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Staying Organized on the Homestead

With a busy household and homestead, it’s imperative that we stay organized. In this blog post and Pantry Chat podcast, we’re sharing some of our best tools and tips for staying organized on the homestead.

A dad and two sons working in the garden spreading compost onto long garden beds.

Management and organization are consistently areas of focus for our family. With eleven children, interns and a bustling homestead, we need organization. Without it, life would be chaotic.

We’ve shared before our household management series where we discussed my secret to running a productive household, our morning routines (which include morning chores for our children and teaching them how to have a productive morning), our daily transitions to stay on track, assigning chore jurisdictions for each member of the household, evening chores for our children, weekly chores for the family and the importance of daily routines for our children.

As each year comes and goes, we like to reassess the previous year and how our systems work. What we’ve noticed is that although the primary systems stay the same, they always need some minor adjustments as the dynamics in our home change from year to year.

In this podcast, we share the tools we use to stay organized on the homestead in the hope that you will find some inspiration for yourself.

If you’d like more assistance in organizing your home, check out Carolyn’s Homestead Management Class.

Tools for Staying Organized

One thing we’ve come to realize about organization is that different systems or methods work for different people and how their brains work. Here are a few tools we use to stay organized around the homestead.

A man standing in a barn pointing to a white board.

Whiteboards & Blackboards

Josh loves having a visual where everyone can see, so he uses whiteboards. He has one in the barn and one in the garden shed. The barn information gets changed twice a year because the needs or projects vary during the different seasons.

You can check out this post on our barn management systems, where Josh goes into deeper detail about how he uses the whiteboard on a daily basis.

The garden whiteboard is only used during the growing season, but it’s a fantastic method for record keeping and can be expanded on year over year.

I (Carolyn) love having lists on display where everyone can see them. I often utilize blackboards in the house or printed-out lists that we can mark off each task.

Two kune kune piglets suckling their mom.

Camera/Pictures

Utilizing our digital tools (or, as Josh calls them, DMTs: Digital Management Tools) is extremely helpful in all areas of the homestead.

  • Josh takes photos of the whiteboards from the previous season to see what changes need to be made moving forward.
  • He takes photos of the new animals birthed on the homestead, which keeps a digital record of birth dates.
  • He takes progress photos of the crops growing in the main garden to keep digital notes of planting and harvesting dates. All this data can be used to better plan the next year’s garden.
  • I’ve started doing this in the cottage garden as well!
A woman holding up a small leather notebook.

Notepad & Pencil

There’s not much that beats a good ol’ notepad and pencil when it comes to planning your garden. Though we’re slowly switching to utilizing a garden planning software called Seedtime, we know we can always rely on a notepad and pencil.

We also keep notebooks for animal processing to keep records of our animal harvests and the dates of when we ran out of each item to know if our needs are being met or we need to adjust how many animals we raise each year for meat.

3-Ring Binder

I have multiple three-ring binders that house our standard homestead procedures. These are necessary because we often have interns learning the ropes, so to have a notebook with the systems all written out is extremely helpful.

These procedures include our weekly schedules, daily chores, and our family’s favorite recipes.

A calendar with a pile of dirt and a plant in it.

Calendar

We love using a digital family calendar that can sync with our older teen children to know where everyone is going daily.

We also like to keep a printed calendar where the rest of the family (for those who don’t yet have a digital device) can see it. This is very helpful when there’s something out of the ordinary, like a dentist appointment, a mama and papa date night, etc.

When it’s on a calendar, we don’t forget about it, and we plan the day around it.

Seedtime Logo

Digital Apps

As mentioned above, we’ve been moving toward using the Seedtime app to keep all our seed starting, transplanting and harvesting dates organized. This has helped us transfer much of what was on an old calendar into something that anyone can access at any time from their phone.

The Seedtime app does so much more, from planning out the layout of your garden to crop rotation year after year. Though we’re not utilizing all of these assets, we’ve definitely found value in the inexpensive (or free version) of the Seedtime app.

A compost thermometer reading about 120 degrees F.

Be Present

One of the lesser-known tools for staying organized is being present. Being present is one of the most significant assets to maintaining an organized lifestyle.

For example, if someone is walking from the barn to the house and passing the compost pile, they would think to take a look at the temperature as they walk by. If it’s time to turn it, that person would either do it right then or add it to a to-do list for someone to take care of in the next day or two.

If that person wasn’t present at that moment and just going from point A to point B, they would have missed the opportunity to check on something, causing someone else to have to do it later on at a more inconvenient time.

A man standing in a field with bundles of portable net fencing.

Project Planning

At the beginning of each year (except for this year, which is our seventh year on our property, and we’re taking a year of rest on the homestead), we each come up with a list of projects we want to accomplish. Then, we sit down together and prioritize those projects and get them on the calendar for the year.

Once they’re on the calendar, we can investigate each project in more detail to determine its duration and mark out workdays accordingly.

Creating systems doesn’t have to be perfect. Ours are by no means perfect, which is why they’re adjusted every year as our family dynamic and our homestead change.

We hope you found some of this information helpful, and we hope nothing but the best for your upcoming homestead year. Check out the blog posts below for more organization tips you may enjoy.

A woman standing in front of a chalk board holding a chicken.



A man and wife smiling.

Welcome to Homesteading Family!

Josh and Carolyn bring you practical knowledge on how to Grow, Cook, Preserve and Thrive on your homestead, whether you are in a city apartment or on 40 acres in the country. If you want to increase your self-sufficiency and health be sure to subscribe for helpful videos on gardening, preserving, herbal medicine, traditional cooking and more.

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