Gardening/Horticulture/Agriculture Thread

[boog]

4 acres, but it's a little pricier because the house is in tip top shape, and it comes with outbuildings, a coop, and an already well tended soil bed?

Or 12 acres, with the possibility of a shack in dire need of repair, nearly half the price of 4 acres, 10 minutes closer, but fuck, it needs to be manicured and mowed down.

Thoughts?

Also, I hope the house that I wanted falls into a fucking sinkhole and takes those dumb, racist fucks down with it. 

[Refugee]

I'd go for the land, you can always build on to a house but you're stuck with your land.  Ours hadn't been tended in 8 years and the unforested 5 acres was covered with 15' pine and clotted knots of blackberries.  Cost 800 to get the pines dozed off, and the brambles were finally driven back after a long and bloody battle. Our weapon was a Honda Foreman pulling a Swisher rough cut mower.  Thing would cut anything you could force the ATV over, I ran it over pines up to about an inch in diameter.

We took the plunge into guinea fowl in hopes they will cut down on the ticks!  We bought ten little keets who were about a week old.  They are pretty big now, about ready to go outside, and already very noisy!  I hope to train them to come to a coop at night, I've got a plan.  We'll see.  I talked to my only close neighbor and he has ticks too, so he said if they end up there he's good with it.  It will be interesting.  They are way stupid compared to chicken chicks, I swear.  They remind me of the ravenous bugblatter beast of Traal.  When I move the heater plate, for instance, they still run to the old spot to hide as if it is still there to crawl under.  It takes a couple of days for them to reprogram.  And man, when I changed their little red plastic feeder out for a big silver metal one, they nearly starved because they were terrified of it.  I'd grab them and dip their beaks, I put their old feeder beside it, I did everything I could think of.  It took three days for them to start eating from it, and then they were back to devouring.  They eat like meat chickens...

They crack me up though.  When they get scared they run to the corner of their bin and start a guinea Coriolis effect.  The ones on the outside will duck down to leg level and push into the center then pop up, forcing the others outward, then those do the same thing, and so on.  This is their main survival skill.  Sacrifice your sibling!  Like that old joke about how I don't have to outrun a bear that's chasing us, I just have to outrun my companion.

They don't stink up the kitchen as bad as chicks did by this age, which is pretty cool.  But they have learned to fly, which complicates caring for them!

[Cind]

Turkeys are a fun breed to raise, some of them are sweet.

I remember we had a blue heavyset breed male called Shy, who would let the hens eat first.

[Refugee]

A murderer has come in the night to my coop the last three nights.  Each night it pulled the head off a hen and last night it got my best rooster too.  RIP Peckerhead, you badass rooster.  I'm gonna miss you.  Young Rocky will have to take care of your girls.  He's much more handsome but nowhere near as tough as you were.


We had a trap out but it just took the bait.  Pretty sure it's at least one raccoon reaching in and trying to pull the chickens out of the coop.  Probably reached in the side of the trap to get the salmon I had in there too.  Son of a bitch.

My neighbor's bringing up a trailcam for us tonight and I'm working on making the trap less easily thwarted, and trying to make the coop more secure.  But dammit.

[boog]

Ugh. I'm sorry, Ref. I've been planning on having cats whenever I get a place. Would they thwart a raccoon? But then again, they might eat the chickens themselves. Fuck.

On that front, the 12 acres is -shit-. And I mean shit. It'd take forever to clear. We don't have a truck.

There's 8 acres, but man, this house is -rough- as fuck. We can do a lot of this labor ourselves, but some of this shit is just... bananas.

If you're interested, PM me and I'll send you a link so you can laugh at how god awful this house is on 8.

However, the 8 is mostly cleared, sooooooooo...

I don't know. I guess we might wait until fall/winter to see if any new houses crop up for the spring market. House hunting is just really fucking discouraging.

[Miradus]

Ref, head or leg removal is coon behavior. Guaranteed. It'll keep coming back until all your chickens are dead. Just like you'd keep returning to the place which hands out free, delicious cheeseburgers.

Boog, it's a thousand times easier to clear land than it is to repair a broken down house. Some houses are to the point where it'd be easier to burn them down, bulldoze the site, start over.

You could pay some good ol' boys $300 to come in with a brush hog and have 10 or so acres cleared in a weekend.

I downsized from 10 acres in the desert to 1 acre in the jungle and I'm already losing out to the constant growth creeping up to the house. I feel like if I take a Saturday afternoon nap, the Banyan will get me.

[Refugee]

Yeah, choose based on the land.   You can put a trailer on it or build a small cabin or fix up the house, but the land is the thing.  It's really the whole reason you're there.

[boog]

You guys'll laugh.

The 12 acres is owned by my old polisci professor from when I was in middle college -- it's this thing where you can take college courses while still being in high school here in NC. I believe he's the head of that department at the college now!

But apparently, he and his wife are slumlords. They're well known by our realtor as being pieces of shit who own a ton of properties but never hired anyone for maintenance, so they let everything they have turn to dust. It's crazy, because you'd think, coming where they come from, they'd take pride in the properties they own, but ... newp.

We went out there and we don't even know if there's a building there. We looked all over what property we could get through and to and there was -nada-, besides a run down and crumbling concrete-block slapped together one car garage.

And y'know, we'd do the trailer thing, or live in something tiny, but it's hard with the kids. They destroy every fucking thing, and I mean -everything-.

The house on 8 isn't as bad as it looks online -- they really could've slapped a fresh coat of paint on the rooms and put in cheap carpeting and saved themselves a bit of money -- and they lowered the price again about 10k. There's also a second house that's in need of some minor repairs on the property that we could rent, or maybe airbnb or WWOOF, possibly.

Otherwise, it looks like anything over 8 isn't really a possibility in this area.

I'd LOVE to go to southern Virginia, but there isn't shit there, and it'd be an hour drive to ... everything. I don't even think they have an elementary school near any of the houses we were looking at in Virginia, lol, though my search was cursory at best.

Bleh. This all is a fuckin' mess.

[Refugee]

Got the son of a bitch.



Game cam took 162 pics last night and I didn't see any others, so hopefully it was a loner.  I got a buddy who has champion coon dogs and he says he can make use of a live coon, but if he doesn't come get him, my 10/22 hasn't been blooded yet.

Lost 5 chickens in 4 consecutive nights.

We used salmon for bait the first two nights, second night we wired it down.  Sucker got the bait both times.  This time we used marshmallows!  Piled some in and also stuck a couple up from the bottom so they were kind of half trapped.  The gamecam shows him going halfway in the trap, then back out, circling around.  He didn't want to step on the pressure plate.  What a clever creature.  But marshmallows were too much for him.

[Refugee]

Boog, nothing for an hour's drive sounds like a selling point to me.  But if it doesn't to you, don't do it!  It's not for everyone.  Just like I was miserable in my 2 story, 4 br suburban house.  There are places that aren't served by schools in the US but I doubt very much VA has any.  Kids might have to ride buses quite awhile though.

[Refugee]

Also Boog, I forgot to answer you about the cat keeping away coons.  A coon will flat tear up a big hound if it gets cornered, even kill them sometimes.  They prefer to run and climb than fight, but I think maybe a cat would be viewed as food, being about the same size as a chicken or rabbit. 

[Miradus]

I don't have anything for scale in that picture but it looks like a smallish coon. His knowledge of the pressure plate leads me to believe he's been trapped before and released.

A lot of city people do that. They catch their problem coons, drive them out into the country and release them ... where they become some other farmer's problem. Only now that new farmer has to deal with a better-educated coon. Those things are so damned smart.

Raccoons will kill for sport. I've had them get inside a chicken coop and kill thirty birds and eat none of them. I think all the birds running around just triggers their prey instinct. Even a small barking dog will usually keep them away from your place. They know that a barking dog means people and people are their main concern. They'll run off and hide and wait for the dog and you to go back to sleep.

Never heard of them messing with cats but I've seen them tear up a lot of dogs when they got cornered. My father was an avid coon hunter and I went out many a night as a young lad into the dark to hunt with him. I wasn't a big fan. An eight year old needs his sleep.

In the 70's though we'd get $30 for the pelt. We'd take pelts to the grocery store in town by the train tracks and if they were in good shape a man would buy them. If we had enough, and I'd not been an ass about being woke up for the hunting, I'd get a fresh donut which a lady made in the store. Which for a kid who never got store food, was a BIG DEAL. So in my primitive little country head, I still associate killing a coon with a tasty donut.

[Refugee]

It is a small coon.  The cage is 15"x15".

I also think relocating trouble is just dumping my problem on someone else.  I understand the motivation, you get to pretend you did something good instead of taking on the necessary unpleasant task of dispatching an animal.  But really you just skate out of your responsibility and make someone else do it for you.  I bet you're right about it having been trapped before.  Someone's "humanitarian" behavior cost me five chickens being pulled apart while still alive.

Thirty bucks, wow.  Tanned?  It was five bucks here in the 70s!  Fifty bucks for a pair of wolf ears.  I don't remember other prices, I never got into it, but I remember my Uncle Jim was about the best hunter and trapper in these parts and he'd talk about all that.

[Miradus]

We'd sell coon pelts, deer hides, and beaver pelts. I remember $30 as a standout price but I'd be hard pressed to say for sure now that you mention it that it wasn't the beaver instead of the coon. There was a bounty on coyotes (we didn't have wolf problems) but they were too wary of us. They wouldn't get close enough to shoot.

There weren't a lot of other trappers in our area, as I recall. The railroad had come through and most of the rural people went to jobs there, or they drove an hour to work at the prison. My father was kind of a holdout in that regard, clinging to an older way of life. Prices kept going up, knowledge got lost, and by the time the mid 80's rolled around we'd lost the ranch and moved to the city where he got a job in a factory.

I used to entertain fantasies of making enough money someday to buy back the ranch. My grandfather had bought it with money he'd saved through WW2, and my father had lost it. Before that my family had been sharecroppers. I'm here to tell you that it wasn't just black people who picked cotton in the south. My grandmother drug my father through the cotton fields as she picked, the infant on a blanket tied to her ankles as she crawled along harvesting.

But Google Earth photos of the land show that the 500 or so acres has been parted out into 2 acre lots and built up as a subdivision. There's a convenience store now where my grandmother was buried. I don't know what they did with the body ... probably one of my aunts (her sisters) would know.

The march of progress.

[Refugee]

Same with our farm.  My mother split when I was just about 14 and then took my old man to court for money, and he had to sell off all his stock and gear, and he got depressed and drunk one night and priced the land to some guy and lost it.  He was broken up about it when he sobered up, but wouldn't go back on his word.  60k for 150 acres along a big Kentucky creek.  I was terribly upset about that and for many years I was determined to get it back.  Then they parceled it into large nice lots along the creek and sold it for $500k.  Burned down our lovely old farmhouse and built ugly modern houses.  Paved the gravel road that ran for 9/10 of a mile to the next house...Ah well.

I'd rather have my tiny cabin on my 10 acres at this point in my life anyway.  Coons and all.  Kinda miss the creek though.

$30 sounds better for beaver than coon, I think you must be right.  Coons are so plentiful.

[boog]

Boog, nothing for an hour's drive sounds like a selling point to me.  But if it doesn't to you, don't do it!  It's not for everyone.  Just like I was miserable in my 2 story, 4 br suburban house.  There are places that aren't served by schools in the US but I doubt very much VA has any.  Kids might have to ride buses quite awhile though.

It sounds great to me too, but not to the dude. Maybe we will work up to that. I think we might try to flip this place. And when the kids get older, maybe we can move somewhere else! Or maybe before then. I dunno.

Signing the papers for an offer on the eight. I adored the house on four, but I dunno that we could wait for the people to get back to us about the twelve. And the twelve is in city limits so it would've probably been a pain to keep animals with the ordinances and shit.

I'm glad you got that raccoon. I love possums, heh, but I hate raccoons. Trashy, rabies infested fuckers.

RIP Peckerhead!

[Refugee]

Good luck Boog!!!  Let us know how it goes!

I got all homesick writing that last post and found this video of the creek.  It starts about half a mile past my old farm but it's very much the same.

[Miradus]

Everyone's got pineapple plants. They're everywhere. They line driveways, are almost ornamentals in front of houses, and even grow wild in spots somehow.

But not me. Mine keep dying back. You're supposed to just cut the green top off of a pineapple you eat and then plant it in the soil. I do that, but then it dies. I've FINALLY got one plant out of about two dozen I've started which is putting out new green and looks to be thriving. I had to plant it in a 25 gallon grow pot with some high dollar soil to get it that far. Stinkin' pineapples.

I've got tomatoes running wild now, but my zucchini plants are old and not producing. I've never seen a squash plant get old. Always before the squash bugs would kill them. It's heartbreaking for me to uproot a healthy plant with thick, green foliage simply because it's no longer producing buds for fruit. Even weirder to garden somewhere that vegetable plants die of old age rather than the frost, drought, or insect predation.

[boog]

I wish I could have a pineapple plant. But then, nobody likes pineapple except for me. I guess nobody's into fruit trying to eat their tongues like me, eheheheh.

I wish you luck on the pineapple endeavor. Everything here dies prematurely of disease. If I had something die purely of old age I'd WTF.

Um! Good news. Our offer was accepted. So as soon as financing's approved, we'll begin due diligence. Fingers crossed we don't find something terribly unsavory. 

[boog]

Good luck Boog!!!  Let us know how it goes!

I got all homesick writing that last post and found this video of the creek.  It starts about half a mile past my old farm but it's very much the same.

I feel you, Ref. I will never forgive my grandmother, who is quite a shady character, honestly, for selling the house we had on Lorton Lake for HALF of her asking price.




I will always maintain that upstate NY is some of the most, if not the most, gorgeous country in all the United States. I can't believe what she did, and why she did it. She legit sold it out from under our feet ... while we were still living there!

[Refugee]

Ah, beautiful, Boog.

Congratulations on your offer being accepted!  Good luck!  Exciting and scary all at the same time!

[boog]

It's fucking frightening. Luckily this house is older, 1954, and it's really solid. There's just a lot of cosmetic work to be done to the thing. Painting is easy enough, and we'll put down carpet and rugs until we can get some time, and a lil extra cash, to put the hardwood in ourselves.

It is really exciting. AND really scary.

Do any of you guys have recommendations on books to read? I definitely want to get some small livestock, probably goats, and chickens, and maybe land ducks, but I dunno where to start. I can grow the fuck out of some food, it's just the animal bit I'm not familiar with.

Except for my cute puppers who's already housebroken and knows a bazillion commands. ^_^_^;

Thanks, Ref. I'd smooch ya if I could.

[Miradus]

Congrats! But damn. If you'd asked in December I could have sent you BOXES of books on homesteading and livestock. I ended up just hauling them to the library rather than pay the freight to Hawaii.

Storey's Guides are a pretty good start. If (like me) you're really interested in chicken genetics, a book called "Genetics of the Fowl" by Norton Creek Press is an awesome read.

I am a cult follower of John Seymour. "The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It"

If you want, PM me your Amazon account and I'll drop you a copy through them as a housewarming gift.

This is a Boog adventure of which I heartily approve. It changes your life, your children's life, and impacts your family legacy for generations to come.

[Refugee]

There are some Facebook groups that are great for learning stuff.  People ask questions and I learn a lot from reading the answers to those.  Plus they're free.  These are all useful to people doing this on a small scale.

Homesteads and Sustainability
5 Acre Living
Chicken Keeping 101
Homesteading
Backyard Meat Rabbits
Chickens Chickens - Yard Bird Central
Backyard Meat Chickens
Backyard Ducks
Backyard Turkeys and Guinea Fowl

These are people really doing it, some are new and some are old hands.  You will see pictures of necropsies of sick animals, butchering, etc., so keep that in mind.  Very educational.  There are many more that I follow but these are the most useful and active.

You have people who see their animals as pets and people like me who see them more as farm animals, and sometimes the two butt heads.  No farmer would take a $20 rabbit to the vet, for instance...it isn't financially smart.  If he can't fix it he'll cull it.  But a pet owner definitely would take it to the vet.  So you will see people advising for culling, and people advising for more expensive solutions, and sometimes they get ornery with each other.  But you can just scroll on by...

You can find groups on any other animals you're interested in.  I've followed groups on pigs and goats in the past, and various breeds of cattle in the past, and also groups on gardening.

BTW, rabbit poop is crazy good fertilizer.  Holy cow.  We basically planted in rabbit poop this year and my garden has gone crazy.  We planted 3 rows in my dad's garden too, and he's cared for that garden and fertilized and done all sorts of things, and it's nowhere near as riotous growth as my rabbit poop garden.  You don't have to let it age either, like other forms of manure.