Homestead pictures... Finally!

The garden.

The peas.
The peas have a fence to vine up as they grow.
We have 2 trees out front that we didn't know what they were. We think, after much research on the internet, that they are some kind of pear tree. Hopefully they are not Bradford pears. We want them to be common pear trees that we can eat the fruit of. See the little pear like fruit starting to take shape?

My garden goodies, this is carrots and turnips, cabbage, and lettuce. The leaves have just started to change shape.
My garden from the front. Every row has it's own plant. The kids helped me make the row markers. We used popsicle sticks and foam sheets and just wrote on them with sharpie markers. They are holding up well.
My tomato sprouts. They have just stated to show through the dirt.
The tomato bed.

The onion bed.And of course our little chicks. Jacob, Lucy (aka Lulu) and Rainbow. The kids named them, can't you tell. They are Golden comets. Jacob, the cockrel will be white as a rooster and the girls will be a copper/penny color as hens. According to my research, these are fast maturing chickens and we should have eggs within 3-4 months. I can't wait. We are starting to plan the coop and will start building that soon. The children are most excited over having the job of collecting the eggs.

We have done a lot around here in the last few weeks. As you can see we have a lot more to do. We only have about 10 weeks to get the coop built. I have been calling all of our family and friends to see if they have any spare scrap wood that we can use to help cut down the cost of building materials. We want to build this as "green" as possible. And let's face it, it doesn't hurt to save a little money either.

I am striving to fill my freezer and pantry with "reserve" food by the end of summer. Also, we want to start a compost pile. We walked the yard this morning to plan where everything will go. We are getting an old moving truck body from my dad for storage. We have been using it at his house for almost a year anyway. He wants to clean up the yard, so he is planning on having it brought to us via tow truck soon. We can really use the storage too. Here is my list of things to do in the next 10 weeks. It looks like a lot, but really some of these things won't take much time to get done.

1. Fill freezer/pantry with reserve food.
2. Build coop for chickens.
3. Get truck body moved here and looking decent. Needs to be painted.
4. Get compost pile started.**DONE!! Yeah!
5. Harvest garden and put up veggies- canning or freezing.
6. Plan the fall garden, get seeds.
7. Have house organized and keep cleaned.
8. Get something done about getting electrical done in kitchen so that I can get a dishwasher installed, finally.
9. Somehow keep my sanity during all of this.
10.rework the family budget- We want to be living on only 70% income by the end of summer. We want to save 30% for future.
11. Change the way we think about money. We want our money to work for us, not us work for our money. If the money we spend doesn't come back to us in one form or another, we won't buy it. (ie: I would rather buy a fruit tree for $15 instead of going to the grocery store and spending $15 on 10 apples. Why do that when you can have all the apples you want from your $15 tree?)
12. Get the list ready for what fruit trees we will be adding to the property this year. Start setting aside money to purchase them.
13. Get rain barrels and have plumbed to water the garden with.
14. Change the way I run our kitchen... (ie: make sure that I keep all food scraps for the compost pile, and not let the children raid the food whenever they want.)

So, as you can see the next 10 weeks or longer will be full of hard work and lots of determination on our part. We (I) want to be as close to self sufficient as we can be by the end of the year. So these next several weeks will mean a lot to that goal.

I would love to know if anyone out there has any other ideas about being more self sufficient on a small scale. I'll keep updating the garden pictures as it grows.

Bless ya'll,
Jamie