Paramount to being a good homesteader is economy: economy of money, of resources, and most of all, of your land.  A lot of time and planning go into utilizing every inch to the best purpose.  Especially with small acreages, it’s tempting to “domesticate” it all—from the vegetable garden to the woodlot to the pastures, the perfect homestead looks like one big AgExtension Calendar Cover, right?

Wrong.

Leaving patches of wild growth is good for the homestead and the homesteaders who dwell there.

First of all, it looks good.  There is something very appealing about a patch of overgrowth pasture or untended woodland—like a living canvas; an ever-changing landscape of nodding blossoms, graceful grasses, and twining viney things gently punctuates your homestead, softening an otherwise too-orderly-for-nature scenery and reminding us that we chose this life to escape from or as a protest to a sadly sterile suburbia.

Second of all, even a tiny wilderness provides an area just screaming to be explored by young Lewis-and-Clarks armed with plastic compasses, butterfly nets, and warm oatmeal cookies nestled in their linty little pockets.  If your place looks like a manicured subdivision yard, where is the benefit to your barefooted, country-raised youngens?

I mean, REALLY, if ya’ll are going to tame the whole mess, you may as well have stayed tucked safely into “Quail Hills” (where they killed all the nasty, pooping, feather-shedding quails and flattened the hills to make way for row upon row of identical structures loosely referred to as homes).

Third of all, it’s less work, and less work is good.  Oh sure, you could spend an entire weekend whaling the tar out of your fencerows, but if you just left them as a “natural wildflower buffer” think of all the OTHER things you could be doing with that time.  You could build a greenhouse, learn to make cheese, teach your kids the difference between a moth and a butterfly by actually LOOKING at real wild moths and butterflies, hang a hammock and crawl into it with a good book, a glass of tea, maybe a cat, but absolutely no watch or clock in sight.  Heck, you could even study a foreign language (maybe Canadian).

Lastly of all, be aware of the fact that your land is not only yours.  This is not a commentary on the government or taxes or the government taxes, but a call to LOOK AROUND you at who you are displacing with every tree cut and every foot of garden tilled.

Humans may be at the top of the food chain (something we like to say, even though there are plenty of life forms quicker, stronger and possessing of larger, sharper teeth than we have) but if we push out all the other links there won’t BE a food chain, just us and those things that are quicker, stronger and with larger, sharper teeth.  Now I’m not a degree-holding scientist or a professional odds-maker, but I do know where I’d put my money in a one-on-one contest of that nature.

Oh, I am aware that the large predators are endangered already by the domestication of the wilderness, and that if we insist on progressing with ‘progress” the only links in the food chain will be us, cockroaches, mice, and bacteria, (and the “us” link will be extremely fragile at that point) but the image of a passel of Starbuck’s-toting, urban-dwelling executives from say, Monsanto, rounding a corner and encountering a large cat is somehow perversely comforting.

We need to keep in mind that this land we claim to “own” will be ours for but a nanosecond in time.

We currently “own” several acres and have been here for 10 years.  There’s a big, dead, half-fallen pine in the back yard that has no bark on it, but at least 8 round holes that have been pecked or chewed around the top.  Woodpeckers, squirrels, and at least one family of hoot-owls have made that tree their home off and on over the years.

There’s a half-acre spring-fed pond down in the woods that has been home to beavers, fish, and lately a pair of blue herons who come silently sailing low across the front of the pines and veer gracefully behind them in and into the pond.  The neighbor had a nice pond too, until he decided to shoot the beavers who were tending the dam.

On a much smaller, but no less important scale, for the first four years we lived here each spring brought a Luna moth to our kitchen window every night for a week or so.  This was enchanting and amazing to me and I looked forward to when “my” moth would return.

In researching theses creatures, I learned that they only live a short time after emerging from their cocoons.  So short a time that in their moth stage they don’t even possess mouth parts (a bad sign for a long life). This made me sad for the individual moths, but no less enchanted and awed by their visits. Something had implanted my kitchen window as a stop in their genetic memories, and that was humbling.

When they stopped coming, I was extremely saddened.  Obviously there had been a change somewhere in the environment.  My kitchen window was no longer a convenient stop in their short lives and I hope fervently that the change was not something that I did in the name of making my farm “better”, since we’ve lost more than a big bug sitting on the window, we’ve lost some magic that was woven into the story of our farm.

I recall reading that The Perfect Lawn is a sterile environment.  Those envied vistas of green, uniform in color and length, carefully maintained and diligently doused with Weed-N-Feed and insecticides, are as dead as the surface of the moon.  Between the miles and miles of concrete we’ve laid and the poisons we’ve poured into the scraped parched soil to manipulate it into a false beauty, much of our earth is as appealing as a garishly painted mannequin.

After spending too much time in urban and suburban America, I return to the tiny speck of land that I call home, reeling from the stress that forced naturalness brings.  My blood pressure drops with each truly natural sight: the wild daylilies under the chinaberry bush, wrens nesting outside the bedroom window in the overgrown untrimmed hedge, even the momentary glimpse of a coyote at the edge of the woods.

This is my home, but it’s mine for a short time only.  It is my pleasure and honor to use it gently for my needs, and preserve and protect it for the needs of all its other occupants.

The post In Defense of the Weed-lot appeared first on Homestead.org.

Untruth #1:  Rent the Rototiller and simply push it along, smiling and humming a settlers’ tune as it turns your land into premium, glorious, farmland.

Truth:  Pay someone with a real tractor to till up your garden plot.  If you want to experience the effects of Rototilling on your body, have someone work you over with a sack of wet sand, then jump off of your garage roof.  Naked.  Into brambles.

Untruth #2:  Your veggies will look just like the picture in the catalog.

Truth:  Actually, they WILL look just like the pictures, they just don’t tell you that the pictures are life-size.

Untruth #3:  Newspaper makes excellent mulch.

Truth:  Newspaper looks like litter in your garden, because it IS litter in your garden.  The best mulch I ever used was stall innards from the goat pen, wheelbarrowed directly from pen to garden and dumped between rows.  If you have no goats (I can help you with that), the thick black plastic the garden store sells is a good alternative that keeps out weeds and doesn’t look awful, although some folks, like my publisher, are opposed to putting anything in the garden that won’t break down rapidly.  Last year’s hay works well too, the flakes are about the right size to fit between rows.

Untruth #4:  Fish heads make excellent fertilizer.

Truth:  Although legend has it that the Native Americans planted a fish head with every kernel of corn, the reality is that this is a myth perpetuated by generations of skunks looking for an easy meal.

Untruth #5:  Natural pest control works just as well as chemical pest control.

Truth:  There’s nothing like a good dose of poison to kill bugs.  Since my children had a habit of eating straight from the garden, I always go chemical-free, and assume the “one for me, two for nature” attitude.  However, using beer for slugs does work—taken internally by the gardener in a large enough dose to obliterate any thought of slugs.

Untruth #6:  Mothballs/aluminum pie tins/sweaty shirts/Tabasco sauce/gunshots will deter mammalian pests.

Truth:  The instant your sweet corn is ready to pick, some sort of silent Corn Alarm sounds, and nothing will keep the raccoons away.  I witnessed the mid-day destruction of my sweet corn from 20 feet away, yelling, waving my arms, jumping up and down, and lobbing every lift-able object at the masked darlings.  They totally ignored the Crazy Woman at the edge of the garden (you would think rabies would’ve been a concern, I was certainly foaming at the mouth), bent a stalk, opened an ear, took 3 or 4 bites, then moved onto the next one, effectively ruining the entire crop and breaking my heart simultaneously.  There is nothing on earth as delicious as homegrown sweet corn, harvested and cooked within minutes, slathered with real butter.  If I ever have the courage to plant sweet corn again, I will fence that area and turn a big doggie loose in it two weeks before harvest.

Untruth #7:  Throwing netting over your fruit trees will keep the birds from eating your ripening fruit.

Truth:  The birds actually love this one, as they hop up into your branches and can eat all day long without worrying about getting eaten themselves by a hawk.

Untruth #8:  The catalogs are full of thousands of different veggies, so you must plant all of them.

Truth:  Plant only what you will eat.  Also, learn what you can plant together.  I learned that if you plant cucumbers and gourds next to each other, you get mutants that are neither edible nor decorative, just disturbing.

Untruth #9:  If your children help in the garden, they will be proud to eat the Fruits of Their Labor.

Truth:  Kids are kids, and kids hate veggies.  This can also work against you when they name each tomato, and you are not allowed to eat them either.

Untruth #9 1/2:  Working together in the garden will enhance the sibling bond.

Truth:  One year, my daughter gave her little brother a radish, claiming it was a strawberry just to see the look on his face at the first bite.  He fell for it every time.  Yes.  Every time.  She is now in law school, and for years he harbored a grave suspicion of all food products.

Untruth #10:  You will save a bundle on your grocery bill by growing your own produce.

Truth:  After the tilling, purchasing, and planting, mulching, fertilizing, pest deterring, watering, harvesting, and putting up, you will be munching on $10 carrots.  My daughter did make a tidy sum one year growing and selling pumpkins.  We planted them among the rows of corn, and they did well.  This was in Wisconsin, where the Yankee raccoons are more civil than these Southern Rebel raccoons, and I could actually eat my own sweet corn and have enough left to freeze (sigh).

To New Gardeners planning a first garden, these veggies are easy to grow, and most likely to be eaten: green beans (get the bush type unless you want to build poles), tomatoes (get cages), squashes, cucumbers, corn (needs lots of room, and a razor wire fence for protection).

Beware of zucchini.  If you must grow it, buy a packet of seeds, plant one, and throw the rest away, better yet, burn them.  You will still be slipping surplus zucchinis into strangers’ purses just to get rid of the damn things.

This year, we will again plant a garden, for Hope springs eternal; there is no finer workout than an hour or two in the garden.  Country life just doesn’t seem complete without those precious gems from your own garden: the one tomato that doesn’t have rust, the one strawberry that doesn’t have a resident slug, squash yellow as sunshine, corn sweet as candy.

Hand me that seed catalog, would you?  I hear the call of the land.  (Sounds suspiciously like giggling raccoons…)

The post Black Thumb! Helpful Hints for the Cultivationally Challenged appeared first on Homestead.org.

For the rest of us, the road to our homestead is not usually so direct.  Fraught with detours, dead ends, and missing road signs, sometimes it takes years to get there, and once there, sometimes, like the dream where you think you are at the bottom, but you just keep falling, our final destination remains elusive.

Perhaps your earliest memories include fantasies of ponies, hen houses, and amber waves of grain, or maybe, in an otherwise normal adulthood, one day pushing pencils in your cubicle you were seized with the overwhelming urge to leap out the window and go plant something.  Outside.  In the dirt.  And the sunshine.  And never be “cubed” again.

No matter—the result is the same: the need and desire to claim a bit of earth, raise a barn, fill it with food-on-the-hoof nourished by grass-in-the-pasture, and earn your keep by the sweat of your brow, darn it.

‘Tis a worthy goal, and like all worthy goals, there must be a worthy plan—a neat and well thought out plan that takes you from point A, to point B and all the way to point Q, which is right about where your farm sits, a perfect jewel set into the warm bosom of a blissful countryside.

Point A is deceptively easy.  It consists of “I wanna be a homesteader.”

Point B is substantially more involved, and quite a bit more lengthy, but generally fun and relatively inexpensive and painless.  This is where all the preliminary learning is done.  Your collection of magazines, books, bookmarked websites, and business cards will amaze even yourself in an alarmingly short time.  New words and phrases will roll off your tongue leaving your ears wondering, “Who said that?”  Sustainability, Grass-fed Beef, and Nitrogen Fixing Cover Crops—these and other, until now, odd combinations of words will dance through your head at night like visions of sugarplums.

The whole concept seems so right.  Caring for the earth while caring for your family, dying a noble peaceful death, and being cared for, in turn, by the earth, like our ancestors did for generation upon generation.  Shunning the mainstream belief of the nine to five followed by the 401k, we voraciously devour every tale telling how others have accomplished this modern day return to a basic and good life.

And one shining truth shimmers through each family story according to the published word: simply follow your plan (or THEIR plan, if they are selling a book), and the end result will be your homestead.  Happy smiling family waving from a tractor on the last page.  The End.

For most of us, this couldn’t be a crueler fallacy.

Because somewhere after Point B, life gets in the way.  People lose jobs, they lose spouses, they gain a child or responsibility of a parent or grandparent, there’s a chronic illness or debilitating injury tossed into the mix and the lovely plan is in shatters, tatters, and shreds.

This is where we separate the wheat from the chaff, the rice from the hulls, the peanuts from the butter.  At this juncture, some people will decide that the homesteading dream is just that—a pretty dream, like the one where Antonio Banderas rides up on a black stallion, swoops you off your feet, hands you a perfectly frozen Dove bar (not too hard, but not dripping and mooshy either), and gallops off to sunny Mexico with you to the perfect beach with sand that will never get into your ice cream…

Ahem.  Sorry…

The “homesteading as a pretty dream” group will buck up, re-group and move on.

The others… Ah, the others.  Every fragment of a thought inferring that they will never have their piece of earth will result in the sound of a tiny piece of their heart breaking.

This story is for you, my friends.

There is ALWAYS something you can do that will move you in the right direction, and just because you APPEAR to be moving backward, does not mean that you must STAY moving backward.

Although the causes of Homestead Dream Endangerment are many, the results are basically the same few depression inducing scenarios:

Homestead Dream Endangerment Scenario One: Stuck in the City—No Money to Get Out.

This one is the hardest because it’s like you are smacked down even before you get started.  In actuality, this is where you can hone skills before you need them.  Go to the farmers’ market, buy a bunch of veggies and fruits and teach yourself to freeze, dehydrate and can.  Learn to bake bread.  Find and take classes on sewing, knitting, woodworking, basic carpentry, electrical, and plumbing, heck even car repair (tractors have engines—who knew?).

If you only have a yard, you can have a garden; plant veggies in between your flowers, veggies are plants, too.  If you have only a balcony, you can have a few pots with tomato and pepper plants in them, and smaller pots with herbs around them.  If you have oregano, basil, and cilantro, you have spaghetti sauce and salsa.  What more could you want?

Volunteering and visiting working farms is a good way to figure out for sure and for certain what you like and what you hate about different aspects of farming, and is more helpful to be done BEFORE you leap in with both rubber boots on.  The fact that your elaborate and brilliant plan to raise heritage Widget Sheep is going to be more difficult than you imagined because you have a previously unknown allergy to lanolin, is something better learned early on.

Of course, all this is done in your “spare time”, while trimming your budget and working overtime to truly be able to escape the city once you find your property.  Which brings us to:

Homestead Dream Endangerment Scenario Two: Land Land Everywhere, But Not a Farm in Sight.

Tiny, sweat-covered down payment in hand, it’s time to find your land and stake your claim to it.  Even if you know where you want to settle, it’s hard enough.  Even in the flattest part of the world, the difference between parcels of land is astounding.  If you are considering moving somewhere you’ve never been before, it’s mind-boggling.

The first 100 or so parcels that you look at will be fun and educational.  After that it just gets tediously bizarre, like that old Dunkin Donuts commercial where the baker sleepwalks to work every morning at 3:00 AM chanting “Time to make the donuts.  Time to make the donuts…”, you will drive down little back roads, map in hand droning “Gotta find the land.  Gotta find the land…”

This is the danger zone—and you must remember three key words—Do Not Settle.  No matter what, wait ’til you step onto the piece of land that whispers to your soul that you will make a happy home and farm there, regardless of any apparent limitations it may have.  Of course this is taking for granted that you will automatically pass on any land that includes a toxic waste dump, has no source of water, or that swarms with werewolves every full moon.  Once you’ve found your land, you must make it yours, which usually involves jumping through hoops for men in suits and:

Homestead Dream Endangerment Scenario Three: Banks Only Lend Money to Those Who Don’t Need It.

A lot of us are credit challenged, and most of us are not, despite what our Credit Score screams, deadbeats.  Job loss, sickness, divorce—any number of things can launch the most conscientious person straight out of the mainstream financial institutions for a mortgage.  Several factors make this worse.  For instance, if you are relocating across country there will be no local references for employment or residence.  This makes bankers nervous.  And if the land in question is no-barn-no-house nekkid, they will really start twitching.

Historically, they have a point.  If something in your life gets tough and you need to pick and choose what and who gets paid, you will keep your house that you live in current.  You will keep your vehicle that you need to get to work current.  Banks assume that if the going gets tough, you will start skipping your land note, and they are usually right.  Even though bankers enjoy being right, they dislike foreclosing on properties—a lot of paperwork and court orders and sheriffs involved there and they’d just as soon avoid it, so they don’t make the loans to begin with.

The options are to either cough up enough of a down payment to make it worth their while (and simultaneously gag on a killer interest rate), or find someone to owner-carry, at least till you can get some stability established.  Once the bank has a record of a year or so of timely made payments, and knows you are not going to leave them holding a partially improved farm, they will generally consider re-writing your note at a more attractive rate.  If you do go owner-carry, make sure ANY owner-carry note is drawn up by a lawyer to avoid  “misunderstandings” down the line.

When you have closed on the land and have moved out yonder, a lot of folks are faced with:

Homestead Dream Endangerment Scenario Four: Well, Here We Are, But Now We Can’t Afford to Do a Dang Thing.

Start small.

Use caution.

Resist the temptations of mental, physical, or financial over-extension.

Or sure as shootin’ you will find yourself smack dab in the middle of:

Homestead Dream Endangerment Scenario Five: How Did We Manage To Lose The Farm?

Of course, there are many routes to this unfortunate spot, and most of them do not have anything to do with your intelligence, money management, or farming savvy.  There are many times the excrement contacts the oscillator and you either get angry, or you get over it.  If you know in your heart that you have done the best you know how, and in the cases where there WERE misjudgments, you learned from them and are determined not to repeat them.  This is not a terminal scenario.

Let’s talk about me for a minute (and I promise Antonio Banderas is not part of this, but I make no such vow about the Dove bars).

I was born and raised up in a mid-sized town in Wisconsin.

Got married.

Learned everything I could about country life while my first child was a toddler.

Moved out to 3 acres when I was pregnant with my second child.

Got a big garden going, got some dairy goats and horses.

Divorced 7 years later and lost the farm.

Married again.

Packed the U-Haul and drove to Texas.

Did several years time in the Worst Trailer Park in Texas.

Got divorced, again.

Moved into a “fixer upper” on 3 acres.

Got a garden going, dairy goats, horses, and poultry.

Married again and had another child.

Decided 3 acres was too small, so looked and looked and finally found 12 acres.

Jumped through roughly 10,000 hoops before securing financing.

Started planning a new family farm that centered around building our own home, ourselves.

Family encountered serious health issues.

Farm plan re-worked to include local contractor as a principal character to achieve building goals.

Everyone enjoys a Dove bar.

My story is not that unusual, and certainly does not include insurmountable problems.  I can think of at least half a dozen of my friends who have done so much more with seemingly so much less. At some point all of us have wrestled with:

Homestead Dream Endangerment Scenario Six: Am I Too Danged Old to Do This?

If this question enters your mind the answer is “YES”—you ARE too old to do this the same way you planned it in your teens, twenties, and thirties.  But if you re-work the labor parts, and lessen the day-to-day workload, you’ll find that homesteading is not out of reach, you just have to shift your definition of a successful farm.

The common thread among us is the bullheadedness to not give up when most sane folks would.  Whether that makes us sensible is up for debate.  But that really matters not.

Because no matter where we are physically or financially, our hearts and our minds are on the farm, and nothing can take that away from us.

Whether we are growing beans behind the petunias, or canning veggies in a high rise, you can take the homesteader out of the country, but you can never take the country out of the homesteader.

The post Keeping the Homestead Dream Alive: What to Do When the Bluebird of Happiness Poops on Your Head appeared first on Homestead.org.

These tiny rodents are not only destructive, fast multiplying, and smelly, but they have unarguably the best public relations campaign in the history of public relations campaigns.  From level-headed justice-minded Mickey Mouse to pitiful lost Fivel and his hat that’s too big for him in American Tale, to the singing mice in t-shirts helping Cinderella get ready for the ball, big screen mice are all small whiskered heroes.  From the first time, we hear “M is for Mouse” (unless you are Canadian where “M is for Moose”) we have a warm fuzzy feeling regarding the little stinkers.

So the first time one makes a wrong turn and scampers across your feet, your likely reaction will be something on the order of “AAAIIIIEEEEE! (In midair, followed by a whole-body shudder upon hitting the ground), but then “AWWWWW… it’s so CUTE!”, and you will not only NOT be aware of the impending menace, you will consider yourself fortunate to have had such a close encounter with a little jewel of Nature.

Several days later, scanning the pantry shelf for a nice can of chicken soup, you will see them—and you will think to yourself, “My, those mice are resourceful—leaving a trail of chewy mouse raisins to find their way back home, just like in Hansel and Gretel”.  It should only take a split second for your mind (the human mind being the marvel that it is) to discard the notion of mouse grocery stores selling mouse raisins for the express purpose of navigational convenience, and realize that what is actually all over your pantry shelves is MOUSE POOP.  This makes it an entirely different matter.

Right about then, still gagging from the idea of your food supply being used as a running rodent toilet, you will notice other subtle changes in the pantry.  Everything that can be gotten into will have been gotten into.  Cereal, pasta, bread, chips, anything not encased in metal or glass will have been tasted and tainted.

If the little darlings have been REALLY busy and REALLY hungry, you will no longer be able to find the chicken soup you originally came for since the label will have been peeled off and shredded.  I’ve found tiny teeth marks on the lid of the peanut butter (in it’s label-less jar).  We once had a tiny hole chewed though a full bottle of canola oil with nary a drop of oil on the shelf (don’t you know THOSE mice had really clean intestinal tracts), an entire batch of curing soap eaten through, and what made my son a lifelong Mouse Hater: a complete 10-pack of Yoo-Hoo-in-a-Box’s broken into and slurped down.

“Wow,” you are thinking, “this chick is a REALLY bad housekeeper!”

A true enough statement, but not completely relevant to this topic.

This scope of damage can be done in an insanely short period of time.  A single mouse can visit a feeding spot up to 200 times a night (it’s true, I found it on the internet) and they have incredibly high metabolisms.

“Well, that’s YOUR problem”, you say; “it’s clearly your fault for living in a 100+-year-old house that’s about as airtight as a fishing net.  MY house has things like windows that close properly and floors that actually meet the walls.”

Mice are tiny.  They are stealthy and they are apparently collapsible (like those tin cups you were issued in your Scout Mess Kit).  Your average-sized mouse has no problem fitting through the same square footage that the Lord’s Prayer takes up on a grain of rice.  If your home contains ANY spaces this size or larger from the Outside World to the Inside World, you will have mice.

“Alrighty then”, you say, confident smile on your face, “I’m a human.  Mice are rodents.  It would take the contents of 100 mouse heads just to equal the size of MY brain (give or take).  I will put any food packaged in non-chew-through containers in the fridge, the freezer or in hermetically sealed mouse-proof bins, thereby solving the problem.  If there’s no food for them to get, they will go away.”

If that were the case, this would be the end of the story, and according to my editor, I must submit a minimum of 1000 words, and we are just 300 words shy of that.

Mice will find food.  Between the crumbs that fall on your floor, to the cat food in the cat dish (a cruel joke for the cat), there is still plenty of food to be had, especially if you are the caretakers of any fledgling people.  If there are children in your house, you are the proud owners of one big ol’ Super Mouse Buffet.

Once they have their food needs met, it’s time for a little nap. Or maybe a little procreation.  Or on a good day, both.  Mice will nest anywhere, but their preferred places seem to be inside a favorite pair of shoes in your closet, smack in the middle of a new roll of paper towels in the cabinet, or nestled snugly in a fluffy bed of the cloth that coats your electrical wires in between your walls.

Yes, having tiny brains even for their tiny heads, mice will not hesitate to take part in dangerous activities that will both kill them, and cause extreme stress for you and your pocketbook: eating through cords both telephonic and electric, burrowing into the innards of a microwave oven, or doing a graceful swan dive into your drinking water cistern.  The loss of one of their own is sad but not catastrophic, since mice are capable of truly epic reproduction.  A female mouse is mature enough to have babies at the tender age of 8 weeks and can produce up to 40 babies per year.  So if you start with one pregnant mouse in your kitchen, and given that 50% of her offspring will be females also, at the end of one year you will have….. ummm…… a lot of mice.

Luckily, you will not have to fight the onslaught of this Lilliputian horde alone.

Mice attract snakes.

One year as we were battling the mice, we noticed their numbers waning and we became smug.  Looking for something in a rarely-opened bottom cabinet, Ward found the real reason for our diminishing mouse population: a three-foot-long rat snake.  The snake was highly offended by the invasion of his personal space and left through the tiny hole he’d come in through, never to be seen again.  Our mouse population blossomed.

The enclosed porch that is now my workroom at one point was home to my guinea pigs and cockatiels.  When we converted it, we removed the cabinets against the wall and found an elaborate maze of trails that had been chewed into the particleboard floor.  Disgusted (Ward) and cursing (me), we swept up all the dusty refuse and bleached the whole place.  Shortly thereafter I had a little shortness of breath.  Looking up diseases on the internet (always dangerous), I found something called hantavirus.  Hantavirus is a disease that’s transmitted by mice to humans, and is sometimes fatal.  You get hantavirus by inhaling dried mouse poop (like the dust in the air when you are SWEEPING IT INTO A DUSTPAN), and breathing problems are one of the symptoms.  Now panicked and more than a little miffed that my gravestone might read “Done in by mouse poop”, I called my family doctor, who looked up hantavirus and told me that there was nothing to do pro-actively, and that I’d just have to wait out the “14 days from time of contact” for further symptoms to appear, since there’s no CURE per se, they just put you in the hospital when you are really sick, and treat the symptoms till you get better, or die. I developed no other symptoms, but it sure didn’t add anything to my already low opinion of mice and I wanted them all dead.

But how to kill the little devils?

Aren’t cats supposed to be the ultimate mouse-eradication device?  Depends on the cat.  A cat will hunt for one reason only.  Pleasure.  Cats do not hunt to find something to eat, and when you see a cat happily crunching on the head of something small and defenseless, it’s more of a victory dance than hunger relief.  I have one cat who was born to a life of luxury and lived completely indoors for his first few years who can take out 2 mice in a feed bag at once, and another who is wild as a March hare and I’ve never seen him kill anything, ever, in the 10 years he’s been living here.  I know of people who have put cats in their barns to kill mice and not fed them ‘so they’d hunt for food’.  The cats either took off for a better place to live or died of starvation.

I have found that my toy poodles are excellent mousers.  Smelling of foo-foo spray, bows in their hair, toenails aglitter with polish, they are curly-headed demons when they think a mouse is around.  Considering their size, I think it’s therapeutic for them to pick on something that’s actually smaller than they are.

One non-violent deterrent is stuffing any opening a mouse could fit through with steel wool, since they won’t chew on it (so ‘they’ say).  The problem with this is that you can never hope to find all those openings, and when you do, you should just FIX THEM.

Another natural deterrent is to soak cotton balls in peppermint oil and scatter them on your pantry shelves.  The mice love this one since it’s so tiresome just eating cereals and chips and so forth.  If you leave little notepads and pens also, they will write you thank you notes for being thoughtful enough to supply them with dessert.

There are lots of anti-mouse devices out there, and most of them flat don’t work.  The phrase ‘Don’t try to build a better mousetrap’ is right—the original is still the best. Let’s look at some of the others.

Many people reach for the D-Con-type poisons and they WILL kill mice.  Also, small dogs and children who eat it and cats or chickens who eat mice who’ve eaten it.  I’ve been in Emergency Animal care for too many years to recommend any way to use the stuff that’s remotely safe.

Those sticky boards they sell are just a laugh.  Oh, sure you load the thing with peanut butter in the center and the mice WILL get stuck.  For a minute.  Then they are off, tummies full of peanut butter and just the loss of a little hair to pay for it.  Pretty sweet.  Occasionally you will find a mouse in between eating the peanut butter and yanking himself off of the board, but what do you do THEN?  Stomp on it?  Gingerly put it in a plastic bag and wait for it to suffocate?  Drown it?  The whole thing is pretty unappealing. And again, if you have pets, most likely THEY like peanut butter too.  I have a vivid memory of my daughter’s cat running through the house on his hind legs, sticky board attached to his entire tummy and front legs, clearly not amused and laying full blame for his embarrassment on yours truly.

There are things called Tin Cats that are little metal lock-ups with one-way doors.  The mice go in, but can’t come out.  Once again, what the heck do you do with a metal box full of mice?

No, the clear choice is still the spring-loaded mousetrap.  An inexpensive investment on your part, a quick kill for the mouse.  The only two problems with the basic mousetrap are that sometimes you have to come dangerously close to touching a dead mouse to empty it (yes I use them over and over again, they’re not THAT cheap), and if you are not possessed with lightning quick reflexes, there’s the chance that you will get pinched setting the traps.  I get pinched setting the traps.

Enter what is the only Better Mousetrap I’ve ever seen, the Victor Quickset, made by Victor- manufacturers of the original spring-loaded mousetraps.  The Quickset looks like one of those big plastic clips you buy to hold your chips bag closed, so to set it, your fingers are out of the line of fire, and to empty it, your hand is on the opposite side of the trap from the carcass.  And they are made of plastic, so there’s less residual goo.  Both the original Victor mousetraps and the newfangled Quicksets can be found at your local feed/hardware/building supply store, or Amazon.

Armed with a case of Quicksets, snarling toy poodle at my side (OK, napping in my lap), wearing my horned Viking helmet (just because I like to wear it), I am ready to do battle with the Scourge of the Homestead: My Enemy Mouse.

The post Mice: Scourge of the Homestead appeared first on Homestead.org.

They’re small, relatively harmless, provide both meat and eggs, and if they have to and are given the chance, they even rustle up their own grub (literally).

The majority of articles written about getting and keeping chickens start with “Buy your chicks”, and describe the pros and cons of hatchery vs. feed store and hatchery vs. another hatchery.  Of course, you have to start somewhere, so for your FIRST round of chickens, this is the first step.  Find chicks and purchase them.

If meat birds for yourself and for sale to others are what you are raising, they have a very limited lifespan before becoming a block on the food pyramid, and a lot of people prefer the breeds that are specifically used as dinner—Cornish X being the most popular.  For a large amount of meat in a short amount of time, they really can’t be beat.

If, however, your goal as a small homesteader is to have a flock of chickens for both meat and eggs, there are a number of “dual-purpose” breeds in an amazing array of colors (and that lay eggs in an amazing array of colors), and a lot of these birds have the added advantage of being prone to broodiness.

For your purposes, this is a good thing and does not include heavy sighs, hoarding of chocolate, or tearful outbursts on the part of the hens.  Broodiness in chickens is the tendency to WANT to sit (or set) on their own eggs, with the end result being more chickens.

Way back when, this is how chickens made more chickens.

Black Australorps (my personal favorites), Buff Orpingtons, Rhode Island Reds, Hampshire Reds, Speckled Sussex, Barred Rocks, and the Brahmas are among these dual-purpose breeds, although there are certainly others.  These are the birds who made up the feathered backbone of the family farm—hens who laid eggs, sat on those eggs, hatched out, and raised up several clutches of brand-spankin’ new poultry every year.  These breeds are bulky enough (the reason they are referred to as Heavy Breeds) that the tiny roosters that get hatched out make darn good eating right before they become problematic teens.

Meat.

Eggs.

And repeat.

The ultimate renewable resource.

Somewhere along the line, egg production became commercialized and hens who “went broody” became more of a bother than an asset—who wants to get bloodied every day when stealing a mother’s offspring?  Plus, all that extra weight and bulk just takes more feed to keep healthy.  Thus, the advent of the White Leghorns (which look nothing at all like Foghorn Leghorn, unless Ol’ Foghorn were to become anorexic and twitchy), hens that are ADVERTISED as “Non-Setters”; in effect, bad mothers who drop an egg every single day, go on about their business and never look back.

The average dual purpose laying hen will lay an egg every day or so, for about 2 years.  At that point, their production drops off and a lot of folks recommend making them all into stew and buying a fresh team.

But here’s the thing:

At the end of that 2 years, my average broodiness-prone hen will have given me at LEAST two dozen more chickens, AND at LEAST 350 eggs. If I purchase my little chicks at $2 each, and eggs sell for $2 per dozen, that hen has provided me with over $100, while costing me… chicken feed; and precious little of that considering that my personal flock free ranges.  I do offer up hen scratch once a day but it’s mostly ignored by them in favor of bugs, weeds, and other stuff chickens were made to eat, my hens just retire here.  They’ve earned it.

And if your flock is constantly being renewed from within, there won’t BE a time when you have all Old Biddies.

Renewing the Flock the Easiest Way = Raising Chickens from Scratch

Gather your initial flock.  Some people prefer to get all one breed of chicken, and some folks like a feathery-confetti-look out in their yard.  We have a yard full of confetti chickens, and each subsequent generation becomes more and more colorful.  My initial chick order was like Saturday morning at Dunkin’ Donuts.  Over the phone I placed my minimum order of 25 chicks: “I’ll take three of these, two of those, four of this other kind, and a little cream-filled one.”  Just kidding.  You can only find cream-filled chicks at Easter time, and those are wrapped in colorful foil.  I found out from that first order which breeds work in our situation (free-ranging = attrition by coyote unless the birds are dark-colored and very quick-footed), and which ones… weren’t.

My second order was something called the Ornamental Layer Collection, and I split the box of 25 chicks with a friend of mine.  Among my dozen, I received 2 Araucanas and an Egyptian Fayouma.  These two breeds are not supposed to go broody, and the Araucanas haven’t, but we’ve forgiven them since they lay gorgeous greenish-blue eggs.  One day the little Fayouma disappeared, and I feared she’d been served up for coyote breakfast.  I was surprised since she was the first to alarm when there were hungry predators about.  I was even more surprised when she showed up one fine morning three weeks later with three chicklets behind her.  Exceptions to the rule—I love ‘em.

For hens to lay eggs, you don’t need a rooster.

For hens to lay eggs that turn into more chickens, you do.

A good rooster is worth his weight in corn.  He’ll guard his hens, protect the chicks and eggs, and escort everyone back into the coop at night.  The trick is to find one that will do all the above without viewing you (or your children) as the enemy.  So far, my best rooster has been my Barred Rock/Hampshire Red, and my worst was a little Frizzle Bantam.  Even within breeds, this will vary, as my first roo was a Light Brahma purchased because they were reported to be calm and gentle.

He made a delicious soup.

Once hens and rooster are in place, it’s just a matter of time before you have the magic of more chickens.

I collect eggs every day at about lunchtime.  I know all the movies show hens laying a nice warm egg at the crack of dawn, but mine are slothful.  After sleeping in, rustling up a hearty breakfast and a few cups of coffee, they think about maybe laying an egg before lunchtime and Oprah.

When I first started with chickens, I built a beautiful bank of nesting boxes inside the coop.  The chickens loved them.  They slept in them.  They scratched bugs out of them.  They pooped on and in them.  Never once did they lay an egg in them.  Not once.  They chose their own places to lay their eggs, and at any given time there are two or three spots in which all the hens will lay.  Periodically, apparently according to some Secret Chicken Calendar, the hens will shift their laying spots, and it’s like Easter for a few days till I figure it out.

When a hen goes broody, she will sometimes do like my little Fayouma and disappear.  Most of the time she’ll just stop leaving one of the laying spots once the eggs are laid there.  And at that point, I leave her alone.

Once or twice a day, a setting hen will leave the nest for a very short time—just long enough to get a drink of water, something to eat, and to use the Little Hen’s Room.  She will never leave the eggs long enough for them to cool off, though, so when I’m egg gathering and come across a hen-free nest with WARM eggs in it, I leave them alone and just check back later to make sure she returns.

I’ve heard that chickens will sometimes break each other’s eggs or kill each other’s chicks.  I’ve never had this happen and I think free-ranging has a lot to do with this.  There’s not the territory stress related to being confined when you have the entire world as your hen house.  Of course, my hens have the stress of living next to coyote-infested woods, but life is full of trade-offs…

I have 2 pairs of hens who actually tag-team a nest.  One pair consists of a Black Australorp and a Rhode Island Red, and the other pair is a Black Australorp and a Silky Bantam. They set right up against each other and take their breaks at different times. When the chicks hatch, they split them up pretty evenly to watch and raise.

A word about Silky Bantams: they’re hysterical looking.  They appear hairy rather than feathered, they have feathers on their legs and a pincushion-ish topknot of feathers on their heads.  They always seem confused, startled, annoyed, or an amazing combination of all three simultaneously.  They are funny little chickens that lay funny little eggs.

As if that all weren’t enough to justify a few running around the farm, they are the world’s best setters of ANY eggs, not just their own or those of other chickens.  I know of silkies that have hatched and raised ducklings, turkeys, and guinea hens.

Hens will lay an egg every day or so, but will not start setting till they deem their nest full enough.  For some, that’s two eggs.  For others, over twenty.  Rarely will all the eggs hatch from a very large nest; about half is all you should expect.  So hatch day brings ALL the babies into the world at once.  When everyone has been hatched and led off into the world, I’ll don latex gloves and gingerly extract all the “leftover” eggs.  After three weeks of being kept warm, there will be a few real stinkers, and I’ve even had one explode as I placed it into the disposal sack, so be vewwwwwy, vewwwwwy careful when you attempt this at home.

Once the chicklets have arrived, the only thing you have to do for them is to make sure there is a water source low and shallow enough for the chicks to reach without drowning.  Mama Hen will teach them how and what to eat, where and when to sleep, and will protect them with every inch of her being till they are about 6-8 weeks old, when she’ll proclaim them Grown Up, and move on to laying another clutch.

For the first few clutches hatched here on the farm, I’d follow them around and make sure mama hen saw me pour out some special baby chicken food (that awful looking gray stuff) for her babies.  Finally, one hen watched me pour it out, gave me that one-eyed look of disdain only a chicken can manage, and scratched up a huge juicy grub for her babies.  With a final dismissive flick of her tail, she stalked away with her offspring in tow.  Thereafter, I’ve only used the special baby chicken food (that awful looking gray stuff) for those replacement chickens who come to the farm through the…………..

There’s really nothing hard about hatching chicks via incubation.  If you can follow an average cooking recipe, you can run an incubator.  The principles are the same—good ingredients, proper equipment, attention to directions, and the correct cooking temperature.

Incubators come in all shapes and sizes—from a tiny pod for 3 eggs, to a behemoth capable of hatching out hundreds at once.  For the average family farm wishing to hatch out a few batches of eggs per year, the Styrofoam variety available at the local Tractor Supply or Farm and Fleet is more than sufficient.  I’ve used the kind with a fan, and without, and can’t really say I’ve noticed a difference in hatch rate.  I turn the eggs by hand, not by automatic turner.  I believe in the tenet that the fewer moving parts a thing has, the more difficult it is for me to break it.

Your ingredients, of course, are the eggs themselves.  Clean (but not washed) eggs can be saved for up to a week at room temperature pointy end down in an egg carton.  This should give you time to amass the embryos of your future flock.  Once you have enough eggs, set up your incubator according to directions.

It should sit in a quiet place: somewhere it’s not likely to be jostled, bumped, or subjected to strong drafts either hot or cold.  Add water to the proper receptacles. Turn it on and give it overnight to make sure it’s holding the proper temperature.  The ideal temperature for chickens is right at 100F.  Once the incubator is holding steady at 100F, it’s time to add your eggs.

As you lay the eggs in the incubator, take a crayon and mark an X on one side.  Lay all the eggs X-up.  You’ll need to turn the eggs at least three times a day to keep the embryos from adhering to one side of the shell. Studies have shown that a hen will turn her eggs every HOUR, but clearly the hens don’t have laundry, cooking, or outside employment to take up their spare time, so my eggs make do with the thrice daily routine. When turning the eggs, turn OVER the ends, not just flipping from side to side.

That’s it.  Make sure the temperature stays correct, the water doesn’t dry up, and the pre-chickens get turned three times a day.

For 18 days.

The morning of the 19th day, fill ALL the water receptacles, remove both stoppers from the lid, and turn those babies one last time.  From here on, all you do is peer through the windows and make sure the temperature stays at 100F; baby chicks make a lot of heat getting ready to hatch.

I love hatch day.

I hate hatch day.

Hatching is hard work, and it’s supposed to be.  Don’t give in to the urge to help out…  It’ll end up badly… Trust me.

Don’t remove the chicks till they are fully dry, no matter how pitiful they sound and no matter how much they are rolling their un-hatched siblings around the incubator—the movement and sound of the other chicks actually encourages those still inside to get a wiggle on and get hatching.

My least stressful hatch day so far was this most recent.  I actually timed incubation so that the last turning coincided with our leaving town for a few days—the only thing my pet sitter had to do was check the temperature.

On day 21 we arrived home mid-evening.  I went straight to the incubator and lifted the lid to have 19 beautiful dry little chicks POUR over the sides.  What a welcome home!

Newly hatched incubator chicks need to be treated the same as newly arrived hatchery chicks (since they’re basically the same critter—without the airplane ride).  Once dry, they need a warm, Not Hot, place to live. Unless you’re hatching in the middle of winter (and why would you?), actual room temperature should be fine as long as there are no drafts. Our non-air-conditioned house stays right around 80 in the summertime, which is perfect for chicks.  Heat lamps are WAY too hot for my peace of mind—they are a fire hazard and it’s very easy to overheat chicks, which will kill them every bit as quickly as chilling.  If there’s a true need for auxiliary heat, please use a regular light bulb.

Make sure you dip each chick’s beak into the water and have it watch you ‘peck” at the food with your finger.  Free feed them the Special Baby Chicken food (that awful looking gray stuff) and all the fresh water they want for the first week or so, then start adding scraps/scratch a little bit at a time.

Congratulations!  You’ve just hatched out your very own next generation of poultry.

The post Raising Chickens… From Scratch appeared first on Homestead.org.

My friend had purchased colored Easter chicks for her daughters and had assumed that I would be thrilled to take them after Easter.  Why not?  We DO live in the country.

Thirteen brightly colored chicklets arrived at our place in a large cage.  They were cute, they were fluffy, they were hungry.  They made endearing little noises when we fed them.  We loved our chickens…

Before long, they had molted out of their Easter feathers and looked like real chickens.  They were turned loose to free-range and be the cherry on our country yard sundae.

The coyotes in the woods also loved our chicks.  In no time we were down to 8.  Our only Rhode Island Red in the bunch wandered into the dog pen and we were down to 7.  One started to terrorize the cats and went to live with a friend.  One chased our little boy and went to live with a neighbor.   Five chickens—4 White Leghorn roosters and (we thought) a big Barred Rock hen.

The Barred Rock foraged into the goat pen and the Great Pyrenees decided she needed a bath.  By the time I got out there she was gasping and dripping with dog drool.  I turned her back into the yard, and she didn’t join up with the other chickens right away, she just stalked up and down, mumbling chicken curses.  From that point on, she couldn’t/wouldn’t roost up in the tree with the others, but chose a low spot right next to the goat pen (go figure) to sleep in.  We rested a piece of sheet metal against the fence to make a chicken-tent.

About that time they entered poultry puberty.  The roosters crowed roughly every 5 minutes all day long and most of the night.  They started making little fighting runs at each other and I worried that they would kill each other.  That would be bad, because we loved our chickens.

I needn’t have worried.  Before too long they stopped quarreling amongst themselves and turned all their energy on a common enemy—me, and by association, my son.

They were a Chicken Gang.  All they needed were little leather jackets, sunglasses, and packs of Camels (filter-less of course) rolled up into their wings.  They’d stand at the edge of the woods, daring the coyotes to come out.

They cruised the neighborhood, lookin’ for trouble, mean and restless.   I now know what the Raptors in the Jurassic Park movies are based on—roosters.  They have the same moves, calls, and hunting tactics.  They would sneak up behind me to attack, barking strategy to each other.  If I turned around, they’d freeze and look off into the distance, casually.

I started carrying a broom.

They recognized my car and would come running at the sound of it.

I tucked the broom under the car seat.

They would come onto the porch and stare at me through the glass door, growling.

I was beginning to dislike our chickens.

At first, my son just carried a big stick when he played outside.  Since the roosters outnumbered him, after a while he only went out to play after they roosted in the evening.  He was becoming pale and a little twitchy.

Invitations to our house became BYOB: Bring Your Own Broom.

It was time for the roosters to go.

We tried to catch them, but they were fast as greased lightning, very wary, and practiced survivors, being the ones who outlived coyote-fest.

I ran an ad in the Thrifty Nickel that read: “Free Roosters. White Leghorns, 7 months old. Free Range. Mean as Snakes. You Catch.”

The first 6 calls I got were not for the chickens, but for the stove we were giving away (read the ad again).  The 2 good ol’ boys who attempted catching the roosters went away empty-handed, the taunting of the roosters ringing in their ears.

Nabbing them while they were sleeping was difficult since they roosted way out on the limb of an oak tree 20 feet in the air.

I hated our chickens.

I began trying to run them down with the car as I drove into the yard.  I could SEE them going under the car, but they always exploded out from behind, missing tail feathers, and screaming poultry death threats.

One of them actually leaped up onto the hood of the car, glared at me through the windshield, and crowed defiantly.

I loathed our chickens.

At long last, the son of a friend came after dark, perched atop the tallest stepladder we had, and plucked them neatly from the oak tree.

The roosters were back in the cage they had first come in.  With the Fearsome Foursome behind bars, our “hen” started crowing.  Lacy was really Larry.  He has been warned that he’s ridiculously easy to catch, living in a tent and all, so he’d better behave or he will suffer the same fate.

Like the idiot I am, now I pitied the chickens.

What to do with them?

The obvious answer, kill them and eat them, is still beyond my ability.  I KNOW they are just chickens, and we eat chicken all the time.  I KNOW given weapons, opposable thumbs, and a nice gas grill, they would have no problem killing and eating us.  I just couldn’t do it.  Still working on that part of farming…

We couldn’t give them away to lay siege to someone else’s yard.

We toyed with the idea of driving far away, finding a nice wild wooded spot, and setting them free.  My husband even started singing “Bock, Bock, Bock, Born Free…”, but we were advised that they would have a bad environmental impact on the wilderness.

Finally, they went into the stewpot at a friend’s father-in-law’s house, an ignoble ending to what could have been a glorious life.

Poor chickens.

I didn’t mind the constant crowing, the massive amounts of poop EVERYWHERE, the feathers.  If they just hadn’t been aggressive, they could’ve lived long and free for all of their chicken days.

Stupid chickens.

I feel sad, because, after all… we loved our chickens.

Raising Animals That May Try to Eat You: A Pastured Pigs Experience

The post Easter Chicks Gone Bad: The Unexpected Menace appeared first on Homestead.org.

In this book, Making Your Small Farm Profitable, Ron takes us through 25 guiding principles for evaluating not only your land, but also your personality traits and those of your family, your local market, and being your own public relations advocate… something he feels is vital to the success of your farm.

When so much of small farming is left to the whims of nature and other seemingly random acts of divine intervention, having something in print and in front of you that is solid and orderly is comforting, soothing and panic-quenching.

Each step building on the last, Ron Macher presents each principle and fills out each one with facts and figures, then has the reader honestly apply them to their own situation. There are a lot of helpful tables and comparisons to help determine just how much (if any) heavy equipment and machinery your farm will need,  what kind of livestock will be the most cost-effective to get from birth (or purchase) to market, and different marketing techniques according to your proximity to urban centers.

Although sometimes he comes across as being too serious, it’s apparent that Ron takes survival of each and every family farm very seriously, and important enough to pay attention to every little detail. As he states at the end of the book:

“Small farms hold the key to reconnect people with the land and the food they must have to sustain life. Small farms are an ongoing process of discovery about life and people. Small farms are the wave of the future, leading to a better world.”

As homesteaders, it’s something we believe as well.

Mortgage Free! Radical Strategies for Home Ownership By Rob Roy

The post Making Your Small Farm Profitable By Ron Macher, Review appeared first on Homestead.org.

For a while now, I’ve been leery of the way we “civilized folk” take care of our body waste.  While no person in their right mind would purposely and willfully defecate into drinking water, that’s just what we do, collectively about a gabazillion times a day.

Joseph Jenkins takes us through the history, mishaps, and misinformation surrounding this basic function of the human animal, and gives us a truly sensible and personally studied alternative to flushing it away downstream.

Eminently understandable, highly illustrated, at times almost TOO technical, and even touting little mascot “Tommy Turd” giving little helpful hints, this is a fun read in OR out of the bathroom.

But at the core of the matter is a tenet that is near and dear to homesteaders – care of and for the planet and the tiny speck of it we each call “home”.

An excerpt:

“The people who care enough about the earth to recycle their personal by-products do so as an exercise in humility, not because they’re going to get rich and famous for it.  That makes them better people.  Some people go to church on Sunday, others make compost.  Still others do both.  Others go to church on Sunday, then throw all their garbage out into the environment.  The exercising of the human spirit can take many forms, and the simple act of cleaning up after oneself is one of them.  The careless dumping of waste out into the world is a self-centered act of arrogance – or ignorance.”

This book provides the nuts and bolts knowledge to carry out the most basic and important recycling project any of us could take on.

Buy The Humanure Handbook on Amazon.

Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front by Sharon Astyk Review

The post The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure By Joseph Jenkins appeared first on Homestead.org.

We have a house we are selling.

Our next step is to move all our stuff and us over TO the land and build our home.

Although we love to camp, and in recent history here in Texas, we could lay out all of our stuff in the naked meadow after June 1st without fear of a raindrop touching it before October, some sort of shelter seems prudent.

*This article is not about LIVING in a Ger (yurt), but about the choosing, research and shopping end of the process. The assemblage and living part is another story…

Unless you have found a place with a home already on it (my last two homesteads have been one of these), or have a lot of money lying idle and can afford to build your new house while living in your old house (I’ve heard some people can actually do this, although no one in my social circle can claim such high finance), you’ll be faced with the dilemma of where to live in the “between time”.

Mainstream Americans put most of their stuff in storage and either rent a place for the 6-8 months it takes for their builder to put up their house, or buy a little mobile home and set it out yonder while the builder does his thing then have it hauled off when they are done. A few daring folks will live in a camper, and a few will move in with relatives.

None of these options are open to us because:

No one in their right mind would rent to someone with over 100 critters

Mobile homes come equipped with things like appliances and kitchen counters—things we are bringing with us and it would be redundant to put ours in storage while paying for theirs

We don’t have access to a camper, plus, with our health issues and the time it will take to build our permanent house, more room and comfort will be necessary to keep a semblance of sanity

We really want to maintain good relations with our relations. This requires a respectful distance at all times.

And our plans are to build our permanent house. Not “hire a builder, choose a plan and pick out colors and faucets” kind of building. More of a “design it out on graph paper, accumulate the supplies, learn and assemble as we go” sort of building. So our timeline is a little different. My conservative estimate is five years from start to finish, paying as we go. Granted, life may get in the way of this plan and cause it to be amended, but that’s the plan today, and we’re sticking to it.

After hearing “So what’re ya’ll gonna do? Live in a tent?” for the thousandth time from friends and acquaintances, Ward looked at me and said, “You know, I’ve always thought yurts were neat”.

Thus began “YurtQuest”.

How We Began Buying a Yurt

(Adding being very aware that we are, in fact, sitting front row/center of Tornado Alley, we will not be moving into our yurt without first having in place a storm shelter. We may be eccentric, but we ain’t crazy)

Yurts are the traditional homes of nomadic tribes who make their livelihood following their flocks across a forbidding landscape. A yurt is designed to be a permanent, movable home, which only sounds contradictory. The original yurts (Mongolian Gers) are assembled from local materials (saplings, cotton cloth and lots and lots of felted wool) and have been fine-tuned over the last 3,000 years or so to be cool in the hot summer sun, warm in the frigid winters, as well as stay upright and strong through the flat line winds coming from the steppes.

Here in the US, yurts have been adjusted, updated and built large scale by three companies: Pacific Yurts, Ranier, and Colorado Yurts.

All three come recommended by actual American yurt-dwellers as having quality products and very good, to excellent, customer service.

After looking at all three sites, and using the handy (and fun) price quote estimators, I called both Ranier and Pacific, whose friendly sales staff sent out informative packets. The packet from Pacific was more in-depth and flashy, so being a creature drawn to such things, and the fact that their yurts priced out as less expensive, I’ve been working with and talking to Scott at Pacific to get the Yurt of Our Dreams.

The yurts built by one of the above companies are sleek, clean-lined, and beautiful in simplicity—unlikely, yet wonderful, crosses of “Girl Scout Sleepover Camp Platform Tent” and “Yuppie Renovated Warehouse on the River Loft”. They use state of the art materials to ensure a non-leaking, comfortable, very livable space that is as strong as something made mainly of cloth can be.

I was happy. I had a plan. I knew what I was doing.

Then my friend Dawn skipped in and ruined it all.

It came as an innocent looking email titled, “Look at THESE”.

And my world tilted flat off of its orbit.

Gers. Authentic Mongolian Gers made by Authentic Mongolians. And importable to the US.

Where the U.S. Yurt is sleek, a Mongolian Ger is touchable—like a teddy bear. They are decorated outside by embroidery around the doorway and inside by each…and… every… rafter being painted with elaborate designs and set off by carvings which match the carvings on the door and toono (circular opening at the top of the roof). The wood is painted in bright colors, which is appealing to me. The outer cloth, inner cloth and felting are really cloth and felt, which is appealing to me. The fact that the Mongolian Ger—made and painted to order in the same way they’ve been made for thousands of years is CHEAPER even shipped from the other side of the planet than the ones made in a factory in Oregon is WILDLY appealing to me.

So I contacted three companies selling “Authentic Mongolian Ger” and got a response from one of them. Heloise Rey is very helpful and patient, sending a lot of pictures and answering all my questions to the best of her abilities.

I also joined a Yahoo group, and was instantly embroiled in the (previously unknown to me) vicious war between ‘”Traditional” and “modern” yurt/ger owners.

Traditional ger enthusiasts say that the U.S. made yurts are flimsy, plastic mutations of a time tested and loved building form. They say if a yurt is not surrounded by felt, it’s not a yurt—it’s a tent. And there’s nothing wrong with a tent—just don’t call it a yurt. They say that if a yurt is built with solid walls and windows, it’s not a yurt—it’s a round house. And there’s nothing wrong with a round house—just don’t call it a yurt. A traditional ger’s lattice is it’s bones, and the felt is it’s muscle— stabilizing and holding the ger intact in wind storms so they don’t need “snow and wind kit” add-ons like the modern ones. A traditional ger stands on the ground—solid earth beneath it (covered with rugs), natural wood and wool on the sides and the sky open through the toono. One door. No windows (although the Mongolian companies will add them to appeal to the American market). Traditionally, air is circulated by simply rolling up part of the side, causing the cooler air on the ground to ooze in and rise up and out the toono as it gets warmer. The door is solid wood, sometimes bracketed by narrow windows; decoration and carvings showing the status of its occupants. Inside, the placement of furniture and living areas are strictly adhered to from ger to ger. This ger is made to be taken down in a few hours’ time, strapped to the back of a yak, and re-built in the same amount of time at the new grazing grounds.

Modern yurt enthusiasts say that the traditional gers are poorly made imports and fall apart in our climate. They say that the felt gets moldy and attracts bugs and mice. They extol the strength of their airline cable tie-downs, beauty of having windows all around, ease of care of the waterproof poly/vinyl exterior, and snug their yurts down on wooden platforms that are everything from a deck a foot above ground, to way high up in a tree—but they MUST be placed on a deck. They can be simple one-room shelters or homes with electric/plumbing, partition walls and (in the bigger ones) loft living areas. With the wind and snow kits attached, they are as stable in high winds as a lot of brand new mobile homes (rated for up to 90mph). The modern yurt can be taken down at the end of summer/hunting season in a few hours time, strapped to the luggage rack of your minivan, and stored in the garage till next year OR lived in full time—in my cyber-wanderings, the longest yurt dweller I’ve come across has been living in her Pacific yurt with her family in Minnesota quite comfortably for seven years. In the US made yurts, insulation is provided by a “reflective medium” that looks like bubble wrap coated with tin foil. Although the manufacturers claim that it works by reflecting the heat OUT in the summer and IN in the winter, the real life yurt dwellers have given mixed reviews. I’ve looked at alternatives to the bubble-stuff, from natural fiber insulation sheets made of recycled cotton/denim to recycled plastic heat-bonded to Styrofoam on rolls, and heard of folks using everything from straw stuffed in-between layers to garage sale blankets sewn to the sides.

Then there’s a whole ‘NUTHER faction who builds their own…

It boggles the mind.

With my eyes and brain slightly crossed, I’ve attempted to figure out not what’s “right”, but what’s right for my family in my climate and in my circumstances.

To their credit, not a single resource person on either side of the Yurt Debate has been outright demeaning to the other side. They just think their side is better, and have told me why, calmly and rationally. It’s been great fun and wonderfully educational to talk to people from Oregon to Mongolia to New York City to Holland to Spain, and I’ll happily share what I’ve found out.

Although Mongolia can get very hot, very cold and very windy, it’s very dry (it’s in the Gobi desert—guess I slept through that class…), and the materials used to make the traditional gers are not grown, or made in, or made FOR a damp environment. The other side of the planet is very far away, and your average Mongolian cannot comprehend the humidity of East Texas, just as I did not realize that Mongolia was arid. As mentioned before, Heloise in Mongolia did answer my questions, but admitted while doing so that these answers were to the best of HER knowledge, not necessarily what WOULD happen when the ger was assembled and exposed to this climate. What I’ve gathered is that when the imported ger meets the southern American humidity, the glue has issues, the paint has issues, the felt has issues, and the material has issues. This does not mean they are cheap imports, it means they are built for, and in, a different environment.

Now, there are people in Europe (and if you join the yurt Yahoo group, you will meet them), who are making “traditional Mongolian ger” using the measurements and structure of Mongolian gers but with materials that will hold up to a more humid environment. But again, there’s still a big ol’ pond between Europe and here, and the gentleman I talked to in Holland (Froit—nice man, very helpful and patient) couldn’t comprehend WHY I need my ger to be tight sealed on the bottom. I don’t mind it being on the ground, but crawlie things shouldn’t be able to get in. He suggested we get a cat. Apparently, things like poisonous spiders, scorpions, and snakes (not to mention skeeters as big as a fry pan) are not a problem in Holland. He also stressed that a ger needs to (as in MUST) be moved at least every six months for its health. And the wait time on one of these “improved traditional European gers” is right at or just over six months.

IF we were not needing this structure to sit securely in place for at least five years, and IF we didn’t have health and comfort requirements to consider, we’d happily wait for a traditional ger. In fact, at some point in the future, I’d love to get a small one to be a little retreat we would move around from one favorite spot to another—from the top of the hill, to the creek bank, to the back high corner overlooking the marsh, etc. depending on the season.

But that’s not what we need right now.

Which brings us right back into the lap of Scott at Pacific Yurts, who did not hold my brief fling with the Mongolian ger against me. In fact, he helpfully admitted that if we wanted to stencil decorations over the doors/windows, we could use latex house paint without compromising the integrity of the waterproofing. And that the wooden parts come oiled, not varnished, and would hold any oil-based decorative painted designs we might want to add to them. Now if I could only get him to carve a dragon into the front door….

The post Gotta Getta Ger: Buying a Yurt for the Homestead appeared first on Homestead.org.

Dogs have been the farmer’s companions ever since the first dogs figured out that if they helped the farmer with the livestock instead of eating the livestock, the farmer was less likely to supplement his own diet with canine cutlets.  Dogs have worn many hats on the farm and still do.  Since dogs come in many sizes and forms, they are a natural for specialization.

Your first inclination when thinking of a farm dog is probably Lassie.

Have a seat.

AKC Registered Rough Collie Lassie is a myth.  So mythical in fact that the dog actor playing Lassie wasn’t even female. Lassie was always played by male collies.  (Good thing they have long hair, huh?)

Now, I have nothing against collies.  I love collies.  I’ve had collies and you will not find a sweeter, better-natured dog around.  But your general run-of-the-mill purebred collie of today will have some issues.  Collies are known for eye problems.  Seems the breeders liked the look of the almond-shaped eye better than the nice round eye that can actually be seen out of and have bred collies with eyes that are literally suffocated for lack of air.  A sleek narrow head was also found to be more attractive so they bred for that over a nice round skull.  Now there’s no room for a brain.  Clearly, a dog who cannot see properly and has a squished in brain is not going to be a very good working dog.  If you are itching for a good old-fashioned ‘farm collie’ there really is such a thing.  They don’t look a lot like Lassie, but then, Timmy’s yard did not look like a farmyard either.

Of course, there’s the OTHER collie: the Border Collie, and they are a completely different animal. Imagine Lassie on speed.

If you have a very busy farm with a lot of stuff that needs tending, herding, sorting, worrying, then a Border Collie is perfect.  Border Collies are arguably smarter than a lot of people and have a whole lot more stamina.  Where Border Collies (and their families) get into trouble is when the dog does not have ENOUGH to do.  Border Collies need to work and if you do not give them a job, they will make one up.  Tearing up an entire household worth of linoleum is a short afternoon’s work for a B.C.  Escaping from the yard just in case the neighbor has something to do takes about a split second if you have an average fence.  If your fence is fashioned after the one at the maximum security prison set into 3 feet of cement, it will take an entire second.

On a farm with plenty of work to do, a Border Collie can be an invaluable companion—sharp, quick, always ready for any adventure you may have to go on no matter the weather—just the chance to be DOING something with you will be met with an exuberance that’s rarely found for something short of winning the lottery.  The big one.

Farms harbor vermin.  It’s a fact. You can deny it, you can ignore it, but they are still there—mice and rats will be wherever there is a food source and that means your farm. Terriers have been bred to dig out vermin—the word “terrier” comes from the Latin word “terra’ or earth, so they are literally dogs bred to “go to earth”.  The most commonly known terrier right now is the Jack Russell Terrier, thanks to the TV show Frasier and Eddie, their dog.  Today’s terrier will kill mice and rats.  Unfortunately, like the Collies, the terriers of today are usually so far away from being working dogs, that they are indiscriminate in their prey and will seriously deplete your flock of chickens as quickly as your mice.

Back in high school, I worked on a poultry farm where the house pet dog was a Cairn Terrier.  Like Toto in The Wizard of Oz.  Now, if you recall, Toto was a farm dog and chickens were blowing by during the tornado that he had not killed.  The terrier on the poultry farm, however, was kept firmly chained when outside because if loose, he had been timed at killing a chicken EVERY 30 SECONDS till caught.  My own flock of hens was recently diminished by the Jack Russell Terrier down the street, and the neighbor gave up on chickens because her rat terrier made short work of them.

For a large terrier, an Airedale is a good choice.  When used as working farm dogs they are more for guarding and pulling carts, but individuals can be gifted as herders and hunting dogs as well.  They are usually good babysitters and are strikingly handsome.

Be very careful with small terriers.  I currently have a crossbred terrier who is wonderful at not killing chickens.  She does not kill mice either.  She will absolutely tear up a rogue cookie, however.  In fact, my best mouser, up to and including any cats I’ve had is my four-pound toy poodle.  Go figure.

There are a lot of other “specialty” dogs who fit in on the farm—previously we discussed the Livestock Guardian Dogs in an article devoted just to them.

The hunting dogs: pointers, hounds, spaniels, and retrievers are all good choices for farms where hunting is part of the routine.

Every once in a while you will find, by accident, a dog who is completely suited for a job on your farm—my four-pound poodle is a good example.

And of course, there’s nothing quite like a good mutt.  Employing a mixed-breed dog can be a very good thing.  They are usually much more inexpensive as far the initial outlay for purchase.  There are people who believe that the mixed breeds possess ‘hybrid vigor’ making them less prone to health problems.  This is not true.  I’ve seen just as many mixes with hip dysplasia and skin conditions as purebreds.  The best reason for getting a mutt is that they usually really need the home, and although I’m not one for anthropomorphism, I truly think rescue dogs tend to try a little harder to be Good Dogs than their counterparts who were born into good situations.

Even with the best of intentions, common sense must play a factor in choosing your mixed breed. Collie/Shepherd/Retriever crosses are a good bet.  Chow/Pit/Rott crosses may not be.  Individual dogs will be as varied in temperament as in looks, so blanket assumptions should just be guidelines, not set in stone rules.

Just like everything else on the farm, your dog will need regular maintenance and upkeep.  A good quality dry dog food should be given twice daily—especially with the larger breeds, multiple small meals lessen the possibility of gastric torsion (usually fatal, always expensive), and in all breeds, food is just assimilated better if not given in one big meal.  Regular worming and vaccination schedules should be adhered to according to your local laws and climate.  External parasites need to be kept to a minimum.  Expect yearly upkeep expenses on your dog (not counting food and squeaky toys) to be several hundred dollars.

A good dog is as valuable an asset as anything else on your homestead, with the added benefit of also being your friend.

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