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Nectars in Nature
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Bee Byproducts
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Farming Lavender
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Yarn Farming
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Make Your Own Soap
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Grow a Gourd, Build a Birdhouse
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Limited acreage can still provide opportunities for earning significant income.
Hop to It Whether for home brewing or landscaping purposes, growing hops on a small scale is easy.
It’s all in a day’s work for entrepreneur Ryan Kelsey, an 18-year-old who rises with the chickens.
The Eggs-traordinary Stantons
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Eggscellent-Laying Heritage Hens
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How to Build a Honey Extractor
A pair of brothers on a family farm runs a large-scale niche business focused on local eggs and laying hens.
How to Become a Beekeeper A certified beekeeper offers a checklist for beginners.
You can grow this heavenly scented plant (and sell it, too!) with some tips from an accomplished grower.
Wool from secondhand sheep, alpacas, and llamas can bring a tidy sum to the small farm, without the fuss of breeding.
Follow these simple instructions, and you’ll be making soap in no time.
A fulfilling project for gardeners who might want to use a piece of their bounty to attract some feathered, crooning critters.
Build Your Own Sprout Racks
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DIY Pegged Garden Harvest Basket
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Meaner’n a Snake Pickles & Cobbler in a Jar
An easy woodworking project to help organize your fodder-sprouting system.
A beautiful and functional harvest basket allows you to rinse vegetables (or eggs!) immediately after gathering.
Texas treats are blissful to eat and profitable to sell.
Rare domesticated animals need engaged stewards to survive.
You can make an inexpensive honey extractor from simple materials available in your local hardware store.
Honey is but one of the items created by ever-industrious honeybees.
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Hatching a Plan
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Market Farming in the Suburbs
What’s your favorite type of honey? Learn what all plays into honing the besttasting honey.
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Growing the Organic Market, One Woman at a Time The time has never been better for women to get into agribusiness; read more to learn the different areas where women may fit in the farm world.
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Earning on an
ACRE
The Secret is in the Soil
The secret to such prolific plants is in the soil, of course. Farmers and gardeners have to be active with liming, drip irrigation, and planting of winter cover crops, all of which Slade does. He admits it is labor intensive farming. But it’s not that hard to get started. “All you need is a 100foot length of twine and two tomato stakes,” he says. He plants rows a foot apart. One can do it by hand, hoeing along the twine tied between two stakes, or fashion a tiller with pieces of rebar attached to the back to dig the rows with less labor. Slade was so excited by how proper soil management increased his harvest and enabled him to produce more in less space that he took the “$1 per square foot” idea to his boss at Virginia State University and Virginia Cooperative Extension, where he works part-time for the school’s Small Farm Outreach Program as a vegetable/produce specialist. “Clif came to me and said, ‘I can make $43,560 off one acre of land,’” says William Crutchfield, director of the Small Farm Outreach Program. Slade asked for two acres of university land to prove it. Crutchfield thought the idea was a good one for the small and often socially disadvantaged and economically limited farmers the program serves. When they started the initiative, Crutchfield says, “We were building the airplane as we were flying it.”
Intensive square-foot gardening makes it possible to make more than $43,000 per acre in produce.
Taking Off
That was two years ago. Today the 43,560 Initiative — as it has come to be known, because there are 43,560 square feet in an acre — is the Small Farm Outreach Program’s most popular initiative. And it’s easy to understand why: When university cooperative extension staff start talking specifics to farmers, they listen, especially when, as Crutchfield points out, “you’re talking dollars.” Slade, who had already been implementing this method on his own farm for two years, headed up the 43,560 Initiative. “A lot of people thought we were crazy,” he says, “but we proved that you could do it.” “No. 1 is the fertilization,” Slade says, noting that even though the two-acre pilot project at VSU is not certified organic, it uses entirely organic farming practices. They keep it simple using what Slade refers to as “5-gallon bucket technology.” For every 500 square feet of garden, Slade employs one 5-gallon bucket of pelletized poultry manure and 10 5-gallon buckets of mushroom compost. Currently, the shiitake mushroom compost comes from Pennsylvania, and it costs between $800 and $1,200 to ship a truckload. Overall production costs for 1 acre of produce farming on this condensed and intensive scale is about $10,000. Compost costs could be lowered substantially, though, by using livestock manure, fruit and vegetable scraps, and other organic matter to fertilize.
The investment in a drip irrigation system is easily returned and cuts down on maintenance. Left: Healthy soil is a must for optimum food production in a small area. It’s a labor-intensive but worthwhile way to make a living growing food.
By Deborah R. Huso
Former But it wasn’t until he attended a Sustainable Agriculture Working Group workshop county extension agent Clifton Slade has been raising commercial vegetables for years.
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supported agriculture) to see what types of produce their customers wanted that the CSA was not providing. Soon he was harvesting carrots, beets, turnips, romaine and other lettuces, kale, onions, and cabbage, filling niche markets no other local vegetable producers were filling. His first year he established 20 beds in a quarter acre.
LEFT TO RIGHT: TERRY
So Slade went back home to Surry County, Virginia, and started intensively farming a quarter acre with the goal of raising a pound, a bunch, or a head of produce in every square foot. “It worked so well that first year, I thought, ‘Oh, I can make a fortune.’” Slade began calling area CSAs (community
WILD STOCK (2); RON MCKIBBAN
a couple of years ago that he started learning how to do more with less — less land, that is. At the workshop, Slade spoke with farmers who were grossing $1 per square foot in greenhouses. “I thought if it could be done inside, why not outside?”
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Beekeeper How to Become a
Busy worker bees take a moment just outside the hive before they take off or go inside to deposit pollen; a beekeeper scrapes off the wax covering on the honeycomb cells before harvesting honey. Opposite: This flower’s color attracts one of the far-ranging honeybees.
A certified beekeeper offers a checklist for beginners.
if they’re coming off of pollination. Sometimes, large apiaries will take bees that are weak and unhealthy, coming off of pollination and combine them into packages or nucs and sell them for what may seem like a good price. Believe me, you get what you pay for with bees and equipment.
get caught up at this point, though, so here’s my recommended to-do list:
1
Read! There is so much wonderful information out there about all things beekeeping. Read about hive design. Check out books from your library, and read what beekeepers are posting about on beekeeping forums. Also, many local beekeeping associations have a library that you can borrow from.
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Consider asking a beekeeper you know if she would be willing to mentor you during your first season. No matter how many YouTube videos you watch showing you how to install a package or nuc, it is really valuable to have someone with a good bit of experience alongside you.
2
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To-do List (to Prepare for Spring)
The truth is that if you’re hoping to have some hives this spring, then you’re already behind. It’s not impossible to
3
If you decide you’re going to take the plunge, it’s time to order bees! Many, if not most places are sold out of nucs and packages by the time February rolls around. You can still find them but you definitely want packages no later than halfway through April and nucs no later than the beginning of May.
4
When shopping around for bees, ask the supplier where their bees come from, if they’ve successfully overwintered and, most importantly,
(3)/CBCKCHRISTINE, PHOTOGRAFIERO, FREEPEOPLEA
The
weather recently was unseasonably warm and it made my spirits soar to see how busy my bees were. I also saw a lot of pollen being brought into the hive, which is another good sign that things are on track for the busy season. Beekeeping is such wonderful hobby and rewarding in more ways than one. I almost didn’t take the leap into it and I certainly wouldn’t have if I had weighed the pros and cons in my honeybee-ignorant mind. The reason I’m telling you
this is because I’m speaking to all of you who think beekeeping sounds like an interesting or worthwhile hobby. I’m not saying to jump right in without doing your research and (more importantly) connecting with some experienced beekeepers, but I am encouraging you to get busy checking off your beginner beekeeper to-do list.
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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: FOTOLIA
By Lindsay Williamson
Get in touch with your local beekeeping association. Start attending regular meetings. It’s a wonderful source for local connections and you will certainly meet some beekeeping veterans who are generous with their time and knowledge. I don’t think my bees would’ve made it through my first season had it not been for the kindness and experience of a local beekeeper I met through the association.
Keep records! It’s important to always check for certain things during hive inspections and make sure that you write them down. Do you see eggs, larvae, and capped brood? If so, how is the laying pattern? Did you spot the queen? Did you see any bees or brood that look sickly? Were there any weird or bad smells? How are their food stores? I’m not a fan of feeding bees sugar syrup, and for that reason, I always leave them with more than enough honey, but sometimes there is just no avoiding it. After installing most nucs and definitely with packages, you will need to provide some sugar syrup for your bees. Too much sugar syrup can be hard on their systems and cause nosema.
When to Expect Your First Harvest
The very last thing I want to tell you
is don’t expect to harvest any honey your first season. It’s not unheard of to have a beginner start out with a crazy successful colony that produces more than they need to overwinter, but it’s definitely not the norm. At the very least, even if you feel they have produced plenty, wait until close to fall to decide, because in most areas, your bees will go through a significant amount of
the stores just making it through the late part of summer when there is not as much nectar available but still a ton of mouths to feed. Enjoy your hives. Bees are such noble and amazing creatures. Naturally, I expected to learn some things when I started keeping bees but they have taught me so much more than I could have anticipated. www.Grit.com
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Y ARN FARMING I do here on the farm, I respond that I am a “yarn farmer.” If I were to say, “I raise sheep, alpacas, and llamas,” it would imply that I actually breed the animals. I don’t, however, breed anything. In fact, I have a very strict ‘no-males-allowed’ policy. I do miss out on the overwhelming cuteness of newborn lambs this way, but I don’t have to spend sleepless nights in the barn during lambing season either. I also don’t need to castrate the young ram lambs or take care of many of the other activities with which breeders must contend. In that way, yarn farming is a way of farming that suits me just fine. In fact, I have recently discovered yarn farming was an occupation of my fourthgreat-grandmother. Around the year 1820, her husband was killed, leaving her alone with seven small children. She kept a flock of sheep and took in weaving to support herself until the children were old enough to help her work a full-scale farming operation. So you might say fiber farming goes right down to my roots.
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Bringing Home the Herd
The first step of yarn farming is determining what breeds you are interested in, and then establishing relationships with quality breeders in your area. I chose the Shetland sheep breed due to its hardiness, the fineness of its fiber, and the variety of natural colors available. I found a reputable breeder in my area to make arrangements for a farm visit. Every breeder reaches a point where he or she needs to choose which animals to keep for their breeding program and which animals to cull. They are perfectly healthy animals, but may have body conformation issues that the breeder finds undesirable. For instance, they may be slightly cow-hocked, or their ears might hang too low. These are minor issues most of us never notice, but a big deal in the show ring. These are the animals that can be purchased at pet-quality prices, even though their fleece is just as nice as the blue-ribbon winner standing next to them. I don’t show the animals competitively, so
WILD STOCK; BELOW: ISTOCK/SEVALJEVIC; OPPOSITE: ISTOCK/FELINDA
posed with the question of what
ABOVE: TERRY
When
Grit’s Guide to Success at Farmers Markets
Below: Shearing by hand may take longer, but it can produce a superior quality fleece.
Wool from secondhand sheep, alpacas, and llamas can bring a tidy sum to the small farm, without the fuss of breeding.
By Christine Byrne
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A Nubian goat watches over his Angora counterparts. Angora goats produce a lustrous fiber known as mohair.
they don’t need to be pretty. They could be ugly as mud, and it wouldn’t matter to me as long as they have nice fiber. By not maintaining my own breeding stock, I also have the luxury of being able to pick and choose whatever color and texture I want to add to my flock or herd, instead of being stuck with whatever lambs, kids or crias are born to my flock. The alpaca and llama industries have been going through a rightsizing of sorts the past several years. The astronomical prices once asked for breeding stock have plummeted, leaving breeders with pastures full of animals they can’t sell. Breeders in some cases are practically giving away juvenile males and geldings. In my case, they even threw in free delivery. Animal rescue groups are another source. Several are inundated with llamas and alpacas needing homes. The organizations I worked with had access to qualified veterinarians, who performed complete examinations before making them available for adoption. I cannot stress enough how important a thorough vet examination is — picking up a cheap animal at an auction may seem like a bargain, but you’ll probably end up paying more in the long run. There is value in the knowledge a breeder or rescue organization can provide.
Barnyard Preparation
Before you bring any animals onto your property, you’ll need to make sure you have adequate shelter and storage room for hay and www.Grit.com
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Make your own Soap Follow these simple instructions, and you’ll be making soap in no time.
Article and photographs by Karen K. Will
Soapmaking perception that it was difficult and dangerous. My ancestors made soap
is a homestead craft I had long wanted to try, despite my unfounded
during the Depression using primitive methods — hardwood ashes and rainwater to make lye, fat rendered to make lard — and no one died, went blind or was burned (though a bar occasionally got stuffed into my mother’s mouth when something came out of it that shouldn’t have). The old-fashioned method of hand stirring — sometimes for hours — combined with the unpredictable strength of lye made from ashes resulted in soap that was highly variable and sometimes harsh on the skin of the person using it Modern methods and conveniences have taken just about all of these unpleasantries out of the equation. Though I’m usually a big fan of old-timey methods, I’m not quite so excited when chemical reactions are involved. When I got serious about soapmaking, I turned to a friend who’s been doing it for years and requested a hands-on demonstration. Sandra J brarian in Baldwin City, Kansas, knows the craft inside and out. She happily agreed and sent me away with instructions to get the “only book I’d ever need,” Smart Soapmaking by Anne L. Watson — and read it cover to cover — and the supplies for one of her foolproof soaps. When I showed up on the appointed lesson day at Sandra’s house, the schooling commenced. As a former schoolteacher, Sandra is exacting with her instructions, always stressing the importance of exact measurements, exact temperatures, and following instructions exactly.
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