THE EARLY DAYS OF STONEY RIDGE FARMER...FARM TOUR 2016....WE'VE COME SO FAR !!!

hey there this is Josh with Stony Ridge Farm I want to tell you a little bit about our story uh I'm a veteran Air Force veteran grew up in Southwest Virginia moved to uh Utah uh joined the Air Force at the age of 18 stayed in for about four and a half years started a small business handyman business and bought uh some real estate uh by the time I was 23 years old uh I did not have to work and I'd gone back to college uh I went to Bieber State University in Ogden Utah and finished up uh my bachelor's degree in nursing at uh UNC Greensboro University North Carolina Greensboro my wife is uh a nurse graduate from UNCC Greensboro also she's a nurse and we got married about two years ago and I told her on our first date I wanted to get back to the country and live a good country life so we're here on the farm uh it's a beautiful place to live it's quiet we're about a half a mile off the black top here in the foothills of North Carolina in Stoneville North Carolina so a little more about the farm our plan is to grow uh our own food and our own vegetables and for our neighbors to enjoy Also vegetables and food uh we have an orchard with about 50 trees planted we'll probably add 20 trees per year to those 50 that are currently planted we're going to raise pasture raise chickens we did some chickens this year we did about 25 just for us just as a test run and uh we've got about a 25 acre field that we've just cleared uh for uh pasture Ray's beef and pasture Ray's chicken uh we're going to start selling those chickens sometime hopefully next year my goals are to uh continue nursing um and uh we're going to make a little bit of money on the farm and basically Bridge myself out of ing over into full-time farming um so what we have behind us is the goat pin it's kind of a mess right now we just had a uh catastrophe our chicken Co collapsed on us when we tried to move it so it's always something fun going on here on the Stony Ridge Farm but we'll give you more updates as things go on I'm going to pan the camera around and show you a little bit just here in the yard what we've got going so we've got some blueberry bushes and we plan on extending that row all the way out to uh the distance way out here where this thing is uh we've got a row of thornless blackberries and the post here that are still Set uh will have high tensil line between them and I went over to uh Lowe's and all year long we've been buying grape Vines so these are muscadines and other types of grapes and we're going to run grape trellises and that's an old bicycle that's just some yard art this is our flag pole we uh repurposed some old irrigation pipe and put in some concrete and we have a flag pole now so we just slide that on and off whenever uh we want to change our flag and uh it's pretty nice to have this is our uh mobile home that we're living in right now we are uh planning on building at some point in the future but um we're going to be living here we actually paid only $3,500 for this house um I gutted the inside and we've uh slowly but surely are making it a home uh took everything out the inside new flooring new walls uh windows are necks paint roof all that and these are two peacon trees that were here when we uh first bought the place there goes Fred and Edna our only two chickens left after our coyote attack looks like they're hunting down some good grubby yummy bugs this is our farm truck I bought this guy on Craigslist for a couple thousand bucks and uh runs good see old three on the column great little old truck uh drive it back and forth to work sometimes uh and we've got a couple tractors under the shed behind us and that's uh some of our vehicles here on Stony Ridge so here are a couple of the tractors that we have here on the farm we've got a Massie Ferguson 135 it's uh kind of our bush hogging tractor um we just got that a couple weeks ago on a little trade and we also have a John Deere 5065 with a loader uh It's a 65 horsepower tractor uh sure is nice to have that canopy over above you when you're bushhoging takes us about uh 50 hours to Bush Hog our uh fields that we currently have hopefully we'll have some cows on those fields soon so we won't have to Bush off we've also got a small Orchard of 50 trees or so um we have peaches we have pears we have apples several different varieties of apples different varieties of peaches and different varieties of pears here in the orchard I think they're 52 or 53 trees and we'll add about 20 per year uh every year and hopefully uh at some point we'll go ahead and start selling some apples so probably take about yeah 10 15 years before uh the apple orchard is up and just blossoming to its full uh potential really close by our apple orchard we also keep our honeybees we have three hives down here and then we have five more hives on the upper portion of our farm uh we'll probably consolidate all those and put them in one place but uh we do have Stony Ridge Farm honey so it's delicious uh sourwood honey is very prevalent here the sourwood tree is uh is uh very prevalent here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge little wild muscadine grape vine here and uh sourwood tree right here so good stuff for honeybees so this is an old cabin that was on the property when we bought it it's a uh Circa 1890s cabin uh it's kind of in rough shape right now fell in under its foundation so got some good logs in here we'll probably utilize that when we get ready to build our home uh permanent home here uh some beautiful logs that we've already taken out and used in our remodel of our $3500 mobile home this is a gigantic oak tree right here that was on the farm when we bought it I'm guessing you probably know that because oak trees don't grow this big in 2 years but uh this uh oak tree I'm told was dwarfed by the one that was directly over here uh which died a few years back split and fell but I was told that there was an old farmhouse right here behind us uh and also there was a uh Apple press that was mounted to that big old big old oak tree so uh we're continuing that farming tradition here in Stoneville North Carolina here we have the piggy piggies hey piggy piggies everybody's just hanging out chilling uh we got some pigs here and uh those are a new addition to the farm here from a couple weeks ago so we've got a pool and a pond uh pool's good for this guy he likes a little bit of swimming and rooting I threw some apples in there so he's hanging out with the apples and Chow Down got a little handful of grain here going to feed it to uh pepper cie goie goie come on it Oinky Oinky uh thank you for watching this is Josh Stony Ridge Farm uh stay tuned for more videos subscribe to us we'll keep on popping them out uh watch a farm go from dirt to fruition to making some money and enjoying life and living the way we're supposed to thank you this is Josh Sony Ridge farmer woo