City Girls Going Rural – A Quick Update

Hi Everyone!!!

I wanted to give you all a little update on how we’re doing while I hit a spot of Internet that works 🙂 I’ve gotten lots of questions from you, Dear Readers, about our move, our Urban Farm, the chickens specifically, and what is next for us, so I figured I’d give you a brief update for now, then elaborate later when we have actual internet and I’m not piggy backing off my phone service/data!

The Urban Farm

Our 1/8 Urban Farm is officially on the market! This decision to move happened quickly, so we packed up all our stuff, patched, painted, and cleaned the house up and are hoping a lucky buyer will find our little oasis in the city very, very quickly! We think the price is a steal of a deal given all the work we’ve put into the yard and the house itself and are hopeful another like-minded individual will think so, too! If you know anyone in the Santa Fe area who is looking for an urban oasis, please send them our way!

The Chickens

All 20 of our chickens are still living at the urban farm. We are selling 10 to a friend who is also moving out of town and who will collect her chickens in the next few days. She is also helping us care for them this week while we get settled in our new home. We will bring 5 chickens with us out to our new home this weekend, when we’ll also build them a new coop. For the time being, they will live in our backyard. We’ll reassess their location in the spring once we have a better feel for the property. The remaining 5 chickens will, hopefully, stay with the house with the buyer. If the buyer doesn’t want chickens, we will first try to sell them on Craigslist before deciding what the next steps might be.

The Harvests

yes, we put a lot of time and effort into our urban farm this spring and summer because we didn’t know we were moving! I have been asked if we are simply “abandoning” it all and the answer is no. Of course not! Until the house sells (which is hopefully very quickly, harvests aside), the harvests are ours and we will continue to harvest as much as possible when we make it over to the house to check on things. The drip irrigation is set on timers, so it’s all getting watered, too 🙂 There are apples and tomatoes and beans and herbs in full production right now, so those are all coming home with us a couple of time a week. There are also potatoes to be harvested (though they didn’t do very well this year) and herbs coming in happily, as well as a few items I want to transplant to our new home (strawberries that are running everywhere, echinacea that can be thinned out, yarrow that was grown in pots sunken into the ground…). So no, we are not abandoning all of our hard work.

The Compost

We are planning to dig out our worms and at least some of the compost to bring to our new home to spread around on some of the future vegetable beds that will be planted out next spring. This is one of those big jobs I am dreading, but it is also something we can’t just leave entirely.  We’re talking years of work in that pile of soil and food scraps!

The Bees/Bee Hive

Though we haven’t had bees for over a year now, we brought our Top Bar hive with us in the hopes we can get bees next Spring. Since we are renting now, this hasn’t yet been negotiated fully, but I am hopeful our landlord will see the benefit of having some pollinators on his property, and since there’s plenty of space, no one would ever really have to interact with them 🙂 We’ll see!

Us

Whew… Honestly, we’re all a little fried! Kim commutes into work each day (which is now a ~20 minutes drive as opposed to her previous 10-15 minute drive…not bad, ha?) and I am left with a million boxes to unpack. It’s a good thing I’m a fairly organized person, because we went from a house with seven rooms, tons of storage and a garage to a five room house, much less storage and no garage…but all the same stuff! So, I’m getting creative and am also purging a few unnecessary items.  This really is a new beginning on so many levels! And Sprout? Well, she’s a trouper, but this whole move, coupled with a really bad bought of teething, has been a struggle for her.  For example, the only place she’ll take a nap is on my back in the Ergo Baby because she just wants to be close! And let me just say, while I love her being close, I am so sore in places I didn’t know I could be sore in from carrying her around half the day every day!

Alright, I think that’s enough for now! Thank you all for following along, asking your questions and expressing your concerns! This really is a crazy move, a “leap and trust that the net will appear” sort of experience and I’m happy to share it all with you!

We should have internet in place at some point over the weekend (tomorrow hopefully), when I’ll be back with more updates, giveaways and DIY gifts for the coming season! In the meantime, I’m posting to Instagram often and Facebook when I can and hope you will stay in touch and keep asking your questions 🙂

xoxo,

M