2025 Homestead Goals
Each year we write a list of homestead goals to help guide us in our projects for the next year and keep us accountable to achieve our homesteading dreams for the year. I always post the list of homesteading goals in a visible location in our house where I will see it regularly to check in on our progress- or lack there of!
I’ve also used an organizing book like one of these homesteading planners to organize my goals and action steps on a weekly and monthly basis.
I’ve been sharing our annual homestead goals since I started this website in 2013 so that’s over a decade of homestead goals! Even on years where I didn’t have the time to publish our list of homestead goals on Montana Homesteader, we still had our list to guide us in our projects.
Setting goals isn’t motivating for everyone but I personally love them. Goals help me to visualize my hopes and dreams for the year ahead and craft actionable steps or “objectives” to achieve those goals.
And yes if you’re wondering, I’m one of those people who also loves to write “to-do” lists to keep track of everything I need to accomplish. I just love the satisfaction of checking something off my list!
Our homesteading goals for the new year:
1. Expand our raised bed gardens to increase growing space
Now that my children are getting older, they are cultivating their growing skills with their very own garden space. They are no longer content with caring for the family garden beds, they want their very own garden space to care for.
It’s been a beautiful homeschool project each year watching them plan out what they want to grow, design their gardens, care for the plants and share in the joy of their own garden harvests. We’ll be following the steps we outlined in how to create a raised bed vegetable garden to add additional raised beds to our garden area.
2. Increase our perennial fruit plants
One of the reasons we grow our own food is not only so we have fresh homegrown fruit to feed our family during gardening season, but also so we can preserve the fruit to eat year round. We currently grow blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and haskaps (honeyberries).
Last year we bought one blackberry plant and my eight year old bought a grape vine to try his hand at growing grapes. While one plant of each is a start, we want to increase the number of plants so we are growing enough to produce an abundance of fruit to feed our family.
3. Plant replacement fruit trees
Two years ago we took a chance and planted some cold-hardy varieties of peach and pear trees in our small orchard. We had been consistently having more mild winters where temperatures rarely dipped below 15 degrees F.
Well luck would have it that after we invested in these fruit trees on the fringe of our growing zone, the following winter was a doozy. Temperatures dipped as low as -30 F for over a week. I hadn’t experienced temperatures this cold in twenty years!
Of course this killed our newly planted peach and pear trees. Even though they were “cold hardy” they were still not hardy enough to withstand -30 F. I had planned to replace these fruit trees last year but other projects took priority so it didn’t happen.
This year instead of picking fruit trees on the fringe of our growing zone, we are planning to invest in ones that are rated hardy enough to withstand the brutal cold Montana winters. Once we plant our new fruit trees, all our fruit trees need fresh mulch spread around them to help hold in moisture in our hot summers.
4. Expand our beehives
The brutal -30 F cold last winter not only killed our peach and pear trees, it also killed our honey bee colonies. In the years prior, I had been celebrating the success of being able to overwinter at least one of our bee hives.
But last year it was a crushing blow to realize that the arctic cold was too much for them and they all died. We bought two new honey bee nucs last spring and only time will tell if they make it all the way through our long, cold Montana winter this year.
My children always come out to the beehives with me and are growing their skills as beekeepers so it’s important to me to continue cultivating these skills in them. We are planning to add two more nucs this spring and hope for the best! If you’re new to beekeeping and want to give it a try this year, check out our Beginner’s Guide to Beekeeping.
5. Raise meat chickens
We have raised our own meat chickens several times in the past but last year did not tackle this project on the homestead. We had an unusually large number of broody hens last year (eight total!!) which produced quite a few new birds on our homestead.
We already had our breeding roosters for each flock that created a rainbow of eggs so we didn’t need to keep all the extra roosters raised by our broody hens. We considered rehoming some of our young cockrels, but so many people in our community were also trying to rehome extra roosters it was difficult to even give them away.
We decided that we would harvest these extra roosters to feed our family since we knew they were raised on a high quality diet of free ranging for bugs and a non GMO feed. I do prefer the meat quality of the Cornish Cross birds we raise for meat chickens so plan to raise a batch again next summer.
6. Build a new chicken tractor
In the past when we raised meat chickens, I used this small covered wire dog kennel as their chicken tractor that I moved to fresh ground each day. It worked great to keep them safe from predators and was manageable enough in size for me to move myself.
Unfortunately this kennel was crushed by an uprooted aspen tree in a bizarre windstorm that swept through our homestead in the fall. So now I have to get creative and build a new chicken tractor for the homestead!
7. Buy a new greenhouse
Last year we had planned to buy a new greenhouse like the one I wrote about at our old homestead. We had some other expensive projects take priority on the homestead last year so did not have the funds to buy a greenhouse.
My children are eager to start all their own seedlings this year and hope to sell seedlings to earn some extra spending money. We have our greenhouse location picked out so once our winter weather subsides we hope to get our new greenhouse set up in time for starting seedlings in early spring.
8. Fence the pasture
This project has been on the goal list for several years and seems to always end up low on the priority list. We have a bunch of metal corral fence panels that I can move around the pasture for rotational grazing.
This works, but it is also really time and labor intensive. Each panel weights about 50lbs which is a bit too heavy for my children to easily move so the bulk of the work falls to me. I don’t mind moving a ton of heavy fence panels every once in a while, but having to move all of them every week in the heat of the summer gets old really fast!
My local mentor for healthy pasture management explained to me how to use this electric fence tape to easily section off parts of the pasture to ensure rotational grazing without the burden of moving all the heavy corral panels every week. My hope is to finally install a perimeter fence around our pasture so I can then use the fence tape to section off areas for rotational grazing.
9. Expand our farmstead sales
Over the years, my kids have embarked on homestead projects to earn extra money like selling eggs, hatching chicks in our incubators to sell, selling honey from our beehives and a couple times a year I sell vermicomposting worms from my big worm bins. Our goal this year is to increase our farmstead income by offering more homegrown/homemade items for sale locally and on our family’s Etsy shop.
10. Create an equine therapy work space
What many people don’t know about this homesteading mama is that I am also a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and have a part-time mental health therapy private practice.
I’ve always been interested in alternative forms of mental health therapy that are more experiential. Last year I completed an intensive equine therapy course and in 2025 plan to start offering sessions on our homestead with our amazing therapy horses, Dusty and Anastasia.
Before I can start offering this service, I need to create a round pen work space area on our property a little further from our house to offer more privacy for the sessions. I have the materials I need to get started, I just need the time and energy to tackle this big project!
This is our current list of homesteading goals for the year 2025 but I’m sure we’ll be adding to it as the year progresses. We always start off the new year with big goals for our homestead so I’m looking forward to where this year will lead us in accomplishing our homestead goals!
Do you have any homesteading goals for the new year? Share your homesteading goals and dreams in the comments below!