Backyard Farmer

Heavytruck

Heavytruck

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TX
Anyone here gone down the road of producing as much of your own food as you can?

Roughly 12 months back, my wife and I got the idea to raise chickens ourselves for eggs, because egg prices were insane at that point. We picked up 10 birds, and 2 of them didn't survive the winter. So we wanted to add a few more — and the batch you see here is the very first one we hatched ourselves, 4 days ago, using eggs from our own flock. Pretty exciting.

We also put in a vegetable garden measuring 76’ x 42’, plus a small 10x20 greenhouse to keep things going during the colder months. The remaining raised beds are still a work in progress, but we already harvested more vegetables than we can store, and we've been stretching the extra eggs by mixing them into dog food. On top of that, we planted 2 apple trees, 2 plum trees, and an orange tree.

What kinds of things have you started doing to save money, only to have it turn into an addiction? (Peptides don't count lol)
 
Heavytruck said:

Anyone here gone down the road of producing as much of your own food as you can?

Roughly 12 months back, my wife and I got the idea to raise chickens ourselves for eggs, because egg prices were insane at that point. We picked up 10 birds, and 2 of them didn't survive the winter. So we wanted to add a few more — and the batch you see here is the very first one we hatched ourselves, 4 days ago, using eggs from our own flock. Pretty exciting.

We also put in a vegetable garden measuring 76’ x 42’, plus a small 10x20 greenhouse to keep things going during the colder months. The remaining raised beds are still a work in progress, but we already harvested more vegetables than we can store, and we've been stretching the extra eggs by mixing them into dog food. On top of that, we planted 2 apple trees, 2 plum trees, and an orange tree.

What kinds of things have you started doing to save money, only to have it turn into an addiction? (Peptides don't count lol)
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I figure my children have gotten a solid education and can stand on their own, and I lean toward the idea that you can't take it with you. So I suppose the answer is none. I'm not trying to poh poh on what you posted. That's just how I see it.
 
In my yard, the only things that go in the ground are things we can eat.

We've got multiple big garden beds going. Rhubarb, artichokes, potatoes, green beans, tomatoes, zucchini, melons...the list goes on and on.

My husband put together a lettuce table for our lettuce. Beyond that, I do microgreens, plus flowers such as calendula and nasturtiums (we use them in salads and teas), and a huge variety of herbs.
 
We keep a lot of chickens, and every so often we raise meat birds to butcher. The venison we harvest mostly gets ground up, and we swap it in for ground beef about twice a week. There's a garden too. Raw milk. I make our own bread and so on. That sure beats shelling out 7+$ for a loaf of daves killer bread, which is the only brand we'll purchase. Of course, that's how it goes in a perfect world. My garden was a bust this year, and I've lacked the energy to do much baking. For the 7 of us, bread runs us roughly 30$ a week.
 
Back when I lived at my previous place, I kept chickens. I really enjoyed it. They gave me breakfast at no cost, needed very little upkeep, cut down on bugs around the yard, and provided free compost material for my garden. I wasn't chasing full self-sufficiency as a target, just trying to move in that direction. The chickens covered eggs and protein, the bee hives gave me honey (which is sugar), the vegetable patch supplied veggies and herbs, and rain barrels handled water. The one thing I never figured out was where to get salt.
 
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