Our lots are sixty feet wide and the coop sits closer to the neighbor’s patio than to my own back door. Here is the conversation I had before building, and the three complaints people really have.
Nobody counts failure when they calculate whether making something at home is worth it. After a few years of throwing things out, I have opinions about which failures to rescue, which to bin, and what they cost.
My husband did not want the yard turned into a project, and he said so in the driveway on a Sunday in May. We are five years past that argument now and I still think he was partly right.
I emptied the bottom cupboard in June and sorted every piece of preserving equipment into keep, donate and what was I thinking. Here is what earned its space, what I bought far too early, and where cheap is a bad idea.
The hardest stretches in this yard are not deep summer or deep winter. They are the seams between seasons, when one thing has not finished and the next thing will not wait. Here is how I stopped losing plants in the gap.
I finally took a tape measure to our lot one evening and found roughly a quarter of the growing space I had been picturing. It has since fed us more than I expected, mostly because I stopped laying things out in rows.
I tracked my minutes for six weeks to find out which homemade projects were paying me a decent wage and which were quietly costing me. Most of my list did not survive the arithmetic.
Someone handed me a jar of home canned green beans at a plant swap and I could not answer one simple question about it. That jar sent me to the official guidance, and changed which things I make.
The chicks cost less than a tank of gas. The housing is where the money went, and I paid for it twice because I bought a kit that looked like a coop and was really a lawn ornament.
A year in, I dragged the seed shelf out of the basement and admitted I was not going to use it again. These are the projects I dropped, why I dropped them, and which ones I still feel a little sheepish about.