Homesteading Archives - Page 2 of 4 - Our Homestead Adventures

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…

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…

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…