripe (plus their children Jamie and Katie). They’ve been homesteading off and on for six years in Indiana. Below you’ll see Sherri’s answers to our farm tour questions, and also a lovely photo tour of their property. Be sure to visit their blog for videos and updates.

Where is your farm?
Thirty minutes northeast of Indianapolis, Indiana.

How long have you been farming/homesteading?
Off and on for six years.

Share a brief description of your farm/homestead.
We live on 14 acres. It’s mostly wooded with some open pasture and two small ponds. There is one small barn and a smaller lean-to shed.

What are you raising, growing, and doing?
We raise pastured pork, pastured poultry and eggs,honeybees, a big garden for our family, and a medicinal herb garden. We are working on getting our property certified as a herbal botanical sanctuary.

How did you get into farming/homesteading?
I (Sherri) grew up on a family farm in Michigan.

Any future plans?
Expanding the medicinal herb garden, offering classes on herbalism, canning, and other homesteading topics.

We’d love to hear a funny story! 🙂
Last week I was trying to lift a 50-lb bag of pig feed into a trash can. We store the feed in metal trash cans so the raccoons can’t get into it. I tripped and fell backwards on top of a plastic bucket, with the sack of feed on top of me. I had a bucket-shaped bruise on my backside for a week! (Wardee: ouch!)

What about a sad story?
The first year I had chickens I raised them from day-old chicks. When they were 6 months old they were finally old enough to start laying eggs. One night a raccoon broke into the chicken coop and killed all of them. (Wardee: that is awful!)

Is there anything else you’d like to share?
We have two children. Jamie is 6 and Katie is 3. I involve them in the farm chores as much as possible. Jamie loves to help me in the garden and already is a hard worker. As soon as they get home from school/daycare they are asking to go see the pigs and the chickens. Being a full-time working mom and a homesteader is a lot of work, but totally worth it.

Let’s Tour Serenity Gulch Farm!

(Wardee: In the captions below, you’re hearing from Sherri, as she tells you what is in each picture.)

Front yard in winter. Our house sits almost 1/4 mile back from the road so we have a big front yard.

Front yard in spring. In the spring our entire yard is covered with tiny pink and white flowers. It’s my favorite time of year and I’m sad when we finally have to mow the grass. (Wardee: I agree!)

Barn. We have a small one-stall barn on our property. Right now it’s just used for storage.

Barn and asparagus patch. This spring my son Jamie and I worked very hard to put in an asparagus patch. Unfortunately the barn cats thought all the turned up ground was the world’s most fantastic litterbox and ended up digging up most of the plants.

Main garden in early spring. We doubled the size of our family garden this year. The goal is grow as many of our vegetables as possible.

Katie checking out the new pigs. One of our new projects this year is raising pastured pork. We have three pigs that will be butchered in the fall. This is the first day we brought the piglets home.

Two pigs in pasture. Two of the three pigs enjoying munching on some greens in the pasture.

Dad and Jamie building a chicken coop. Another new project this year is raising chickens for meat. We built a chicken tractor so they could be raised outside.

Meat birds in the new coop. My Mother’s Day present was the new coop for the meat birds. Best gift ever!

(Back to Wardee) Sherri and Keith, thank you for sharing your farm 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.)

Isn’t the Cripe’s homestead beautiful? Do you have any questions for Sherri? Please give the Cripe family a warm welcome in the comments.