HomesteaderWife - Tales from Wolf Branch [05/10/2023 - The New Fella!]

HomesteaderWife

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10/14/2021 - - - Sheesh, been over a year since I last posted here and updated I believe. I am leaving the original wording of the post from when I initially made it, just to follow along with our adventures from the beginning, but please check recent pages to see how we've come along!

Hello there Backyard Herds! My husband and I have a little homestead called Wolf Branch. I have been a blogger for about 3 years now online at Mother Earth News!

I Blog for Mother Earth News.jpg



**Please Note! I do not get paid to write these articles so I hope this does not count as advertisement. I just want to share these with the good folks of BYH!**


I wanted to write up a small journal not only for personal benefit (such as note/date keeping) but also to provide ideas or help as we go along. I am going to try and answer some of the newcomer questions as best as I can, by typing it out neatly in a little biography-style fashion.

My husband and I live in the east-central area of Alabama, and have been married since December 2014. I grew up with half of my younger years spent at my grandmother's 43 acre farm, while my husband grew up in a small town on the land we now call home, with mainly poultry and dogs in his life. We call our plot of land "Wolf Branch" due to the rumors of wolves being in the area (someone has already caught a black panther on their game camera in the area!). The land is about 20 acres, give/take.

Wolf Branch is not just our own family farm, but a homestead in progress. I was tired of working just to make money to have a job, and my husband just finished up schooling after getting out of the military, so we now are our own bosses. The things we do here and the crafts we make with our own hands are our only income. And we manage to make enough every month to get by, by the grace of God. Therefore, this home is not only a lifestyle, but a source of income as well. We are currently milling up our own lumber to build a cabin, and are working on the foundation right now. I can't wait to post photos of it!

We currently have 4 dogs, 5 chickens, and 2 ducks at our farm. We also grow our own garden from seed each year, and I have just got into canning a lot of it. Next year, we will be enlarging our garden to include all the more veggies. Hopefully, this winter will allow us to hunt a little and bring in some wild game meat to store! We do really love to fish, so we do occasionally ride to a local pond and catch a few catfish to bring home and process. In time, we do hope to raise our own meat and process it ourselves. Our goal is to be as self-sufficient as possible!

We currently have a 1954 Ford tractor that does some of the hard work around here, including dragging logs to the mill. We sold my beat up little truck to pay for part of it, and the other part of the price we actually did some labor to make up for. The tractor is my husband's "toy" while the four-wheeler is my helper around the farm. We also own a Norwood LM29 sawmill, that we mill up our own lumber with and lumber to sell. These are three key items to help our home function.

As for cooking- we finally invested in a beautiful little wood stove that will be in our cabin. We will be growing a lot of corn next year in order to help make our own corn meal and grits. We also are going to build an outdoor kitchen to make syrups and be able to cook outdoors during the Summer.

Finally, both of us have been inspired to life this way by our grandparents. My grandmother was my idol, and my husband's idol is his grandfather. We both changed our lifestyles to take on this dream, and don't regret it thus far. It is hard some days, but I would never have life any other way. Thank you for visiting, and I can't wait to share the continuing story of Wolf Branch!
 

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HomesteaderWife

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I just wanted to share an old post from my BYC account that people may find interesting. When we first got our young chickens, we cleared off a small plot of land and made our own fence posts to surround it. We also built our own log cabin chicken coop. Below are some photos, and I will explain a little of what we did!

First Step: Clearing the land and marking off where the pen will be built. Then we took a few scrap pines that we cut while clearing the land, cut them 7' tall, and de-barked them by hand with a draw knife to make fence posts. These are not temporary (we will be building a new coop once we have our cabin built, so they can be closer to home). Then we put wire around the pen and secured the bottom to keep predators out.

Second Step: Building the log cabin chicken coop with more scrap wood that would not have been used otherwise. I home-made the chinking materials to make sure it was well insulated. Tada! Time for the chicks to move in.

Then came ducks and bunny rabbits, so we had to build houses for them. The ducks got their very own little house made from scrap lumber we milled up ourselves, while the rabbits moved in to the bottom of the log cabin coop. Our pen now houses the rabbits, chickens, and ducks all in one space. Everyone gets along, and it's always cute to let the bunnies out so that they can play tag with the chickens!
 

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animalmom

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Very nice chickens! The two of you sound like your hands are full with projects that benefit you and to this I say loudly, BRAVO!!!!!

I think that self-sufficiency is a young person's game. We both were city folks, saw our first cow in the zoo type people but we seem to be doing ok with our projects even though we started real late in life, like well after retirement. We are good on growing our own protein (rabbits, geese, chicken, goat) and after much trial and failure I think I'm getting the hang of growing vegetables... just not enough to do much besides eat in the summer. Loving the life we now live and wonder how we managed before. God is good.

Everyone can be more self-sufficient and maybe I can pick up some good tips to help our efforts from your journal.
 

HomesteaderWife

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Just some photos today of the land we are building our cabin at, and other cute photos of some of our animal friends. I am also going to include some photographs of different art projects that we sell, made from recycled or home-milled lumber.
 

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