The joys and struggles of renovating an old farmhouse and creating the Newtown Orchard
December 20, 2020 It is December and we are experiencing freezing nights and short days, but I (Katie) am dreaming about and planning our 2021 garden! Last year, we hurriedly put up a 15x15 garden. My father is a Master Gardner, but I don’t know if he’d be mortified, or impressed! At least we did …
December 7, 2020 It is amazing how much we need people. During this pandemic, our family has been blessed with great health. We are all working our off-farm jobs and are able to be around people – masked and 6’ apart, of course. We do know, however, that we need social time to play and …
November 13, 2020 We are doing more building and less demo-ing on the house and it feels great. The biggest design element in our reconstruction is taking down an interior wall and exposing the vaulted ceilings. Both those elements required a 12' header to be removed and a 19' header installed in its place. We've …
October 22, 2020 It has been just over a year since we purchased the old farm and boy has it been a roller coaster ride. We went back to the beginning and read all our blog entrees to see how far we’ve come. There were quite a few things we had forgotten about!When we closed …
September 20, 2020 We have been working almost non-stop renovating the farm house and it shows! We are finally making significant progress and crossing major projects off our list. We still have a long way to go, but it feels so much better to be building than demolishing. The sub-floors in the bedroom are finished. …
August 5, 2020 All homesteaders, farmers and those building their own homes know that EVERY.SINGLE.PROJECT has obstacles that have to be taken care of before getting to the actual project. We have learned to take them in stride. Before we build the bathroom wall, we had to take care of the rotted sill plate. Before …
Keeping bees is like growing any other agricultural product. You have good years and you have learning years! This was a good year. We have been keeping bees for 8 years and no two years have been the same. Last fall, we moved all our hives to our farm. That was a life-changer. We no …
July 2, 2020 It has been a while since we updated you on the status of our farm. This past month has been a wild ride, both ups and downs. We started the month with a major up! We finished one complete wall where almost all the studs either had water damage or had been …
Continue reading The Easy Way, the Hard Way, and the Newtown Way
June 11, 2020 We recently took the time to walk more of our property and appreciate the beautiful landscape God left for us. These flowers and wild edibles are all around out property (and there's probably quite a bit more, too). They don't look like they have been propagated. We used our plant ID app …
May 27, 2020 We finished the chicken enclosure! We had to move the chicken brooder out to our deck because they were starting to smell and they were creating SO.MUCH.DUST! The enclosure suddenly became a higher priority, so we all worked together to get it finished. We purchased a billboard tarp online to use as …
Undaunted Farming 