It’s amazing what one month can grow! Our garden is beginning to produce our dinners and all the flowers are blooming like crazy. You’ll notice our chicken expenses are up this month. Mama Elsie now has 7 cute little baby chicks, so the extra cost of more pine shavings and a 50-lb bag of grower feed add up. Find the full June 2021 on the homestead financial breakdown below.
Chickens
Our ladies this past month have thrown us for a loop! While we’ve been getting a steady 4 to 5 eggs–per-day…we have to hunt and dig for them! Suddenly hiding their eggs is all the rage. I blame Betty Lou. Miss Betty Lou disappeared for a week and we assumed a hawk or coon had snatched her. But it turns out she was sitting on 17 (yes 17!) eggs underneath the chicken coop. Now EVERYONE wants to lay under the coop. So we’re on our bellies with a rake trying to collect the eggs these days. We’ve been trying to make the nesting boxes inside the coop attractive with more hay and covering up their nests under the coop…we’ll have to wait and see if it works…
Farm fresh eggs around here go from $3-7 per dozen depending on raising practices. We’re fairly middle of the road, so we price ours right in the middle.
Egg Totals
- Brown Eggs: 45
- Green Eggs: 37
- Blue Eggs: 25
- Total Eggs: 107
- Total value: $44.50
- ($5/dozen)
Chicken Expenses
- Bedding: $10
- Feed: $54
- Total: $64
Net: $-19.50
Homestead Kitchen
We’ve reached the point in the growing season where we are eating fresh veggies straight from the garden in addition to finishing off frozen and canned items from last year. We’ve been loving the cucumbers, greens, and onions and it won’t be long before the first tomatoes ripen on the vine. Here’s what we ate from our homestead this past month.
Total grocery savings: $84.18
Flowers
Well, this month certainly proved that growing your own bouquets is one of the most frugal things you can do on a homestead! Farmer Nathan took a look at bouquet prices at the local farmer’s market and we had some sticker shock. We also took a mini-series course from Floret Flower Farm and learned how simple making those bouquets could be. So we’ve been enjoying our amatuer floral arrangements on our table all month long.
While I enjoy bouquets of flowers around the house, I don’t love spending money on something that is going to die and go into the compost pile in a week. Growing your own flowers is quite cheap (especially from seed!), so we are hoping to grow plenty of flowers to fill vases from spring to fall this year. Flowers around here run about a dollar per stem, so that’s how I’m calculating the cost savings for this category. The combo market bouquets locally run $10-15 dollars.
- Flowers by the stem: 27 stems = $27
- Market bouquets: 4 x $15 = $60
- Mini bouquet for mom: $5
Total flower savings: $92
Selling Extra
We often over grow more than we could possibly eat, so we often sell our extra produce (or plant starts) through Growing Green Family Farms consignment-style. Selling some of our excess brings a little extra $ into the household budget to restock the pantry with items we can’t or don’t grow ourselves (like chocolate, coffee, spices, etc.) and to pay for our seeds and seed starting soil. Another way we fund our homesteading lifestyle sustainably.
Total extra transplants and herbs – $96
Wrap up
Hope you enjoyed a look at June 2021 on the homestead to give you some inspiration to grow your own food, flowers, and share the bounty with your neighbors.
- Chicken Net: $ -19.50
- Grocery Savings: $84.18
- Flower Savings: $92
- Selling Extra: $96
June Totals: $252.68