Homestead Highlight: Sonja

My name is Sonja Twombly. My husband, Sean and I live with our 2 teenage daughters in Coastal Maine. Together, we are building Lally Broch Farm, our homestead and growing small farm business. It is not easy. Anyone with any experience in farming large or small can tell you that. But, it is the very best way we have found to live.

You can follow along with Sonja at Lally Broch Farm

 In some ways, our story is probably like many of yours; a young family, working two full-time jobs in this uncertain economy, trying to make ends meet. What started with us thinking it might be fun to try to grow some of our own fruits and vegetables on our small 4 acre +/- slice of land has become a journey into really providing for ourselves.  It’s changed how we view the food we eat, what it is made of, where it came from, and how it was handled. It opened our eyes to terms like “GMOs” and “battery hens”. It led to our first getting mad, and then, determined. These changes have not happened overnight. This journey we’re on is still in progress. But, “when you know better, you do better”.  We want to do better.

 It would take too long to write about how we decided to add different kinds of animals to our homestead. I can say that at the beginning it was less a plan and more a pattern of animals coming into our lives just when they needed us or we needed them the most. Our eldest daughter, Caitlin (grown and married now) wanted to purchase Jasmine, the horse she learned to ride on, from the folks who owned and were selling her after 7 years. That was before Sean and I wed. The kids and I lived in-town in a modest home with a modest yard. Keeping a horse there was just impossible. But, we’re not the sort to give up easily. At 14 years, Caitlin got a part time job and worked off part of her horse’s boarding with a neighbor, who had a barn, pastures, and horses of their own. When Sean married us, he helped Caitlin fence off some pasture at his home and we built our first stable.

 This will be our first official year opened for business. We’re expanding our gardens. We hope to sell CSA shares for fruits, vegetables, and eggs. We learned to make soap and cheese. We’re adding fiber bunnies and turkeys this year. Our growth has more of a planned direction to it, certainly.