Maine Homestead Magazine isn’t your standard publication. You don’t need to subscribe. All editions are printed individually to order, and can be purchased at any time. Our writers are homesteaders, hunters, farmers and many of them own family farms and small businesses. Although they are diverse, they do have one thing in common—they love Maine.
I’m Mandy Wheaton, your editor, designer, and web developer—and former farmer at Wheaton Mountain Farm. Our little family lived on a little mountaintop in Bucksport for several years building a homesteading life there. We had various animals over the years, including Kune Kune pigs, American Buff geese, Flemish Giant rabbits, and Nubian goats. What we were best known for was our rare and fancy breed poultry.
The last few years have been a strange journey. Following a truly unbelievable series of tragic events in both our families, my husband Kevin and I decided to live a little more adventurously.
We sold everything we owned in 2023 and moved onto a boat. Only weeks into our journey, we nearly died at sea in the worst storm either of us had ever witnessed. You can read about that here. We dropped anchor in a safe inlet on Long Island, NY and called our boat broker.
After returning to Maine in September of 2023, we eventually settled into a one-room hunting cabin on 223-acres of wooded land in Bradford. We had no road access, water, power, or wood for the long Maine winter ahead—but we made it work. We always make do with what we have. We went from a luxury catamaran with four bathrooms, to using an outhouse and heating our water for showers and dishes from a nearby stream on the wood stove. When we were home, I stacked the freshly-cut pitchy wood on and around the stove. I joked we were steam-heating the cabin. It didn’t take long to instal the solar Kevin had ordered while we were still on the boat.
The boat finally sold after months of repairs in spring of 2024. We bought an RV with the proceeds and drove to Alaska. We were gone for nearly four months.
As part of that trip, we flew out of Anchorage and stayed in Hawaii for a week. In only two years we saw more things then I thought I would in a lifetime. Glaciers, volcanoes, and living so far out to sea there’s nothing but blue. What I learned is that I love Maine. After 12,000 miles of seeing the sights across the US and Canada—all I really wanted was to rough out another Maine winter in a one-room cabin accessed by snowmobile.
As we headed home over the last few weeks of that trip, I worked on the first edition of Maine Homestead Magazine. I’d written for magazines and worked as a graphic designer for years, so it came naturally. This magazine is something I’ve wanted to do for years. In fact, the web developer dork in me had snagged the domain a decade before and used it for my farm’s website with plans to make a full-blown publication.
This website was used primarily for my highly-successful shipped hatching eggs business. I was known for having the darkest black copper Marans eggs in the US. I became so popular that fake scammer accounts popped up all over social media. It got so bad, I had to pull all my egg photos and put watermarks on them.
We returned home from our RV trip with plans to start collecting things to for building a garage, house, and eventually another barn. Before long, I’d published two more editions and taken on a full time local job. I plan to have chickens again in two years.