Self Sufficiency Shared

This attached image is a composite from Google Maps that I have developed with regards this property just outside Featherston (5km). We have financial and personal energy limitations that would prevent us from taking on this challenge by ourselves and thus we are looking for similarly minded compatriots interested in such a challenge.

The current asking price for this 14ha block is $230,000. I have already called the seller (not being sold through an agent) to discuss a few details. This was more in the interests of ascertaining whether he had a timeline by which he was hoping to sell, which he advised he hasn't.

There were several details brought up though and issues with the property which would require much effort. This isn't unexpected but forewarned is forearmed.

1) The property has a bit of a gorse problem. He advised that he had been working on it but hadn't managed to fully get it down yet. Not impossible, bit of hard yakka, maybe some goats?
2)  Ground is quite rocky in the lower cleared area. This means it has good drainage (good for animals) but would potentially be a difficult proposition for crops. The higher paddocks (marked in purple) have some drainage issues so would need to be worked on.

Now, the idea regarding expectations of how this would work sharing such a property with another group of people breaks down thusly in my mind:
1) The total cost of the land, any fees and initial setup (such as getting attached to the grid) would be shared by all parties.
2) The section marked in pink would be divided equally and would be where housing/accommodation would be built as it allows for a single entry point to the property for services (such as power).
3) The effort required to maintain the land would be shared between all parties taking in to consideration personal needs (in my case, I am working 5 days/week in Wellington and would therefore only be putting effort in on evenings and weekends).
4) The pink section is the only bit that is truly divided. The rest of the property is completely shared between the parties - divided we fall, united we stand?

Our personal budget for a mortgage we can maintain is $200k-250k. Is anyone else up to downsizing, moving to the country and becoming self sufficient?

Caring for the Chooks

For the last few months my main reason for getting out of bed in a timely fashion is to unlock the hen house and give the birds a feed. I have fussed about and decided to buy leg rings for them all so that I could tell them apart. This worked in some ways but not in others. For one, I found it impossible to tell the birds apart when they were running through long grass because I couldn't see their legs, but I found that if I could check which ones were which when I could eyeball their tags I soon learned their faces and colouring. They now all have names, even if they are mostly named after the randomly assigned coloured rings which I put on their legs in the dark while they slept.

My runty little chicken, named "Blondie" lost her siblings because her mother is a very slack broody, but she was successfully fostered into a brood of her cousins (the "Pippits") and it turns out that all four of them have survived and thrived and appear to be females (so we don't have to eat them). "Princess" who was laying next to the fence, hatched one chick on the first of April, but being the southern hemisphere, it died in a cold snap. I bought 6 Barred Rock roosters and 4 of them have survived to 19 weeks, while the other 2 (not having a mum or rooster to look after them) were picked off by a kahu (native hawk).

Alexander named the biggest Barred Rock, "Joey". "Joey" will be kept for breeding and his siblings are destined for the table. His largest brother has just gone through a growth spurt and surpassed him in size and will make a welcome midwinter roast.

In mid May our alpha rooster ("Garden Rooster") was taken to by "Booster", his brother and wore the worst of it. He couldn't open one eye and was quite scratched up. We had been trying to decide which of the roosters we were going to cull and our decision was made for us. I called a friend in Palmerston North who kindly came out and showed me how to break a bird's neck. We scalded it, plucked it and he kindly decapitated and gutted it for me. I cooked the meat off the bones, shredded it, and made a chicken vegetable soup, as the bird was so stringy that cooking it dry would have made it inedible. As it was he made quite a toothsome meal and my 8-year-old half-sister-in-law who had helped raise him was quite happy to have second helpings.

A few weeks ago I added another roosting perch to the hen house to give the birds a little more room. This afternoon I mucked out the hen house, which has been left for so long that the mulch at the bottom of the straw had thoroughly composted. I think if I were organising the living area for the chickens myself I would keep it cleaner than this. I had some help from my father-in-law's partner who removed the old, half rotten drawers that had been put in once-upon-a-year as nest boxes and have since been collecting a healthy layer of guano.

Most of the birds seem healthy and happy except for one who had unsightly lumps on her feet. I looked it up some time ago and found someone saying that old birds sometimes just get these deformities, but "Fleur" has recently been hiding in the hen house and not coming out when all the others are foraging. I brought her inside this evening and had a proper go at cleaning out the gunk that had collected in the huge deformities on her feet. I got a plug the size of a small marble out of one foot and a similar amount of mass out of the other foot. Each foot had a huge hole on the bottom that extended into a huge lump on top of the foot. Now these have been cleaned and disinfected and her feet have been covered so no dirt gets in while she heals, hopefully she will feel a bit better.

I have been considering a bunch of options for trying out my carpentry skills. I would like to make the chooks a dust bath, with a roof to keep the wet off, and possibly with some kind of catchment so I can collect run-off water so I don't need to lug watering cans from the house out to the chook house. My main inhibition is the lack of materials, but I am saving up my pocket money.

My other project is to build another small hen house so I can separate the flock for breeding. My father-in-law recently introduced 5 ex-battery hens to the flock and the plan is to have "Booster" breeding with the battery girls, and "Joey" breeding with the rest of the flock who are mostly the other rooster's siblings, nieces, and granddaughters. This should hopefully mean stronger chicks and more interesting looking offspring.

Now all I have to do is count my pennies and start looking at borrowing some power-tools... unless I want to get very proficient with a handsaw!

Rescuing our baby chicken

We've just moved to a lifestyle block, owned by my husband's father, in Awahuri, New Zealand. There are chickens here and I have taken up the responsibility of feeding them, which feels pretty much like jumping into farming at the shallow end.

We have a couple of Khaki Campbell ducks, a guinea fowl, and about 9 Rhode Island Red chickens free ranging, and one of the hens was looking after four chicks when we got here. When we moved we brought two cats with us, so we thought it prudent to lock the brood in an old rabbit hutch that had been used as a chicken tractor for previous chicks by the owners of the property.

We recently had torrential rain from the tail end of tropical cyclone Wilma. Unfortunately a couple of the chicks managed to jump out of the nest box and did not know how to jump back in, so when I went to check on them I found two prone and lifeless looking bodies in the grass.

I picked them both up and one of them moved a leg so I bustled them inside and held them against my body for warmth. The bigger chick twitched his leg a bit and then expired, but the smaller chick started to open her beak and within an hour had warmed up, and fluffed up enough for me to return her to her mother.

Unfortunately, because I was too slack to fuss about in the rain, I didn't fix up a step for her so when I checked on her later the next day I found her in the rain, lying prone and limp in the grass again. She hadn't been there long though, as I had fed the chickens no more than half an hour earlier. I managed to warm her back up to conscious once more, and returned her to her mother, and added a brick to the box so she could jump back into the box. That was a learning experience.

All was well for about a week but one of her siblings mysteriously went missing and it became obvious that she was not being cared for by her mother. Her remaining sibling seemed to be getting all the food and she spent much of her time hiding in the grass or under the edge of the wooden frame, out of the nest box. She was so weak that even with the step I had added she could not climb into the box so I decided to bring her inside.

Since the warm wet weather we have had an abundance of flies now and she is enjoying feasting on them as I catch them for her. She is growing stronger by the day. It is still unclear whether she will make it to fully grown. Our oldest boy, Alexander, is loving having a cute baby chicken in the house. We have assumed that she is female but she hasn't actually been sexed so it may turn out that if we can get her to size, and she is a "he", then he will end up on the dinner table. This may be one of those traumatic growth experiences that small children endure. Only time will tell.

I have a friend in Feilding who has recently acquired an incubator and she is keen to go halves on any chickens if I can collect a clutch of eggs. I've been told that there is every likelihood that all the eggs the chooks are laying are fertile but currently we have one hen with three chicks, another with one (and the one I have inside), one who is laying flimsy shelled eggs in the nest box in the hen house and then standing on them and smashing them *sigh*, and one hen who has the rooster watch over her while she lays her eggs in a depression in the ground next to a corrugated iron fence... which is hardly a great place to sit on them.

Today Captain got a bunch of books from the library on keeping ducks and chickens. We are learning as we go!

Good news from Meridian Energy

I submitted an enquiry to Meridian energy about how difficult it is to connect a small wind turbine to the local energy network and how much it's likely to cost.

"Thank you for contacting Meridian Energy about self generation.

Meridian does purchase electricity produced from customers with small scale self generation equipment. The price we pay for the electricity you generate is the same as the price we currently charge you for your consumption, but this is subject to change just like all our rates.

The first step is to contact your local Electricity Lines company to get the details of what standards and specifications your equipment must meet in order to be connected to the local electricity network. Once you have obtained your compliant equipment, you will need Network approval from your local Lines Company to connect it to their network. Once this is obtained and you are a Meridian customer, we can arrange the metering for you.

A new Import/Export meter is required to be installed as it is not compliant with industry regulations for a meter to spin backwards. The Import/Export meter will separately measure all electricity consumed from the network and the electricity you export from your installed generation equipment.

Right House, a subsidiary company of Meridian Energy, can help with all aspects of distributed generation including as little or as much assistance as you need with generation, insulation, property design, hot water set up, lighting and heating and much more. They can even assist with the consents process (for Wind Turbines in particular) if necessary.

If you need further assistance, please feel free to email us at service@meridianenergy.co.nz or call our Contact Centre on 0800 496 496, 7.30am to 7.30pm Monday to Friday (Excluding public Holidays)

Kind Regards
{name removed}
Energy Advisor
Meridian Energy Centre"

Getting Long-Term

So Captain hasn't had a chance to relocate his career yet, but he's still got his feelers out for opportunities. We have had a bit of time to wrap our head around some practicalities of what we are after and have a lot of options with regards finance. Most of our ideas can't be firmed-up until we have more information but we can start identifying our values and learning more about the possibilities.

At the moment I have a book out from the library on small wind turbines, and I am looking at how micro-hydro (water turbines) and PV (photo-voltaic / solar) systems could be integrated to make the most of our resources and meet our power needs.

Hopefully once we know more about the practicalities of construction, crop cultivation, animal husbandry, power generation and use, and water treatment, we will know whether or not any property we look at will be a wise move, or just a liability.

Our Journey: In the Beginning

It's Christchurch, October, 2010. We know nothing. Stephen has just turned 9 months and is starting to walk. Captain has grown weary of Christchurch, a fact that has been shaken home by the incessant earthquakes that have bothered us and jostled us since the morning of September 4th. Housing in Christchurch is un-insurable.

October 29th, we get a visit from Captain's father, with whom we haven't spoken in about 5 years. He shares opinions with Captain about the generally dismal state of the world economy and environment. They often quibble on the semantics but both agree that things look pretty bad for the future of the world as we know it... but they are both curiously excited to be living in "interesting times". John expresses interest in building an "Earthship": an environmentally sustainable home made from reclaimed tyres and natural materials.

Now we're not really hippies; scientists maybe, family minded, pragmatists at times, survivalists perhaps, a little socially isolated, and certainly people who indulge in too many video games and have a penchant for apocalyptic science fiction. As a depressive "recovering" goth I had often had fantasies of running off to the wilds and building my own house somewhere. I liked the idea of something that we could build with our own physical labour. Having always been tight with money (or at least below the poverty line for most of my adult life), the idea of building a house without spending loads of cash was also appealing.

Captain has applied for jobs in Taumarunui and now Taihape. If he doesn't get one of them we will keep looking for positions in the North Island where we can be closer to the extended family.

Now all we need to do is figure out, how, where... and ultimately, when.