time to take stock of our project

The growing season is over and it is time to take stock of our project, and of us.

Although we are not as close as we would like to be to our original goal of providing most of our foodstuff’s from the farm, in retrospect, the education we gained through trial and error was more than worth the price of the effort.

Herewith (and in no particular order) are some of the important points we would like to share with others:

• It takes a MUCH bigger garden than we had expected to furnish a family of four with 80% of the vegetables they would normally consume in a year. Although it seems like simple math, i.e. if your family consumes 2 heads of broccoli each week you need to harvest 104 heads, and plant somewhat more for insect damage and loss. Well, 104 harvested heads of broccoli takes up a lot of space, and requires a great deal of weeding, watering, and manuring of the soil (to be self sufficient really means no commercial fertilizer). Now do the same exercise with tomatoes, spinach, cucumbers, carrots, beats, radishes, cabbage, etc… and this does not include the much bigger ground area needed for your “calorie crops” corn, potatoes, and wheat. We grew enough vegetables to feed us for just over 2 months – not exactly self-sufficient. We are expanding the size of the garden and are leaving 2 horses in the area with hay bales to feed on (they can dung up an acre pretty well over the winter, but will need to be removed around the first of March to allow time for their manure to compost in early spring before we turn it under).

• Speaking of soil, you can screw up just about everything else, and if you have composted and properly amended your soil you will still do well – but if you plant, water, weed, double dig, etc… perfectly, and you don’t fertilize your garden’s soil, your yields won’t be worth a darn. The problem is that it can take several years to get a garden's soil to the point of top production.

• Fruit trees take several years to produce, so unless you buy a place with mature fruit trees… it will be a while before you are self-sufficient in this regard.

• Self-sufficiency also means growing your livestock’s feed. This is relatively easy for cattle and goats – they are quite happy with hay and grass – but it means you need enough land to grow it. We had too many horses and could not support them, so we had to cut back, and besides, our horse are for pleasure - they don't help us to be self-sufficient at all as they ae not draft animals. Chickens will provide more than half their own feed in the warmer months if allowed to free range. The problem is finding their eggs becomes a Ground Hog’s Day Easter egg hunt every day. We compromised, and built a moveable chicken coop that I can drag over new pasture every day (more like twice per day) and this resulted in them getting a 1/4 of their feed on their own and ¾ from commercial feed. Next year we hope to grow enough field corn and wheat on the property to care for 50 chickens. Each chicken will need 100 lbs. of food per year (and will give you 50 pounds of eggs); I expect them to forrage for ¼ of that, so we will need to grow 3,750 pounds of corn and wheat. That is one full acre of corn at 70 bushels per acre (a bushel = 56 pounds) or some combination of wheat and corn. Or I can spend $550 on feed, which sort of defeats the purpose. If you don’t eat your chickens (we have not) a family of 4 only needs 15 or so laying hens to keep you in eggs. Or I can build them a one-acre chicken run and let them forage as much as possible… I’ll let you know.

• It is relatively easy to produce all of the eggs and milk a family of 4 will need. 2 dairy goats and 15 laying hens should do it (Goats only give milk for 9 or so months per year), and you will never have to run to the store for milk and eggs (or bread, if you grow wheat and have a grinder). If you want to grow your own meat you will need more or different animals depending on your preferences.
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• You need water on your property. Either you have it, or you have to dig a pond. No water, no animals. (A well works, too, but is a lot less convenient. A rain water catchement system works if you live in an area with sufficient rainfall.)

• Food preservation is as important as food production. It is easy to keep the fridge full at the end of the growing season. February and March are another story. Some things are easy and safe to can - like tomatoes. I do not yet feel comfortable canning meats. We have not made cheese yet, but will begin doing so this spring after our goats have fresshened (gave birth).

• Truly self-sufficient means animal power traction, not my Ford 4000 diesel tractor. I have met several folks who actually farm using draft horses, and the Amish and Menonites in the area ONLY farm with animal power (fascinating folks, I bought our tack from them). That is next year's project.

• One needs to be in good physical shape to be self-sufficient. The more so the better. Animals don’t always cooperate, round hay bales weigh over 1000 lbs. and do not walk out into the pasture for you…

• While doing this, I worked my day job from the farmhouse as much as possible. Not needing to commute, not commuting to restaurants (and waiting to be seated, and waiting to be served, and waiting for the check, and waiting for the valet… these things we think of as normal or convenient… if they were ever subjected to an impartial time/motion study would not make a great deal of sense) nor go grocery shopping more than once per week left us with a great deal of time on our hands (even though we had an infant to care for). At first we were somewhat lost, and then we polished off several good books, practiced our musical instruments, learned how to bake, I learned to draw (a little, anyway), and I learned about gardening, and carpentry, and animal husbandry, etc… it was delightful - once we got over the “I am bored I need to be entertained now so I will turn on the TV” mentality. It is hard to comprehend how much time commuting, dropping off dry cleaning, fueling your car; etc… takes up – until you are no longer doing it.

• Did we feel isolated? Sometimes (It is a big change from living in downtown Boca Raton, FL), but as time went on we felt less and less so, to the point that we did not really relish leaving the farm after the summer was over. Still, one had better have an ability to entertain oneself, and an ability to gather interests, or I would imagine a less satisfying outcome. Still, we have not “over wintered” at the farm yet, and I would imagine that that would be the true test. Still, we are only 35 minutes from a major American city if we were jonesing for some sushi.

• We derived a great deal of satisfaction from little things; like my first pot of homemade spaghetti sauce with 100% of the ingredients coming from the garden, collecting seeds for next years garden, repairing the barn, unloading the hay into the loft, raising day old chicks into laying hens, and watching our animals give birth and raise their young. Cool as can be.

So next year we need to scale the garden up, build a rainwater catchments system for the garden and the livestock, and maybe for ourselves, and try using animal power instead of a diesel powered tractor.

Cya

Almostselfsufficient (at) yahoo.com

Time

It has been just over 1 year since we bought the ranch/farm, and we are more than halfway through our second growing season. What I am most impressed with, if I can use the phrase correctly, is how much time it takes to get significant food production on a small holding.

It takes several years to amend and compost a vegitable garden, which in our case is about 100' x 100' (does not include the corn, wheat, and potato plots - these require MUCH more ground). Give this some thought: to make a 10,000 sqft garden plot fertile takes about 4 inches of composted manure plus another inch or 2 of wood chips, leaves, or straw. That is 5,000 cubic (not sqft, we are talking volume here, not area) feet of organic material. This takes some time, and then the material has to react with the soil before it is bio available... Say 3 to 4 years for optimum fertility - and you must continue your efforts or production will decline.

For the most part you have just one growing season. Here in Middle Tennessee it starts April 15 and ends, in stages, from July 15 to September 1. If you make a mistake, have a storm, suffer a pest invasion, disease... well, that's it till next year. This is why most farmers prior to WW II maintained 1 full year's food supply in their larder - in case something bad happens to the crops. Even if your growing season is successful, your food preservation needs to successful, too, or you won't be self sufficient for long. During harvest season it is EASY to keep the table well supplied, how well you do so come February or March is the real issue.

Fruit trees don't produce for their first few years, even if you buy dwarf (I recommend them) trees. You will need at least 3 trees of each kind of fruit you plan to grow, so I would plant 5 or 6 as you will lose 1 or 2. That means 30 or more trees to be dug in and planted (apple, pear, plum, and peach all will grow in much of the lower 48), so in addition to time you better have a strong back... Say 3 to 4 years for fruit production.

Cattle, sheep, and goats for meat consumption and milk production take several years to breed and grow. Chickens, rabbits, and pigs take less time but still their feed supply is at least 1 season, and probably 2, away.

Provisioning your homestead with tools and implements will take more than 1 year, unless you make it your full time job, and learning how to use them all is no small feat.

If you are thinking of providing any important amount of food for your family, the preparations take much longer than many might think, and I think the "time to prepare" element must fit more prominently in your calculations.

Duh!

Our neighbors have farmed their land for the past 5 generations, and I chanced to meet the farmer tonight when I was out in my garden and he was examining his corn crop. We talked about his crops, commodity prices, and then corn. I mentioned my little experiment as if it was some crucial knowledge that the world must know (a little dramatic, but work woth me) about the corn plots with and without fertilizer. He chuckled politely and told me 'Corn won't grow without fertilizer", and that although I will grow some stalks, there won't be any corn cobs unless I fertilize the soil. I told him I did not use any commercial fertilizer, mostly manure, to which he replied that I must have used a lot of manure, and that if I did not manure the ground again before the next year, that crop would not grow.

I had researched growing corn and I kept running into the term "heavy feeder"... but that really was not that informative. You see, I thought that if you turned over the soil, planted some corn seeds, got some rain, that the corn would grow. Nope. It doesn't. And to think that corn is the number one source of animal feed... I wonder if Tyson is worried about this...

Thinking about this further, it would seem that all that corn farm land in Iowa purchased in 1035 exchanges and arranged by Wall Street investment banks is really under the Sword of Damocles/Amonium Nitrate fertilizer, derived from natural gas, and any hiccup in the natural gas market or supply and POOFF!! the value of those corn fields is zipity do da.

Corn!

We took 2, 15-feet by 30-feet plots and planted corn. On 1 plot we added several inches of composted manure from our horse stalls, straw, grass clippings, leaves, wood chips and other organic matter and worked it into about 8 inches of top soil giving us about 12 inches of loosened soil on planting day and sowed with corn. On the other, we added no organic material, tilled the soil, and planted the same seed of corn. Neither plot received commercial fertilizer.

As of June 28, 2007, 8 weeks into the project, the corn in the improved soil is nearly twice the height of the corn growing in the unimproved soil. The plants are a dark, healthy green, while the corn in the unimproved soil is a sickly pail green.

We will do an exact measurement by weight and cob count at harvest, but I have a good idea of the outcome.

BTW, we did a similar experiment with tomatoes... same outcome, though not as severe. The tomato plants in the unimproved soil are about 75% of the size of those in the improved soil.

The risk to our food supply is falling production per acre due to a lack of nitrogen fertilizer. And, no, we don’t have enough cows, horses, goats, etc… to provide enough manure to replace the nitrogen we now get from fertilizer. So don’t worry about how far your food has traveled; worry about how far the fertilizer traveled, from where, and how much nitrogen fertilizer is available, because we can’t go organic fast enough to make up the difference.

Vegitables

The broccoli, spinach, and cabbage are coming in nicely, as are the tomatos and peppers. The problem is quantity.

A family of four will consume 2 heads of broccoli per weak, 104 per year. Since you get only 1 true head per plant, it follows that you will need 104 broccoli plants, at a minimum as you will lose some to bugs and disease, or about 10 raised beds with 10 plants per bed. That is a lot of digging. (We define a row as 15 feet long and 3 feet wide and raised about 8 inches before settling.)

Tomatoes? Same problem. In order to supply our family of four with all of our own tomato sause, pasta, salsa, ketchup... we figure we need 64 plants. Another 8 rows with 8 plants, and several more for losses.

Did I mention you will need several hundred jars to can all this stuff? Actually we freeze the broccoli after blanching but you will need to can tomatoes...

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... So you need a 35' by 30' foot garden area just for the tomoatoes, more for the brocolli, slighly smaller for the spinach, 15' x 15' for the peppers and another for the cabage. Carrots, lettuce, cucumbers, egg plant, etc... each will take an additional 15' x 15' area.

Potatoes for a familiy of 4 will require a minimum of 50' x 50'. Wheat requires a 100' x 100' plot and Corn requires 40' x 40' (and that does not include animal feed).

Again you must prepare all of these items to store over winter.

I hope that I am not discouraging you by posting this but it takes A GREAT DEAL OF WORK to grow most of your own food, and several acres of land. How much land? I will have a better idea next year but for right now I would say that a minimum of 5 very productive acres for a family of four.

Pigs!

Every family should have a pig. Well, any family that eats meat (pork) should have a pig.

We have 3 pigs and they are now about 75 or 80 lbs, up from 15 lbs on March 21 - Incredible! But the cool thing with raising a pig is that table scraps and food refuse from a family of 4 will provide more than half the feed for 1 pig. If you think recycling glass is efficient, it does not come close to a pig. The amount of household garbage that is food refuse is much more by volume than you might imagine, and your pig will happily consume it all, and give you some very fertile soil in the process. One 240 pound pig will give you about 160 pounds of meat when dressed out, certainly enough pork for a family of 4 for 1 year.

Pigs do smell pretty bad - actually really bad. Our pigs are 300 yards from our house and we can smell them if the wind is right. They really could not be rasied in anything other than rural country side. But they do have their advantages for the small holder, self sufficient farm. Besides eating all our food waste, our pigs are digging up and fertilizing a significant portion of next year's garden better than any garden tractor. We move them by rearranging metal hog panels and fence posts that we bought from the local farmer's co-op. After a couple weeks on a 16 x 32 foot area we move them, and they leave behind well loosened, fertile garden soil.

I will let you know how things go as they grow, as I have heard that some are diffiuclt to handle after a certain size.

Birth Announcement

2 of our goats have kidded; one had twins, a male and female, and the other had 1 female. The single kid is obviously half La Mancha, with its distinct ears. The mama goats were already bred when we got them, so we don't know much about the fathers. We now have a total of 23 goats, although we plan to sell or eat the 4 wethers (castrated males). This is our breeding base.

The pigs continue to grow, weighing about 50 pounds now, still cute, but not as cute as they were when we got them. I am told they will be 250 lbs in the fall. That is alot of pig. So far the pigs gain about 1 pound for every 3 pounds of feed.

We are constantly composting and adding organic matter to the garden and have begun a little experiment. We planted corn in 2 differnt patches. In one, we composted heavily, and the other not at all, just turned the soil and planted the corn. Neither plot will receive commercial fertilizer.

I will let you know.

Progress

We are making progress. corn and the beans are starting to come up, and the vegitables are doing well.

We planted 5 plum, 6 apple, 4 peach, and 3 pear trees, along with 10 grape vines. So far, they are all alive. The trees are in their second season, and we expect some to yield next year. 2 of the plum trees are yielding right now!

We purchased a herd of dairy goats, 15 does, mostly nubian and alpine. We also bought 2 nubians bucks, so next years kids will be 1/2, 3/4, or full blood nubian. The goats are very low maintenance, living for the most part off of the land. We are not drinking their milk yet, as I am de-worming them. The milk is going to the pigs at the moment, but the goats produce far more milk than we require.

The chickens continue to lay about 6 eggs per day, and the chicks have feathered out. We also bought 3 roosters: 2 Rhode Island Reds, and 1 Jersey Giant. The Jersey Giant is truly a giant bird. We have one Jersey Giant Hen and she lays HUGE eggs, though not as often as the Reds. Although it sounds like we are self suffcient on eggs, we are not. To be truly self sufficient we need to grow our own feed, which we are in the process of doing - corn for this sumer and winter wheat for next spring. Each laying hen will eat about 100lbs of food per year, so we have to put up a lot of feed.

The chicks will not begin to lay until late August, right about the time that the hens will start to lay less due to lower light levels. We hope that they will make up the difference.

Frost is bad for your garden

We were fooled by 85 degree weather in late March and early April, and planted our garden with tomatos, bell peppers, brocolli, cabbage, and spinach.

Around April 7 the tempatures plunged to about 20 degrees for 3 nights in a row. We lost every tomato, brocolli, and pepper plant, and all but 2 of the cabbage. The spinich survived by being buried in straw. What a drag.

We had to replant using plants bought from a nursery. I realize this is cheating but it was either that or forget this growing season except for beans and corn.

We also bought 3 feeder pigs of about 15 lbs each.

Chicken Coop

We constructed a chicken coop out of cattle panels bent over a square of 8 by 8 foot 2 by 4's, covererd with chicken wire and a tarp. It can be dragged each day to a new spot of pasture, giving the birds access to new bugs, seed, and grass each day.

In addition to the 25 day old rhode island red chicks, we bought 12 layers or different breeds at a flea market. They are averaging 6 eggs per day, and consume about 2 pounds of feed every day.

6 of the 25 chicks died during the first week. I blame the post office, not the hatchery, as the post office let them sit for 1 full day beofre calling us.

We ordered our chicks today. They will arrive during the second week in March as day old chicks. For the first several weeks they must be kept warm, so we set up a place in the garage.

Does anybody have plans or pictures (or both) of a chicken coop? I want to build a coop with a run so that this group of chickens avoids the fate of last year’s flock. Please email at the address below if you have anything.

Also, this might seem like a silly question (remember, we are new at this)… what is the difference between bush beans and pole beans? I am assuming that pole beans need a trellis…

Also, as soon as we have some dry weather forecast I plan to build some ferro-cement water catchment cisterns. That is unless anyone has a better plan for retaining rainwater for the animals and the garden.

We plan to plant tomatoes, sweet corn, several kinds of peppers, cabbage, spinach, carrots, beans, radishes, and lettuce. Last year we planted 5 blueberry bushes and 4 blackberry bushes, and several different types of grapes – but after reflection (and harvest) this was not nearly enough. This year I will ad 20 bushes of each and at least 10 additional grape plants.

Thanks!

Almostselfsufficient (at) yahoo (dot) com

Just starting out

“Just starting out”

Late last April 2006, my wife and I purchased a "hobby farm" in middle Tennessee.

A life long ambition of mine, (I am in my mid 40’s, my wife is in her early 30’s), my purpose in doing so was to raise livestock and grow fruits and vegetables in an attempt to see just how self-sufficient we could be. My wife is still not too sure about all of this, but I will get to that later…

We are not going completely “off grid”… or anything quite so dramatic. Nor do we intend to draw or sole means (or even an important means) of income from the farm – but we hope to make enough to pay for seeds, animal feed, equipment and tools, and to provide an honest summer job for our 13 year old son (our younger son is an infant), and we hope to leave less of an environmental impact by driving as little as possible and lowering our electricity usage as much as possible.

Our other goal is to produce most of our meats and vegetables, all of our eggs and milk, and most of our wheat consumption. Fruits, we knew, would take time just to supply a small portion of our needs.

I plan to keep a journal and post our experiences in this endeavor on this Blog, and I sincerely hope that people interested in a more self-sufficient, sustainable lifestyle would be willing to check in on this project and share ideas on everything from growing and preserving foods to maintaining sustainable heating methods. I have lived in the “city” my entire life as has my wife, and we are true neophytes.

To give you an idea of what we are working with, our farm is 14 acres, with most of it in pasture. I have a ½ acre vegetable garden presently, and am in the process of developing another 3/4 acre crop area to be split: ½ acre for feed corn for the chickens and goats, and ¼ acre for wheat for bread. I hope to have corn/wheat area producing for the 2007 growing season. We have a 5 stall poll barn with a 3 bay shed attached for stacking round bales, and a 30 by 50 metal outbuilding for storage. Our house is small and functional, with 1450 sqft of living space above a comfortably finished 800 sqft grade level basement where I work at my “real job”. It is quite enough for a family of 4. We do not have a woodstove yet, but plan to install one before Winter 2008. We do not have a wood lot but am looking for one nearby.

I should say that we made some small progress last year. Our vegitable garden was productive in that for 2 months we had all of the tomatoes, sweet corn, bell peppers, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, spinach, cucumbers, watermelon, and cantaloupe we could eat. We did not preserve anything, as we started small because we were deep into the growing season when we closed on the property. I hope the garden is much more productive this year as I have been adding a great deal of manure and other organic matter.

Our chickens (15 Rhode Island Reds) produced enough eggs but the goats (2 Nubian crosses) were less than cooperative when it came to milking. These were allowed to forage in the pasture with our 4 horses.

Unfortunately, in early winter our goats and chickens were killed by 2 dogs that had been abandoned in the countryside, something the animal control officers said was common in our county. We were devastated, as the goats, and even the chickens, had become family pets. We have ordered chicks from a hatchery and some layers from a local farm. This year, our animals will have a little less freedom than last year.

We plan to grow a much wider variety of vegetables this year and have purchased a variety of heirloom seeds. We hope to be able to preserve much of our produce for consumption over the winter and spring.

Last year our bean crop was a complete failure, and training a goat to let us milk her remained a “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”. This year we plan to grow potatoes for the first time as well as raise a pig and/or a beef calf for slaughter and others to sell.

Any tips, suggestions, or advice on ANY matter having to do with self-sufficient living would be greatly appreciated. You can post a comment here or email me at:

Almostselfsufficient (at) yahoo (dot) com.

Thanks!