Opinions Wanted: Reasonable income for Homesteading family of 3

If you have everything paid for (no debt) you would be shocked at how little you need to live on. My only bills are about $50\month for electricity (also runs water pump), $30\month for cell phone and $70\month for car insurance. I make more money off of my market garden than I spend at the grocery store. I also get about half my meat from hunting. I spend about $120\month on fuel for my vehicle.

I do not carry health insurance. That would cost me more than all the rest of my bills combined. It is a risk, but one I am willing to live with.

As for retirement, I spent most of the money I had saved for retirement buying the place. I plant fruit and nut trees every year. They will help fund my retirement income. If SSI is still around, then I will be fine. If not, I'll find a way to get by.

I agree with the posters who say you aren't going to grow your own food and see a huge savings on your food bill unless you choose your battles very carefully. For example, planting blueberry bushes is an upfront investment, but they'll produced berries for decades.. and if you plant enough of them, make you some pocket change. Strawberries are another investment crop that can pay off. Apple trees? Not as much as you'd expect. You're better off hunting down wild apple trees.

I realized today, as I was pulling rhubarb out of the patch, that we eat, year 'round, something we're produced on our property every day. And I could probably slash our monthly food expenses in half if I bought what we grow at the supermarket. Some people may be saving money, but we're not among them.

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Icelandic Sheep and German Angora Rabbits

We are in Connecticut and the taxes alone on the place we are about to move into are $6652/year. I am also trying to find a way to get out of my stress (management) job and find something with less hours at work and with out the commute. Right now I am commuting 50 miles each way and in a month that will go up to 100 miles each way. I am also looking at ways to supplement my income even more. I figure in the warm months I can sell what I grow and make on our land, and in the winter months I have always done well on ebay. The more $ I can earn working for myself and not someone else, the better. More time at home with my family makes me so happy.
There are always ways to make some extra money. Sell homemade desserts, preserves, eggs, vegetables, plants, flowers, so many choices.

We have been picking the 'wild' apples. They are mostly crab apples in this area. Very few of them are edible without a lot of sugar added. The apples are tiny and it takes a lot to fill a bucket.

The Dw has been cooking them down to produce pectin, but we are not big jelly eaters, so we really do not need much pectin.

I am not much in favour of the wild crab apples. Though we have a lot of them around. The freeway has a lot of crab apples growing in the medians and triangles at each on-ramp and off-ramp.

However our pigs do like crab apples, so we end up feeding them to the hogs.



We planted 16 apple trees last year. Two groups: one group is summer-fall varieties, the second group are fall-winter varieties. Both groups include three varieties, one high sugar variety and two sour varieties. I expect to produce about 200 gallons of hard cider each year when they finally come into their production.

If properly pruned and cared for apples trees should produce a great deal.

Don't forget maple trees. We tapped some of our maple trees for the first time this spring. and we produced some syrup.

It was fun, and for us a new experience. Now that we have done it, we plan to continue tapping the maples each spring, more and more.

Maple syrup is just one of those items on a shopping list. Most folks today buy Carmel sugar syrups like "Aunt Jemima" so they are not using a maple product at all.

Now that we have produced some maple syrup, we sent bottles as gifts to each of the relatives. If it does not lower your grocery bill, at least it can lower your gift shopping budget.




This year, we just finished planting a walnut, a basket willow, a pecan, a ginkgo, a mulberry, 2 cherry trees, 2 chestnuts, 2 pears, 2 hazelnuts, 2 apricots, 2 elderberries, 2 witch-hazels, and 4 plum trees.

Obviously our selections were limited due to the local climate. However we expect that once they are all in production, the yield should have a remarkable effect on our lifestyle, our road side stand, and our budget.

Overall trees are a much more efficient crop then annual veggies and fruits. Plant once and they produce for decades. They reach deep into the ground to mine their own minerals, and they do not require as much soil nutrients to be added as do annual crops.

We are doing it all 'organic', so we mulch them. Mulching around a fruit tree with a thick layer of woodchips each year should provide all the nutrients the soil needs. I get woodchips for free around here. So the cost is low.


Labour intensiveness:
I built raised-beds for our fruit and medicinal herb trees. I built them once. I selected tree varieties once. I planted once.

With our garden, we prep the beds every year. We shop for seeds every year. We buy seeds every year. We plant indoors every year. We transplant the crops outside every year. Our garden requires intensive weeding and watering every year.

Our trees will require pruning, which produces firewood.

Once established our trees should water themselves.

In comparison we see fruit trees as far less labour intensive than having an annual garden.




Perennial crops like you listed [Blueberries, strawberries, and rhubarb] are nice.

We also have raised beds with garlic and onions which produce very nicely. Four beds of garlic varieties and 2 with onions. We harvest in September, dry and sort the bulbs. Turn over the beds and they are replanted within about 2 weeks. Doing this should produce a nice selection of hanging garlic ropes.

You should research Carbon/Nitrogen ratios. You need to be aware that wood chips and sawdust are very high in carbon which takes years to break down, and are very low in NPK. You say that woodchips provide all the nutrients the soil needs, wood products contain very little, and usually actually draw nutrients OUT of the soil to feed the decomposition process.

Every time you add wood chips to the soil the bacteria that breaks down the wood has to draw nitrogen out of the soil to decompose that wood, causing a lack of N. Without an added source of N, either chemical fertilizer or a "hot" manure, added along with the carbon material (wood, straw, etc) you are depleting the soil Nitrogen and your plants will suffer and perhaps die, more probably have little to no growth.

Wood chips or sawdust are great for keeping down weeds, but do nothing to provide nutrients for growth. Also depending on the source of the chips, they may be changing your soil PH. Pine chips are highly acidic, good for blueberries and such, but bad for most other fruits and veggies.

Don't forget to chase the pH bubble, up and down.

I grew up on a commmercial farm. My family are mostly farmers. They all spend a lto of time chasing the pH bubble up and down. And payign for petro-chems to pump into their soil.

When I did my Horticulture A.S. these were all important: pH, NPK, and carbon-Nitrogen ratios.

And I do appriciate the GI bill for making that education available to me.

However now I have seen that there are other methods which also work.

With organic methods you focus more on the health of the organisms living in the soil. Not so much on how many petro-chemicals you can pump into the soil.

Short life span crops may need high levels of nutrients in ready access. However woody crops reach deeper for their nutrients and do not require high consentration NPK and micro-nutrients.

Woodchips are made of wood, a tree is wood, woodchips have everything that a tree needs. Healthy micro-organisms and fungi in the woodchips can be breaking them down and supplying the soil nicely.

Perhaps you should research organics

Or not, it is entirely up to you [and how much you wish to remain dependant upon petroleum products].

ET1SS,

I was trying to point out to you what you already should know, that without a N source such as fertilizer or manure you are depleting your soil N for as long as it takes to break down those chips..if you keep adding chips yearly then that N stays unavailable long term because it takes longer than a year to break them down.

Yes I know all about organic farming....

We import about 4-6 TONS of manure per week from local horse boarding facilities near here to spread on our farm. We haul it in an 8x16 and two 7x18 trailers, with 2' sides. When we get home we spread that "by hand" on our hayfields using an old fashioned pitchfork! Yes it does contain some woodchips as bedding but the manure is so hot that it also has all the N needed to break them down, so that not only are we not drawing N from the soil, but are adding organic matter (chips) and NPK in large quantities, 10-15 tons per acre per year, some fields as high as 20 tons per year. Manure is nature's fertilizer, containing organic matter, fertility nutrients, and improving the tilth of the soil.

We only use chemical fertilizer on leased land as it is a year to year basis and I don't see the sense in putting down a 'long term' material like manure on land that I may not have next year. Our farm is primarily non-chemical, most of our fields have never seen chemical fertilizer, and we have been able to go from broomstraw and fields so thin you couldn't tell where you cut, to fields yielding 80-90 square bales per acre per cut! But to do this with only wood chips is nonsensical! You'll lose all your soil N for many years as the bacteria needs it to feed the decomposition.

PH is very Important. We had fields full of broomstraw with a ph of 4-5 ten years ago. Now with no lime, just heavy applications of manure, the ph is between 6 and 6.5. With no reseeding the fields are now full of good grasses and clovers and medic, with just that ph adjustment and fertility improvement. But woodchips would maintain a low ph, perhaps even reducing it further as pine is about ph 4. Aside from a few certain plants, this reduced ph will stifle the growth of most plants.

You hit the nail on the head when you said "woodchips have everything a tree needs." Yep, and manure has everything grasses, shrubs, and clovers need! God's cycle, tree matter falls to feed the trees, animal poop falls to feed the grasses and low growing plants!

By the way, I didn't go to any school or get government money to learn how to do this....
Trial and error with good results, combined with the great and wonderfully informative WEB!! And the knowledge that if my 'methods' didnt work, I wouldn't have money to pay next months bills! Feed the soil, which in turn feeds your plants.

This is what they taught in a class that I took.

Plants eat last.

On the GOOD side, when you add high-carbon things as a mulch EVERY year, the bottom of the mulch will be releasing the good stuff because it is fully rotted and it rains. The good stuff washes down into the soil while the top has barely begun to break down. Eventually, anyways. This stage takes years when you are using wood chips.

On the BAD side, it takes wood chips years to break down to that point, so it will be a few years before there is any release of nutrients at all.

In other words, once you have fertile soil and a lower level of rotted wood then a yearly addition of wood chips will maintain it and even slowly increase fertility. But, your first couple of years of applications of wood chips will pretty much kill the weeds and not much else.

IF you mix the chips into the soil it will even decrease fertility, as it takes nitrogen to make the wood chips rot and so there will be not enough to feed the plants: wood chips will take the lions share! Wood chips belong on top and not mixed in!

People who BEGIN a mulch with wood chips are advised to fertilize as well, as so many feeder roots are near the surface of the soil and the wood chips will take the nitrogen out of the surface for the next few years! (And then release it).

Manure, of course, is immediately available.

Yea, guaranteed to break

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The 7th Day is still God's Sabbath
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Layton Hollow ADGA Nubians
Taking Reservation for 2015!

My advice is to get the farm and keep working your day job until it is apparent that you are making enough money from the farm, the farm is paid for, and the day to day reality of farm life is really what you want to do. You can probably pay someone to do the grunt work needed to start the operation up for a fraction of what it would cost you to do it.

Most of what I produce here for us is animal foods. Eggs, milk and meat. We definitely save money. It does cost time however. Especially the milk. But my goats can pay for themselves, even produce profit even with me having to buy their grain and alfalfa. I'm working towards not having to buy the alfalfa, but it's not at all worth me trying to grow the oats for them. My goats take up a good 2 hours per day. But I enjoy them and the milk we get is FAR superior to what is in the store. I am able to sell the kids for a good price and sell milk.

The chickens in the summer don't really even have to be fed. They get plenty of high protein food eating bugs and legumes in the field. They also keep our tick problem at bay.

The beef only costs me in the loose minerals I buy them. We have a lot of clover in our field and it puts the pounds on them quick. Plus, having horses in the field at the same time keeps the intestinal parasites down for both species.

What you need is you land paid for, and enough of it.

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The 7th Day is still God's Sabbath
ICOG7.ORG
Layton Hollow ADGA Nubians
Taking Reservation for 2015!