First Year Challenges Building a 14 Acre Homestead (Year End Review)

in today's video we're going to talk about the challenges that we faced growing our new Homestead this year the first challenge was actually finding the homestead the entire year of 2021 we put in an offer on eight different properties and we got outbid on all of them it was it was crazy time you know some of you guys know but at the same time we knew we wanted a bigger property because we outgrew our one and a half acres we started this year by putting our one and a half acre Homestead on the market and selling it and at the same time buying this 14-acre property even though we were a small Homestead we still had a lot of stuff and moving all of that was a challenge anyone that we're trying to get a head start of our move we needed to rent a storage unit when we actually get our keys this week we are only going to have about two days to completely move out the issue is is that we have nowhere to put all of our stuff Bernice how you guys doing fuzzy muggins it was nice having this chicken coop but I think on the next property I need to make some portable chicken tractors for our egg layers foreign ER of the house that we just bought is going to let us use the horse barn to put some of this stuff in there we're still boxing up some things inside the house all right we're packing up our pantry it's kind of hard to pack up the pantry because we still have a few days left in the house and naturally we like to cook our own food instead of going out to eat so we have to get into that mindset of like we're packing we're moving I wish we could take some of our soil with us but you know it almost feels like we are starting over from scratch again we are leaving this greenhouse that I made we are leaving the veggie washing station what are we keeping in here all your pots all my pots right now we're just kind of going through stuff that's it this DIY Greenhouse taught us a lot still going strong the biggest thing we have to haul on a trailer is these chicken tractors people people hey Ben hey Jason can I borrow your trailer yeah sure I could have left these chicken tractors for the new owners but I also felt like we needed chicken tractors I don't know if I'm going to end up using the same design you know on our new property but this is going to give us a head start [Music] okay let us leave our chicken tractors here and this is just the start of it guys the start of starting to move our stuff out from our place and into our new home so I actually ordered a smaller U-Haul truck but they didn't have any so they gave me a free 26 foot upgrade you think all that stuff will fit in there I think all our stuff and more I hope so huge but we need to take some more of our Outdoor Equipment out our portable cool room we need to take sandbags the pig shelter we sold I feel like it's a lot harder to move within North Carolina than it was to move across the country one we have more stuff we actually have basically a mini Farm out there that we have to move what we're keeping to the new Homestead we still need to box up our chickens and take them on the road [Music] oh it's Hill man that did not work we're gonna let this dry up today we might try it again today or tomorrow we're kind of waiting on a specific date where we could actually move in we're on one and a half acres here and I feel like we are fairly a minimal Homestead fragile I mean as minimal of a homestead you could possibly get all right let's try this again it's towards the end of the day it's a little bit drier not that much drier but we need to get these things out of here [Music] [Applause] and for my next stunts all right I've been putting off packing up my 12 by 10 shed the shed was not here when we bought this property I brought this shed in and I did not build it but I'm also not taking it with us I never got around to building those steps this shed's not only been a place where I make stuff but also fix things when we first moved here I really didn't have this many tools Bernice we're going home Bernice she has food on her beak Freddy hold on Bernice we're gonna go home [Music] made it home all right chickies come on it's a little bit Bittersweet we're happy to leave and to move on to a bigger place but at the same time there's so many beautiful memories that we've built here in this house and it's kind of sad to leave but we're still excited to go foreign of six years is empty we're gonna strap it a couple of times this is a chicken tractor on steroids Billy oh we can't forget the ham this is the last thing and then on 2196 years since leaving California to start this homesteading journey we sell our one and a half acre Homestead the homestead that we built from nothing and that taught us so much in El Paso Texas eating our lunch are we having fun without me [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] this mobile in this land was vacant for a whole year so nobody wanted this place this place was never meant to be our forever home but rather a place that was going to teach us show us how to grow food and build stuff in a completely different environment I mean we really didn't know if we could make this life work for us I left a comfortable job and a big house and we moved just to see what would happen we were all in together as a family and we are leaving it better than how we found it we are now ready to start all over again on more land and bigger dreams foreign it feels so weird to coming from one and a half acres to coming to 14 acres you know just having the mindset that yeah hey we can spread out you know we're not so like contained in a small area we have a forest I can't believe we have an actual Forest a lot of thorny bushes here Beyond this horse fencing is the property kind of goes in an L-shaped and it goes that way and if you go further enough you'll hit the creek [Music] one of the things on our checklist for a property for our one and a half acres that we just sold and this one was access to water this is a little bit bigger than our previous Creek it's really hard to say what animals we're gonna get first you know we still have our egg-laying chickens um of course we're still going to do meat chickens no matter what because I feel like we should be here at least maybe a year to kind of see how the land is as far as water wind how much it rains and stuff like that before we can actually do stuff but I know that I also want to do stuff now there's an old dishwasher which is on the other side of the kitchen I sure sure why on the other side of this wall is the kitchen I'm thinking on this wall I want to tear it down and that would open up this whole room and make it into one giant room with the kitchen and the dining room so no heating no AC it has some window ACS but they don't work either the wood paneling I think has got to go one of the things I'm excited about is that it actually has a basement our freezers actually have a home they're not going to be in our house I mean this could be a root cellar maybe this week has been a week full of just moving as pretty much as fast as we possibly could and also having family coming out and friends coming out helping us also helped tremendously the first week was really all about just trying to move in here but it's already been a week since we've been here and we need to move these chickens so I guess you could say this is our official move with the chicken tractor ever on this property Freddy's Bernice trying to find our way here guys on this new land and trying to figure that out of you know where we're gonna put these chickens we're gonna move them to I mean I have to walk down here to get the feed yeah Freddy good morning today was probably the first day I actually could breathe and actually think and actually sit down and just take in uh what we are starting here all right my friend Jonah just loaded up the skag the pastures have been way over grazed and really compacted with the horses that were on here I mean very compacted it's like a desert and I believe they had donkeys as well lots of these Briars over there too and so with these Briars I plan on just chopping it down with the mower it's all these little patches of thorny bushes not sure how long this is gonna take me I'm hoping it's just gonna take me the day uh but you know we got probably about 10 acres of these bushes as much as I dislike mowing the lawn driving this skag actually makes it kind of fun because it goes to like I think 16 miles per hour man this thing is fast so I'm trying to go slow but it's hard because you just like it just wants to go [Music] my neighbor let me borrow this I guess you could say we're just trying to reclaim back our pasture land here so many thorny brambles man that's the reason why we're here we're gonna grow food we're gonna build stuff it's been neglected long enough finding somebody to hire to Bush Hog a place or to bring in a tractor to help me clear out some areas it's hard hard to find those people you know either I either find them and they say yeah and they don't show up or you just can't find them to even want to come or maybe they're like four months out all right this is the official start of chicken season Bernice hey we got some more Bernice's these are black australorps we have 40 of these and these are meat chickens these chickens were hatched on Tuesday morning and after they count them box them up they ship them out that day so by like five five thirty they're out the door ready to be shipped so then Wednesday today's Thursday so Thursday morning they called me up and said they're at our post office these guys beat us to it on our road trip this is our sixth year raising our own meat chickens they're alert they're moving they're acting like chickens after coming from McMurray Hatchery just a few days ago it's awesome to see him here and then my buddy Justin calls me up and says hey there's a farm going out of business they're a pasture-raised farm they're getting rid of all their animals they're selling everything oh man here we go here we go I wasn't planning on buying bigger animals this year where we're gonna stick with chickens maybe a couple pigs but here we were buying two steer and buying a breeding pair of Cooney coonies it was you had the biggest one of the biggest steers we had okay trying to Wrangle up our two beef cows beef steers I don't know so there's one more we need to get [Music] all right [Music] good to help [Music] all right now we gotta get our pigs okay this is the plan our plan is just to grab and lift you're all right [Applause] [Music] all right we're on our way home we did it we got him we got two pigs and two cows steers we just got back we're trying to utilize our Corral here come on come on there you go come on come on okay looking back on it now I felt like it was perfect timing you know if we hadn't moved to the new bigger property I wouldn't we wouldn't have got the stairs we maybe would have got the Kuni coonies because I think that by having kunikunis for a one and a half acre Homestead a smallish Homestead is perfect welcome home but we just moved to our new property right we're excited we want to do all the things all at once and I know it's so hard not to do that we're here like this is why we're here let's get the stairs let's get the pigs let's get more chickens let's do more workshops all right it's the next morning we were excited so excited last night I don't know if I even slept they're still sleeping you know I had a Google this morning how do cows sleep so apparently they sleep like this they do lay down at night I didn't know I didn't know this is going to be exciting guys we're going to be learning a lot of stuff here and we're going to be showing you guys what we learned as we go she's beating me she's running going from one and a half acres to 14 acres was a challenge I mean we have no like tractor or like side by side to move around in so the first couple months of doing chores of feeding the animals water running hoses everywhere we felt exhausted I had felt like I had ran a marathon but after a few months of living here you kind of get used to that you kind of get used to walking around all right I think we have a plan of action guys first thing we're gonna do with this house is rip up this carpet first we're going to start in this room we need to rip out this wallpaper another thing we wanted to do this year was renovate our home the home was built in the 60s and it definitely needed some updates because you could tell that nothing really has been done in the previous years Lorraine got all the wallpaper down look at that lots of wallpaper now we're taping up [Music] you know this is the start our first room painted look at this beautiful hardwood floor underneath why would we cover this well let's see if it's beautiful I'm sure it's got some spots but we could refinish it [Music] initially our house was the priority when we first moved in but now it has become less of a priority because one we have to grow our own food and we are renovating our old barn plus our house is actually not bad I mean it's just outdated in the seven months that we've lived here we painted one room and we ripped out all the carpet all right since we've been living here we've been thinking about it and thinking about it but we are deciding to tear down this wall every dinner that I sat down for the last 304 days since we've been here in this new house I stared at this window AC unit every single time foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign I'm gonna start in the hallway first and then work my way out into the dining area here guys compared to our kitchen the dark dungeon and the dark dungeon here but it you know what but it brightens up the kitchen like with this light on stove which needs to be cleaned some things that were important for us when moving onto a bigger property that we wanted to continue doing was doing uh the chicken processing Workshops the Hands-On workshops and also raising our own meat chickens because that was important to us we really like doing it and it became easy for us because we we've already done it before also this year I did a woodworking Workshop which I think it turned out really well and I like the fact that we also raffled off the chicken tractor after after we were done building it there it is awesome we grew about the same amount of meat chickens that we always have in the previous years which is about 160 chickens because we raised some for ourselves we give some away to our Workshop attendees and we raise some for family as well these chickens are a different breed you will not waste feed I mean you could spill on the ground and these chickens will find it and they will eat it all I don't want to just put it on the ground because you know poop they'll eventually find it come on guys it's in there there's more than one way to raise meat chickens you don't have to move them every single day in a chicken tractor you could just put a fence around them like this foreign I could not wait to take this for a test run I pulled it up our heels I did it with two hands I did it with one hand and overall I'm pretty happy with it I also built this cube with a mesh floor so that way when they poop when they're on their roosting bars it's fertilizing the grass in the beginning we used a lot of tarps and a lot of wood pallets and over the years I got tired of using those things as chicken coops it needs to look cool you can't just be functional it has to be both we have this outdoor shed guess I'm just going to be using it for feed for hay for straw it's like a storage area I mean I figure it's a kind of a central location from the whole property I guess if we can't get a tractor or side by side of the car is going to have to do I think the land is telling me that it wants to be a pond right here [Music] what I've noticed so far in the past oh so oh month when it rains heavily water just kind of pulls up like it doesn't seep through the ground what does that mean [Music] there's a lot of just random trees everywhere on this property I mean there's a lot of trees just growing in the barns a lot of these trees are growing into Barns and just like kind of weeds I guess you know they just kind of randomly popping up everywhere it's just never been maintained and so since we've been here only a couple months you know I've been trying to you know a little bit every week chop down some of this trees there's an old chicken coop here you know over six years ago when I was sitting in my office job this property right here is the property I thought that we would get at the time you know I figured we would have to get a property that's overgrown trees everywhere old buildings but the property we ended up getting six years ago was not that it was a one and a half acres it was the mobile and it was not overgrown now that I'm clearing out this property this is the property I had envisioned and I guess it just took six years to get it it's just really overgrown right here it's hard to get in so slowly been trying to cut it back from what I understanding from the neighbors is that this chicken coop and then this Barn over here used to be at a different property foreign [Applause] yeah definitely got a lot to do as far as clearing out stuff man but that on our previous one and a half acres we never really had an issue with Predators I mean we had a couple issues but it wasn't a big deal so I knew that probably out here we're gonna have some issues sooner or later they are going to find you the Predators will find your animals and they will want to eat them before you do they drug her out of that right here oh this is not good there's a leg that's what I'm saying this is like lion sound like you know they're gonna die there's death into farming and raising animals as we do this more and more we'll understand where our weak points are and those are the things that we're going to work on year after year after year and this will always be an ongoing battle with Critters trying to keep our animals safe and healthy and strong and trying to get to know our land and what other animals are here clearing our fence line and trying to reuse this horse fence that we have and just reclaim it because there's definitely overgrown and if I can reestablish that and just use what's there we can help with the Predator issue that can help you know if we if we charge it and energize it and then I think over time the fence is just going to evolve it's going to change I don't think it's going to stay how it is like a horse fence it's going to be more for you know pigs sheep cattle and like farm animals type things foreign [Music] and then we're gonna put fruit trees in there we have five apple trees here Billy from permanent pastures Farm gave us these so I guess you could say today we're planting our first Orchard it's gonna be every other tree apple and then on this side the middle two are gonna be apple and then that leaves us five more trees that we have to go out and buy how's that soil clay it's Sandy and clay [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right the first apple trees in good job Penelope [Music] what's up once we get soil we need to add soil on top of that and that's it all right that's it yeah one two three four five apple trees I'm picturing right here this time next year where we're gonna have apples guys on our property which is amazing to even think about we're still not done planting we needed some more trees in here but I like the spacing here you know maybe run some chickens in between maybe run our Kuni coonies with growing a homestead one of the things is the need of commercial type equipment this John Deere I mean let's be honest it's a it's a residential lawnmower coming from one and a half acres to now 14 acres this John Deere lawnmower is not cutting it anymore one of my big buys this year was definitely a bigger moment after the dealer left I cannot wait to take this thing out on the land comparing it to the skag that I borrowed from my friend I really couldn't tell the difference from the skag that I borrowed to this Gravely and I know that this mower is not a bush hog but I do have a lot of Briars here and I wanted a mower that could mow through that you also got to think of Dual Purpose we felt like with this type of mower we can use it as a mower and then also use it to pull stuff kind of use it as a side by side you know we could pull a cart with it we could you know shovel some wood chips and then pull it around so something that would take me probably an hour to do with the edger you know with my table saw blade at the end it's just taking me like hello a minute I called every local feed store that was near me and asked them if I can deliver a tote of feed to their feed store I got mostly no's I did call my local Tractor Supply and they said yes all right that's it guys 2 000 pounds of feed put some extra bags for turkey feed this is the back of Tractor Supply I'm gonna try to push it in with these connections first gate is actually in the way out of all the different ways that we tried to come up with to get this pallet off of this off the trailer like we came up with just getting the pallet jack the easy way yeah because I have concrete now so that helps using a pallet jack to unload that big tote from this trailer is not the way to go after buying over 6 000 pounds of feed like this we've come to find that the best way to do it is to use the pallet jack because we have concrete and then move the barrels to the trailer and then unload it just bucket by bucket into each metal Barrel that's the fastest way that's the safest way and it's the best way for us right now in just two months of living on the new property we have a farm these cows want to move this morning but honestly this area that they were in is really no different than this area now that I have them I'm I want the grass to grow I want to grow fast oh you got him foreign fifth time at Lowe's hopefully this is the final one for the day [Music] thank you hopefully that's it there he is there he is little brother's getting it big brother over there he's got it we're farming we're farming we're farming forget it forget it when we first looked at this property this barn with the concrete floor I wanted to live in I wanted to turn this into our home uh it's just old you know it's just weathered and I have my father-in-law helping today there's our hole right there I've been looking at this thing the electricity hadn't been on in over 30 years so that was important for me to put new lights in it turn on electricity all right my friends here Brad he's gonna help us out today what's the plan So the plan is we're going to get rid of this old archaic fluorescent light and we're gonna go with the new LEDs High base and also I want to turn it into my workshop and I started doing that by tearing down some walls [Music] oh [Music] foreign [Music] and slowly bringing in equipment and also fixing up leaks and also turn it into an area where we host more workshops it could be right now it's just for you know housing all our feed and some of my tools but like maybe half of it being um like a place where we can like butcher out an animal maybe turn it a stall into a walk-in cooler I mean there's so much possibility with this big of a structure foreign [Music] S I have from the last property I brought all this tin in this is just used tin that I found over the years [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] your new home these cootie coonies are smaller Pig and they grow a lot slower and also they're not destroyers like a feeder pig something I've been kind of putting off is putting down these trees you know at this point they're just growing it in the side of this barn and I believe that's what's causing some leaks in there and some flooding a little bit more confident every single day of dropping down a bigger tree even though I mean they're not that big but still it's pretty big for me it was a beautiful sunny day today now Cloud's rolling in I think we're gonna get some rain [Music] [Music] I had some guys knock down six giant trees right here we had some trees hovering over our barn here I mean there are some trees like leaning up against it growing into it and so there's trees like look at these trees I mean what is that I don't know 20 feet tall or something like that I mean it would have took me probably months to knock these down and these guys did it in an hour now I have this whole barn on this side all cleared pretty much foreign [Music] ladies good morning [Music] building these raised beds this is something that I didn't think we were gonna do but after seeing how compacted our soil was we felt like this was the best way to get us going and start growing our own food right away it's a lot of work up front with the soil with putting in the sticks and filling the raised beds up building the raised beds the cost of building the raised beds it's a lot of work up front but if we take care of these beds these beds should Outlast me we've finally filled up all the beds [Music] I kind of feel like this is the first for me major update to this property um I know we got cows we got pigs and we're updating the house a little bit but for me this Garden I have anticipated this moment for so long I almost I almost didn't think it was gonna happen because Jason's got a long list of things to do and to build and so I'm so thankful for these garden beds I mean we have plenty of seeds plus I still need to get the okra somewhere and to get actual plants in in the beds already it feels like it's happening right now so this is like the beginning of a brand new season it's gonna be a good one and we're already making plans to extend that Garden area out this way uh and they're gonna be more in ground also greenhouses we're already talking about that so putting that in another location so definitely we're going to be growing some more vegetable type things in this coming new year it's taken a while but I feel like the grass is finally growing pretty much all summer I felt like we were in a drought it felt like it didn't rain for maybe a month but now slowly I feel like the rain's kind of coming back here and there when we first moved this was all brambles right here huge Bramble blackberry bushes right here really thick thorny bushes I think some of them are probably wild blackberries as well over there too and so with these Briars I plan on just chopping it down with the mower this year I wasn't too sure how we were going to start doing this like where do you put the chickens why are we going to run our meat birds but sometimes you just have to stop thinking about it you just have to start just doing it too much thinking can paralyze you and then you just won't do it so stop thinking and just get the chickens put them on the grass move them around and they're going to fertilize the soil and then grass is going to grow even with this compacted soil that we have from the previous owner's horses and donkeys that he had I can see how this land is going to get better and better every single year foreign they're like literally running this one this way come on beefy boys [Music] but now I feel like look at this thick grass that they now get to eat well I cannot believe we've been over six months here on our new Homestead and I have not once shoveled wood chips until today my wood ship dealer has not came through yet you know nobody wants to come and deliver wood chips and don't tell me about chip drop because I never have success with that this is not nearly as much as I'm going to need in the future but this is a start we're going to put some wood chips on on the bare ground here uh just because we definitely need something I think out in pastures I could do but it's just not enough and I really want to spread it out way out there not really because it's it's pretty hot so for today we're gonna do it right here this is a walking path that we're normally at also where we butcher chickens and when it rains it kind of pulls up here pretty good and so to combat that you know you add wood chips [Music] thank you one of the major things to think about when moving onto a new Homestead this is a issue this is a major issue is water we got hoses we are on a well system and that was important to us and being that we have farm animals we need to bring water to them so how do you do that the only water we had was in this Barn which I'm super thankful because everything is running off of this Barn you know we have about 400 feet of hoses in the summer that we are watering all animals but there's a certain limit where that hose will go it won't go on the very tippy top of our Mountain Water is going to be an ongoing project here I mean this hydrant this is a new hydrant top that I put on this year but it still doesn't work not sure why but there's no water coming out of it at all I've checked all the possibilities at our well but nothing one thing I'm incorporating more in this coming new year is saving water rain water I just installed this rain water system just simple just to get it started get going and then eventually save more water on all of our buildings that we have here I think we were lucky with this property because this is the only trash that we have really that was here I think this would be good for a chicken brooder like we're gonna be raising some more meat chickens next year and we need we're outgrowing everything we need to we need more space I'm a firm believer in when you want a homestead and you want to find land is that you buy ugly buy ugly but this is ugly right like this is what we have to deal with because you can't afford the nice uh romantic wrap-around porch Grand View land right you know it's Gotta It's gotta take time to get there and you will get there but you need to buy ugly first we have pigs to feed and pigs to move again we need to move these two kunikunis we have we have an extra Pig shelter since we moved the Three Little Pigs out and then we're gonna drag the other one over wow they're being occupied with food come on you know the routine you know it you guys are too smart the only reason why we got these two kunikunis in Spring is because the farmer told us that they were already pregnant what do I know right like I've never had pregnant pigs before so they looked pregnant to me we're not giving up on them yet we're gonna still gonna try right now we're gonna separate them we did have them separated when we first got them and then we put them back together and then you know all summer and then now we're gonna separate them we could use a netting to separate them we're going to try to use a single wire line to separate them from there sorry Zeke it's for your own good Zeke [Music] for your own good Olvera Zeke does try you try don't you you try Zeke does try I've seen him it's Elvira if you don't let him and then you separate them because they might have that brother and sister mentality [Applause] now with larger animals you got to think about do you want to butcher them yourself if you raise them for meat or do you want to take them in I mean it just depends what you're comfortable with and for us what was really important for me and for our family is that we butcher our cow ourselves you know our steer that we raised pigs that we raise also bigger animals I mean we already do the chickens and turkeys the geese but a larger animal I feel like I want to do it I want to be able to want to do it myself the reality is if you want to get better at butchering a larger animal you have to actually butcher a larger animal but putting our beefy boy in the freezer was probably the ultimate for me because I remember sitting in my office job you know 10 this is over 10 10 years ago and thinking of like whoa is that possible that was just so far out there like right like that was like the ultimate like if I could do that if I could raise my own beef and put them in our freezer and do it all by ourselves that was the ultimate ultimate goal for me and we reached that this year we still have little brother here and uh you know we're gonna be butchering him eventually I'm not sure when exactly I don't know I'm sure we're going to wait another year or maybe we might do it again this this winter hey Pig I've always thought of this Homestead life that we live as one big class project just trying different things building just these weird chicken structures and and seeing what works seeing what doesn't work seeing what we like seeing what we don't like and that's all this is we enjoy living this life and figuring it all out because there's no end in sight there's no end result there's no top of the mountain you know it's just climbing up the mountain and trying to find the most efficient way to raise animals to grow our own food and just to be healthy to live as a family work for ourselves and so we go into this new year with a new hope in a new step on trying to figure all this out and so the only thing that we're doing here is talking about it and sharing about it and sharing with you all the things that we're doing and the things that we're learning and we cannot wait to show you what we have in store for this year uh it's gonna be some exciting stuff as we continue to grow and show you how we're going growing on our 14 acres and how we are restoring this old horse property into a pasture-raised farm of our dreams thank you guys for watching and happy New Year

Channel: Sow the Land

Views: 533,589

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Id: d1rQKDtAA4U

Length: 48min 57sec (2937 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2023