Locked here in the dead of winter, with COVID lurking around for the second year, I find myself craving spring in a way I never have before. Last year was a huge year of growth for our family. Due to the early COVID food shortages we started seeing how fragile the food system is in America. We decided to start taking steps to being more self sustainable on a small scale. It was also something great to keep us occupied and learn something new while working alongside our children.
Like most new projects we at first wanted to go 110% all in and then learned very quickly we needed to make sure to first have good infrastructure in place before expanding into too many new things at once. We bought a set of new pullets to restart our flock (we lost our previous flock due to predators). We put some effort into updating our coop and fencing to make things a little safer for them. On a whim we purchased a Cornish cross meat chicken and 2 turkey poults. We purchased 20 more meat chickens shortly after. My husband (T) also let me get some bantams (mini chickens!!) for fun as well!
Next T built me some awesome raised gardens. I've tried to garden the past several years and never had success, we have very poor soil here. As a birthday gift my awesome in laws bought me a truck load of mushroom soil to fill in my gardens. I was so excited about the whole thing I started all my plants too early and had to redo most of them! Ah well put this in my live and learn bucket.
I also started raising meat rabbits last year. I know this one is hard for a lot of people but they're great for small spaces, they don't have huge expensive enclosure requirements and they're fairly low maintenance as live stock goes. A breeding trio, one male and two females, can produce 600lbs of meat in a year! We started out with babies in June and this week processed our first batch of home grown rabbit meat.
As part of our food growing endeavors we learned to process our own animals, mostly from reading and watching YouTube and I also learned to process and can or freeze our produce. I bought seconds from some of the local farms and canned them to help stock up our shelves as well.
This year I'm really looking to expand my garden and I'm already working on plans to make the layout better. The rabbits really fit in with our plans for this as well since their waste makes pretty much ready to use compost. I already purchased all my seeds for my plants. If you're looking for smaller packets in order to have a large variety of produce the dollar tree is great for this. They sell seeds for 4/$1 mix and match any variety. I stocked up and made a list actually planning out what needed to be started and when this year.
We also recently added a new female rabbit to our mix. Our 2 were producing nicely but we've had some friends interested in starting meat rabbits as well and we thought this would give us a chance to sell some and process the overages for ourselves.
I also want to either get or hatch some more chickens soon and we are debating adding a third pen. We currently have 2 pens, one for standard size chickens and one for the bantams. If we add a third we can have a pen for meat birds or a breeding project.
I currently have blue berry, strawberry and raspberry plants but we're considering adding in some fruit trees in the coming year as well. T also really wants some pigs! This last one seems to need the most investment as far as time and infrastructure and we want to make sure we do it right so we're not chasing pigs at 2 AM.
This time of year just feels so on hold like I can't wait for all the things spring and summer will bring. I know it's going to be more work, but it's also just something to hold our attention during all these weird times. While we started out last year just looking to make our food supply a little more stable we've come to really enjoy many of the things we did and I can't wait to see what we expand into next.
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