Farm Life: The Best Bits

From time to time Nick will send me links for rental houses. For a long time now he has dreamed of having a place with land.

One day he sent me a link for a 100-year-old homestead nestled in the middle of 26 hectares of farmland.

I scanned the photos featuring a wraparound porch with climbing wisteria and huge established trees and texted back a brief note of approval.

We had just renewed the lease on our current house for another year so I didn’t see us moving anytime soon.

Nick suggested I call the owners to see if we could have a look (this was his way of making me talk on the phone because he hates to).

The house was everything I had wanted and dreamed of.

It had a dedicated garden patch and potting shed. There was an orchard on one side of the house and a large grassy lawn on the other.

The rooms were huge with high ceilings and ornate crowns where chandeliers once hung. Almost every room has a fireplace although no chimneys remained.

For almost 15 years the house had served as an office for a seed research company which had a sister farm in Oregon.  There were shelves and outlets a plenty.

Some of the fields are still used by local scientists who, according to the farm’s current owners, will stand in the potato fields for hours studying the plants and discussing them in hushed tones with one another. They don’t grow the plants for food so when it’s time for the harvest the farmer ends up with a lot of spuds.

If there was ever a need for me to show a poker face when deciding on something important I would probably fail miserably. I was enchanted by the house and there was no hiding it. A casual observer might have described me as “dewy eyed and hopeful.”

Nick and I thanked the owners for showing us around, hopped in his truck and headed down the long driveway.

“Why aren’t we telling them right now that we want the place?” I asked.

Nick wanted to live there too but he didn’t want to be discomfited by a phone conversation so he made me do the talking.

The family liked us, we liked them and we got the house.

In addition to the people we rent from, our neighbours include a pair of pheasants, a flock of sheep, one donkey, one horse, three ducks, two working dogs, one cat and a handful of California quail. 

There is also an abundance of wild bird life.

We have all the joys of living on a farm without actually having to do any of the farming.

There is no getting up before first light to hook up teats to a milking machine or rounding up sheep for shearing, drenching or tail docking.

I highly recommend this kind of farm life. It's pretty sweet if you can swing it.