The snow and cold have set the stage for a cozy winter season here in Los Lunas, NM. As I sit at my desk looking out the window, my mind wanders to the near future when we’ll be planting a garden again. We put our house on the market hoping to sell and purchase a larger tract of land outright and build a small eco-home or yurt, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards for us. I’m not disappointed in the least because our home truly is perfect for our family. Our main objective for selling was to become mortgage free. Now we need to reevaluate our priorities, and figure out how we can aggressively pay off our house early.
A part of homesteading is being able to affectively work full time from home. Our food allergy consulting business is coming along very nicely, and I’m very excited about all that we will be able to offer to those in need of support and assistance. We’ve received our certifications in food allergy management and special dietary needs, but we’ve postponed the rest of our training until the spring. Once we complete our training we will be able to train and certify restaurants, schools k-12, universities, colleges, and any other commercial food operation. Before that time approaches, however, we will be launching our business in January for one-on-one consultations and online training courses for families of newly diagnosed food allergic loved ones. Our hope is that our business will lead to full time work for both Dom and myself. Right now it’s a full time job just putting our company together. I’m on a huge learning curve, but I’m getting everything that I’ve been working on, done.
January will most likely be the target date for taking our house off the market, unless by some strange miracle, someone decides to buy it between now and then. After the house is taken off the market, we’ll start collecting materials to build our spring garden beds. I’ve posted about the kind of raised beds we’d like to install, (click here to read that post) but I haven’t talked about how we’ll be keeping animals again.
When we first started raising ducks and chickens, we only had three chickens, a rooster, and 30 ducks. The ducks were for eggs and meat, the chickens we raised just for the eggs. We also had three angora rabbits. We learned a lot about not only how to care for these animals, but also about the astronomical cost in feeding ducks. It was insane. We never liked the fact that we fed our animals commercially prepared feed, but we didn’t have a system in place that would allow us feed all our animals naturally.
So, we’ve decided this coming year that we would build a few different systems to support our new animals. I haven’t decided yet what kind of chickens, ducks, turkeys, and rabbits (and whatever else catches my eye) we’ll be getting, but we will be purchasing them in large quantities. I’m talking at least 100 or more chickens (both meat and egg birds), 50 or more ducks, an insane amount of meat rabbits, and turkeys will probably be the only bird that we put a small number on.
The system we’ll be using for the chickens and turkeys is a compost yard, and a series of chicken tunnels, where chickens and turkeys will be
able to roam the property within a tunnel system, keeping them out of my gardens, but giving them access to plenty of bugs, weeds and other little goodies in the soil.
There’s an area on the south side of our property that we’re eyeing up as a potential place. This particular area has a strip of ground that can’t be used because of our septic leach field. This leach field will be kind of a buffer zone between the chickens, turkeys and sheep.
We want to plant the leach field with wild flowers, and prairie grasses, as a way to keep weeds to a minimum. The chickens won’t be on the leach field at all. I felt this would be the most appropriate place to put 100 plus chickens and other birds since there aren’t any immediate neighbors right next to us. There are neighbors right across the street in two directions, but my most immediate neighbor shares a fence with us, and I don’t think they would appreciate hearing chickens and roosters being social all day long.
The photo below is of the area we’re looking to put this large chicken yard, it’s about 60′x 30′ total. This photo was taken a few years back, and Dom was preparing the foundation for the greenhouse…which ultimately blew over and had to be relocated:
It’s a very large area, but with added tunnels along the perimeter of our property, and everywhere, the amount of freedom they would have will be amazing! Here’s a photo of what chicken tunnels look like:
So, with tunnels leading from their coop, to the compost yard, and all over the property, we won’t need to ever purchase feed for them, and we’ll be able to provide our neighbors and the farmers market with truly organic healthy eggs at an affordable price.
I’ll post more on our spring plans in the next few days. I know our blog has suffered a bit because I haven’t been writing as frequently, but I will pick up with posts in the near future!
I’ve done quite a bit of research on how we can keep ducks without buying feed for them, and I’ll update with that post very soon. I miss having ducks so much, and I can’t WAIT till we can order more.
2014 will prove to be an extremely productive and amazing year for us. I’m looking forward with great excitement and anticipation.
