Plan, Revise, and Plan Some More

For most plans it goes like the diagram. When you are a homesteader, I usually go through a couple options and revise the dickens out of them. kind of like washing your hair- wash, rinse, and repeat. Or, repeat until it is literally squeaky clean. Don't laugh, but there been times working that I've had to rewash my hair four times to get it to that squeaky clean state. The planning stage of "Set Goals" is a definite goal.

For 2019, the goal is get dairy/fiber goats. I wanted goats for three reasons.

1) They eat bramble so they will help clear areas. We've got an acre of uncleared, heavily wooded land covered with blackberry thickets and poison ivy. Goats love this.  With the over population of trees comes the seeding of new trees, goats devour these too. After they munch their way through one area, we'll move them to a new area via 30 sq. ft. section of electrified fencing at a time.

2) They produce fiber twice a year. We decided on Nygora goats. Since they are herd animals, we want two to start. Two does (preferrable) or a doe  and a wethered buck in a pinch. Why Nygoras? They are smaller than regular goats and command a great selling price ($400-$800) each. They often have multiple babies. Their fiber is mohair with a much longer staple lengththan angora. It can be blended with angora, or sold on its own at a price a little under the price of angora, and within a year they will pay their own way.

3) Food for us.They go into heat every 30 days or so. So we can alternately breed two does for a year around supply of milk. A dwarf nubian cross angora equals a Nygora. As such, they'll produce 1 qt to half a gallon of milk per day. That's plenty for us. I can makes cheese or butter with the overage. If a baby doesn't sell or has unwanted qualities (poor fiber, aggressive), it's meat for our table. Being small, about the size of a German Shepherd, they'll be easier to handle, care for, and even butcher. When butchering you are talking about less than 100 lbs of meat which is great for us. Within a couple of years, we'll have a flock of six to care for (our maximum). So that's the goal.

4) We want a year to get to know our girls before we breed them.

But first, we have to fence off an area. The electric fence is cheap enough at under $200. A solar charge on controller with all the bells and whistles is another couple hundred.(I'm still in the shop around stage)The head stanchion and stand is easily made from scrap lumber or pallets. It's a very good thing that we know a guy for pallets.(grinning) The same goes for their housing and feeders.I want to have everything in place before we get the goats including a good supply of alfafa hay. 

Part of any plan is resource allocation. Everything begins and ends with the almighty dollar, doesn't it? I've outlined a few of the costs above. Eventually, we'll need a ferrier and a shearer services, at least once, to show Mel the ropes. She'll carry the brunt of this load because my one-handed self won't be able to do it even with a well mannered goat.

Mel is also talking about going back to work this year. Yeah, this surprised me too. Being almost 60 and finding a job for a nonpeople person like Mel is hard. I won't say it's impossible, but we'll see. It will put less of a financial burden on me, but more of the day to day operation of the homestead on me. Not that I mind that. It will take some juggling, but I can do it.

The building projects will just have to wait until Mel's time off, but we've got nothing but time. As for the rest of the year's progress, we are coasting. We'll put out fires as they crop up, as they did multiple times last year. Take care of what we can when we can. What else can we do?

We've done the research, compiled our data, revised, our plan, planned some more, and now is the time to implement the plan. We'll be monitoring our progress along the way, revising again and again as the need arises. It all begins now.

Y'all have a blessed day.

Jo

Cockeyed Videos Standstill, but the Programs are Great!

We are still on hiatus with our cockeyed videos on YouTube. Mel is still busily working on an additional Java based software programs. The garden planner/seed catalog/gardening journal is now out for beta testing.

This new program is based on animals on the homestead. For example, (it can be used for whatever animal you choose) I'll use our angora rabbits. Date of birth, breeding, offspring, size of litter are important information you'll have access  within a few clicks of your mouse after inputting your data. It will also contain a simple profits and loss calculator which will show you where and how much money you are making and spending for your animals. Like the gardening software, it will help you stay organized. It will also include information enabling you to pedigree your stock.

These are separate programs. So you can buy just what you need. It's a buy once and it's yours to use unlike the online subscription based services. It has plenty of wiggle room built in to expand or customize it based on your needs. The exact price of the software programs has not been set yet, but we want to make it affordable for small homesteads like ours. These are not comprehensive programs but they do cover the basics every small homestead up to hobby farm size ventures.

What determines what software to make? Well, that's simple. Whatever we need or want. If we could use it, you can bet other homesteads out there can use them too. The small homestead governs what we make because we are tiny compared to other homesteads. We have just two acres. 

What's next on the programming agenda?  How about something based on your pantry/freezer? We can a lot of our vegetable and poultry production here at the Cockeyed Homestead. We have chickens that provide us with meat and eggs. A garden that produces about 75% of our needs. It's great that we are able to put by each year. How do you keep track of it all? Do you know how many jars of food stuff to put by each year. What did you can too much of? What did you can too little of?



I canned about three bushels of tomatoes last year thinking that would be enough. It lasted the two of us four months. Guess what I'll be planting and canning more of this year. My pickles? I barely will eek through. A few extra jars would be heavenly. I canned way too much jams. We don't need half as much for a year. Peaches, between frozen and canned we broke even. I did this by memory and guessimation this year. A program would have been nice. It will help us produce more accurately and hold down costs.

I normally buy meats we don't produce from Zaycon by the case.Well, it turned out their pork sausage links made Mel nauseous. I ended up giving 3/4 of a case to my neighbor. We loved their all beef hot dogs so much that I'll be buying two cases this summer to last us all year. With just the two of us on this homestead, a case or two of whatever will last us a year. Coupled with their sales, it's cheaper than the grocery store. I'll hit a local vendor for grass fed/ no antibiotic beef. I'll buy half a cow a year. I'll even take all the bones, tongues, and fat the processor will give me. It's bone broth/beef stock and rendered fat for soaps for basically free. The dogs love the bones after I've finished with them.

So why did Mel design the computer based programs? 
 
We started, like most homesteads, with a ring binder journal. We quickly found that the forms that were downloadable were inadequate for our needs in just three years. We tried creating spread sheets of our own. We were quickly overwhelmed by just pages upon pages. A 3" binder wasn't big enough. We ended up with several. And then, it was shuffling back and forth between notebooks trying to correlate the data we needed. It became a headache in record keeping. Now, we have the data we need and want within a simple program that we can adjust based on our needs.

Let's face it, as homesteaders, we have a duty to be self accountable. We want to know if something is a dismal failure or a success, and by how much. Are we getting our money's worth? A return on investment? Where did we spend too much or too little? How can we save money? Will these programs help with that? Well, let me put it this way. It sure couldn't hurt. It had to be simple to use because my damaged brain and at my <cough>age, it has to be.

The programs will be available soon.

Y'all have a blessed day.

Saying Hello and Goodbye on the Homestead

This week brought more loss to the homestead. We lost our New Hampshire Red rooster to a stray dog. Whitie was our last surviving rooster. He will be missed. So we were left with four remaining hens plus Broody.

Broody still hasn't laid an egg. But she's in her protected new home on the porch. A medium dog crate. The other hens come to visit and talk to her but are unable to peck her. This is until I can build a tractor for her. She still has the use of only one leg.

In the meantime, Tractor Supply has "Chick Days" going on. While we had eggs in the incubator, I basically ignored it. But we had four viable eggs in the incubator at the time. This was until Dervish, Mel's cat, tipped over the incubator and cracked open all of the eggs. None of the chicks survived. With the death of Whitie, we needed a rooster for our free ranging flock of Reds. This was coupled by the concern Nnyus had actually killed Whitie. This seems unlikely to me because the dog had lived with this free roaming rooster for almost two years with no problem. So I blame a stray. We've had a few over the past few weeks. Not having our acreage fenced, this is a continual danger.

After some discussion, we agreed to purchase six Rhode Island Reds and six Buff Orpingtons. Straight run so the odds are 50-50 of gaining at least one rooster for each type. The weather has turned warmer. So we set the brooder up on the porch. We still have a heat lamp hanging in one corner. The huge 3'x5' brooder seems like over kill for so small a number, but they won't be small long. In a few short weeks, they'll have feathers and more than doubled in size. In the meantime, they have plenty of room to run around. I would have loved to find some Americaunas too, but there are none within a 50-mile radius. Maybe next year. If YouTube chicken sexing videos are correct, we should have two roosters and four hens of each. I could be wrong though. Extra roosters are just destined for their next stage of life when they are big enough. We'll be separating the Rhode Island Reds and the Buffs so we'll have pure bred chicks to sell or increase our flock. So now we'll be building three tractors.

FOR RABBITS

I pulled all the sprouting containers to be washed today. Our fodder and sprouting grain operation will be up and running again after the winter lull. It's hard controlling the temperature over the winter months so we suspend the operation. I spent 15 minutes mixing a 5-gallon buckets of wheat, barley, and sunflower seeds. The first cup of the mixture is soaking as I type. Over the winter I purchased another 100-pounds of wheat and barley and 40 pounds of sunflower seeds. To make sprouted grains for the chickens, I'll need to add oats, corn, and Milo.  Cost wise, rabbit feed costs $34 a month for our rabbits in commercial pellets. For sprouted grains, the cost is $100 for nine months worth of feed and it's better digested. The fact that it's non GMO grain is an added benefit. The seeds for rabbits are sprouted for seven to eight days for optimum protein for the rabbits. For the chickens, they eat half as much plus their free ranging for optimum protein only takes three days. Total cost for the chickens eating sprouted grains per month is $17 instead of $34 for commercial feed. The cost consideration is important to the homestead finances, but the animal's health and what they pass on to us in their meat and eggs is even more important.

FOR CHICKENS

That's it for this week.

Y'all have a blessed day!

So We Are Planning...

Mel announced on the May 28th, 2016 video called "Garden Stuff & Questions"  our long range plans (1-5 years away) on building a commune or compound of sorts. Yes, it's true. No, forget about the communes of the 1960s and 70s. No free love, wild sexual escapades, or nudity here. I'm still a minister.

Think of a group of pioneering women coming together as like minded individuals. We are going tiny, as far as individual living spaces go.  Each tiny house will have a kitchenette type arrangement, a desk, a bedroom, and bathroom. Each unit will also have upper storage/bedroom area, and a sitting area. Each unit will be about 48 sq. ft. not including the upper storage/bedroom area. Think a little larger than a motel room.  It will be your personal space. All adults need a private retreat, or a place to go when "told to go to your room" that will actually be separate. The communal space is different. We are redesigning two storage containers to house the kitchen, a full bath, dining room, and library/sitting/living/craft place. It will be 16x40. There will also be a separate root cellar in the plans. We've got to have a place to store all our harvest and canning. You can find the design layouts on our Pinterest site.

Yes, this is a bold new adventure. The reasons behind this change, or as Paul Harvey used to say..."the rest of the story"is...
We aren't getting any younger.
While Mel is able bodied, she can't expected to do all the heavy lifting by herself.
We want to add sheep and milk goats to our hobby farm. Neither of us have experience with those animals.
We also have too much to do on our own.
We want to branch out to a totally self sufficient lifestyle, which means off the grid living.
While we understand the concept, we have limited experience in this area. So we will need help in this area also.
While Mel is a decent carpenter, we need someone that actually has experience with large construction projects. There's a lot of maintenance work involved around the homestead too. There's something to be said for younger able bodied folks.
While I love all the aspects of cooking, gardening, harvesting, and preserving, I don't want to do all of it myself all the time.  Even a cook likes a day off.

We understand a lot of y'all will want to come and visit. Maybe some of y'all are even thinking of joining us. But please be aware that this will be an ongoing project, and it is still in the planning stages. Although we are talking about a communal community, everyone will have something to contribute. Everyone will also enjoy the fruits of our labor. As a community, we have to have a leader who will listen to all. I elect Mel. It is her property. I'm just providing the revenue to get us started. There will be a buy-in price above the some pooling of monetary resources. Large cash expenditures will be discussed and based on needs. So in this respect it will be a commune. This amount is still to be set.

There is still a lot of planning to be done. We'll keep you posted.