Tag: homestead

Homestead Harmony was born out of a need to make sure the animals on our family’s homestead were taken care of.

One summer, weekend morning, the kids were lazily getting out of bed, just like their parents. Mid-morning, someone realized that the dogs had been kenneled for 12 hours. Usually, the dogs are kenneled around 9:30pm for the evening and then let out in the morning around 7:30am. Our dogs are used to this timeline and are comforted knowing they will be inside for the night hours.

This particular morning, however, the dogs did not get let out until 2 hours later than their normal time. We all felt a little panicked and let them out and got them fed. So no real harm was done. BUT, the reality is that we were lucky this time. What would prevent this from happening next weekend?

Thus we realized a tool was needed in our family. We were already using a whiteboard to track a few specific tasks that we take turns completing. For instance, a few of the kids take turns vacuuming and wiping off the table after meals and the whiteboard is in the dining room. But feeding the dogs and letting them out required a different level of tracking for a few reasons…

• Dogs should only be fed 1x in the morning (in other words, once it is done, it is done)
• If it doesn’t happen by a certain time, other folks need to know so they can take action
• The dogs are in a remote part of the house and not near the whiteboard at all

At this point, since we have experience integrating web services that do things like push notifications, mobile apps, SMS text messages, and web portals – we decided to see if we could build something that works for us. You know, the “mad scientist” kind of thing where we try to take our own concoction.

At the same time as our prototype started working, we also started asking other homesteading families what they use. They shared some strategies and we started trying to figure out how their methods could work for us and what that would mean.

Also during that time, we looked at commercial products for To Do list management. And we also started considering if we could do it all through shared calendars. We gave them all a “scout’s bite” (that is, we tried them earnestly) but the combination of potential reporting/summarizing, as well as fail-safe alerting showed us that we needed something special. Something specific.

The recipe of ingredients (web services) that we needed in order to truly ensure our chores and tasks were being handled was simply too specific to be handled by existing tools.

So here we are. We continue to use our system and expand its functionality. And this website was born out of the desire to share it with the public so that it can help other homesteaders achieve the harmony they need in making sure livestock, gardens, and all the assets and resources of the homestead are properly managed.