Welcome to Parc Ferme

We have been on our small farm in New Freedom, Pennsylvania for six months and have set our renovations in motion with our inaugural blog post!

The Cottage:

We hired Williams Architecture to assist us in modernizing the living space while maintaining the historical charm and details of the original house, and we could not be happier with our plans! Williams Architects share our passion for historical preservation and are really innovative in how best to retain the architectural features of the older Pennsylvania farmhouses and barns! Below is a glimpse of our future residence.

What I love most about our renovation plans is that we are able to keep the 25 ft roof and floor beams that offer structural support to the house. We are also keeping the summer kitchen – which is older than the house dating back to the late 1700s. We will be using the space as our guest suite with a full bath.

The Farm & Orchard:

Our farm’s front pasture will be returned to an apple orchard growing native varieties to south central PA. We will need to choose a minimum four types of apples and are working with farm experts from the Pennsylvania State University Extension Program. They are helping us with the orchard layout of 450 apple trees that we will plant over the next few years. We also are developing strategies for encouraging pollinators and hope to retain about an acre on our farm for a meadow of wildflowers.

For our berries, we have chosen the northern highbush blueberry. This is a native plant, that produces large sweet blueberries favored by farmstands. We are currently seeding 200 blueberry bushes that we will plant in the spring.

We have amazing song birds coming through the farm and we want to conserve the habitat for them to live and flourish. We reached out to the York Audubon Society for advice and have found that our farm has great conditions for the Wood Thrush. Just look at this little cutie and he has a beautiful melody to his song.

I hope he likes blueberries! In our next post of Life on the Farm we will introduce the Parc Ferme herd of pygora goats.