New Homesteading Projects...

Yesterday's weather was sunny and beautiful! The high was somewhere in the vicinity of 68 degrees. We had received an email from the nursery, stating that our raspberry canes would be arriving this week. After months of trying to figure out where to plant them,I finally had to make a decision. After consulting with TheMartianMan, I decided that the best place was near our second driveway. It was important that the raspberries not be too close to our chain link fence as they can become entangled in the links. But it was equally important that they not be able to spread willy-nilly all over the yard. We wanted a controlled bramble patch!


I hauled out the edging bricks that I got at the Habitat Re-Store and arranged them in an arc, right at the end of the driveway.Then I tilled the space and pulled out any rocks that I found. I added some maple leaves and tilled again. A topping of mulch completed the task. We are supposed to get some rain this week, so the soil should stay nice and moist until the plants arrive. It looks a lot nicer in person. I waited until today to take the picture and our weather is fairly gray, rainy and dreary. When I plant the raspberries, I will also add some companion flowers to brighten things up and attract bees and other pollinators. My neighbors are used to my yard always looking neat with lots of flowers. I don't think that they'll be disappointed with the outcome in a couple of months.



The tiller that I used was the Mantis tiller that I picked up on Craigslist last year for $150. It wasn't even one year old at the time of purchase. For anyone who is not fond of equipment that makes a lot of noise, the electric Mantis tiller is a very quiet option and does not require a lot of muscle power to keep it under control. It really does a good job for such a small machine!

I also finished the Quail Jail! Well, sort of... We have all of the pieces cut but assembly is not possible for two reasons: 1) We need to buy longer screws to hold it together and 2) There is a truck in the way of the stairs that lead to the 2nd floor of the carriage house. The truck was a freebie from my dad. It needs a new transmission and does not move on its own. Unfortunately, it is in the wrong parking bay and blocks the only access to the 2nd floor. So, if we put the Quail Jail pieces together now, we will have to carry it in one piece to the second floor. Although it won't be extremely heavy, it would be pretty awkward to carry.

The good news is that TheMartianMan and his friend should be pulling the truck out of the carriage house and replacing the transmission. A working truck will make it much easier to haul firewood that we find at the curb after people have had trees cut down and reduce our firewood expenses.

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

Did I Really Just Blow The Budget?

I have spent the past couple of days trying to justify a couple of purchases for the urban farmstead. I finally decided to post what I have done here and let the inhabitants of Earth judge the Martian:

First Scenario: I had completed a list of the various fruits that I would like to be grown on our property. Right now, we only have an old mulberry tree that produces fruit. Anyway, when I tallied up the strawberries, blackberries, grapes, vine peaches, blueberries, etc. The total was $68. I thought long and hard about this and then looked in my cabinets, deep freezer and two refrigerators. I decided to skip grocery shopping for the week. We probably would have spent around that amount buying food at the grocery store. We actually don't have to grocery shop too often because we are really stocked up. Given the uncertainty in the economy and the job market, we try to have food stored so that we won't have to buy much in the event of a layoff at TheMartianMan's place of employment. So, should I add the cost of the fruit plants in to the farm budget or is it really about the same as buying groceries? After all, these groceries will be on the table during the summer and fall!

Second Scenario: As you probably know, we really want some chickens. Our desire was to actually breed some unusual breeds. Now that I have a friend who is willing to hold a rooster or 2 for me at his farm, I actually have the opportunity to be able to breed 1 unusual breed. The problem is that for the breed that I want, I cannot seem to find chicks ANYWHERE!! So I must hatch eggs if I am to get these birds.

So I browsed around on Ebay and saw a used top quality, almost foolproof incubator. It works kind of like the rotisserie that they advertise on tv during the holiday season: Set it and Forget it! Though I bid and bid and bid...someone else won the item. Then a miracle happened! I remembered that I had a stash of American Express gift cards. They were left over from a vacation that we took last May. The cards were free to us since we cashed in reward points to get them. There was a grand total of $325. So, I used them to buy the brand new version of the top quality incubator. Since I bought it with free money, should it count against my budget?

Before you answer, I also have three plans for recouping the money that I spent for the incubator. The first plan is to hatch out some specialty breed eggs for others and sell them to people like me who cannot find them anywhere. This would help me to recoup some, if not all of the money over time. The second plan involves possibly ordering up some quail and selling quail eggs and or birds locally. I believe that there is a market for it. The third plan is to sell the incubator on Ebay when it has paid for itself. The auction that I was bidding on taught me that this particular model of incubator holds its value and that people are willing to pay an awful lot of money for it, even when it is used. I can also do a combination of any of these three plans and probably MAKE money on the deal. So, given all of this rationalization (fooling myself) that I have done, should the incubator count against the farm budget?

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.

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

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.

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?