Homestead Archives - Page 2 of 4 - Our Homestead Adventures

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…

Corn Success Despite Adversity

1st corn crop brings less than an ear-full but more than “needed”. We are celebrating, knowing that we can check off one more item from our Homegrown Thanksgiving Menu! Corn! This success will taste so much sweeter come Thanksgiving when you consider how much adversity we faced with our crop this year. Second time is…

Volunteer Pumpkins, Better Than No Pumpkins

Our pumpkins are poppin’, just not where we planned. It’s like Halloween in July! Exciting times hit this weekend as we checked on the volunteer pumpkins that were growing in a wild, weedy, area where we had a pumpkin patch last year. We noticed about 6 plants sprouting in the early spring, volunteers from last…

Embracing the “F” Word: “Failure”

Failure can create valuable lessons on the homestead, workplace or life. This homesteading adventure that we’re on is opening up all sorts of opportunities to face the “F” word… “failure”. In life we try to avoid failure, no one likes to be labeled a “failure”. It’s a brand that’s hard to shed from the psyche.…

Gardening is Possible Anywhere

How we learned about urban, small space and desert gardening. When we moved from Iowa to Arizona, I gave all of my canning jars away to friends. I certainly wouldn’t need them in the desert! When we moved into our Mesa, AZ home, it was love at first site. Finally, a yard we didn’t have…

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…

Canning Made Easy

How to do boiling-water processing or water bath canning If you’ve never preserved fruits and vegetables by canning, this is a really easy way to get started. You just need a boiling-water canner, which is a large pot with a lid and a rack to help you manage those hot jars. You can also purchase…

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…