Homestead Highlight: Mary

My name is Mary Woollard and I blog over at Homegrown on the Hill. (http://www.homegrownonthehill.blogspot.com/) Our 5 acre farm is located in Southwestern Ohio, and I live there with my handy husband, Aaron, and our two children.

We have been backyard farming for the past 3 years starting out with a small garden and doing more and more things each year! We started our chicken coop just last April when we hatched out our first girls. A year later, we currently have 15 hens. This spring, we also raised meat chickens to process and ended up with 19 chickens for our deep freezer. We got started on our journey, because I was reading more and more about what exactly was in our food that we purchased from the grocery store. All the unnecessary chemicals, ingredients, and the increasing of GMOs led us to grow our own food, let us be in control of what exactly we ate – to an extent.

I have a 8 yr old son and 5 yr old daughter who won’t let me go completely whole foods (hahaha), but I try to substitute where I can hoping that we’ll show them there are a lot healthier options than what we can buy from the store. I’d say our biggest success is just in everything we do, surprising our family and friends, and ourselves! Neither myself or my husband grew up on a farm, so we’ve been very fortunate to have success in just about everything we’ve done.

When my mom asked me last year where did I learn how to do all this, because she didn’t teach me this, I felt like she was definitely proud of what we were accomplishing, and I was proud too! We haven’t had any major mistakes yet, but I would say a sad setback was just recently when our turkeys didn’t hatch. We received some turkey eggs from a friend, and had them set to hatch just a week ago. Unfortunately, something happened, and none of our eggs hatched. It is disappointing to all of us, the kids were excited about having baby turkeys, but I know we’ll try again and hopefully have success next time.

Our plans for the future is to just grow our farm to be more self sustaining. We’re planning on purchasing some cattle this summer to start a herd for beef. I’ve already purchased some berry plants (blueberry, blackberry, & raspberry) that are planted, and I’d like to order some fruit trees as well. We’ve worked our compost for the last couple years and this year was the first year we incorporated it into our gardening, because we had enough of it! I’m looking to find a good place for an asparagus bed and growing garlic in the fall. The possibilities are endless and we just want to do as much of it as we can!