Anyone homesteading in Florida or anywhere else in the world can tell you -one of the absolute most important things in the world is being quick on your feet. When a situation arises, you need to act quick and waste no time thinking. Because sometimes, even a moments hesitation can literally mean the difference between life and death. Of course, most reactions aren’t to events this dire. But, being able to pivot quickly and make decisions in the moment is important to general health and wellbeing on a homestead.
Despite this, perhaps the next most important thing in homesteading is making plans. Without a plan, you’ll often find yourself unprepared for those unexpected events. And worse yet, you’ll find yourself with hungry animals and dead plants. Today, let’s look ahead at the month of May and what kind of homesteading plans we have in place.
Getting Our Garden In Order
May second was a productive day on the homestead. Since Joseph had the day off work, he was able to tackle some extra projects. Chief among them, he got the garden ready with two additional rows ready to accept plants. This means beyond our already-prepared seedlings, we’ll have room to plant more in the garden. This is good for a variety of reasons. But, it also brings up a sense of urgency.
See, beyond purchasing a few already-started plants, we did our own seed starting this year. Growing your own plants from seed can be an important part of homesteading in Florida. However, not all of our seed starters have sprouted. In fact, we’ve had a much less successful start rate than we have ever before. Our suspicion is that the later cold fronts played their part in this. Regardless, our next step this month is to start some new seeds to fill in these garden rows.
Who Wants More Backyard Chickens?
As most of you know, we have six backyard chickens in the flock right now. This includes four Rhode island red hens, one Rhode island rooster, and one Ameraucana hen. Shortly after they started producing, we were getting 4-5 eggs per day. However, since winter hit, and even with the warmer weather, our production has notably dropped. Granted, these are our first hens, so maybe we just have no idea how things work. But, in our mind, we were figuring we’d get those 4-5 eggs for at least a few years. Instead, it seems 5 is the outlier -and more often than not it’s just 3-4 eggs (and 2 eggs certain days seem a weekly occurrence).
Since we both like having 2 eggs per day (or more) and we wish to continue supplying eggs to family and friends, getting less than 4 eggs a day is not really working for us. So, what better way to remedy this than to buy more chickens? And, since Victoria is so fond of the multi-color eggs, we plan to expand the variety of flock significantly with our next round of chickens. We haven’t settled on exactly how many pullets we intend to buy, but…at least six.
Should We Prepare for More Goats?
Aside from an aggressive vegetable garden and the addition of new chickens, we aren’t looking to make any significant changes to our Florida homestead in May. However, one other thing we’ll be starting this month is the next fence for goats. Specifically, we’ll be looking at introducing two male goats to our herd late this year. And, that means building a new enclosure and a new structure for those goats to call home. So, we’re eyeing an area out front that will give them access to lots of forage and (hopefully) keep them far away from the does that things don’t get weird outside intended mating periods.
The Key to Homesteading in Florida
When it’s said and done, choosing to homestead anywhere can be tough. And, we consider ourselves blessed that we can work on building this while we still make money from remote jobs. Being able to work from home may not be necessary to starting a homestead, but it definitely helps in our case. More important than this however, there is one thing I must say personally is the key for me to homesteading in Florida.
And, before I said it…I know you might dismiss this as romantic sentiment. But, I want to stress how much more than this is. The real key to Florida homesteading is having the right partner. Victoria and I couldn’t do this without each other. So, if you are getting started with your own homestead, make sure you have someone (or multiple someones) you can rely on and trust. If we can help you get started on that journey, let us know in the comments below. Until next time, we’ll see you around the homestead.