Homesteading for Beginners

(This is part of a two-part post. Read WHY I chose to move onto a farm here..)

We dabbled in urban homesteading when we lived in the city. Our teeny yard was filled with raised garden beds, a small flock of chickens, and a couple of peach trees. In that house I taught beginner gardening classes several times and we helped other families build gardens in their own backyards.

Our interests grew to include beekeeping and a desire to expand our collection of fruit trees.

We had a couple minor problems:

1- We couldn't keep a rooster (Well, LEGALLY we could keep one, but we didn't want to be bad neighbors....I'm sure no one would thank us for the ruckus a rooster makes at 5:00am)
2- There wasn't an isolated corner for a beehive (where it would be safe from the ravaging appetites of our chickens)
3- We couldn't fit any more fruit trees on the property (and we REALLY wanted to plan some pomegranates, pears, and plums.)
4- We couldn't fit a dairy goat on our property (even though I was so excited when I discovered a legal loophole in Round Rock's city laws that actually would allow us to keep a goat, sheep, or even a pig on our property. Cool, eh what?)

We already made our own bread, jams, yogurts, kefirs, and the occasional cheese. We wanted to dabble in more. We didn't have the land to do so.

Fast forward a couple years. Now we have plenty of land to do all of our experiments. Here is our four-year plan for this place:

Year One-
Move onto our new property. Give birth to our new little boy. Repair the house and make the necessary improvements. Start our large chicken flock, including guineas  and roosters this time. Incubate eggs so we can perpetuate the flock sustainably, without buying chicks online. Begin the compost pile so we will have soil amendments for our veggie garden. Start fencing in the garden plot. Plant our herb garden this year. (Seriously, have you seen how ridiculously expensive fresh mint and tarragon are? Yikees!) Begin vermicomposting with kitchen scraps. Raise enough meat birds to produce the meat our family will eat this year. Slaughter the birds and preserve the meat in one long weekend. Participate in 4-H so our children can learn how to work with livestock. Continue studying permaculture techniques to implement in our farm design.

Year Two-
Prepare the soil for garden beds (this one will be a doozy of a chore). Plant one vegetable garden bed this year, 100 feet long and 4 feet wide. Begin planting fruit trees for our orchard. Expand poultry flock to include ducks and geese, which will live in pools made in the fruit orchard area (the geese eat grass, so they'll keep the orchard area mowed and fertilized on their own, isn't that neat?) Expand herb garden to include medicinal plants. Improve the barn so it's ready for livestock. Reseed the pasture so it has a healthy ecosystem of grasses. Build a beehive and begin beekeeping in the pasture.

Year Three-
Add another vegetable garden bed, 100 feet long and 4 feet wide. Add grape vines to the property (not the wild Mustang grapes that already grow here, just to clarify. Those are mostly used to make wine....not helpful to sober Mormons!). Plant native berry bushes. Add some dairy goats or a Jersey cow so we have our own milk supply, then we can produce home made butter, cheese, cream, yogurts, kefir, etc. with farm-fresh milk. Yum! (I'm really looking forward to this particular goal! Milk is SO much healthier when it's not from a dairy plant. There's no pharmaceuticals in the milk.)

Year Four-
Add another vegetable garden bed, 100 feet long and 4 feet wide. By now I'm hoping our food production will be largely self-reliant. Unless calamities occur to set us back, we'll be using plenty of veggies from our three garden beds, fruit from our bushes, vines and trees, eggs and meat from our chickens, milk from our large livestock (either cow or goats), and sweetener from our beehive. It is presumed that we will preserve the harvest each year with canning, dehydrating, and freezing so we won't have to buy much produce during the extremely hot or cold months of the year.


My aim is to be as self-reliant as  possible.