Preparing The Homestead for a Vacation
Our homestead is pretty self sustainable when it comes to leaving for a weekend, however, when it comes to a three week trip, it is important to thoroughly prep our homestead and also make sure we have support. We are blessed to live near family that is often more than willing to help us out, but nevertheless, even with the help it is important to prepare the homestead to make things as efficient and easy to take care of as we can. This includes:
-Animal water and food supply
-Automatic watering system for garden, trees and grass
-Thorough cleaning and weeding of the yard and garden
-Complete, clear and succinct instruction list
The Dumyahn homestead family took a 3 week trip to Europe recently and though traveling does not always seem possible (especially for 3 whole weeks) when you are trying to build and maintain a small homestead, we are here to show you that it can be possible with some preparation and small sacrifices.
Traveling has always been important to Ciera, while I (Luke) could stay home and work around the Homestead and be perfectly content. That being said, I do appreciate traveling once I am already at the destination and have given up on the fact that we will be spending a lot of money. Plus, it is important to see and learn about different cultures, people, and history.
To make traveling successful when leaving our homestead, the most important part is making sure we have support. Whether that be friends, family or a paid caretaker, we want to make sure we can leave our home, animals and plants to someone trustworthy because that will enhance the comfort of our travels. The second most important part is the preparation of the homestead to make it efficient and easy to take care of and maintain.
Prepping the animal water and food supply is the first big challenge. We have a dog, chickens in the garden area and goats towards the top of our property. Let’s talk about our dog first. Kiva is probably the easiest out of all the animals. She has a dog door which allows her out into our entire fenced off property and we have a large automatic water bowl and automatic food bowl. All that needs to be done here is refilling the feeder and waterer about once a week making it very easy for any guest to take care of her.
The chickens are a little more involved, but still not too high maintenance with our set up. I have created multiple feeders that seem to distribute food at different paces. Ultimately their food does not need to be refilled that often (maybe 1-2x’s per week). I made two large PVC feeders right before the trip as I had read these would help decrease the amount of time between refills. I will give an update on these in a later post.
Also to make their feed easier, I put an animal proof container to hold their food next to the coop with a bucket and funnel to help fill the feeders.
Lastly, I have a flat head shovel and hand shovel in the chicken run for scooping out poop in the coop (hey that rhymes!), and this is quick and easy to do quick clean of the coop once a week, especially because our chickens seem to poop primary
The goats are the most involved. Luckily they are not producing milk yet or this would be another complicating factor into taking care of the homestead. However, they do need to be fed and watered daily. To make this more efficient, before the trip I purchased a 150 gallon resin deck box and assembled it next to the goat pen. This is large enough to hold our goat feed, alfalfa hay and a rag for cleaning. My sister was watching our home and all she needed to do was open the deck box and grab some hay to throw into their feeder in the morning and then fill their bowls with a little goat sweet feed in the evening.
For their water I had an automatic waterer with a float valve, as well as, a water bin with a hose and sprayer placed next to it to make it easy to fill (every other day) and clean when needed.
After we made sure all the animals were prepped and ready to go, we had to make sure to prep our garden. The most difficult part about leaving our garden for this long is the weeds and unfortunately for us, bermuda grass. This is one of the sacrifices we made, but if you didn’t want to make this sacrifice you would probably be able to find someone to pay to come weed your garden. We prepared this the best we could by thoroughly weeding our garden beds the couple of days before we left. Other than this, the water part was mostly easy. We have a water timer with four hose outlets and dividers which go to poly tubing with emitters into each of our garden beds. The timer is set to go off twice a day for each bed due to the dry heat in our area.
Finally, we made sure to make a clear, concise and organized instruction list. This was categorized into house, garden and animals, with each set of animals having their own section. This was mainly just a quick reference list that my sister could refer back to if she did not recall something from a walk through we did with her the week before leaving.
In the coming weeks, I will give a debrief and assessment of how all the preparation and work towards making things more self-sufficient and easy for our help to take care of the property went. I will let you know what worked well and what didn’t and what I would recommend for future travels. Again, our goal here is to find ways that we can balance a part time homestead lifestyle while still having opportunities to work, travel and be social outside the homestead.