Mission Accomplished

This weekend began on Friday for me, since I had the day off. The To Do list was long but I was determined to get as much as possible accomplished. I began by removing all of the old firewood out of the carriage house. Some of that wood had been in there for years. Each summer we would order up new wood which would end up stored on top of the old wood and the cycle continued, year after year.

I removed all of the old wood and stored it on the porch so that we'll actually burn it. Next, I cleaned the carriage house out to accommodate the quail cages for the winter. This was no easy task. The carriage house has a dirt floor and clouds of dust are kicked up whenever you try to move anything. My organizational system was to move everything to the edges of the barn and leave the center, wide open for the cages.

Though I had previously loaded up the chicken pen with plenty of pine shavings, I decided to make use of a free resource...LEAVES! I took them a couple of bags full for them to play in. Though the chooks were scared of them at first. They soon discovered that it was great fun to scratch around in them. I was sorry that my camera has been borrowed by a friend. It was hysterical watching them fly up in the air making the leaves scatter.I may try to put some up for them to have in the winter. It would help to cut down on pine shaving usage.

In an attempt to spread the fun, I also gave the quail some leaves to play in.They dug tunnels through them and peeked out at me.

Then it was back to (real)work...This time gathering up sticks and twigs in the yard and storing them away for quick kindling to get fires started. I went back into the house in an effort to escape the rain that started in the afternoon and made some firestarters. I make them out of leftover paper towel/toilet paper rolls, candle wax, laundry lint, and sometimes a handful or two of that shredded insulation made from paper. We used to spend about $30 per year buying commercial firestarters.Now we just make them from things that we used to throw out. Besides, mine smell better than the commercial ones.This batch smelled like plums...Just in time for the holiday season.

Next undertaking involved putting up plastic on the back porch. I like to hang the laundry there to save on energy(read=save $)Once the clothes are just about dry, I throw them in the dryer to soften them up. It is something that really saves on the electric bill and I'd like to be able to continue it through the winter, if possible. We've already saved a bundle on the gas bill by only heating the house with wood this season. Of course we know that we won't be able to continue that much longer but we are pleased that we've been able to do it this long.

I also drained the water barrels, put away most of the garden tools, stocked up on feed, urea fertilizer(for melting ice) and a couple of bales of straw for the quail.

Last,but not least, is a project I've been trying to accomplish for the past month...putting the gardens to bed. Well, it still isn't completely finished. I have a hard time pulling up plants that are still producing. We are still getting a few green cherry tomatoes. They don't ripen until I bring them in the house, but after not getting tomatoes for most of the summer, we are enjoying their meager bounty. We still have onions in the ground, one more potato plant, a few herbs, turnips and (of all things)several pea plants that are beginning to bloom. I still got some quail manure, straw and leaves into the gardens around the remaining crops. I may not actually till anything until the spring.

Tomorrow, it is back to work. Sitting at a desk sounds pretty good right about now!

Fantastic New Blog About Being Frugal

Good morning! I wanted to shine a spotlight on a blog that was recently started by a Canadian friend and mentor. I first found his articles on the Homestead.org website and they really inspired me to think about ways that I could reduce the costs around my home. I have shared his articles with many people over the past year or so and find that I gain new insight and a renewed sense of frugality every time that I read them. He is light years ahead of me, utilizing both solar and wind power. I always get new projects to add to the To-Do list, which grows longer by the day. For those of you who think that you will never be able to afford a comfortable retirement, I offer up this article by Jan R. Cooke:

The Economics of Being a Cheap-O

His new blog is Cheap-O Economics

I hope that he inspires you as much as he inspires me!

Finally...An Update!

Well... It has been a long time since I have posted any updates to this blog. The summer has been very busy and has somehow gotten away from me. I have been taking online classes again which ate up far more of my time than I expected it to. I hurt my back twice, making it difficult to do the chores, I have been working on a novel that I've been meaning to write for the past three years. I've continued to work my part-time-work-from-home jobs. Let's see...Where do I start?

Our garden was pitiful this year...We just didn't get enough sunshine and warmth. The squirrels have been running around with all of my cherry tomatoes in their mouths and have actually broken some of the plants in half.

The chickens are doing well and have gotten really big. I lost one of my Marans roosters to an impacted crop. He was a sweetheart and didn't crow very much. Luckily, we have three more roos at my friends farm as spares. We probably won't be bringing a spare here until spring, when we will begin to sell the hatching eggs. Our hens should be laying eggs in the next few weeks, I think.

The quail have been doing their part to pay for their own feed by laying eggs. Selling their eggs for eating has actually been providing enough income to support the chickens' addiction to scratch grains. Yep...it is just like crack to them! We still haven't eaten any of our quail...It's kind of hard when several of them have names. The neighborhood stray cats are still quite interested in putting them on the menu and spent a great deal of time watching through their cages. I am so glad that the cages seem to be kitty-proof.

While the beginning of the summer was rainy and cool, the month of August was fairly dry. My two water barrels are very low as I've had to rely on their contents to water the gardens. Although I had been wishing for an abundance of bees to assist with plant pollination, the reality was that we had way too many yellow jackets. They were everyplace that we turned. Finally a very kind skunk (we think) dug up their nest and many of them went away. Now that's what I call natural pest control!

I will update the egg and money counter a bit later.

Another Budget Update

Here is the latest tally of what we've spent so far to get our property ready to be an urban farmstead. We did modify the budget to re-allocate funds to urban farm categories that are more needy. So far, we aren't doing too badly.

CHICKEN EQUIPMENT - Budget $250 - Only $83 left!
Children's Playhouse.............$80
Plastic Dishpan.......................$ 1
Plastic Crate............................$ 1
Diatomaceous Earth...............$15
Crushed Eggshells..................$ 0
Poultry Waterer Heater........$ 0
Poultry Feeder.......................$ 0

Chicken Feed..........................$20
Oyster Shell Dish...................$ 0
Brooder Construction............$ 0
Welded Wire...........................$13
Heating Pads..........................$30
Fasteners................................$ 7

Garden - Budget $225 - Only $55 left!
Member to Member Seedswaps............$ 5
5 Mushroom Kit.......................................$28
12 Raspberry Canes................................$26
Assorted Fruit Order..............................$63
Plant Labels..............................................$ 6
Recycled Wood.........................................$38
Concrete Edging.......................................$ 2

Garden Shears..........................................$ 2

40 oz Beer.................................................$ 0

Newspaper................................................$ 0

2 Water Barrels........................................$ 0

Aquaculture - Budget $200

Miscellaneous - Budget $325 - Only $84 left!

1000 Mealworms...............$20
Oatmeal...............................$ 4
Aquarium Brooder.............$ 0
Potatoes..............................$ 0
Plastic Bins..........................$12
Quail Supplies....................$41
Quail Eggs..........................$29

Quail Feed.........................$ 13

Bird Seed........................... $ 3
Welded Wire......................$26
Chicken Eggs.....................$74
Wall Thermometer...........$ 1
Pea Seeds..........................$ 3

Child's Pool.......................$15

Memorial Weekend Workout

We decided to put the long weekend to good use. We managed to get most of the gardens in: some tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, more herbs, radishes, cucumbers, zucchini, cantaloupe and watermelon. We sowed some pots of mesclun mix and various other salad greens awhile back and they are doing fairly well...Or at least they are when the squirrels leave them alone!




Our strawberries are doing very well and there are quite a few blossoms on them. We can't wait until we can taste some homegrown berries.

The peas are up and we continue to sow more each week to make sure that we have a continuous crop.

The quail are enjoying the backyard in their Quail Jail. Fabricated from old windows, it still needs a paint job. I never manage to remember to check the hardware store for OOPS paint. I'm hoping to find something that will complement the colors of our house. The first batch of quail hens are all laying 4 eggs consistently. This photo only shows the first batch of birds as the Rich Heritage birds have been residing on my screened back porch . The Rich Heritage quail started to lay this week, though I'm still not certain as to the sexes of most of those birds... Only one bird crows! Could we really be so fortunate as to have only one rooster in the hatch? If so, it would bring our total male count to three.

Here is a picture of one of our water barrels. I would love to get another one that is shaped like this. It is currently half full due to some generous rainfall...Now if we could just get some gutters up on the house or carriage house to direct the rain into the barrel...hmmmm...

A Working Vacation

I have been on vacation from work this week and have been working hard on the urban farmstead. With the weather just starting to level out, there were many projects that I could finally tackle.

Right on time, our mail carrier brought bags of plants from the nursery that we ordered from. It was as though he knew that I would be on vacation and he didn't want to take a chance that I might have time to relax!

First up were the strawberries. We bought this aluminum, 3 tiered garden about 6 years ago and never installed it. It has gotten battered in the carriage house, but we were able to bend it back into shape by stomping on it a bit.



Next came the asparagus. I was careful to install it in a raised bed because it has a bad habit of taking over if not kept contained. The bed was built with some of the lumber that we got at the Habitat for Humanity Store.



Then came two kiwi. These are not the fuzzy kind that you find in the grocery store, but a smooth skinned variety that is cold hardy to withstand our winters. With kiwi, you have to plant both a male and a female plant in order to get fruit. I can't help but wonder how they figure that out. Does one plant wear ribbons or a frilly skirt? Both plants looked the same to me!




Then came getting the greens in pots. These will go on the garden table that I built a couple of months ago in my attempt to keep the greens away from the groundhogs. There is spinach, mesclun mix and lettuce for salads. For TheMartianMan, there are collard greens and cabbage. Also planted in pots are cauliflower, kale and broccoli. We shall see how they do...They can't do any worse than they did last year when not a single one of these plants survived in the garden. Luckily, I had grown some lettuce varieties in pots on the front porch or there would have been no salad for us!


We needed to get busy building the raised bed for the kitchen garden. It measures about 12 feet x 8 feet and will include basic herbs, beans, a variety of heirloom tomatoes, scallions, carrots, peppers and other basic veggie staples. It is nice to be able to run out the back door while cooking to grab some fresh herbs!



I took time out to hang the hummingbird feeder. I would love to get hummers, but know that I may have to settle for bees. We have seen many bumblebees this season paying visits to our flowers and trees. Not so many honeybees... I also noticed that this feeder is no longer full...Hmmm... I may have to keep a closer eye on this to determine if it leaks.



Well, that has been my week so far! I have more still to do and not nearly enough time to get it done.

12 Step Program Needed!

My name is TheMartianChick and I am a hatchaholic! After having two successful quail hatches, I am feeling confident enough to move on to chicken eggs. Not just any chicken eggs, but Black Copper Marans! To most people, a chicken is a chicken, is a chicken...unless it's fried! To people who are really into breeding chickens, the BC Marans are something special. The eggs are a deep, deep brownish red color. The darker the egg color, the more desirable the bird.



The eggs now reside in the incubator along with some Rhode Island Red hatching eggs. Tomorrow, they will be joined by some blue-green Ameracauna eggs that arrived in the mail today. The eggs need to recover from their postal journey before going in the incubator.




Once hatched, we plan to keep all Marans hens at our house and one or two roosters at a friend's farm for breeding purposes. We will likely keep an Ameracauna hen or two for the novelty of having green eggs. All of the Rhode Island Reds will be sold as chicks on Craigslist along with any other Ameracaunas. Of course, the more chicks that we sell, the faster the incubator will be paid off.

Budget Update

I decided to revisit the farm budget today...Sheesh, money sure doesn't buy as much as it used to! We will be modifying the budget soon to free up some of the money that is currently dedicated to the aquaculture/tilapia. We have managed to locate a stock tank that costs half as much as the one that we had originally planned to buy. We also located someone who is willing to sell us a smaller number of tilapia. Most places that sell them deal on a commercial scale and want the purchaser to buy hundreds (or thousands) of fish. We plan to buy only about 50 fish now, which will drive our costs down.

Here is the latest tally of what we've spent so far to get our property ready to be an urban farmstead. On the right side of the blog, you will notice that I added a ticker to help us keep track of the money generated by the incubator. After all, it has to pay for itself! I have separated the expenses by category:

CHICKEN EQUIPMENT - Budget $200 - Only $45 left!
Children's Playhouse..................$80
Plastic Dishpan.......................$ 1
Plastic Crate.........................$ 1
Diatomaceous Earth....................$15
Crushed Eggshells.....................$ 0
Poultry Waterer Heater................$ 0
Poultry Feeder........................$ 0
Oyster Shell Dish.....................$ 0
Brooder Construction..................$ 0
Welded Wire...........................$13
Heating Pads..........................$30
Child's Pool.............................$15

Garden - Budget $300 - Only $139 left!
Member to Member Seedswaps............$ 5
Mushroom Kit..........................$28
12 Raspberry Canes................$26
Assorted Fruit Order..............$63
Plant Labels..............................$ 3
Recycled Wood.........................$38
Concrete Edging.......................$2

Aquaculture - Budget $300

Miscellaneous - Budget $200 - Only $12 left!
1000 Mealworms........................$20
Oatmeal...............................$ 4
Aquarium Brooder.............$ 0
Potatoes..............................$ 0
Plastic Bins..........................$12
Quail Supplies....................$23
Quail Eggs.........................$29
Welded Wire.....................$26
Chicken Eggs....................$74
Wall Thermometer................$ 1

Balancing the Budget...

Here is the latest tally of what we've spent so far to get our property ready to be an urban farmstead. On the right side of the blog, you will notice that I added a ticker to help to keep track of the money generated by the incubator. After all, it has to pay for itself! I have separated the expenses by category:

CHICKEN EQUIPMENT - Budget $200 - Only $103 left!
Children's Playhouse..................$80
Plastic Dishpan.......................$ 1
Plastic Crate.........................$ 1
Diatomaceous Earth....................$15
Crushed Eggshells.....................$ 0
Poultry Waterer Heater................$ 0
Poultry Feeder........................$ 0
Oyster Shell Dish.....................$ 0
Brooder Construction..................$ 0

Garden - Budget $300 - Only $150 left!
Member to Member Seedswaps............$ 5
Mushroom Kit..........................$28
12 Raspberry Canes................$26
Assorted Fruit Order..............$63
Plant Labels..............................$ 3
Recycled Wood.........................$27
Concrete Edging.......................$2

Aquaculture - Budget $300

Miscellaneous - Budget $200 - Only $13 left!
1000 Mealworms........................$20
Oatmeal...............................$ 4
Aquarium Brooder.............$ 0
Potatoes..............................$ 0
Plastic Bins..........................$12
Quail Supplies....................$23
Quail Eggs.........................$29
Welded Wire.....................$26
Chicken Eggs....................$74

The Incubator Is Here!!

I was so excited to see the UPS delivery truck pull up in front of the house a few days ago. Our Brinsea Octagon 20 incubator arrived! We set it up on my dresser to see how it works and to make sure that it is consistent in holding the temperature and humidity levels steady. Today is Day 2 of its operation and it is running like a dream. We decided to start with some quail eggs to make sure that this thing is as foolproof as the company says.

We logged on to the Backyard Chickens website to see if someone had any quail eggs for sale. Luck was with us and we now have 20 eggs on the way. The seller had an assortment of goldens, chocolate and Texas A&M quail. Though eggs that are shipped through the mail have a decreased likelihood of hatching, we have high hopes that we will at least get 5 birds out of the deal. Any more than that and we will consider them to be purely a blessing.

Today, we had beautiful sunny weather and it was actually warm enough for me to get outside to work on a farmstead project:

I made a makeshift table out of a couple of halved pallets and some of the lumber that we got from the Habitat Re-Store. Last year, the groundhogs launched an attack on every cabbage, collard, squash, and cucumber plant that I planted. This time around, we decided to plant the cabbage and collards in 5 gallon buckets that will be raised up on the table and out of the greedy reach of the groundhogs.

I've been told that we'll have nice weather tomorrow, too... If so, then I'll be busy storing away the remainder of the firewood pile in our carriage house for next year. We still have wood on our porch that we will continue to use, but this pile will likely not be needed. It is about 2 cords of wood left over from our original purchase of 10 cords. I'll probably order another 10 cords for next year. I really like having a surplus.

I might even have time to start building a cage for the quail! The weather will need to warm up a bit more for me to start construction on the chicken pen, though.

The Local Habitat Revisited

We went back to the local Habitat Re-Store again today. We are going to try to go every Monday on my lunch hour. We scored again, spending only $15, but some of what we picked up will NEVER be used to build a chicken pen or a raised bed. We got several pieces of maple lumber. I'm not sure what we will use it for, but there was no way that we were going to leave that in the store! It wasn't of the quality that I would want to use for shelves in my house, but maybe it could be used to build outdoor benches? I don't really know. I am open to any ideas that you all might have. Each board is about 4 feet long and 8 inches wide.They are really heavy. I guess I'm used to the weight of similar sized pieces of pine.

Re-Storing My Faith

I know... I have gone many days without posting and today I felt the need to post twice. I just had to share about my experience with our local Habitat For Humanity Re-Store. I work highly unusual hours and haven't had the opportunity to visit the Re-Store during their highly USUAL hours. So...TheMartianMan and I both had the morning off from work and decided to use the time wisely.

The local Re-Store is now our new favorite place! We found lumber as inexpensively as 50 cents per piece. In fact, we purchased enough wood to create one and a half raised garden beds. We paid with a ten dollar bill and still had more than $3 come back to us in change. TheMartianMan checked out all of the windows, doors and hinges. He was most impressed with the selection. They also had a large quantity of new power tools and used gardening tools. Still looking for welded wire fencing or hardware cloth, though.

If there is a Habitat For Humanity Re-Store in your area, I highly recommend that you check them out. Now, I am trying to figure out how I can sneak out during my lunch hour once a week to check out the new stuff that they might get. An hour might not be enough time...

In the Mood to Brood...

Realizing yesterday morning that I had made no arrangements for brooding my baby chicks when they (eventually) arrive, I set out to rectify the situation. With my mantra of Re-think, Re-use, Re-purpose reverberating in my skull, I quickly settled on a long cardboard box with a lid.

I had originally considered using a Rubbermaid tote that had been purchased it at WalMart about a year ago( shortly before I decided to boycott the retail chain).

The plastic tote measured only about 4x2 feet. I wanted to install a window in the side of the tote, but decided against it. While I am sure that the chicks would have appreciated a room with a view, I didn't want to do anything to a tote that would interfere with it being reused again for something else.

So, I moved on to converting a fabulous, lidded corrugated box. The box would provide more floor space for the birds than the tote would have anyway. Since I can only have a few chickens in the city, it is unlikely that I will need a brooder of this size again, so I have no plans to recycle it when we are through with it. Since it is made of cardboard it will be contaminated from chicken poo and incapable of being cleaned.All bedding materials will of course be turned out into the compost pile.

Anyway...I wanted the brooder to be large enough to accommodate 6 chicks, so I devised something that they could grow into. The floor of the box is waterproofed with leftover linoleum from some of the rental apartments that we own. Martha Stewart probably wouldn't approve of my taste in decorating, but the flooring will be covered in pine shavings, so the chicks won't really be embarrassed by it anyway.I found a roll of screen in my basement and will probably use that to cover the top. However, I am toying with the idea of using an old sheer curtain instead...Hmmm... The birds will only occupy one portion of the box initially. When they need more room, I will bring out the other half of the box(the lid)and put the two parts together, instantly doubling their space.(What you see in the photo is the expanded version which measures 4x5 feet.) Even more convenient is the fact that the two parts of the box actually "nest" together for storage until we actually need to expand it. This project was accomplished entirely with things that we had lying around the house and took about an hour to complete.

Counting Coins

I thought that I should take a few minutes to tally up what we've spent so far to get our property ready to be an urban farmstead. I have separated the expenses by category:

CHICKEN EQUIPMENT - Budget $200
Children's Playhouse..................$80
Plastic Dishpan.......................$ 1
Plastic Crate.........................$ 1
Diatomaceous Earth....................$15
Crushed Eggshells.....................$ 0
Poultry Waterer Heater................$ 0
Poultry Feeder........................$ 0
Oyster Shell Dish.....................$ 0

Garden - Budget $300
Member to Member Seedswaps............$ 5
Mushroom Kit..........................$28

Aquaculture - Budget $300

Miscellaneus - Budget $200
1000 Mealworms........................$20
Oatmeal...............................$ 4
Aquarium..............................$ 0

The Incredible, Edible Eggshell?

We used to be really good at "making do" with what we happened to have at hand. Of course TheMartianMidgets were toddlers then and we were frugal out of necessity, not because we really preferred to be. This urban farmstead project is really forcing us to take a hard look at ways to pull things together on a shoestring budget.

As I go through the planning stages, I am constantly tempted to just buy certain things that we'll need.Instead, I have to rein myself in and Re-think, Re-use and Re-Purpose ordinary items that we happen to have around the house.Today, I decided to begin saving eggshells for our future flock of chickens. Eggshells can be washed, dried, crushed and fed to laying hens to provide calcium. The mineral is critical to ensuring that eggs laid will have strong shells. I could purchase calcium for poultry (also known as oyster shell), but that is an additional cost, albeit a small one at around $5. However, I do have about nine months before our chickens will begin to lay. (This is an extreme version of counting your chickens before they hatch, since the chicks that we will get in the Spring haven't actually hatched yet!) Hopefully, all of these small savings will add up and enable us to meet our farm-building budget of $1000.

Fast Food Nation

My daughters (collectively known as TheMartianMidgets) have spent the past month at home from college for winter break. The biggest difference that I notice is the dwindling amount of foodstuffs in my house.Over the summer,I spent an inordinate amount of time stocking my deep freezer and two refrigerators with fresh veggies from the farmer's market and from my garden. I shopped every sale at the grocery store to put away bulk quantities of chicken, fish and beef for the main carnivore and chief grillmaster in our house, TheMartianMan. I truly thought that I had squirrelled away enough of the basic ingredients to get us through the majority of the winter. Apparently, I was wrong.

During the summer, there were more daylight hours to prepare food for storage and I was able to create my own convenience food items. My frozen containers of macaroni and cheese and pasta with sauce are far superior to any purchased in the freezer case at the supermarket. (If I do say so myself!) With shorter winter days and longer working hours, my convenience foods provide me with a quick way to start dinner and something healthy (and inexpensive) to carry to work for lunches.

Peering into my nearly empty cabinets , refrigerators and freezers, I determined a few days ago that I will again need to re-stock. I began by making cookie mixes. I know that cookies aren't really necessary to survival but they do make life worth living for, especially if there is chocolate involved! I filled plastic Zip-Loc bags with the basic ingredients for chocolate chip walnut, oatmeal chocolate chip walnut, oatmeal(no raisins), chocolate chip peanut butter and sugar cookies. On the outside of each bag, I listed the additional wet ingredients that would need to be added to complete each recipe. It went very quickly and I soon had 12 bags of cookie mix assembled.Once the mixes have been used, I save the bags for re-filling.

I repeated the same steps to make cornbread mix, biscuit mix and a basic muffin mix. For muffins, any mashed fruit can be added to the mix to add flavor. Over the next few days, I will set about the task of restocking the freezer with main dishes like the aforementioned mac and cheese, lasagna, soup, chili, stew, and anything else that I can think of. I'm already watching the grocery store sales for meat. In this tight economy, a well-stocked pantry buys me some peace of mind. The kids will be going back to college in a few days. Then the countdown begins for spring break when my pantry will take another hit...

Quick Homesteading Project

Today was a beautiful day. The sun was out in full force, though we have received about 8 or 9 inches of snow over the past few days. Maybe the sunshine went to my head, but I was in the mood for a homesteading project. With the cold temperatures outside, any project that I was going to undertake needed to be completed indoors.

I decided to put together a heated base to keep a chicken waterer from freezing during the winter. A galvanized poultry waterer would be placed on top of the heated base to keep the water temperature above freezing. I used the heating element from a potpourri simmerer. The element was already pre-wired to a plug in cord. I inserted it into an old cookie or candy tin and used tin snips to make a hole in the tin. Once it was assembled, I caulked around the hole to prevent water or other foreign materials from getting inside. That was it! The entire project took about 25 minutes and most of that was spent looking for the tin snips! This project could also be completed with the parts to construct a small lamp. In that case, a low watt lightbulb (rather than a heating element) would provide the heat to keep a metal waterer from freezing. Now, I just need to get a galvanized waterer and some chickens!

Chickens On The Cheap...

I am fairly frugal by nature. I caught a break a month or so ago and was able to purchase two wooden playhouse kits for only $80 each, which would make perfect chicken coops. Their purchase had been an investment in our future farm. We hadn’t planned to use them at our city property, but at least one would be put to good use on our urban farm.

City life can be treacherous for chickens. I always heard that everybody likes to eat chicken. However, everybody in that sentence should be changed to every species. That includes stray dogs, cats, raccoons, skunks, hawks, even peregrine falcons! We also have harsh winters that include blizzards and bone-numbing cold. In the northeast, storms can creep in with very little warning. It just made sense to create an indoor pen to protect our chickens. They would have opportunities to forage outside when we were home, but while at work it was important that they be safe.

We determined that the best place to do this was on the second floor of our carriage house. It was a rather large affair, roughly the size of a raised ranch house. We wouldn’t have more than 6 hens, but they would have about 700 square feet of living space. Once we partitioned off the chicken pen, there would be room for some storage and maybe some of our other farm ventures. Since the weather was so cold, it wasn’t feasible to start the construction work. But it did give us several months to start to collect construction materials from Craigslist, Freecycle and even the curb. I would also have the time to watch the sales at Tractor Supply and other places until we had everything that we needed to go forward in the Spring. Mission: 2 Mars urban farm was really starting to come together.

Managing Money

Money…money…money… It doesn't grow on trees and it truly was the root of most evil. It was certainly at the root of many of our problems. The stock market had taken a nosedive, which negatively affected our retirement savings. We were fortunate enough to have decent jobs during a time when so many people were unemployed and struggling to make ends meet. We also had two children in college. They had developed the unique ability to suction money out of our wallets as though they were vacuum cleaners.

The Mission: 2 Mars urban farm would need to be put together as frugally as possible. We didn’t really want to invest any more money into our current property when our dream was to move to a five acre farm. We set a goal of $1000 to get started. That’s right! $1000… Not much, but it would force us to think carefully before making any expenditures and seek out freebies when possible. The costs broke down as follows: Securing an area for chickens and/or quail would cost about $200. The gardens were allocated $300 because we would need to truck in additional soil and possibly build raised beds. The aquaculture of tilapia would require another $300 for the equipment, leaving a whopping $200 to pay for fish, birds, seeds, a few plants and the inevitable problems or miscalculations. Any additional money required would have to be raised by the farm itself through the sale of its products. For now, a hobby greenhouse was way out of our budget. Ideally, we would find ways to locate recycled materials to cut our costs down and find a way to add a greenhouse to extend our growing season in time for next winter.

Armed with an outline for both the urban farm layout and a plan for the finances to create it, the real work was to begin immediately. It might be winter, but there was a lot to be done right now.

Thinking It Through...

We would need to plan carefully. Taking stock of our resources, we realized that we had a lot going for us. Our fully fenced yard was capable of keeping out stray dogs. We had a wonderful mix of sun and shade allowing us to grow most any crop effectively. The back portion of our property was shrouded by the foliage of several maple trees. Each autumn, our yard was filled with a prodigious amount of leaves for enriching the soil. Our Victorian home was equipped with a generous two story carriage house for storage and there was a separate fenced area that had previously been utilized as a dog run. We had been saving seeds for years and we already had an ample supply for several gardens. Of course as a seed junkie, I would be ordering more from my favorite organic seed catalogs.

On the down side, we also had groundhogs the size of Volkswagens, raccoons, skunks, the occasional stray dog, several stray cats and far too many crows and starlings.

We talked about what we wanted to have: chickens, tilapia, organic gardens, an orchard component, a greenhouse, mealworms, redworm composting, traditional composting, etc…It was important that we not only grow food to sustain ourselves, but to do so in a responsible manner. We wanted to replenish the earth so that it could continue to nourish our plants. We wanted to leave our little piece of the planet in better condition than when we first found it.

There were also local laws and ordinances to ponder. Hens were allowed in our area, but roosters were not. This put an end to any thoughts of breeding rare heritage breeds of chickens. Ducks were also out, but quail were a possibility. Gardening was allowed, but a structure like a shed or greenhouse would need to be smaller than 12 feet x 12 feet or a permit would be required.

We had to consider the amount of time that we were willing to commit to this endeavor and more importantly…How much money could we afford to spend?