Hello, and welcome to our burgeoning farm! We're located in Southeast Texas in a little town called Willis about 45 minutes north of Houston. Since this is our first blog post, I wanted to take a moment to introduce ourselves. We are the Plowman's. We have lived on this farm for just a few weeks shy of one year, and we feel like we've found our heaven on earth! We are a family of five. Two parents, Ian and Carrie, and our children Ethan, Aidan and Brynn. Below is a recent photo of us out at one of our favorite sushi restaurant, Chi, for the first time since things shut down early on in the pandemic. We were celebrating Brynn's Kindergarten graduation!
This year Ian and I will have been married for 16 years! There's definitely no one else we'd rather share this crazy life with than each other!! We met in college at Baylor University in Waco, TX as sophomores, and married two weeks after graduation a few years later. A few months before we celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary, we welcomed our first child a son we named, Ethan. Two years later we welcomed our second son, Aidan. Our daughter was our final addition, and joined us almost 3 years after that.
Neither of us grew up in Willis. Ian spent his childhood in Lake Jackson, TX, and I grew up in a town outside of Austin, TX called Lakeway. After we married in a beautiful ceremony on the shores of Lake Travis near where I grew up, we moved to the northern part of Houston for both of us to continue our educations. Ian attended Universal Technical Institute in pursuit of an automotive technician certification, and I went to University of Houston Clear Lake to pursue a Master's degree in Industrial Organizational Psychology. Once we graduated from our respective schools we bought our first house in the town of Atascocita, TX sticking to the northern part of the Houston Area. We both loved our first house, but we thought we wanted something different for our little family. So after we got pregnant with our second child, we decided to move to The Woodlands, TX.
We are a bit on the crazy side as we ended up moving about 4 weeks before we welcomed our second son! Needless to say, that house didn't get unpacked for a while! While we did grow to love that house, about 4 years ago we got bit with the gardening/homesteading bug. We weren't in a position at the time move, so we decided to turn our waiting room into a classroom (a la one of my top favorite YouTube vloggers, Jess Sowards of Roots and Refuge Farm) and try to grow a garden. We learned so much that first year! The most crucial nugget we took away was that we needed more sun! The Woodlands is known for many wonderful things. Top of the list is the fact that it feels like you're living in a forest. Well, many of the things we wanted to grow required 6 or more hours of sun, and the sunniest part of our yard there could barely muster that length even during the longest days during the summer.
So in 2020 at the start of a global pandemic, we decided it was time to look for our dream farm! We were referred to the most amazing realtor, Jenny Elmi of The Elmi Group. She was so patient and knowledgeable! We knew what we were looking for was going to be very niche as we wanted a house with property and no or few restrictions so that we could start our dream farm! We visited and even offered several places that ticked some of the boxes, but never all of them. Luckily, though it was frustrating at the time, each offer didn't work out and we were pushed to keep searching.
One day a few months later, I noticed a property that I had looked at online a number of times had a significant price drop. It was quite a drive north from our house at the time, but we decided to take the drive to see the house and get a feel for truly how far the drive would be. Needless to say, that sealed the deal for us! We called Jenny on the way home and asked her to set up a walk through. The rest is history! If you'd like to check out our journey to building our farm over this first year, I would encourage you to check out our farm's Facebook page here.
We look forward to sharing more with you as we continue to grow and get established. Our goals here are simple. We wanted fresh air and space to run and play outside for our kiddos. We want to produce our own food, so that we know exactly how each animal, plant, tree, and hive were treated before they hit our plates. We have decided to focus first on meat production, so we started with chickens and meat rabbits even before we actually moved to our property! From there we picked up three feeder pigs, and then added meat chickens and milking goats. We have plans and space for future expansion, so we hope you'll enjoy the ride with us and maybe pick up a few nuggets from our journey as we have learned so much from the many who have come before us.
Thank you for hanging out with us, and we hope to see you again soon!