Once a beloved phrase turned into a dream and then a reality. 

​

     We have tried to think really hard on where we first heard the term "toats magoats". The supposed origins of the term is said to have originated from the 2009 movie "I Love You Man" where Paul Rudd's character says it as a goofy follow-up of the word "totally". It was later seen in the hilarious Sprint commercial with James Earl Jones and Malcom McDowell sometime in 2013. Look them both up, they are hysterical. We are a Paul Rudd fan and have seen that movie a handful of times and I remember cracking up seeing that Sprint commercial. Regardless, at some point it just stuck as a favorite phrase.

​

​     We started really using "Toats Magoats" when we would go order food and they would ask for a name and we thought it would be funny to hear them call it out when our food was ready. We weren't wrong. Then it became a common name Derek would use on his own social media accounts or other things we didn't really have to put anything legal.  

​​

     It was during 2020 when the world shut down and we decided to buy some rural property out in North-East New Mexico (where we were living at the time) to be able to get away from it all. We bought this amazing 5 acre lot in Pine Meadow Ranch, New Mexico full of juniper and pinon pine trees, rolling hills and great views of mountains and the New Mexico landscape. We would take our camper out there and spend the weekends walking around and dreaming of one day building a small house and maybe start some kind of small ranch with various animals and plants. We discussed a name we thought would be good for our ranch and it wasn't hard to fall on the very name we had loved for years "Toats Magoats Ranch".   ​​​​

 

     Now the typical spelling of the phrase is "totes magoats" but we really liked the way the "oats" in "toats" matched the "oats" in "magoats". Visually we just liked the way the two words grouped together. Now by definition we really weren't ever going to be a "ranch", but farm didn't quite fit and homestead, which is more accurate didn't flow as well as "ranch". So there it was. We fenced and gated the property, added a little outdoor shower and ordered our first side to hang. We were on our way. 

​​

     Our "kids", that being our adult daughter and her husband, had moved from Colorado to New Mexico and had their first child - one of our now seven grandchildren. We of course were thrilled to be able to watch one of our grandchildren grow since our others were living the military life stationed across the country. But as life happens, they decided to move off to Florida and take our grandson and granddaughter (on the way) to the south. Of course we were not thrilled....happy for them...but not so for us. We were now grandchild-less with all of them in some other state across the country. Even though we had this great property and oh so many plans, we started to see the reality that we really wouldn't have many visitors aside from our parents here and there and realized in the grand scheme of things this was a dream we preferred to share with our kids and grandkids.

 

     After many months of our daughter begging us to move to Florida and many months of me saying "I have no desire to live in Florida", we visited Florida. And fell in love with Florida. Now it wasn't love-at-first-sight. They had originally moved to Tampa and as it was a nice a place to visit, we felt it was too big and busy and very "big city" for us. Now we were not living in a small town by any means, Albuquerque is pretty large. But you add humidity, bugs and hurricanes to big city with all the traffic and it's a big "no thank you". But when they moved to Jacksonville a year later, and we went out to see our granddaughter be born, it was then and there that we fell in love. We fell in love with the long country roads, never ending rows of pines trees and the beautiful massive drooping live oak trees ornamented with Spanish moss that seem to hover everywhere over roads and pathways. Not mention the colors and flowers and ocean and the feel of a slower pace of life that tends to ooze out of North Florida. Five months later we had the house sold, packed up and headed on a two day trip with all the dogs and a car full of plants (I just could not leave in the desert). 

 

     ​In July of 2022 we found an amazing 1.25 acre property in Keystone Heights, Florida, a small town just outside of Gainesville and about an hour away from Jacksonville. The house was in need of help, but the property was what really sold us. It was the perfect place to realize our dream of the ranch. Little by little we worked on making it our own. In the late summer of 2022 we converted an old lean-to into a chicken coop and got our first batch of little chickens. In the spring of 2023 we started building the vegetable garden and clearing paths for our art garden. Our art garden is comprised of two areas - one "Bob's Art Garden" dedicated to Jen's late uncle Bob who was an amazing welder and found metal artist. The garden has several cleared paths among the Long Leaf Pine and Live Oak trees that contains several metal art pieces including many made from Bob himself. Jen has been working on several sectioned gardens including bromeliads, cactus and succulents and American Beauty's. (Check out the Gardens page for more). The second area is a small little glass art garden that shows many other delightful glass findings and plants. In Spring of 2025 we were able to build an amazing greenhouse using old windows and doors we where able to find in the area. 2026 will be the start of our apiary and we have plans for much more! So stay tuned, visit often, as we continue to add to our ranch!

  

Cheers! 

 

Derek & Jenifer Andrews