Boomerscaboose

In an effort to become as self-sufficient and frugal as possible, heck, healthy eating isn't such a bad thing either... we have been raising chickens, rabbits and goats, mostly in the past year and a half all on .9 acre. That is when the creek lets us have the rest of our property.

I started raising red composting worms, at first because I saw them mentioned on a site having to do with creating a free range diet for space limited (penned) chickens. At $20 per pound initially I figured that was damn expensive chicken food but when I noticed that the worms double in mass every ninety days I did a little math and realized we can have a ton of worms with a little time and a little work.

Well, the time has happened but other projects reduced some of the work toward the worm effort. Still, however we have a bunch of worms to use to multiply this project out properly though measured in pounds and not tons.

My wife Christine, luckily for me, is on the same page (and a few more) as me and together we did our first canning, food dehydration, smoking and vacuum packing this past summer. I was intimidated initially by our canner and it lived in it's box for over a year.

Now we have LOTS of canned food and the days of being intimidated are behind us.

My wife Christine is a great artist and the pursuit of that was our plan when we bought this house. The economy has put a major dent in the sale of art and living in the sticks was a challenge even when the economic times were better.

Our daughter Heather, age 12 is homeschooled, mainly ala Christine, and knows how to skin a rabbit. A week ago she gave me a big hug because she knows I don't like killing them but we do what we have to do and will become more self-sufficient come hell or high water.

Right now we have the high water so the goats have less ground.

I mainly aim to write about our experiences and plans to do with being as self-sufficient as possible on very little land.

For a winter project I will undertake building solar panels and hopefully my first wind turbine. Initially this will be to power our electric fence and a bank of twelve volt batteries maybe it will grow from there.

I work in a prison and was a cop for fifteen years prior to that. I was an army medic and EMT and am fairly proficient with firearms.

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