My Essential Homesteading Equipment

My Essential Homesteading Equipment

So you have purchased your minor piece of heaven, and you want to turn it into a homestead.

The only difficulty is it truly is covered in trees (both desirable and undesirable), standing deadwood and underbrush. What’s a fledgling farmsteader to do? How much land are you arranging to clear? An acre or two? A lot more?

In our case, we cleared just over 33 acres out of 58+ acres. We left 75 foot buffers all around the property’s perimeter and near a spring-fed stream. A buffer was also left by the river that adjoins our property. On a smaller task it may possibly have created sense to take care of it all with sweat and backbreaking labor. Nonetheless, we chose to have the timber surveyed by a licensed forester and put up for sealed bid auction. The winning bidder was awarded the contract and they harvested the timber. We’ve since reseeded 28 acres in loblolly pines and reserved five acres for our initial house internet site and modest homestead farm.

We have also chosen a nearby company to finish the clearing, stump grubbing, driveway function and a last burn up of stumps, snags and treetops. Some of the snags and tops are being left behind for interim wildlife habitat. My brother and I are salvaging all of the worthwhile firewood that the logger left behind – they cleared out in a bit of a hurry at the finish of the task with a whole lot of usable firelogs left behind. Waste not, want not – our outside boiler will consume that just fine!

Logging operation in progress – these beauties are destined to be lumber for woodworking and pulpwood for paper goods.

Here’s what the property looked like back in January – we have currently harvested very a bit of firewood, and burned some snaggy scrap that was not well worth saving for the wood burner. As you can see there’s a bit of perform to even now be accomplished. If I can get all of my ducks in a row, I hope to have the earth moving guy in and operating pretty quickly. He’ll be clearing my driveway of stumps (all 800 feet of it!) and doing a final grade on it before applying a entire bunch of #2 construction gravel. Then he’ll move on to clearing the 5 acre open spot and prepping for our builder.

I’d enjoy to have our clearing man do the foundation work, too – but our builder says their individuals have to do that part for guarantee purposes. Meh – so be it. I mention this mainly because “Earthmover Dude” is significantly more affordable – however comes highly advisable in our local community. It pays to shop close to!

Speaking of earth moving, my brother and I did a good bit of that ourselves this previous January. I rented an industrial strength tractor with backhoe and front-end loader and it did a wonderful job. Nonetheless, with the rental charges for the gear plus burning holiday time to work, it speedily became evident employing a professional would be the way to go. Chalk that 1 up to expertise and a lesson realized!

We worked far more in May possibly as properly – though this time it was largely burning piles and salvaging more firewood.

Note: Please pay attention to any nearby burning restrictions – some places regulate by season, time of day and other conditions. It pays to verify your county administration web site!

This photo was taken in early April – they’ve virtually doubled in dimension previously…

Photograph: Doris McCray

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Image: morguefile.com mconnors