5 things I do each week outside to move our family towards "homesteading"
Since Ciera shared the five things she does inside the home to help move our family toward self sustainable living, I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts into the five things I deem important to keep our little part time homestead going. When I first started thinking about this topic I had to ask myself, how do I pick only five. There are a plethora of jobs and items that need to be done to keep our homestead healthy, safe and happy. However, there are other aspects of life and challenges that will try to change my routine. The trick is finding my balance between getting the essentials done, and maintaining flexibility for other things we value (family time, for example.) Since we do work outside the home, maintenance and organization is crucial to our homestead.
When choosing items on your full time homestead, part time homestead, or just your home in general it is important to consider a few things. What jobs, if we did not get done, would:
- Affect the physical health of my family and my animals around the homestead?
- Affect my mental health?
- Build up to an insurmountable task?
I am sure there are other questions we could ask to rate the importance of picking tasks that need to get done each week, but these are the questions I asked myself when making a list. The beautiful thing about it is that my list is going to be totally different from many other lists. Every family is different, every homestead is different, and everyone has their own opinions on what is most important to them.
So enough said. Here is my list:
- Cleaning and maintaining the animal structures
- Feeding animals and maintaining clean water and food containers
- Maintaining the garden
- Composting
- Cleaning the yard/property/outdoor living space
1. Cleaning and maintaining the animal structures
This is a must for me and the only reason it might get missed for a week is if we are out of town and I don’t feel comfortable asking our house sitter to do it. Typically the animals on the homestead are there to produce something, whether that be eggs, milk, materials or meat. Most of what I listed is for consumption, so as you can imagine it is pretty important to maintain a relatively clean and safe environment for our animals. I want, at all costs, to avoid sick and stressed out animals so that we get a good product, our family stays healthy and our food tastes good.
Once a week (usually on Mondays) I will quick clean the coop. This means removing most if not all the chicken poop in the coop and refreshing the coop with any bedding that might be in there. I will also quickly add some food and do a quick check on the water container. Every 4-6 months I will do a deeper clean unless it is warranted earlier than that.
2. Feeding animals and maintaining clean water and food containers
One to two times a week I am filling a big container of scratch and grains for the chickens and nearly every day we are bringing out compost scraps to them. Every day I am giving the goats some hay (alfalfa or orchard) and then in the evening I give them grain.
As far as maintaining clean water and food containers, I dedicate one of my daily chores to this. What this means is I set aside about an hour to clean my chicken waterer, my goat waterer and the water container I set out for our dog.
The chicken waterer is a 5 gallon bucket with drinking cups that I bought off amazon (link here) and I just switched my goat water from a container to an automatic waterer with a float valve (link here). For those interested, I am working on a post on this in the near future, regarding the automatic goat waterer and making your homestead a little more self sustainable (which is crucial for us when we want to go camping for a weekend or be gone for a longer period of time.) Recently, I have been looking into how to keep our chicken water bucket cleaner and algae free as the Arizona sun heats up in the spring and summer. So far apple cider vinegar (1 Tbs/gallon of water) as an additive is looking promising, as the last two times I cleaned their water bucket it was not nearly as dirty and the walls were not filling up with algae. I then work to clean out their food bowls/containers and make sure any containers I am storing food in are clean and stocked.
3. Maintaining the Garden
Maintaining our garden is important as we work towards being more self-sustaining in our living. It is also the thing that I feel I get behind the most on. Right now I work to do a quick run through in the garden each day when there is active growing in the garden. This means checking for pests and making sure our automatic watering system is doing its job. I also set aside one day per week where I spend at least 30 mins in the garden weeding the beds. As we continue to move forward with our gardening we are also working on our knowledge of soil and plant health. This consists of testing our soil and knowing how to correct imbalances, as well as, knowing the signs and symptoms of unhealthy plants and what steps to take to improve plant health.
4. Composting
This is an important aspect of homesteading to us and I’ll tell you why. First, composting is what improves our soil health/nutrients, soil density, soil pH, natural pest control and more. On top of that it helps us to feel that there is really no food waste. Between our chickens and our compost bins, all of our food scraps are accounted for.
We keep two large compost bins within our garden area. Every 2-3 days we take the small compost containers from our house and dump them in the bigger bins. We rotate between bins every 30-60 days so one bin has time to decompose undisturbed. I add water and stir both bins regularly. Eventually, when the compost is ready we put it in our garden beds.
5. Cleaning the yard/property/outdoor living space
This may not be one on everyone’s list, but let me explain. For me, this one is about mental health. I have always found that a dirty space, indoors or outdoors, can affect my mood and how I am feeling. When I see clutter, my mind feels cluttered. When my mind feels cluttered it makes it more difficult for me to complete all the above and more. That is why, at least once a week and occasionally twice, I clean up and straighten our property. This consists of putting things away (tools, kids toys, dog toys, etc.), weed wacking if it needs to be done, and scooping up the dog poop.
These are the five things I do outside to move our family closer to homesteading and becoming more self reliant. I know every homestead has different needs and other’s five items and top priorities each week will be different than the ones I have chosen, but that is the beauty of it all. We are all working to create and build something that works for us. Please share below any tips, tricks or the five items you deem most important to get done each week.