'Half-way' Homesteading (from, The New Agrarian)

magpye thanks for the link. Great info. and great site. Makes mr want to go out and get some ducks. 7ducks= several dozen eggs a week. If I look at it this way and sell the eggs to friends and co-workers for 1$/dozen, maybe that would help offset the upkeep. My family eats about 1 dozen eggs a week. that is alot of left over eggs.


Just thoughts though, live in the city and would be cited for sure.

calvin

Calvin, we have a city nearby where people are allowed to keep chickens - but hens only, that is, no roosters. I think chickens are a little bit less messy, too. Having had both chickens and ducks as a kid, the baby ducks were really a lot of fun, since they will follow you around as if you were their mama, in a line. Used to let them go out on the lake too and herd them back up with a canoe. Lost a few to snapping turtles though :(

Just have a pair of banties at the moment. Have gotten so that I sleep right through the crowing at 5:15 a.m. Haven't gotten many eggs, perhaps I bought an old hen.

I am sooo jealous. I only have a half an acre, and you
have to have over one acre here to keep ducks, chickens,
etc.

I'd love to have a few guinea fowl. They eat all kinds of
naughty bugs and are also great watchmen. They holler
their heads off when strangers get near the property,
both the two-legged and the four-legged kind. :o)

We'd tried the guineas a few years ago .. but the yoties and the snakes that abound on our property surrounded by more woods, is just too much competition for starting out with guinea babies.

From what we've understood, if you try to bring older guineas to your place - they just fly away! Maybe, come Spring - it'll be time to try once again.

- Magpye

Someone please define homesteading or selfsufficiency for me please, or rather how do you know when you have gone far enough? You can grow most of your own foods and meats. Cut wood for fuel. You can even make your own tools. There are just some things you can't make...you have to make a trip to town. At what comfort level do you feel you are as self sufficient as you need to be? When you can make do with only one trip to town a month......once a year? I avoid WallyWorld as much as I can but there are still some things you just have to buy.....meds, seeds, some staples like salt, baking powder, etc.

What I am working toward is a contingency plan. If there is ever a big natural disaster here then there will be a lot of people in a bad way. So much of our society is dependant on that Walmart truck being able to get through within the next three days. What happens if it doesn't run for the next month? Has anyone tried to make one trip to town for supplies suffice for a year? Like the settlers of the past, go to town once a year for supplies?

My grandparents were used to a monthly or less frequent supplies delivery and never changed their buying habits. Some of my cousins live in a mountain farm town in Europe that doesn't have any stores. They have a supply wagon comes once a month during good weather and not at all during the snow season. You have a lot of company in wanting to keep "shopping" to a minimum.

My suggestion would be to make a list of the items that you purchase off farm and then start cutting back on the number of times you buy it, and set up a plan for how you will handle being without other items.

Taking a cue from your list:

meds - if these are over the counter products, are there herbal alternatives that you can grow yourself?
Prescription Alternatives, Third Edition : Hundreds of Safe, Natural Prescription-Free Remedies to Restore and Maintain Your Health (Paperback)
http://tinyurl.com/yw986g

Do you have a good herbal medicine reference manual and would you recognize the plants? Horizon Herbs offers discount price on a collection called "Lifeline Medicinal Herb Garden" and they produce a book on making plant medicine at home.
https://www.horizonherbs.com/product.asp?specific=jnnphor8
https://www.horizonherbs.com/product.asp?specific=jppmerm8

http://tinyurl.com/2cakm6
http://tinyurl.com/yt643t
Here's the amazon link to an earlier edition of Christophers "School of Natural Healing" so you can read the reviews:
http://tinyurl.com/24cxou


seeds - can you start saving your own?


salt & baking powder/soda- how much do you use in a month? Can you purchase and store 6 months worth at a time?
Interesting history of salt & human culture:
http://www.saltinstitute.org/38.html

Hope this helps give you some ideas so you and your family will be prepared.

Yes, all good info.

We already purchase about a year's worth of supplies like baking powder, salt, etc. We work from a shopping list,too.

As far as seeds; some of the old strains of beans and such can be saved back but things like hybred corn can't be held back.

Guess it depends on how self-sufficient and independent you want to be. Are there any heritage open pollinated corn varieties that you like? Maybe you could grow some of both and save the seed of your OP crops. If a big natural disaster occurs, you'll probably be more interested in having something to plant to have food on the table. Besides, hybrids in general are testing out to have lower nutritional values than the heritage crops.

garden mermaid,
We like the sweet corn best. Usually we plant Silver Queen or Sugar Dots. I am not sure if either of them are hybrids.

i have a black sweet corn called aztec black one of the oldest corns around and one of the first

I'll have to look for that phicks. Where did you find it?

i got it off of ebay

Plant/soil nutrition plays a very large part in the sweetness of corn.

A few OP sweet corn varieties are available from Baker Creek, including Black Aztec:
http://rareseeds.com/seeds/Corn

A few more here:
http://www.heirloomseeds.com/corn.htm
http://www.victoryseeds.com/catalog/vegetable/corn/corn.html
http://www.southernexposure.com/productlist/OPSCORN.html

A couple of articles you may find interesting:
http://home.woh.rr.com/billkrisjohnson/Garden/GardeningforMaximumNutrition.htm
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Organic_Gardening/2004_April_May/Uncommon_Corn

thanks

Try this--you can join and trade/buy all kinds of organically grown seeds (sometimes plants) with other members. The fee is around $35 a year and is worth it as they have some really OLD varieties you don't see any more. They even send you a surpsiingly large catalogue each year with the members' names and addresses' including the seeds/plants they have to offer for trade or sale.

http://www.seedsavers.org/

Like Virginian, I am working with a contingency plan. So far it's not much as this place is new to me 6 months ago. However, I have a good start on a stocked pantry of dry goods (beans, rice, pasta, etc. in 15-25 pound quantities) and home canned goods. I try to buy a few items ahead like tp, salt, yeast, etc. every month. I want to build a solar food dryer, and buy a hand-operated home grain mill. (Whole grain dried corn and berries keep better than flour purchased already ground.)

My veggie garden this year will be a first for me other than tomatoes. I am getting OP seeds so I can save seeds for next year, and trade seeds where/when I can. I have a root cellar to store some vegetables and fruits for winter, and I plan a 3 season greenhouse plus hoop houses and cold frames to extend the growing season. I also plan a chicken tractor and maybe 8-10 hens and a rooster.

My planting area is small (and I have no mechanical equipment) but I can plant fruiting trees and berry bushes up the hill behind the house when I have money to do so. I kinda have a wood lot... this 19 acres was timbered a few years ago so it's mostly small trees now but firewood is plentiful around here. I have a good airtight wood stove (for heat and cooking) in storage but I need the chimney relined to use it safely.

One thing I immediately know I lack if there is a long crisis is a way to cook in the summer. I've been looking at alternative building materials' sites and I'm wondering if I can build a bread oven outside with a place to cook and maybe do canned goods...

I have a decent library of herbal, medical, building, farm and garden books, plus lots of reference books if I ever can get my stuff moved from storage in NC to here.

It's an ambitious plan for a single woman who will be 67 this year, but you eat an elephant one bite at a time. I just wish I was stronger and healthier... and younger!

darius, no doubt you'll get stronger and healthier eating your home grown food and working outdoors. Yyou might consider constructing a tandoori oven for outdoor cooking:
http://www.cpsusa.com/ebay/tandoorOven.htm
http://piers.thompson.users.btopenworld.com/building.html

Here's another possibility for outdoor oven and stove combined:
http://www.thefarm.org/charities/i4at/surv/stove.htm

Thanks! I'm toying with an outdoor stove/oven built in such a way that I can also use it during the winter to augment solar heat in the GH.

My GH is starting to take shape in my mind's eye... There's lots of clay here and I have a few large weeping willows so I'm thinking of wattle and daub for the filler walls (about 3' high with 12" wall cavities) between cedar post support walls . I plan to use rice hulls as insulation in the walls (R36) since they are so cheap and effective, and black 55 gal. water-filled drums on the back wall as a heat collector.

I'm posting a lot of my on-going efforts and disasters (no matter how small) in a series of threads in the Parking Lot Forum. The threads are titled "Getting out of Limbo" if anyone cares to read through them.

I wonder if there is enough interest to have a Forum dedicated to alternative building materials, sustainable agriculture and aquaculture, and all many of the other ways/things we are doing world-wide to increase our safe food supply and marshall our current waste materials into something useable, affordable and effective?