The Backyard Homestead

As we see the prices at the gas pump climb up higher and higher, we'll see our grocery bill climb at the same rate.  It takes gas to deliver food to the grocery store and sadly, as gas prices climb, food prices climb!

To offset this, you may want to start a garden, plant some berry bushes, or you may even want to get a few chickens.  But you live on a quarter-acre lot and fear you don't have enough space.  There's a book that can help you get started!

The Backyard Homestead, edited by Carleen Madigan, writes on it's front cover that you can "Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre!"  The back cover its reads that, from a quarter acre, you can harvest:

1400 eggs

50 pounds of wheat

60 pounds of fruit

2,000 pounds of vegetables

280 pounds of pork

and 

75 pounds of nuts.  

The book contains wonderful illustrations showing the layout of a homestead on one-tenth of an acre, a quarter-acre, and half an acre.  These illustrations show how a small homestead can utilize every inch of space!

There are seven chapters cover; The Home Vegetable Garden, Backyard Fruits and Nuts, Home-grown Grains, Food from the Wild: Easy, Fragrant Herbs, Poultry for Eggs and Meat, and Meat and Dairy.  Within these chapters you'll find great recipes, pruning information, informative charts, chicken coop plans, how to milk a goat, and much more.  

This is a really great book for the new gardener or mini-farmer.  It's incredibly inspirational.  Having said that, I would like to point out that this book is a great starter book.  The gardening sections are clear and you may not need more information than The Backyard Homestead provides.  But, if you are interested in raising chickens, or other livestock, this book will get you started, then you'll want to find a more in-depth book on the subject.


"When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it.  If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant."  

Copra Onions

This year I decided to try starting my onions from seeds rather than from sets.  Sets are when you buy little baby onions and plant them to grow into larger onions.  It's a lot less expensive to start them from seed and if it doesn't work, I figure I can always get the sets.  I planted them in mid - February and they're coming along beautifully!

Courtesy of Johnny's Select Seeds catalog.

I chose "Copra" onions because they are a good all-purpose onion and store well throughout the winter.  Here is the description from the Johnny's Select Seeds catalog. www.johnnyseeds.com

Unsurpassed for storage.

Uniform, "rock-hard" storage onion with early maturity. These medium-sized, dark yellow-skinned storage onions have the preferred blocky round shape with thin necks that dry quickly. Firmness and skin are superior. Copra remains one of the absolute best in our yearly storage trials, staying firm and flavorful after most other varieties have sprouted. Highest in sugar (13°-14°) of the storage onions. Adaptation: 38°-55° latitude. NOTE: Also offered as plants. Packet: 460 seeds.

  Days to Maturity or Bloom:   104

Here are my baby onion plants.  I have two flats of about 250 baby onions starting up. (Don't mind the beer bottle in the bottom picture.  It works beautifully for reaching in under the lights and watering the plants!)  

Check out this Homestead Barn Hop! (click on the image below): 

I don't know why the cute little symbol turned into a question mark, but go ahead and click on it anyway!

Will It End Ever End?

Schnee, neve, nieve, sneeuw, niege ... in any language, they all mean the same thing... SNOW!

And I think I can speak for most folks around here when I say, 

I think we've had enough!

Killer Candy

I have a terrible vole problem in my high tunnel this winter.  They come in because it's warm and there's plenty of food.  It's like going to Florida for the winter!  They are also destructive and have ruined a good part of a radish crop by taking a few bites out of each one.

But happily, Killer Candy Cane is on the job.  She comes in the high tunnel with me and goes nuts sniffing after the voles.  When she gets one, it has about one second of life left.

How can something so innocent,

be so vicious!?!

Egg Colors

A lovely palette.  These are yesterday's eggs and I didn't get any green ones.  

Waiting for Summer Flowers and Free Birdhouse Gourd Seeds

Some flower pictures from last year's Potter County Fair and 

my garden as a reminder 

that spring is coming!

I have some bottle or birdhouse gourd seeds to give away.  Let me know if you would like some and I'll mail or give them to you. 

Bottle or Birdhouse Gourd plant - it's a vine that climbs. 

2011 Chicken Order

Yesterday I ordered my chickens for June delivery.  We've always had them sent earlier, but then it would be too cold to put them under the lights out in the chicken coop.  They would have to be put down in the basement until the weather eased up a bit and let me tell you, chickens are dirty.  They generate a ton of dust and it gets into every single nook and cranny!

When I get my chicks, I put them in two plastic round kiddy pools with some nice straw in the bottom (thick enough to discourage spraddled legs) and wire fencing around it so they can't fly out.  There's no corners for them to get piled up and crush one another.

When you order chickens, you can get pullets, which are females (egg layers), males, or straight run (which is a mix of male and female chicks).  I have two good-natured male roosters (trust me a good-natured rooster is hard to find!) and I'm not raising chicks, so other than my cornish rocks (who are for meat), I get all pullets.

Here was my order from Ideal Poultry (the pictures are borrowed from their website).  I just hope the pictures stay and I don't end up with the question mark thing:

5 - Americauna pullets (Easter eggers - green or blue tinted eggs)



5 - Speckled Sussex pullets (so darn pretty, and lay a speckled egg)



5- Rhode Island Red pullets (good layers, brown eggs)



25 - Cornish Rock straight run (meat birds)



10 - Buff Orpington pullets (a really nice temperament, good laying chicken, brown eggs)



5 - Golden Lakenvelder pullets (white eggs, hardy, rare, and they're Pittsburgh Steeler colors!)



5 - Welsummer pullets (fairly rare, hardy, lay a dark, terra-cotta brown egg)



The Welsummers are back ordered and, if they're not available in June, I'll get 10 of the Golden Lakenvelders instead.

This seems like a large order, but you generally lose a few of the chicks due to the stress of shipping, and because my chickens free-range, I have some loss to predators.  I have a number of old chickens in the coop this year who are not laying and a couple of meat chickens from last year that are about the size of small ostriches who will all be culled.  It's time to move in some fresh layers!