Homesteading updates

As we begin to approach our two-year mark living in the country, I wanted to evaluate our progress in the homesteading goals we wrote when we first moved to the country. Here is the four-year plan we made, along with our progress report:

Year One-

-Move onto our new property. CHECK

-Give birth to our new little boy. CHECK (I didn't plan on postpartum depression, extreme sleep-deprivation, and exhaustion with this one....so I went into 'survival mode' and ignored our homestead plans for almost a year. Now that I'm out of the "new baby" phase, I'm quickly catching up with our plans for the property. I'm on fire with progress this month!)

-Repair the house and make the necessary improvements. CHECK, CHECK, CHECK, and still more to do. (Finish remodeling the garage into two additional rooms, demolish the badly-done extension that is literally rotting away and falling off the rest of the house. Oy.)

-Start our large chicken flock, including guineas and roosters this time. CHECK and CHECK (FYI- guineas are pretty annoying. And our guinea likes to scratch off the gravel on our composition shingle roof. I'm not sure they're keepers. We are slaughtering our last guinea during our next butchering day.)

-Incubate eggs so we can perpetuate the flock sustainably, without buying chicks online. CHECK,  CHECK and CHECK.  (We prefer letting a hen hatch the eggs rather than incubating them indoors. The hens take such good care of the chicks, and greatly reduce our workload regarding chick brooding/care.)

-Begin the compost pile so we will have soil amendments for our veggie garden. CHECK (We have several piles going. It's so nice to use rich homemade compost this year in our orchard and veggie garden!)

-Fence in the garden plot. CHECK

-Plant our herb garden this year. -we're working on this one now-

-Begin vermicomposting with kitchen scraps. CHECK (Sarah LOVES searching for worms in the pasture and relocating them to our compost bin. She'll spend hours at a time happily digging in the dirt hunting for worms and carefully cradling them in her hands as she carries them to their new home.)

-Raise enough meat birds to produce the meat our family will eat this year. CHECK and CHECK

-Slaughter the birds and preserve the meat in one long weekend. CHECK (One long weekend didn't work- we do several smaller batches instead. It's much easier to process the meat on a smaller scale.)

-Participate in 4-H so our children can learn how to work with livestock. -NOPE, the meetings in our area are only on Sundays, so we won't be participating in 4-H. Boo hoo.-

-Continue studying permaculture techniques to implement in our farm design. CHECK



Year Two-

Amend the soil for garden beds. CHECK (Double digging a garden is back-breaking work, just to warn ya. But you'll LOVE the results! I love our garden bed!)

Plant one vegetable garden bed this year, 100 feet long and 4 feet wide. CHECK (I even edged our garden with large limestone blocks this year- it's lookin' good! It finally looks like a real garden instead of a random patch of pasture.)

Begin planting fruit trees for our orchard. CHECK (2 figs, 2 pomegranates, and 2 peaches are planted. We're still looking for 2 persimmons and 2 jujubes.)

Expand poultry flock to include ducks and geese, which will live in pools made in the fruit orchard area.     -Our goslings will arrive in April!-

Expand herb garden to include medicinal plants. -working on this one-

Improve the barn so it's ready for livestock.-working on this one-

Reseed the pasture so it has a healthy ecosystem of grasses. -working on this one-

Build a beehive and begin beekeeping in the pasture. NOPE (Maybe we'll get to this next year after we help friends with their bees to gain hands-on experience. And after I conquer my huge fear of flying, stinging insects. Maybe.)

Raise meat goats to keep brush and weeds under control in the pasture. (We are hoping to buy three goats this spring after we repair the pasture fences and install gates.)

And looking ahead to the next couple of years:

Year Three-
Add another vegetable garden bed, 100 feet long and 4 feet wide. 
Add domesticated grape vines to the property 
Plant native berry bushes, including blackberries and blueberries.  
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. 

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 large 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.