We are currently looking at ways to cut costs on the homestead. With winter approaching we tend to use more electricity due to heated water bowls for the chickens and the use of more lights.
We are currently looking at ways to cut costs on the homestead. With winter approaching we tend to use more electricity due to heated water bowls for the chickens and the use of more lights. Our electric bill is one of the first cost cutting things we plan to look at. Ideally we would like to move to solar and wind combination for electric, at least for the barn to get started. The set up for solar/wind is spendy but does pay off in the long run. We plan to have someone come out and give us a quote on what we need to get that up and running. So far we have changed all of the light bulbs in the barn to LEDs and started hang drying our laundry outside instead of using the dryer. We are also planning to install an outdoor wood boiler to cut the cost of propane but will probably not get that installed until next summer.
Rabbits:
Roxanne delivered 4 kits this week. All are alive and well. Rachel’s 6 kits came out of the nesting box and are running around the cage with her. They are super chunky little things so they should make good meat rabbits for us. The rabbits had a visitor this week. Little Kaylin (a friend of ours daughter) came out to see all of the rabbits.
Chickens:
Our 4 barred rock chickens started laying eggs this week! Hopefully, the delawares that are about the same age as them, will start laying soon too. We did our last candling of the eggs in the incubator and have 23 eggs remaining for hatching.
Garden:
This week we harvested 15 cucumbers, 9 zucchini, 3 serranos, 3 jalapenos, 2 bell peppers, 2 onions and many more cherry tomatoes. The onions were still not ready and we think that we may have planted them too late. The scallions on the onions are huge so we cut some of them up and froze them to use later in the year. We made 12 quart sized jars of cucumber pickles this week. Added some of the hot peppers to a couple batches to see how they taste.
Projects:
Got a great deal locally on some dig your own pine trees. We planted a row of 18 pines in our back field. If there are still trees available this fall we may go back and get more to make a second row.
