A Visit to Huck & Buck Farm
Andrea Haritos knows what it takes to rebuild. The time, the hours, the patience, the messy mistakes, and self-taught lessons.
The summer crops mostly cleared away, life on Huck and Buck Farm & Sanctuary began turning to fall—and proprietors Andrea and Michael Haritos were clearing the final scraps and overgrown remnants of tomatoes, eggplant, okra, corn and watermelon and making space for Brussels sprouts, kale, collard greens, cabbage, broccoli, and winter squash.
“This soil is rooty,” she says, grazing her shoe over the dirt. “So we need to harvest that and pull it out and then put whatever nutrients back into it to get it going. Kinda like rotating your tires, right?”
Andrea talks a good game, and the farm is professional if a little shaggy. Only, she and her husband aren’t exactly farmers—they’re realtors. Two years ago? “We knew absolutely nothing,” she says.
Things are different these days at Huck and Buck Farm.
Andrea and Michael have steadily grown their backyard hobby farm into a modest agri-tourism business. They’ve learned over the last two years—often the hard way—the many ways life on a farm can go sideways.
For instance, what does one do when the water tap for the duck pond freezes over in winter? (Two buckets and lot of trips.) How to keep the foxes from tunneling into the chicken coop? (Bury the fencing underground.) What happens when a goose gets tangled in an electric fence? (You don’t want to know.)
Besides trial and error, the couple piece together their farming acumen from—where else? —YouTube tutorials. “Seriously, there are people that we follow,” Andrea says. “As we were in the process of moving, we must have watched a dozen good YouTube people that we've learned from, everything from different tractor styles to caring for meat chickens.”
After some turbulent years in their private lives, Andrea and Michael sought the tranquility of open space and the therapeutic effects of caring for animals. So in January 2020, on their fifth wedding anniversary, they sealed the deal on a 7-acre lot on Smyrna Landing Road in Smyrna, a quiet but growing town that toes the line between Delaware’s Kent and New Castle counties.
In short time, the couple built out vegetable and flower gardens in addition to several coops and ponds for fowl, including ducks, geese, chickens, turkeys, and guinea hens. They began experimenting with crops, and before long the gardens featured a diverse mélange of raspberries, kidney and sugar snap peas, sweet potatoes, tomatillos, and blackberries. Handmade sheds, windmills, fences, enclosures dot the land.
Though they sometimes sell produce, eggs, and meat at local farmers markets and festivals, most of their fledgling retail business is unstructured and geared for friends and family. Visitors can drop by to purchase eggs and ice cream, and their modest website has begun accepting reservations for CSA produce and flower baskets.
But in Huck and Buck, Andrea sees more than just a farm. She sees a destination.
The couple have already hosted a variety of small to medium events, ranging from birthdays and baby showers to educational visits from a local Girl Scout troop and a few nonprofits, like Black Girls Run.
Perhaps the neatest corner of the farm is Huck and Buck’s glamping set-up, available to renters, travelers, and self-care seekers through AirBnB and Hipcamp.
The ornate mega-tent fits a queen bed, mini fridge and Keurig, along with dishes, pots and pans to work the shared fire pit or grill. The Haritoses navigated the construction of a small but posh outdoor bathhouse with flushing toilets and full shower with hot water.
For Andrea and Michael, striking the balance between full-time careers in realty with farm and hosting duties isn’t easy. But balance is another thing they seem to master along the way.
Budd Lake, New Jersey native Michael is the organized introvert and DIY builder and gardener. Andrea is a whirlwind of an entrepreneur, spinning with energy and ideas. Walking around the property, she bounds from one vision to the next. The fencing she’ll need to pen the eventual alpacas, donkeys, goats, and pygmy goats she one day hopes to acquire.
She envisions more visiting kids and campers, fire pits and furniture, a high-end treehouse, a wedding venue, and more. Given all the DIY moxie she and her husband have undergone in two short years, it’s hard to doubt her.
“My endgame is to try to set this property up to incorporate education, some type of health and wellness, a place of respite for people to come, relax, enjoy the camping experience,” she says. “Have people understand about different animals as we're learning alongside them. I'm literally not an expert in this at all. And because of that, we can show that two knuckleheads can do it.”
Huck and Buck Farm-Sanctuary
765 Smyrna Landing Road, Smyrna, Delaware
(302) 354-4271
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