Bought it over 30 years ago from an estate that needed to be settled. 60 acres of semi-abandoned pig farm with old corn fields, a swamp in the bottom 20 acres, lots of trees and some thick woods.
We let the son of the previous owners take the pigs and all the barbed wire fencing he could pull out of the underbrush. Spent several years cleaning up - one of the sons worked in a restaurant and brought home the organic garbage to feed the pigs, along with whatever got mixed in. There were piles of chipped dishes, buckets of bent flatware, and we still find buried in the clay little plastic packets that say "mayonnaise" or "mustard" on them. We hauled off a dead car and a dead truck. Cleared acres of brush, mowed more acres of old corn stalks and weeds, killed hundreds of cotton rats (with the help of red tailed hawks that hovered overhead to watch when we were mowing and clearing).
Some parts were thick with scrubby oak growing so close together you couldn't see through them and certainly couldn't walk through. That's the parts we thinned thirty years ago. In the wide open areas we planted selected varieties of trees, put in pasture in the open areas, and generally fixed the place up to be a working horse farm. We left the wooded and swampy bottom land undisturbed aside from putting in a wildlife pond. Back in there is a stand of American beech trees - one use to be the biggest American Beech in Florida. It and its companions are listed in the book, Big Trees of Florida - the foresters who put the book together told us it's the only naturally growing stand of large beech they know of in Florida. The other beeches that are larger are specimen trees either planted by humans or sole remnants of stands.
When we were done, the neighborhood got "gentrified" and property values soared. I plan to die on this farm and want my ashes spread on it. After that, I hope it can become a county park if I can manage it in my will. It's a unique piece of land now for this area.
I can't even imagine what it would be like to live in a city. Grew up in a small town, lived in larger towns while in college, and on the farm ever since. I haven't even spent much time in cities since - they just are not pleasant for me.
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