Strategies to Grow an ENTIRE YEAR’S Worth of Food on a Small Homestead

so like most homesteaders we are striving for self-sufficiency here on our Homestead last year we actually undershot a little bit we didn't factor in that our kids are going to start eating as much as us to adults we ran out of white potatoes and sweet potatoes this year and also beef but we have some ideas to up our game this year and we're going to take you around the farm and show you what we have going on we believe that the key to self-sufficiency over the Long Haul is efficiency we see so many people get so overwhelmed and burned out from trying to take on too much and they eventually quit homesteading and I think that's really sad it's something that we want to do for the Long Haul so along with realizing that we're going to need to grow more food this year we also want to try to make things more efficient so we can do that without getting burned out so we're going to make some changes around here and I'll show you a few things that we're going to do I have a more and more efficient what was my biggest barrier last year what was the thing I spent the most time on what was the thing that frustrated me the most last year the thing that frustrated me the most was weeding and the other thing was getting my plants out in really wet soil in the spring so this year to overcome that problem we are putting in 10 raised beds and that will help take care of the soil wetness issue and also weeding in these raised beds is so much easier than just in a regular Garden I can't really explain why but it just is Michelle does most of the work in the gardens I help her with that but that's not the real stressor for me the real stressor for me is the work that I do with the animals and last year the biggest thing was the chickens we're doing something pretty major to try to change that up this year that we're going to have to go over in a little bit but first let's talk about the things that we're actually going to grow this year to be more self-sufficient and grow more of our own food [Music] because we're more than Farmers last year because of what I talked about previously our soil was too wet and so I ended up getting the potatoes out too late the soil conditions were not ideal and so they didn't do as good as they should have this year we got them planted here in the front garden in beautiful soil with compost it's very loose up here so we're hoping for a big crop of white potatoes this year white potatoes are number one on my list of self-sufficiency vegetables because number one they're hearty number two they have very little pest pressure they're very easy to grow and most importantly for me no processing I can just throw them straight into my root cellar and they will last all year long so like I said we did run out of white potatoes this year but I'm really not sweating it we have a couple months before these will be ready but it really is okay I am very intentional about not letting homesteading be my slave masters we are planting more sweet potatoes this year last year we planted about 25 to 30 potato sweet potato slips this year I'm doing 40. our sweet potatoes last year did much better in the raised bed than they did just in the ground we have issues with like fungus or something I don't know so we are doing them in all of them in the raised beds this year we are doing vardaman and Covington varieties they're both Bush plants that means they don't Runner so much and you don't have sweet potatoes like everywhere you just have the sweet potatoes at the base of the plant that's a huge efficiency thing for us we have in past years had to dig up like our entire Garden while we were digging sweet potatoes because they were everywhere you like your puppies yeah so as you can see Cody is still working on her raised beds but we have plans to fill at least one raised bed full of butternut squash it's definitely a staple for us I love it for pumpkin pies and butternut squash soup and things like that last year I completely failed at that because I waited too long to plant them because here again the soil was too wet so they did nothing we bought squash from an Amish farm they didn't last very long I think they had like spots and stuff that just made them rot really fast so this year butternut squash is definitely on our list we don't do pumpkins because of like powdery mildew is a real issue but butternut squash seems to do the best at bearing before they're completely killed from the powdery mildew so something that we're really excited about is we added grapes to our Homestead this year not one of those things that would go in a survival garden food you would need to grow to survive but definitely a part of self-sufficiency growing more and more of the food that we love to eat we actually did really well with onions last year I actually still have a ton left over over so I won't be upping my game with onions this year I do four packages with 25 plants in each and that lasts us for a solid Year I'll also be doing the same as I did last year with garlic I just do like a little plot raspberries are another thing that is a big part of being self-sufficient I think I have more raspberries than anything else another one of those things to keep us out of the grocery store some of you have had questions about how our raspberry trellis did and if I've done anything different this is how I first built the trellis but last year I added another board here and have another wire going around it some of the plants that didn't make it all the way up to here were hanging out and so we need another wire on the outside of that but I needed to take it off so that I could till the side I haven't tilled yet that still needs to get done it works really really great and we get tons of raspberries off of that patch carrots are also a staple so we'll be doing those this year as well I like to do spring carrots and then also fall carrots just so that the fall ones last a little bit longer we have strawberries here we're gonna plant some zucchini sweet corn green beans we plan to put our tomatoes in right here this year I plan to do 15. that might not sound like many but we like to space our Tomatoes far apart fertilize them prune them take really good care of them and honestly we come out of this garden with pounds and pounds and pounds of tomatoes I'm headed out to the back pasture because I want to talk a little bit about what we're going to do for beef and milk this year but while we're on our way back there let's stop and take a look at the bees bees are something we added last year to our Homestead to be more self-sufficient it went pretty well last year I lost a couple colonies looks like this one's a fail too but I've still got one that's going really strong I need to check them and I did for this year also set out a few swarm traps so I'm really hoping to catch some bees and be able to fill up these other two hives at least maybe even more thank you hey Maddie [Music] having raw dairy on the Olmstead is my absolute favorite thing about being self-sufficient I love the milk I love the products we can make from it our cow Maddie is pregnant which is awesome she's pregnant you got to keep them having calves to keep the milk production up she's starting to taper off a little bit but she'll be in full production again early this winter peaches still won't let me get close enough to touch her that's a heifer right there that we're raising to get processed for beef she's actually going in in a few weeks to get processed our first cow was a Jersey cow and I would get her bread to an Angus bull and so we'd have half Angus cows that we'd raised for beef well since we got our Guernsey cow I use sex semen for her and I raise heifer calves that we sell as Future Family milk cows so since that Dynamic has changed I haven't really gotten in a good rhythm of getting calves in time to get beef processed as often as we need it and so I didn't get one soon enough we end up running out of beef I really don't like that I have to go out and buy calves to raise for beef so I'd really like to start raising our own beef I'm thinking thinking about possibly getting into mini herefords or possibly Dexter's need something small because we just don't have enough property to raise some full-size cows but I think we could do something like that and it could work out for beef for just our family our goal when we first started homesteading was to grow enough food to sell as well as to feed ourselves but our Focus now is Shifting where we would like to have our Homestead just for us that is why I took out a whole bunch of my rhubarb patch we ended up taking out most of our rhubarb patch I just left one plant chickens are obviously a big part of self-sufficiency on a homestead like a lot of you that's how we got started in homesteading we had chickens and a little garden we've got egg laying hens and we raise our own meat birds I should have a batch of meat birds going right now but if you saw in one of our previous videos the ones that came were all Dead on Arrival all except for a few of them that I ended up giving away so the Hatchery is sending us a new batch of those in a week or so and we usually raise about 50 to 55 of those for our family for the year this year will probably do at least 60 and for the egg layers we haven't been just keeping enough chickens for eggs for ourselves but we've also been selling eggs at a local store and we were selling eggs to a restaurant for a while we had ideas of making that into a big part part of a farm business for us and I think we could do it if we really wanted to but I think we would need to scale it bigger having a lot of chickens is something that I wanted to do for the farm business part of it but I don't just love having and taking care of chickens like I love having the cows it was just a lot of work and we were making some money with it but I decided it wasn't enough money that it was worth all the extra stress and hassle that was putting on us I still want to have enough chickens for eggs for us so we've kept about 20 hens but one thing you will notice is that these chickens are still in a hoop house and they really could and should be out on pasture but I've got to figure out how exactly I want to do it I'm not sure if I want to do in another electric net type of thing because of the hawk pressure that we had last year so I might be making another chicken tractor kind of like we use for our meat chickens but with nesting boxes in it I have to see how that goes but you might be seeing me build a chicken tractor before too long and here's our asparagus attach you can see how massive this is I think it's at least 100 plants and it's a lot of work and asparagus doesn't make a lot of money so it's a nice thing for the kids to do but we are rethinking this thinking maybe we'll take out half of it or three quarters of it next year we're just not sure yet just as a side note it was really really hard for me to give up the egg business and to sell all those chickens like I said it wasn't something that I just loved like I loved cows but it was still really hard because it was it felt like a dream that had died one thing that I found with homesteading and with a lot of life is just because you change your mind and go in a little bit different direction doesn't mean that something is dyed or you're losing something sometimes you're replacing it with something better and in this case it might be replacing it with just better mental health that's not as stressful or it might be that I have more time to spend with my family or it might be that I have more time to be able to get Manny herefords so many people get overwhelmed and burned out and stop homesteading all together and I don't want that to happen so we gotta make what we have more manageable and more efficient so we can keep this thing going and be self sufficient for as long as possible [Music] foreign

Channel: More Than Farmers

Views: 281,716

Keywords: homestead, organic farm, simple living, how to grow food, homesteading, homesteading family

Id: g94ep1HYEnE

Length: 11min 9sec (669 seconds)

Published: Sun May 21 2023