The White Family Homesteaders

This last Friday I was home relaxing on our front deck drinking wine. Wine has of late became my drink of choice here at the homestead thanks in large to my generous wino friend John. He gives me cases of wine that he grows tired of and being that it's free and quite tasty I have indulged in it quite frequently lately. Any how I had just swallowed the last sip of the bottle I decided to kill all by my lonesome when my dog Tuff let out a wicked growl followed by some genuinely concerned barking. It had just become dark enough to force me to look for a flash light so in my drunken panic I grab a tiny key chain flash light, my pistol and an Axe handle just in case whatever it is needs a good beating. Finally I waddled my dumb drunken stumbling ass down the hill to find Tuff all up in the backside of a good size skunk. One thing about our boxer is he is fearless when it comes to defending what he thinks needs defended. This particular time he was exceptionally tenacious and would not b...

We are getting so close to having the garden all done and planted.  I love gardening but I want to move on to other chores.  Hopefully just one more week of transplanting and the garden will be in.  The cantaloupe seeds I saved and planted have popped out of the ground. I wasn't sure about them but so far it's a success which makes me smile.  The cantaloupe sprouts saying hello. The peas are growing fast, so we put up some T-posts and fencing for a trellis for them to climb up.  The T-posts we already had and the fencing we acquired from family that didn't want it anymore.  I took video to show how we wrapped the fencing onto the posts and I'll be posting that on our you tube channel.  The drip system is all laid out and in place for the most part.  There was an unexpected chore that came up this week. The trellis for the peas.  I was minding my own business doing the dishes the other morning when I realized our water pressure had dwindled...

I hate poison oak I get that stuff about once a month during the summer. Not bad break outs but itchy little rashes. Our Lil man here is at the age where he is walking about our property by himself.  So I decided to do battle with the Grove of poison oak in our back 40. Armed with an Axe a hand saw and a hand powered brush/weed cutter I ventured out. Everything was going well until I cut a thick trunked bush out, that vindictive sucker fell right on top of my head. Well needless to say I freaked out I ran in circles throwing clothes off in a frenzied panic. Then I realized my beautiful homestead wife locked the back door to keep Lil man in the house while I was in the heat of battle. So there I am standing in my chonies in the garage, door locked poison oak seeping into my pores. Luckily my beautiful homestead wife must have heard my panicked frenzy and came to see what was happening. Long story long I washed in dawn soap and only have a little rash behind my right ear.

After hitting the grocery store today for our weekly menu I watered the garden and found some great surprises.  I checked all the newly seeded beds and discovered little green sprouts poking out. Corn popping out. A bunch of broccoli sprouts. Ladybug on flower I planted in the garden. If you look really closely you can see potential lettuce. Kale sprouts that I thought weren't going to sprout.

I posted some pictures this week on our Facebook fan page showing our progress on the garden. If you follow us on Facebook you know there was one small set back, picking seeds up that a little boy got his hands on.  We had sowed spinach, lettuce, kale, and broccoli about a month ago but nothing popped up so I re-sowed them.  I'd sure like to enjoy some leafy greens so I threw in some extra love this time.   I also sowed some melon seeds from our last cantaloupe just to see if anything will come up.  Some other stuff we got in the ground was a mix of squash starts, bush bean seeds and some flower seeds.  I'm wanting a full garden of vegetables with colorful flowers surrounding them.   We split up and did double duties one day this week...I tended to the potato beds by covering the sprouts with a layer of dirt and the hubby cut up some more logs. Wheeling dirt to the potatoes turned out to be more work than I thought and luckily Mr. Homestead helped ...

We had a busy week of planting and finishing up fencing in the garden this last week.  Not sure if I mentioned that the deer ate all our tomatoes for dinner before we put up the sprinkler scarecrow.  It made me so sad, we put so much time and love into growing those plants from seeds.  My hubby keeps reminding me though that gardening is a trial and error process.  We are definitely not professionals but we are constantly learning. Luckily we do know someone who is amazing at gardening and she gave us some of her extra tomato plants she started.  She's a giver and usually gives us some of her starts every year.  She also gave us some more of the plastic raised beds we put in last week. It was time to put transplant some more of our starts into the garden so we loaded up our homestead rig and headed for the garden. I worked on the tomato plants while the hubby worked on the swiss chard, bok choy, brussels sprouts, cauliflower and broccoli.  I k...

So as you can see we've relocated where we blog.  We want to keep everyone updated on what we are doing on the homestead and the last blog site was making it too difficult. Our garden has been keeping us busy the last couple of weeks. We direct sowed our peas, onions, beets, and leafy greens into their appointed rows for this season.  I'm super duper excited to see some of them sprouting from the ground. We transplanted our tomatoes into the garden but unfortunately either the deer or the darn squirrels got their grubby little paws on them.  We are hoping that they grow back soon.  My handy hubby put together a motion activated scarecrow to hopefully keep those critters out of the garden.  Here's a link to our you tube video so you can see it in action  here. Yesterday we had quite a productive day on the homestead.  We transplanted 14 cucumber, 8 zucchini, a few pumpkin and watermelon plants.  To help them get established before any wildlife ...