BACK PAGE BACKYARD A Good Homestead

Matt and Heather Goodwin, high school sweethearts, have been gardening their whole lives and slowly working toward creating a family homestead. They moved to Keene in 1999, on a 1/5-acre lot and spent their years creating an impressive veggie garden. After 21 years in Keene and raising four children, they decided to move to a bigger property in Surry. They purchased a single-story "L" shaped ranch on eight acres of land. They have a bigger garden now and started a family farm with a few products they can sell, and they can line their freezers to keep them going throughout the winter months. We talked to Matt about the family's growing homestead — which now includes chickens, goats, rabbits, and more — which they use to feed the family and provide extra income. Tell me about the garden on your new property. We have the pretty traditional "around here" garden, with everything from zucchini, cucumbers, summer squash, beans, peas, garlic, strawberries, asparagus and we just started growing more blueberries, too. So, that's been pretty exciting. We have a good deal of wild blueberries but we also planted a few high-bush varieties as well. We grow so much zucchini that we shred it into one cup size and bag and freeze it to make zucchini bread throughout the winter. We also made 11 jars of pickles. Do you raise any animals? Before we moved (to the homestead), we got a few chickens that were lightly used by a neighbor who was moving out of state in 2019. It got us into not just animals for pets but what I would consider livestock or farm animals. From the chickens we decided to do, we fell in love with the fresh eggs. We decided to hatch out some eggs that we got from somebody here in town. I think we have about 35 chickens, and they are divided into two separate flocks. We also have two roosters. They are out in an electric fence area to protect them from all the creatures that enjoy chickens as much as we do. The kids got to experience eggs hatching. That was pretty fun. We have eggs to eat and sell those to friends and neighbors. There are definitely more eggs than we can consume. &emsp;Another thing we have been doing through McMurray Hatchery for two or three years in a row is broilers, and I learned how to butcher chickens. We have them in a similar type of enclosure as the other chickens. We move those birds around the property two times a day to get fresh grass. In the end, we get 26 meat birds that line our freezers. Every other Sunday, we can have a whole bird right out of the oven. We know how they are treated and there's no antibiotics. We have a real connection with food. &emsp;We also fell in love with some goats — little Nigerian dwarf goats. My wife saw a picture of them and just couldn't say no. We kidded them out twice to primarily produce milk, we sold some of the kids. We drink the milk and use it in our baking and those kinds of things. &emsp;At the end of last year, another farmer up north had to liquidate their farm inventory, and they had angora rabbits. I reached out to the farmer and got all seven of his angora rabbits: two males and five females. One of them is the mother of the other six, and she is tattooed, registered, and absolutely beautiful. We have to groom and shear them, so we have been collecting their fur to make into yarn. Heather has a spinner and has been dabbling in spinning. Any other plans for the homestead? We ordered Christmas trees through the State of New Hampshire. They have a catalog with a Christmas tree package each year that we order from. I had done lots of research — how far apart to space them, how long to grow them. Since I have a lot of patience, we are hoping to sell, but we have to wait for them to grow up. With the first batch we grew, we planted 100 trees and have about 60 trees left — we have harsh winters here. Seems like it might be a pretty good return on investment. &emsp;The other things are mostly plant-related; we have done hazelnut trees and willow trees, as well. The willow trees are grown mostly to create coppice (tree hay). Young trees make really good hay for animals like goats, who are browsers, not grazers. Goats really aren't fans of grass. We cut it and store it for winter. We are also doing basket weaving from the cuttings. &emsp;And we bought sugar maple trees and plan to do sugaring, but that takes a great deal of time to wait for them to grow for us to tap.