Posts Tagged ‘water’

Every winter we work hard to ensure the animals have access to water. With several animal pens, this can be a challenge. It can be frustrating to refill a water bowl with fresh water only to have it freeze in a matter of hours. Here are some tips we’ve learned along the way that may […]

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Today we continue our piglets series with some insights on feeding and watering growing pigs. Pigs grow so fast that any missteps in feeding and watering can have dramatic consequences. Too little feed can permanently damage a pig, while too much can lead to plenty of issues, too. That being the case, there’s a lot […]

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Happy Friday! As we wrap up the week, it was cold, but productive. I posted a lot of this week’s activities earlier in the week, but there’s a bit more to talk about today. The Cold! Right now it’s a whopping 9 degrees outside. That’s so cold, it’s a hand warmer day! There’s just nothing like […]

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You may have read a previous post where we mention that in the spring we fermented our chicken feed. We stopped doing this over summer because wetness breeds fly problems. Around the end of August the fly population dropped and we began fermenting chicken feed again. Here’s a quick summary of why and how we do […]

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We often refer to the dogs as our “four-legged chickens” when they try to sneak into the chicken run for a snack of chicken feed.  Well today was a first: Noah the dog learned to drink from the chicken waterer!  Now those poor chickens really have to watch out, the dogs try to steal their food and […]

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  This is the the waterer we use for our chickens.  The chickens learn quickly to hit the red nipples with their beaks in order to get water out.  We love this type of waterer for several reasons: chickens cannot access the stored water so it stays clean, refilling is as easy as taking off the lid, […]

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Since it’s summertime, I’m off!  It’s a great part of being a teacher.  I enjoy doing some morning chores around the homestead a few days a week. I usually begin with filling a bucket from the rainbarrel, and using that water to water the plants around the yard. I will also take a bucket of […]

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Water!

Here at Independence Homestead, a big part of being self-sufficient is being able to get through an emergency.  In our area there was a huge storm on Friday night.  While our homestead came through the storm just fine, over 200,000 people in our county were still without power 24 hours later.  Plus several areas had […]

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April showers have finally arrived and our rain barrels are already both at capacity. It has not even rained that much but between the two barrels they collect over half the rain that falls on our roof, and that adds up to enough collected water to fill up our two barrels. Seeing all this rain water leave our barrels made me realize that it was time we started utilizing this water more effectively.

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Martha did a fantastic job prepping our rain barrels. Now it is time for me to install them! We decided that our first two rain barrels would reside in our back yard as we had a bit of trouble with water flowing from the existing down spouts from the roof into our lawn and washing […]

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