sustainability Archives - That Homestead

6 Easy Ways to be More Sustainable

Homesteading is for everyone! As a brand new homesteader, I would like to pass on how easy it is to get started. When you look on Youtube or other blogs, it is easy to get overwhelmed. Some of these people are running full time farms while you barely know how to keep a cactus alive on your countertop. Don’t fret. I started the same way. In this blog, I want to show you 6 ways to start off a small homestead. The cool thing is, that some of these things can be done from an apartment! Who knew!? All you have to remember is not to think too big. goals are great, but you also have to be realistic. If you go out and get 6 pigs, a cow, a goat, chickens, rabbits, and 400 linear feet of beans, you might fail. Start small and expand accordingly.

Aquaponics. Although I have not tried this yet, I plan on it this winter. If you don’t know what it is, start here. This is a great demo on a small scale aquaponics system. If I were you, I would steal his idea and run with it. I plan on building a small countertop version for my herbs. well, I should say, my wife’s herbs. Is there anything cooler than fresh herbs that are also helping to keep a fish alive? I don’t know, but probably not. This is one of those small scale sustainable practices that would be great if you had an apartment.
Chickens. I have not started my chicken farm yet, but it is next on the list for this year. I have never head chickens, but I know people with less know-how than my left foot that haven’t killed their egg chickens yet. This makes me hopeful that the endeavor will not be too out of reach. If you go to Far North International, you can find some pretty small, fairly cheap chicken coupes to get started. I have seen people in very suburban areas raise chickens for eggs with small coupes like these. If you are a little more handy and would like to do it on a larger scale like I’m planning on, there are many other ways to get started. This guy is one of my favorite homesteaders, and that link is a good start for a detachable chicken tractor/ coupe. I’m going to satellite for a second to tell you that he is one of my favorite homesteading YouTubers. Only watch if you don’t mind someone being way smarter than you. He has so many great ideas and explains them all very well in his videos. There are a few cool things about raising egg chickens. Eating fresh eggs (of course), selling extra eggs, you can feed chickens your table scraps, you can compost chicken manure, chickens eat ticks and other bugs, and they are just funny as the day is long to watch.
Rabbits. Obviously my favorite. This was the beginning of my homestead obsession. I don’t even remember what got me into it, but these guys have the lock down on information on getting started. It is not very in depth, but is a perfect overview on what obstacles you are up against and when they will happen. I would personally recommend that everyone start with meat rabbits on their homestead. They are so easy. All I do right now is go out every morning, fill up the water bottles, and put food in the feeders. That, of course is the bare minimum, but it’s all you HAVE to do. once your rabbitry is up and running it pretty much runs itself, other that any unforeseen hurdles. But if you are alive, hurdles will happen…so you might as well also have fresh healthy meat for your family. Obviously there will be more work involved the larger your rabbitry gets, or during harvest times.
Garden. I have always found this one easy, but I have always had a garden growing up. Don’t get me wrong, there have been a few years where I have produced nothing from my garden due to disease and weather. Lucky for you, you obviously read blogs and peruse the internet for information, so when it comes to disease and weather issues, you’ll be ahead of it.
Recycling. I live in Michigan, so this may be a little more state specific for the purposes that I am going after. I hate recycling at the road. I have one of the tiniest bins every created to hold an entire weeks worth of plastics, paper, cardboard, metal, etc. I have to PAY for the tiniest bin in the world. Why am I paying to recycle? I refuse. No pun intended. In Michigan, we have scrap yards galore. All of my metal is sorted, cleaned, and taken in. They pay ME for my garbage. Many places will take plastics for money as well. As for paper and cardboard, we compost a lot of it. Whatever we don’t compost, we burn. The only thing that gets thrown away is meat scraps, which can be fed to come animals if you have pigs or chickens. Bango jango, I will not ever pay anyone to recycle anything. Ever.
Composting. Composting is a great way to be sustainable at your homestead. It and recycling really go hand in hand, as it is just another form of recycling. We put all of our green garbage in our compost pile. There are a lot of different ways to compost. You can get worm bins, compost bins, or just put it all in a big pile like I do. I will eventually get into worm composting, but for now My way is working just fine.

I hope that these 6 tips helped you gather a few ideas on getting started toward sustainability. After all, that is the key to homesteading. The beauty is that most of this can be done with little or no property. It is a great feeling to know that your home is running clean, and it is my pleasure to help you in your journey to sustainability. Don’t forget to subscribe so that you don’t miss new blog posts!

Paradigm Shift

There has been a paradigm shift in our mindsets around consumption over the years. People are relying less and less on GMO’s and more and more on local food. From backyard gardens to farmers markets, people have had enough of big government farming.

It is my goal here to instill a sense of pride in your neighbor with the annoying chickens. To have you smile instead of dry heave at the smell of the compost pile across the street. I want you to understand the hard work, dedication, and fear that goes with full time farming on a small scale. It’s not because I wholly disagree with industrialism. God made us to be ever striving to reach our potential. He made us in his image, and he is The Creator, after all. It’s because these small scale farmers and homesteaders feel a sense of pride in something pure. Pure food. Humane food. Healthy bodies. Helping the world to be a little more sustainable. These are all things that God had in mind when he made this place.

It’s very interesting to me how people’s mindsets can change so quickly and to such a degree. How few years ago was it when we grew up on family farms? Men were trained by their fathers and grandfathers. Women were trained by mothers and grandmothers. Family was more important than 401k, and our food was from dirt to table.

Fast forward to now and you wouldn’t know it was the same place. We slave at a job to pay for a car…which we need just so we can get to our job. We buy big houses and big televisions and our children are raised by IPads. Men are not men and women are not women. Our kids are surrounded by filth and hate at every turn, and rarely have any sort of a family structure to rely on.

I don’t know about you, but I get real depression if I think about it for too long. I find that I have to distract myself from the reality of the world so that I don’t lose all hope in it. “For all that is in the world-the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life-is not from the father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.” 1 John 2:16-17 ESV. Our world, as a whole, is headed the way of worldly desires. It is up to us to act singularly against the grain of the flesh. We are light and truth to people living in a world of darkness and deceit.

The Face of Food

In this section of That Homestead, we will be featuring you! Are you a local CSA or homesteader? Do you sell eggs, chicken, produce, beef, or anything organic? I want to hear from you!

I want to feature only the most passionate of homesteaders here. This is a place for the elite. The ones who said “enough is enough” with leaving their families in the dust while they worked 70 hours a week. The ones who said “enough is enough” to ingredients in their food that they can’t even pronounce. The ones who’s friends told them they were nuts.

If this is you, contact me to set up an interview and we will show the world what it’s like to be sustainable.

4 Easy Steps to Starting Seeds in Eggshells

There are many ways to start your seeds before planting season, but here is one that we have found helpful. You can start your seeds in eggshells in 4 easy steps.

Eat eggs (preferably from your own chickens)
Save the eggshells and cartons
Add soil and seed.
Just add water!

It really is that easy. When we eat our eggs, we don’t wash them or anything. Just put the two halves inside each other, back into the hole in the egg carton that you pulled them from, back in the fridge with your uneaten eggs. We eat a lot of eggs around here, so we start saving shells 2-3 weeks before we want to plant (depending on how many seedlings we’re starting). The ones we don’t save go to the compost pile.

Sadly, I don’t have established compost yet, so we buy potting soil. It’s whatever. BUT we put a rabbit pellet in every eggshell with our seeds. Rabbit manure only needs to dry for a week or so and it can be put directly into soil.

We use our rabbit tractors to give our plants some sun in the early spring.

After that, water like you would any other seedling and bada bing, bada boom. You nailed it.

The one thing we are going to try next year (if the greenhouse isn’t built yet) is to buy some of those plastic lids that you would put on aluminum trays and cover the cartons like a mini greenhouse. Right now we carry them in and out everyday to get sunlight and it’s kind of a drag. The worst part is the one night your two year old has a melt down and you forget to bring them in is the one night you get frost and kill your poor little plants. That’s just no bueno.

If you have any other ways or ideas to start seeds I would love to hear them! Leave them in the comments!

Breeding Rabbits

Yes it’s a little odd. I know. But it’s a necessary step in producing more rabbits. Lucky for us, “breeding like rabbits” is all too true.

Step 1: Always take the female to the male. Females are more territorial, and males have less of an attention span. Sounds a little like real life for humans too. Anyway….if you take the male to the female, he will spend more time smelling around than bumping uglies. Always always always take the female to the male.

Step 2: Light a candle, put on some mood music, and watch it all unf…oh, never mind. It’s already done. It will not take much time out of your day to make sure that you get a successful breeding. When I bred mine, I watched the buck knock out two quick ones within a minute, watched for a couple of minutes, and then witnessed a third go-round. There are a lot of different ways to check for a successful breeding, but I like this hands off approach. Make sure they have three tries and you’re probably good to go.

Between 10-14 days you can palpate the females to check for pregnancy. I haven’t figured out how to do it yet, so watch all of the same YouTube videos I watched and see if you can. I waited the 29 days and woke up to exponentially more rabbits than I had the night before. Sometimes the suspense is half the fun.

The males can breed once a day successfully. I can attest since both of my does had kits and they were bred one day after the other. The only thing I noticed was that the male had a little harder time focusing on the task at hand. Maybe I’ll get him some Gatorade next time…

You can apparently re-breed the females 2-3 weeks after birth. I will keep you posted on how this plays out. I plan on breeding on week 2 to the exact day to see how it goes. I’ll be looking for ease of breeding, wellness of mama, and wellness/number of kits comparatively in the next litter.

If you have any other questions or comments please feel free!

How to Build a Rabbit Tractor (Video)

Sorry about the video quality. YouTube channel coming soon. I will have a more involved post on building these in the future with full dimensions. Hope this is helpful!

I was worried about the poultry mesh because it’s so flimsy. It has been just over a month and it is still holding out. I don’t really believe that it will work out, but it’s pennies compared to the price of the welded wire, so I will probably stick with it.

You can watch the video here!

What Kind of Rabbits for Meat?

So, this should be a relatively short post. I thought that, as it was my first step to starting my rabbitry, I should explain what I was looking for in my meat rabbits.

I did a lot of research and eventually landed on New Zealand white rabbits. Don’t ask me why the color is a thing…I don’t know. I honestly think it’s only a thing for show rabbits. Please comment if I am wrong, because I would love to know. I DO know that they come in all sorts of colors. Seems to be irrelevant, but all of the legitimate breeders seem to have whites, so that’s what I got.

As far as breeds go, I was all geeked and ready for some Flemish Giants until I did some reading. Yes they are huge. No, the turn around is not very fast. They put all of the first bit of time (and your food) into bone structure. This may be ok with you, but along with having home grown meat, I am also looking at it from a cost standpoint. Brass tax dictates that longer time from birth to table=more money. I know a lot of people breed New Zealand/ Californian crosses, but after much research on that, some people who are much smarter than I am were noticing that after only a few generations, the cross did not make any difference in the rabbit quality. That only means that they were having to re-cross their rabbits. Again, this may be fine with you if you have a lot more time than I do and are good at record keeping. At my homestead, I only have to keep track of one breed of rabbits. Obviously cross breeding throws more of a curve your way. If rabbits are your hobby, go for it. If rabbits are purely food, I say pick a breed and stick with it. I honestly did not do much more research than that on breeds because the majority of people eating their rabbits -that I found on the internet- were breeding New Zealands.

After you’re done brand shopping, you need to find a breeder. Gee whiz, I hope it’s easier for you than it was for me. Craigslist ended up being the winner for me. Once you find bunnies in your area, make sure you’re allowed to see where they live and that you get a pick of the rabbits. Anyone who won’t show you living conditions probably isn’t a trustworthy breeder. When you’re looking for breeders, make sure they are healthy. No eye or nasal discharge, no poop stuck to their fur, healthy front teeth (top overlapping the bottom, and straight). So when I got my rabbits all of this was good…but one of my females seems to have a bad case of vertigo. Terrible balance. Oddly enough, she just miscarried 6 kits. So other than the obvious, don’t take a rabbit if something seems off. It’s your money and you’re banking your breeding on it.

Short and sweet. I know that when you start looking for rabbits it may seem overwhelming. You’ll be fine. It’s really all common sense stuff out of the gate. There are sooooooo many people out there with blogs and YouTube channels, and opinions, but sometimes the majority rules. A lot of people are doing this stuff, so if it seems to be working for them, it may be a good start for you. You can always add/change/delete later. Start small, do your research, and I have faith that you will be a rockstar.

Our Rabbitry

This was the first step in our homestead (not including our garden). Yes…the rabbits were names from Frozen (two and a half year old daughter). Rocky was named after a goat that my daughter fell in love with while we were watching Living Traditions Homestead on Youtube.

I started the rabbitry about a month ago and had NO IDEA what I was doing. I watched countless hours of YouTube videos before I got started and I’m still figuring out a lot as I go along. I will tell you this…It’s a good start. If you’re even a little bit handy and have/ can acquire some basic tools, you will be off and running to start raising meat rabbits.

Here’s how I started:

First, I had to find rabbits. Holy crap was this a chore. It has honestly been the hardest part so far. I literally sent 35 emails within a 15 minute break at work to different rabbitrys from different sites, I called, I texted, and I Googled and FINALLY found one that had some rabbits available. I ended up getting two females and a male because she gave them to me for $20 apiece instead of $25. This step took me about a month. We live in Michigan, so I think this might have been due to the frigid winter we had. I keep reading that the males go sterile while it is too hot or too cold. This makes sense, because every time I got ahold of someone, they didn’t have any rabbits “at this time.” What a drag…anyway…

Second, I built two rabbit tractors. I put the two females in one and the male in the other. This saved me a lot of money in buying rabbit pellets from TSC because they fill up on as much grass as they can. I put the females together because apparently the females can get very territorial. Cool beans, everyone was happy….

Third, I bred the females. This was honestly a lot easier than I expected. Always take the female to the male. The male can successfully breed once a day. Easy peasy, my girls were both knocked up.

Fourth, I started the lean-to. I had 28 ish days to get a shelter up for my breeders. I picked a good spot in the shade (rabbits don’t do well in heat), and out of the wind (rabbits are fine in the winter as long as they are dry and out of the wind). I had plenty of old treated lumber lying around and miles of tin that I bought for a song. I built mine 16×6. 16′ because that’s how long the existing shed was, and 6′ because tin is 3′ wide, so there is no waste. I should be able to fit 10 breeders in here very comfortably. It will have a cement floor for easy cleaning, because I plan on using/ selling the rabbit manure. More on rabbit manure uses in a separate post.

Fifth, I built my hanging cages. I built two for my females so far at 3′ wide, 2′ deep, and 18″ high. I’m thinking that the cages for the males will be 2’x2’x16″ so that there is no waste on my cage wire. Also, the males don’t require nesting boxes and won’t have up to 12 other bunnies in the cage with them, so they don’t need all of that real estate. If you catch on to anything around here, it may be that everything I do has some sort of electrical components holding it together. I hung my cages with EMT straps and blue #10 THHN. There are infinite ways to hang these things, but mine was free because I have this stuff everywhere.

Sixth, and finally as of this moment, was the nesting boxes. I believe I made them 8″x24″ by 10″ high. I used a bunch of scrap pine that my brother used to trim his house. I literally pulled it out of my fire pit with one of those light bulb moments. I have to keep remembering that part of homesteading is letting nothing go to waste…anyway, sorry to satellite on you there, they are not of uniform size.

This was my order of operation. It was very time crunched because after my long wait to find rabbits I kind of gave up. Naturally, when I gave up I finally got an email, ran to get three rabbits, and subsequently had no place for them to live. For this reason, I believe it to be a good order to work in, as it provides all of your parts and pieces as you will be needing them. I will eventually post more to the separate parts of this to show you in more detail how why why I built things the way that I did, but hopefully this gives you a good jumping off point. I highly recommend Living Traditions Homestead if you are going to start raising meat rabbits. She has a great video series just for you!

All of my welded wire for tractor floors and hanging cages was ordered from Far North International. They are a great company to work with and I haven’t been disappointed in any of their products yet. On top of that, they were cheaper than TSC and they shipped all of my stuff crazy fast.

Conduit storage…
Into hanging cage rabbitry!
Rabbit tractor/ greenhouse?
Rocky
Elsa
Anna
Our first kits!