On the Homestead

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

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!

Early Spring Gardening Notes

I am about to set off on a very long road-trip adventure with my kids, so I am sad to know that I will miss some of the best time in the garden.  But at least the tulips bloomed for me before I leave.




I don't know about other gardeners, but I have been accumulating a lot of partially used seed envelopes over the years.  This year I am not buying any new seed until I plant all the seed I already have ... some of it may have lost its potency, but it's worth a try anyway.  During the winter I inventoried and sorted, and now I can pull out these wads of seeds - this is all bush bean seed pictured above.




I've got my onion starts in. (What- doesn't everybody bury their white wine in the garden so it doesn't fall over in between sips?  It's a great way to garden on a puttering Sunday afternoon.)




Moving one of our chicken yards around the yard onto fresh grass results in bare spots that we are then covering with new raised beds.  I'm going to have a border of raised beds all around my back yard in a couple years (and then have to think of a new method for moving the chickens around, or just plop them down on top of a bed to give it some fertilizer directly - we'll see!)




I've got carrots, turnips, pole beans, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and potatoes planted in the new beds, and after I harvested the over-wintered kale I planted bush beans in that older bed.  The marigolds are because they seem to discourage the cats using the beds as litter boxes.




My garlic was planted in November, and it's looking pretty good.




Peas and Radishes are making an appearance!



And the bleeding hearts are in bloom.



Hopefully some of that seed I put in will make it, and I'll be back at the gardening in mid-May.  I'll miss it while I'm gone! (My husband and then some house-sitters will be caring for the place, and I've left them with watering instructions if there is no rain, but otherwise it's all just waiting for me.)