Homesteading and Hobby Farm/Ranch

Aaron

Aaron

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It is this DIY that is another aspect that my family member loves his homestead. He worked in an office his whole life and now he gets to play around with powertools. The chicken coop and surrounding chickenwire enclosure and timed door opener he all built himself, albeit with lots of googling and youtube video watching.

Basically, homestading to me seems to be an entire lifestyle choice from A to Z. Either you love it, and dive right in head first, or you'll hate it. You'll find out the first 6 months. If you're not having the time of your life by then, then it's probably never going to get better.
 
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error

error

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I love that this post exists. I live in suburbia and work in IT, with two little ones... I'm trying to offset some by growing veggies, might get some chickens too, but I dream of having a homestead and living more of a permaculture lifestyle.

Visit a Mother Earth News Fair some time. Ignore the conspiracy GMO, hippies, the random silliness, but there's a lot of good info around you can cherry pick. I recommend, bees for better pollination... and a food forest or synergistic planting style. You can do a lot with a little bit of room. Also, can, ferment, dehydrate. Sorry if that shit is obvious, I used to throw out so much shit
 
Aaron

Aaron

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Folks in here might be interested in watching one of my favourite shows about homesteading. They were made by an English guy called Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (yes, with a name like that, he is a member of the aristocracy, though he is a bit hippy about it) and go by the brand name River Cottage. He started out small (in fact he made a couple of shows before River Cottage, one where he lived off the land in an old Land Rover, and another in a house boat), but then gradually got bigger. Now it's a major brand. His modern shows are not nearly as good as the old ones, but the first few series are damn good TV.

What I love best about them is what I mentioned earlier, the community aspect. He knows he's a city bumpkin and goes out and finds people to help him, and some of them are quite interesting characters themselves.

You can probably find most of it online, such as YouTube. First episode of the first season:
 
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Locnar

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error said:
I love that this post exists. I live in suburbia and work in IT, with two little ones... I'm trying to offset some by growing veggies, might get some chickens too, but I dream of having a homestead and living more of a permaculture lifestyle.

Visit a Mother Earth News Fair some time. Ignore the conspiracy GMO, hippies, the random silliness, but there's a lot of good info around you can cherry pick. I recommend, bees for better pollination... and a food forest or synergistic planting style. You can do a lot with a little bit of room. Also, can, ferment, dehydrate. Sorry if that shit is obvious, I used to throw out so much shit
Click to expand...

You don't have to live in the middle of nowhere to do this. I live very much in Suburbia, I boarder subdivisions and am a short bike ride to a local downtown. I call it town and country living :)
 
Dandai

Dandai

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Aaron said:
Folks in here might be interested in watching one of my favourite shows about homesteading. They were made by an English guy called Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (yes, with a name like that, he is a member of the aristocracy, though he is a bit hippy about it) and go by the brand name River Cottage. He started out small (in fact he made a couple of shows before River Cottage, one where he lived off the land in an old Land Rover, and another in a house boat), but then gradually got bigger. Now it's a major brand. His modern shows are not nearly as good as the old ones, but the first few series are damn good TV.

What I love best about them is what I mentioned earlier, the community aspect. He knows he's a city bumpkin and goes out and finds people to help him, and some of them are quite interesting characters themselves.

You can probably find most of it online, such as YouTube. First episode of the first season:
Click to expand...
Looks like the whole series is on IPT

Code: 
https://iptorrents.com/details.php?id=870095
 
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Kiroy

Kiroy

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update:

no chickens, no goats, no nothing... well that's not true

So we've been crazy fucking busy getting the 2nd house on the property renovated as we have a great family coming in in the next few months. That's been the main project as i've been doing most of it myself, but I am bringing in a contractor to put in the cabinets and a few other odd jobs that would be "first times" for me and I don't want to fuck up (and I just don't have time to meet my deadlines if I do it all myself).

That said, next task when that's complete in a few months is automating all irrigation, plus adding irrigation. I've been doing a lot of work on making it so our pond runoff (we have a lot of water flowing in / out of our irrigation holding pond ((about 1/2 acre pond:emoji_nose: get's routed properly to irrigate the whole bottom half of our pastures. I'm also going to pipe/pump water to the top half and gravity irrigate the full thing, hopefully to be done by next summer so we can keep 10 cows in the pasture year round. We're bringing in 4 in a couple days. During all this we'll likely get chickens going, maybe sometime this winter.

For things we have gotten done that's non-renovation related, doesn't seem like much but we've trimmed a fuck ass ton of tree's that needed it, placed a few 4x12 raised gardens and gottem em filled and ready for planting a fall garden in the next few weeks, and like I said, i've been working on routing our pond run off to properly irrigate our bottom field.
 
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Screamfeeder

Screamfeeder

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Kiroy said:
I'm also going to pipe/pump water to the top half and gravity irrigate the full thing..
Click to expand...

Why the pump if it's all gravity fed? You have an upslope pasture and a downslope pasture with a pond at the higher pasture? Am I just misreading this? If you can, avoid pumping (or have it only in the case of flooding but mobile (back of a shitty farm truck which can also be of use in case of fire).

Gravity fed irrigation even on an almost level plane (provided there is at least a little downward grade has always been the easier solution than pumping backwards in my experience (again I might just be misreading your post).
 
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Kiroy

Kiroy

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Screamfeeder said:
Why the pump if it's all gravity fed? You have an upslope pasture and a downslope pasture with a pond at the higher pasture? Am I just misreading this? If you can, avoid pumping (or have it only in the case of flooding but mobile (back of a shitty farm truck which can also be of use in case of fire).

Gravity fed irrigation even on an almost level plane (provided there is at least a little downward grade has always been the easier solution than pumping backwards in my experience (again I might just be misreading your post).
Click to expand...

water comes in mid slope (and the pond it feeds is in the middle of the property slope wise) and there's no changing that, can use that to gravity feed the mid and lower half, will have to pump to up irrigate top third, which will be easy
 
Screamfeeder

Screamfeeder

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Kiroy said:
water comes in mid slope (and the pond it feeds is in the middle of the property slope wise) and there's no changing that, can use that to gravity feed the mid and lower half, will have to pump to up irrigate top third, which will be easy
Click to expand...
Ahhh copy that. I read the "gravity irrigate the whole thing" part incorrectly.
 
Kiroy

Kiroy

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Screamfeeder said:
Ahhh copy that. I read the "gravity irrigate the whole thing" part incorrectly.
Click to expand...

ya i'm saying it wrong, I pretty sure what I'm doing is called slope irrigation or something similar. I read what the actual term was a couple weeks ago while doing research but of course forgot and have gone back to incorrectly saying 'gravity irrigation' cause it's stuck in my head.
 
LachiusTZ

LachiusTZ

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Wasn't sure if this should go in hunting, cooking, gardening, here, etc...

Edit: buying a dehydrator

Have a kinda crappy one. Want a nice one. Anyone have experience? The Excalibur brand gets good reviews, but the plastic makes me shy away from it.

Anyway, instead of creating a thread, cross posting it.

BrutulTM BrutulTM maybe?
 
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Dandai

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LachiusTZ said:
Wasn't sure if this should go in hunting, cooking, gardening, here, etc...

Edit: buying a dehydrator

Have a kinda crappy one. Want a nice one. Anyone have experience? The Excalibur brand gets good reviews, but the plastic makes me shy away from it.

Anyway, instead of creating a thread, cross posting it.

BrutulTM BrutulTM maybe?
Click to expand...
I use this one to make jerky. It works really well and the trays are dishwasher safe.

F0D5BB40-955F-49F1-AED9-53021924BD9F.jpeg


EA53785E-1B9D-4A46-A865-4E7DBF88FF26.jpeg
 
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Borzak

Borzak

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Have the same as the one above. Made a lot of jerky and dried stuff with it thru the years with no issue. Make banana and apple chips and jerky mostly.
 
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Noble Savage

Noble Savage

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I am looking at doing the homesteading thing myself. I have never owned land or worked land in my life so I have no idea how many acres would be ideal for such a thing. I would love 200 acres to not be anywhere near my neighbors but there is a huge price diff between 25 and 200 acres. If I was looking to do some homesteading and possible put a couple of houses and greenhouses on the land how many acres would be a starting place. Would 25 acres be enough to do a decent amount of personal farming on?
 
BrutulTM

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It depends on what you are planning to do and where you're located. If you're in Stockton California raising vegetables 25 acres would be huge. If you're in Elko Nevada with no irrigation 25 acres could barely keep a goat alive.

When you're looking at properties, find out about the water situation. There are plenty of people in this area that buy a property and then find out it would cost $60K to drill a well there and wind up hauling water from town to fill a cistern.
 
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Kiroy

Kiroy

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ya it really does all depend on how much you can irrigate, and the cost + stability of that irrigation
 
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...

...

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(i was going to post a chicken thread but found this so i'm bumping this!)

I'm buying a new house and it has a decent sized chicken coup already built and ready to go. I didn't look in it to understand everything about it, but I think I'll get some chickens to go in there. Partially because the wife loves eggs, and because I like spergy survivalist shit.

1. what breed of chickens should i get?
2. how many? I know it's limited by the coup size, but is there a bare minimum i should have for them to feel like they have plenty of homies?
3. Do i let them roam the property and just wrangle them at night? part of my interest in having chickens is to let them eat bugs.

Thank you in advance for all chicken related advice.
 
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