The farm has existed in it's various incarnations since my husband and I purchased the property in 1989. Located in northern Waller County, Texas, it is just south of a popular retreat known as Camp Allen, on the same Farm Road. It’s the prettiest part of the county, alternating between trees and farms and cow pastures and there is still enough wildlife to make us hopeful that some wild things will continue to thrive in their natural environment.
When we began looking for land to build a farm we were seeking a place where we could raise our children in a peaceful environment, away from the hurried lifestyle and crime in the city. Driving into Waller Township, we saw a large billboard sign that said, “Welcome to Waller County, God’s country. Land of clean living.” We thought that sounded good so we began looking for a patch of ground that we could call our own. When we found it, The Farm was raw land with weeds 6 feet high. There were only 2 trees and 1 small tin shed, no utilities and no phone lines.
It took a little while to get it going, mainly because of the Savings & Loan Crisis. Newly wed and ready to take on the world, we suddenly found ourselves with hardly enough money left to buy the land. Some bank shares had been devalued in a merger. That is when I learned that the stock market is not for “saving” it’s for gambling.
During our first long, cold, wet winter, camping in the van with our toddler, cooking over an open fire, we managed to put up a fence. The horses tore it down. That same year, a tornado crossed the property, knocking down one of the two trees and the old tin shed. Thus began the 20 year construction project we call The Farm and it’s not finished yet. In fact, we feel like we are starting all over again, making everything new. We do this regularly.
Over the years, we have tried to operate many businesses on the farm, most of them involving horses, with varying degrees of success and failure. We also commuted 45 minutes (each way) to work in the city, for years. We were still doing that as gasoline prices began shooting up. As the pinch began to squeeze, we realized that another S&L style economic crisis was in the making. People were beginning to choose between buying gasoline to get to work or paying their mortgages. I pointed out that a productive farm would get us through times of no money better than money would get us through times of inflated food prices. We quit our jobs and came home to try and create for ourselves the kind of lifestyle we would want to enjoy if we were rich, having little in savings, and no net.
We began by refurbishing the old garden and setting up to sell vegetables and plants, as we had done before when we had excess produce.
We tore down the round pens built for racehorses and the kennels built for show collies became goat pens. The pasture fences, never in good repair, we rebuilt to accommodate cultivation for grain crops and for grazing livestock. In reconditioning the facilities, we reused every post, wire, and staple.
We opened up a little stand at the front of the property and we began selling farm products. 
My daughter suggested I bake some of my homemade bread to sell and she decided to call her new business Aurielle’s Homemade Bread. Admittedly, I didn’t think much of the idea, but my daughter was so insistent and so flattering in her estimation of my culinary skills, I baked her a dozen loaves, which she and Grandma sold in about 15 minutes. Seeing her success, I baked more until I realized that I couldn’t keep up alone. I began teaching my 20 year old son to bake bread. He began putting his own style into my recipes and before long, the kitchen was his domain.
In partnership with her brother and with Grandma handling most of the sales, my daughter was confident enough to buy a little tent for her business. The wind blew the tent down, twisting the poles like corkscrews. We put up two more tents before my daughter announced that she was tired of wasting money on tents that blew down every few days. She wanted her “own restaurant” and she told her father just where she wanted it to be built. (My daughter has an errant food service gene that must come from my Grandfather, the greatest cook in history).
The shop is about 12 x 20 feet and we built it with a mind toward making it look like the Seven Dwarf’s cottage in the movie, Snow White. It isn’t quite finished, but it’s close. 
While trying to decide on a construction method, we were impressed with the centuries old buildings made of wattle and daub. We were determined to use natural materials in the construction and we were wary of using modern construction methods after seeing all of our modern buildings looking old and tired after only a few years in service. We are weary of refurbishing barns and tearing down structures we made with our own hands because they were no longer useable after weathering a few storms.
A little research was all it took to learn the technique of building half-timbered houses. It is one of the most ancient construction methods. We cut down trees on our property north of The Farm, stripped the bark, used them to support the building, and let them season in place. We used mud from digging ditches and hay left by the animals to make daub. The shop has cost less than $1500 to build so far, most of that going into the roof, but it would be impossible to have another like it constructed by contractors without spending thousands of dollars.
We weathered Hurricane Ike in our shop. It is by far the strongest building on The Farm. We felt certain the hurricane would be no worse than Tropical Storm Alicia if it even reached us. After all, it was only a Category 2. Ike came through like a steamroller, like nothing we had ever experienced in our lives. Grandma insisted that it was worse than Carla, and she should know. As a young woman, she had walked out of her home to experience the winds of Carla. (Grandma takes a good deal of looking-after.)
We expected to experience a calm period, in the eye of the storm. A time we could go out, care for our animals, and assess the damage from the first half of the storm. The eye did not come over our farm. Waller sat in the eyewall winds and for 17 hours, we stayed in our small shop with candles lit, wondering how our animals were faring and worrying about our home being blown to pieces. To comfort myself, I kept touching the wall, trying to feel the vibration of the wind, relieved that I could feel nothing. After the many years of seeing minor summer thunderstorms wear down and tear down everything we had built, I prepared myself for the worst. I did not believe that anything would be left and I could not allow myself to think about the animals.
When Ike had passed, we drove the truck up the driveway to find everything still standing, including all of the animals. There were no casualties and only a few sheets of tin had been ripped from the barn roof. The garden, newly planted was almost undisturbed with the young plants barely bent from the wind. The house appeared to have been squeezed with bulges in the ceiling panels, but we figure it will last us until we can build a new one. The shop was not affected. It looked as though no storm had come through.
While several counties, including Waller, were nearly 100% without power for more than 6 weeks (some places as long as 3 months) we never lost power. We suddenly realized that our farm was important to our community in a crisis. So shaken, we never thought of opening the shop that day, we soon found it necessary as vehicles began pulling in the drive and people were asking for bread. The stores were closed. Open stores had no bread. Our little farm was the only place anyone could find bread and for more than a week we were selling furiously to fill a critical need. People had not prepared because we are so far inland, no one was terribly worried about Ike. My family is from Houston and my husband is from Lake Jackson. We do not take hurricanes lightly but even we had only taken the precaution of sheltering in the shop, putting in some dry goods, and buying a few candles.
No one could find bread but the sole grocery store willing to open for 2 hours each day, had plenty of flour on the shelf. Flour is considered a necessity of life, because it is used to bake bread, “the staff of life”. The grocery store would only permit those who were seeking the necessities of life to enter and they would only accept cash. We had no trouble obtaining all the flour we needed to supply Field Store with any sort of bread the people might want.
Ike made true believers of us and we have decided that building with natural materials is the only logical way to proceed. As we have progressed in our efforts to build our harmonic lifestyle, we have discovered that mud construction, whether it is half-timbered or daub-filled pallets, or mud bricks, makes the strongest, safest, most stable structures. The only natural event that destroys mud buildings are earthquakes and usually, the mud buildings stand longer than modern buildings in a strong quake. I would like to point out that even a volcanic eruption that buried two whole towns did not destroy the mud buildings of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Since building the shop, we have discovered even simpler, more fluid, and more efficient ways to build using natural materials. Adobe bricks (mud bricks) are the most effective building material known to man. A building constructed of mud bricks will have a natural climate control feature in the thick, clay walls. The bricks can be molded in any shape desired, allowing the builder complete freedom for artistic expression in the design. Outdoor living areas can be incorporated into buildings to increase square footage without the need of roofing those large areas, significantly reducing the cost of an expensive part of most construction. Many of the materials used in mud brick buildings exist on our own farm. We only have to collect them and modify them slightly to suit our purposes. After a thousand years, if the buildings are no longer here, they will have simply gone back to the soil from whence they came, leaving no trace. But, in a thousand years, if the buildings were well maintained, they would still be here. There are mud brick buildings that are 1400 years old still in use today. Perhaps the greatest benefit of adobe construction is that it will allow us to sit back and relax on occasion, instead of constantly rebuilding and repairing existing structures on The Farm.
Some construction methods promoted as “green” are anything but, requiring transportation of materials on cargo ships, 18 wheelers, and step vans before they reach the construction site. The methods we use cut out nearly all need for shipping. The constant tearing down of old buildings to construct new ones on the same spot every 20 or 30 years may be very good for the construction industry, but it is not environmentally friendly. Most buildings today, including single-family homes, are deliberately constructed to be very temporary. All of the processes involved in producing modern construction materials waste energy, raw materials, and financial resources.
We are in the earliest stages of what we hope will be a transformation of our farm. We have created this site to document and share our experiences as we go forward. Hopefully, others can avoid the mistakes that we will inevitably make along the way if they decide to use similar methods in their own projects. We will include photographs with full explanations and the reasoning involved in our decision-making paradigm.
We are now experimenting with mud brick construction to gain experience working with these materials by building a small, outdoor kitchen where we can enjoy the cool, fall evenings cooking and of course, eating. The outdoor kitchen will be fully explained on the Farm Projects page and photos will soon be available.
This is the first step toward building our new home, new barns, a wall to encircle a portion of the property, and entertainment areas that may also be used by folks looking for a nice place to hold events. It is an ambitious project to begin without borrowing and without an abundance of excess capital. We realize the difficulties but we are excited about every project and we can’t wait to see the farm the way we imagine that it can be.
An early photo of horses on the farm.
This photo shows our first toehold on the farm. The camper, feed room and hay shed were the only shelters on the place. 
Once we had the house, we were able to get back to raising and showing dogs.
And we got back to training race horses.
We managed to get the yard in order over time, to construct better barns and bring in some nice horses.
The switch from horse racing and rat racing with the other working commuters was difficult in some ways. Some dreams die very hard. New dreams are slow to materialize but once a dream begins to become a reality, life can be much easier and a lot less stressful.
Goats have turned out to be a real pleasure for us. They are such entertaining animals, always looking for some mischeif or a new game to play. We even had a soccer playing buckling in our first good crop of kids.
For the first year of our goat venture, we got no kids and I was beginning to believe that we never would see any baby goats born. Once our billy goat matured, every doe we owned conceived.
We had our first promising crop of goat kids in the winter of 2008-2009.
The two little bucklings above were born to Serina, our best milking doe.
The Mini Tennessee Stiffleg goat kids are impossible to resist.
Princess is our favorite goat because she is always healthy and has given us 3 doelings, one in the Spring of 2008 and two more in 2009.
Hornet's kids were born a little over 2 months ago.
We have three new additions to our goat herd. Lolla and Sparkle are two hefty Boer does, purchased in Missouri on September 5, 2009 from Jennifer Keys. We will have photos of them on the website very shortly. Samantha is also a hefty Boer doeling purchased from Bubba Bruner in Waller.
