So it has been some time...

since my last post, and a lot has happened. I will try to update more regularly since we are actually doing some 'homesteady' things now.

Last June we both lost our jobs within a week of each other. We saw that as an opportunity to move from the Raleigh area to where Krystal grew up (and I mean the exact house she grew up in). It didn't take her long to find a job, but I am having no such luck, I have been unemployed for about a year now. The bad news is that our income has been greatly reduced, the good news is that I have time to get a lot of things done around our new mini-farm.

Speaking of the mini-farm, we currently have:

Two crazy border-collies. I imagine I talk about them so much I might as well add in a pic when I can. I also would guess they will turn up in most pics of any outside endeavours; they usually aren't very far away from us when we are working outside. Brogan is on the left and Angus is on the right.


This picture was taken a couple seconds later. Already Brogan has decided he has been still long enough and must go back to herding the chicken pen.

A chicken coop and run with 17 hens, and 2 roosters. The bare spots surrounding the pen is the path Brogan has worn into the ground.

A small garden consisting of two beds, each measuring 4ft by 20ft. We have harvested a couple things, mostly greens and radishes for salads.

We are also adding a bed around the pear tree, mostly for strawberries. Krystal really wants some and we had a nice patch of wild strawberries already growing underneath the pear tree so I thought that would be a good place to put them. It also saves me from having to cut the grass around the tree.


The limb pictured below is out to get me, it is the exact height when sitting on my mower as to be out of my range of vision when looking at the ground to make sure I don't hit the tree with the mowing deck but low enough to slam the top of my head if I don't duck. Very shortly after making this discovery, I was seeing stars and had to bring the mower to a stop until the world stopped spinning. So not having to cut around the tree seemed like a good idea to me.


The plant in the picture above is a baby watermelon. I wanted to try growing vine plants in hanging baskets. If I ever get around to planting the cucumbers , zucchini, and eggplant I will most likely plant some of each in hanging baskets to keep the watermelon company, in addition to what I plant in the actual garden.

Now for a bit more detail.

On Halloween last year, we got our first chickens. We ordered 20 Barred Rock chicks straight run, and 5 Easter-egger pullets from Whelp hatchery. I had wanted fewer Barred Rocks in lieu of some Cornish Rock broilers, but was told the broilers ship from another facility and, as such, I could increase my order to 25 broilers and 25 other chicks, or they could keep my current order and add in 'packing peanut chicks'.(Most hatcheries have a box they ship chicks in that holds about 25 peepers. If you order less than 25, they add in extra chicks they have a surplus of so that the body heat from the chicks keep them warm enough during shipment). Either way, I would be getting 50 chicks instead of 25 and I just didn't have room for that many, so the order was changed to the above selection.

I don't want to give the impression that I was unhappy with the turn of events, far from it. The customer service person at Whelp was very helpful and the whole transaction was purely positive. They actually ended up shipping 26 Barred Rocks and 5 Easter-eggers. One little BR didn't make it, one had spraddle leg which we were able to correct, and the other 29 were amazingly healthy. I have had no problem at all raising the chicks, all survived and thrived except for the one noted before. It has been a surprisingly easy and rewarding experience so far.

We currently have 14 Barred Rock hens, 2 Barred Rock roosters, and 3 Easter-egger hens. I have pics of the peepers when they arrived that I plan to use in another update post to cover what we have already done. The posts about what we have done will be good for days when I am not currently 'doing' anything interesting. We are getting a lot more eggs than we can use, but so far I haven't had any luck selling them. I posted on Craigslist and a local site, though I admit I could have done a much better job selling them on the posts than I did. I still need to do a sign for the front yard, but as with any kind of homestead, the list of to-dos far exceeds the amount of time I have to do them.

As for the garden, this is my second try at a decent garden. Tried it once in Clayton but, with us working such long days, I really didn't have the drive or energy to do a good job of it. As I said before, we now have two beds, mostly of greens. We only have the two small beds because I made them by hand with shovel and hoe, and well established centipede sod is a bear to break up. The root system easily reaches 8 inches down and creates a thick mat both above and below ground.

For the first bed I used a shovel to just turn chunks of sod upside down, assuming that a shovel deep clump of dirt would smother the grass. I was wrong, the stuff still grew upside down. The next bed I just cut up with a hoe, breaking 3 hoes in the process and giving me some nice blisters and sore shoulders. Then I let the smaller chunks of sod dry for a day or two. After that came the exhausting part of picking each dried sod chunk up and shaking out the dirt, leaving a mass of dead grass and roots, which were then given to the chickens.

Krystal's grandmother has a small garden which had a number of tomato plants eaten by deer one night. That tells me I need to fence in my garden to keep the deer out, not to mention dogs and chickens. Once I fence in what I plan to be the garden area, I may just rent a tiller and not bother with the raised beds. The ground is fertile enough, though I need to mix some compost when I till it.

The advantages to not doing raised beds are that I don't have to spend the money on boards for the bed and I can more easily keep grass out of the garden since I can plow the walkways. It will also give me more flexibility as to how I plant stuff. With the raised beds, I have no choice but to work with 4 foot blocks. With just a plowed area for a garden, I can just plant a single row of something if I think that is the best way to do it, which would most likely be the case for tomatoes and other large plants. I am re-reading The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Edward Smith before I make my final decision regarding raised beds since he is a strong believer in them.

Once the garden is fenced in, I then plan to fence in the majority of the back yard, leaving at least a 3 foot gap between that fence and the garden one so that the chickens have access to the full perimeter of the garden. That will greatly cut down on the number of bugs in my garden. We had a heavy infestation of junebugs for a couple days. I say only a couple days because I let a few chickens out in the evenings while I was outside working and they were very vigilant about running all across the yard chasing the bugs on wing. The junebugs didn't have a chance, and I got tons of chuckles from watching it.

I am also reading Storey's Guide to Raising Ducks. Those will most likely be the next animals added to our place. The plan is to raise the ducks for roasters and use the chickens as fryers. So if anyone has any beginner advice on raising ducks, just let me know.

Now off to work on a small pen on the end of the chicken run to place a broody hen.

Matthew