Homesteading 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

How to grow a garden through plastic sheeting

Two things that can frustrate a hopeful gardener are weeds and slow growing plants. Planting your garden through agriculture plastic can be a cure for both of those worries. Here’s how to get growing.

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…

Persimmon Seed Weather Prediction

The first year we lived on our property, we discovered we had a few trees with small, orange, crab-apple sized fruits on them. We weren’t sure exactly what they were until, one day in the fall, we tasted one and then we knew exactly what we had- a persimmon. The next year, we worked on…

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.…

Candied Jalapeños Recipe

Call it “Candied Jalapeños”, “Jalapeño Candy” or “Cowboy Candy”, it’s just yummy! Our nephew’s family joined us for a gathering and brought a tray, a block of softened cream cheese, and a jar of sliced jalapeños in a sweet, clear syrup, and dumped it over the cream cheese. There were crackers and tortilla chips to…

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…