Farm Life Archives - Our Homestead Adventures

This is why you don’t name your chickens

Chickens can be a great addition to your farm, family or homestead. But there’s an old rule about keeping a chicken… don’t name it

Ms. Olivia’s Sweet Peaches

A peach buzz began to swirl. There was a buzz among the locals that a peach truck was scheduled to deliver in our small town. There is nothing like access to good foods that aren’t typical of your area. A friend called to let me know it was coming and we started thinking about all…

Chestnut Jam Recipe

When life gives you chestnuts… you make chestnut jam. When you have more chestnut trees than you can easily count, and they produce an abundance of chestnuts, you find a way to use them, unless of course, you are only using them to feed the local deer and squirrels. Since we have enough nuts to…

Chore Charts for Children

We want more but do we want another chore. With the New Year, we’ve started dreaming of adding more to our homestead. We want to grow more food. We’ve been pondering raising other farm animals too. While these thoughts have been exciting, they have me thinking, “How is this going to happen when it was…

Homegrown Thanksgiving Success

Thanksgiving unlike any before. We sat at the table, a bountiful Thanksgiving feast laid out in front of us. The amazing spread of food was more than a reason to give thanks… it was the culmination of a year’s worth of work, sacrifice and commitment. It was a meal to feed the soul as much…

Beauty in the Fade, Fall on the Homestead

Finding meaning in fall. The leaves swirled down from our persimmon tree with a wind rushing up our hill. The chickens have lost quite a few feathers, as a palette of various shades have been wind-blown lining the sides of the chicken run like a tossed feathered boa. Our majestic sunflowers with multiple heads of…

Preserving Eggs for Winter

Fresh eggs long after the hens stop laying. People ask all of the time, what do you do with all those eggs? You can eat that many eggs? The truth is, we don’t get tons of eggs all year ‘round. We think we’ve found a way to continue to have fresh eggs in the winter.…

Our First Predator Encounter

Not a single predator… until now. A predator is going to come hunting for dinner when you have a farm, it’s just a fact of nature. We’ve taken every precaution to protect our chickens and have been very fortunate… until now. When Chris designed the chicken coop and chicken run, he designed the fence to…

Why We Candle Chicken Eggs

What’s going on inside your chicken eggs? We never needed to know what is going on with the chicken eggs we bring indoors to consume, until recently. In fact, we thought we had it all down-pat. I guess when you have more than a handful of chickens, there is a lot more chicken behavior to…

Garden Fresh Tomato Soup Recipe

There’s nothing like garden fresh tomato soup. After a couple sessions of canning tomatoes from our garden, and a few rounds of B.L.T. sandwiches, we needed another way to enjoy them and boy did we find the answer with this tomato soup recipe. Our dining room table has become the place to unload our rolled…