About Us

On eighty-five wooded acres nestled in the western mountains of Maine you can find Ross and Amy Lasley.

About 5 miles outside the town of Strong we are located in West Freeman, an unorganized township. The land was part of the Brackley Apple Orchard at one time and was developed by Richard and Ardy Rausch beginning in the 1970's. They built the house, garage, sugar house, and ran a commercial sawmill (Strong Lumber) on the site for many years. When the Rausch's passed away they donated the property to The Nature Conservancy.

In 2005 the Lasley's acquired the property from the Nature Conservancy. Work began almost immediately to convert the sawmill building into a barn and make a number of improvements and changes to the living spaces. The bulk of this work was done by Amy's brother Nathaniel Smith who runs a construction firm called Home Improvements Plus based in Marlboro, MA.

Today our facility is a bit more than 13,000 square feet – the main house, a four car garage with second floor, a sugarhouse, and a four stall barn that also contains our rodent room along with the big feed room.

The main reptile rack room is located in the center of the house in what used to be the wood stove room. The thick concrete walls really help with temperature stability year round and allow us to give our young ones ideal conditions. We are grateful to our electrician who spent many hours with a hammer drill installing outlets and not loving the concrete walls the way we and the snakes do. Our adult snakes are housed in the halls of the same floor, incubation and storage can be found just around the corner.

On the main floor you'll find our Kinkajou colony – this room is attached to our living room and while it can be closed off it never is. Our kinks live in a large colony style cage and enjoy getting bananas from Mom and Dad in the evenings.

The top floor contains our offices where most of our business work is done, but each animal area also has a workstation to allow for data entry while maintaining creatures. As you might expect pets are all over the place in the main house – from fish tanks to Ross's parrot Loco our house is full of critters.

Our barn is a converted sawmill and a wonderful structure, much of the timber was milled right on site. Our rodent room has super insulated walls to allow for low energy heating and cooling – we maintain temps near 60 year round.

Our horses sleep in box stalls which utilize comfort stall systems, our goats occupy another stall, and our other stall is used either for hay storage or raising poultry up to the size it can be moved out into pens depending on the time of year. We use a rotational grazing system for our paddocks and fields and are continuing to work on how to best utilize the resource and our animals – goats seem to happily graze on grasses horses ignore.

Having spent the better part of a decade founding and building a successful web development company the Lasley's moved out to the country in September of 2005. Our goal is to be deeply and spiritually connected to the natural environment, encounter our animals every day, and continue to grow as human beings..

We're modern homesteaders, and Spruce Nubble Farm is focused on self sufficiency. From cutting firewood, to producing all of our own food right here on the farm, we want to live from the land all we can. Both raised as “city kids” the research necessary to achieve this goal is expected to take between two and five years.

Passion for the land and each other is what drives the Lasley's – only time will tell where else that passion may lead them.