“We bought a farm!” I rejoiced.
“A farm? Where? Why?” our friends asked.
“It’s five acres, and it’s beautiful. We are tired of city life and are moving. Country life is the life for us!” my husband and I explained.
This could have been a conversation in an old TV show called Green Acres starring Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert. I’m playing the role of glamorous, seductive, city-bred Eva. Like Eddie, my husband is the handsome, debonair husband who has no clue about farming or running a farm. But he’s got BIG dreams. Neither one of us has given any thought about the BIG bucks we will be spending.
We started out with chickens so we could have fresh eggs.
Then, we bought guinea hens to eat all the ticks and other little insects around the farm.
After came the sheep because they were easy to care for and would mow the lawn. To the flock of sheep, we added a couple of goats because we loved goat cheese.
Followed by the geese to protect the sheep and the goats.
The pheasants came next. They didn’t do anything but were going to make us rich. We were told hunting farms would pay a lot of money for pheasants. My husband built them a giant aviary.
You can’t have a farm without a horse, so we bought Estella, a Tennessee Walker, known for her smooth gait.
Lastly, we got two dogs: Charley, a Golden Retriever, and Lucy, a German Shepperd, to work the farm. We were farmers, and we would live off the land.
Fast forward a couple of years ….
We are broke, and I want to go back to the city.
The pheasant investment cost us over $2,000, and we made a grand profit of $44.
The geese would not let us into our property, so we paid two guys to come to pick them up and take them …. somewhere.
The goats preferred the neighbor’s farm and ate his garden several times. While the sheep refused to eat our farm’s grass because they liked alfalfa.
The army of tick eating guineas was very effective, but I don’t believe they ate the ticks; instead, they blasted ticks away with their infernal crowing, “buck-wheat, buck-wheat,” all day and all night long.
Fresh eggs, anyone? Not so fast. The chickens defiantly would lay their eggs wherever they wanted, and all the other critters usually got to the eggs before we did.
Estella bucked my husband off her back and sent him to the hospital with a concussion that lasted for months. I think he still is suffering from it.
Lucy was a wonderful dog, but she had one minor problem, she liked to eat the lambs. “She thinks they are her babies,” my husband justified. The lambs didn’t survive her mothering. After the third lamb appeared on our front steps, my husband sent Lucy to work at a sheepless farm.
Charley, oh my Charley, he was perfect. He lay there and watched us work our tails off while he leisurely wagged his. We kept Charley for years, long after all the other farm animals were gone. He was my baby and the happiest memory from that hellish farm.