Hello all,
I just recently stumbled upon this forum, and I’m very excited that I get a chance to learn so much from all of you wonderful people! I have been wanting to turn our little 4 acres of
land in Montana into a hobby farm that could support our family, but I feel we’ve got our work cut out for us. I’m hoping some of you seasoned folks could help me organize my ideas a bit and put things in perspective, so that I can more steadily move toward our goal. Right now we’ve got 30 or so laying hens and one rooster. We’ve tried vegetable
gardening, and the first year we did great, but then the soil got depleted, the winds blew hard, killing our little plants, and the grasshoppers ate what was left over

This spring, we’re going to try vegetable
gardening again, though.
Here’s a list of the projects I’d like to tackle:
(1) I’m hoping to improve our soil conditions by mulching,
composting and setting up worm bins
(2) I want to see about building hugelkultures to garden in, but also to act as a wind break (will this work?)
(3) get a few goats for milking, and some piggies for meat.
(4) (this ties in with #3) In the pasture area of our lot, we were thinking about having 6 equal-sized paddocks that we’d rotate the animals through
(5) Bee hives
The following lists my concerns:
(1) our soil is really bad (rocky, lots of clay, doesn’t hold
water)
(2) we get really strong gusts of wind
(3) our growing season is pretty short
(4) we don’t have much precipitation in the area, and really quick evaporation
(5) we’ve got really hungry prairie dogs (gophers, whatever you call them) and sometimes
deer
(6) every other year or so, we get swarms of grasshoppers who love to eat up any green thing [one year I watched them eat my spinach and lettuce as it was coming up, and another year, they ate the leaves off a young tree we had planted, who, sadly, did not survive].
(7) Fencing

We don’t have hardly any disposable income that we can use to put up fencing on our property. Does anyone have suggestions for that?
(

We also would like ideas on building adequate
shelters for the goats and pigs. I’m more inclined to having one shelter per paddock, so it stays in the paddock. That way, each shelter also gets time to “rest.”
I am fairly new at this stuff, and I’m open to any suggestions. I’ve read a bunch of Joel Salatin’s
books, and now that I’ve found this site, I’m learning a bunch more. I don’t want to spend time reinventing the wheel when I know there’s a whole bunch of really smart people out there who love this stuff as much as I do, and who know much more than me :

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