Farming Archives - Our Homestead Adventures

Gardening: In A Coronavirus Crazy World, Control What You Can Control

Why gardening can: calm the soul, ease food security worries and lead to self empowerment even as the world seems to be going crazy during the coronavirus crisis.

Frugal Gardening and Farm Tip: Tomato tie-up wire

Check out this frugal gardening hack. Why pay full price for stuff to tie-up your tomatoes? This is actually Christmas wreath tie I bought at Walmart. I picked it up the day after Christmas for 75% off… they were basically giving it away. This is what we like to use to tie-up our tomatoes. It’s…

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.…

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…

Turkeys are here, don’t get attached

Turkeys have arrived! After weeks of waiting and preparing, our turkey’s have finally arrived at the homestead. The pair of Bronze turkeys are just less than 8 weeks old and getting along just fine. Chris built a temporary house for the birds out of reclaimed materials. The project took only a few days and our…

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…

Garden Planning, Let’s Get Growing!

Observe before planting your garden. When we moved into our home we knew we wanted to have a family garden. The first summer we resisted starting one though. Why not just dive in? We could have, but we would be blindly going for it without the most important method of learning…. Observation. Lots and lots…

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…