Frequently Asked Questions

How to Use Social Media to Earn an Income on the Homestead

April 29, 2025 by Leigh Leave a Comment

Gone are the days when farming meant staying offline and off the grid. Today, some of the most successful homesteaders are using social media not just to share their lives—but to fund them. If you’re looking to make extra money while raising animals, growing food, or living a simpler life, creating a homestead social media plan could be one of the smartest moves you make.

Whether you want to start a YouTube channel, monetize your Instagram reels, or sell digital products on Pinterest, this guide will walk you through exactly how to turn your homestead content into consistent income.

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Why Social Media Is a Powerful Tool for Homesteaders

As a homesteader, you already have what most content creators spend hours trying to fake—real life, real experience, and real value. People are hungry for authentic content: how to raise chickens, grow tomatoes, can green beans, make herbal salves, or balance motherhood with chores. You’re doing all that and more.

When you start sharing your journey, you:

Build community and trust
Establish yourself as an expert
Drive traffic to your blog, shop, or YouTube
Open doors to partnerships, sponsorships, and sales

The best part? You don’t need millions of followers to make money. With a clear homestead social media plan, even a small but loyal audience can create reliable income streams.

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Step 1: Choose Your Social Media Platforms

You don’t have to be everywhere. The best platform is the one you’ll actually use consistently. Focus on 1–2 platforms that match your content style and target audience.

Here’s a breakdown of the most effective platforms for homesteaders:

Instagram
Great for visuals (gardens, animals, DIYs) and reels. Ideal for building community and growing quickly with daily posts and stories.

TikTok
Short-form video works well for quick tips, farm humor, or before-and-after projects. Viral potential is huge even with a small account.

YouTube
Perfect for long-form tutorials, project breakdowns, and vlogs. A great way to establish yourself as an expert and generate passive ad revenue.

Pinterest
Drives traffic to blogs, Etsy shops, and YouTube videos. Best for evergreen content like recipes, how-tos, and printables.

Facebook
Useful for joining homesteading groups, selling locally, and building a Facebook page or group for your audience.

Step 2: Define Your Niche and Audience

Before posting anything, get crystal clear on who you’re talking to. Not every homesteader has the same goals or challenges. Think about your ideal follower:

Are they beginner homesteaders looking to learn?
Moms trying to balance family and farm life?
Off-grid or self-sufficiency enthusiasts?
Gardeners wanting to grow food in small spaces?

Then, ask yourself what problems you can help solve. Your homestead social media plan should revolve around service, not just aesthetics.

Examples of niche focuses:

Raising goats for milk or meat
Canning and food preservation
Frugal and debt-free homesteading
Gardening in small spaces
Off-grid cooking and DIYs

The more specific you are, the easier it is to grow a loyal, engaged audience.

Step 3: Plan Your Content Strategy

Now it’s time to map out your content. The best strategy combines three types of posts:

1. Educational Content
Teach your audience something useful:

How to start seeds indoors
5 mistakes new chicken owners make
How to use comfrey salve for wounds

2. Inspirational Content
Share your story, successes, and daily life:

A sunrise over your garden
A quote about simplicity
“Why we started homesteading”

3. Promotional Content
Invite your followers to buy or click:

Check out your blog post
Buy your ebook or course
Visit your Etsy shop

Use a monthly calendar to balance all three types. Pinterest-friendly posts and keyword-rich descriptions can dramatically increase traffic to monetized links.

Step 4: Create and Schedule Content Consistently

You don’t need to post every day, but you do need to be consistent. Pick a posting schedule you can stick to, like:

Instagram: 3 reels per week, 2 story days
TikTok: 1–2 videos daily
YouTube: 1 video every 1–2 weeks
Pinterest: 3–5 pins per blog post

Use tools like Later, Tailwind, Metricool, or Canva’s content planner to schedule your posts ahead of time. I use Metricool and have really enjoyed it and the ease of use. Plus, their free option is pretty robust.

Batch your content creation by filming or photographing multiple things at once—like your weekly chores, a harvest day, or a DIY project. Then break that footage into multiple reels, TikToks, or blog tutorials.

Step 5: Monetize Your Content

This is where your homestead social media plan turns into a paycheck. There are several ways homesteaders earn money from their content, even with small audiences.

1. Affiliate Marketing

Share your favorite tools, seeds, gear, or books and earn a commission.
Examples:

Amazon Associates
Homesteading toolkits or digital bundles
Seed companies or gardening supplies

2. Ad Revenue

Once you hit enough views or traffic, platforms pay you to run ads.

YouTube Partner Program (1,000 subs + 4,000 watch hours)
Pinterest (via blog traffic → Mediavine or Raptive ad networks)
TikTok Creator Fund (availability varies)

3. Digital Products

Sell printables, guides, planners, or courses.
Ideas:

Garden planning workbook
Monthly homestead checklist
Goat care guide or feed calculator
Online course on canning or microgreens

4. Brand Sponsorships

Once you build trust and engagement, brands may pay you for sponsored posts, product features, or reviews.

Start by tagging brands in your posts and writing honest reviews. As you grow, reach out with a media kit showing your audience size, engagement, and services offered.

5. Physical Products

Promote products you already make:

Goat milk soap
Farm-fresh eggs
Preserved foods or herbal remedies

Use your social media to drive traffic to your Shopify store, Etsy shop, or local pickup days.

Step 6: Build Your Funnel

To create consistent income, you need a funnel—a clear path from your social media post to a purchase.

Here’s an example funnel:

Instagram reel shows you trimming goat hooves
Caption links to your blog post on goat care
Blog post offers a free goat health checklist in exchange for email
Email series pitches your beginner goat-raising ebook

That’s how you turn a 30-second video into a $27 sale (or more).

Create content that leads people to:

Join your email list
Read your blog
Buy your product
Watch your YouTube channel

Step 7: Track What’s Working

Every platform gives you analytics—use them. Review each month:

Which posts got the most views or saves?
What drove the most traffic to your blog?
Which links got clicked the most?

Focus on what’s working and do more of it. Your homestead social media plan should evolve as you learn what your audience responds to best.

Tools like Google Analytics, Pinterest Analytics, and social media insights will guide your strategy.

Step 8: Stay Authentic and Serve First

People follow you for you. Don’t try to copy influencers with perfectly polished lives. Show your mud boots, garden fails, and behind-the-scenes struggles. That authenticity is your superpower.

When you focus on serving your audience—educating, inspiring, and connecting—the income naturally follows.

Be honest. Be consistent. Be kind. And the right followers (and opportunities) will come.

Final Thoughts on Creating a Homestead Social Media Plan

If you’re living the homestead life, you already have content worth sharing—and monetizing. Whether you want to supplement your income or create a full-time business, a solid homestead social media plan can turn your skills and stories into a steady source of income.

Start simple. Choose one platform. Create helpful content. Build your audience and serve them well. In time, you’ll grow a digital income stream that supports your homestead dreams.

If you like the content I put out, feel free to buy us a coffee! It helps keep this site running, marketing and the goats in grain!

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How to Set Realistic Goals for Your Homestead

April 26, 2025 by Leigh Leave a Comment

When you start homesteading, it’s easy to dream big—chickens, goats, gardens, beehives, canning pantries, solar panels, and homemade everything. But without a clear plan, all those dreams can quickly turn into burnout. That’s why mastering homestead goal setting is one of the most valuable skills you can develop. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to set achievable and realistic goals for your homestead that align with your lifestyle, budget, and time.

Whether you’re homesteading on a quarter-acre suburban lot or a 20-acre rural spread, smart planning is the key to long-term success and joy on the land.

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Why Homestead Goal Setting Matters

Homesteading isn’t just a lifestyle—it’s a deeply personal journey toward self-reliance, sustainability, and fulfillment. But with so many moving pieces, trying to do everything at once is a recipe for chaos. Homestead goal setting allows you to:

Stay focused on what matters most
Avoid wasting money or energy on the wrong projects
Build your skills in a steady, manageable way
Prevent overwhelm and burnout
Track your progress and celebrate your wins

Instead of spinning your wheels, you’ll move with intention—and that’s where the real magic happens.

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Step 1: Define Your Homestead Vision

Before setting any goals, step back and ask: Why am I homesteading?

Your personal “why” shapes every decision on your land. For example, do you want to:

Raise your own food to reduce grocery bills?
Teach your kids about nature and responsibility?
Create a profitable side hustle?
Live more sustainably or off-grid?

Your vision will determine your priorities. If you want to sell produce at the farmers market, a market garden becomes a higher priority than a dairy cow. If your goal is food security, then canning, meat rabbits, or a root cellar might top the list.

Pro tip: Write down your homestead vision and keep it somewhere visible—on your fridge, in your garden journal, or posted in the barn.

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Step 2: Assess Your Resources Honestly

Setting realistic homesteading goals starts with understanding what you’re working with. Take stock of your available:

Time – Are you working full-time? Homeschooling? Raising toddlers? Be honest.
Land – How much usable space do you have? Is it wooded, sloped, wet?
Budget – What can you afford to start with? Do you have savings set aside?
Skill Level – Are you brand new to gardening, livestock, or building?
Support – Are you doing this solo, or do you have help from family, friends, or neighbors?

You don’t need unlimited resources to start homesteading, but understanding your limitations helps you set smart, achievable targets. For instance, if you only have an hour a day, starting a full-scale garden and livestock operation simultaneously might not be feasible—but a small raised bed and a few hens could be perfect.

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Step 3: Break It Down by Season or Year

One of the best homestead goal setting strategies is to plan by season or by year. Instead of trying to do everything at once, divide your big picture into quarterly or monthly chunks.

Example Annual Goal: Become 50% food self-sufficient
Seasonal Breakdown:

Spring: Build raised beds and plant cool-season crops
Summer: Expand garden and preserve harvest
Fall: Raise and butcher meat chickens
Winter: Learn pressure canning and plan fruit trees

This method keeps you focused and makes your goals feel less overwhelming. It also gives you natural checkpoints to celebrate your wins and adjust plans as needed.

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Step 4: Use SMART Goals

SMART goals are:

Specific – Clear and detailed
Measurable – You can track your progress
Achievable – It’s realistic with your current resources
Relevant – It supports your overall homestead vision
Time-bound – There’s a set deadline

Bad goal: “I want to grow more food.”
SMART goal: “Grow 75% of our salad greens from April to September using three 4×8 garden beds.”

SMART goals give you clarity and accountability. They help you stay on track and give you confidence as you move forward.

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Step 5: Prioritize What’s Most Important

You probably have a long list of dreams—fruit trees, bees, goats, solar panels, an orchard, a pond. And they’re all great! But doing everything at once is a fast track to burnout. Pick just 1–3 main goals per season and focus on doing them well.

Ask yourself:

What will have the biggest impact on our quality of life?
What aligns most with our values or needs right now?
What is time-sensitive (like spring planting)?

If your family is struggling with food bills, starting a garden and learning food preservation might be more urgent than building a chicken coop. You can always add more later.

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Step 6: Track Your Progress

Tracking your progress is not only helpful—it’s encouraging. When you see how far you’ve come, it builds momentum and motivation.

Ideas for tracking:

A garden journal or planner
A monthly homestead checklist
A whiteboard in your kitchen or barn
A simple spreadsheet
A visual tracker (like coloring in a jar for every quart canned)

You’ll be amazed how satisfying it is to check things off, track harvest totals, or log new skills you’ve learned.

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Step 7: Reassess and Adjust

Life on the homestead is unpredictable. Weather, animal health, family needs, and even burnout can derail the best-laid plans. That’s okay. The key is to expect things to change and stay flexible.

Set regular check-ins—monthly or seasonally—to review your goals:

What’s working?
What’s not?
What needs to be paused or scaled back?
What new opportunities have come up?

This reassessment is where real wisdom and growth happen. Flexibility is one of the most powerful homesteading tools you can develop.

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Step 8: Celebrate Small Wins

When you set realistic homesteading goals, even small wins matter. Maybe your first garden only yielded a few tomatoes. Maybe you only canned five jars of salsa. That’s still progress!

Celebrate it:

Take a picture
Post your success on social media
Share your homemade meal with friends
Mark it in your journal

Each step forward builds your confidence and your skill set. Every win is proof that you’re growing—literally and metaphorically.

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Goal Setting Examples by Homestead Focus

Here are some practical homestead goal setting ideas by category to inspire your plan:

Gardening Goals

Build 4 raised beds and plant spring crops
Grow and preserve enough tomatoes to make 12 jars of sauce
Start composting with kitchen scraps

Livestock Goals

Raise 25 meat chickens for freezer meat
Build a secure coop and start with 6 laying hens
Learn how to trim goat hooves or do a FAMACHA check

Food Preservation Goals

Water bath can 40 jars of jam or salsa
Learn pressure canning for broth and beans
Freeze enough zucchini to use all winter

Income or Business Goals

Sell $500 worth of produce at the farmers market
Start a blog or YouTube channel about your homestead journey
Offer farm tours or goat yoga classes once a month

Sustainability Goals

Line dry all laundry in summer
Reduce grocery store trips to once per month
Start using a solar oven or dehydrator

Family Goals

Teach kids how to plant, water, and harvest vegetables
Plan weekly outdoor family chores or animal care
Involve the whole family in harvesting and preserving food

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Final Thoughts on Homestead Goal Setting

The beauty of homesteading is that it’s not about perfection—it’s about progress. By learning how to set realistic goals, you give yourself the freedom to grow, learn, and enjoy your homestead without constant stress or overwhelm.

Whether you’re dreaming of living off-grid or just want to grow a few vegetables and keep chickens, homestead goal setting is your secret weapon. Start with what you have. Do what you can. And watch your homestead—and your confidence—flourish.

If you like the content I put out, feel free to buy us a coffee! It helps keep this site running, marketing and the goats in grain!

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Is Homesteading Hard

March 1, 2025 by Leigh Leave a Comment

I should probably wait to write this, maybe when I’m not quite so raw. But the cold hard reality is that homesteading is hard. Out of all the things I have done in my life, I think homesteading is the hardest. I have had multiple miscarriages. Sent my husband off to war twice and raise two babies while he was gone. I have stood over bleeding and mangled bodies and said, “I’ve got you.” I’ve had a mom hand me her infant and say, “Save her.” Is homesteading hard? It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

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Be sure to read till the end

Why Is Homesteading Hard?

The constant life and death decisions will wear you down. The constant checking on feed, hay, and medication levels. Hauling sick animals into the house or into the vet. Checking finances to make sure you can cover the feed, vet or light bill. Worrying about the garden producing not only your food but your animals. Prepping firewood and praying you’ve got enough. Constant research to find another way to possibly save money or a life. Frustration when a product doesn’t work. It’s enough to drive you insane. Homesteading is hard.

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Life and Death Decisions

When you live a “normal” life, maybe you really only worry about your dogs or cats, maybe an “exotic”. But when you homestead (even small scale), you have to be constantly aware of your house pets and livestock, their safety and wellbeing, their health, laboring or egg/ hatching rates and so much more. You have to worry about predators.

You order chicks and realize that one just isn’t doing well, and you have to make the decision to cull. A duck breaks a leg? Is it worth the pain they will go through to see if you can set it, splint it and keep them confined? Actively warming a goat kid till the wee hours of the morning. Only to have them die a couple days later, anyways.

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Running Out Of Feed

Sometimes you run out of feed, and can’t get more. The supply chain shortages were a thing and usually the small farmer is who suffers. You’ve got to get creative with how you are going to feed your chickens, ducks, pigs and goats with no access to feed. Sometimes it’s taking 5gal buckets to work and asking coworkers to fill it with their food scraps, just to feed your pigs or chickens. Or begging neighbors for a couple bales of hay.

The reality of caring for so many animals on the homestead is overwhelming sometimes.

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Sick Animals

Sometimes, your living room turns into an infirmary. Sometimes, your really nice SUV turns into a litter box because you’ve got to haul the pigs to the vet. Then despite all of your very best efforts, your animal dies anyways.

It’s pulling goats because momma is too tired to push, only to realize the kid is stuck and you can’t get it out. Praying to forces you don’t even believe in to save this baby.

It’s a cemetery on your property because you just couldn’t save them.

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Financial Impact

Sometimes life and death decisions are made because of finances and that feels worse. When you have to cull an animal, especially a favorite, because you don’t have the money for medicine or a vet visit. Or it’s feeding the pigs out of your pantry or fridge because you don’t have anything else.

Other times, it’s using your emergency fund to cover hay because you ran out.

Working Your Gardens

Whether you are praying for rain, or praying for rain to stop, your life revolves around your gardens in spring and summer. Since you’ve decided to grow as much fodder for your livestock as possible, you are stressing over it’s growth. You are simply hoping to reduce the strain on your wallet.

You are constantly checking for pests and weeds. Thinking about next years garden and what you will do differently. Pouring over notes, blog posts, and more trying to get a leg up.

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Firewood

When you make the decision to heat solely with your wood stove, you spend hours, days and weeks building that firewood stack. One cord down, seven more to go. Only to realize mid winter, seven wasn’t enough either. So you’re back out there, cutting down trees or finding your stacks you had put back for the next year.

It’s hauling huge rounds of wood up hills. It’s the pure manual labor that feels back breaking, but isn’t.

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Is Homesteading Hard?

Yes, but it is worth it. Every single time and every single way, it is worth it. The good outweighs the bad, every single time.

The pure joy of harvesting peppers, dehydrating them, grinding them, and then using them in your dinner? It’s a feeling of pure satisfaction.

Seeing that firewood stack go from empty at the beginning of spring and full at the end of summer? Knowing that you are going to be warm and snuggly? It’s hard to describe the feeling of accomplishment.

It’s cleaning eggs, putting them in a jar to waterglass, and putting them on shelves in your basement, knowing you will have eggs this winter.

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Watching your garden bloom and grow. Eating beans fresh from the garden, while harvesting peppers and tomatoes. Canning your tomatoes, knowing that when you are buttoning up everything for the winter, you have succeeded in your goal of providing for your family and livestock.

It’s watching that goat kid thrive after a traumatic birth. Knowing that you would do it again and again, just to see that baby come out alive and hear those first cries. And crying when you bury her sisters and listening to that momma goat cry for her other babies.

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It’s waking up before the sun breaks the horizon to milk the goats. Softly talking to your most skittish goat and thanking her for her milk. Watching the sunrise with her as her kid jumps and plays with the other kids. Listening for her call her kid and the kid call back.

Planning a bigger, better garden because you learned from your mistakes last year or the year before.

Is homesteading hard? Yes, but you should absolutely do it. There is no better feeling in the world than watching all of your hard work pay off. No amount of money or promotions, or follows, likes and shares compares to feeling of being self reliant, self sufficient, and earning through blood, sweat and tears the bounty.

Because when you homestead, it’s real. And in a world full of slight of hand, disinformation, division, and mistrust, your homestead is a living breathing thing that YOU created.

If you like the content I put out, feel free to buy us a coffee! It helps keep this site running, marketing and the goats in grain!

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Canning Food Is Safe

November 12, 2024 by Leigh Leave a Comment

I would say, as a whole, canning food is totally safe. But that being said, there are a lot of variables that can make canning food unsafe. In this blog post, I will go over all the reasons that you should consider canning and all the reasons why canning food is safe, practical and the things that can go wrong. But the end of this blog post, you will be able to make the decision of if canning food is safe for you and your family.

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Get the tools you need to stay organized, track profits, and manage your homestead with ease!

$99 value – now just $47! Start your homesteading journey today!

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Canning Food Is Safe

There are many reasons that canning food could become unsafe, but as a whole, canning is totally safe. In this blog post, I am going to talk about everything that I’ve heard about unsafe and safe canning practices. I’m also going to talk about things to keep in mind as you start your canning journey and how to minimize your risk of consuming unsafe foods. But most importantly, I am going to give you as much information as I can about Botulism, which is everyone’s biggest fear when it comes to canning.

What Is Canning?

Canning is a preservation method that allows food to be shelf stable for a longer period of time. There is some debate about the longevity of canned foods. I’ll discuss more about this below but the average shelf life for home canned foods is about 18 months.

There are two main types of canning here in the US; pressure canning and waterbath canning. Pressure canning is used for low acidity foods and waterbath canning is for high acidity foods. But understand something here, the US is one of the very, VERY few countries that use pressure canning as a food preservation method.

The jist of canning is this; put food in a jar, wipe the rim, put in a pot and heat it for a certain amount of time. There is a lot more to it, but for the point of figuring out if canning food is safe, that’s really it.

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The Dreaded Botulism

Canning food is a personal choice that you REALLY have to think about. For me, it was a no brainer. But I also understand that some people may not feel comfortable risking their family like this. So I wanted to drop some information for you to digest as we move through the rest of this post.

Botulism is an anaerobic bacteria which means that it lives and thrives in an environment with no oxygen. This means that canning is the perfect breeding ground for botulism because the whole purpose of heating the food and sealing it, is to get most the air out of the jar.

But to give you some stats, in 2022, there were 19 cases of foodborne Botulism. You can go here to play with the CDC’s BEAM Dashboard and see where I am getting these numbers. You want to make sure that you are putting “Clostridium” in the etiology filter, and specifically, we are looking for foodborne cases.

To give you a little more information about what would be considered a foodborne Botulism case, it could have been home canned food OR honey, baked potatoes and minced garlic in oil.

But before you start freaking out, keep reading.

Botulism spores cannot live in acidic environments with a pH less than 4.6. Nor is Botulism found in canned food where the internal temperatures have reached, at least, 240*.

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Get the tools you need to stay organized, track profits, and manage your homestead with ease!

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Safe Vs Unsafe Canning Practices

This is really where you are going to protect yourself and your family against most issues when it comes to canning. What is considered a safe or unsafe canning practice? Well, I’m going to tell you.

Not washing vegetables prior to canning is unsafe. Even if you peel the skin, you should still wash both the skin before peeling and the vegetable AFTER peeling. This decreases risk of contamination.

Raising the pH of your foods that are going to be waterbath canned is always safe. Though sometimes unnecessary, it is always good practice.

Boiling food for at least 10 minutes prior to eating is safe practice. This will kill any possible toxins that have grown and to be fair, most of the time you need to heat the food anyways.

Using unsterilized jars is an unsafe practice. Your jars should be clean before you put anything in it. Personally, I do not sterilize my jars prior to canning. But I do make sure that if I’m water bath canning, I dip those babies in boiling water, this will “sterilize” them as best as I can get. My dishwasher is a 13 or 16 year old boy. I’m just working with what I’ve got.

Not reusing lids is another safe canning practice, that I don’t always do. It really depends if the lid is in good shape but normally, I do use new lids. But I can’t say that I ALWAYS do.

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The Pressure Canning Debate

The debate is this: People have used waterbath, open kettle, dry canning, and other forms of canning, instead of pressure canning, for hundreds of years and the vast majority of them didn’t die from Botulism.

And that argument is correct for the most part. With a decade worth of recent reporting, there have been less than 1,000 cases of home canned Botulism cases. The risk of death or injury from other canning methods is extremely low, but never zero.

One of the things that I really want to bring up here is a two fold thing that you should decide for yourself. Again, I am NEVER going to tell you what to do. I’m going to give you information and tell you what I do. After that, you make your own decision. I follow the “Your kitchen, homestead, home, kids, your rules” philosophy, so you do you boo boo.

That being said, there is a lot of debate about pressure canning in other countries vs the US. Above, I told you that the US is one of the only states in the world that has and uses pressure canners to can food. But the US is NOT the only country that cans food. That being said, other countries have more cases of Botulism than we do, mind you it’s still really low at 82 in 2021. But these are SEVERAL countries in Europe.

All of that to say, your risk of getting Botulism or other injury, illness or death from home canned food is extremely low, but never zero.

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How Long Does Canned Food Stay Safe

12-18 months is the generally accepted timeframe for shelf stable home canned food, depending on food type, recipe, and canning method. I have found that most of the time, the food itself is still good long after 12-18 months, but the texture, nutrition, etc are all poor.

In my home, most food doesn’t last past the 18 month mark for two reasons. One, we’ve already eaten it and two, I need the jars. But there are a few cans of food that I wouldn’t touch after 18 months; beans and pickles are the two that come to mind immediately. But anything that sits in water for a long period isn’t going to taste very good after 18 months.

But there are two ways that I ALWAYS use to check if the food is still good. I ALWAYS look at the food before I open the jar. If it doesn’t look good, it’s probably not. If there’s mold, obviously toss it. Second, I smell it. If it doesn’t smell, we are probably good to go. If it does smell, does it smell like the cooked version of that food. For example, cooked carrots have a very distinct smell. Does the jar of canned carrots smell like cooked carrots? Yes, we are good to go. No, toss it.

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Starting Your Canning Journey

My suggestion for any new canner is to start small and easy. Don’t try to run a pressure canner without any canning experience. Don’t try and make a super difficult recipe when you don’t have a clue what you are doing. Start easy with jams, syrups, and salsa.

Once you’ve got that under your belt, start working with things like chow chow, relish, etc. Then get a pressure canner and start working on single vegetable jars like canning corn, green beans, etc.

After you’ve gotten a feel for how to use your canner, start working on harder things like beef stew, chicken noodle, etc and move on from there.

The biggest thing that I will recommend is always starting with tried, true, and tested recipes. Personally, I use recipes from all over the web. But I’ve been canning for over 15 years. I don’t always know what I’m doing, but I do know when things go sideways and something isn’t right.

But all that knowledge didn’t help me when I warped my pressure canner this year. I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t add enough water to the canner. That was an expensive mistake. But it happens.

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Canning Food Is Safe

At the end of the day, canning food is safe. It’s far safer than texting and driving (400 deaths/year on average). It’s safer running a marathon. And while that sounds funny, it really is the reality.

Canned food is safe as long as you follow safe practices and don’t try to out can your abilities. Learn, grow, and enjoy the fruits of your labor!

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Is Homesteading Worth It?

September 17, 2024 by Leigh Leave a Comment

When the shutdowns hit the US, a lot of people were stuck inside with nothing to do. They were scared of the virus and scared that they couldn’t find the basic supplies they need. All of this caused a huge uptick in people learning about homesteading. Mostly because they were stuck at home and bored out of their mind. This in turn caused a lot of people to start gardens, learn how to process foods, and in general adopt the homesteaders mentality. Is homesteading worth it? Absolutely!

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How To Get Started

I wrote an entire blog post about how to start a homestead and how to homestead on 5 acres. You don’t need to have a million acres to homestead. To be honest, you don’t even need 5 acres. You just need the right attitude to get started. I talked, in depth about what homestead means here and the reality is that no two homesteads look the same.

An urban homestead is just as amazing as a country homestead. A 100 acre homestead is just as awesome as a 5 acre homestead. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what homestead means because YOU are the homestead. It’s your ideas, your dreams, and your needs, not someone else’s.

What Do You Want?

Do you want to have a veggie garden, fruit trees or a container garden? Should you have chickens, rabbits, or quail because you only have a quarter acre in the city? What about a couple of goats or pigs? What about converting your lawn into a veggie garden? Or removing non edible landscaping and replacing it with edible, like raspberry bushes, grapes, or a salad bar?

All of these questions should be floating around in your brain about how to get started. The only thing that should be limiting you, is you. Set your goals and get to work. If you are on a small property, get creative. Instead of having a huge garden plot, go vertical. There are hundreds of posts on vertical gardening but my favorite is this one from The Homesteading RD. If you follow her, especially on Instagram, you can see all the wonderful ideas she has.

I always suggest writing down all of your wants, dreams, and desires. Then pick a couple a week to really dive into. As you start educating yourself on that thing, ask yourself if this is something that you really want to do. For example, we really wanted ducks, chickens, and rabbits. After doing a deep dive into raising each, we realized that rabbits just weren’t really worth it. That’s ok! It saved us a ton of money, work and frustration just because we educated ourselves on what it would take to actually raise these animals.

Becoming Self Reliant

We are in an age where shortages are a thing. Toilet paper, baby formula, you name it. What is next? So, I’ll ask the question again: Is homesteading worth it? Yes. Because if you become self reliant, you will do yourself and your family a world of good.

Being self reliant can mean many different things. It could mean having the ability to grow, harvest, and preserve your garden. It could mean having the knowledge and understanding of what animals can eat, how to make them grow faster for meat, and to butcher them humanely. But it also means adding new skills to your toolbox and not relying on others to fix it.

By being self reliant, you can barter for goods or services. If you suck at growing veggies but you have the space for extra meat birds. Strike a deal with someone who does grow veggies but doesn’t have the space for meat birds. If you have never canned anything, find someone who has and start learning.

We have become more and more self reliant, just by being more frugal with what we do purchase, make or use. We purchase whole ingredients instead of quick meals… for the most part. But one of the things that we decided early on was to learn the “manual” way to do something.

We wanted to be able to make pasta if we ever needed to instead of always buying it from the store. Or making bread. Learning to be more self reliant doesn’t have to mean these big huge skills like gardening, canning, butchering, etc. It can be as simple as making bread or pasta.

Is Homesteading Worth It?

At the end of the day, you need to make that decision for yourself. I can say this, it is the most amazing feeling knowing that I made most the food in my food storage room. It’s also pretty cool that if I’m out of something, I know how to make a lot of things from scratch. Like that time that Jaxson wanted hamburger helper but I haven’t bought that stuff in years. Instead, I was able to make my own cheese sauce from butter and cheese that I made.

The question is, do you want that? Do you want to cook from scratch? Does a garden appeal to you? You have to know your why.

Every decision you make and goal you have should start with a Why. Why is it so important to you? This helps keep you on track when things get hard… And they WILL get hard. If you remember your why, every single decision you make will be a lot easier.

Our Why

Our why is simple: to not rely on others for things we can do ourselves. When it comes to the blog our why is equally as simple: To help beginning homesteaders with setting up their homestead and avoid the pitfalls of doing things “wrong”.

I have said for many years, if I just had 5 years and 5 acres, I could get us about 75% self reliant in terms of produce and meat. I could get our infrastructure set up to a point were trees, bushes, and other perennials require minimal effort with major results.

While we have had some major set backs, we have made a good sized dent in our infrastructure and are working towards doing more. I have to remind myself daily that our neighbors homestead has had over 100 years of work done to it. Ours only has a couple. They may have what we are moving towards, but we are starting from scratch. We’ll get there, though, and so will you.

So Join Us

The homesteading community is an amazing resource for all of us. It doesn’t matter if you are a master gardener or a beginner. It doesn’t matter if you have 1/8th acre or 800. We are a supportive group that only wants you to be successful.

YouTube is an amazing resource, as well as Instagram. The vast majority of us want to chat about anything and everything from livestock to gardens to preserving. Don’t be afraid to reach out!

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Homesteading On A Budget

June 18, 2024 by Leigh Leave a Comment

This blog has been up and running for several years now and one of the topics that I don’t usually cover is finances. There’s a lot of reason for that, but one of the biggest is that I don’t feel overly qualified to offer a lot of financial advise. I can’t tell you who you should invest your money with or the best way to raise your credit score. But I do feel qualified to tell you how we do things here on our homestead. So here is how we have tackled homesteading on a budget.

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Homesteading On A Budget

First and foremost, you should absolutely have a budget. Not just for your regular finances, but also for any projects or animals you have. One of the things I have seen over and over, and fell victim to ourselves, is not having a solid budget. Next, you should always plan for failure. While it may seem counter productive, it’s always better to be ready for failure than caught with your pants down. Finally, you should never, ever rely on new income sources to cover something.

This isn’t an end all be all list of homesteading on a budget. But it is a place to start.

Start With A Budget

It is shocking to me that even now, in 2024, people still don’t have or know how to budget. This is so weird to me because we’ve always had a budget. It’s a product of growing up poor and staying poor for a long time. Hell, having a budget is what eased us out of poverty and into solidly middle income.

When it comes to homesteading, you should have your regular budget for paying bills and getting food, gas, clothing, etc. But you should also be budgeting what projects, animals or other “add ons” you will be adding to your homestead.

A prime example of this was the greenhouse. We knew that we wanted a greenhouse and that we did not want a kit greenhouse. So we had to figure out how to build it, draw it up, purchase materials and begin. The problem with any project like this is that you are going to forget something. So making sure to have an extra buffer built into your budget is a great way to not get stuck.

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Types of Budgets

It doesn’t necessarily matter what kind of budget you use. This post from Nerd Wallet is a great place to get started if you need a little more help figuring out what kind of budget will work for you. It could be a zero budget, where every penny of income is accounted for and you zero out your bank account every month. It could be the 50/30/20 budget were 20% goes to savings, 30% goes to wants, and 50% goes to necessities. Or a pay yourself first budget that focuses on savings first.

We follow a mix of these budgets. Because I am a spender and Jared is a saver, we use that to our advantage. Basically, just enough money goes into our main account to pay bills, take care of the homestead and some “fun” money. Then the rest goes into his savings to cover bigger projects for the homestead, putting money back for big purchases like purchasing a whole cow or into our emergency fund.

The most important thing is to have a budget and that it accounts for everything. A budget that doesn’t account for chicken feed isn’t going to do you any favors if you are constantly having to dip into other funds to pay for your chicken feed.

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Planning For Failure

I wrote a blog post about planning for failure here, but it’s mostly geared towards earning an income from the farm. It doesn’t really talk about planning for failure on plain ole homestead. So I wanted to touch on what planning for failure means to your budget and homestead.

Planning for failure on the homestead really revolves around having back up plans. It’s the same idea that you won’t start an emergency garden in the middle of an emergency. You should start it when you don’t HAVE to rely on it to feed you. That way you can learn and grow that muscle first.

Planning for failure looks like having 2 proven milk goats if you are trying to move away from store bought milk and cheese. Because if one of those goats goes down, you have a back up. It’s better to have to figure out what to do with too much milk, than not enough.

But when it comes to finances, it means that a $1,000 emergency fund is not enough. To be honest, regardless if you homestead or not, that is a tiny emergency fund to start with, especially with inflation. But on a homestead, it’s WAY too small. If your well pump goes out, that can be a $3,000 fix. A call and visit to the vet can easily rack up thousands of dollars.

As you are setting up your budget, make sure that you are taking into account what will happen if your garden fails and you don’t get a lot of food. Take into account a freezer failing at any point. Make sure that you have back up plans.

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Never Count Chickens Before They Are Sold

Everyone is guilty of expecting one thing to happen, and then it either doesn’t or something worse happens. It’s equally true here. In fact, this saying exemplifies homesteading. Do not expect that 50 tomato plants will produce enough for your family until you have consistently maxed those plants production.

If you are working on a new income stream, like a farmers market, don’t rely 100% on that to feed your family. You should absolutely hustle like it’s the only income you’ll have, but you should plan that it won’t. Just in case.

If I had quit my job to focus on the farmers market, we would have been sunk. If I had quit my job to focus on this blog, we would have been sunk. And yes, you should go at every new venture as if your life depends on it, but in these crazy times, I’m not willing to risk my family, finances, and farm to rash decisions.

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How Homesteading On A Budget Works For Us

I’ve mentioned in various points how we do it, but I will condense it down all right here for you.

First, we work full time jobs and that pays our bills, projects, and other homestead stuff. We are not at a point where the farm can sustain us. Plus, we really like our jobs.

Second, we try to only take on projects that can be self sustaining. That means that we don’t want to have to work our asses off off farm, to pay for the farm. So little to no inputs to keep that project running. For example, we don’t feed a lot of feed to our chickens. They get kitchen scraps, from home and work, and forage for bugs and grass.

Third, we use our financial habits to our advantage. Jared saves money, I don’t. So I’m not in charge of saving money. I get the bills paid, food/feed bought, and plan projects. Jared saves every penny so that when the time comes, we can build the new decks, purchase meat animals, etc.

Fourth, we account for EVERYTHING and plan for failure. This helps keep things from popping up. And while there are still surprises, it’s not as terrifying because we have back up plans to the back up plans.

Fifth, we have monthly, quarterly and yearly finance meetings were we sit down and actually go through our finances and figure out what is happening, is it working and where we want to go from here. I am a firm believer in money talks with the whole family, but specifically your spouse.

Finally, while we hold each other accountable, we also give grace. Life is hard, there is not reason to make it harder by constantly arguing with your person about money. So keeping accountability is important, but so is kindness and grace.

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Homesteading With A Job

May 11, 2024 by Leigh 1 Comment

Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to go to work anymore? No matter how much you love your job, the idea of staying on your homestead is very appealing. I would love to be in a situation where I no longer have to work outside of my homestead. But homesteading doesn’t save you money, at least initially. So if you are like most of us, you are interested in homesteading with a job and you’ve come to the right place.

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Social Media Would Have You Believe

If you are browsing YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, or other blogs, you will see a ton of stories about how they only work their homestead. Their home is insta-worthy and never once will they show last nights dishes in the sink.

Jealous? Maybe a little.

But a lot of people have been shown through various social media platforms that the only way to homestead is by not having a job. For a long time, I thought that too. But I figured with our schedule, we could make something work. And we have.

So how do I homestead with a job?

First and foremost, we have divided the chores between the four of us. Jaxson takes care of the chickens. Chase has the goats. I handle most of the garden, canning and project research. Jared handles butchering, building and many other tasks.

When it comes to the house split those chores as well. That sounds very homestead-y, right? But what about working? How is it with a job?

Well, between Jared and I, we work a ton. I work about 48 hours a week at one job, another 8-12 hours at another, and then spend another 20 hours a week on the blog. Not to mention that we homeschool the boys. Jared will usually pick up one or two extra shifts a week and he also works on the homestead.

We are always busy with something and come 8PM, we are exhausted. With our schedule though, that actually only looks like 3-5 days of work off the homestead. Both of us average about 65 hours of non homestead related jobs.

We are lucky enough that we have jobs that allow us to fit homesteading and homeschooling around our work life. But sometimes it just doesn’t seem like there are enough hours in the day. Especially for Jared since he is the master of projects around the property.

But Leigh, I work 9-5 Monday through Friday

Start small. If you start off thinking that you need to do everything all at once, you are not going to succeed. But if you start small and slowly build up, you will find that it’s not too bad. I did a blog post about saving your sanity with chores, and this is really no different.

The best thing you can do is start with a couple chickens, then add more. Or start with a small garden, then add to it. You do not have to start everything the day you move in.

I would set up your homestead goals and make sure you prioritize them. It takes a lot of time to get where you want to be, so don’t beat yourself up if you don’t get everything done in one year or five years.

When we started homesteading, we started small-ish. We started with chickens but then jumped to goats and all bets were off. The last six months “catching up” with the goats. We were also still trying to fix up the house, property, and all the other things starting a from scratch homestead entails.

Our schedule isn’t five days a week, but it is extremely long hours. But if you are working five days a week, it may be difficult to start at all. You probably only have the weekends off or two random days a week. So how can you do it?

Figure out what you CAN do then Level Up

Figure out what you can do during the week. Can you work the garden in the evenings when it’s cool? Do you have an instapot or crockpot for dinners? What about milking the goats in the morning before you go to work? Can you do anything early, the night before, or when you get back from work?

On the days that I am working at the college, I throw one of my favorite slow cooker recipes in before I leave for work. PS This one is great for winter! If I get home a little early, I will throw one of these awesome recipes in my Instapot. I could, and sometimes will grab a pizza on the way home but I really prefer to not spend extra cash that I don’t have on things I can make at home.

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My friend over at the 104 Homestead has some great recipes for slow cookers and Instapots. Seriously, if you don’t have an instapot by now, you really should get one!

My other friend at The Farmer’s Lamp has some really awesome Instapot recipes to look at here.

Some of the other things that can work out great for you is don’t touch the garden until it’s in the shade. For us, that is usually around 5pm. That allows us to get other chores done in the mean time. We also have our hoses set on a timer so if we aren’t there, the garden still gets water.

Our goats and chickens can be let out in less than 5 minutes. We will also plan ahead and “pre-bucket” their feed, if we know that we have an early morning. Our does get a scoop of grain (about a quart per bucket) and two scoops of alfalfa pellets (four quarts) per bucket. That way come morning we grab buckets and let them out. This really helps cut down on wasted time in the mornings.

If you can work around your work schedule, then you can absolutely homestead with a job. It just takes some time, patience, creativity, and a ton of hard work. But you can absolutely do it.

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Can You Start A Homestead With No Money?

March 23, 2024 by Leigh 10 Comments

The short answer is no. You do need some money but it might surprise you that you don’t need a ton of money to start a homestead. Ingenuity, hard work and a lot of sweat goes a long way. But at the end of the day, no, you can’t start a homestead with no money.

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When we started our homestead, we had about $2,000. Considering the amount of work we needed to do? It was not a lot of money and I was panicking. I thought we needed all the things to get everything done, RIGHT NOW. Thankfully, after working a ton of overtime we have been able to slowly grow our homestead over the next year. Keyword is slowly.

How much do you need?

I would say a good rule of thumb to moderately build your homestead is $1,000 per acre to start. That doesn’t mean if you don’t have that $1,000 you can’t buy a homestead. But $1,000 is a good way to get started on a fair amount of projects without freaking out when you have to go back to the hardware store for the 15x in two days.

Replacing the water heater only took 7 trips in two days.

Also, depending on the state of your homestead, you may need to do a lot of manual labor before you can even get to work on any big projects. When we first moved in, we had to pull tons of debris from the homestead. Fencing, barbed wire, posts, random pieces of wood with nails sticking out of them, etc. Even a burned out freezer was just hanging out.

Can You Homestead With No Money: Animals

It took us a month and a half before we brought goats to the homestead to help clear land. Even though you can get goats pretty cheap, it’s not ideal. Cheap goats tend to be problem goats. Even mix breed goats can be expensive. Then there’s medication, feed, hay, shelters, and basic supplies.

Shelter

Before bringing home new animals, make sure that you have shelter already figured out. When we brought home Bella and V, we thought one of those plastic dog crates would be fine…. Well, we live in the rainiest parts of Georgia and every summer afternoon we have a pop up shower. Which is great for the garden, but not so great for goats. Depending on your weather, a good, cheap option is a dog igloo.

Fencing

I will say is this, before you bring bigger livestock (goats, pigs, donkey, etc) to the homestead, make sure you have plenty of money set aside because your first fence probably sucks. Especially if you have never built fences for livestock. I’m not knocking your fence building skills, but those animals will find the weak points. We spent two hours chasing Bella between our property and our neighbors. So make sure you either have extra money on hand or someone who actually knows how to build livestock fencing.

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Can You Homestead With No Money: Gardening

Gardening doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive. In fact, you could have an amazing garden on a shoestring budget. You really just need time, dirt, seed and some manual labor.

This year we put in our kitchen garden beds. While I absolutely LOVE them and I’m so glad we did it, the reality is that it cost us around $2,000 between soil, materials, trellising, etc. And we’re not even done yet. We still have to add more trellising and a better fence.

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Putting in gardens is going to be hard work. You can do a lot of work by hand instead of relying on a tractor. I feel like it’s worth it to learn how to do it manually so you know how to till (if that’s what you’re doing), amend the beds, see the soil structure, etc. However, it would be really nice to have a tractor for pulling stumps and not spending two weeks working the soil.

Can You Homestead With No Money: Get Creative

If you can get creative with what is already on your property, you don’t need a ton of money to start a homestead. We had a ton of old material from various projects we did at our old house. We made sure to bring all of that with us. Since our new garage wasn’t big enough for the 2 sets of storage shelves we had in the old garage, we used the wood for something else.

Some of the debris on the property has yielded us a couple of goat shacks, a chicken coop, plenty of roosting bars, and much more all without spending a penny. And while it’s not pretty, it works really well. The goat shack above has about $2 worth of screws invested in it. Since it has been converted into a kidding pen it has another $10 worth of hinges and wood.

There have also been instances of numerous projects that need to be done, and we only have $1,000 to all of them. Things get really creative then but when I look around at all the things we have gotten done around here, I’m pretty impressed.

Don’t be afraid of buying a property because you don’t have a ton of money to get started. It takes time to get a homestead up and running, not money. Hard work goes a lot further than a dollar so please don’t get hung up on that part.

It Doesn’t Have To Be Insta-Worthy

With the rise of homesteading, I see tons and tons of Instagram or Pinterest boards of these perfectly curated gardens, chicken coops, barns, homes, etc. Please, please, please don’t fall into that trap! Those of us that have been homesteading for more than 5 minutes fully understand the reality of homesteading.

You will wear yourself out trying to keep everything perfect.

There was chicken poop all over our back deck before we got our chicken run set up. Before we renovated the living room, we had goat vomit on the ceiling. I have a trash pile that is almost as wide as my driveway. I have flies in my kitchen no matter what I do to get rid of them.

Is my house dirty? No. It’s a working homestead. Syringes by the sink, coffee mugs on the deck, measuring tape on the picnic table, and boxes of garden harvest on every flat surface.

It’s this life, I love so much.

Sure, you could spend your entire day chasing after kids trying to keep those baseboards white….. Or you could enjoy the laughter as that child snuggles with a baby goat.

You could spend 2 hours every day making sure the chicken coop is spotless. Or you could spend those same 2 hours playing in the garden.

You could spend your day pulling every weed from the garden. Or you could cover it with some mulch and plant new things.

It’s all a matter of perspective. I don’t need a perfectly clean house, coop/barn, or weed free garden. My happiness means more to me than an insta-worthy picture.

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How Much Hay Does Your Goat Need?

March 2, 2024 by Leigh Leave a Comment

No matter where you live, there’s a really good chance that you will need to feed your goats hay to get them through winter. If you live in the south, you probably won’t need a ton. But if you have an actual winter, you probably want to make sure you have enough. To figure out how much hay you need, we’ll need to ask some questions first.

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Questions to ask yourself

How many goats do you have? How long do you need to hay your goat? Are you breeding your goats? What kind of storage do you have for hay?

I wish it was a simple equation but the reality is you don’t want to find out you were wrong in the middle of a snow storm. But I am going to give you the high points and what we do with our goats. By the end of this post, you can go into fall and winter with a rough idea of how much hay you’ll need.

Oakley and Bailey the goats — Oakley and Bailey

Before we get started I want to address something. Yes, I am writing this post in March. Why am I writing a post about how much hay you need for winter in the spring? Because being prepared is key for getting your livestock through winter. It doesn’t matter if you are in a mild winter climate like Georgia, or being buried in feet of snow every winter like Alaska. Knowing how much hay your goats need will get your goats through winter without losing body condition or worst case, a goat.

How Many Goats Do You Have? And Are You Breeding?

The key to successfully getting your animals through winter is know how many mouths you are feeding and how much they should eat. While this may seem like a no brainer, you must also consider how many additional animals may be coming to your homestead. We ended up picking up two more goats in January, had we not planned for extra hay, we would have been short because we now have two more mouths to feed.

Bella scratching her side because her pregnant belly gets in the way

You also need to consider if any of your does are pregnant, or could become pregnant. If you only get the minimum needed for each goat, and now your doe needs more hay because she is pregnant, you will be short. Or worse case, you don’t have enough for when the babies are ready to eat.

How Long Is Your Winter? Where Are You Storing Your Hay?

In Georgia, we have an extremely mild winter. Sure it gets cold and wet, but it doesn’t snow a lot and we usually have some sort of greenery for goats to eat. It is certainly not enough for them to eat throughout winter, but we do have some grasses that will grow year round here. When we start figuring up how much hay we need, we look at how much we got last year, and how long that lasted us. We also figure up how many months we will use hay.

For us, we want the ability to start giving them hay by mid to end October and have enough to carry them to the end of April. Now, we don’t start getting cold enough for our pastures to start hibernating until probably November. Our grass also usually starts growing in March, but having that extra cushion allows us to not worry if we get a freak snow storm in March, which has happened.

Jared also built a hay barn that is about fifty feet from our goat barn. While that is certainly a pain some days, especially when it is raining. It adds a layer of security that if the hay catches fire, which it’s prone to doing, our goats are safe. We tweaked his original design so that it’s easier to load. He’s also going to make an opening so that the goats can still get hay if they run out.

So How Much Hay Do You Need?

The general rule of thumb is 2-4 pounds of hay per day per goat. Or if you know their weight, 2-4% of their weight per day. Before we start looking at how much hay you need, I have a hay calcula tor in our general store that will make all this math a LOT easier. All you have to do is put the weight of your animal (estimating is fine), the percentage you want to feed per day and the amount of days you want to feed for. On the second page, there is a hay tracker that allows you to see where you bought your hay previously, how much you bought, how much you spent and so on.

The Hay Calculator:

If you aren’t math-y (don’t worry I’m not either), check out our Hay Calculator. It literally does ALL of the math for you and gives you totals based on what you want your goals.

On the second page, you can track where you’ve bought hay, what you spent and how long it lasted.

Buy the Hay Calculator

So let’s crunch some numbers. When we ordered our hay this year we got fescue/ Bermuda mix and we got two strand square bales. We had four goats, but our Texas died before we actually started using the hay. But we figured that each goat weighed 50# and we wanted to make sure that we had plenty of hay. So our equation looked like this

50# x .04= 2#/ day

2#x4 goats= 8#/ day

30 days in a month x 8 months= 240 days

8#x 240 days=1920# of hay

I know two tons of hay sounds like a lot, and it is. But if we had minimized what we needed:

30# x .02= .6#/ day

.6#x4 goats= 2.4#/ day

30 days in a month x 8 months= 240 days

2.4#x 240 days=576# of hay

We would have run out of hay in December. Let’s not mention that we wouldn’t have had enough to feed the two new goats we got in January. So knowing these figures allowed us to figure out how much hay we needed and we actually rounded down to about 1600# of hay.

The Hay Calculator:

If you aren’t math-y (don’t worry I’m not either), check out our Hay Calculator. It literally does ALL of the math for you and gives you totals based on what you want your goals.

On the second page, you can track where you’ve bought hay, what you spent and how long it lasted.

Buy the Hay Calculator

Now the second question of where to put the hay comes into question. Because we didn’t have a place to put a round bale of hay, nor anyway to move it into the pens, we opted for 2 strand square bales. Not only did we not have space, but putting all our eggs in that basket seemed like a bad idea. If any portion of that round bale molded and we fed it to the goats, they could all die. So we went with square bales.

Jared built our hay barn so that we could house the hay without it getting wet but still had plenty of ventilation, which decreases the chances of it molding, composting, or any other nasty that would make it unusable. When we ordered our hay we ordered 28 bales of hay to get everyone though winter. That’s about 1600# and we only paid $200 for it.

This year we will have twelve goats to get through winter and we have been seeding our pasture to make sure they had plenty of options, especially in winter. To give you a break down of how much hay we are planning for and the corresponding math.

Our seven girls total weight= approximately 525#

Our five bucks/wether= approximately 600#

1125# goat x .04 & .02= 45# of hay/ day or 22# of hay/day

30 days x 45 (and 22)= 1350# or 660#

Long feed (September to April) X High Weight= 10,800#

Long Feed X Low Weight=5280#

Short Feed (November to March) X High Weight=6750#

Short Feed X Low Weight=3330#

If all of that is just a lot of information and hard to keep up with? Just head over to our hay calculator and you can purchase the much easier version.

Now we average the highest number and the lowest number: 10,800# and 3,300#= 7,050# of hay.

Why do we average it? Because they aren’t only going to eat hay. They get alfalfa pellets and grain as well. Plus they will eat branches, dead leaves, etc. So they won’t need the full 45# of hay per day. But they might. And as I said before, I would rather have too much than not enough. And let’s face it, they are going to waste a fair amount of it.

Is there an easier way to do this? Absolutely. I could just multiply by .03 instead but I like having the high and low numbers. If I am aiming for 10k # of feed and only hit 5k #, then I know I will have to buy extra grain, alfalfa pellets, or beet pulp.

So how much hay do you need to get through winter? Use the formula above to figure it out and remember, it is better to have too much than not enough.

If that was a little too much to handle, don’t forget you can use the hay calculator to make it a TON easier

The Hay Calculator:

If you aren’t math-y (don’t worry I’m not either), check out our Hay Calculator. It literally does ALL of the math for you and gives you totals based on what you want your goals.

On the second page, you can track where you’ve bought hay, what you spent and how long it lasted.

Buy the Hay Calculator

If you like the content I put out, feel free to buy us a coffee! It helps keep this site running, marketing and the goats in grain!

Buy me a coffee

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How To Start A Homestead

December 29, 2023 by Leigh Leave a Comment

I can’t and won’t tell you how to start a homestead. Each homesteader is going to have different ideas, wants, desires, goals, etc. So to give you a step by step guide is pretty pointless. But what I am going to do, is tell you how I would have done it when we started. I am going to give you the tips and tricks I wish I had known prior to starting out. Because to tell you how to start a homestead would be amazing, it’s not going to work for everyone.

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Before You Start A Homestead

Before you start looking for properties, you need to set your homesteading goals. Do you want to raise or grow all your own food? Are you looking to make money? Is this a retirement plan? You really need to dig deep about why you want to start your homestead and start journaling everything.

The reason this comes first is because you are going to need to know what kind of land you need for the goals you have. When we started looking at properties, we found one that we absolutely fell in love with. It was at the top of a mountain with 15 acres and a ton of boulders. As you can imagine, living on a mountain would have a lot of challenge like, steep cliffs, rocky soil, and outbuilding issues.

Because we knew what we wanted to do on the property, we knew that doing those things on a mountain would be extremely difficult.

After Setting Your Goals

You should consider your goals with every single property that you look at. Is there enough land for your goals? Can you work the land without a lot of initial investment? Is the layout of the land going to work with your principles, goals and ideals?

If you find a property that has a ton of pasture, fencing, and outbuildings, only to find out that the land was used to grow GMO corn? That may not line up with your ideals of organic farming. While that land is already set up to farm, it’s going to take years to repair that soil.

If your property is completely raw, you are going to put a TON of work into it to get it where you want it. Our property was almost completely raw. No outbuildings, no gardens, and minimal pastures. So we have spent a lot of time and money getting everything set up. And we aren’t even close to being done.

Researching Laws On Your Homestead

If you are planning on homesteading, but your county or state laws require all sorts of regulations, make sure you know what they are before you buy that property. The sale of raw milk recently became legal in the state of Georgia. But there are a lot of regulations to go with it. Same with cow sharing and meat purchases. Don’t sink all your money into a property only to find out later that you can’t do the things you want to do.

If we had just started selling raw milk when we first started, we would have ended up in law suits with possible jail time. It’s better to know what you’re getting into before your hip deep in problems.

Start an LLC, S Corp or Similar

Research which of these business options make the most sense to you, your property and your goals. But whatever it is, get it started before you buy the first fence post, animal, bag of feed, you name it. If possible get an EIN number or other tax applications done. You want to make sure you are tracking every purchase.

This will lower your tax burden and allow you to *hopefully* get some money back at the end of the year.

I use this tracker to make sure that I am getting as much back on my taxes as possible.

After Buying Your Property

Once you’ve committed, or purchased a property, I want you to sit with it for a minute. Especially if you are a brand new homesteader! Don’t start digging a garden, building a barn, or anything else until you know what you’re land is capable of.

We knew we wanted animals, but weren’t in a hurry to get them. Until the goats. While I’m glad we got the goats, I really wish we would have waited.

Waiting On Gardens

No matter how much you know you need to wait, you want to plant more. My biggest reason for waiting was just wanting to make sure that before we started clearing huge areas for a garden, we knew what it would look like in all four seasons. I wanted to make sure that I knew where water run off would be, sunlight, and where the good soil already was.

Because we waited, we saved ourselves a ton of physical labor as well as time and money.

Waiting On Animals

This is by far the hardest thing for any new homesteader. It’s usually the first thing that we think of when we think about farming or homesteading. But trust me when I say, if you get animals before your infrastructure is set up, you will be chasing your tail for the next decade.

We brought two goats onto the property without fencing put up, shelter in place or any idea what to feed them. After we lost V, we had to scramble to buy more goats. Then more shelters, fencing, etc. That first year should have been figuring out what we wanted to do. Instead, it was a year of figuring out what we were doing.

Waiting On Major Purchases

When we first bought the property, we were going to build Jared’s shop, get a tractor, a side by side, and huge barn. Man, I am SO glad we waited. We had all these ideas and plans, that I am beyond grateful didn’t work out. That first year would have cost us several thousand dollars. But you know what we learned? We don’t need a tractor, a side by side, a huge barn, or Jared’s shop.

Would those things have made our lives easier? Abso-freaking-loutely! But it would have stretched us so thin that we wouldn’t have been able to do the other things that we wanted to do.

Because we waited, we learned that manual power is the advantage. We don’t need a tractor to haul the dead trees anywhere. We cut them into smaller chunks and rolled them where they needed to be.

Because we waited on the huge barn, we realized that smaller shacks for the animals are easier to move and easier for them to keep themselves warm.

Because we waited on the side by side, we found a great deal on a pair of four wheelers that don’t require payments.

We did realize that a barn, shop, tractor, side by side would make things easier but we could do more manually.

Getting To Work

Once you have sat on your property for a minute, and learned what you and that property were capable of, get to work.

Start Your Garden First

I will say it again and again, wait on livestock till you have your gardens in! Yes, this is a do as I say not as I DID. I say this with the experience of someone who DIDN’T start with gardens. I wish we would have waited on livestock but we didn’t.

When you are setting up your gardens, think about your goals for the garden. Are you planning on a fresh eating garden? Or are you looking to put up food for the off season? How big is your family? All of these questions are important to answer before you start your gardens.

I suggest starting with a larger space than you think you need. Without fail, and every year, we end up having to expand our gardens. Which is great, but does lead to issues with fencing, beds and having to change stuff around constantly.

Start On Your Animals

If you listened, which I doubt because I wouldn’t either, you have waited on getting animals till after you’ve gotten your gardens dialed in. Now, we get animals.

Unlike the garden, where you give yourself more space than you need, start small with your livestock. Start with ONLY the amount of chickens you need. Only get a couple of goats or cows. Start small and learn the animal before you get an entire herd.

I know you’re not going to and I’m wasting my time, but you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Revisit Those Major Purchases

After you have learned how to do things manually, start thinking about those bigger purchases. We thought we would need that tractor? Turns out, we don’t even want a tractor. It doesn’t fit with our land philosophies.

Jared’s shop? Yes, we will be building it. But it doesn’t have to be any time soon. There are more important things to build. Like the barn.

One of the big things that we have noticed is that we need more space in the barn. We have 9 permanent does and space during kidding season is at a premium. In fact, the shuffle of trying to figure out who goes where is kind of intense. Especially, since the girls don’t like the other does near their babies. So it can get pretty hairy.

But if we had just built the barn, we wouldn’t know exactly what we wanted.

How To Start A Homestead

I can’t tell you how to start a homestead. I can only tell you the things that we have discovered since starting our own homestead. Things I wish we would have done differently but also things I’m REALLY glad we waited on.

If you like this post, feel free to share it and follow us below on our social media accounts!

Frequently Asked Questions

Why Social Media Is a Powerful Tool for Homesteaders

Step 1: Choose Your Social Media Platforms

Step 2: Define Your Niche and Audience

Step 3: Plan Your Content Strategy

Step 4: Create and Schedule Content Consistently

Step 5: Monetize Your Content

1. Affiliate Marketing

2. Ad Revenue

3. Digital Products

4. Brand Sponsorships

5. Physical Products

Step 6: Build Your Funnel

Step 7: Track What’s Working

Step 8: Stay Authentic and Serve First

Final Thoughts on Creating a Homestead Social Media Plan

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Why Homestead Goal Setting Matters

Step 1: Define Your Homestead Vision

Step 2: Assess Your Resources Honestly

Step 3: Break It Down by Season or Year

Step 4: Use SMART Goals

Step 5: Prioritize What’s Most Important

The Hay Calculator:

Step 6: Track Your Progress

Step 7: Reassess and Adjust

Step 8: Celebrate Small Wins

Goal Setting Examples by Homestead Focus

Gardening Goals

Livestock Goals

Food Preservation Goals

Income or Business Goals

Sustainability Goals

Family Goals

Final Thoughts on Homestead Goal Setting

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*****Be sure to read till the end*****

Why Is Homesteading Hard?

Life and Death Decisions

Running Out Of Feed

Sick Animals

Financial Impact

Working Your Gardens

Firewood

Is Homesteading Hard?

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Canning Food Is Safe

What Is Canning?

The Dreaded Botulism

Safe Vs Unsafe Canning Practices

The Pressure Canning Debate

How Long Does Canned Food Stay Safe

Starting Your Canning Journey

Canning Food Is Safe

How To Get Started

What Do You Want?

Becoming Self Reliant

Is Homesteading Worth It?

Our Why

So Join Us

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Homesteading On A Budget

Start With A Budget

Types of Budgets

Planning For Failure

Never Count Chickens Before They Are Sold

How Homesteading On A Budget Works For Us

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Social Media Would Have You Believe

So how do I homestead with a job?

But Leigh, I work 9-5 Monday through Friday

Figure out what you CAN do then Level Up

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How much do you need?

Can You Homestead With No Money: Animals

Shelter

Fencing

Can You Homestead With No Money: Gardening

Can You Homestead With No Money: Get Creative

It Doesn’t Have To Be Insta-Worthy

Be sure to read till the end