Agriculture Archives - Our Homestead Adventures

Pumpkin Planting Experiment

Few things make me smile the way a pumpkin makes me smile. I know, it sounds weird, but I just love pumpkins and have this dream of someday growing a state fair champion pumpkin. In the meantime, we’re doing our best to have a real pumpkin patch this year and are experimenting with a way…

Natural Japanese Beetle Control

It’s a beauty of a beetle but bad news for plants. Shiny, metallic colored insects hanging out on orchard leaves and vegetable plants. They are beautiful, but when they consume what we are trying to grow and leave behind skeleton leaves, they become a menace. It seems that this beetle, known as a Japanese beetle, are…

Restoring Order in the Chicken Coop

Order in the Coop Last October we hatched our first chicks in the coop, “Thursday” and “Friday”. It was extraordinary to watch our little chickens grow-up. We discovered at about 4 months of age that our distinctive young chickens were roosters. We knew we would not be able to keep them, especially since we still…

Learning How to Grow Potatoes

They say potatoes are easy to grow, they’re right. They say that potatoes are about as easy a crop to grow as anything you might try to plant. If our first harvest is any proof, they’re right. We hauled in a total of nearly 10 lbs. In our first effort! It was an exciting experience…

Summer Squash Pickles Recipe

Summer squash is plentiful, how ’bout some pickles? We have never had much luck growing squash. It seems we’d get in 3-5 and then the leaves of the plant would start looking diseased, shrivel, and die. Year after year. We could have said, “We just can’t grow squash,” or we could just keep trying to…

How to Make Honeysuckle Jelly

Honeysuckle jelly, a sweet summer treat You’ll know summer is on the way when the thick, aromatic perfume of the honeysuckles embrace you, sending a stream of warm memories rushing through your mind and sending a joyous smile to your face. The nostalgia of bright yellow honeysuckle vining around old fence posts, causing one to…

Thanksgiving turkey, Raise or Hunt?

Homegrown Thanksgiving challenge update, Turkey edition “What if our Thanksgiving dinner included only the things that we provided for ourselves?” That question triggered the first Inspired to Try challenge, now we had a big decision to make. The turkey is usually the star of the show so do we hunt a turkey or raise a…

Meet Amy + Chris

We are Amy and Chris, parents of 4 children, learning by living, taking a homestead adventure that many of our friends and family think is crazy… even if they secretly envy us. We do not shy away from adventure & trying new things but even this is not what we would have imagined just a…

Our Orchard, A Memorial to A Great Man

Instead of just a tree, why not plant an orchard? When we moved into our home, it was shortly after Chris’ dad had passed. Family and friends wanted to give us something that would remind us of him. Maybe a flower bush or special tree? After some thought, we decided to pool our gifts into building a…