Homestead Update

So we thought we would give you a little update about how things are going on our homestead since we have been here.  We moved into our homestead in March of 2014 and most of our projects have been home improvement type stuff but we have started some homesteading projects.  Currently we have been only maintaining two of the seven acres, letting the other five grow natural for now until next year and we have seen tons of honeybees tending to the wildflowers that are growing out there, which is exciting for us as future beekeepers.  Liz and I have also discussed purchasing some of the surrounding lands, acre by acre, if finances allow so we can one day expand our homestead.

Liz has been hard at work canning, preserving, propagating crops and planting various fruit bearing plants and trees.  So far we have planted muscadines, fig trees, blueberry bushes, tomato plants, a peach tree and a plum tree and some butterfly bushes for our bees next year; unfortunately one of the blueberry bushes has died and the peach tree is in rough shape as well.  We are trying to plant as many of the perennial fruit bearing plants, bushes and trees as we can in the first few years, with much of the trees being planted this coming fall.  Liz has also processed (cored and sliced) about thirty pounds of apples and has filled four one-gallon bags of blackberries, which were harvested from our field- all of which are stored in our freezer.  She has canned five jars of apple butter and two jars of pesto and two jars of tomato and has additional canning to do this week and next week.

Our firewood supply is off to a decent start for this winter.  I built a small firewood rack out of some left-over lumber treated wood I had and filled it with red oak and poplar.  This weekend we will cut more firewood and I’ll be building another and even larger rack.  Hope to at least get one cord of firewood this weekend (one cord= four feet high by eight feet long by four feet deep) and we will be installing a wood-burning insert into our fireplace this fall to heat our home this winter.  My goal is to run the heater as little as possible, if at all, this winter and just heat the house with firewood, though I don’t know if our wood supply for this year will allow us to do so. 

Other than that not much else has been going on around here homestead wise.  We are trying to make our old home more efficient and we had insulation blown in our attic to help keep the place stay cooler during the day.  I haven’t completed our rain barrel collection system yet and it bothers me every time I walk past the downspouts that would empty into the rain barrels that I haven’t purchased yet.  It will be nice when we get it up and running though, and it will save us a lot of money in the long run when it comes to watering plants.  

If you are interested in carpentry and beekeeping please keep following us; we have a lot of carpentry projects coming up this fall and winter to include our chicken coop project, fence replacement and building some hive stands for our beehives, along with a lot of other carpentry projects.  This fall we will start preparing for our first bee season which we will start around March of 2015.  I have a feeling 2015 will be a very interesting year and we hope that you will join us.  Thanks for reading!