We are thrilled with how the new labels turned out for the automatic chicken waterer.
Anna did a great job on the drawing.
It's good to know someone who knows someone in the label business. Thanks, Jayne.

The regular reader may have noticed several changes to our site over the last few weeks.  First, my sweet brother helped me turn our archives into a much more usable format.  You can now browse through past entries by year and month.  So, if you get busy and miss a week of our blog, it's easy to check back in and catch up in one gulp.  Alternatively, why not read back over last year's posts to see how much our farm has changed in the last twelve months?

Meanwhile, I put some extra ads at the top of the page.  I appreciate no one whining and complaining --- I hope the ads don't impinge too much on your experience.  Including some advertising on the blog helps fund our adventure so that we can put in lots of time experimenting and relaying our experiences to you rather than getting a real job.   If you haven't lately, please go window shopping on some of our advertising sponsors' sites.  (Alternatively, if you're morally opposed to advertising, feel free to subscribe to our RSS feed and read our posts in your own, ad-free reader.)

Last stop on Walden Effect --- I've revamped our tag system.  Now you can read all of our posts about permaculture in one place.  Ditto for posts about our golf cart.

Finally, I've started blogging part-time over on our microbusiness ebook site.  If you're interested in learning tidbits about starting a home-based business to fund your own homestead adventure, I hope you'll subscribe to our home-based business blog.  I'll probably be posting over there two or three times a week.

Okay, now I'll return you to your regularly scheduled discussion of leaves, leaves, leaves!

One of the best things about our farm is our "moat" --- the large creek that you have to cross to get to where we park our cars.  After a heavy rain like the one on Wednesday, the creek floods and we're cut off from the outside world.  Priorities shift, and I manage to work on projects that have sat on the back burner nearly finished for far too long.

Since I quit my job a year ago, Mark and I have been feeling our way toward an independent existence.  It was scary at first, hoping we'd manage to pay the bills every month, but we slowly figured out how to sell Mark's chicken waterer invention over the internet and the money started pouring in.  Suddenly, we had the time we craved to focus on the garden and the infrastructure of our homestead.

Before long, we started getting emails from customers who said they wished they were able to quit their jobs and start a microbusiness the way we have.  "I want to go back to the land," one wrote, "but I know I'm not going to be able to support my family selling produce at the farmer's market."  It's true --- small farm-based businesses tend to pay minimum wage or less, which leaves the homesteader scant time to do the real work of running the farm.

"Why don't we write an e-book showing people how to replicate our success?" Mark asked.  He always has the good ideas.  Several months later, our ebook is finally polished and ready to meet the world.  We want it to be accessible to everyone, not just the rich or the desperate, so we're selling it for $4 (although I reserve the right to raise the price in a few weeks if I decide to start advertising.)  You can read the first chapter for free on our microbusiness ebook site and decide if you'd like to forego your Big Mac today and read a good book instead.

Our homemade chicken waterer photo contest ended last week, and we were thrilled by the ingenuity of the entries.  Alexandra Kent submitted our favorite entry --- a bucket waterer mounted on a plant hanger.  Why didn't we think of that?


The photo to the right by Vance Foster was a  close runnerup.  I like the simplicity of the drinking water bottle reservoirs, and I have to admit that the pullets made me laugh.

Many thanks to everyone who took the time to capture their chickens in action.  Stay tuned for another photo contest next year!

Perhaps our largest learning experience this year has been our microbusiness.  At this time last year, I was just starting to burn out on my job, but I was terrified to quit.  Everyone was talking about the economy tanking and I knew that jobs in our area were scarce.

But I did it anyway, and together Mark and I started marketing his automatic chicken waterer.  It took a few months for us to get our feet under us, but before long we were making more money and working fewer hours.  We had shed 85% of the stress associated with my old job, and we both felt immensely empowered by the experience.  Why did we ever want to work for someone else?

We have a lot of projects in the hopper for the next year, of course.  As I mentioned a couple of days ago, we want to share all of our deer deterrent secrets with the world --- we figure we owe the community something totally free.  Next on the agenda is finishing up the ebook we've been drafting to help other folks mimic our microbusiness success.

We don't plan to expand our gardening perimeter over the next year, just to keep bringing it closer to a state of equilibrium.  I want to keep exploring permaculture, and Mark has several new inventions on the drawing board (automatic bug feeder for your chickens, anyone?)

Most all, though, we want to keep feeling the power of the Walden Effect.  I hope you can all catch a whiff of the fragrance through your monitors.  Just as this year was better than last year, I suspect next year will be the best one yet!

Every week, Mark and I mail off dozens of chicken waterers.  They seem to disappear into the void, since we seldom hear back from any of our customers.  We especially miss not getting to see how our waterers fit into other folks' lives.

In hopes of dredging some photos out of that void, we're holding a photo contest over on our automatic chicken waterer site.  If you bought one of our waterers, or just made our own waterer, we hope you'll wander over there and email us your photos.  To sweeten the pot, we're giving away three ready to go waterers to one grand prize winner.  Good luck!

A day spent fabricating, packing, and driving to the post office is a good day indeed.

I keep expecting the excitement of going to the post office on shipping days to wear off, but it just seems to get stronger as I settle in on the fact that a micro business lifestyle is a perfect fit for me and our way of life here on the farm.

The most unexpected perk I've run into with our chicken waterer microbusiness is the strangers I meet who turn out to be both kind and fun.  Author and blogger Julie A. Carda posted a delightful story of her chickens' introduction to the Avian Aqua Miser yesterday, making me grin from ear to ear.

The story was just the kind of flight of fancy I adore reading, so I wasn't surprised to find that Julie has written two books full of intrigue, romance, espionage, and the paranormal.  You can buy the first one either as an ebook or a paperback.  Or just download the second book for free.  (Once you decide you love it, you can head back to her site and leave a donation.)

Thanks for the story, Julie!

Clean water is essential for chicken health, but it's easy to overlook for the backyard hobbyist.  A scientific paper in the Proceedings of the Second Mid-Atlantic Nutrition Conference notes that chickens who don't drink enough water get sick more easily and grow more slowly as chicks.  I can't find any hard data, but it just makes sense that hens would also lay fewer eggs if they had less to drink.

But how hard is it to keep plentiful water in your chicken coop?  Not so hard...until you realize that chickens just won't drink if the water is dirty.  With traditional waterers, the water can get dirty half an hour after you put it out in their coop, or can spill dry in a tractor in seconds.  As we learned during our first summer of chicken-keeping, the result can be disaster --- two of our hens died of heat exhaustion due to a spilled waterer on a hot summer day.

Our favorite solution is Mark's chicken waterer invention, the Avian Aqua Miser.  I feel a bit selfish pointing you all to our store, but the truth is that I adore our automatic chicken waterers --- they let us go out of town for four days in the midst of summer without worrying about our birds!  If you don't feel comfortable forking out $15 for a DIY kit, you should at least keep a careful eye on your chickens' waterers during the summer months.  Before the Avian Aqua Miser, Mark often gave our girls fresh water multiple times a day.  And if you really want to pamper them, throw some ice cubes into the waterer --- those chickens will drink as if they're in heaven!

Tuesday afternoon, I played hooky and went to the Scott County Lavender Farm with my mom and some friends.  The farm seems like a great ecotourism business on the surface --- attract folks to the beauty and scent of lavender, then sell them all kinds of related products.  Unfortunately, the farm was closed and going to weeds.

Our visit just confirmed a feeling I've had for quite a while --- the best homestead businesses aren't physically farm-related.  We've given various options a shot, from a little CSA to selling native wildflowers.  But when I do the math, I always discover that on a small, homestead microbusiness scale, these ventures barely pay minimum wage.

Even before our current recession, people in our area complained about the lack of good jobs, a constant problem in rural areas.  But I feel strongly that in our current world, anyone with imagination and gumption can make a living through learning a useful skill and taking advantage of the internet.  Then you can save your farming for yourself, putting all of that love and time into your vegetables so that it flows right back into yourself.

Several people have asked for advice on starting a homestead microbusiness, and I've been starting to compile a lot of pointers about what we've learned with Mark's chicken waterer invention.  Assuming I don't play hooky too many more times, I hope to have an ebook out for folks to read in a couple of months.  Stay tuned!

This loaded golf cart picture was taken yesterday and represents a full day's work of building, packing, and printing for our automatic chicken waterer microbusiness.

Our local Post Office deserves a big pat on the back for making the shipping side of our business fun and easy.

Our micro business is off to a good start thanks to Anna's experiments with internet marketing.

If you're looking for some good free advice in this department I recommend checking out the micro-niche maverick website.

It just got started in March of this year, but what's there is some valuable and up to date gems on this ever changing field.

Dawn Rivers Baker has an excellent blog on microbusinesses that pointed me towards a post on bootstrapping that I thought would be worth sharing.

Tim Berry sat down with his wife recently and came up with 10 lessons they've learned over the last 22 years of running their business.

At the top of the list was learning from your mistakes. It got me to thinking how much we learned a couple of years ago from a failed attempt to video tape and sell footage of local parades. We lost money on the deal, and spent a lot of time producing each product, but those lessons gave us some confidence and we were able to translate what we learned about marketing to our next business idea. The contacts we made along the way also helped to introduce us to the area and the people.

Looking back now I can clearly see how those early failures were necessary steps in the quest for a microbusiness that fits our lifestyle.

The June/July issue of Backyard Poultry hit the streets on Saturday and I couldn't be happier with how Anna's full page article on page 36 came out.

We've been getting some good feedback on how much happier chicken chores can be with this new concept in backyard poultry watering.

It's exciting to see an idea go from the drawing board to reality in the span of a few months. I was thinking today that our operation is a level below most small business set-ups, which inspired me to call it a micro-business. The name has been around for a while, and Lloyd Lemons is one of the top sources for all things related to these smallest of businesses.