Author: mdibois

45 years an educator in the state of Georgia. I still teach part-time. My subjects are Environmental Science and Physics. My wife Linda and I live on a small 15 acre farm where we garden and raise sheep and Pyrenees dogs as well as our own Poultry and beef. We enjoy being outside and working with the land. We find that subsistence farming in the deep south poses as many challenges as surviving in the cold latitudes of the north country. The problems are different but just as big. Virtually everything we endeavor to do is experimental. I also enjoy singing and playing the guitar in my church and working with our worship team. Our family is deeply rooted in the Christian faith and we attend church when ever possible. I also enjoy hunting, fishing and target shooting. I have always loved the outdoors and prefer working outside any time. We feel extremely blessed to have the privilege of working the land with integrity and care for all life that is on it.

The year 2019 in the middle

So far this year we have been busy with expanding our food choices by putting some needed grass fed beef in our freezer. We have also changed the emphasis of our sheep herd. We are now going to be raising registered Katahdins. This will be the sole type of sheep we will be raising on our farm. We have been fortunate to raise our CKC registered Pyrenees and find good homes for all of them. In the next few months our garden will be ready and we will have lots of fresh food for the table and freezer. We have also built a “chicken tractor” for raising our own meat birds and this year we will try our first sample of pasture raised chickens.

In the last half of the year we will be simplifying our ventures and try to place more emphasis on those things which seem to work best for us. The bee yard has been scaled down to 5 hives and that’s probably all we will keep. The main purpose of having bees is to pollinate our gardens. That has worked very well. And as always we are experimenting with woven ground cover and drip irrigation. So far so good. We will update later in the year.

The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me!

Treating the land and it’s inhabitants with respect and integrity.

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Sweet Farley Farm is a non-profit 501c-3 subsistence homestead. The name comes from our favorite pet cat Farley and the Sweet from the honey we harvest from our modest apiary.

At Sweet Farley farm we utilize organic practices in all our gardening. We are endeavoring to become self sufficient and sustainable. However, almost everything we do is in some way experimental. We will soon be posting videos of our many experiments.. successful and unsuccessful. Successes and blunders. We want everyone to see the things that worked and the things that didn’t.

We are also an educational farm and we believe in sharing any knowledge we have with others.

We are also a giving organization. That which we produce above and beyond our needs is freely given to those in need.

We also breed CKC registered Great Pyrenees dogs and sell them to good homes.

2019 is going to be an exciting year. We are endeavoring to expand our apiary and we are also improving our organic gardening skills. This year we will be adding additional layers and meat chickens that will be housed in a chicken tractor. We plan to sell meat chickens as the state agriculture department will allow us to sell up to 1000 birds to individuals. We are planning to set up an outdoor processing area and raising both Georgia Broilers and Red Ranger meat chickens.