Urban homesteading projects

February 23, 2017 Chandra Comments 0 Comment

What can you get for 3 hours and $274 at Menards? About half the things you need for your new urban homesteading projects!

Supplies for urban homesteading — Seeds and a small seed starter, some fun planters for the kids, hardware for the chicken coop.

Chicken coop locks — Lots of locks to keep the chickens safe, a new staple gun, screws, and paint samples!

Not shown here are the big purchases that stayed in the garage – some lumber, roofing shingles, and four rolls (!) of hardware cloth. We have not yet purchased the majority of the lumber needed for the coop; that will definitely be another several hundred dollars and at least one more big trip.

A Quick Note on Hardware Cloth

For newbies like me, hardware cloth is nothing like it sounds. It’s a kind of wire fencing with small, strong square holes in it. Despite the name, ‘chicken wire’ is not safe for your chickens! Larger animals can tear it down easily, and smaller animals can chew or squeeze right through it. 1/4″ or 1/2″ hardware cloth is essential for your run and windows. (The chicken run is the area that allows them to be out of the coop, on the ground. Sometimes this is a separate moveable structure, often called a ‘chicken tractor’, but more often it is referring to the area attached to your actual coop.)

1/4" hardware cloth — This is 1/4′ hardware cloth

Urban Homesteading Projects

So let’s talk about what I’m doing with all of this! I have about half a dozen “urban homestead” projects that I would like to complete this year, and hopefully help you get started on as well. Maybe with the exception of the chicken coop, these are all fairly easy projects for beginners, and well-suited for people without acres of land available to them. I highly recommend the book The Weekend Homesteader: A Twelve-Month Guide to Self-Sufficiency for anyone looking to get started in their backyard. It’s a great all-in-one reference for many of these projects, breaking them down into simple steps so you can complete one at a time. My project goals include:

– Raising chicks (we plan to get them mid-April)

– Building a chicken coop and run

– Building & starting a new raised garden bed to double my garden space

– Starting my own seeds indoors

– Setting up a compost bin

– Building rain barrel

– Growing and hopefully canning some home-grown vegetables

We are also planning to re-do our front sidewalk, which is badly cracked thanks to tree roots growing underneath. My husband will be spearheading this one though, and because it’s not really a homesteading project, I’m leaving it off the official list.

There you have it, our outdoor goals for this year. The biggest of these will obviously be the chicken coop, which will need to be done by May for our little chickies to move in. First on the list, however, is the raised garden bed. Which means that soon I will need to begin the adventure of seed starting indoors!

What about you? What do you hope to work on or learn this year?