01/02/2025
Good morning everyone!
Now that we are in a new year I thought I would share some of our plans for this year. We have some changes and some new things coming to the homestead this year so be on the lookout for some things.
Every year or every season we have had so far has taught us a few things and our knowledge continues to grow with each lesson. Taking what we have learned so far and implementing them into the homestead is always our goal. Keeping in mind that every homestead is different and what works for one may not work for another. With that said, this may be a bit long as we have many changes and updates that we are planning to make this year! These are in no particular order.
Garden changes
1.) We plan to use a w**d barrier this year instead of mulch. We love using mulch and going with the lasagna style of gardening but we have struggled with getting mulch this season and the amount of mulch needed for our size garden is just not feasible to buy every year. We choose not to till so we have decided this is the next option to try.
2.) We are changing our trellis system a bit. Last year we used perimeter fencing with some t-posts. Although this sort of worked the fence was still too weak to hold up some of our tomatoe plants. We will use it for pole beans, and peas but we are bringing in cattle panels and making arches with them to give some more structure and support for our tomatoes, squash, luffas...
3.) We plan to alternate what we plant each year. This one is really new for us as we have tried to plant everything we could think of every year that we may want to try. This creates all kinds of messes for us. We had squash plants taking over everything, and popping up where I didn't want them, and we had way less produce of certain things like peas, greenbeans, and corn than I would have wanted. So with that said, this year I will not be planting summer squash at all only planting 1-2 plants of pumpkins that will be used to feed to the animals to aid in deworming. We will be increasing our peas, greenbeans, and corn rows with having the extra space of not planting the squashes.
4.) We will be planting with more purpose. What do I mean by that? We will not be planting as many varieties of hot peppers or cherry tomatoes. We use jalapeños, chilies, and habaneros. We don't use scorpion peppers aside from making extreme hotsauce, which isn't very often, so planting what we use most is our focus. Cherry tomatoes taste fabulous and are great in salsas but we use sauce tomatoes way more. While we will plant a couple cherry tomato plants and a couple slicing tomato plants, our focus will be on sauce tomatoes.
5.) I will not be including all of my herbs in the garden itself I will use companion planting with some things like basil, but I will have a separate area for our herb garden.
6.) We planning to work heavily on seed saving this year! Last year we were able to do sunflowers, peas and mustard seeds but nowhere near what we would like to have done. so we plan to hopefully get some tomato and pepper seeds saved this year as well.
Animals and animal husbandry
1.) We added goats to our homestead last year and they were already in milk! This year we are doing the breeding, babies, and getting the milk going on our own! Hopefully we will have some baby goats in the spring! We had a buck for about 2-3 weeks and at this time we are unsure if he was able to get his job done before he left or not so it is a waiting game at the moment.
2.) We plan to start milking the sheep this year as well! I am so excited for this step! We have 3 ewes that this will be their second round of babies so we will introduce them to milking this year, and 2 new ewes that it will be their first time birthing. We did this on purpose, as we wanted to see their mothering skills the first year and how they handled everything. Goats you can start milking their first year but with the sheep, we decided it was better for us to wait and see.
3.) This one hurts a bit but it is for the best. We are doing away with the pigs for the moment. At least the IPP and and IPP crosses we have. They have been very destructive, they try to bite when you are taking out their feed, they don't respect fencing (even electric fencing), and they ultimately are just not for us. We love our kune kunes and will be keeping Fungus as well as possibly another one as a friend for him but currently we plan to get out of the kune kunes at this time as well. We may in the future bring them back because we absolutely love them but timing for us and how long they take for growing out just isn't quite right at the moment.
4.) We are adding meat chickens!!!! We have ordered cornish crosses and Black jersey giants to be our meat breeds to try out. We really want a heritage breed so we can hatch our own and be more self sufficient even with meat birds but since we have never done meat birds we wanted to try both the cornish cross and a heritage breed to see what works best for us and see how their growth compares to each other.
If you are still here, thank you so much for reading this all the way through! We are so excited for the changes and additions and cannot wait to share our experiences and lessons learned. Homesteading is all about learning, even when you think you know everything there is, something changes and there are more lessons to learn from.
What are you planing this year???
Picture of our ducks fluffing their fresh bedding! Getting ready for this cold snap that is coming soon.
