Announcing..... my dream come true!

After literally years of dreaming about, planning and looking for a farm, my husband took an uncharacteristic, yet impressive leap. JD found out about a land auction on Friday night, checked it out early Saturday morning, and by 11am, without me even seeing it (not even a photo!) he had bid on and won nearly 17 acres of farmland in Lascassas, TN. He got an incredible deal- paying half of what we expected to and nearly doubling the acreage we thought we'd get. It is extremely beautiful and meets almost all of our qualifications. It is over 15 acres (qualifies for greenbelt status to lower our property taxes), it has woods and a creek to play in, and a spring for water- if not for us, for irrigation and animals. Although the location is further from our Church than we are now, JD could not pass this up and I'm so glad he didn't. I'll show you....

When you come in from the road, we have a bottleneck of woods that makes it very private. We are looking south in this photo, standing in what we hope will be a pond someday.

Walking through the bottleneck, it opens up to the main area of land that has been used as farmland- alternating soybeans and corn. It feels good to capture some land back from all those pesticides and GMOs!

We have an old stone wall in the woods along the west property line.

Past this line of trees, up a gradual slope is an area almost surrounded by trees. This is the site we will reserve for our future house. We plan to build a barn type building first, live in it cheaply and do a lot of research on sustainable building methods before we build our house. Notice the view of the farmland in the background on the left- that is the south end of our property.

This is standing on the south hill (in the background of the pic above) looking back at the home site. The bulk of our property is to the right (east).

This is standing on that southern hill, but looking toward the south.

Now the best part! The 700 ft of our southern property line runs along Bradley Creek!

*Sigh* and more of the stone walls

This is standing near the eastern tree line looking towards the creek. There's RJ not wanting to walk anymore.

The fields were planted in soy this year. Some of the leftovers are sprouting. Edemame, anyone?

This is standing just north of the creek, looking north, towards the front of the property.

This is standing to the east of the south hill, looking towards the bottleneck.

You can see satellite views HERE

We are in the planning stages now as we wait for our house to sell so we can build the barn with our equity, but we will be doing as much as we can to the land with cash in the meantime.

I am going to attempt to keep up this blog with progress on the land as well as our life, without letting any of my other responsibilities suffer, but I'm not promising anything. So if you are not already subscribed, you may do so if you would like to receive email notifications of new posts.

P.S. Avery and Addie would like to be guest posters on this blog, so with their budding typing and photography skills, we may have some especially interesting posts coming up. :)