Homesteading Sustainable Living on Dignata Ranch
Our goal as a family on Dignata Ranch is to live sustainably off the land, not only for health and financial benefit to our family, but in order to be able to reproduce these methods in developing countries to feed orphans and the needy.
Fresh batch of fodder for the animals
Paxton feeding our spring calf
Foraging
The spring, summer, and fall bring foraging opportunities for us too! We pick morel mushrooms in the wild each spring and dry them to have them year round. In the summer we can find wild berries like thimbleberries, blackberries, raspberries, and rosehips and asparagus. In the fall we find wild apples galore and make cider and can what we don’t eat.
Homesteading & Sustainability is a Doherty family pursuit and pillar
James Doherty brings life everywhere he goes. Whether that’s starting a Freedom Business abroad or feeding our family from the land... he just makes things grow and give life!
At Dignata Ranch we have Greta our milk cow and a couple of steer we raise for meat each year. Greta is a Brown Swiss and gives us 4-8 gallons of milk a day when fresh! We’ve learned to make yogurt by the gallon each week, and all things dairy (sour cream, butter, ice cream, cheese). This also allows me to ferment foods naturally with whey, which gives us loads of healthy probiotics!
Our 10-15 chickens produce loads of eggs for us everyday, and the kids love collecting them as part of their daily chores!
We usually have plenty of beef from our 1-2 steer we raise each year, plenty of dairy from Greta, fresh eggs from our chickens, and an garden full of veggies we plant each spring!
We forage for morels every spring and dry them to keep them for all year
We are working on putting up an AQUAPONICS system soon!!! More to come about that in the near future!
The Fodder System
Up north we get a lot of snow and long months of cold, and naturally the animals still need to eat! We give them hay like most people do, but we’ve started a NEW system of growing fodder from barley seed that’s amazing!
It grows in only six days, and provides far more nutrition than even alfalfa hay or just the grain itself. It’s sprouted grain and then a few inches of grass. We still give them some hay, but the animals are so excited to see fresh grass in the middle of the winter!
