The White Family Homesteaders

My kitchen table is being swallowed up by zucchini. I was about to drag it all to work and leave it with a free sign on it, I didn't know what to do with it. Then someone mentioned that I could shred it and freeze it for some zucchini bread down the road. I didn't know there was such an easy way to preserve it. I was just itching to get it done and stored but I had to wait a few days. I pulled out my food processor which has been putting in some overtime lately. Before this summer I maybe used it a handful of times. I had to locate all the parts so I could use it for shredding. I had to hunt down the manual to figure out how to work it, but I've got it now. The one thing I knew I wanted to do was save the seeds for next year's garden so I let some zucchini grow and grow and grow some more.  The result was enormous zucchini, there were two that were almost as long as the depth of my stove. I halved the zucchini so I could scoop out the guts and then cut it up f...

Our Lil boy shared his cold with us so we were laid up on the couch for about a week. While we were under the weather we didn't get out to the garden like we should have. Some how the pesky deer knew our defenses were down and snuck into the garden. My heart shattered when I saw half eaten zucchini laying on the ground and my tomato plants chomped on.  I'm about to go all World War III on their asses.  Papa put up some more wire where the fencing wasn't as tall. One of our friends also passed on an article about sprinkling Irish spring around the perimeter. So I picked some up and grated some with a potato peeler. I threw it out along the fence line but our oh so helpful boxer decided that it looked delectable and cleaned some of it up. Strong scented Irish Spring My poor defenseless jalapeño plants didn't see those deer coming their way and got a bit of a trim job. I had to barricade everything vulnerable as best as I could with bits and pieces of chicken wir...

We've been enjoying our delicious rewards from our garden.  It's hard to explain the feeling you get when you feed your family food you've grown.  To know we started all of our plants from seed and have taken care of them and they've grown into these beautiful plants and are now providing us with food makes me a bit speechless.  It's pretty awesome to provide our lil farmer boy with food we've grown and he's having a blast helping us.  Going out every day to the garden and finding a new surprise, whether it's finding something new producing or just seeing lil man get so excited about it warms my heart so much. The other night I prepared dinner from a Rachael Ray recipe I've been using and adjusted it by adding more veggies.  Our broccoli was ready and used some our endless supply of zucchini, it was pretty delicious, the boys devoured it.  To use up more of the pile of zucchini we have I spent the day with my sis baking zucchini bread.  We needed s...

We are extremely happy with how the garden is doing. Plants are producing vegetables, flowers are blooming and we have a big grin on our face.  Our peas are producing a lot and so are the zucchini plants.  Little farmer boy is in love with the peas and picks at least two every time we go to the garden to nibble on.  One of the many sunflowers in the garden, I'm in love with them. The zucchini row growing steady. Our goal this summer is to can more of our fortunes from our garden along with some delicious pickens from local farms.  Last summer we canned some peach jam and we wanted to try strawberry jam this year.  We found a recipe from Certo and picked up some strawberries and had a day of canning jam.  Luckily we did it on a day that wasn't in the 90s, cause boy was our kitchen hot.  There were a few incidents of burning our   finger tips but nothing too serious. Our other challenge was our two year old wanting our attention and ...

I'm trying to catch up on here, we've been so busy lately.  We get going on the homestead with chores for days then we have to go back to the real world of our actual paying jobs and then next thing I know it's a new week.  Last week we did some much needed maintenance on the homestead of trimming up some trees. That was an all week project with a little work on the garden. We have at least a handful of trees that are in need of some desperate trimming. We got to two of them and the process is still continuing. We still need to take what we trimmed off to a local tree limb drop off site. It's amazing how much better and happier the trees look.  Besides trimming them up for landscaping reasons we also did it to discourage the deer from hanging out under them. We don't want them getting comfortable on our property close to our garden. The first tree was pretty simple of just cutting limbs down. The second tree was more challenging, it didn't want to let go...