Welcome to The Parker’s Farm website! We are located in the community of Meadow, North Carolina, in Johnston County. We are right at the southern edge of the county so we are minutes from Harnett and Sampson County. Its in a pretty part of the county, just about a dozen miles from Dunn.
We, meaning my wife and I, are brand new homesteaders, of sort. And we are older homesteaders, of sort. The catch is that we didn’t get into the homesteader lifestyle until 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit with all its impact on homesteading supplies and markets. So, we are older, we are learning, and like so many folks trying to become more independent and self-reliant, we are facing obstacles that those who have done this for years have faced, plus now the new way things are perceived and done.
Does this sound like you? New to homesteading? Starting the lifestyle older than the rest of the crowd?
This site is mainly for newbies (and oldies, pardon the pun) and our farm friends, local and online, that have supported our efforts to learn, improve, and enjoy a return to traditional living. We have dipped our toes into gardening on a large scale, raising and harvesting livestock, self-processing our harvests, both plant and animal, and food preservation of almost everything we grow. And it has been a wonderful, tiring, and fulfilling trip so far. And it has brought us to a new level of appreciation of God and his creation.
Some of what we used to buy, like soaps, seasonings, vegetables, meats, shampoos, and sponges, we now make ourselves. We plant a lot, we pick a lot, we feed a lot, and we are canning, freezing, or pickling a lot. I guess the lesson is this – whatever we do on the farm, we do it a lot!
I know some of you who see this site will say, big deal, we’ve been doing this like forever. If you have shared your information on the web, we thank you, because that is how we learned everything we are doing. We both have jobs in the ‘real world’ and we both are rookies at this stuff. But for those who may visit this site that are thinking about homesteading, we want to be a source for practical information and entertaining reading. We want to share information and vent sometimes.
And we want this website to be something of thanksgiving site to God for all his goodness as well as a historical review of this wonderful phase in our lives. We also want to highlight things that we are doing, right or wrong, and share with our readers our experiences in a light-hearted way. This site is not primarily a selling site or an instructional site. It’s a sharing site, and we enjoy talking, reading, and writing about it. We hope you will enjoy it too.