Layton Farms logoLayton FarmsFranklin, Kentucky

About Layton Farms

[DEREK: photo needed — a real photo of the farmhouse, garden or flock. No faces or names of the boys; no stock or AI images.]

Hi, I’m Derek. My wife and I and our three boys live in a 1910 farmhouse on 2.6 acres in Franklin, Kentucky.

We’re working toward producing at least 75% of our own food. We aren’t there yet. Some seasons the garden gets ahead of us and some seasons we get ahead of it. Most years it’s a bit of both. Right now the place has a garden, a pantry we’re trying to fill a little more each year, and 27 chickens: 3 roosters and 24 hens.

Why we started sharing

Most of what we’ve learned came the slow way, through trial, error and a few things built twice. [DEREK: confirm.] Layton Farms exists to save other homesteaders some of that time.

So we turn what works on our place into tools you can use on yours:

  • Printable planners and checklists for canning, chickens, chores, the pantry and farm money. They’re the same kind of pages we keep in our own binder.
  • DIY build plans for things we built ourselves, like our cedar compost bin and the kids’ tree fort. The photos are of our real builds, not renderings.
  • Honest write-ups on the blog about what worked, what failed and what we’d do differently.

We’d rather tell you a project went sideways than pretend everything here looks like a magazine. If it broke, we’ll say so. If it worked, we’ll tell you why.

The family

This is a family place, and everyone pitches in, from collecting eggs [DEREK: confirm] to hunting for dropped screws with a magnet after a build. We keep the kids’ names and faces off the internet on purpose. Their home isn’t content, so you’ll see the work here, not them.

What we believe

We’re a Christian family. We try to live that out in how we run our home, how we treat our customers and how we care for the land we’ve been given, more than by talking about it.

Say hello

Questions about a plan or a printable, or just want to compare notes on chickens? Email us at [email protected] or see our contact page. We read every message.

— Derek, for the Layton family