Welcome to Brown Acre Farm
Hi I’m Brandy! I am a wife, lawyer, & homesteader living on a small Ohio farm.
My life has always been a serious of contradictions. I love getting dirty on the farm just as much as I enjoy getting dressed up in a formal gown and high heels. I thrive on intellectual challenge nearly as much as I thrive on the stillness of the country. I love my career but I also love cooking, cleaning and making my house a home. I am a perpetual perfectionist and also the worlds worst procrastinator. I love fashion, beauty and shopping almost as much as I love my comfy sweatpants. I do not fit easily into any particular box and here on this blog, I will be sharing a little bit of everything that makes up my strange, wonderful life on a little farm here in Ohio.
A little about me: I grew up on an 80 acre horse farm in the rolling hills of eastern Pennsylvania. My roots run deep in the country lifestyle. When I was in middle school, my family moved to Northern Ohio and I have been here ever since. My formative years were spent in the barn, riding horses all day long. As the child of two professional horse trainers, you could say it is in my blood. I showed horses competitively all around the country and found great success along with priceless friendships and memories.
I met my husband, Zac, when I moved to Ohio but we didn’t hit it off until High School. After getting to know each other in our Freshman communications class, I finally agreed to go on a date with him in the Fall of our Sophomore year (2009) and we’ve been together ever since. We married one month after graduating College in 2016.
After our wedding, I started law school. I held a lifelong dream of becoming a Lawyer and I feel so blessed that I was able to live that dream and receive my legal education. I blogged my way through law school over on The Legal Duchess. I graduated law school in 2019, passed the bar exam and began a job working at my law school.
That brings us to the farm. My husband and I lived in a small house in the city for the first 4 years of our marriage. While it was a good first home, we were both itching to get back to the land and have some space again. When the pandemic hit in 2020, it actually opened up a few doors for us to begin the search for a farm. We thought it would be a lengthy search to find what we were looking for but instead, we found the perfect property within a month, sold our previous home in 24 hours and moved to the cutest little 5 acre farm ever. The move to the farm brought us back to our roots and brought so much peace back to our souls. We have space to breath now and space to bring our horses home to our backyard after years of yearning.
We immediately jumped into homesteading as we fixed up the property to prepare it for animals and then by getting 50 chickens, 4 outdoor cats, 2 horses, a 4th dog, goats and a greenhouse. We don’t totally know what we are doing but we are figuring it out as we go.
That brings me to the “why” behind the creation of this blog. Though I have blogged before and built a thriving platform, it just wasn’t fitting my life anymore. I was feeling stretched too far to try to continue that law focused content. My focus has shifted to a simpler, homegrown, homestead life and that was what I felt driven to share. I wanted a place to share the trials and errors along the way with this homestead life we are building while still sharing the other things I enjoy. You may see a post about planting a winter garden followed by my recipe for the perfect chocolate chip cookies and then there might be a post on the books I read this month followed by my favorite brands for classic work clothes (yes I still work full time). This blog, just like myself, is a series of contradictions that mesh together into a unique blend of homestead with a side of lifestyle. We may be mucking stalls and planting seeds but that doesn’t mean we have to say goodbye to our lipstick and high heels.