My Little Homestead on the Prairie

This is my little homestead on the prairie. It is a 2,ooosqft modular on a full basement. The original home that was here was a 1,000sqft bi-level home built in 1892. I loved that little house so much. But, a friend of mine burnt it down several years ago and now we have this one. There are eight of us so my husband is building some bedrooms, a bathroom, a storage room and a family room in the basement. It's slow going, but getting there. We live on eight acres of honest to goodness prairie ground. The upside is that we are surrounded by farmland, except our acerage, and we only have one neighbor across the street and not another one for miles in every direction. The downside is that because we live on prairie, what we don't activly cultivate gets swallowed up by thick, unyielding prairie grass and the fastest growing trees you've ever seen. Since we weren't able to rebuild right away, our land has been overrun by the trees that grow like weeds. It's a gigantic mess. Daniel, my husband, almost feels powerless to do anything about it. We don't have the right equipment to deal with the problem and we don't have the liquid funds to keep renting the heavy equipment needed. We just keep doing our best, though, and eventually it will come together.

On our property we have a big metal double car gaurage with a side entrance section for the tractor, which we don't keep in there. Actually, the only two cars in there right now are Daniel's Mustang (he's restoring it) and a geo that he's trying to find an engin for. We also have a washhouse, that is now my studio since our modular came with a laundryroom; a library, that was actually the chicken mansion that Daniel and I built to hold 177 chickens; and a couple of animal pens, two that were there already and two that I put up because I wanted animals. There had been a barn but it burnt down before we bought the property. So instead of a barn we have a slab of concreat. There is a silo in the field that is falling apart one piece at a time. There is also a spring fed seasonal creek that runs at the front of our property. A couple of times this spring it has actually become a little fast moving river. Our area has gotten a lot of rain and has flooded in many places. We are lucky to be one of the few that have not been fludded (knock on wood.) We have a section at the top of our property that is wooded and everything else is just open field. There is not much too it, but it has all the potential that I need.