Monday, October 13, 2014

On the Homestead

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I bought this book with some of my birthday money: The Weekend Homesteader.  It is a series of projects to work through to develop your own sustainable homestead, and the most helpful part for me is that the projects are organized by month of the year. 

As I read through the book, I started to organize a To Do list for our place organized by month.  Some months just have less in them (December, January, and February) so seeing that I put some of the indoor projects we have been putting off into those months. 

October's Tasks:

  • Harvest from the garden and clean out the garden beds
  • Move the raised beds up closer to the house
  • Slaughter and freeze the meat birds we raised
  • Set up a hoop house over one raised bed
  • Plant garlic
  • Plant flower bulbs
  • Build the pig pen
  • plant winter greens in the hoop house (spinach, kale, hardy lettuce varieties)
  • harvest and preserve apple crop
Kids in the Garden

Another step toward getting better organized to be homesteaders was a conversation I had with my husband about our weekly schedules.  I work every day except Saturday (sometimes I have to work Saturday too, but not every Saturday) and Monday, and my husband works a normal Monday-Friday, so this means that the only day the whole family is together is Saturday.  If we are going to have a homestead, we need to do all that work on Saturday - so no scheduling other stuff or expecting to sleep in or have a lazy day.

If we get up on Saturday and the whole family gets to work, we can accomplish a lot.  We're calling Saturday "Farming Day" and making that our highest priority on that day, and it's actually nice to have the family out working together and getting lots of fresh air.

And that's what is going on here on the Homestead!

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