Kate Downham

tuffy monteverdi wrote:

Kate Downham wrote:We have around 10 acres of land that can be easily cleared…

I would not “clear” any land. Keep it in silvopasture. Trees are fantastically productive and shade-giving as well as wildlife supporting. Completely Cleared fields are “the industrial way” of farming. No need to do that. Your pastures and meadows will thank you.

The land is typical Tasmanian clearfell regrowth, which is a big mess of shrubs with not much feed value, a few trees here and there that we can use for firewood and building materials, and no pasture or meadows to speak of at all. Clearing some of this to grow food is more of a matter of choosing where to get our firewood and mulch from, not industrial-scale clearing.

Kathleen Sanderson wrote:What I would do is fence nine acres of the ten for sheep - the sheep would produce both milk and meat (and wool, depending on what breed you decide to raise). In my climate, and probably also yours, you can run about four adult sheep per acre of land, with proper management.  On the one acre remaining, I would put my vegetable garden, some ducks (or chickens if you prefer, or both), and a shed for some caged rabbits. You said you also have some wooded land; I'd put moveable electric fence for pigs in the woods, and shift them regularly. You can plant widely spaced useful trees in the sheep pasture, and also, as you cut some trees in your woods, replace them with useful varieties. If you want, later, you could find a spot for a fish pond, or aquaculture tanks, but I would start with the other stuff first.

We get most of our calories from meat, some from dairy (we can't eat eggs, unfortunately). So as long as we are able to raise our meat, the plant foods are optional and mostly just provide some variety and seasonings. That's for our household.

I think we are thinking along the same lines. If we could produce all (or most) of our calorie needs from animals, I would feel very reassured about self reliance, because we can always replace other foods with meat, eggs, and milk, and feel healthy on that.

That's really good to hear that you can run 4 sheep to the acre. We've fenced off around 2 1/2 acres of sheep land so far, around half of that is a bush paddock, which might turn to silvopasture over time, and several small paddocks of around 1/8 acre each, so that we can rotate the animals around.

Ulla Bisgaard wrote:Here we are very close to self sufficiency. Our homestead produced 1 million calories this year including 1700 pounds of produce. Part was meat and parts where fruits, vegetables, grains herbs, berries  and nuts. I have a 3300 square foot food forest garden and 23 large raised beds.
One thing I have learned, is that there are limits to how many vegetables you can eat, so you might produce it, but the volume will be too large to eat. This means you have to produce calorie dense vegetables or seed to press oil from. If you have cattle, you can get your fat that way.
Another thing you have to think about, is logistics. You need pick varieties where you prioritize covering a year. Here that means picking fruit and berry varieties that ripens at different times of the year. If you get snow, you need to produce things that can be preserved for winter eating. If you don’t get snow/frost or only get a little, but have hot summer you plant to fit that. A good example here, is avocados and strawberries. Hass avocados can be harvested from spring to fall, and a fuerte from fall to spring thus covering a full year. Growing 7 different varieties of strawberries means we have fresh strawberries 8 to 10 months of the year. This year I added sapote fruits, to cover November and December, since we don’t produce fruit during those two months, and rely on storage apples. I use planners and calendars to make sure this happens. Also, remember that if you get frost, you can grow food in cold frames or caterpillar tunnels. Cold hardy strawberries thrive in tunnels during winter time.
Calories that stores well are beans, peas and corn, since they can be dried for later use, and store very well for a long time. A good root cellar will also keep root vegetables, pumpkins and squash fresh, for a very long time.
A lot of this is hands on, so finding perennials is a must, or you end up overworked. We also plan harvest times, so my family takes time off work to help harvest, preserve and plant. A good layer of mulch will cut down on water needs and keep weeds away.
You also have to take into consideration what your family likes to eat. Just because you grew it, they might not want to eat it. For specialty fruits I suggest buying some of it first and then ask your family if this is something they want me to grow for food. I grew passion fruits at one point, but no one wanted to eat them, so it was a waste of space.
I hope these suggestions will help you in selecting your crops.

That is a good point about year-round fruit. Apples alone in this climate, if the right varieties are chosen, can be ripening for 5 months of the year, and then there’s the stone fruit, berries, and in the right microclimates some citrus too. I could grow avocado here, but I'm the only one who eats it, so I'd rather grow other things.

It's also really exciting to hear about how much you are producing on that amount of land.

Medlars are not a well known crop, but they aren’t ready to eat until they’ve been stored for weeks or months, so are another good choice for low energy storage fruit. Some apples store better than others - we are growing a couple of different reinette trees, which are said to be the best storage apples. I make a lot of apple sauce as well.

I have the rocket-assisted solar dehydator plans and I’m keen to try making one of these sometime for dehydrating fruit, vegetables, and jerky. Currently we dry some things in the bottom of our woodstove oven, but this has limited capacity and gets too hot at times.

Your Kinder goats sound excellent for homesteaders.

Our selection of dairy goats in Australia is pretty limited, and I don’t think we have Kinders here. I am a big fan of the Toggenburg for dairy. I’ve found them to be more resilient than the Saanens I’ve seen, and they give higher milk yields for longer. They don’t give much meat though.

My herd is a mixture of pure Toggenburg and Toggenburg/Saanen/Anglo-Nubian crosses.

I think it’s good to speak to breeders, and to find a specific breeder within that breed, to find animals that are being raised in a similar way to how you intend to raise them. Also for dairy it’s important to ask about milk yield.

I planted some seeds at the edge of a garden bed, intending to transplant them later if they came up. The bed had compost and was irrigated. 2 years later the trees are nearly twice my height!

These trees survived through the coldest winter I've ever seen here, not sure how low the temperature got (probably no lower than -7ºC/19ºF), but the ground was frosted over without thaw for several days in a row.

I am about to start off more seeds, this time in seedling trays, this time around being very strict about transplanting them.

Before sowing, the seeds need to have special treatment. Putting them in a bowl and pouring water over them and leaving it to cool for a few hours is the best treatment I've found. But sometimes they can be tricky to germinate.

Thank you all for your thoughtful responses. There is a lot to think about!

For getting more food-producing perennials going in the forest, wildlife and goats can be an issue, but I am thinking that for a big tree like an oak or chestnut it would be worth putting up pallet tree guards. Or I could just spread a bunch of acorns around and see what happens.

Goats I haven’t really added into the equation. We had a really good system with them for years, where they would just free range (unfenced) and come back every morning to be milked, but this winter they stopped coming every day, went away for too long, and dried up, so it’s hard to rely on them after experiencing this, unless we do a lot of fencing.

Total free range is good when it works because they are understocked and just nibbling stuff here and there. In the past we kept some goats in fences, and the forage took a very long time to regenerate, so I am not sure if fencing off large areas of forest is going to be worthwhile.

So far I’ve been thinking along the John Seymour lines that I mentioned earlier, but with swales with fodder and food trees dividing up paddocks in the pasture/cropland rotation.

We have around an 1/2 acre near the house planted to vegetables and fruit, and around another 1/4 acre that’s semi-cleared and needs to be fenced and planted, perhaps fruit and nut trees on seedling rootstock with a plan to graze geese, sheep, and pigs underneath eventually. We produce nearly all our vegetables (hopefully 100% of them this season), and our fruit trees and berries are getting better year by year.

I need to get better at gardening without inputs. Once we can catch more animal manure this will get easier.

This leaves around 9 acres for the rest of the plan.

At 4 sheep to the acre, this is 36 sheep, or around 16 ewes with lambs. If we got on average 750ml per day per ewe, we would get around 2700 litres of milk in an 8 month lactation which might yield around 500kg cheese and 160kg butter.

We’d also get around 19 lambs to eat every year, which if raised to around 14 months old could provide around 266 meals, plus some fat for cooking with, which is roughly how much red meat we eat at the moment.

So if the sheep idea works out roughly as planned, we’ll be getting enough red meat, butter, and cheese to provide for what we currently eat, plus some extra cheese that we could eat instead of other foods.

I am wondering if 2 ewes (plus their lambs) to the acre with no inputs is too much to expect? We would need to produce our own hay from this land, as well as grazing. Tagasaste and other tree hay plants could help towards this. The sheep enjoy eating some of the wild trees we have here too, so there is also the option to harvest branches of these, or try pollarding some of them for more intensive harvesting.

We would also want to keep pigs, to help till up bits of land for grains and fodder roots, to make use of excess buttermilk and other ‘waste’, and just because we like bacon.

For grain, at our current usage, we’d want to grow around an acre a year of it. If we stopped feeding it to dairy animals, then we’d only need 3/4 of that, and we could reduce it a bit more if we ate less bread or the chickens ate less grain. If we wanted to feed the chickens some legumes, we’d want maybe 1/4 acre of those, and if we wanted to grow some roots for fodder, we’d want maybe 1/2 an acre for that. So for these crops we could plough up 1/2 acre a year with pigs or potatoes, and then grow a rotation of potatoes (or combine potatoes and roots), roots, wheat, barley/oats/rye/legumes, then pasture again, so at any time in the 9 acre plan, we’d have 1 1/2 to 2 acres in crops and 7 to 7 1/2 acres in pasture.

Or I am wondering if the pasture would be healthier if it remained perennial, and we had an extra 1 1/2 to 2 acres for crops set aside permanently?

What are your thoughts?

I think by starting in the kitchen, anyone can achieve a lot towards future homesteading.

Cooking from scratch, local, and with the seasons. Imagine that you are growing it all yourself, and that you don’t want to bring anything in from outside at all (except maybe some salt and spices), and you can achieve this way of cooking by buying from local farmers and cooking recipes that don’t use packaged ingredients.

Learning to preserve food when it’s abundant to eat when these foods are not available. Buying a bulk lot of sauce tomatoes when they’re in season and preserving them, or making jams and canned fruit from different short-season fruits. Dehydrating, pickling, fermenting, canning and more.

By starting in the kitchen, it also means that you’re eating healthier, and will have more energy for other things.

In the years before we got our homestead, I read a lot of permaculture and homesteading books from the library as well, and that helped.

There might be a community garden where you can get a plot to grow your own, or you can grow food in containers. Foraging is also an important skill to learn and you don’t need any land for that.

Wwoofing is something to consider if you want to get experience with animals or other aspects of homesteading.

People here use pigs to clear bracken. I wonder if the pigs are getting some food from the roots or rhizomes.

We had a lot of trouble here with goats and bracken our first few years here. Most adult goats can nibble a bit here and there without problems (so long as there is other food there for them), but our baby goats used to have a very low tolerance to it. Over the years the goats that we've bred either have a higher tolerance for bracken when young, or have inherited some instincts to stay away from it, I'm not sure which.

My painted mountain flour corn seeds are sold by Gatherer Forager Farm - they sell a lot of their own seeds as well, which they grow organically.

https://www.gathererforager.com/

I don't think the term landrace seeds is used much here. There probably are people doing some landrace stuff, but not aware that they are doing it.

A few other seed places I have bought seed from and had good results:
Diggers club
The seed collection
Eden Seeds
The Lost Seed
Seed Freaks (I think they are no longer selling online though)

I think I read somewhere that tagasaste (tree lucerne) can be a complete food for rabbits.