A Hard Lesson

Homesteading is not always easy. It is not always fun. Sometimes we make mistakes and others suffer due to our ignorance. That is one of the reasons we started this blog: to help others learn from our mistakes...so you, your family and your animals, don't have to suffer due to ignorance.

We knew the temperatures were going to be low for several nights in a row. Normally we hay our animals twice a day; however, with the temperatures dipping into the teens and twenties for this week, we put a round bale of hay in the big pasture for all of the animals. As we have horses in the pasture, the hay quality is high. Unfortunately, I did not realize that a horse can over eat on hay.

Yep, when my son brought my horse up Tuesday night to feed, he came and got me. My son informed me that Max was not his normal self and that he had diarrhea. Sure enough, my son was correct. I made a quick call to the vet as it was almost 5:00 pm. That is when I learned that horses will eat and eat and eat hay when it is cold out. They often don't drink enough water and they get an impacted colon, which then leads to colic. NOT GOOD.

Tuesday night I gave Max a bran mash and two quarts of mineral oil, plus an injection of vitamin C. He was given Banamine, orally, also. Wednesday morning, he was still dragging his feet, but there was fresh manure in the pen. I gave him an injection of Banamine at this point and headed to town.

The vet reached me as I was almost home and told me I had to get a blanket on him. Since I did not have one, that meant another drive to town. When I left in the afternoon, Max was visibly shaking. I did not arrive back home until 8:00 pm with the new blanket. His head is low, he did not eat all of his meal and he is not drinking. I'm very discouraged. To be honest, I'm concerned I will lose him. How did we get here with a healthy four year old gelding? I let him eat freely of hay when it was cold outside. Please heed my warning: Don't free feed your horse hay, especially if he is not used to it and it is cold outside.

Meet the Townsons

If you live in a town now or grew up in a town and have always wanted to homestead, we are proof that you can! My husband grew up in Jacksonville while I grew up in a small town in south Florida. With no farming experience, after two years of marriage we moved to our homestead. We currently have bees, chickens, ducks, turkeys, guineas, diary goats, meat and dairy cows, horses and sheep...not to mention the dogs and cats. If you want to homestead, YOU CAN! We are PROOF!

What is Homesteading?

This is the first post of what will be MANY posts concerning homesteading in the 21st century. There are many different ways to homestead. Some people will homestead on hundreds of acres and others are homesteaders in apartments! Often, it is the 'heart' that makes one a homesteader. With that said, I am hoping that this site and our sister site which is currently being built, will be a valuable resource to anyone interested in homesteading. The benefit of these websites is simple: Six homesteading families are putting all of their knowledge out here to help you save time and MONEY! Yep, we are going to share our mistakes and our success stories with you. We are going to share what works and what doesn't all in an effort to reflect the genuine homesteading spirit of helping one another.

Between these six families, we have over 75 years of homesteading experience! Some of us have large acreage while others of us are still in the American Suburb homesteading in the backyard with a privacy fence. You will hear experiences from way up north, to way down south to way out west! We can teach you how to make cane syrup and maple syrup! We can teach you how to milk a goat and sheer a sheep. Want to talk bees? We have three beekeepers here! Chickens: four families have chickens for meat and eggs. Do you know what to look for when you buy a milk cow? We do and we will share! Livestock Guardian Dogs: We can cover that topic with practical experience too. We will speak from an organic and conventional farming view point and everywhere in between. Out of the six families, none of us homestead just like the other and so you can choose what works best for you.

Remember, there is not a wrong way to homestead...just what works best for you!