short term plans

We have some short term (within 6 months) goals for the property.

• Build chicken coop and purchase chicks for spring, we plan to get hens for laying as well as some cornish cross birds for meat.
  
• garden, rather than the traditional garden we will be doing things a bit differently. We will be building an aquaponic system. This system is a combination of Hydroponics and Aquaculture in simple terms fish are raised as a food source and the water from the fish tanks is pumped into the plants. The plants feed off the nutrients which in turn filters the water before it's returned to the tank.
  
• compost. since we no longer have a dishwasher and garbage disposal waste from the kitchen will be composted in order to fertilize plants which can not be grown in the aquaponic system.
  
• Build a pig pen and purchase one or two feeder pigs.
  

It's been a long time since I have raised any farm animals so i'm planning on taking it slow.
My daughter is very excited about the animals and she already knows the plans for the chickens and pigs. Everytime she calls me she says "Did you get the chickens yet? what about the piggy?"

She made the mistake of telling her mother "we're going to kill the chickens and the pigs and have bacon , pork chops and chicken in the freezer".
She said her mom got mad and said "you have GOT to be KIDDING me!"
Apparently her mother didn't see the good in raising your own food.

LOL

lesson learned

It's been about two weeks in our new place and things are slowly coming together. But, we learned an important lesson the other day. Our dryer kept tripping the breaker for some reason so I pulled the plug and noticed it was warm and melted around one of the prongs. Figuring that probably wasn't good and whats causing the breaker to trip I removed the old cord, proceeding to lose one of the screw down the back of the dryer. I searched everywhere and I couldn't see or hear it moving around so we headed off to Lowes and bought a replacement cord. Lowes, it's hard to leave it's like being a kid in a candy store. After drooling over everything I wanted I managed to get out the door and replaced the cord, still missing one of the screw to attach the hot lead I searched and searched to no avail. I looked through all of my toolboxes and junk drawer for a replacement and of course couldn't find one that fit.

Just as I was about to give up and drive back to Lowes for a damn screw I tipped the dryer one last time and teh screw came rolling along the inside of the dryer. Success! the dryer worked ....

For about 5 minutes when it tripped the breaker and gena said a spark came out of the outlet. not being one to mess with home electricity and after several warning from family members about burning the house down I had gena call the home warranty company and they sent an electrician. She called me at work and said that the outlet was the problem and it looked like we had a fire in it. He replaced the outlet and checked the other outlets in the house warning us that we have old style outlets that don't meet new fire codes and we should replace them because they are a fire hazard. he also said "you're lucky you didnt burn the house down with that dryer!"

Lesson of the week, when something, especially a dryer on a 220 line trips the breaker, don't pass it off and just reset the breaker without having the problem checked out.

Aquaponics for homesteaders

Aquaponics, what is it?
by definition "the symbiotic cultivation of plants and aquatic animals in a recirculating environment."

what that means:
Fish such as Tilapia are tank raised. the dirty fish water is pumped through gravel filled grow beds, where plants growing in the gravel extract the nutrients. The water then returns to the fish tank cleaned and freshly oxygenated. The two combine together beautifully to create an efficient growing system that uses little power, very little water, and yet produces quite an incredible amount of produce for the area that it uses.

no chemicals and no wastes, using about one tenth of the water used in dirt grown vegetables.

Aquaponics can come in a myriad of forms, and likewise the amount of money that you spend on a system can vary just as much. Aquariums, bathtubs, barrels, old swimming pools, water troughs and plastic tubs, right through to custom made steel or fiberglass, the possibilities are endless, but with a few basic principles a system can easily be built, and quite often with bits that you may have laying around the house or farm. So long as you can find water proof containers, then your on your way.

Systems don’t need to be made using gravel grow beds either, it could be as simple as polystyrene foam sheets floating on the surface of the water, with plants poking through the foam into the water below, NFT (nutrient film technique) guttering, or aeroponics can also be used, systems are limited only by your imagination.

Aquaponics is just beginning to catch on in the US, but has been popular in europe and asia for years.

We'll be working on construction of an aquaponic system in the near future.
for more information see the Australian based backyard aquaponics forum at Backyard Aquaponics