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Hello! Thanks! The roses have been gorgeous this year. 🙂 hope your garden is growing well!

We have not! But I’ve heard others have used them

Welcome to the farmstead! 🙂

So sorry to hear about your hen! Glad the vet was able to help her. The soil is loaded with parasites of all sorts, and a healthy flock with a good gut can usually handle them. So prevention and keeping the ladies healthy is usually the best bet! If you can spread DE on the poopy areas in your coop, that will kill off the parasites in their poop before your spread them around the yard or put in compost. If you're concerned you might have an imbalance of microbes in your soil, you could look into beneficial nematodes for your area/crops/trees to see if you can introduce more of the "good guys" :-) Hope this helps!

Beneficial Nematodes source: www.arbico-organics.com/category/beneficial-nematodes?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwu8uyBhC6ARIsAKwBGpSVBzJmf2dcdd37bDrYrk9sn_j0xTMcykBvT2wvzpK_IEAVRWS1uiYaAhSZEALw_wcB

So glad it helped! We're hoping to share numbers of how much it costs to raise meat birds soon! 🙂

😊

Totally a fan of mixing in flowers to make veggie gardens even more beautiful!

@@cottagefarmstead Awesome. Same here. Got impatiens and marigolds. Looking into companion plantings also. So much to learn coming from the city and trying to start a self sustaining homestead. Overwhelming.

@@coachtim6188 A little at a time year after year adds up! 🙂

@@cottagefarmstead God is good!

Would have a lot to do with the local climate. At our old house, if we didn't speed drying with a dehydrator things would mold first due to high humidity. At our new homestead, the wind is always blowing, so things blow away easily. But if you've got the ideal climate for it, sun drying totally works!

It will probably have a lot to do with your climate and ambient home temperature. We live in a warmer climate and our home runs about 78-80F inside this time of year. It gets plenty fizzy for us about 24 hours this time of year. We let it go a little longer in the winter, but we've had a few bottles explode from trying to go too far beyond 36 hours!

Thanks!☺ I'm not super familiar with the Fly Lady method, but I did get some inspiration from the book Sidetracked Home Executives ( amzn.to/49ZTOz4 ). A bit dated with using index cards for keeping track of chores, but it's adaptable for the 21st century. I wouldn't be surprised if Fly Lady has some crossover and a lot of the "looping" and "zone" systems have similarities. Mostly it's about figuring out what works best for your home after trial and error! I'm still learning our new farmhouse and how often certain spaces need cleaning versus others, where farmer Nathan tracks in the most dirt, and so on. 😂

@@cottagefarmstead Thank you for the recommendation. I had never heard of that book so I went and ordered myself a used copy off ebay 😂 I actually own the Fly Lady's book but something about her method just wasn't working for me. I'm curious to compare the two and then like you said, I'll figure out what works best for my home. As always I really enjoy your videos and find them to be motivating. God bless and have a great day.

@@jrlpz15 I have also loved the Complete Book of Home Organization (amzn.to/3wu2kZj) and the Complete Book of Clean (amzn.to/3wlMmk2) by Toni Hammersley for tips and tricks to incorporate into housekeeping. I don't follow her cleaning schedule, but really appreciated little tweaks here and there that have made maintenance easier! I found both available at our local library. Happy cleaning! :-)

@@cottagefarmstead Yay more recommendations! Thank you so much. I’ll definitely check these out too.

Red’s not bad as long as it has enough organic matter to not turn into a brick! 😂 this video is from 2 years ago, so the soil has only continued to improve as we’ve added compost each year..😊

Good morning from SC! We’ve actually come to love a hybrid of Charles Dowding and Back-to-Eden methods for getting gardens started directly on pasture/lawn or red clay. Essentially, cut the grass super short, place down 2 layers of cardboard, cover the garden beds with compost/soil about 3-4 inches, and cover the paths with 3-4 inches wood chips. The cardboard works to kill off the grass and the worms LOVE it and break it down into wormy soil underneath pretty quickly. In your instance, it might be worth just tilling your garden beds to get the topsoil and compost mixed to get started a bit faster if planting this weekend is your goal. And then cardboard and mulch your paths. These days we don't till at all anymore. Just a thin layer of compost on top each year. :-) Hope this helps! Free Cardboard sources: Post office, local dump/recycling center, grocery store, etc. Free/cheap Wood chip sources: Power companies, tree trimming crews, getchipdrop.com/ Compost Sources: we usually have had to pay for a load of this from landscaping company but it sounds like you might have a well-decomposed pile of it on hand or to at least mix into other soil to make it go further with less $$$. A few glimpses of it early in 2023 garden season videos: th-cam.com/video/dWSTQ4sy9fg/w-d-xo.html We’ll also have a video in a couple weeks that shows a look at the new garden zone we got started with this same method this year.

​@@cottagefarmstead Glad I read this first thing. Thank you so much. I had about decided to just buy a tiller. Had never heard of no till gardening. That is awesome. I just rented one for this first time to get it started. I'll just add to it every year from now on. The ground is so hard I can't get it to till much deeper than 3 or 4 inches though. I did strip out the lawn and put it all in my compost bin. I bought a big truckload of compost to start with, have enough for probably 2-3 inches on top of the 3 inches tilling depth. Everything online says you need to be 10 to 12 inches deep of soft dirt for a garden. Am I about to waste my time planting with it only being 6 inches deep of soft soil and compost? Going to follow your methods after this first year for sure. It's 25X20.

@@cottagefarmstead oh and the cardboard. Great idea. Picking up a bunch of that Monday.

@@cottagefarmstead After studying Charles Dowding approach, I have zero to worry about with 6 inches of awesome soil. LOL Thanks for pointing me towards him.

​@@coachtim6188 6 inches is plenty deep for pretty much all crops! That gives plenty of space for the roots to develop and then the plants will probably do the work of breaking up the clay underneath for you. Tilling has its place to help get solid packed clay broken up to get started, but no-till has continued to amaze us both in our own family gardens, but also at my husband's market farm business as well. Usually by year 3 you can stick your whole hand into the dirt without hitting packed clay. Happy growing! 🙂

Sorry to hear you’re having issues with bonding! Our gosling took just fine with the chickens. Goose gets into a few squabbles with our rooster during mating season, but usually they all get along just fine. Sometimes pulling feathers is simply a sign of boredom (chickens will do it to each other too). If your chicks have access to grit, maybe try putting in greens, grass and other goodies to entertain goose and chicks? When goose was a Gosling, we would also take him out to a trough of water to let him swim some energy off occasionally.

@@cottagefarmstead thank you so much! That’s helpful info 🙏🪿💛

Always a work in progress! 🙂It takes time to find a system that works for each person. Still learning how to manage our new farmhouse a year and a half into living here!

Haha! It just shows what poor agricultural practices over a century does to a soil (or in our case eliminates the topsoil!) Good news is it can be built back over time and amended in the short-term to enable things to grow!

Great question! My husband owns Growing Green Family Farms, a local market farm. He works full-time for GGFF off-site and I work a few hours a week as well for GGFF. Cottage Farmstead is our personal family homestead and my primary working hours are spent managing the farmhouse and our family gardens and animals.

What spring vegetables are you excited to eat?

Did dowsing for water ACTUALLY work? th-cam.com/video/5kFplreIaRs/w-d-xo.html

Thank you. I'm clicking the link now to see.

We were delighted with how well this worked in our cool basement! 🙂 Should work great in a garage too!

Just needs to be something conductive. Ours are a bit of leftover scrap copper grounding rod. Precise size/length doesn't really matter.

Hello Jann! Thanks for joining me around the farmhouse. 😊 So happy to hear it inspires. Happy spring!

Our are copper, but any reactive/magnetic metal works