This year has definitely been a wild ride in more ways than one! I can certainly say that I never expected to see half the things that have occurred this past year in my lifetime. But here we are, and the best we can do is find peace in our own decisions, respect boundaries that work best for our families, and continue to seek growth and positive change.
Our homestead took on several new adventures this past year – some fueled from events that happened this year and others were planned.
From just our homestead, we had a myriad of success, failures, and many, many opportunities to learn lessons to help us in the future!
I had big aspirations for this year in gardening, our livestock, and with the blog. There were many changes and additions, but life always gives you surprises. Finding out we were expecting our third baby was definitely and exciting surprise! And helped me to level out some of the goals I had aspired to. There’s always next year to continue the journey!
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The Garden
The Greenhouse
The greenhouse was probably one of my favorite additions to our property! I was able to start several hundreds of seeds early on. Many of which I sold at our roadside stand that helped us cover some of the costs for the build.
I was able to add in a fall garden and have moved several pots inside the green house where it’s currently heated by a milk box heater. We’re growing carrots, several varieties of kale, lettuce, and I had my citrus inside until temperatures dropped below 20 F. Even with the heater on, that was too cold for the tropical plants!
It was a learning experience this year starting most of our own seeds. Next year I plan on ramping up our operation and made it a point to save the seeds from several of the varieties we grew this year that did well for us!
I fully plan on growing micro greens in there throughout the winter.
Back to Eden
This was such a strange year in the garden.
Pests were unrelenting. From grape beetles, to aphids, to any sort of squash bug, borer, beetle… I was completely overrun. Using supplements such as diatomaceous earth, BT, and a few other organic approved sprays used routinely throughout the week, I was able to harvest some crop this year.
The best addition we made were ordering beneficial insects to bring into the garden. Lady bugs had the aphid infestation cleared up quickly, and anytime I found preying mantis while foraging in our woods, I relocated them into the garden where they were quite happy with their variety of prey to choose from!
In hindsight, it was too much work for what little we were able to bring in. I’ve made the decision at least for this upcoming seasons to only do select brassicas in a raised bed and under netting, forgo all squashes, and focus mostly on nightshades, root vegetables, and our perennial berries.
My goal is to not offer these pests their chosen food sources and hopefully break the pest cycle over the next year (or two).
I added two raised beds this year near our greenhouse with repurposed landscaping bricks. One held culinary herbs and the other grew a lovely crop of beets and is still producing from our fall garden with lettuce, cabbage, and pak choy.
My husband also added two VERY large native pollinator patches to our front yard. They produced some beautiful flowers we used often as cut flowers to sell at our stand, decorate our home, and there was more than enough for the wildlife to enjoy as well! You could walk out side during the day both of those beds would be humming with the amount of pollinators enjoying the bounty.
Bees
Our bees exploded this spring and summer! We began with two hives early spring (the third hive absconded over winter) but with how quickly the hives began splitting we were able to capture and add another hive back in.
Unfortunately, they didn’t stop! For several weeks it seemed like they tried splitting regularly.
We had quite a bit on our plates this year and with the intense and prolonged heat, did not keep up with hive checks like we would have liked.
By the end of this season we found one hive overrun by field mice and another brutally being attacked by bald faced hornets. My husband spent hours trying to save that hive by killing as many hornets as he could, but inevitably that hive was also lost.
The remaining hive still seemed to thrive, but we decided not to pull any honey from them at all this year in hopes to allow them to flourish this winter and into the spring.
Livestock
Rabbits
The animal that brought us into raising for meat.
Bunny Nuggets – as my husband called them, were so stinking adorable. We raised rabbits for almost three years to butcher for a lean and inexpensive meat source.
We began running into various issues with our rabbits this summer – from the grow out rabbits constantly escaping into the yard (and devastating the garden), to sudden death, to infertility issues.
Eventually the decision was made to stop raising rabbits for our homestead. While I did thoroughly enjoy how adorable the babies were and the free manure for the garden, it began to switch from being an easy and inexpensive daily chore to something we were constantly battling to justify spending the resources on.
I can’t say we won’t ever raise rabbits again, but at least for this season we have closed that door.
We were able to put roughly 75lbs of rabbit meat into our freezer for the year!
Chickens
I added several chicks this year of varying breeds at the beginning of spring. We butchered most of our older laying hens (the ones who were 3 years +) and I started hatching eggs from our silkie hens. Altogether I hatched over 40 chicks this year (with only a small handful staying in our flock) and played around with hatching black easter eggers crossed with silkies. They turned out ADORABLE with extra crazy tufts on top of their heads!
Unfortunately, our automatic coop door got stuck one evening early this fall and we lost the majority of our flock and all of our silkies. I was pretty heartbroken, as our silkie roosters had been the best roosters we’ve ever had on our property.
Their current replacement is also a silkie (from one we hatched here!) But is full of attitude and has gotten aggressive with the boys already. (In other words, his days here are numbered).
A kind friend offered us some of her flock, so we were able to add about twice as many hens back in with an even wider range of breeds! They’re incredibly healthy, lay well, and all get along better than I could have hoped!
Our meat bird operation was a definite success this year! We did two rounds of Cornish cross birds this year as well as butchering extra roosters and retired hens from our layer flock. Meat birds were another hard to locate item this year along with so many other things, so with our last batch of meat birds we had some that were two weeks older than others – just because it was the only way I could get enough to meet our needs for the freezer.
Both rounds of birds were moved outside to fresh pasture by week 3 and were moved daily to fresh grass. They served multiple purposes for us by fertilizing, lightly tilling by scratching, eating extra bugs, and filling our freezer!
Keeping them on pasture not only allows for less damage to the lawn, but also decreasing the chance of disease and infections by constantly moving to fresh areas.
With both out meat birds and egg laying flock, during the summer they receive a fermented non-GMO, organic feed, options for fresh grass, and apple cider vinegar in their water.
Butchering went pretty smooth both times. The first round we had friends and family over, and the second Bryce and I tackled by ourselves! Once we get into a good groove, the day moves by swiftly! (Although we did have a police car drive by our house several times over a 5 minute period – lol!)
Overall, we were able to put roughly 400lbs of whole chicken away between pressure canning and freezing the meat! My goal was to at least have 1 whole chicken per week available for our family with the hopes we could have a few extra to share with family and friends for special occasions.
Ducks
The fluffy, twitchy little rumps of ducks have been and addition I’ve wanted to make on our homestead for several years. This was finally the year to give them an opportunity!
Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that ducks probably aren’t right for our property. At least not in this season of life we are in.
Thick, liquid poop covering every surface of the back yard (and garage!). Filthy water that needed changed twice a day, along with them flying out to get into the boy’s pool. Escaping at night and not returning to their house (which led to predator issues). 9 months of waiting before our first eggs appeared (only to find out we don’t much care for them cooked). Both of our pekin ducks passed before we were able to butcher them.
In May, we started out with 5 ducklings and currently only have two left. Thankfully we have a hen and a drake left, so if we decide to give ducks another shot in 2021 we can hatch some of their eggs this spring.
Hogs
Hogs were on our original plan for the 2020 year. Catch up with our initial experience here!
We drove over an hour to pick up these beautiful heritage breed hogs from a farmer out west. We decided our first round of hogs would be the Hereford Hog specifically because they are known for their decent foraging abilities, easy temperament, and fast growing maturity.
Headcheese, Everest, and Bubbles were each about 4 months old when we brought them home in April and weighed about 75lbs. This was larger than we initially planned on; however, they had been raised in a large hog barn and we were planning on raising them forested from the day they came to our property. Choosing the older hogs meant they would be more hardy to the weather changes while they acclimated to being outside.
Everyday the piggies got a scratch down, scraps from our garden and kitchen, and fermented feed in the mornings and evenings.
They grew MUCH faster than we anticipated! Our hope was to finish them on acorns under our oak trees, but they reached roughly 300lbs by late August. (This was our ideal butcher weight.)
Two of the hogs filled our freezer, while the other filled other families. We had an open invitation to our friends and family who were interested in helping or learning the dispatch and butchering process and were so blessed with the turnout!
It was a weekend filled with heartache at the sacrifice of the hogs (which we had become quite attached to), laughter with friends, good food, and thankfulness for a full freezer.
When our two were fully butchered and processed, we were able to add 348 lbs of meat in our freezers and store several jars of leaf lard for cooking.
Goats
Goats were on my dream list for years! And I honestly thought we were never reach an agreement to bring them onto our property. With the boys only drinking raw goat milk and the amount we were going through, we finally decided this would be the year to *try* them!
Initially, Nigerian Dwarf goats were our first pick for their small size, low feed input, and high butterfat content of roughly 10%. The pair we initially purchased (Oona and Edda) were both pregnant from the same farm. We fell into a case of the price is right, and they were both pregnant…
We learned quickly that might have been the best idea. These girls were severely copper and mineral deficient (notice the rough fur with heavy copper tinge), were severely skittish, and completely untrained to milking and walking on a lead.
They had mites, hoof rot, and one suffered from a staph infection on her udder.
Needless to say, we jumped in headfirst with as many challenges as we could possibly face.
With patience, dietary and changing to an essential oil and herbal worming protocol the girls have had drastic changes over the past 8 months. They both kidded unassisted to two beautiful sets of twins (three does and a buckling. Check out Oona and Edda‘s births). Their coat is now silky black with a beautiful sheen, body condition has significantly improved, and while we are still battling their hooves, they are ALMOST where I would like to see them!
Training them to the milking stand was frustrating, and at times seemed hopeless. The best thing we used were hobbles that keep their back hooves from jumping, kicking, and stepping in the milk pails.
Milking the two females twice a day while they nursed their kids was simply not providing us with enough milk to support our family.
This brought us to the Daisy situation.
We already had the smallest dairy goats… Why not add in the largest dairy breed, too? Welcome Daisy, the Saanen.
She also came with an infant – who was her niece that she had bonded with. From Daisy alone, we were getting almost a full gallon milking twice a day in the height of summer! She’s sweet and gentle, and is so well trained I don’t need to put her in a milking stand or tether her down at all.
During the summer, I began struggling to keep up with everything around our little homestead. Between the constant pregnancy sickness, a round of shingles, caring for all the animals, the house, and my family – I knew something needed to change.
The plan had been to keep two of the Nigerian dwarf babies. Their temperament was so sweet and they were absolutely adorable. But when I started struggling, I made the decision to re-home all of our kids. (The goat kids, of course!)
I had intended on rebreeding our three remaining does this fall, but again, life has gotten the best of me and with 5 weeks left until my own due date, it looks like we will be waiting until the spring of 2022 to welcome new goat babies onto our little farm!
Because of the addition of our goats, we have been able to supply our family with milk solely from our property for about 5 months and use the extra to make breads, simple cheeses, and yogurt!
Food Preservation
With the food distribution shortages at different times throughout the year, we really tried to focus on preserving what bounty we were able to bring in. Finding and repairing a used deep freezer definitely added space to easily store meat and produce for us.
For what fruits and vegetables we weren’t able to grow on our property, I tried sourcing locally from farmers and small businesses. This allowed me to gain many new contacts for the future so we can support local bu
Cool Room
We added a cold room for storing winter squashes, hardy apples, potatoes, and one day can store fermented vegetables over winter. I still have yet to master the art of fermenting vegetables.
The cold room also allowed us to butcher the hogs at our home and keep them cool for processing.
Canning
I put all of our canners to good use this year! We have a pressure canner for meat and produce low in acid levels and a steam canner for everything that is able to be canned in a water bath (usually jams, fruits, tomatoes, and juices). I prefer a weighted gauge pressure canner as it has been much easier for me to use and monitor the pressure levels. The steam canner requires much less water than a water bath, and will heat up faster as a result.
My family generally isn’t a ‘juice’ type of family, but when we were offered an enormous amount of Concord grapes from a friend’s vines – I knew grape juice was definitely going to be a new addition! My juice preparation was very limited until this year and squeezing through a funnel was exceedingly tedious!
This lead me to looking into a steam juicer – and boy was it handy! We processed several concentrated quarts of apple juice, grape juice, and cranberry juice. My momma heart is much more comfortable giving the boys juice processed at home with no additives or preservatives!
Having the juice on hand will also allow us to make jelly (if the will to do so ever sets in!). As jelly is made strictly from the juice and added pectin, while jam can be made from the whole fruit and usually pectin or sugar.
I was in a time crunch with the grapes, and needed to process them ASAP. I purchased a used aluminum steam canner; however, I would fully recommend opting for a stainless steel steam canner for efficiency and cooking safety! Upgrading our current model is definitely on the agenda for 2021.
Dehydrating
We have had a large dehydrator from Cabela’s for several years. Honestly, I’ve been slightly intimidated by it and could never seem to get the right temperature or length of time to properly. (You can find a similar model here)
Between the jar and lid shortages for canning and our dwindling storage space, I knew the time to master the dehydrator had come!
Honestly, it was as simple as double checking online for times and temperature for the specific food we were dehydrating. The oven worked well enough, but it was too easy to burn the fruit and waste all the hard work and food.
This allowed us to store many berries, herbs, and fruit in much smaller spaces. I made salt blends with fresh garden herbs that we’ve been using mainly to spice our meals, Bryce put together full meals for a long trip he took to the mountains, and the boys have abundance of tasty (and healthy!) treats to snack on and use in teas.
(Just a note: Apples covered in ceylon cinnamon and dehydrated either as chips or small chunks for tea are DELICIOUS!)