Posts Tagged ‘garden’

While we have all these lofty reasons for having a homestead, at the end of the day what keeps us going is that we get to eat amazing food. We produce some pretty delicious stuff! This quiche is one of our favorites in the spring and summer as it’s quick and easy, which is exactly what […]

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Fall Garden Cleanup

Its that time of year when you see everyone’s formerly green and bountiful garden turning brown and looking more like a jungle. We decided that rather than fight it, we’d embrace it and turn all that unused plant life into free feed for our goats! We put our two junior does into the garden and let […]

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Raising Ducks 101

Here’s a quick post addressing some of the questions I get most frequently when we sell ducklings. Most questions apply to anyone who’s considering raising ducks, with some specific to the scenario of buying ducklings from us. For more information, I’d recommend checking out all our duck blog posts. Housing Ducklings Ducklings should be housed […]

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Michael Judd’s book Edible Landscaping with a Permaculture Twist: How to Have Your Yard and Eat it Too was an informative read that we have already utilized in our yard. This book was great! It took a few permaculture principles, and explained each to a depth that made me feel comfortable immediately implementing the principles […]

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I was recently inspired by reading Niki Jabbour’s Groundbreaking Food Gardens: 73 Plans That Will Change the Way You Grow Your Garden. At first I was skeptical as I didn’t see how a book that included 73 different garden plans could do justice to any of the plans. After reading just a few pages, though, […]

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2014 was the year of livestock here on the farm. New additions included Goats, Ducks, Chickens, Rabbits, and Hogs. 2015 is going to be the year of the garden. We plan on, at a minimum, having a 5,000+ square foot vegetable garden, in addition to perennial beds closer to the house and edible landscaping out […]

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I wrote this book review addressing the challenges regarding potentially hazardous chemicals in our everyday products. We have discussed how we would like to lessen any unnecessary chemical exposure in our home. Our homesteading work has done a lot to give us chemical-free options. Our organic garden gives us food free of herbicides and pesticides.  We […]

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We are building a hoop house!  This will house hens over the winter.  The bedding from the hens will decompose, creating great compost.  In the spring we’ll move the hens out and plant vegetables.   The basic structure for the hoop house is a 2×4 wood base, with two cattle panels as the hoop, connected […]

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Goat Update

      The goats have been great so far! They’re very friendly, and they love to eat feed from our hands.  They’re already earning their keep by eating weeds and branches, and giving us fertilizing manure in return! We had the road regraveled, and the gravel truck broke a tree limb covered in leafy […]

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The installation of our wood stove brought about a new need, firewood. The first round of wood we struggled to get to our house in the back of our jeep. It took about three trips to get the wood seen in the picture here to our house. That clearly was not very efficient, though the price (free) was right. Now that we had the wood we had to split it. After a few tries with our ax we realized that another tool was needed.

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I’ve spent some time absorbing all of the information in The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live it by John Seymour. This book is an amazing resource that covers so many aspects of homesteading!  Since the book covers a wide range of topics, it doesn’t go into too much depth on any one.  I could […]

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George and I want to grow more goodness in our garden!  We discussed how to do this, and decided on creating some raised beds.  The first will go right where this row of dead bushes is. We transplanted the bushes from a friend’s yard.  We hoped they would screen the beehives a bit and protect […]

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We moved into Independence Homestead at the beginning of the summer in 2011, so almost a year ago.  Last year was spent improving the inside of the house and settling in.   While we did routine maintenance on the yard, that’s about all we did outside.  The prior owners were obviously not gardeners, so we started […]

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