2026 Update on Our Tiny Farm in Etowah, North Carolina!

 

Yesterday, a friend pointed out to me that it has been a REALLY LONG TIME since I posted an update about the farm and she wanted to know what was going on! So, here is what has transpired from the present back to to September 15, 2024 when I made the last post. The picture above is of our three donkeys this spring. That's PJ on the left, Chester on the far right, and Meadow standing next to Chester. Right now we are not running any kind of business on Our Tiny Farm. We have a large garden, but it is to feed family and friends. People do come to visit the donkeys from time to time, but they come as friends and we ask them to make a donation to one of our favorite local non-profits. A few of them have to come for their "donkey fix" quite frequently! We aren't currently boarding any donkeys, but are available to serve as a temporary home when a family finds their donkeys before they have the shelter and fencing ready for them on their own farms. That happens more often then you would think, and we enjoy mentoring new donkey families.

The farrier comes to visit every few months. He is so very good with the donkeys. Here he is trimming PJ's hooves. PJ is about 16 years old and wasn't fond of getting his pedicures before he moved to Our Tiny Farm, but he seems to appreciate how gentle and calm our farrier is with him. 

PJ moved to Our Tiny Farm last fall. We consider ourselves his stepparents. The family he lived with for most of his 16 years comes to visit him frequently. That's his "real mother" giving him a good brushing this spring. We are all one big happy family now.

This photo is from late February 2026. The three donkeys are a very comfortable little herd now. If you read my post from September 2024, I had mentioned that I thought Chester and Meadow needed another pasture mate!

The three little donkeys wait for me to come out and give them hay and their hoof supplement (I call it breakfast) every morning. They have great internal clocks. If I am more than 15 minutes off my regular schedule, one or more of them will start braying to get my attention.
 

Here they are eating their "breakfast". It is just one ounce of a hoof supplement, but they think it is a wonderful treat.

In late January and early February of 2026, we experienced bitter cold temperatures (single digits) and high winds. We put coats on the donkeys, but one night Chester started shivering and we became very concerned for him. We set up a propane blast heater and took turns sitting there monitoring it with several fire extinguishers right next to us. We might never have to use them, but we are going to order longer coats with belly wraps to have on hand in case this happens again.

It was terribly cold, but so beautiful!

PJ had never worn a coat before and took off running every time we tried to get near him with it, but after experiencing one very cold night without it, and seeing the other two wearing theirs, he finally let us put a coat on him. It made us feel so much better to know that he had some additional protection from the cold.

This is from January 2025. Meadow and Chester love playing with toys, but PJ didn't seem very interested. On this day, he decided to pick up the Jolly Ball and see what he could do with it! Since then, he plays with the others and enjoys traffic cones, pieces of plastic drain pipe, old boots, rakes, brushes, buckets, and just about anything he can pick up with his teeth and carry off!

This is just a pretty shot from December 2025.

This photo if from November 21, 2025 when PJ moved to Our Tiny Farm. PJ had lived with horses his whole life. He had never met another donkey before! He adjusted very quickly, and now we are working to slowly help him lose the weight he gained by trying to eat like a horse!

We feed the birds on the farm and expect the squirrels, raccoons, and opposums to also partake, but we were not expecting the deer to stand on their hind legs and eat the feed, too! We have a very large herd of deer, so we use a pulley system to keep the vulnerable feeders out of their reach.

Just a pretty picture of the farm on a November afternoon. We were enjoying the sunshine and planning how we are going to replant the farm after a microburst in 2021 and Hurricane Helene in 2024 took down almost every large tree on the farm. We are thinking of planting multi-functional windbreaks and many trees with edible fruit and nuts for us and the wildlife.

This is a photo from October 2025. It is always such a good feeling to get the hay put up for the winter. It was a special relief this time because quality hay was scarce after Helene destroyed many fields and barns. 

I just had to share this special photo from a morning in October 2025 with the blue sky, frost on the grass, and fog coming up from the river and hugging the ground. We quit beekeeping after about 25 years, and gave our hives and all of our equipment to a young farmer across the street. Hubby is mentoring him.

Chester on the left and Meadow on the right. It is not unusual to find them standing this way. 

We are always making changes in the farm landscape and brought in some soil to help build up low areas. We had the dump truck put the dirt pile in the small pasture area, and the donkeys love to play on it.

This is Meadow taking a nap on a cool afternoon in September 2025. Meadow and Chester both wear fly masks to keep the little biting gnats out of their ears. We have not been able to convince PJ to wear one yet. 

They love their toys and will make a play thing out of anything you leave unattended, including gloves, tools, spray bottles, manure forks, wheelbarrows...

In June 2025 we were introduced to PJ. This is him in the pasture where he lived most of his life with several horses. The last horse was nearing the end of her life, and his "parents" did not intend to get another horse. They found Our Tiny Farm and asked if we would welcome PJ to our farm. We couldn't say no.

This is April 2025. I had been brushing the donkeys, got up for a few minutes and they quickly took over the stool and the brushes. 

Spring 2025 was very beautiful on the farm. 

As I mentioned earlier, people just love to visit the donkeys and the donkeys love the attention. This was February 2025.

Chester and Meadow look so smart in their colorful winter coats in January 2025.

Donkeys gain weight very quickly, so we limit pasture time to just a few hours each day, weigh out the hay that we feed them, and put the hay in slow feeders. Here you can see the NibbleNet and the hay ball. This is November 2024.

Our farm is surrounded by other small farms. Our neighbors are horses, goats, donkeys, and sheep. This is October 2024.

In October 2024 we experienced a special treat when the Northern Lights were visible in our area! 

This was October 5, 2024 and the damage from Hurricane Helene was all around us. Almost two years later, there are still many roads that are impassable and many people still without permanent homes. We were very fortunate. We lost a lot of trees and we were isolated for many days. But we have a generator and several wells, the pantry is always well-stocked, and we have great neighbors. Everyone came together to cut trees and help each other. The scariest issue for our little group of families was not being able to communicate with anyone outside of our tiny area. So we did not know how our family was just eight miles away, and we could not have called for emergency medical help if it was needed. 

This photo and the ones below are from September 27, 2024. This is what we saw after we emerged from our home after Helene passed through. That is not a river or a lake. That is the large pasture next door. 

 

We lost so many large trees, but we were fortunate. There was no damage to our house or barn, and the damage to the workshop was minimal. So many others suffered catastrophic damage. 

 

Fortunately, we had the equipment to move enough of the downed trees so we could get in and out of the property. It was many months before a professional tree service could come in and remove the others laid flat all over the farm. 

 

The winds knocked all the old windbreaks down, pulling the trees up by their roots.  

This was the warning we received on September 26, 2024. I hope we never experience anything like that again. But, I am glad we live on a farm and are pretty self-sufficient. I am glad that we raised our children to know how to grow abundant gardens, raise chickens and cattle, fix their cars and small equipment, do basic carpentry and plumbing, cook and sew, and have the tools on hand to do these things. You never know when you will need those skills. 

 

Our Tiny Farm During the Year of COVID

In December 2019 I wrote a post about how we were transitioning Our Tiny Farm for the next stage of our lives. I am still working full-time as a faculty member in the Department of Horticultural Science at  NC State University, but I am starting to think about what I want to do next. 

We also have an RV that we really enjoy exploring this beautiful country in. So raising cattle, garlic, and vegetables don't fit quite as easily into our lives and plans as they used to. 

We have decided that we will continue to raise our own donkeys and provide a temporary home for a few others. We enjoy them so very much. And when we travel, our very capable son, who lives on the farm, takes care of them for us. THAT is one of the keys to our being able to make this transition and keep the farm; having a young, strong son who enjoys living here with us. He gets free rent and we have built-in farm help.

These are our two donkeys. Chester is the brown miniature donkey on the left and Meadow is the small standard donkey on the right.

The farm behind us also raises donkeys and one summer day a baby was born right next to our fence line. This donkey is less than five minutes old!

We put up a nice supply of locally grown hay for our donkeys. We have a good relationship with our hay supplier and are assured that they use no persistent herbicides on their fields so we can safely use the manure on our gardens and provide it to others without risk to sensitive plants.

The plan for 2020 was to grow a small, manageable garden that would be easy to maintain and not put a guilt trip on us come harvest time. Well, old habits die hard and before I knew it, hubby had planted a sizeable garden. We enjoyed lots of fresh, homegrown tomatoes, beans, sweet corn, summer squash, zucchini, butternut squash, peppers, eggplant, and potatoes. 

We also froze and gave away much of what we grew. Now this big garden area, which we have managed following practices and using products approved by the National Organic Program, is sown in cover crops. Next spring our plan is to keep this area planted in soil building and pollinator friendly plants and build raised beds close to the kitchen!

We had a very special treat this summer. We had several elk from the Smoky Mountain National Park find their way into our community. People were posting pictures of them on social media from all over our area, and then late one afternoon, a big bull came to our area. Here he is just strolling across our farm. All the horses and donkeys just stood and stared. 

On a very sad note, we had to say good-bye to the most loving, wonderful dog in the world, Traveler. Traveler came to us from the Foothills Humane Society 12 years ago. He was our constant companion. He got along well (most of the time) with all the farm animals and the house cats. He is missed very, very much.

In addition to boarding donkeys, we will continue to be beekeepers and bottle honey.

It was an excellent honey year. Our friends and family will be enjoying this for a long time.

Easter night we had a terrible storm come through with high winds and a deluge of rain. Our Tiny Farm was hit particularly hard. We don't know if it was a micro-burst, straight line winds, or a tornado, but twenty VERY large trees were blown down in the middle of the night. We were so blessed. The only damage to the house was to the gutter on the corner of the porch.

Like many others, I became quite proficient at making many kinds of face masks for family and friends.

We till up the garden each spring using the Troy-Bilt rototiller that my mother, siblings, and I bought for my father when I was a teenager. They don't make them like that anymore!

Carpenter bees were making swiss cheese out of our barn, so we hung four of these traps on the barn this year. They really work!

These daffodils were here when we bought Our Tiny Farm in 1999. Who knows how long they were there before that!

We see beautiful sunrises and sunsets from our farm.

Our big excitement in January was going out to see the donkeys in the morning and finding that a bear had tried to push his, or her, way into the donkeys' paddock. Several years ago I had my husband reinforce the fencing on the paddock area where we confine our little donkeys each night. He moved the six-strand electric fencing to the outside and put woven wire fencing on the inside. The bear reached through the upper electric wires and pushed the woven wire fencing out of the big heavy staples on the corner post. We assume that as he/she pushed forward, he/she made contact with several of the electric wires and was shocked enough to give up (we keep that fence very hot). There was a footprint left in the mud that I asked some of my bear hunting friends to verify that it was indeed a bear (although, what else could have done that?). Since then, we have a trail cam mounted.

And that was our COVID year on Our Tiny Farm. Today I was planning for our very small Thanksgiving celebration later in the week. It will just be three of us this year but we are looking forward to Zoom video calls with parents, siblings, and my daughter and family. Aren't we fortunate to have such technology to get us through this pandemic. Stay safe.