Official Poll: What are the products that you make/produce at home?

[baymule]

We live in town on a small lot. I have hens in the back yard and a garden in the front. I can, dehydrate, freeze and make jelly. I butcher old hens and the occasional rooster from straight run chick purchases. I butchered 7 chickens a few days ago and canned 21 pints of broth. I picked the meat off the bones and froze it.

We'll be moving 160 miles north at the end of the year on some acreage. I'll plant fruit and nut trees, grapes, berries and a BIG garden!

Wow....this post was in 2014....We did move. We moved on February 14, 2015 which also happened to be our 19th anniversary. LOL

Hmmm..... We raise sheep, lamb is now our red meat. I raise a couple of feeder pigs every year, sell one to cover costs. Last year I sold both and wound up buying a 820 pound boar, Wilbur that I fed on soured corn, milk, boiled eggs and hay for 45 days before we took him to slaughter. In fact, I took 50 pounds of Wilbur out last night and ground it up for sausage this evening. Tomorrow I'll make stuffed sausage and my husband will smoke it low and slow on the pit with hickory wood.

We have chickens for eggs and meat. I have a chicken customer that I raise Cornish Cross for and their purchase covers the cost of what we keep for ourselves. I DO have that big garden now, but this year it was a pretty bad flop. We went into drought and I couldn't keep it alive, weeds galloped away and oh well. We pick elderberries and make syrup for flu and colds. We pick honeysuckle flowers and I make syrup for cough. We pick little wild plums on the fencerows and I make the best darned jam with them.

I keep the offal from the animals we take to slaughter and I can it for dog food. I take the chicken backs, necks, wing tips, hearts and can them for dog food. My husband mixes it with the kibble every night and the dogs inhale it. We have 2 Great Pyrenees, 1 half Anatolian,1/4 GP,1/4Akbash and 1 Great Dane/Labrador. So 4 big dogs that I now can quarts of goodies for!

We did plant 2 plum trees, they died. We planted two peach trees, we got peaches this past spring. We planted an apricot, nothing yet, a pear, we got a few pears. We got suckers that came up from the roots of a neighbors plum tree and planted them this spring, and they are still living. We planted grapes, but rabbits ate them. We have a patch of elderberries where we pick, that got mowed down by a power line crew. So we are going to go dig up a bunch and start our own elderberry patch. Elderberry pie is yummy.

there was nothing here but a doublewide. Nothing. We have cleared land, hacked out 20' walls of green briars, dragged, piled and burned. We built fence all the way around our 8 acres, cross fenced and hung gates, lots of gates! We have built a barn (or neighbor did) for the horses, a barn for the sheep, chicken coops, all the infrastructure needed for a farm. We had a 12'x54' screened porch built on the front of our house. We recently hired a forestry mulcher to clear about 3-4 acres and will be working on that this winter, getting it ready for planting grass seed in the early spring.

I don't make soap, don't crochet or knit, don't make air fresheners or hygiene products. Our focus has been to make our farm able to feed us, sell enough to cover costs, sometimes even make a little and be able to give and share with our daughter and her family. We have wonderful neighbors and are in a great place if there was a SHTF situation. One neighbor wants to drill his own well, we want one also. that is on the list, there are always projects on the list LOL. We work on our farm almost every day, steadily improving it.

That's what we make and produce at home, we raise our food!

 

[Lazy Gardener]

Awesome post, @baymule : Your post exemplifies my definition of "homesteading". While some folks talk the talk, you WALK the talk.

 

[baymule]

Thank you for the lovely compliment! We are currently on day 3 of making and smoking sausage. I updated on Baymule’s 500 pound Boar thread, but here’s a picture!

 

[cluckmecoop7]

I make candles sometimes. I also produce my own eggs and veggies.

 

[CrealCritter]

My other is adult drinks and wooden stuff

 

[Britesea]

@Lazy Gardener have you tried doing anything with purselane yet? it is edible but also seems to be goopy enough to be interesting to try (like aloe perhaps). i've not done anything with it other than eating some of it or mostly just using it as worm food (weeding and burying).

I purposely allowed some purslane to survive in a few select areas of our garden. We love it for salads- and it stays fresh in the fridge for way longer than lettuce does.

 

[flowerbug]

I purposely allowed some purslane to survive in a few select areas of our garden. We love it for salads- and it stays fresh in the fridge for way longer than lettuce does.

i eat it once in a while, but mostly i just like it as a nice cover crop that is different than grass - it grows really well here in almost every garden. i have a pretty tough time getting rid of it completely, but the stirrup hoe does a pretty good job of knocking the younger sprouts back and then they can eventually dry up.