HARRISTON — One step inside of Louise Cadney Coleman’s Frog Farm in Harriston and it quickly becomes clear this is not any regular frog farm.

“Welcome, as you walk in you will see my aquarium,” Coleman said.

“The animals don’t need food and the water doesn’t need changing.”

There are not little critters scurrying around and the sound of not a single croak is to be heard.

In the aquarium are frogs and fish, but they are of Coleman’s own devising.

They are painted in a variety of shades and nailed to a blue wall.

Coleman is not a farmer, she is an artist.

The Frog Farm is a folk art sculpture garden that has roots completely in Coleman’s own imagination.

She started as a doll maker when she was a child.

“There were 11 of us,” she said.

“And there wasn’t enough money to buy me dolls, and being a doll lover, I started making my own.”

So, with her father’s carpenter tools and the scrapes of cloth that her mother didn’t use when she was making clothes, she built and dressed her dolls.

“I named ’em and I dressed ’em up. They were part of my family,” she said.

Over the years, she accrued a huge collection of dolls, so she started selling them, but quickly learned that she needed more than just dolls to entice people.

“That’s when I started making birds,” she said.

After her husband Ray Coleman’s hunting camp burned down and he did not wish to rebuild it, Coleman saw a golden opportunity.

“I started putting my birds around the land and kids would come by and they wanted frogs, so I started making frogs and that’s how the farm was born,” Coleman said.

And over the years, it has just grown.

They built a small house that serves at the farm’s gift shop and built a small frog village behind the building where frogs, turtles, alligators and even penguins are on display.

“It is so much more than a hobby,” Coleman said. “It’s a passion.”

She’s proud of what she has created and proud that she has an opportunity to share it with others.

“Visitors ask me all the time why I did this all way out here,” Coleman said.

“I don’t know. I guess that is just my own middle of nowhere.”