As I said before, homestead life can be very busy. Along with our day to day chores I also write for my holistic healing blog ApotheKayla and we are full time students!
So a quick recap of our summer activities is in order since it is officially, almost, Halloween (which is one of my favorite holidays by the way)!!
First let's talk about the ladies...
It is so amazing to have been able to watch these creatures grow from 2 day old chicks to full grown layers! Sadly, because we knew nothing about chickens when we began this process, we ended up with two roosters. One of them had to go to ensure safety for the rest of our small flock; however the good news is that the one we chose to keep is doing his job fertilizing the eggs and we will be able to hatch our own chickens.
My amazing husband used only re-purposed materials to build our cute little chicken coop, which sits at the top of our cinder block, stair stepped garden beds. The birds seem very content with it....
We on the other hand have big, and I mean BIG plans for our new chicken palace that we will construct this winter. Why winter? Well we want it to sit halfway in the yard and halfway in the woods behind the house. We are going to build an earth-ship type chicken house (aka coop) that we can walk around in, and have plenty of fenced in areas (grassy and wooded) for the chickens to roam about in. This being the case we need to wait until the small undergrowth has gone dormant for the winter so we can tell what's-what!
After making sure our feathery friends were happy for almost twenty weeks we received a startling show of song and dance (from the girls) and a present of two lovely eggs! To be honest it was weird to eat the first few eggs, but now we recognize them as a gift from the animals we love. We feed our birds a mixture of store bought feed, with wild bird seeds, flax seeds, and garlic powder once a day; and they wouldn't be able to claim they are spoiled if we didn't give them treats (veggies, clover, they absolutely love watermelon) every evening before they tuck themselves in to bed at night!
We are very fortunate that we ended up with roosters, although in the beginning we said "absolutely no boys allowed"! The universe begged to differ, and now we can expand our flock!
We brought home our teeny tiny 6 week old kitten Judzia (yes she is named after the one and only Judzia Dax from Deep Space Nine) a few weeks early and I ended up having to bottle feed her. At one point we really didn't think she was going to make it, but we pulled through together!
The garden...
So... we live in North Carolina, and this summer we had slight drought in the beginning of the summer followed by a month long streak of continuous rain which broke records for our area. Our garden stayed drenched, many farmers in our area had entire crops go to waste...
We did enjoy a few good looking heirloom non-gmo cucumbers though!
We also enjoyed our very first bowl of non-gmo green beans!
The bits and pieces of the garden that didn't quite make it were a well received treat for the chickens and I swear they smiled when we almost filled their entire coop with Lima bean stalks. They scratched and played in the vines for days!
Some plants survived the wet summer, the basil and fennel are still growing and like I mentioned earlier it's almost halloween! We also have tomatoes that are still growing, there are several varieties including: Purple Cherokee, Roma, Cherry, Grape, and regular red's. They are all heirloom and non-gmo as are all of the seeds we plant!
We tore all of the sad plants out of the garden and re-seeded the beds with a fall crop of carrots, cabbage, lettuce, onions, and we were hoping we may be able to grow some broccoli... but I think the broccoli prefers the warm temperatures of the late spring/ early summer.
We plan on building some indoor greenhouses for our basement, so we can grow certain crops year round and of course get our seedlings to a head start at the beginning of next year..
..oh so many plans..
The husband and I have also been "making over" the basement as an apartment. This has taken a lot of patience but we really enjoy our space down here! We have a lot of work left to do but so far we have a bedroom, living room, laundry area, I have an office (which includes a custom built desk under the stairs), greenhouse space, and the husband has his own work room! We decided to give up apartment living and go into the purchase of a home with my mother and nine year old brother so they live upstairs and we get the basement. Don't worry... when the renovations are complete I will post pictures... plenty of pictures.
So all in all our first summer as homesteaders was successful, we lived, learned, laughed, and loved all while building new dreams and plans for seasons to come! I hope to be able to blog more here, and keep you all up to date with projects inside and outside of the home! Thanks for reading!!
-The Winters =]
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