What was your biggest homesteading mistake?

[Deleted]

What was your biggest homesteading mistake?

We've all made them.

Who wants to go first?

[Deleted]

Selling my place because my neighbor from the city didn't want me building a House on my property.

Rockpile

[Deleted]

Our biggest mistake was always getting the animals before we had a place ready for them. Happened more times than I care to remember. We are doing better, now, though. I want to get a few pullet chicks, but have held off till I can get the brooder house ready. I am about ready!

[spacecase0]

breeding new vegetables before saving lots of seeds from standard types that people want to buy seeds for (even if they don't grow as well)
and trusting the well to have water that I can get at (it has run dry and the power fails to often)

[Awnry Abe]

I have a general category of mistake that falls in the domain of mismanagement (or plain laziness) . Of those, the most memorable involved loss of life or permanent injury to an animal. All told, the list is long, but each year the additions become far less frequent. On one particular incident early on involving a sick calf, I delayed in taking action and lost him as a result. Now he would be dealt with quickly and that particular incident would have gone unnoticed by today's standards.

I am finding that my blunders now are coming more in the form of costly financial flubs. I have become quite good at lighting small piles of money on fire. Last winter the hydrostatic transmission on my tractor went out right in the middle of hay-feeding season. It was operator error. Cost me 8,000 'to fix.

On the positive side, I have made some classic blunders and came out smelling like a rose. I don't mean a "lesson learned that I got right the next time." I mean a bad event that changed the course of other events for good. I think the one that most typifies this type of mistake-turned-good is Peaches, our dairy cow. She is a scrawny, ugly mutt that we paid way too much for (or so we thought). Fishtail teat. Horns that point in odd directions. We had her bred wayyyy too young. Rookie mistake. We literally stood by and watched as she lost her calf in delivery. We nearly lost Peaches. She walked with a limp all summer from the delivery. Looking back on that day, I am certain that we are having the dairy success that we are because of losing that calf. We were forced to take on the twice daily job of milking and to do it well. There was no calf to lean on. Peaches turned out to be our million dollar milker. I still get nervous when she calves, but I hover now...(by the way, she is due in 10 days)

[snoozy]

Lending a pair of goats to an acquaintance to clear his property. He had said his place was all fenced and secure and had a stream running through it. One of the goats (named Lightning) got out and got into the neighbour's vegetation too often and so he tethered them to separate cables. And he would go away and leave them for days, tethered away from each other (so that they wouldn't get tangled with the other). A cruelty to herd animals! He came back one day and found Lightning dying of who knows what. Listeriosis or plain ol poisonous to goat plant. I sped down there but coudl do nothing. He died that night. I took back the other goat the next day.

Jerk! (him)
Idiot! (me)

[Jolly]

Trees.

Trees take time to grow and mature. 

One time frame is the home orchard. I needed to plan my orchard and get the trees in the ground ten years before I did. And I also needed to plan for the eventual demise of some types of orchard trees...I needed to have a couple of young peaches planted and growing, long before the older two trees died. I also needed to keep in mind what cross-pollinators are needed as time goes on. I think one needs to break it up into five year reassessments, and put down what you think you'll need in the next 5-10 years.

A second time frame is slower growing, nut producing trees. I was very late in my journey getting my pecan trees planted. One also needs to give thought to variety. Some trees will within a decade. Some won't. Pecans are a long haul project.

Shade trees are my next category. If you don't have some where you need them, for shade or windbreak, it's better to plant them when you're young, than when you're middle-aged. It takes awhile to make decent shade, especially depending on the variety of tree planted.

Lastly, take stock of your woodlot, or lack of. Carefully husbanded, a good, small woodlot will keep a homestead in firewood for perpetuity.

All of the above take long-term thinking and planning. So, learn from my mistakes, plan well and start early. You'll be glad with the results.

[Muller's Lane Farm]

Nut trees ... we've been here 13 years and just planted our first nut trees last year (almonds)

[jassytoo]

Forgetting how big trees get and planting them too close together. We've done that with bushes too and now after 40 years the place is a jungle and we have to keep taking stuff out.

[Rustaholic]

Okay, I don't admit this very often but here goes.
What I have many time called My Folly was an area out back that I needed to secure from view. 
I staked out a 70 X 70 foot area and drove ten foot pieces of 1/2" re-rod in two feet then used zip-ties and plastic ropes to put 8' X 10' tarps between the poles. They were the gray ones that hold up well outside.
Then came the wind and even though I had a rope from the top of every pole staked out to the ground both directions the wind turned those re-rod stakes into something more like pretzels.
Okay I was younger then and YES I can learn.

[LauraD]

Not beginning this entire process of finding and starting a homestead 20 years ago...

[Deleted]

Not digging all over the property finding the right place to put a garden. We have been fighting so hard to make a good garden in a bad spot and after 8 years of growing rocks we found the previous garden spot - deep deep beautiful black soil.

Also - not thinking through how we wanted to arrange things. The chickens, the goats, and the garden should have all been together in the same general vicinity to make life easier.

Hopefully we'll do OK when we start over.

[Melissa]

Wish I would have planted more fruit trees sooner, built a workshop/garage way sooner and we planted yard trees in wrong places and had to cut them out later. Still have an oak tree in a spot I hate. I tried to get Cale to cut it down this winter, but that hasn't happened. He likes the tree, but we both agree we don't necessarily like where it is, so I think I will get him convinced someday!!! lol

[ketoriverfarm]

We bought land which had been logged because my DH wanted to be on either a river or lake. However the soil is very poor. It is sand and will not hold water so growing grass is a never ending job. we are way too old to start over, so we make due with what we have.

Susan

[ohiodreamer]

#1 not starting sooner
#2 thinking we would be in this "city/starter house" for only 5 yrs then move to a bit more land......been here 17 1/2 now.

[Deleted]

I've made more mistakes in my life than we have room to list here. But I think I've learned from every one.
My most recent mistake was leaving the ducks out one night a few weeks ago. I always shut them up in their house at night but had not lost an animal on the farm in years due to good fences. So I felt safe leaving them out in the "middle" pasture with two fences and hot wires between them and the outside world. As luck would have it a tree limb fell on the hotwire  knocking it out. A small dog came through the fence and ate my best pekin layer. I am still mad at myself and her mate is still very lonesome.

[jamiecatheryn]

Ever getting into a cent of debt in the first place. It puts a lot of dreams on hold if you have to pay any off, and once you're in it it's easy to get deeper.

[richnc]

Trying to pull 80 year old locust fence posts by hand, digging and digging, driving big nails into the sides to get a good hold and then hurting my back when I could have pulled out the old ford tractor with the bucket on the front and yanking them right out with a few chains...didn't know they were four feet deep! My goodness so many others, chain saws, only got my pants luckily, anything electric, for some reason I just don't have the knack for it!!

[Deleted]

Buying a place finding the seller had taken all the Top Soil off. And buried, buildings and trash all over.

Rockpile

[Deleted]

Not buying a tractor with a FEL (front end loader).....I guess all the exercise I get from not having one is a benefit though. I did get a tiller for my tractor though. I keep 2 gardens, one is 35'x90' and the other is 25'x70', guess it takes me about 45 mins total to do my tilling vs 10 hours with a walk behind.

[woolybear]

Not buying a place that is flat. The field is flat, but where the house is isn't. So you go down a hill to get to the barn, garden, mailbox. It's all well and good when I was younger, but I've had knee problems - hurts to walk and going down a hill is a killer.

[whisperwindkat]

Not planting fruit trees as soon as we moved here.

[Homesteader]

Big mistake for us was not realizing how truly awful and invasive crab or quackgrass is.

Trouble is, if we poison it with spray, then we won't want to grow food in that area. So we are trying to control it via plastic and pulling. Very big mistake to ever let even one sprig of that stuff remain more than an hour!

[grillbilly]

Not wrapping hardware cloth around the trunks of the first orchard attempt. Cost alot of money the next spring to replace it and learned what voles do the hard way.

[patty]

I allowed two goats to be gifted to us without proper fencing. Every time they got loose that ate something we had planted. They ate the apple trees, lilac bushes and even rose bushes. They got loose in the barn and ate the seat off the kid's bicycles, ate the cardboard from a 100 lb box of nails and the list goes on. We also were over zealous in planting trees. We never dreamed we would be mowing around so many trees!

[Deleted]

I had 8 tons of chicken litter put in the garden 5yrs ago and have been fighting pigweed ever since !!!

[Deleted]

Biggest mistake? I've had so many they all vie for that title!
I've done the getting animals before set up with shelter, fencing, etc. Spent a ton of $ getting all that on other ppl's land that we rented then losing my investment when we moved.
I would have to say though that my Biggest mistake was not picking the right partner in my 1st husband. He liked the IDEA of it all but not the Reality. The man simply didn't want to work or put in the effort that it took.
My current husband is a city boy. Knows nothing about the farm but is willing to learn and do. That makes a huge difference.

[trailrider]

I've made a lot of the same mistakes. The biggest and most costly mistake was not realizing I should have put a "live PTO" attachment (still have not actually seen one) on my 1964 Massey Fergusson tractor. After sinking thousands of dollars in the thing one day a ruined the engine! I am told this live PTO would have saved me. The tractor had more new parts than old. I ended up trading the tractor for a flat bed trailer.

Other mistakes that I made and hopefully have learned from. NEVER weed eat in the dark. I almost lost a young apple tree that way. I saved it though. It might start to produce this year.

Don't raise a bottle calf by himself. Even if you don't play with him or make him a pet, he will think he is one and get difficult to handle as he grows up.

I planted my orchard of 2 dozen fruit trees without first checking with the County Extension office to see what trees will do well and produce. I got lucky a few times. But I also have lovely big apricot trees, a sweet cherry tree and two plum trees that I have NEVER gotten fruit from!

[farmer]

Biggest one was building our animal barn lean-to with too flat of a roof. It hasn't actually caused any issues, but since we live in northern New England, and the barn is on the north side of the main barn, and the upper barn's roof theoretically can shed snow down to the animal barn roof, it would have made sense to push the lower barn's roof right up to the big barn roof, essentially making it one long roofline. However, it was my former partners' and my very first building project...an 8X48' lean-to addition, I think we really did quite well. We also used only hand tools--hammer, nails, no power tools at all. It was built almost ten years ago, and is holding up well. It just makes me cringe to look at it, given what I know now...

[horseyrider]

I so completely regret not working hard to save an old building here. The previous owners called it the oil shed, and it had been taken over by coons. That made it kind of squicky to me, and I figured I'd never be able to give it a job. The roof was bad and gradually it was in such disrepair that it had to be torn down.

My regret was not having the vision at the time for what else that building could be. It was the first building on this homestead, built right after the Civil War to house the family and one large animal while the big house was being built. It was made of rough sawn planks, some a foot and a half wide, shingled with wood, with a little sleeping loft over the horse/milk cow spot. There was a wood stove spot, the stove long gone, and it had spent some time as a farmer's workshop, so there were little cubbies on the wall.

Much of the wood has been recycled, and I saved the old hand made ladder and use it for decoration in the feed room of my turkey coop. But it could have been such an awesome place for a little lady's cabin! Old quilts, a little stove for tea, a mason jar with wildflowers, shut the door and leave me alone. Perhaps even a little place for visitors in nice weather. Nothing nearly so nice could be built now.

Ahh, regrets....