A Bit More About US
I never thought of myself as an animal lover, until we started growing our little menagerie on our small homestead.
We moved and just began acquiring animals – sheep, goats, chickens, dogs, and, at one point a peacock!
We didn’t do so carelessly. Research was done before we started deciding what animals we wanted to raise, breed, and, yes, eat. Everything, except our Gertie Girl (our little goat), has a purpose and plays an important part of our desire to grow our homestead!
It has been an amazing experience learning about these animals, caring for them, and watching them grow over the past year. We haven’t just learned about our animals, but their predators too.
Hopefully, we’ll be able to share more of that knowledge and experience with y’all as we go further into our homestead journey!
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By now, I’m sure you’ve put two and two together that our primary flock is our beautiful Blackbelly Sheep. We love lamb and are slowly growing our flock so that we’re able to slowly add organic lamb into our diets consistently.
We also have quite a few egg laying chickens because it’s not uncommon for my household to go through a dozen eggs in a sitting! I have growing boys who love eggs so our Betties (Rhode Island Reds) and our Mabels (Maran and Welsummer mix) are dutifully doing their jobs and provide delicious fresh eggs daily!
Meat chickens! If you didn’t know, now you know! There IS a difference between egg layers and meat chickens and it’s tied to their growth cycles. We’ve done a few rounds of meat chickens and it’s another way for us to benefit from fresh, organic, and humanely treated meat.
Recently we introduced honey bees! They’re producing well but we’ll harvest once they’ve had a good year to build up their supply so we’re counting down the months until we can start benefiting from their honey.
I’ve mentioned our Gertie Girl. She’s a sweet, but bougie little goat who is more of a pet and the only animal without a clear purpose. Intent was to have her and her companion maintain weeds and eat the things our sheep wouldn’t. But she’s run amuck, thinks she’s a sheep now, and she just hangs around all day with the flock.
Finally, we’ve got our little barn cat, Oreo, and our guardian livestock dogs, Maisy Girl and Sundance who help protect our animals.
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Pigs! We have nothing against them! We love a good pork shoulder BUT we after researching and knowing our amount of land may not sustain pigs, we’ve decided this will be best to keep off our homestead property for now. This thinking may change but it’s an animal we’d likely have to do a lot of feed supplementing and the cost-benefit analysis for us just isn’t there at this time.
Meat goats…jury is out on this one for the time being but I don’t want to say never. Our area has a diverse population so our return on investment has the potential to be GREAT on this! There is actually a goo demand for goat meat so who knows if we ever decide to introduce goats for either our consumption or as a supplemental income.
Cattle. We simply don’t have enough property to realistically sustain 1 or even 2 cows. We’d have to do significant supplementing and it’s not very cost effective for us, especially when we know a local farmer that we can purchase a full (processed) cow for at any time.
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I have some big dreams for the future in an effort to really push our family to be more self-sustaining and eating higher quality, healthy, organic food! Continuing to grow our flock and build on what we’re doing now with our current animals is a big part of that, of course, but growth is super important as well.
We’ve cleared land so properly fencing for rotational grazing is a top priority! Of course, this means seeding, cross fencing appropriately, and running more water lines to those pastures first is all built into that dream so it’ll be a multi-step process, and one that won’t happen over night. Learning big time patience in the process!
I also know that our garden for this year was just a starter garden so expanding that, building a greenhouse, and being more intentional with our layouts is a top, and more immediate priority since I’d love to be able to preserve enough food for a full year! I know we’ll still need to rely on the large grocery chains for things, but I want to get to a point where I know that a majority of our diet is sourced directly and treated with the utmost of care!
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I’ll bullet this out and break down further later, BUT in a nutshell, biggest lessons:
Homesteading is HARD work and not for the faint of heart. Not just the physical aspects but mental. We’ve lost quite a few animals to predators or caring for sick animals and it’s never easy.
Predators!!! We aren’t terribly far outside of a large city so I was shocked that we’d have a “friendly” neighborhood Bobcat, wild dogs, and wild looking hawks poaching our animals. We’ve take a lot of steps to deter these animals, but it took us about 6 months to really get it under control and our GLD (Guardian Livestock Dogs) have been a MAJOR help here.
Homesteading is hard - really hard, but it’s also been extremely fun and rewarding. We’re all learning to really appreciate our food and find joy in putting that work in after working an “office” job all week because we’re reaping the rewards and can taste it in the quality of our food.
Planning, planning, planning, and more planning, especially in the garden area is so important.
Mentorship and community has been our saving grace this past year. Finding blogs, online forums, and friends who are on the same journey as us has been the best way to learn, ask advice, and commiserate when something has gone terribly awry.
