I'm waiting impatiently to finish the steps necessary to buy a house we've fallen in love with. It's actually the 3rd house we've made an offer on. The first had sink holes so the VA wouldn't approve it and the second made a counteroffer that made me think the seller was trying to scam us. Turns out his request wasn't unreasonable, but by then I'd found a listing for house 3 online and requested to see it. We fell in love and put in an offer the same day.
Over the course of this adventure we've seen a lot of houses and I've really been able to refine my eventual goals. What is important to me is to try to be as self sufficient as possible. We are going to start a small farm regardless of where we end up living. We want to keep some chickens for eggs and if we get this house with 2 acres, we'll keep another flock of meat chickens. I plan to plant a garden, bigger if we end up here, but I'll scale it to fit whatever yard we end up with. I also want at least 2 or 3 beehives to help with pollination, but honey and wax would be great too. We have plans to set up rain barrels to water the garden and eventually add some solar and wind collection to help power and maybe some day be able to go completely off grid.
Does anybody else do any of those things? I'd love to compare notes. Whether you have an actual working farm or your "farm" consists of a few containers on your window sill I'd love to hear about your experiences with providing food for your table and how it's working out for you.
I envy you. I dream of the day when Evan and I can start house hunting...which won't be for quite some time but I want a place where I can have a small farm. My Mom and stepdad have a cute little house with like 1.7 acres and growing up we had a variety of farm animals (chickens, turkeys and hogs) which they then turned into a name for their 'farm'... Chitturhog - chicken, turkey, hog. pretty clever I think!
They've also grown flowers, fruits and veggies all my life so along with fresh eggs, farm raised turkeys and hogs, we always had a plethora of fresh foods. They no longer raise turkeys and hogs, which I do quite miss but they still have chickens for eggs, plus the gardens. They used to raise some big ol' turkeys, like 30-40lb turkeys! They were quite tasty, as were the hogs haha.
I hope to have a yard big enough for a decent garden with some chickens running around. I don't really have many notes to compare because I was only a child when they started gardening and raising animals but I do remember some of it. It'll be a while before we settle down and buy a house but until then there are farmers markets and locally grown/raised stuff so I buy a lot of that. I support local farmers 100%
Sorry to hear about your challenges finding your perfect home. I don't think it's ever an easy situation, either on the buyer side or as a seller.
I don't do much more than a pot garden but I grew up in KS and I have a lot of extended family that are farmers of all different sizes and products. I think the biggest thing to try to scale is not the size of your land, but the amount of time you have. It takes an incredible amount of time to manage.
Another thing to check on about your new home in particular, in case you haven't already, is to ask about the deer population. If they show up they will eat EVERYTHING and they will decimate all your hard work. That's why we can't do much planting here, because there are too many deer.
Plus, apparently bears are an issue around here. I don't know about out by you though. There was a family of bears in John's Creek this week. That's the next suburb over from us, less than 30mi from downtown ATL! Crazy! Definitely something to check on though.
I live way out in the country and shop in open air farmer's markets in addition to growing a lot of my own vegetables. Black berries grow wild on my property, more than my husband and I can eat by ourselves. We bought a freezer in addition to our fridge. We store homemade stewed tomatoes and spaghetti sauce, plus vegetables we buy in quantity at discount at the end of the growing season. That way we have fresh produce all year long. We are thinking about Pygmy goats and a few chickens. A stream cuts threw our yard making watering the garden or any livestock unnecessary. I got two cookbooks on cooking in large quantities to freeze and they have been very helpful. Good luck to you.
@Sharilynn, did your folks process their own hogs? I thought very very briefly about someday expanding to include other animals for meat, but I'm afraid by the time we paid to have them processed and fed them and such it wouldn't really save us much money in the long run.
@Tiffany, I grew up around the Hutchinson area. Where are you from?
I haven't heard anything about bears out here (Augusta), but I know there are plenty of deer. I found a fairly low cost way to build a DIY greenhouse using cattle fencing and a frame to make a "hoop" structure. It should extend my growing season to maybe 8 or 9 months and keep out deers and rabbits. I'm not quite sure what the situation is with burrowers, but I was thinking of just laying down hardware cloth and doing raised beds. That should prevent most of that, I think. Really though only time will tell what the real garden predators are. I've never gardened before period and I'm not native to this area so I'm not really very knowledgable yet.
@Alvaretta, I'm really hoping to learn more about freezer cooking. I've heard it's a really cost effective way to shop and cook and saves time when all you have to do is pop out a casserole and throw it in the oven. I'd love to hear what books you went with.
@Wren: I read somewhere (forget where) that you can discourage burrowers by laying down wire fencing, and then putting a layer of gravel over that (underneath your raised beds). Don't know if it works, but it sounded like a good idea. They also talk about saving your cut hair clippings to use around your garden beds - supposedly it's a deterrent.
@ Lizanne, those are great ideas!
@Wren, I'm from Wichita and went to college at K-State! I hardly get back anymore though. We take the kids one week a year to see all our extended family.
That is a cool idea about the green house and really should help extend your plantings as long as we get enough sun. This was such a weird year. Good thing about no bears though!
@Alvaretta, my grandpa did the same things and made us all learn to can. That is something I wish I still had the time and resources for. The garden food I miss the most? The tiny new potatoes. Those are the BEST pan fried! I miss homemade pickles too.
We live in a townhouse subdivision in Baltimore County. Our yard is what we like to call "postage-stamp size."
However, we have an area of about 3'x16' that we have turned into a garden. We've successfully grown tomatoes, peppers, garlic, lettuce, lots of squash and melon varieties.
Now, this is the stupid part. In B'more City, you can own up to 5 chickens in a townhouse yard. In B'more County, you are not allowed any kind of "farm" animal, including poultry.
Say what?
Yes, in the CITY you can own chickens, in the less-densely-populated, larger-sized properties of the COUNTY you can't do that. >_<
Believe you me, this is the last time we buy a townhouse, and the next place we live, we'll look into the poultry guidelines.
Sometimes my stepdad would process the hogs/turkeys and if he couldn't find the time, he'd have one of my uncles process it for him. I come from a family of hunters/farmers/fishers/diy-living enthusiasts so it's rare that anyone outside the family is brought in to help with anything.
We have a small farm, but we only raise veggies and fruit - no animals... I'd love to have a cow, a few pigs, sheep, goats and chickens! But... I have a full time job and that would be too much for hubby to take care of by himself.
My sister raises chickens so we swap vegetables for eggs and when her chicks get older we have fresh chicken - my neighbor raises cattle and we buy beef from him from time to time. My husband also hunts for deer - the season is opening up soon so we will have the freezer stocked again soon! We also give my sis one for her freezer.
For the earlier crops we have the peas, leaf lettuce, mustard, and kale - then potatoes, tomatoes, corn, peppers,green beans, squash, canteloupe, pumpkins, and whatever else we decide to throw in. We also have apple trees, pear trees, cherry bushes (that are not worth having) and some peach trees that are still to young to produce. We also have blackberry and raspberry bushes and I make jam... Yumm...
i take it the hog is a pig? ...you don't need money to feed them ...just give them all your food scraps ...no egg shells though ...they eat anything! Get people to keep their leftovers & peelings etc for them too. This way it doesn't cost anything to keep them and people are generally happy to give you their scraps ...they feel good about recycling or not trashing it and saving on the landfills
my dream place is what us English call a small holding ,and nice house with some land to grow fruit and veg and have a few animals so we would almost be self sufficient ,at the moment we have an allotment so we can grow our own fruit and veg ,but not allowed animals
We live on a small 5 acre farm that is part of my husbands grandparents large farm. We have chickens, horses and had cows that we sold and will buy more in the spring. I love having a big garden and putting up the fruits of our labor. A farm life is a very satisfying one. Ours is just a living life farm and not a for profit one
I grew up with a great garden in the backyard. It's the only reason we could eat fresh veggies, because we couldn't afford much in the way of the grocery store. It's not <i>hard</i>, it's just time consuming. You have to remember to water, weed, feed, and protect. Otherwise you've thrown away money just like any other food.