And the wait continues.

We were supposed to have our building permits by now. What’s the hold up? Money. Always money. We need $300 to give them. We have about $80. I am hoping that Cs next paycheck will let us do it. I really don’t want to put it off yet another month. In the meantime (aside from the little fundraising we are doing: I have a hard time asking people to help us) we are Doing a lot of reading. We checked out a bunch of books from the library about bees, homesteading, pasture raising animals, etc. this is both good and bad. It’s good because we can spend this downtime planning our farm. It’s bad because now we have a list of MORE stuff we need to spend money on.

I’ve currently been reading “the sheer ecstasy of being a lunatic farmer”. By Joel salatin. It’s giving me a lot of ideas. The big one is that our water for our animals will come from a pond we will be putting in at the top of the hill. Gravity will be used to bring water to where the paddocks will be. We are going to section off a 100×150 plot of land that we will section off into 24 25×25 sections (what we are calling paddocks). Everyday the animals will be moved to the next paddock over (it will be made in such a way that the last paddock is connected to the first). The cows will be first, then two paddocks down will be goats, then another 2 paddocks down will be chickens. That way the soil has 2 days in between each animal to heal, and 2 weeks to completely heal after the chickens pass through before the cows are back. When the chickens pass through the manure from the cows and goats will be covered in bugs for the chickens to eat. We are a little nervous that it’s not enough time in between each animals group, but we can try it out for a little while and if it doesn’t work we can modify it. If we have enough space we may add another row of 6 making it 6×5 paddocks instead of 6×4. We will see. We also may add pigs into the mix too. I really don’t want to damage the land, I want the land to flourish, and grow soil.