As if 5 kids under 8, 2 dogs, 1 cat, and 1 tortoise were not enough for two people that work full time…. We want to start a homestead.
Dreamers
In the last few years Travis and I were feeling unsettled about how we were raising our children. We are country people though we were not exactly raised that way. I did grow up in a rural small town in New England and spent most of my childhood outside and he grew up … in Los Angelas. If that tells you anything!
We have spent the last six years living in suburbs, first in Washington state and then in Arizona. Suburbs work great for little kids. We had neighbors, we had nice little yards, beautiful cookie-cutter homes. Sidewalks, parks. I did enjoy it. But it isn’t for us long term.
We had a dream of wide open spaces. We wanted to start a homestead, get chickens, stay home more, teach the kids how to plant and garden and spend long days outside. Our goal was to find a place with at least an acre. We ended up on almost two.
The Homestead Begins
Some might say we are rushing it but we have been dreaming for months about turning whatever property we got into our own little homestead. We have been here for almost a month now and we are loving it.
Most of the unpacking is done, we have fallen into a wonderful comfortable schedule. We have been working on the yard and getting caught up on the landscape and we decided we were ready to start our homestead.
My thoughts are that I still have about 6 weeks before I return to work. By adding to my plate and adding to the chaos now, it will feel normal by the time I start work.
Learning the Ropes
Homesteading is a lot to learn. We have owned chickens before back when we were living in Kentucky on an acre there, but the chickens were more my husband’s thing. He loved them, I was not interested then. I am interested now, more for the sake of my children and this lifestyle we are cultivating for them. I’m lucky that my husband remembers a LOT about chicken care, so I’m learning a lot from him.
We spontaneously decided to buy baby turkeys and baby ducks as well. I have been looking up things on both of them. Turns out turkeys need a lot more protein than chickens, and are much more susceptible to respiratory and other diseases. We decided we would keep them separate from the chicks, so we are feeding them their own starter right now and have them in a brooder with a heat lamp.
The ducks are a lot messier than chickens. They need to fit their entire bills in the water to blow out food from their beaks. They also like to climb in and swim in the water. Turns out too much protein for them can be dangerous, and they need a niacin supplement. They also don’t need it as hot, and grow a lot faster than chicks. So, we put them in their own brooder as well with a heat lamp and started them on their own starter feed. They will switch to a grower feed MUCH sooner than the chicks and turkeys.
The chicks we had planned for so we have them in a stock tank with a heater and chick starter feed.
Getting Set Up
My husband is extremely handy and wants to build a very large chicken coop for all the chickens we want. (Put it this way, when my family eats eggs we eat at least a dozen EVERY TIME. We eat a lot of eggs). It is unrealistic to build this coop right now, so we bought a coop off facebook that would house probably up to 10 chickens. Turns out, that coop came with an adult chicken. So, now we have one adult chicken, 4 baby chicks, 2 ducklings and 2 poults. The adult chicken is staying outside, in her coop, with her own food. All the brooders are set up inside the shop in this little area we thought would be a man cave but decided it works well for starting our little farm.
The kids and I also weeded out a garden that was on the property and my husband and kids planted seeds for some vegetables that can tolerate a frost. Carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce and Brussel sprouts all can be planted in the fall. We will see if we can get any to grow.
And lastly, I started a sourdough. I’m making the starter from scratch, so it’ll take over a week before it is ready to bake. But so far, I enjoy it because it feels a lot like science with the weighing and measuring and stirring. I almost want to keep the starter in an Erlenmeyer flask and use a stir bar and feel a little bit like Lessons in Chemistry!
Still to come!
That’s what we are working on these days for making our dream of the perfect little homestead for our kids come true. We’re still dreaming big. We need to make a home for Duramax, our tortoise and get the cat to be an indoor/outdoor cat. We are searching facebook for the perfect playground for the kids and want to get them a trampoline as well.
We put a table in the gazebo and want to start eating outside. We have some trees we want to remove and some pictures to hang still but the vision is really coming to life and I couldn’t be happier. I think we have all started to accept that we do not want to move again and are eager to turn this into our absolute perfect forever home!