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As I’ve mentioned many times in other blog posts….time gets away from me when spring and summer get here. So, here I am, months since my last post, giving an update.

Spring was a whirlwind of activity as usual, with needing to pull weeds from the garden, planting the garden, kittens being born, ducklings hatching, getting meat chickens, getting turkeys, putting up a new area in the yard for the turkeys…It was a productive spring.

And with the start of summer, God has definitely blessed the homestead. The garden is doing so well this year…with the exception of my corn. It was “knee high by 4th of July”…but I think the corn thought that was all it was supposed to do, because it hasn’t grown much more, and is already tasseling! It’s looking promising for a good green bean crop, unlike last year! My tomatoes are looking pretty good this year too, with the exception of my cherry tomato plant. It is literally 5” tall and has produced 3 cherry tomatoes. What am I supposed to do with that?! lol All in all, we are truly blessed.

The last three weekends have been a bit taxing with all the butchering of the meat chickens. We decided it was best to break it up into three weekends, rather than trying to do all 46 in one weekend, which did prove to be beneficial. We are thankful for the chickens and how big they got, and that they provided us with meat and broth for the rest of the year. And truth be told, it’s nice to have the butchering and canning done, so that I can reclaim that section of yard, allow it to regrow, and ease up on the feed budget. We get a nice break from butchering, until its time to butcher the geese and the turkeys.

As summer continues, we harvest what we can out of the garden (lettuce, a couple zucchini, and herbs mostly), and will wait until more produce is ready to be picked. With some of the herbs and plants I’ve been able to collect so far, I have used some in making tinctures, some for making teas, and others for drying out to use in cooking throughout the year.

Hope everyone is having a blessed summer so far!
Until next time, take care and God bless!

I confess, I am not the best at taking the time to sit down and write blog articles, but once a month is better than once every couple months. At least that’s what I’m telling myself. I would really like to get more diligent with this, but my schedule always seems to get full of getting other tasks done.

Last month I posted about how I had taken what would be considered produce scraps, and planted them to try to give them new life. While they had started out to look promising, I had a couple casualties. I’m not sure what happened with the celery, but it was doing great…I had three stalks growing. Then one day, they all just went limp and fell off the root ball. The other casualty was the tomato plant. It looked good and healthy, but after a 10 day vacation, we came home to a shriveled up pot of nothing. But that’s the end of the bad news! I have some things that are still growing, and I even started some others.

I mentioned that a 10 day vacation had killed my tomato plant. Luke, me and the kids all went to Southern Florida to stay with Grandma and Grandpa. It was a much needed trip, and it was nice to have Luke with me on my birthday, since he had been out of town on business for the past several years over my birthday. We had a lot of fun in Florida. We got some of the best churros, did some shopping, played some games, went to Everglades State Park, took the kids down to Key West, went to the beach, and just spent time soaking up the sun. Coming back to cold weather in Ohio made us all ask why we live where the air hurts our faces and joints…but it was good to be back home and get back into the swing of things.

An update on the animals… you can definitely tell spring is in the air. Our chickens have been faithfully providing us with an abundance of eggs all winter, which we have been blessed to be able to fulfill customer orders. This weekend we were shocked to find the geese had started laying eggs! We got two eggs over the weekend, and we will stop collecting them after Easter, as we have seen our geese pairing up. Hopefully this means they will brood and sit on their clutches of eggs. The ducks will be starting to lay soon, as well. We have seen them doing their little mating dance…so I am hopeful that we will be able to build up the duck flock, after having harvested so many last fall (a couple were harvested by accident). We may also have a lot of kittens again this year. As of right now, I think we have 5 females pregnant. This is why we don’t have a mouse problem on our property. I would rather have a herd of cats than have mice. But, once the kittens reach 6 weeks, they are free to a good home.

The most recent homestead update, is I planted MORE seeds!!!! My kids are going crazy from all the grown lights everywhere LOL I got these awesome grow light kits, and started some of me seeds, so I will have plants to get into the ground once it is warm. I started some bell pepper seeds, jalapeno seeds, poblano seeds, heirloom tomato seeds, herbs, and some medicinal flower seeds. I can’t wait to get outside and start planting…but since it is much too cold still…I am settling for filling my house with grow lights where I can. 🙂
I also decided, after our trip to Florida, to try growing some avocado trees again. The kids and I had started an avocado pit at our last house, 8-9 years ago, and it was doing really good in our big indoor planter…until we moved. Not sure what happened, but after the move, it just died. So, we are giving it another shot, and I have started 3 pits to see if I can get them to grow.

I really need it to get warm so I can start working outside!
I have plants growing everywhere !! LOL

Blogger question: What is your favorite thing about spring? And can you guess what mine is???

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year!! As always, ours was a wonderful time spent enjoying some much needed family time and playing lots of games.

This is a quiet time for the homestead. The winter months are a time of rest for much of the homestead…the garden is at rest until spring, the geese and ducks are in their “off” season for producing eggs, projects are at a temporary stand still. But that doesn’t mean I’m not still busy. I’d rather be outside working…but winter is the time when I get to give my back a break, and start planning for the next warm season. I plan for the upcoming garden season and all my crop rotations, I research things…like how to naturally add nutrients into the soil, best way to use duck and chicken manure, what plants do better started indoors vs direct sew…I also make a project list to help keep me on track for what I hope to get accomplished in the coming year.

I titled this blog post “A New Year For Trying New Things”, because I’m doing just that. I’m sure if you are on Facebook or Instagram, you may have come across reels or posts about how to reuse your kitchen scraps. Well, I am trying a couple of them out… I had done the whole avocado pit hovered over water until roots sprout, and then planting in soil… But in the end, I ended up with a 12″ stick. That’s it. I saw a few of these “use your kitchen scraps to grow more produce”, and I decided to give them a try. And so far…they are not failures…not yet, anyway.

During fall and winter, there are a few family members who like to declare this “Soup Season”… I’m more of a “Sweater Weather” person. Anyway, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we had several soup days, and I ended up with the bottom root-bulb of celery. I fully intended to just throw it in the compost, but I had seen a reel that said you can grow more celery from the root-bulb. So I tried it. I stuck 4 toothpicks around the celery bulb, and hovered the bottom of it in water until it started growing roots. Once roots sprouted, I planted it in a pot. And this is what I have so far:

I did a similar thing with some tomatoes I had on the counter. One evening I had made tacos for supper, and when I went to dice up a tomato, I cut into it and the seeds had sprouted inside the tomato. So….I carefully dug out all the “seed guts” and put them in a pot. Now, full disclosure, for the amount of seeds that I put in the pot, I should have ended up with a LOT of tomato plants…but that did not end up being the case. But I still have a sprout or two that seem to be trying:

And the last “Trash to Treasure” produce experiment….blueberries! Blueberries happen to be a favorite of mine. I like pretty much all berries, but I REALLY like blueberries…so how in the world a whole pint of blueberries got lost in my fridge is beyond me! But sometime around October/November, I found a pint of blueberries buried in the bottom of the crisper drawer. They had already started to get squishy, and I remembered one of those reels again… So I got out a seed starter tray, and got to work. I moistened my soil, filled my little pods, and then I squished several blueberries and put them in the pods, until my tray was full. I put the clear lid on and set it in the window. It took a LONG time….but now, I have sprouts!!! The last I counted, I had 82 little sprouts! Getting them all to survive til I plant them outside, and then staying alive once outside….that will be a whole different hurdle. But for now, I take in the joy of new life from these seeds. (Sorry for the bad picture…just know there is a lot of sprouts in this tray).

It will soon be time for me to get the rest of my seed starter trays out and plant seeds under my grow lights. Then that means spring will be right around the corner….YAY!!!!!

Take care, and God bless!!!
For anyone who utilizes our produce stand, leave me a comment of what veggies you would like to see out there in the coming season? I’m looking to expand the vegetable options, and want to know what you would like.

I have not proven to be very good at keeping up on the blog this year… but that is a resolution that I hope to keep for 2024. Bear with me, as this was a very productive year for the homestead. A lot has happened since May, so lets jump into it and I’ll catch you up. I’d love to hear from you, so please leave a comment with any advice, suggestions, or questions. I’m planning to expand on what I plant in the garden, so if there is something you think I should grow, leave a suggestion of that, and I will see what I can do.

My last post included the planting of the garden. Well, as like many others I talked to this year, my garden didn’t do great. I’m very fortunate to have extra tomatoes from last year in my deep freeze that I will be canning this winter. I already got some out and did a first…I made my own tomato paste! It’s awesome!! But for the most part, it was not a good year in the garden. We did have a few things we were able to pass along to others, and in order for people to be able to get our overflow produce, I wanted something that people could pull up to and help themselves. The solution…a lean-to produce stand. It is “Take what you need, give what you can”, and I’ve also included a box for people to be able to leave prayer requests so we can pray for them. Leave as much or as little info on the prayer request as you’re comfortable with, and know that you will be prayed for.

This summer we were blessed with the hatching of ducklings. As usual, not all of them survived, and that is actually a blessing. If all of the ducklings had survived, we would have had well over 50 ducks in our flock, and we definitely don’t have enough room for that! We had 13 that joined the flock, bringing our flock total to 19.
The duck parlor got a facelift this summer, as I painted the exterior. The paint was peeling and it just looked sad. Fortunately, we had some pretty nice summer days, and I was able to get a couple coats of paint on, and it looked like a pretty little barn again.
Our ducklings grew so well over the summer, that this fall we were able to harvest them. We kept 6 ducks to continue to repopulate, but 13 met the chopping block this fall.

For being a first time goose owner, they have really thrived! We are very lucky to have 2 females and 2 males. In the research I’ve done, they mate for life, so I’m glad that we ended up with two of each. And this summer, both of the females started laying eggs! We didn’t allow any of them to try and hatch, but we did eat them….and they are so rich! Just like duck eggs, they are good for baking (and making French toast) 😉 As full grown geese, they definitely needed more room, so we created a run for them to be able to stretch their wings and have some fun in a kiddie pool. The girls used their creativity and even made me a sign for the geese. I love it!

Every year we get meat chickens, and every year we say that we didn’t have enough the year before. So this year, we had 45 meat chickens to butcher. Definitely not something we could get done in one day…so we took a weekend and butchered and processed the birds. I was able to get quite a few jars of canned chicken processed, and I also cooked down the carcasses with some veggies and made broth. It is the BEST broth ever!!! Of course, next year we are talking about getting even more meat birds…

We added to our egg layers this year as well, as we just were not able to keep up with people who wanted eggs. In doing so, we had to expand our coop space and the run. We had to take out a big section of our coop storage and convert it into roosting space for the additional birds. Plus, we had to increase our available nesting boxes. Our run space has more than doubled, which was a huge blessing for them. So much more room for them to run around in and take dust baths and dig for bugs. I’ll spare you the photo of what it looks like to have a staple from a nail gun go thru my hand…. OOOF!!

Earlier in the spring, I transplanted my berry bushes/plants into new boxes we built. But…I got sick of seeing the birds around my berry plants, so we got creative and built covers out of some spare wood we had around the homestead and some bird netting. It was a success, as I got so many blackberries this year!!! The strawberry plants spread like CRAZY this summer, so I am anticipating being able to pick a bunch of strawberries this summer.

One area in the garden that was fruitful for us was our herbs. They were unbelievable this year! Such a blessing!!! I was able to dry and store quite a bit of homegrown herbs to use throughout the winter.

If you have driven past the homestead since this summer, you will have seen my new sign. The previous sign that I had made ended up not fairing so well in the weather, so I made a new one. It’s quite a bit bigger than the last one I made.

The house on the homestead has had a facelift as well. It was long overdue, but we needed to get some work done to the house. We were able to put on a new roof, gutters and am in the process of getting a wrap around porch. Since the porch is being added, that also led to us needing to move the fire ring further from the house. Since it needed to be moved, we modified it a bit as well. We have a large ring for bigger party fires, and a smaller one for the family to cook food over. And my son and I also decided that we needed some fun seating for the fire ring, so we built a pergola to hang some egg chairs.

It is amazing that in our travels and in just talking with people, that the homestead comes up in conversation. So, to help spread the word of our faith and the homestead, and to encourage more conversations, I got some advertising items for the family (sweatshirts, hoodies, jackets) and I also got business cards for the homestead!

And now, here we are at December. The garden has been put to bed, the birds are back to having their heat lights on, heated waterers are plugged back in, and we have to bundle up to do chores again. It was a very blessed year on the homestead, and there is so much to be thankful for. I thank each one of you who take time to read when I do post blogs, and for those who also follow the homestead on facebook/instagram/linkedin. May God bless you all this holiday season. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!

I’m still here… I can’t believe that its been since October that I last published an article, but I’m still working hard on the homestead. This spring has been extremely busy, both for the homestead and in our family, and for those who follow me on Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn, you have seen the updates along the way. This will be a little bit of a recap, and a little update on the family.

To start spring off, I decided I would yet again try to start seeds indoors. I was very ambitious and also trying to be realistic in that I over planted knowing that they would not all make it to being planted outside. That being said, I planted somewhere along the lines of 70 tomato seeds and 20 cucumber seeds, as well as 60 pepper seeds, and a bunch of herb seeds. Again, knowing that I do not usually have much luck with starting seeds indoors, I was not shocked when my peppers and my herbs didn’t grow well, and ended up dying. However, I was over the moon at how well the tomatoes and cucumbers were doing! They were thriving!! And then, all of a sudden, my tomato plants starting missing leaves and eventually just being stems. What was going on??? They had been doing so good. I thought it was a rotation issue, so I started rotating the plants closer to the lights, from one shelf to another. More stems without leaves. Come to find out…one of our dogs was eating the leaves! Which answered another reason as to they our dog wasn’t acting right. *face palm* So, fast forward to planting the tomatoes outside, I have 5 that might end up making it out of all the seeds I started. smh

A lot of work has been done in the garden though. The kids and I got the expansion done, which is my tea garden, and we also made plant boxes for it. Plus, I got the majority of the garden planted. I told Luke…the bad news is that I planned my garden incorrectly. The good news is that I was somehow off by 4 rows, and I can plant even more stuff!!!! LOL

This spring we also have become very bird-rich. We already had our 16 egg layers, 9 ducks and 1 guinea… but now we have a total of 50 egg layers, 46 meat chickens, 17 ducks, 4 guineas and 4 geese. And acquiring more birds, means needing more places for them to live. The kids and I really worked hard this spring and we got not one, but two different coops built, two brooders built, and two lean-to’s.

A little update on the family…Wyatt and Ella have finished their 8th grade and 10th grade school years, and Lillian graduated!! How is it possible that we have a high school graduate already? Lillian and Ella also got to enjoy prom this year. Ella is such a hard worker. She helps around the house/homestead during the day and then goes to work in the evenings. And Wyatt earned his black belt this year! Luke started working for a company in Kansas called ISPN, and he has really enjoyed the transition to this new position. I have been busy working hard around the homestead, planning the future for the homestead, and trying to keep everything here running like a well oiled machine. Some days the schedules get a little hectic, but just like the country music song goes, it’s “Just another day in paradise”.

Hope everyone has a great week! Leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you.
Reader question… What is one spring/summer chore that you LIKE to do??

For those of you who have been following along with my Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, you have seem some of the busyness that’s been happening on the homestead. Some of this may be “old news”…but I’m just going to do a recap of the past two weeks.

In the heat of summer, when tomatoes are coming off the plants in droves, no one wants to heat up their house with canning. The past two years, I have started storing my harvested tomatoes in the freezer until the weather cools and I need an excuse to warm up the house. I have 3 refrigerator freezers and a deep freeze, and they were/are stocked full. Last week we had some pretty chilly days, so I decided to knock the chill out of the house by starting up the canner and making my first ever attempt at condensed tomato soup. Truth be told, I was a little skeptical as to whether or not it would go over well with the kids….BUT IT DID!!!! They love it!

Those cooler days also brought an end to the few plants that were still in the garden, so I took a couple days and cleaned it out. I pulled the last of the plants and started the process of covering the rows with straw/grass for the winter.

Colder weather does lead to the planting of one crop that I have not attempted before….garlic. We go through a LOT of garlic in our house. When it calls for 1 clove, you can bet that we will at least double it. So, this year, I am trying to grow some of my own. In this hill, I planted three rows. If all goes well, we will see a bunch of garlic bulbs this spring/summer! That might last us a couple months LOL

This next fall chore, I will save you from all the graphic, gore that went along with it. We started the process of butchering our meat chickens. Our roosters were getting to the point where they were almost the size of turkeys, and they were pushing the hens away from the feed, and had starting fighting for dominance. It was time for them to go. Last Sunday, we separated out our 7 roosters, set up a little production line, and started processing the birds. I held the chicken’s feet while Luke was in charge of removing the head. We let it bleed out, and then Ella and I started skinning. In previous years, we boiled and plucked….but that was horrible, and smelled awful. Skinning the birds was easier, went so much faster, and didn’t have the bad smell. WIN! Taking the roosters out of the mix, this is allowing for our hens get put on some more weight, so we can process them in another week or two.

Last week was another canning first for me. With all the chickens we had just butchered, I cut the meat off the bones and processed it in the pressure canner. Why had I never done this before??? Easy and I don’t have to worry about it getting freezer burned or looking at it in the freezer and not wanting to mess with it. I also took the bones from the chickens, added some celery, onion and bulbs of garlic, boiled it down for several hours, strained it and canned the broth. It is SO good!! Canning chicken and homemade broth is a game changer in the Faithful Friends Homestead kitchen!

Our newest dilemma with trying all these new canning products…I am quickly running out of jars and storage space! But that’s a good problem to have! Means we have lots of food stocked up!

This past weekend was beautiful, so we had to make the most of it and get some final things done outside. Lily and I shoveled, and shoveled, and shoveled…moving more dirt onto the rows in the garden that we had added this year, building them up. The herb garden got cleaned out. The basil had all died with the frosts, the chamomile was done, and the cilantro had all gone to seed and needed to be pulled. We also took advantage of the beautiful weather and Ella got our final mowing of the year done, while the rest of us cleaned out the shed and the garage making it possible to fit more than one vehicle in our garage again.

As a homestead, I definitely think that fall is the busiest time. Spring has a lot going on, but fall has a lot of chores that need to get done before the snow starts to fall. We still have 8 hens to butcher, but other than that, I think we are ready whenever winter decides to show up. Hope everyone has a great week!

Reader question of the week…. What is your favorite recipe that uses canned chicken? Our family, hands down, would vote for shredded chicken sandwiches.

With the beautiful crisp weather we’ve been having, things have been busy around here. As I’ve mentioned before, fall is my favorite season…but that also brings on a new set of chores to get done around the homestead.

Back in July we acquired a bunch of tree trimmings, which created quite the beaver dam in our front yard. We had slowly been chopping it up over the summer, but with the start of school, soccer season and karate…our schedule became full overnight. This past weekend, we finally had a free day where we were able to get the beaver dam cut up and stacked along the tree line. We wanted to get this done before the first snowfall, because we are using it as a natural snow fence.

Another chore that we have been working on, is slowly getting the garden “put to bed” for the winter. As vegetable plants finish up for this year, we are pulling the plants and putting the rows to bed. The rows get one final good weeding (if there are any), and then are covered with straw to protect them from the coming winter. Not only does this protect the rows from compacting and becoming hard from the winter weather, but the straw will also decompose and improve the rows for next year’s planting season.

The past two weeks, we’ve also been dealing with the issue of going from getting a dozen eggs a day, to getting no eggs. One day, Wyatt came in from being out by the chickens, and he was afraid that we may have had a predator get one, because there were feathers everywhere! We did a head count, and all the chickens were accounted for, which meant one thing…. they were molting. If you don’t know what molting is, it is when chickens renew their feathers. Chickens molt every year when the weather starts to get cold and the days get shorter. They drop their feathers and grow new ones. During this time they stop laying eggs, and build up their nutrient reserves for the coming winter. This is also a sign that we need to get the coop ready for winter, as chickens lay best when they have 14-16 hours of daylight, so to assist in that we place a heat lamp in the coop. It offers both the warmth and additional light to encourage egg production.

Even though we have a lot of fall chores getting done on the homestead, we also take time to appreciate the beauty of the season. The leaves are starting to turn colors, which shows the wonders of God’s artwork.

What is your least favorite fall chore? I’d say mine is probably pulling the tomato plants. It’s just such a pain having to pick up all the tomatoes that fall off the plants and taking it all to the compost. But, it’s all necessary to get the garden put to bed. Have a great week!!!

The days are getting shorter, there’s a chill in the air, the jeans/sweaters/boots are coming out, and the garden is slowly getting cleaned out… That can only mean one thing…. IT’S FALL Y’ALL!! In case you don’t know me, or haven’t read any of my previous blog posts, fall is my favorite season!! Although I love seeing all the new sprouts coming up in the garden in the spring, like seeing the garden all cleaned out in the fall. It is a feeling of accomplishment from all the hard work of planting, harvesting and putting up for the coming year.

While much of my garden is cleaned out already, I still have a few things in the garden. As long as they are going to continue to give me produce, I’m going to let them go until the frost kills them, and this week I was able to get quite a picking of veggies.

This year was my first time doing a second planting of peas, and I wasn’t sure how they would turn out planting them in the warm dirt…however, I got quite the picking yesterday! They seem to be doing great, and I still have quite few blossoms on the plants. Hopefully, that means I will have another picking or two left from them.

As worried as I was about the slow start to my tomatoes, even with the weather turning cold, my tomato plants are still producing. They are definitely slowing down, but I was still able to get a good picking from them. We are going to try canning homemade tomato soup with this batch.

In a previous post, I wrote how my pepper plants were looking great, but I was not getting any peppers…well, that has changed! I was able to pick poblano, jalapeno and a couple bell peppers! The kids have been asking for me to make jalapeno poppers, so this round of peppers will be turned into poppers and put in the freezer. I’m not sure what will be done with all the poblanos. I loved stuffed poblano peppers, so I may do that with some (although I think I’m the only one who will eat them). HAHAHA

My first picking of corn this year didn’t seem to do well. The stalks all stayed really short, and we only got a few ears of corn off of our 4 short rows. The rest of the corn got some kind of fungus. I planted corn a second time, and it seems to be doing a lot better! The stalks are taller than last time, and the ears of corn seem to be getting bigger than the first batch.

While I was in the mood to harvest some veggies, I took the opportunity to pick some herbs as well. I picked basil again, got it washed, dried out, and put in a jar to use through the rest of the year. Truth be told, I have been putting off cutting my rosemary. I hated the task of tying the rosemary and hanging it to dry. I don’t know why, it isn’t difficult. But I just dreaded that chore. However, I found a game changer!!! I don’t have a dehydrator, but I have been drying my parsley and basil in the oven, and after doing some searching, I found how to dry rosemary in the oven!! Why is it a game changer??? Hanging the rosemary to dry can take weeks to months to dry out (depending on weather and humidity), but drying it in the oven only takes 2 hours. I gave it a shot last night, and VICTORY! In my option, it works even better than hanging to dry. And, with all the drying of herbs last night, my house smelled amazing! Double win!

I hope everyone had a blessed start to the fall season! Dig out those sweaters/sweatshirts and boots…it’s time to get cozy with this crisp weather!! <3 I’d love to hear from you!! What is some of your favorite things to do with peppers? Have a blessed week!!!

Who’s excited for Thursday???? Anyone??? THIS GIRL!!!!!
Thursday, September 22, is the first day of Autumn!!! It’s my favorite season!!!

With summer coming to an end, and cooler weather soon upon us, there are still a lot of things happening on the homestead. Projects getting finished up, some projects getting started, and cleaning up the garden.

There have been a few projects around the homestead that I have been working on, and I can finally post pics of the finished products. About a month ago, Luke and I were talking about our garden and how, with its abundance, we are able to give to others. From that, we nonchalantly came up with a name for it….and it stuck! I painted some signs and hung them on the gates… Our garden is now named, Little Eden. I was reading some Bible verses about Eden, and the verse from Genesis 2:8 made me smile. It says “The Lord God plated a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there he placed the man whom He had formed”. Why did I smile…??? Because on our property, our garden is to the east! 🙂

Some other projects I have been working on, is a garbage can enclosure. I am so over the garbage cans being stored in the garage, and the bugs that accumulate around the trash cans, so I came up with the idea of making an enclosure out of pallet wood to house them outside. This way, the trash and its bugs can stay outside, and we don’t have to worry about the trash cans blowing away (which used to be a problem).

Another projects is the path to the duck house and chicken coop. I finally got the pavers laid the rest of the way, and was able to fill it with sawdust and lay the pallet boards. I was a little short of cut boards, so I still need to deconstruct some pallets to get the wood laid, but the sawdust is down and its looking better than just pavers and grass.
Sawdust played double duty this week on the homestead, and I was able to get some fresh sawdust on the garden paths. It’s an endless process, putting down sawdust in the garden, but it looks so good when its down.

We are still getting a LOT of tomatoes out of our garden. They were struggling in the beginning, but they have really made up for their slow start! This week, we canned 36 pints of stewed tomatoes!! It literally took all day! It’s so rewarding though, to know that this winter when we want to make chili, we can just go down to the basement and use the stewed tomatoes that came from our garden!

A couple weeks ago I posted about how we had a terrible case of squash bugs and vine borer, and I was honestly sick of looking at the dying and mangled plants in the garden. This past week, Wyatt and I spent some time cleaning it up. We removed all the vines, weeds, and rotten fruit/vegetables. While we were cleaning the rows out, we found that we have our first ever little (and I mean LITTLE) eggplant! Still not sure why those plants didn’t grow more….. But, the garden looks much better just having those items cleaned out. Now, the open rows are ready for me to winterize…but that’s a topic for another post.

And finally, Wyatt wanted to take on the planning and building of a small building for the cats. They are currently in a shed on our property, but with the hopes of putting a kennel in that spot, the shed will need to come down. This is the beginning of the cat house plan.

Summer is coming to a close, and autumn is in a few days. While things of summer may be dying off for the season, God assures us that to everything there is a season. The joys of summer may be coming to an end, but we now get to anticipate the joys of fall and all that comes with the next season… For me, that’s the cooler weather, sweaters and boots, bonfires, leaves turning colors, and THANKSGIVING!!!!. What is your favorite thing about fall?? Leave a comment, I’d love to know what others like about my favorite season! Have a blessed week!!!

It’s been a busy week here. My youngest started his 8th grade year (homeschooling), its tradeshow season (for my husbands’ work), soccer practice or games every night for my husband and second daughter, my oldest is in her senior year and she works from home in the evenings and we had a vehicle go out of commission due to a stone incident that broke the drivers side mirror and window. In addition to all that, I had a noodle making day, and we have had a constant flow of tomatoes from the garden. As soon as I can or freeze one batch, we get another picking of tomatoes that fills the table and counters.

All the tomatoes coming in from the garden are a blessing though. We will definitely have more than enough to get us through until next year. And with the abundance, we will be able to try to can some things that we have not attempted before. We are excited to try canning homemade tomato soup, tomatoes and diced chilis, and homemade tomato paste. The trick is going to be finding the time to get the canning done! LOL

While we are very thankful for how well our tomatoes are doing (although the kids would say they are sick of them), I have grown frustrated with some of the other items in the garden, and have started cleaning it out for the year already. One of the new rows of lettuce I planted was attacked by tiny black bugs, and it was just ruined, so I pulled the row. And my green beans were pretty much done. The leaves were turning brown and falling off….so I decided to pull them as well. They were not a total waste though, as our chickens were very thankful for the treat of fresh produce. The plan for this weekend, if we can find some time, is to further clean out the garden. Unfortunately, we had the worst case of squash bugs we have ever had, and they wiped out a lot of my garden. We were able to get a few cantaloupe before the plants were ruined. But the squash bugs decimated my watermelon, both pumpkin patches, the cucumbers, spaghetti squash and my zucchini plants. It’s quite frustrating…but my plan is to make this a learning experience, and do some research into what I can do as preventative measures for next year. Maybe I put something in the soil this fall to kill any eggs that are still there, or I mix something into the ground before I plant in the spring….or maybe I do both! LOL

But all is not lost. I still have my constant flow of tomatoes, my peas are growing, I have cabbages, a row of lettuce, and SO MANY peppers!!! In a few weeks, I’m going to have the same problem with peppers that I have now with my tomatoes! LOL It’s a good problem to have.

If you have some time to look at the website, I uploaded some family favorites in the “Recipes” tab. You will have to let me know if you give them a try, and what you thought of them! And since I uploaded some of my family favorite recipes, what are some recipes that are a family favorite at your house?? Leave a comment, I’d love to know! Hope you all have a blessed week!!!!