My husband and I live in Upstate NY with our three children. Ours is an old house, built in 1775, with 12 acres of land. When we were house-hunting 15 years ago, I wanted a big house for large family gatherings and visits from the grandchildren you know (talk about long-range planning!) and my DH wanted land for hunting ... and so we purchased our property which met both requirements. As the years have gone by, I have developed another passion, and that is for self-sustaining living.
Why? Many people wonder about that (mostly my family!).
Well, for a lot of reasons. I have always been the kind of person who loves "living off the land." That used to mean camping, fishing, and hunting, all pastimes that DH and I did a lot of early on. I think that as I've gotten older, I realize that there was a reason that our ancestors settled down from "hunter-gatherer" to farming! A properly run homestead is more reliable and stable than depending upon just fishing and hunting. We dabbled with vegetable gardening for a couple of years and then last year (2010) we started to get more serious. We had a kick-butt vegetable garden and I started to learn about the best ways to preserve food ... and we also got our first chickens! This year we've expanded the vegetable garden, gotten more serious about composting, installed 4 rain barrels for watering the chickens, compost, and gardens, and plan to experiment with root cellaring this fall and winter. Later posts will expand upon all of these topics and more.
Hooray! We finally have our rain barrels installed. Commercial rain barrels can be really expensive - $150 each, or even more. We made our own using food-grade barrels that I got from a restaurant (they used to contain crushed tomatoes!). They are 55 gallons each and we have two sets of two linked together. We have a set next to the raised vegetable beds and a set by the chicken coop. We use them for drinking water for the chickens, to water the vegetables, and also to keep the compost piles moist. There is a screen over the one open barrel below the gutter to keep the mosquitoes out and there is an overflow at the top of the closed barrel. They work great and I am so happy that we have them. It is amazing how much water is wasted in a soaking rain! These barrels fill up completely in about 5 minutes if there is a good downpour (typical of the summer thunderstorms that we get). The only thing that we would have done differently is put a larger diameter spigot at the bottom. We used the typical diameter hose, but we should have used bigger to get a faster flow rate. It's not a big deal, but if we build any more we will definitely use the bigger size.
