December Days Around the Homestead

December is plugging along, and it's hard to believe the month is half over! Its early days were beautiful. Autumn arrived late and lingered longer than usual, so the color and mild temperatures were still here to enjoy at the beginning of the month.

Colby and my blueberry bush. The bush was late to
turn this year, and never fails to offer eye-catching color.

An evening fire in the woodstove was enough to warm the house.

Sam never fails to get a comfy spot in front of the fire.

The afternoons were lovely so I spent them outdoors gathering kindling

The girls come along to hunt acorns and choice leaves.

or raking leaves to mulch the garden.

First bed done. There's something about the contrast
between the brown and green that makes me happy.

And we do have plenty of leaves to rake.

Meowy in the leafy woods.

Then our first winter cold front came through and we got rain and ...

Snow! Two inches on the first day and more the second. But
the temp didn't get below freezing so it didn't stick for long.

We don't usually get snow until January! December is now more like its old self with lows below freezing and highs above. On chilly or drizzly days, I'm in the kitchen with the wood cookstove going. I'm making jam and jelly from the fruits I froze last summer,

Blueberry-fig jam in the making. I'm using my homemade pectin
in this one and find the slow cooker works well to cook it down.

and bone broth and soup from the frozen bones.

Bone broth. Next I'll strain it and can it.

Besides working on the barn, Dan took down the last of our two old oak trees.

We've trimmed away the dead branches over the years
but this past summer was the end of it. It's dead now.

Always sad to see old trees die, but they inevitably do. Lots of firewood tho.

But! New life elsewhere. In the garden some of my late planted seeds are starting to sprout!

Mustard greens seedlings

Spinach seedlings

Honeybee on radish flowers

Every time I see honeybees I can't help but wonder where they came from and if they didn't originate from one of my absconded hives.

We're eating lots of salads, and still have the last of summer's tomatoes ripening in the house.

Our first frost was at the end of October and I picked these the day before.

Pretty soon I'll be pulling the rest of the tomatoes out of the freezer and making more pizza sauce.

Also starting to dream over seed catalogues.

Catalogues from Sow True, Baker Creek, and Strictly Medicinal. 

I haven't ordered seeds in several years, but I've really got a hankering to try something new!

So how is your December faring? Care to share?

December Days Around the Homestead © Dec 2017 

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/

2016 Homestead Goals: Time to Analyze

Does it seem to anyone else that the year has flown by? When we were having our endless days of drought and stifling heat last summer I thought it would never end. Now that's all behind us, we're getting plenty of rain, and the year is rapidly coming to a close. That means it's evaluation time. It's time to take a look at our 2016 homestead goals and analyze what we've accomplished, what we haven't, and what we've changed our minds about.

House

We're actually getting close to finishing the house, at least on paper. The doing takes longer! This year we wanted to finish the dining room windows, finish the front porch, and install our 1550-gallon rainwater tank.

The dining room windows can be checked off the list.

For some odd reason the window on the left looks narrower
than the window on the right, but they are actually the same size!

I can't believe how much warmer the house stays now that these windows are done. Energy efficient windows and good insulation make all the difference in the world. Such energy upgrades are well worth the investment.

The front porch is almost done. Here's what it looked like before.

We started on the front porch in Sept. 2014, floor first.

Dec. 2016. The wood box is still in the way, but you can see the difference.

We want to replace the ceiling and then the remaining corner trims can be put up. Hopefully we'll do that next year and then the front porch will be done - an example of an annual goal staying on the list for several years.

Another example is installing our 1550-gallon rain tank. When we bought the tank we knew where we wanted it to go...

How it used to be

but the question was whether we wanted to install the tank first and then later go back to replace those windows and siding, or do the windows and siding first and then install the tank.

January 2016. The dining room windows were part of this project's detour.

Doing the windows and siding first won out. By the beginning of the year it was mostly done except for waiting on warmer weather to finish the caulking and painting. Finally Dan was able to level the ground and get it in place.

The only thing left to do is make a filter for it, then we can at last get it hooked up.

Goat Barn

This was to be our big project for 2016.

This was the original plan for my dream barn.

We started with that floor plan and the purchase of a sawmill. About the time Dan got all his lumber cut, the roof on goat shed started to leak.

The original old shed when we first bought the place. The roof was leaking
then so we tarped it. When it started leaking again, we decided to re-roof.

Since we were going to put on a new roof, it made sense to enlarge. (In case you missed that series of posts, it starts here.)

 The old shed is still there, now the left side of the "Little Barn."

So that was a necessary detour, but it allowed curing time for our home-cut lumber. Building the "big" barn will be the big project of 2017. The "little" barn will then become a better workshop for Dan.

Fencing

Fencing our woods is an annual carry-over goal. It stays on the list because it's important, but it's not a straightforward project. There's no vehicle access along the property line and there are numerous fallen trees blocking even a footpath. With the barn taking priority this year, we weren't sure how far we could get. When our summer drought dried up our pastures, I started taking the does for daily walks in the woods. To pass the time while they forage, I've been working on finding and clearing the old fenceline.

In some spots it's slow going. I follow the old fence.

I'm looking for the pins that mark the property line. When we 1st
bought the place we paid a surveyor to find & mark all these.

I get so far and then Dan comes down with the chain saw and clears away the big stuff. We have two rolls of 330-foot goat fencing and a pile of t-posts, so we may actually be getting closer to making this a reality this winter. We would love to be better using all of our five acres.

Honeybees

March 2016

My goal this year was to add two more hives for a total of three. Sadly I lost all three colonies and am now beeless. I haven't decided what to do. I definitely still want bees, but I don't want to go with package bees again. Folks seem to have a lot of trouble keeping package bees alive. I may try again to catch a swarm or find someone selling nucs.

Garden

The garden started well, but once my rainwater collection
tanks were empty, it succumbed to the drought and heat.

This year I wanted to focus on year-round gardening. Most folks think of that as expanding the harvest to the winter months. Me too and I'll blog about that soon. This past summer, however, has me revisiting thoughts I've had in the past - that my gardening break ought to be in July and August, not winter. Everything struggles so when we have our hot dry spell every year, whereas there are a lot of cool weather crops that do well for me all winter. I'm thinking I need to invest in a non-traditional gardening "hat" and plan a little differently for next year.

Writing

I never considered this a homestead goal before, but in a way it is. I love to share what we're learning, but also, it helps support the homestead. Not in a huge way, but we've been able to buy quite a few necessary and useful things for our lifestyle from book money. My goal this year was to work on more volumes for The Little Series of Homestead How-Tos, and I managed to publish seven new additions. Some folks ask where do I find that time. I find it in the pre-dawn hours, somewhere between letting the cats out and time to do chores.

All of my books are on sale through the end of the month. Click here for details.

Preparedness 

This was another goal that was new to the list. I added it because I wanted to focus on two things: acquiring more alternative tools and getting hard copies of information that I consider a good resource.

Tools

I already mentioned Dan's sawmill.

It's not alternative in the sense of powering it (it has a gasoline engine) but it does increase our self-sufficiency in that we can cut our own lumber. Considering the number of mature pines falling down in our woods, this is a real win-win.

In terms of alternative energy we installed a solar attic fan.

And a solar barn light.

Also I bought was a wind-up clock.

It's pretty good at keeping good time, as long as I remember to wind it regularly. 😉

Information

I'm still working on hard copy collections of notes and useful notes. Not the stuff I've learned from experience, but things that are occasionally useful. I have to say it's convenient to have the notebooks. It seems to take less time to flip to a page than to search through scores of computer folders, book marks, or websites. For me, anyway.

Whew, that was a lot, but all in all, we did pretty well at meeting our goals, with the Little Barn being our only major but necessary detour.

How about you? Was it a productive year or one filled with the unexpected?

2016 Homestead Goals: Time to Analyze © Dec 2016 

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/

Not a Good Bee Mom

It is with great disappointment that I write this news - I've lost my last hive of bees. Gone. This was my surviving Daylily Hive, which started out so vigorously. We've had a lot of problems with skunks this year (as in one almost every other week), but I assumed because of my skunk guard they hadn't actually gotten to the hive.

Daylily Hive with skunk guard

If bees are sensitive to the smell of skunks, however, that would have been a problem, because that's been how we've known we've had so many skunks. (The carport still stinks from the one that was making a home under a cabinet stored out there.)

I think the real problem was the long period of upper 90s this summer with no rain. I told you how the garden stopped producing and went into survival mode. That meant very little was blooming. I had been keeping an eye on progress in the hive and knew they weren't building a lot of comb. After the fact I realize they weren't building because they were consuming their stores. If I'd been smart or had the experience to realize what was going on, I would have fed them.

In other bee news I never did catch anything in my bait hive.

Honeysuckle as a bait hive remains empty.

I wasn't really counting on that so I wasn't disappointed. More disappointed about Daylily. I hate learning things the hard way.

Not a Good Bee Mom © September 2016

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/

Mid-Summer Garden Report

June was very hard on the garden with daytime highs in the mid to upper 90s (30s C) and only seven-eights inch of rain since mid-May. I spent most days using our wood chips to mulch. I used our collected rainwater to water the beds, dressed with compost, and then applied a thick layer of mulch. I worked in small sections because when the air is that hot and dry, moisture evaporates right out of the ground. I've been able to keep most of of the garden alive, but it struggles.

Still, I have some nice photos to show you, although production has slowed down and much of the garden seems stunted. Cantaloupes, for example are small, and have stopped flowering.

Cantaloupe and bush beans.

But they've been tasty. Green beans are slow too, and I've only been able to can six quarts so far.

Sweet potatoes and marigolds

My 3 rows of okra don't seem to be growing at all.

In one of the old, unkempt beds of the garden I discovered several
clumps of multiplier onions that escaped being harvested last fall.

Cucumbers and dill along a cattle panel
trellis with sunflowers in the background.

Most of the cucumbers have been bitter from the lack of water,

but the plants are loaded with flowers and honeybees.

Honeybees visit the sunflowers too.

The next two rows of trellises are tomatoes, along with more dill, sweet basil, and multiplier onions.

Sam keeps me company while I work in the garden. He has tomato
plants on the left and Jerusalem artichokes behind him on the right.

Tomatoes are just beginning to ripen.

The first of my tomatoes all suffer from blossom end rot. Gardeners know this is caused by a lack of calcium, but it's not necessarily because calcium is lacking in the soil. It can be caused by something interfering with the plants calcium uptake, things like not enough moisture in the soil.

Another place loaded with honeybees is in the popcorn.

Last year I was rather unceremoniously corrected by a number of people when I mentioned that I looked forward to our bees helping pollinate the corn. Corn is wind pollinated, which of course is true, but having seen bees in my corn in the past I added corn to the list of plants my bees would help. It would have been more correct to say that the corn helps the bees rather than the bees help the corn.

Honeybee busy collecting pollen in the popcorn. The grain-like
 things are called "anthers," and they bear pale yellow corn pollen.

My bees have been busy in the popcorn stuffing their pollen baskets! And if they happen to knock down some of the pollen laden anthers which fall on the tassels, I won't complain.

Popcorn tassels. Each strand is a potential corn kernel.

A dry summer is hard on honeybees because less is blooming, so there is less nectar and pollen for them to live on. When that's the case they must utilize their honey stores, which can mean a smaller honey harvest in the fall.

Unfortunately we cannot collect enough water to water everything. I focus on the garden, but other things like fruit trees and bushes suffer.

Blueberries waiting to ripen

July is my month to harvest blueberries. The bush is loaded but the berries are small. Without enough water they will remain small and not be sweet and juicy when they ripen. Rain is in the forecast, though, so here's hoping.

Mid-Summer Garden Report © July 2016 

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/