Farmlet

Annie the sheep

Hide and seek in the hay loft

The last of tomatoes and peppers for the season

I've decided to do a little creative shuffling around this space.  I'm not that great when it comes to technology.  I think I have a hard time sitting still long enough in front of the computer to actually figure things out.  Anyway, I decided to freshen things up a bit by changing the name of my blog to "Among the Alders".   "Life on Seaside Farms II" has always felt a bit bland, and I think I chose the name in an uninspired moment!

I've touched on the name "Seaside Farms" before.  I spent my summers growing up on our family's hobby farm, Seaside Farms, in the community of Seaside, New Brunswick, Canada.  When my husband and I purchased our 16 acre parcel of land in Nova Scotia, we thought it would be fun to name it after the place I grew up.  How lucky we felt to find this rural spot just 20 km from downtown Halifax!  At the time, it was overgrown with alders and strewn with about 40 junker cars.  The cars are long gone, but the alders remain, and I have grown to love them.  We always joked around about calling this place a farm, as it was far from it at the time.  As I strolled through the yard today, I finally felt a sense that it was coming together in a very small scale sense, which is really all I want.  I recently found the definition for the term farmette/farmlet, and fell in love with it. 

A farmette is a small residential farm run by an owner who earns income from a source other than the farm. It is sometimes known as a yokelet or a farmlet.  Farmette owners are typically city workers who want to own rural land without operating a full farm. A farmette often includes a large vegetable garden, the occasional barn, tractor, and even farm or domestic animals, such as goats and cats. Farmetters usually rely on their tractor to plow or snow blow their driveways during the winter. Farmettes are usually around 50 acres.  They can have a small hog pen, a few chickens in a chicken coop or a kennel house for dogs.

I don't actually have any aspirations of becoming a real farmer.  I grew up reading Little House on the Prairie books, so I think I'm trying to live out my girlish dream of being just a tiny bit like Laura Ingles.  Farmlet really does sum things up nicely.  We have out  tiny chicken/duck coop, a little barn, a nice-sized garden and FINALLY two pet sheep (a Wool Fairy's dream come true).  It's fulfilling, yet not consuming.  It's a farmlet!  My husband read the definition and noted that we don't have a tractor.....the man wants a tractor (: