There is nothing quite like gazing upon a freezer full of pork that you had a hand in raising yourself, to make you do a little bit of reflecting. There are always intricacies in doing something for the first time, especially when it comes to animal husbandry. As par for the course, it’s easy to…
Tag: experiment
Growing Rhubarb
This spring we decided to get super serious about planting crops that will keep blessing us for years to come. One of those crops, by happenstance, was Rhubarb. In May, we found a total of 4 Victoria Rhubarb plants on clearance and brought them home to become part of our ever expanding homestead. We were…
Growing Garlic – Take 2
We’ve tried this once before– with clearance bin garlic bulbs… and it did not work. We never got a single bit of real growth, which I knew was a very good probability. So this time, we’re going about it completely differently. First- we did set up the patch in the same way, lots of alpaca…
The Cost of Raising Pigs for Meat
This is the second in our “Cost of” series- a bunch of blogs I am compiling to record the real cost of growing our own food, running our homestead/farm startup, etc. Today’s topic is PIGS! Piglets – This is a time of year thing- spring piglets are between $75 and $125 each. We purchased ours…
The Cost of Raising Chickens For Meat
This was a summer of firsts- and one of the most important ones was our first time raising our own chickens for meat. We went big, raising enough for not just our expanding family for a whole year, but also raising a years worth for my parents. We are very excited about how the whole…
Raising Meat Chickens- Lessons Learned
We are less then 24 hours away from sending our first batch of birds to the butcher and I’ve had some time to reflect. This was our first year raising our own meat- we tend to never do anything halfheartedly so we started out big by raising 120+ meat Cornish Rock Crosses and 4 pigs….
Turning Fiber into Money
Part of our homestead dream is for our animals to basically pay for themselves. This has been a bit of a trial and error deal with the chickens (best money so far is in pickled eggs by far, but it is a time intensive and smelly process). With our herd of alpacas, we are hoping…
How We Are Raising Our Meat Chickens- After the Brooder and into the Tractor
A few blogs ago, I published one about how we were starting our meat chickens off on the right foot. Now I am here to tell you how they will spend weeks 3 thru culling in Mid August. We built ourselves some chicken tractors -we used rough cedar boards (yes I know CEDAR IS BAD…
Raising Pigs for Meat
This last winter, I published a blog about why we had decided to raise our own pigs for meat this summer – Well I am proud to say, we are! Early May, we brought home 4 Tamworth piglets- a heritage breed from the UK known for its long, lean body, red hair and hardiness. And…
Why We Decided to Raise Pigs
I’m going to preface this blog by explaining a bit of personal history. I was a vegetarian for over a decade. I decided at the ripe old age of 8 that eating animals was cruel, unnecessary and not something I wanted to be apart of. This lasted until I was in college. I am now…
