Homesteading

[fastbilly1]

Yeah, I don't know if I could send the lovely livestock to the slaughter. Is there a sustainable way that you've found or others have used to raise ducks or chickens, and use a lot of their manure or waste as fertilizer, etc? Does the feed necessary outweigh their benefit? That's what I'm curious about. I'd just like a few ducks to run around and gently quack at me. Chase the kids around a bit.

I know plenty of people that use ducks to keep the yard clean. It is common to have them if you have alot of horses (they will eat any bugs that the horses churn up). You might want to lookup chicken tractors if you just want them as pets. Its really a mobile pen used like a lawnmower but having chickens eat down the plants.

I really like his build. I jumped around in the series a bit, but is there a specific amount of yield he's looking to get out of a building that size? I mean that looks like quite an extensive investment, especially when he went off the grid with the solar panels. Does he cover what his total costs for this bad boy? Really quite awesome though! Question, what's the purpose of the koi and fish tank? Adding nutrients to the soil?

I honestly do not remember too much about his build purposes and ROI. I want a dome badly, but if I come across a bunch of storm doors cheap, Ill be making a monstrosity of a green house.

As for the fish, the easy answer is that aquaponics is a portmanteau of aquaculture and hydroponics. So you feed the fish, the fish poop, the fish poop goes into your grow beds (which are usually clay beads, pebbles, or some other like material), bacteria eat the poop and release the nutrients that go straight into the planet. Then the water drains back to the fish. You cannot grow everything aquaponically, but what you can grow will grow very fast. If properly maintained, the plants are never wanting for minerals. If it helps, think of it like hydroponics that does not require the water to be replaced each grow cycle.

Another dream is building my own home. I don't actually know the first thing about wood working, so I'm woefully ill prepared for this, but maybe in five or ten years I'll be able to get started.

I limit myself to not building/repairing two things:
1. My daily driving car.
2. The structure of my house.
Ill work on tractors or my fire engine, no big deal. But the daily driver is what pays the bills. The house is where I sleep and store my things, so I dont want to screw it up. I have no issue adding onto a house, or building a barn or shed, but the core of my house will be built by a 3rd party.

That said, after I designed a house based around a super yacht's floor plan, small bedrooms and multiple common areas/double uses rooms, my wife said I do not get to design houses anymore. We did put in the paperwork to get a permit to build a castle in our county, but got shot down by zoning. They said it would be fine as a second building on the property, but not the primary.

I do like your floodplain house concept though. No reason to be in the plain when you can be above it. My only worry would be that the garage usually becomes seasonal storage or a workshop for most people. If you had that house, would that be an issue if it floods?

[Nemoide]

I've got a homesteading plan AND backup plan I'm hoping to put into place later this year. My first choice involves running a roadside attraction in rural upstate NY where house prices are LOW. The second involves moving to Buffalo which has an awesome urban homesteading program - you can claim an abandoned house, fix any code violations, agree to live in it for a few years, and then you can buy it for $1! I don't know much about construction/repairs, so I can easily see myself getting in over my head with that plan.

My general life strategy at this point is to figure out how to live independently while spending as little money as possible. Someday that will probably mean growing all my own food and raising chickens. In the meantime it means baking my own sourdough bread, having a small vegetable garden, and other minor things. (Actually last year was my first attempt at gardening... it was a pretty dramatic failure but I'm hoping to do better this year.)

A book I would recommend to anyone who is "interested but doesn't know anything" about the subject is The Urban Homestead. It's extremely reader/beginner friendly and is filled with easy/low-cost projects that anyone can start doing right away! The most significant project it sparked for me was making my own sourdough bread. I've drifted from the recipe it provides, but it helped me get the ball rolling!

[Forlorn Drifter]

Its an interesting lifestyle, to say the least. I personally have mixed opinions on homesteading for various reason, but I'll leave that out for now. The urban homesteading seems interesting to me, as it seems like a great way to bring back run down buildings or homes rather than spend time demolishing them or letting them rot.

Though I'll admit I've groaned at certain livestock based things in this thread...

[fastbilly1]

Though I'll admit I've groaned at certain livestock based things in this thread...

Like what?

[Forlorn Drifter]

I believe it was Sampson that said that goat meat tasted like venison- I don't know if I can agree with that. This isn't necessarily something you where you can state how it tastes, because different people will pick different flavors out, and how you cook it can make a difference. Goat is like hog or sheep meat where it varies a lot depending on age, sexual maturity, whether or not it was castrated (if male), overall weight, and gender. Overall, I'd say it tastes closest to beef, although more gamey. I wouldn't mark it down to any one thing though, because cabrito is different than mature nanny meat is different than billy meat is different than wether meat. There's too much variation.

I'm not sure who did it, but referring to nannies as fillies is a no no. That's more of a pet peeve overall, my animal science classes and years of ranch life give a knee jerk reaction where I hear that. Billy and nanny can be interchangeable with buck and doe though, as some groups are pushing for the latter because it sounds a bit more refined.

Saying chickens eat vegetation is right, although far from the preferred diet. They eat parts of a plant, mostly seeds, fruits the plant may produce, etc. They do eat young, tender vegetation. Its preferable to have insects and other invertebrates around, if at all possible. Protein is a major thing with chickens, for both growing to eat and egg production. Its hard to "graze" chickens like it is other livestock.

[J T]

In regards to micro-housing, I find it a worrying trend. While I marvel at the ability of people to conjure up design plans that are incredibly economical and maximize the use of space, I am watching in horror as neighborhoods in my area are being rezoned to allow for aPodments, which sell the micro-livingspace movement to the masses.

Developers are profitting heavily by squeezing more people into smaller spaces. They get away with it on the moral ground that they are providing "affordable housing", and the Seattle laws are such that they even get 12 years exemption from paying property taxes if they have enough affordable units. While the monthly rate for an aPodment is less than that for a one-bedroom, the cost per square foot is roughly 2 to 3 times as much. That's because a micro-apartment only ranges from 100-350 square feet, with shared kitchen and bathroom areas. Developers are getting more tenants (rent checks) packed into a smaller space, charging more per square foot, and getting out of paying 12 years of taxes. It's highly lucrative in such a populated city, so these things are sprouting up everywhere.

The city is moving skyward as aPodment buildlings spread throughout Seattle, but with that forgone tax revenue from developers who provided supposed "affordable housing", we aren't developing our city infrastructure (roads, sewer, water, etc.) to sustain the population growth. The property tax burden is spread to the neighboring residential home owners. Our streets are clogged with traffic, especially since these buildings aren't required to provide parking, and people park on the street, which is now metered almost everywhere. They call it "density", I call it congestion. It is redefining what it means to be low income. Low income individuals aren't just the one-bedroom set anymore, or even the studio apartment set. They are now the 200 square foot aPodment set. Well designed and efficient, yes, but tiny nonetheless.

Consequently, this ends up affecting the middle class negatively as well, as they are finding the lots where they own their single-family homes are being rezoned to be "mixed use residential" meaning you have shops on the bottom floor with apartments above. Suddenly, their property value is seeing an upswing in land value, but a downswing in the value of the home that sits on it (really the home is useless to a developer and the banks know not to provide mortgages to people buying houses in commercial zones), leaving people to only sell to developers, which means these developments spread into the formerly residential neighborhoods. As this happens the houses get bought up over time, demolished, and replaced with apartments. As the supply of single-family homes goes down due to rezoning and development, while the demand remains the same, the price of homes are sure to skyrocket. In a few decades, the idea that a middle class family living in Seattle could afford a home is going to be laughable. They will live in apartment buildings and homes will only be affordable to the rich. This is what "affordable housing" will bring us.

[jp1]

The next level of gentrification? The negatives are apparent, but how about those people who would have been homeless without that lower priced epodment? Surely, there is some value in the idea that you can provide homes to people who could otherwise not afford it. Obviously they need to have some regulations to curb the impact on the middle class, but the idea itself seems like a good one. If it weren't lucrative then people wouldn't be pressed to do it at all, leaving more individuals who couldn't live on the minimum wage and leading to more poverty, homelessness, and crime. At least in theory this is how I see it. There isn't anything similar near me for me to draw real life comparisons.

Something has to be done to deal with the ever growing population, and it is better to have 100 people in "epodments" than 10 people in 2000+ square foot homes and 90 homeless people in my opinion. While it seems like there are some real problems associated with it, the ideology of bridging the gap between the middle class and the impoverished does have benefits as well. All that said, I can't think of any good solutions for all the problems that it brings up. Perhaps I'm simply being too idealistic in my view.

[J T]

It seems to me that we should be incentivizing smaller family sizes to slow population growth, rather than just incentivizing increasingly dense living spaces to accommodate people having as many babies as they want. But you're not allowed to even talk about a challenge to people's reproductive rights, so I'm a bad man.

[jp1]

How would you propose you limit reproductive rights? By income, current offspring, or???? I'm thinking China when you say that, certainly that isn't what you mean? Or are you screwing with me?

[MrPopo]

It seems to me that we should be incentivizing smaller family sizes to slow population growth, rather than just incentivizing increasingly dense living spaces to accommodate people having as many babies as they want. But you're not allowed to even talk about a challenge to people's reproductive rights, so I'm a bad man.

I've finally found a kindred soul.