After 10 years of being together, raising 2 kids, and going through 1 pandemic, we decided to move out of Toronto in 2022 and radically change our lifestyle.

After a few months of research, we found this piece of land in Bath, close to Odessa, in Ontario.
4.7 acres including a huge house, a large field, a little forest with a tiny cabin, a barn, a couple of sheds, and a tiny greenhouse. This is our new home, this is Collin Estate!

We are focusing on self-sufficiency. That means we want to produce food primarily for us, and to give away or trade with our friends. We will not sell what we produce on the market.

Our goal is not to open a commercial business at all, but we hope we’ll meet people like us who want to trade and exchange their products with ours.

In our first year, we arrived late may so we focused on starting up the basices: compost pile, getting a tractor, getting rabbit breeders, a few plants and some COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO.

We could have raised laying hens who gave us more than 1000 eggs so far. We installed 6 raised beds containers to grow zucchini, green beans, bok choi, lettuce, tomato, cucumbers, eggplants, and a few habanero peppers.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Rosa Parks and Louise Michel came to our life. These 3 Champagne d’Argent rabbits were almost adults when we got them, so we built a hutch and had them spent their first winter inside the Garage.

And we bought that cute little beast of a Kubota!

In our second year, after fighting our first winter, we extended the garden with 4 x 30 ft rows :

• A raspberry and blackberry row
• A strawberry row (~40 plants)
• A green beans row with green, yellow and purple bush beans
• A zucchini and eggplants row

In addition to that, we planted a dozen tomato plants in 10 gal pots, 18 pots of potatoes, around 20 various hot pepper plants.

We build a whole pasture system with an electric fence and chicken/rabbits tractors. We got 30 day-old chicks from Performance Poultry and discovered what it is to be Parents of a whole tribe.

So what’s this Nature Sanctuary? Are we a farm or a conservation area? Are we growing veggies or are we educating people on wild life ?

BOTH! Our land is huge, and we decided to leave some parts untouched, or at least develop some parts “left for wildlife”. We want to work on a big pond to attract more amphibians, reptiles, and insects. So we can attract more birds and host more life!

To know more about the Nature Sanctuary, visit our website where we’ll list all the species we can find on the Estate as well as blog about the sanctuary.