Episode 138: Spring Tips For Your Homestead That You Will Thank Yourself For Next Winter

INTRO & RESOURCE REMINDER

Hi, welcome back. I just want to remind you that you can get all of my Homestead Science books on my website and many on Amazon for a new way of teaching agriculture to today’s youth and aspiring homesteaders by focusing on small-scale farming and self-sufficiency. If you are a school, co-op, or retailer and need invoicing, please feel free to reach out to me directly.

REAL-LIFE RECORDING WITH KIDS AT HOME

So while I record today, just so you know, I usually record at night and I’m recording in the morning, which means, okay, if you’re watching this, you can see this happening in the background. My husband is at the barn milking and I have a child sneaking in behind me. Hello, child.
Would you like to say hi to my YouTube friends? Say hi. Hi. Oh, I have another one who wants to say hi too.
Do you want to come in and say hi? Come here. So this wasn’t planned, but again, if you’re watching on YouTube or even just listening, let’s just go ahead and have some fun with it. What do you boys love about homesteading? About everything.
About everything? What’s your favorite part? Everything. Branch, what do you like about our farm? Uh, books. You like books? Books on our farm? Okay.
Branch is still learning the talking thing. What about our animals? What’s your favorite animal? Hutch. Hutch? Hutch is our lab puppy.
So I can totally get it that that would be his favorite animal. What’s yours, Wade? Duke. Duke? Duke is Hutch’s dad.
So apparently, like we could go without all of the cows and pigs and chickens. We just need a couple of lab pups. All right, guys, why don’t you go out and be good boys in the living room while I finish recording? Hey, are you, put that on your hair? Thank you for the hair tie.
I might put my hair up afterwards. Okay. So this is one of the fun joys of running a homestead and a homeschool and having your children home with you.

THE NEW NORMAL OF WORKING WITH KIDS

And I mean, like I said, this wasn’t what I planned on talking about, but I really love the new culture of being able to work from home with your kids and that the kids are socially acceptable to be part of your life in that way. And that’s something else that I really see in homesteading and homeschooling a lot. Like, for example, my husband went to an interview with the fire department yesterday.
He’s already on the fire department and stuff, but they’re changing some leadership. And so he went in to talk and see where he could fit into that. And he took our 16 year old son with him.
And after the interview, they did some work on some of the equipment at the firehouse. And it was just kind of that I feel like wouldn’t have even been socially acceptable, like not even five years ago. Yeah.
You don’t take your kids to work with you unless it’s take your kids to work day. And we literally run our businesses with our children every day and expose them to things like going to a sit down interview that yeah, it was a casual environment, but our son got to experience a sit down interview before he ever has to go out and do that himself. Although he’s done a few with 4-H, but it’s just that concept that a lot of kids don’t have those opportunities.
And with this move into homeschooling, and that being like socially acceptable across the board in like professional settings and things like that too, I just think it’s a really amazing thing. I was doing a talk one time at a Texas homeschool conference, and my teenage son wanted to come, but he had the little boys with him. And so he brought the little boys in and they were actually crawling around on the floor in front of me while I was doing my speech to close to 200 people, which I mean, isn’t huge, but it was just in like a, like a small like conference room type thing.
Like certain people were just packed in there and sitting on the floor and everything. And there was other kids crawling around on the floor, but my kids were in on it too, like barking at other children and stuff. And then at one point I kind of asked them to mellow out and they didn’t.
And so I just turned to my 16 year old and I said, Hey, you know, bud, thanks for coming and supporting me. Would you mind taking the little boys out? And so he just, you know, kind of like gave them like the hand wave and they got up and walked out and I finished my talk. And at the end, I actually had so many parents come over to me and say like, thanks for showing us that you can be a professional woman and do that with your kids.
And that your kids, they were comfortable in the room. They but then also behaved so well in the fact that they, when it was time for them to go, they just got up and left. And they’re like, that really showed like what you’re doing at home with your kids.
So, I mean, it was, I think it’s just really important for so many of us to embrace this new lifestyle that, I don’t know, I don’t even know, like embrace homeschooling, embrace homesteading, embrace the fact that home is becoming more important again.

TRANSITION TO TODAY’S MAIN TOPICS

Okay, I’m off that little mini soapbox that my children decided to bring up, but I wanted to start off today. This kind of came up yesterday.
And so I jotted it down real quick in my notes, the importance of leaving reviews and for businesses, small businesses. There’s a tom turkey walking through my backyard. I love where I live.
Anyways.

THE IMPORTANCE OF REVIEWS FOR SMALL BUSINESS

And this came up, you know, it was, as a business owner, reviews are really important. And I don’t know if everybody realizes how important they are.
And I’m not coming on to say this to be like, hey, go leave me a review. But I mean, you know, if you want to leave me a review, I would totally accept it, either on the podcast or in my books, like either one, we’re good. But we had somebody leave a review on our pork yesterday.
And, you know, we pork ebbs and flows as far as people buying it. We have a solid product, we have regular customers. But I find, you know, our regular customers, they’re stopping and buying like, a pack of bacon and a pack of sausage and maybe some pork chops for dinner.
Half a gallon of milk, something, you know, maybe their eggs. And, you know, yeah, we’re maybe making 50 or 100 bucks. And that helps that 100% helps that like pays our feed bills.
And then there’s, we get customers that come and buy half hogs, whole hogs, that’s $1,000 income that we get. And that’s the things that make it where we’re paying our taxes, we’re, you know, buying new pens, we’re putting it away and buying a whole truckload of feed, not just our like feed bags for chickens. And that’s what really makes the differences for small businesses.
And so we’re kind of like, like I said, ebbs and flows. And we’re kind of in an ebb right now. Like we haven’t had any big sales in, I don’t know, probably a few weeks, which, you know, puts us back into last month’s finances.
And we had a lady reach out to us. She was a firefighter in San Francisco, she just moved. Well, I say just moved, she moved to our rural area about five years ago.
And she’s been vegetarian her whole life. Like growing up in San Francisco, she’s like, that’s just what you did. If you were healthy, you were vegan.
And she’s like, living up here, I’ve realized that that’s not necessarily the case. And I’m trying to get healthier. And so I’m working on doing a carnivore diet.
But I’m having to really work myself into eating meat. And one thing that I really wanted to try was bacon, but I didn’t want store bacon. And she’s like, I was hoping to find bacon with no nitrates.
But that’s really hard to find. And I, you know, I explained to her that, yeah, there’s only I don’t know of any butchers around here that don’t really use nitrates. We have one that uses celery salt, instead of like the pickling salt.
Oh, is that your baseball glove? Cool. Do you want to play some baseball later? Okay, go find the ball. And then we can go throw the ball later.
You want to put it in your walking bag? Yeah. Okay, go put it in your walking bag. We’re going to town later and there might be activities.
So she I was explaining to her that like a lot of local butchers, you can’t get the nitrate free unless you just go with plain bacon, which then also just doesn’t cook and taste the same way. I mean, it’s good, but it’s not what you’re wanting when you get bacon. And our butcher, the only US local USDA butcher does not use they do use the pickling or pickling the curing salt.
And so hi, buddy. So we we I explained to her that even though we do use those that other than that, our pork is probably the cleanest product she’s gonna find. I mean, not that we’re not that we’re more clean than the pork producer down the road, just we are probably one of the larger pork producers in our area.
So if she likes our product, we’re going to consistently have product for her where some of the other producers locally only do the whole and half where you have to buy a lot of pork at once versus just being able to pick up a pack of bacon or something. So, you know, let her know that our pork is non GMO, we don’t give any medications to the animals that go into our retail meat. I if I have an animal that does get sick, I have to medicate it, I don’t, I am not one of those people who says my animals should not be taken care of, or that I like go rub garlic in a wound or something like I think that there’s a lot of great herbal remedies that are good for prevention.
I try to not use them for treatment, unless I think that that would be sufficient. But so if I do have an animal that I give antibiotics to or I worm them or something like that, I’ll just put them into a different like herd basically, where those animals don’t go into my retail meat, they go for like the whole and halves that I’m selling to somebody that I’m having a personal conversation with about the animal that they’re receiving. So anyways, kind of long story short, she ended up going on our website going on our Facebook page and just leaving wonderful reviews about how this is the best bacon she’s ever had and she loves it so much and so on and so forth.
And so that was I mean, it was a really, really sweet review. And immediately, not only Hey, boys, would you shut the door so that you can play? Thank you. So immediately, I started having more influx onto my Facebook page.
And not only that, I’m working on like starting a club locally. Well, I’m working on starting a Grange. Locally, we used to have one the building burned down and then the community it kind of just went away.
And so we’re reactivating that I have a lot of really excited people. But at the same time, she left that review, it triggered our page in the local stuff. And immediately, I started having a bunch of people responding to that.
And it just made me realize how important reviews are in today’s world of marketing and selling. And like the algorithms that go with that, and I’m guilty of it too. Because I’m really bad at leaving reviews.
But when I get them, I’m always so excited. And, you know, then they’re great for my site. And I can use them for social media, and so on and so forth.
But I didn’t realize like how much it sways the algorithm, especially so quick, because I literally sold her that meat on Sunday, it’s now Tuesday morning. And I’ve had this like, consistent influx across my page since then.

REVIEWS, SEO, AND SELLING A BUSINESS

And so I have some friends that are trying to sell a local business, and they’re really pushing the Google reviews.
And they’re doing that because they need to keep their like SEO and numbers, like site views and things like that up really high, because that’s part of the package that they’re selling, like, not only you know, are they selling a business and showing the financials, they’re also showing what the consistent numbers for the business are, as far as people coming in and reviews. And you know, that’s a huge piece that like banks are literally wanting to see is their website traffic numbers and things like that, of what the business is. And I didn’t realize that banks would even want to see some of those things.
When someone’s a business or getting a business loan.

USING REVIEWS AS A TRAVELER

I do know that I travel a lot for the business. And I hate eating on the road, because I love our food here.
And so I’m always trying to find restaurants and delis and things like that. I can’t always go to the grocery store, my daughter and I, when we travel, we always try to keep, you know, sandwich stuff and fruits and things like that in the car. But I mean, you can’t live on sandwich meat and package of strawberries, like a whole trip.
Like you just sit down and have a meal sometimes, you know. And so I’m always looking at, you know, restaurants that I want to see their reviews. And sometimes I’m totally game with just going to like a diner and getting a cheeseburger and a soda, you know, I mean, like, that’s part of the fun of traveling, it’s getting to see some of these other restaurants.
But I also don’t want to go to places that are dirty that my daughter and I don’t feel safe. You know, a bunch of stuff. A lot of times we are in places in like backwoods, rural America, trust me, I love I mean, I have this joke, I always say if it’s on a back road in rural America, eventually, I’m going to find it.
It doesn’t matter what state I’m in, like, I get done with a conference. And I mean, we run to the car and go get something cold to drink and drive until it’s dark, and we can’t see anything. We don’t even care what we’re gonna see, we just get on a back road and go.
And so those reviews really helped me decide where we want to stop and be. And like I said, I didn’t even have this conversation necessarily for our business. But if you want to help my business that way, I would love it.
But I’m also going to make sure that I start leaving more reviews for the products that I use, because I just didn’t realize. I know that, you know, they help people decide if they’re good. And, you know, like I said, I use them for social media and stuff like that.
But to really know what it does to the algorithm and how important it is, even from a, like back end business standpoint, like I said, for loans, or whatever, I think it’s really important that if that’s the way, like, commerce is running at this point, that if we’re going to be buying online, shopping online, shopping in person, whatever it is that we’re going to be doing, we need to acknowledge that, you know, Google reviews, website reviews, those types of things, Yelp reviews, all really help people. And a lot of times, we’re only inclined to leave a review if it’s negative. So start leaving more positive reviews, say, you know, and even if it’s just small, like went to this business, it was clean, I bought something, you know, like, I think that that really makes a difference that, you know, somebody goes, Okay, it’s clean, I probably feel safe there, they bought something that’s probably a means that it’s a, like, you feel comfortable spending your money in this small business.

FARM STORE & LOCAL FARM CORRIDOR UPDATE

So I’m moving on. Our farm store is officially going to be like, well, we’re getting our review and pictures and everything this week.
But we should be going on the panhandle farm corridor, which is a local kind of organization cooperative of farms in the northern panhandle part of Idaho, where people who are wanting to find farm stores and go for drives and that type of stuff, they can pick up this brochure and it gives them a map of all the farms in the area.
And they can just drive up and down and check them all out. So that’s really going to help our business. And we’re really excited.
We’re looking for some products to carry in the store. You know, I’m just gonna be upfront, we don’t have a lot of money to start investing in some products to have in our store. We have a few that we’ve already worked with some people.
Of course, we’re gonna have some soda, not sodas, we’re gonna have like water, I’m trying to get figure out a way to get this soda that I really love that’s made out of honey. I’ve only seen it back east. But I have her name, like her contact, and she’s gonna help me get it out here.
So yeah, if you’re local, and you’re looking to have a product to sell, or not even local, but have something that we might like, I’d love to hear about it. I mean, and we can go from there. I also love learning about unique products and supporting them on social media or having you as a guest on the podcast.
So something to consider.

DAIRYING, TOO MUCH MILK, AND MOZZARELLA QUEST

We are still dairying. I mean, we’re gonna be dairying year round.
But like right now, we’re still doing that thing where we have too much milk and not enough customers. Only because we had a cow that just calved and we’re not. Like we haven’t got her certificate from our vet yet.
She’s been tested in the past, but we have to get a fresh test. And so we’re only selling the one cow’s milk, which means we are drowning in the current cow’s milk. And I still don’t have enough customers to kind of cover all of it.
So we are doing a ton of dairying so that we’re not wasting product. We’re also freezing a lot of her butter so that when we do get her approved, we’ll have frozen butter that we can sell. And our big goal right now is mastering mozzarella.
We’ve had some good mozzarellas. We’ve had mozzarellas that the kids enjoyed munching on. We’ve made cheese curds.
Our new favorite one is pretty much no matter what the consistency of the mozzarella is, we can melt it on a pizza. So if we start doing mozzarella, we’ll start a pizza crust at the same time and do a pizza on the Traeger. And I mean, we’re just whipping up a pizza sauce and putting our mozzarella over it and just whatever like leftover meat.
We did a package of Italian sausage the other night. Oh, the kids found some cheddar jalapeno smokies in the freezer and we cut those up and put them on the pizza. So we’re just having a really good time with that.
If you have a really good tried and true mozzarella recipe, I would love to see it. I have watched YouTube videos. I have read books.
I have read blogs. And I haven’t found one that’s like, yes, spot on. This is the cheese like because I like the softer cheese, like the little pearls that you get and put your salad and stuff like I could eat those all day long.
And I just can’t quite master that. And if I do get one that that is that consistency, I’ll put it in a container with some whey or I’ve tried whey, I’ve tried water, I’ve tried salted whey, salted water, all of them. And they just it makes it like a really weird gooey consistency being in the water.
So if you have a good one, I would love to hear it.

ANNOUNCEMENTS: TUTTLE TWINS & HOMESTEAD ECONOMICS

Make sure you’re watching for your Tuttle Twins magazine this month. Our family is they’re doing a featured article of us on there.
And if you haven’t heard of the Tuttle Twins before, go check them out because they’re awesome. I’ll link them in the show notes. Another one, keep your eyes open.
I think I talked about it a little bit last week. I am going to have Homestead Economics available for high schoolers. It’s going to be worth a half a credit.
It’s Homestead Economics and Business. It’s going to talk to them about what ag economics is and the difference with Homestead Economics and how the supply chain is different with homesteaders. It’s going to go through tons of math, like the beginning accounting, how to start a business, legalities, all those things for students.
It’s going to be worth half a credit. It covers almost everything for a full credit of ag economics. But there was some pieces that I still want to do an ag accounting course.
And so that’ll be the other half of credit when it becomes available. But this course, it could easily stretch your whole year with your introduction to homestead science or as a second to homestead science, like after you’re done with it. I think it would also be really beneficial to adults.
If you’re starting a homestead business, if you have a store and you’re wanting to know how it works on the home, like on your producer’s side, any of that, I think that it could be a really great economics course. You know, I talk a lot about how I have my bachelor’s in animal science. I also have two business associates degrees and was working on a minor in ag business.
And I was like one-ish classes away because everything like crossed over. And so we just kind of left it at that. And then I’ve worked in business for a really long time.
So I have all the background to write it. And I don’t know why I didn’t sit down and do this before, because I really love writing about business. And this course is coming together really fast and it’s really fun.
So it’s going to be showing up soon. It’s a reasonably priced course. It’s like one of my mini courses, but it’s still worth half a credit.
And I think that if you wanted to make it full credit by like a high schooler working part-time in an ag business, that could easily be done. And I mean, some states don’t even really care on that as much as like, it’s more about hours than what the not a Christian course. Like I say that, like there’s no religious base, so you can buy it with like state funds and things like that.
So yeah, keep an eye open for that one. I haven’t done like a waitlist or a, oh, my mind just went blank, like a pre-order yet, because I kind of just dreamed it up and started pulling all my notes from different directions. And I’m just trying to really focus on getting it done.
I might put together a waitlist here soon. Maybe I’ll do it after I get off. Okay.
All right. Let me start over. There is a waitlist for the Homestead Economics course, and I will link it in the show notes.
There we go.

HOMESTEAD BUNDLE REMINDER

All right. Then don’t forget, there’s only two days left on the Homestead bundle.
It is $4,800 worth of Homestead eBooks and courses. There’s 79 of them and you get it for 50 bucks. That includes my Homestead business video course on starting a Homestead business.
And I flipped through it and the rest of the stuff is pure gold as well. So hop on over.

MAIN TOPIC INTRO: SPRING PREP FOR YOUR HOMESTEAD

Okay.
I don’t know how long I’ve talked, but it’s time to actually talk about what I came here to talk to you guys about today, which is getting your Homestead ready for spring. And some of you, okay, it’s April 8th, and you’re probably thinking it’s spring. Spring has already sprung.
What are you talking about? Well, in North Idaho, we just now got green grass. So, but there’s a lot of other things that I talk about just kind of for this springtime window that I think is really important to bring up whether you have already hit spring or you still have snow on the ground.

SPRING GARDEN TASKS & LATE STARTS

First one is your seed stuff should already be started.
Mine are not, but that’s a whole nother conversation. I usually start mine in January. It has been a really rough year.
I went ahead and I’m starting my stuff now. Anything that isn’t tall enough, I’ll just buy from another homesteader. There’s some stuff of mine that will be big and ready to go that I can go in my garden or I can sell to other homesteaders or we can trade off for like, I’ll get them some varieties of tomatoes they don’t have and they can get me broccolis or something.
So it’ll all be good and it’ll work but sometimes life just gets to you like that.

SOIL TESTING IN SPRING

One thing I do say though is test your soil. Test it every year.
I like to test it. I know you should probably test it in the fall so that you can get any amendments on that you need and stuff. The thing is, I feel like you’ve depleted it at the end of fall and then we put all of our mulch and everything back on top of it and by spring with the worms and everything, we have a totally different soil.
So I like to test early in the spring before I start doing anything with my soil. And you’re not supposed to like start tilling it or taking off the mulch or aerating it or anything like that. Say hello to my other child.
Oh, she’s hiding behind me. I don’t like to, you know, take the mulch off or anything because that is where all of our pollinators are living. That’s what’s keeping the worms from freezing, all that type of stuff.
So I leave that till the last minute. If I do have a bare bed that like I hadn’t mulched in the fall or something, I will actually at this point go out and put like a ground cover on. I use one from Truleaf.
I can link that in the show notes. Let me go ahead and make some notes on the things I’m listing. So the Truleaf ground cover.
And that way when I’m ready to plant, I have, you know, nice, moist, nutritious soil. And I have the results of my soil test back. And so I can make any choices that I need to make at that time.

TYPES OF SOIL TESTS

When it comes to soil testing, there’s two methods that I use or that I suggest.
One is you can buy a soil test kit from like the hardware store, the grocery store, maybe the grocery store, the garden store, you can get them off Amazon. And I actually really like those because you personally are testing each part individually, like the main nutrients and the pH.
And you can you have results like maybe the next day. From when you start the project, I think you have to like dry out your soil and stuff first. And so you can start making decisions right away.
And sometimes I’ll even suggest doing both of the things I’m talking about. And then there’s also okay, so I guess there’s three ways, but there’s like the home way and there’s the send out way. And so the home way is doing that chemistry soil test, which is for nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, and then the pH.
And that’ll tell you, you know, if you’re low on anything, and that can kind of get you started, you know, because even if you send something out, it may take a couple weeks to get back. And like for us here in North Idaho, like things get things thought out. And literally, I should be getting some of my cold weather crops in the ground.
So I don’t have a really big window, especially on some of those early crops that I plant. Another one I do is the soil composition test, which tells you how much sand silt and wow, my brain just went, wow, okay, sand silt. And I mean, I have to look that up, because that’s actually like legitimately bothering me that I can’t think of that off the top of my head.
Three soil textures, sand silt and clay. Oh my gosh. So I was trying to say loam, but the thing is you want loam.
Loam is what the combination of those three are in your soil. So you can actually do that with just a mason jar and your soil and a ruler and a little bit of math. I know that’s terrible, right? But you can, if you use a ruler that has the metric system, it makes the math a little easier.
So I have a blog on how to do that. I’m going to link it on both the composition and the chemistry. And both of them, like if you start it one day, you can have your results the next day because one, you have to dry out and then you do all the chemistry in it.
And again, I have a whole blog and I have a YouTube on both of those. And then the composition test, you actually put the water or soil and water in a jar and you shake it and then you set it down and you let it settle. And it actually settles by the sand is at the bottom and then the silt and then the clay, because the clay is the finest.
And then you measure like the total and then you get the percentage of each of those. And then there’s a chart that you look at and it tells you what type of soil you have and what you need to add to it to make it more of the other type. And the reason that’s important is holding nutrients, runoff, uh, water drainage, all those things like clay, like holds water and can be all bogged down.
If it’s too sandy, all the water will just leach off and as with your nutrients as well. So those are really important.

SENDING SOIL OUT TO REDMOND’S OR A LAB

The other thing is both Redmond’s, uh, soil or Redmond’s agriculture.
And I’ll, again, I’ll link that they have a soil test kit. I believe you get them for free and then you just pay to ship them out. Uh, don’t quote me on that one because I have two sitting on my desk that I haven’t used yet.
And I’m going to try to use them this week. Um, I know that you, I mean, they make their money somehow. So it’s like you get them for free and then maybe the shipping comes with it and you pay the 25 or whatever it is to actually have your soil tested.
Um, and it comes back fairly quick. I do know that part. And then they’ll give you all that information.
You can also send your soil out to labs. Most state, um, what do you call them? State extension offices have labs that you can send your soil out to. Again, it’s about the same price as Redmond’s.
Um, I just like supporting Redmond’s, um, because then they also have the minerals you can buy from them. And I know that that’s obviously a sales gimmick, but if they’re going to actually test the soil and then give you exactly back what you need, then I think that’s pretty, like, it takes all the guesswork out of it. Um, when you get the soil test back from the labs, a lot of times they’re really long, kind of hard to read.
And then they’ll like list, you can do 20 different things to increase nitrogen and you’re kind of like, so which one do I do? And like Redmond’s just kind of gives you that, like, this is what you need. So that, I do like that.

SPRING ANIMAL & PASTURE TASKS

Now I’m going to move on to animals because this is not just about gardening.
This is about your whole homestead. Uh, it’s time to just throw everybody out in pasture. Some of them might already be in pasture, but this is a really great time, great time to check fences because the ground’s still soft.
And if you need to put new posts in, go ahead and do that. Uh, some of our animals, they’re barn bound for the winter because we have such cold winters here. And so this is a good time to, you know, after you check your pastures, check your waterers, that type of stuff, go ahead and kick them out and get their stalls really cleaned out.
Of course, we’ve cleaned stalls a few times over the winter, but this is a good time to get it like really cleaned out, aired out. You know, we put baking soda or lye down, lime, um, and just kind of do a reset, do any repairs we need to do. And then we have a good basis for the rest of the year.
Now there’s a lot of stuff happening in spring, so you may not get all your repairs done, but at least get it all cleaned out so it can start airing out, that type of thing. If you’re going to worm your animals, some people do, some people don’t, whole nother conversation. This is just an if you do it.
I always find the animals that I do worm yearly, I always do it in the spring because that is when the ground is soft. And that’s also when they’re going to be eating really low to the ground, all the sprouts that are coming up, and that’s where the worm eggs are. So like we run a pretty holistic system where our animals, they, I don’t need to worm them usually sometimes with younger ones, like piglets, I’ll have to worm them because they just don’t have that immune system built up yet.
But our older animals have a really good system, so unless one of them gets sick and their immune system gets down, I don’t worm them. But they’re eating that, those shoots close to the ground, and that’s when they get the worm eggs. And if their immune system is down in any way, then that worm load can overtake them.

SPRING CHICKS & INCUBATING FOR PROFIT

Chicks, it’s all about the chicks, and I mean the little peeping ones that lay eggs when they get big.
I know so many of you are heading to the feed store and buying up all the chicks that you can. We choose to incubate every year.
I don’t know, okay, I’m gonna back up. If I catch it, like sometimes I’ll go to our local feed store and they order too many chicks or something, and they’ll be like, oh we have a bunch, like they’re all half off. I will totally scoop them up, raise them till fall, choose a few that I want, and sell the rest as pullets because I can sell those about 20 bucks a piece, and it was really nothing for me to raise them up over the summer.
And I get them for like a buck fifty. So that’s a no-brainer. But that’s just a business call, not necessarily I want all the chicks call.
As far as for what like we have for our own flock, and what I plan on selling annually, is we incubate our own chickens’ eggs. Right now we are drowning in eggs, like I think we had 13, 15 dozen the other day, and that was just from like two or three days, like it was so bad. You know what, I’m preserving some, we’re eating a lot, we’re, you know, making breakfast burritos, all those things, but we’re incubating a lot of them.
And then I’ll turn around and sell those chicks, or the ones I don’t sell, like I said, I’ll raise up and sell as pullets. We keep a few for our flock, and then we also will ship in some purebred eggs and incubate those. So that we have, we’re kind of bringing in like fresh genetics, because we just have a barnyard mix.
We do have three roosters, and we kind of rotate which roosters in there. So we’re keeping our genetics fresh, but I’m not really watching our genetics. They aren’t separated in any way, they aren’t, I’m not watching like, you know, who’s breeding with who, or who’s, you know, I’m just, it’s not something I’m doing with my chickens.
So if I’m bringing in new chicks every year, I usually do straight run. If we get pretty roosters, I’ll keep them, you know, I’ll keep a lot of the hens, because again, that’s my keeping my flock diverse. I do have a quail incubation course that you can get online.
I think it’s normally $97, and it tells how to make money off of incubating chicks as well. We actually, at one point, we’re making $1,800 a month off incubating quail. Now we’ve backed it off, it’s a little bit more seasonal and hobby, just to kind of support our flock, make a few extra bucks here and there.
But we’ve got the marketing of it down, how to scale that marketing, and I have it on sale right now for $37. I do that every spring, because there’s so many people that want to try new things, and I really want to support that for them. So go ahead and check out that link, and it’s a fun one.
The audio did not transfer well from like YouTube to my course. I’m working on redoing that. The information is still solid.
If the audio is a little hard for you to hear, you can click the closed captioning button, and it brings up all of the words. So you don’t even need to listen to me. I don’t want to listen to me either.
What am I talking about? You’re all here listening to me right now.

PLAN NOW FOR NEXT WINTER (WATER, FEED, WOOD)

So anyways, this is also the best time to line up your feed and wood for winter. I know, you’re all thinking, what are you talking about? We just got out of winter, let’s not talk about winter.
But especially if you had a rough winter, you’re also thinking, I don’t want to have another rough winter. If you had water systems that were freezing, and you were having to break water, and fix pipes all winter, fix that all now. Invest in it, because now is the time when you’re like, I’m so over this.
I never want to have to do this again. Do it, because you’re going to get to August, and you’re not thinking about it anymore, and then it’s next thing you know, it’s going to be too late. So fix your water systems now.
I’m making a note for myself, because I want to do a social media post to remind people. Because that is probably my best advice that I could possibly give as a homesteader, is fix your water systems when it’s fresh in your mind that you hate your water systems.

BULK FEED & HAY SCHEDULING WITH LOCAL GROWERS

Also, if you order your feed in bulk, whether that’s grain or hay, these are not products that, like especially the hay, they’re not infinite.
They’re limited. You know, we get a truckload, you know, $4,000 worth of hay from our neighbors every year. If I don’t kind of give them the heads up of about what I want now, they’re not going to have it in the fall.
Because they have other customers, and they have their own cattle they have to feed through the winter. So they need to know, get me like basically on a wait list now, and also know how many fields they need to plant. Some of them, they’ve already made their decisions, but there’s some fields that they’ll wait and say, you know, how many people want hay this year, and how many people are wanting grain, and then that’s what they plant.
Also, we put in our straw order with them, because we get their straw from their wheat. So any fields that they plant in wheat, we get their, we buy the straw from them. So they need to know how much.
I mean, even if you buy bagged feed from a local feed mill, I’m not talking like if you buy Purina from your local feed store, I’m saying like if you buy from a local feed mill, which we do, we prefer it, then it’s local products, I can work with the people, they can even do custom blends if we have things going on. It’s just a whole different concept. So I like to let them know, like what our flock projections are, or our herd projections, so that they can plan for how much they’re going to be purchasing over the year, because then they need to let their farmers know, or their brokers know, so that the farmers can decide how much they need to plant.
Like this, like this isn’t just about how much you want to plant, it’s about like three, four steps back of what that farmer is going to plant. So keep that in mind. And sometimes it’s just, you know, some feed stores, like, we’ll stop in with our local feed store and be like, yeah, we’re doing good this year, we’re still on track for about a ton of, you know, our maintenance feed every month.
And they’re like, oh, thanks, good to know, because we, we get a special one that they order some of the stuff in. So they’re like, oh, good to know. Thanks for giving us a heads up.
If they’re getting that from all of their large producers, they’re going to have a pretty good idea of what they need for the small producers. So it really does make a difference.

FIREWOOD PLANNING & SAVING MONEY

Wood, that’s another one.
Start thinking about your cutting plans now, because there’s a, if you cut on national forest land, there’s a lot that shut down cutting in the fall because of fire risk. So you might need to be getting those trees down now. And they may not even have time to season until for this fall, but you then you’ll have your wood for like the next fall.
If you’re buying a truckload from somebody, whether that’s a truckload of logs, like we buy a whole log deck, it’s lasted us three years, it’s, you know, sitting out off to the side of the barn, and we just go cut what we need. And then we also cut off our own property, trees that need to come down. But we buy a log deck for I think $1,300 in the spring, that same log deck would be 2000 or more in the fall.
So those are huge considerations. Even, you know, if you get your wood cut and split, that’s another one, like order it now, you’re going to pay half the price. Just something to think about.

SPRING CLEANING & PANTRY ROTATION

Now on to home, home life, like we talked about the gardens, we talked about the animals. It’s spring cleaning, like clean out those pantries, open the windows, clean out from under your furniture, all those things that you need to do, because that’s going to make your family like healthier and happier throughout the whole year.
You know, we have animals, we’re pig farmers.
We live on a ranch. Like, I don’t even want to know what’s under our couches. Like we have a bunch of kids.
I’m not saying like we’re dirty or nasty or anything like that. But there’s definitely a buildup that happens that unless you’re somebody who’s pulling out all your furniture and cleaning it weekly, like most farmers don’t have time for that. So yeah, like I said, there’s a lot going on in the spring.
So don’t kill yourself. But, you know, be thinking about it. Like maybe once you get past all the planting and everything kind of mellows out, that’s probably a really great time to do a super good clean out on, you know, your furniture, your pantries, use the foods up that, you know, have a shelf life.
Like if you have anything left in your root cellar or anything like that. If you have canning from two years ago, like get all that used so that you have open jars and a good headcount of what you need to be growing and sourcing for your own preservation this year. Because just like the animal feed, if you don’t plan kind of what you need, you may not be able to find it.
So have that all locked in now, at least a good idea of what you want.

HOMESCHOOL YEAR WRAP-UP & BUYING SEASON

If you’re a homeschool family, you’re doing a lot of school wrap up now.
I know it’s so hard to do school this time of year and we’re actually a little behind.
So we’re going to have to push through. Our kids always like to kind of take a break. But I’m home with them a lot over the summer and the weather, you know, when it gets hot, we’ll do a lot of our schoolwork.
We’ll come inside, turn on the AC and do schoolwork in the summer. They just still have that public school mindset because they started in public school. But my little boys have no clue.
They’re like, it’s a Sunday morning. Can we do school, mom? And I’m like, sure, whatever, go grab your stuff. Like they have no concept of summer or weekends or any of that, where my teenagers, they have a concept of that.
And so they don’t like to do school over the summer. They don’t like to do it on the weekends, but they will. And then they feel like martyrs.
They’re like, oh, I worked all weekend. I got caught up on math. And I’m like, that’s because I let you do whatever you wanted all week.
So bite me. But different relationship with the teenagers.

This is also a really great homeschool buying season.
There’s a lot of spring sales. There’s some curriculum companies that only do sales this time of year. It’s kind of their gimmick to get people to buy now rather than in the fall.
Watch for my sale. No, just kidding. I do sales probably, I try to do like something once a month.
Right now I do have free shipping on orders over 250. So I mean, that ends up saving families. It’s actually I think a little bit more than 10%.
So that’s a pretty good sale, especially, you know, 250 sounds like a lot. But some of my larger curriculums, or if you get the family set, you’re going to quickly hit that free shipping like that. Well, the family said if you get all the books, you’re over 250 right there.
So that’s a really good way to go ahead and save some money. And it doesn’t feel like as much but it actually I think it’s almost like I said, it’s almost a 15% discount. So it works out.
I mean, you’d have to run the math for your own particular order, but that helps. And that’s only for standard shipping if you want faster shipping, which a lot of times we’re waiting on orders from books. So it’s not a faster processing time.
But once I do ship rather than waiting like another week for standard shipping, they’ll be there in a couple days.

SPRING IS A GOOD TIME TO START HOMESTEAD BUSINESSES

This is also a good time to start looking into your homestead businesses.
I talked about that a little bit I talked about how you can make some money with some of my other programs, you know how you can help others make money by leaving reviews, encouraging your own customers to leave your reviews.
But if you’re looking at starting some new endeavors, I mean, hopefully you did the research over the winter so that you’re ready to just rock and roll right now. But if you’re needing help, like getting set up with the legalities of your business, how to market your business, how to market legally, how to make sure you have all your certificates in line and that type of stuff, that same homestead bundle that I was talking about at the beginning, that’s only available for two more days, has my coaching package, which is normally it’s $47, not my coaching package, I’m sorry, my video course on how to start a homestead business is in there and it’s $47 you can get for $50 you can get 79 other products as well or 78 other products as well. So that’s a heck of a deal.
So if you catch this in the next two days, I would definitely go that route. If you don’t, I do have my, you know, video course, I have a how to start a homestead business guide. It’s a little bit more like you write it out, read it and write it out and watch the stuff yourself, the course, you’re doing it, you’re watching the videos, and then you’re filling out your stuff.
And you get access to my new Facebook, like, Facebook group that you can only be in if you have a homestead business or purchase one of my homestead business courses, or my coaching, and then you have people to like bounce ideas off of and network with and that type of thing. We’re getting a few members over there, that’s going to continue to grow. And then I also have redone my coaching and that one’s really exciting.
It’s a little more expensive because you know, that just comes with it, but I’m providing a lot more. It’s you get a one hour call with me, but I send you some stuff to fill out beforehand. So I have a really good idea of your business, and we’re ready to like rock and roll when we do our hour talk.
If you don’t know what business you have, like you kind of list like what your homestead has, what you’re interested in. And then I already have some really good ideas to brainstorm with you, that you narrow down on what you’re wanting to do. And then I follow up with tools to make that happen for you.
So you’re going to get one or two like business plan financial breakdowns to help you make those decisions. I have other like, you know, planning things. I have a sauna board, a pre-made sauna board that I customize.
A sauna is a digital planning program that I customize just for your homestead with the things you need to work on so that you have that accountability. I suggest books to expand your business, books to expand, you know, specific parts of your business. From the time I send that report to you, because it does take me sometimes a week or two to get that report back out because I really make sure that it is a solid report.
I send that back out from the time I send that. You can have Voxer access to me for a month. Yeah, I have to double check that.
But Voxer access for a month where you can just, you know, send me messages like, hey, what does this mean? What do you think I should do for this? And I respond back to you. And then at the end of the month, I send an, you know, an email and we really like hash out what changes you need to make. And so that comes for 297.
I think that’s a really amazing deal for what I do. And it’s just, it’s how it’s really helps a lot of people. I’ve been kind of doing that in the background for a couple of people to see what their results were versus my one hour coaching with a follow up and their results were much better.
And it didn’t take the amount of time that I was concerned. I do only, I can only offer so many spots because with that Voxer access, I can’t, I have my own businesses that I’m running. I can’t be there for, you know, 200 people.
So I only have a limited number of spots. I know how many I have right now. I know how many more I can offer.
I mean, we’re only talking in the five to 10 range. So if that’s something that you’re interested in, and that’s five to 10 at a time, because it’s only a month long thing. So if that this is something you’re interested in, definitely reach out to me.
If I’m full, I can put you on a waitlist and you can catch the next round that I do. So act quick if you’re wanting to do this right now. And then if you’re good with waiting, I’ll put you on a waitlist that I’m just keeping track of because I’ll chat with you a little and make sure that this is the right program for you because you might be more interested in starting a bookkeeping business and I might be like, well, you know, I could give you advice on that, but I bet that there’s someone else I would help you find that.
So not that I couldn’t help you start a bookkeeping business, especially if you’re trying to balance it with homesteading and homeschooling. I would absolutely be a good resource for you. But if you’re wanting to look into like taking a bookkeeping course and starting on with like a firm or something, I don’t know if I’m necessarily the 100% right one.
But I also once we do that sheet and talk, if I don’t feel like I’m the right person for you, I’ll let you know and find you a good resource. Because I feel like this is more about our relationship than whether or not I’m making any money.

Q&A SEGMENT INTRO

So I just realized that I completely skipped over the questions that people have sent in.
And I love answering these questions for you guys. So I’m going to go ahead and do those real quick.
Because I do have an appointment I got to get to.

Q1: NEURODIVERGENT KIDS & LEARNING

The first one was, how do you get neurodivergent kids to want to learn? That is a big question. But I have, I believe all six of my kids have some sort of neurodivergence. The two younger ones, I don’t have like any diagnoses with them.
And I’m not actively seeking one. I think it’s pretty obvious, though, that when my seven year old likes to slam himself into the wall repeatedly, there’s probably some ADHD or something like that going on. But my daughter says the only thing that runs thicker in our family than blood is ADHD.
So it’s very, very possible. And you know, I was even one of those people who thought that maybe ADHD wasn’t a real thing until I was suddenly blessed with, well, when my husband and I blended our families, I had one with ADHD and one with autism and was kind of like, oh, maybe this isn’t the right diagnosis. I’m not sure.
And then all of a sudden, I had four children that very obviously had ADHD. And then we had two more that there is no doubt. So my kids, two of my kids also have dyslexia.
Two of them have speech delays. And no, three have speech delays. And one has autism.
And then one has social speech disorder, which is similar to autism, but not the same. So, I mean, it’s a lot. And I have ADHD myself.
And my husband has PTSD. Like, we are just a wreck. No, we’re actually pretty cool.
You should get to know us. But with that, doing schoolwork has been a challenge. For some of my kids, they like the schoolwork, but they just struggle.
But they’re going to push through because that’s their personality. Like my daughter, she has dyslexia, but she wants to do well. So she’ll really push herself almost to the point of, I have to be like, chill out.
Don’t worry about it. Like, we’ll just skip that part. Or let me help you, you know.
Where then my now 20-year-old, oh my gosh, how is he 20? My now 20-year-old, he wouldn’t do work at all. Like, I mean, you couldn’t pay this kid to do work. And so he was really the one that I had to get creative with.
And then it’s helped me not with all my other kids, but how to write my curriculums. And one thing I did was strewing. Some people think strewing is manipulative, but I think it was a really great way to spark interest.
And it’s actually strewing has been a great one for a few of my kids. And what it is, is basically you just put something out that they might find interesting, and then you just leave it there and see if they do anything with it. Now that’s definitely cost me some money because I bought things that I thought that they would like, and then they didn’t.
So I’ll either use them or get another kid interested. And I’ve also, or you know, you can turn on like the Discovery Channel and then walk away and see if they’re interested. Or buy a book and leave it out and see if they’ll pick it up.
And I’ve done a little bit of manipulative strewing. I’m not going to deny that. I think the act of strewing isn’t necessarily manipulative.
I have, I have purposely done manipulative strewing because I had some struggles with like my 20 year old who just, he did not want to learn. He was convinced that I invented math to ruin his life. And I knew that he needed more than what he not only was willing to do, but I mean, like I knew he needed it.
So I did things like, I have the book, something on my bookshelf and I’ll link it. But it’s called like a homestead building book. And it has a trellis in there.
And it has other things too, but it has a trellis, a real easy trellis to build. And this kid is very mechanically like physically inclined. He’s an electrician’s apprentice now.
And so I said, I bought the book and I set it out and I said, oh, I bought this book to learn how to make a trellis. Because I need a trellis for my peas. And then I said something about being busy.
And then I opened it up to the trellis, but, or the trellis part a few days later and was like, oh, what do I need? And then I’m like, oh, could somebody make me a list of everything I need from town to get to build this trellis? And I kind of just acted like it was just too much for me. I didn’t know how to do it, like on and on and on. And next thing I knew, he had the book and had gathered up most of the supplies around our property and had not only built me one trellis, but built me like five trellises, one for like each planter box.
And then sought out a supplier for this hardwood that we can get for free from a cabinet shop here in town and started, then like the only thing he had to buy was string and hinges. And he started building these trellises and selling them for like $25 a piece. And he would come to me and be like, what does this word mean? How do I do this math? And it was because he wanted to do it.
He was willing to learn. Whereas when it was something I was putting in front of him that he had to learn, he didn’t want to do it. But being able to do it hands-on and have the desire to figure it out, like he would try to build it and it wouldn’t be right.
And then he’d come to me and be like, I did my math, why isn’t that right? And so we would work through his math and figure out what he had done wrong. So I think that manipulative strewing can be good, especially if they’re going to get something good out of it. Like his pride made him in what he was able to accomplish and the money he was able to save up was where he bought the tools that he needed to get on with a local electrician’s apprentice.
And he had his tools and he had the confidence that he could work construction because he realized that math made sense to him when he was doing it hands-on. So it’s definitely something to consider. And if you’re worried about like time with your hours, anything can be a curriculum.
So, I mean, if he reads the book and does five hours of building a trellis, I mean, that’s five hours of, I don’t know, life skills, vocational education. If your kid struggles with math and suddenly they understand this, call it five hours of applied mathematics. Because if you have struggling kids, it is worth it for them to understand the material more than how they get the material.
So that was my reminder that we have to leave soon. I’m on my last one though.

Q2: CAN A LIVESTOCK GUARDIAN LIVE IN THE HOUSE?

So the other question is, can I have a livestock guardian that lives in the house? Yeah, no, it’s, I could get really technical with you on how to raise and train livestock dogs.
Well, I’ve never, I’ve trained just mine, but I’ve worked with livestock dogs my whole life, livestock guardian dogs. I’ve worked with herding dogs my whole life. There’s kind of three types of ways you can raise a livestock guardian.
Any of them can be a house dog. That’s, I mean, you can do whatever you want. Like if you want a great Pyrenees, you know, who weighs 200 pounds and is covered in hair sleeping on your couch, like more power to you.
Sometimes mine does. He’s not allowed to, but he does it anyways. He’s afraid of thunder.
So I know big bad boy, but there’s full livestock guardians. There’s three different types. So full livestock guardians, you bring them home from the breeder.
You basically put them in a goat pen or whatever livestock they’re going to be watching you and make them think that they’re basically a goat. You know, there’s still things you have to do with them. You need to teach them some manners.
They need to know that food comes from you, that type of thing. But you are really hands-off with them. They’re not a pet.
They are, they’re an employee. They have a job and they’re there to do that job and not be socializing. Then there’s farm guardians.
And that’s what we have. A farm guardian will interact with the family. They kind of watch the whole farm.
They aren’t bonded with any particular livestock on your family. Some of them might go ahead and like super like attached to certain species of livestock. But they don’t like, they don’t live with the goats and think they’re a goat.
They just know that all the animals are theirs. And then they might just prefer ones or feel that some are more susceptible than others. Like our guy, I don’t know that he really pays any attention to the pigs other than protecting them.
But then I’ve caught him in pens with baby goats or calves or laying with the chickens. So, I mean, he feels a little bit more connected to them. He’s also very protective of our children, which is wonderful.
Like my kids can go walk all over the property and I know that he is with them. Like he is not, he doesn’t let them be alone when they’re out playing. If they’re in the like vicinity where he can see them, he lays right there and watches them the whole time.
And that is 100% worth it to us to not have him just focused on one livestock. Like I said, he is afraid of thunder. And when he got a mouthful of porcupine quills, we let him live in the laundry room for the week while, or for a few days while we fed him yogurt and that type of stuff.
So, I mean, he has, he is a member of the family. He’s just a member of a family that also has a job and lives outside. Like I said, he’s great with the kids.
They can love on him, play with him. The other day we had somebody over and she’s literally asking like, so are you able to, like, is your livestock dog like comfortable with the family and stuff? And while she’s asking that, my 16-year-old daughter literally has her hands in his mouth checking the inside of his lip where he had the porcupine quills. And like, it was a while back, but she was just, while she was standing there messing with him, she was checking him out.
And I was like, I think that answers your question. Like literally like her arm is inside his giant mouth, you know? So I think that that really shows like what kind of personalities they have and what they can do. I also know we have never lost an animal to predators here.
He comes home. I know that he’s been in fights. I’ve seen blood on him, blood that’s been his blood.
I’ve seen blood that’s been from something else. I hear him at night barking. I hear him running off coyotes.
Like we have coyotes down below us and he’ll stand in the backyard and bark all night long. That’s his job. He’s letting them do not come on our property.
When we brought him home, we set him up at the barn. He had his food and water and we went and saw him every day, but he wasn’t allowed to come down to the house. But that was his home.
Now he’s made it where he sets up a perch on our porch, but he’s still respectful of those boundaries. On the flip side, then there’s the ones that they’re allowed in the pets. Their instincts, especially if you have a purebred, their instincts have been bred into them for hundreds of years.
If you have a crossbreed livestock guardian, you may not have all of those instincts or they may be even better if you get that hybrid vigor. But sometimes you just don’t. It’s just for lack of a better word, a crapshoot.
I can’t say for sure what you’ll have. But some of those instincts will still be there as they’re going to be a more protective pet. They are going to have weirder habits than your other ones.
Like my great parent uses up all night and sleeps all day and that’s just his routine. And so your dogs, you know, you might, even if they’re a house dog, that might be more of their routine because it’s instinct. So that’s just things to consider when you’re working with them.

CLOSING REMINDERS & QUESTION SUBMISSION

Other than that, I think livestock guardians are great. I think they’re really important. I don’t think they should live in like apartments.
So as long as you have enough property that they have room to stretch out, they’re very large animals, do what works best for your family. And I know that when you have kids, unless you have a giant, like, you know, 20,000 acre ranch where you have 10 livestock guardian dogs that are out there with different flocks of sheep or cattle, chances are, if you just have a homestead, you know, anything under 50 acres and you have kids, you’re not going to be able to keep them from being friends. And you’re not going to keep that livestock guardian from just naturally protecting those children.
So, I think you’re probably going to end up having a farm guardian either way. If you have any more questions about that, always feel free to reach out. And I just want to remind everybody that you can put in your questions for me to answer on the podcast at thehomesteadeducation.com forward slash help me grow.
And I will link that in the show notes and just want to remind everybody to keep growing.