The Vision

After perusing around the web and YouTube, looking at homesteading links, I started thinking about what my goals really are for Frühlingskabine. Do I have a real set of goals or is it really just a vision of what I want from life?
I think everyone eventually gets to that junction where wanting to do better for yourself and your children becomes doing better for yourself and your children. Changes need to happen in order to get where you want to be.

The Vision:
My vision is to be (somewhat) self-reliant or self-sustaining. I would like to wake up every morning to feed the chickens, collect eggs, water the garden, say hello to the dairy goats, feed the Angora rabbits, and harvest food from the garden for the days meals.

I would like both meat chickens and egg-layers since my family is by no means vegetarian... maybe 50 eggers and 12 meatsys at any given time. That way I have more than enough for my family and perhaps extra product to sell (which would at least pay for feed and water). The same would go for the dairy goats.

The most important thing for me, and I believe I can speak for my husband also, is that our daughter learns where food comes from. So she can provide for herself when the time comes and how animal husbandry is an important aspect of living.

Reality:
Come September, I don't think we will be too far off. We will officially be moved into the Frühlingskabine, where our chickens already live, and our rabbits should be almost ready to bring home from the breeder.
I also just ordered a wool spinning wheel off of Etsy (more on that when it arrives) so I will be ready for my first Angora wool harvest. I'm also working on re-learning to knit and crochet. The latter seems to be easier for me.

Our bee hive was shipped today along with "swarm lure". Trevor is going to try and catch a local swarm. If that fails, we will just order a swarm in January when most places start selling them.

Again, chickens are already thriving at our Micro-Farm and will be getting a bigger upgraded coop in the next week or so. We are aiming for under $300 in cost. I'll let you know how that goes.

As far as gardening goes, we already have it going... in a sense. We will be co-op gardening with our neighbors who's backyard backs up to ours and is incidentally our landlord. In exchange for gardening/weeding help and some fresh eggs, we can have a share of some fresh produce. Pretty good starting ground I say.

Lastly, and unfortunately, we will not be able to keep dairy goats. So that aspect of the vision is postponed until we are able to buy our own land. It's good to always have a goal though and our landlords are very accepting and generous to let us keep our other animals. Someday goats will come into the picture, but for now we're happy with our other aspects of homesteading.

What is your family vision?






- Sarah