The Homestead Weekly Update

      This has been a busy week on the homestead. Who am I kidding having 6 kids, chickens, ducks, dogs, and other small pets and now with school started for 3 of the 5 school age kids, it seems like noon is here before you know it. This month has flown by so quick and it feels like fall is just around the corner.

     The garden has been producing full force, since mid July we have had cucumbers non stop along with yellow squash. These to have since slowed down and we picked the last cucumber we have. The plants will being removed this coming week. Zucchini and Tomatoes are now hammering us. We’ve been freezing every other day and plan to can some tomatoes shortly. We also have some peppers trickling in.  We planted our peppers a little later then we wanted this year. We learned much more about our garden this year, and it will continue to evolve in the coming years. We do plant to do a few fall crops as well, lettuces and peas for sure. 

 Our chickens and ducks are doing well and back to producing eggs, we had a few week stretch where weren’t more then 1 or 2 when we typically get 6-8 a day. The good news is some of them are in the process of malting so we will have some more eggs then normal this fall. The rabbits are surviving the dog days of summer as well and we have plenty of babies ready for a new home.

    The projects at the homestead just seem to be piling up and never getting ahead. We did complete our oldest sons bed and started getting the wood ready for his desk. We also have the entire school room set up for the new school year, a task that doesn’t typically get accomplished till thanksgiving. Time management and prioritizing is something we are really focusing on along with maintaining what we have accomplished. We also just put out a new video on how to make a flashcard holder.

Projects upcoming are a watering system for the chickens, a desk for under the bed, can oil change and other preventive maintenance to get ready for state inspection and a family day trip to a animal safari at the end of the month. We also have to finish the new duck pen and put on the over head netting on our meat chickens pen so we can relocate those chickens there. And then there’s the tree I fell down in the beginning of July that  we still need to plank up and we have 2 fig trees needing planting. It’s a lot of work but we haven’t been so happy with our lifestyle!