Suburbanites build a fence

[GLC1968]

shooting star - that's really cool about your partner!

My H and I are undertaking this one all on our own! We have found a lot of really nice and helpful people locally, but as far as living on the land, it's just us. We are keeping it small because we both have full time jobs/careers. We have just over an acre, so we don't have room to expand too far beyond our means!

The fruit orchard was already here, though it does need some tending.
We have planted a full veggie garden, but we were late getting it in due to not closing on the house until June. I harvested our first tomato yesterday.
We have 1 goat and are looking for a second. We will be kidding this goat and that will probably be the limit of our herd (3 or 4 goats).
We are brooding 15 chickens, but we will have to sell some as our coop was designed to only hold 12 comfortably.
Our next steps are to undertake canning, look into solar hot water and dig a deep well for drinking water (we already have a shallow one for irrigation).

We came into this with no real experience. I grew up with small veggie gardens, but have never gone the 'organic' route before. The rest of this is learn as we go. Eek!

[shootingstar]

We came into this with no real experience. I grew up with small veggie gardens, but have never gone the 'organic' route before. The rest of this is learn as we go. Eek!

No doubt any TE member who is/was part of farming family have stories to tell and trivia us urbanites don't know. ie. pigs are intelligent animals. Pigs won't overeat if they are left on their own for days which is what happened if my partner couldn't make it to the farm on certain weekends.

And don't crowd those chickens...that's how those major animal disease epidemics start..

I'm certain if sweetie hung in longer in farming...he would have started using GPS tags on his cows to track his animals when he wasn't around for days to look after them. Probably by now, this IS being done/tested already somewhere....

You are commended for forays into sustainable living. I have a black thumb, plants don't seem to live under my tutelage. I have childhood memories of strange family gardening ...a whole garden full of koh rabi (a green beet) and corner of green onions. The only veggies our family could grow without ants munching up everything. We were so gauche....initially when my parents bought this rundown house, in the backyard, we kept chopping down this furiously fast growing head of red stalks and big leaves... What was this weed???

It was a whole patch of rhubarb. We found out ...years later.

[GLC1968]

We were so gauche....initially when my parents bought this rundown house, in the backyard, we kept chopping down this furiously fast growing head of red stalks and big leaves... What was this weed???

It was a whole patch of rhubarb. We found out ...years later.

Ha! We had a similiar experience. When we were kids, my parents bought this huge old (200 years old) house on a farm. We only had a few acres surrounding the house, but my mom tried planting corn (the crows got it) and strawberries (the rabbits got them).

We found a huge patch of rhubarb and another of asparagus. We never harvested either because my mom had no idea what to do with rhubarb (silly city folk) and she kept trying to harvest asparagus in the summer and kept wondering why it didn't look right (again, silly city folk!).

I was at most 8, when we lived in that house and I remember these things!

Oh, and let me point out that if the internet did not exist, I'm pretty sure my husband and I would be facing failure upon failure. Instant research has saved us countless times already!

[Lifesgreat]

I read the title and thought you were talking about the "hot" story in my neck of the woods :

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=3929956

[SadieKate]

Good for him! Next they'll probably complain that there isn't a Starbucks within a block.

Buffalo stew. Yum.

Goat cheese. Yum.