This Week | August 19-25

At the end of summer time seems to move faster and faster as we head towards September. It’s kind of like our new year around here, since my husband is a teacher the hustle and bustle of Fall beginning is imminent already as he heads in daily to work on his classroom and tends to everything else in the evening, meanwhile after 6 weeks of summer bliss and two sets of hands, I’m back to solo daytime parenting and exhausted.

This weeks post will likely end up having a sombre attitude. If you follow me on Instagram you will know, I am super bummed that yesterday morning, August 25th, we received the first frost. So not only is Fall rapidly closing in on us here in Alberta, but so is Winter it seems.

We’ve been feeling that kind of, it might be an early winter feeling for a few days, but we did not expect to lose parts of our garden overnight to an AUGUST frost. You truly do never know what is going to happen here.

What’s STILL growing

When I looked out on Saturday afternoon and saw brown and crispy basil, I could have cried. The Bee had brought in a nasturtium leaf in a light frost early in the morning, but we didn’t think much of it. As my gaze continued around the garden, the squash, the cucumbers, pumpkins, some tomatoes, tomatillos, and zucchini, plus much of the flowers, had met the same fate. Shrivelled up leaves, and browning stalks, while this isn’t devastating in the least as I cannot imagine having a full crop or relied upon harvest die like this, it sure felt devastating.

But, there are still things growing, looking to the brassicas, and strawberries, artichokes and a giant kale plant, they are still there, seemingly unharmed, ready to be picked at soon. So it’s not all bad, but I just could not believe my eyes and I truly cannot imagine how this would impact someone who’s livelihood depended on this.

This really hits home on how difficult homesteading can be. We are nowhere near living entirely off our land and maybe we never will be, but that is the dream. If something like this happens, so unexpected and we were so unprepared for it, what can you do? Nothing really.

Chicken Story

We have a few roosters that are going to meet the soup pot before Fall really gets going, because a) they are crowing all the time and b) I hate roosters, which you know. This week our one who thinks he’s cock of the walk (but everyone knows he’s not as even the hens will peck him into place) has been getting a little too frisky and also mean with the ladies and we do not like it. He was getting so bad, he had to have a little time out in the box! After a day in there he’s still not quite learned his lesson, but boy is he scared of us now.

As our house gears up for fall schedules and begins to also wind down into cozy sweaters, furnaces kicking on, and hot beverages, I can’t say I’m not excited. I do love the summer but the fall and winter aren’t that bad either. I’m writing this with wool sweater on and pumpkin spice tea in hand so really, I’m ready. If only winter didn’t get so cold and the garden could last a little longer. I’m hoping to work on an indoor greens garden over this winter, so we can have a little bit of summer with us all year round.

This Week | Aug 5-11

I’m really beginning to understand the concept of working from sunup to sundown. When there are things to do and harvest and plant and work on, holy cow! We cannot get it all done some days! Also, I can’t even figure out what day it is, which is why this is coming at you on a Monday evening or Tuesday morning! Here is a very brief update from us this week, but mostly just pictures of my favorite things going on

What’s growing

This week we found some very exciting things! It was a super chilly weekend, but I was okay with that because there were no wasps and we got a ton of rain. Thank goodness! So we found a few surprises, some very tiny tiny pumpkins growing on the ends of the vines, a butternut squash plant in the cucumbers (I really do not have any clue how this ended up here. whoops) and more delicious strawberries making their debut. Looks like we have an early and late variety so that is very exciting! 

The Bee also finished up the herb spiral and I love it being at the bottom of the steps into the garden! 

The Chicken Coop

This week the chicken coop is finito! And I really think the toddler wants to live here, possibly the little man too. He keeps trying to climb the fence.

This coop is massive compared to old one and while I will miss looking (staring more like it) out the kitchen window and seeing chickens mucking about, I am so excited about this space. I will definitely be doing a full blog post on this, maybe even a video! And I really hope our chickens learn to love this giant space, they have 10 new chicken friends to help fill it up too!

Okay, that’s it from me this week, because after a night of harvest and prepping since my toddler actually went to bed on time, I’m wiped! Time for some of my apple peel tea (a blog post coming for that too I think) and bedtime, before we are back at it tomorrow!

This Week July 15-21

While one can tend to worry about the garden and acreage constantly while gone on vacation, luckily I didn’t’ have to worry one bit. We got back this week from a mom and kiddos solo trip, while the hubs stayed home to get things done. So what a treat to come home to all the things going on this week! I don’t even know if I kept up with it all. 

What’s growing

It seems like come mid July, everything is growing! We’ve forgotten about the many things that didn’t work and when I look at my window I can’t help but be happy. Even if it is chaos. We got some really great harvests this week, the first cucumber and zucchini, which means we will now be buried in a mountain of zucchini from here on out. I can already see about 5 almost ready on the plant, so while the first one is exciting there’s plenty more zucchini coming our way. I’m really glad we didn’t plant those SIX plants I originally suggested. Two will be plenty!

The first red of a tomato has been spotted on my sons darling little garden in the Earth Boxes, but these tomato plants this year were seriously stunted somewhere along the way, so they all look a little ridiculous and we will not be getting much fruit off them unfortunately.

We also have our first (and only) broccoli head coming up! And I’m quite proud I’ve been able to finally pull out some actual salad turnips! I replanted these at least 3 times, and finally we had some yield. They were worth it and so yummy!

We also may have underestimated the size of our pollinators and companion flowers just a wee bit. The borage is blooming and it’s beautiful, but not to self, do not put right in front of the teeny tiny cherry tomato plants next year, though hopefully the tomatoes next year will grow a bit larger.

Everything feels like it’s growing and producing and it’s so lovely. There’s a few spots ready for some fall harvest, but I’m not sure what to do yet. This spot here has been empty all summer, I’m thinking of just throwing some carrots in there to see what will happen since we will only have a handful from the 6 rows I planted. Ideas on what to plant here will be welcomed!

As well as the peas are almost finished and I’m thinking if I pull them I can maybe add some more lettuce, turnips, radishes maybe since those didn’t work out either. But it hurts just a little to pull out full grown plants mid summer!

 

Mom life

As I mentioned I drove my kids solo to Vancouver for the week while my super hubs stayed home and actually spent a decent chunk of the time if not all of it on our brand new chicken coop!

This week we’ve been trying to get back into home mode so this blog post is a little sparse on the details, because I just haven’t had time to do anything it feels, besides wrangling two toddlers into getting back into a bit of a routine. But this evening before putting the oldest little dude to bed, I took him outside to check out the coop and all dad has done. He immediately decided that he was a chicken, began crowing endlessly and that he will live in the coop. I looked at my husband and said “this would make a pretty nice kid coop tiny house” followed by this kiddo refusing to leave… so we may have to reconsider this coop now, can kids just live full time outside?

Chicken-y story

Here is where I’ll just post a bunch of photos of the new coop. I will definitely be doing a solo post on this later as we are so excited and the hubs is so proud of this work, but check it out!

We are going from a what we thought would be totally fine 4×4 chicken coop, to a 8×12 coop, that means we can have nearly 20 chickens now if we wanted! We thought the tiny coop would be just fine forever, perfect for 4-6 hens and that’s all we’d ever need. Well, chicken math. That’s all.

 

Something random

This week I’m trying to learn to live with wasps. I downright am terrified of them, but the more I see them buzzing about our garden, the more I learn that by having pollinators in the garden it’s significantly helping everything. I try my best to now flee in terror, nor get in their way too much. But with small kiddos around it just makes me a huge worry wart and we are trying to respect them a bit more than fear them around here.

 

a yummy nasturtium salad for my mom’s birthday this weekend filled with only garden foods!

 

 

This Week – July 1-7

Only week two and already a day late. Can I blame a newly walking toddler and just general nutty madness over here? Sure? Okay!

But here’s the weekly scoop over at our little backyard farm.

What’s growing (or not)

Walking through the garden beginning of July is pretty exciting. We happily picked bowls of strawberries this week, along with peas every night for dinner. The peas were actually getting a little unruly, thank you zip ties. Though, it looks like they are coming to an end so we have the decision now either to pull and plant again for a little fall harvest, or leave them just to be tied to the trellis. It’s so hard to pull something even when it’s not bearing anything to harvest! We spied some pretty yellow flowers on our cucumber plants, which I am so excited about! This year one of my wishes was some garden fresh cucumbers would actually work, looks like it might come true! As well, all our pretty (and random but purposeful) flowers we decided to plant like borage, marigolds, and calendula along with a ton of pansies are making their debut along the sides of the beds. Making for an even prettier garden.

covering up those eggplants since they are still so little!

As always, something is NOT growing. The kale we started died so I attempted some more from a local greenhouse, but that’s not looking so hot either. With a few empty spots in the beds it’s time to decide what to fill them with for fall harvest. Beets? Carrots? More kale or cabbage that never worked? What would you pick?

Mom Life

Little guy has been super interested in his little garden we made for him out of the Earth Boxes. He keeps reminding me every day that the tomatoes are still green, we can’t eat them. Yet, he’s also an almost 3 year old and some of his more stinker-y days, he just decides he’s going to eat whatever the heck he wants. Hopefully cabbage leaves go down easy in a toddler belly. Our other little just started walking which is a welcome change, but it’s going to have me running two different directions I can tell!

Small chicken story

The little chickens aren’t so little anymore! Some are even rivaling the size of our current gals. Since they are a bit of a barnyard mix we aren’t exactly sure what they are, but when we bought them she said likely they all have at least a little Orpington in them, known to get a bit bigger. This will come in handy if our guesses on roosters are correct… currently we think out of 6, 4 are roosters. How many facepalms can one mom do in a week?!

Something random

Have you ever planted seeds and not labelled them? That’s my style, and even though I take pics of the packages or label them somehow in my… super put together brain. I always forget what is where. The most hilarious part of this week is me, over here sitting waiting for beautiful broccoli to just start flourishing. When talking with the hubs he says, no all the broccoli died. I insisted that this plant is BROCCOLI. He is a much better labeler than I, as he reached down and pointed to the DWARF GREEN KALE label he made for this plant I’ve been so desperately watching to fend off bugs for broccoli. So, now we just have some out of control kale that I’ve got to do something with, maybe if I wish really hard it will turn into broccoli? One can dream!

 

-Liz 

This week – June 24-30

How is it already the end of June!? This past week I said I would attempt a more regular and hopefully easier format for this blog with a weekly update, I still have so many posts on the back burner or written and just need a re-read so watch out for those too, but for now here is what I’m hoping will help me become a better and more regular blogger, and still let you in on some fun around this backyard farm.

The weekly update will hopefully go something like this
What’s growing (or not)
Small mom story
Small garden/chicken/farm-y story
Something random

What’s growing?

LOTS! End of June is where things seem to slow down as far as the rush of garden work and planting, seeding, saving things from dying goes and now we can get into some harvest and, well still saving things from dying. We’ve harvested our first fruits from the haskaps and the strawberries, as well as been able to pop a snap pea in our mouths each day when we tour the garden. Things that are looking promising are the tomato plants, though for some reason they all decided to stop growing before flowering this year, it’s strange. Our squash, an August full of zucchini will come all too fast, and the potatoes have just taken off! It’s like a forest!

Mom Life

As you know, I’m a stay at home mom to two fantastic little boys. My little O is quite the garden lover, when he feels like it. This year he’s ever so proud to be able to harvest a few things on his own, grab a lettuce leaf, or eat his favorites – the berries. I don’t have any particularly funny stories for this week, but I do love our sweet morning walks usually in PJ’s through the garden as my other little guy sleeps, where we check out all the plants, water, and usually have a snack or two (or 10)

Garden Life

I say it to myself over and over that I truly believe at least 30% of the garden will fail. Now this could be very small parts of your garden when you have a backyard plot or huge parts when you have tons of bushes, trees, and more. In any case, it feels awful but knowing it can happen and at least trying to prevent the failures is the battle I suppose. This week we dealt with three pretty detrimental bugs in the garden. Upon walking out one evening just to check on things, I found Spittlebugs on the strawberries (you know when you see that weird foam on plants, yea… them) A slug on the lettuce and potato beetles. Oh my! It was quite the evening on spraying down plants and squishing those nasty buggers looking to feast on our plants. We try as much as possible to use no chemical sprays or insecticides, so I was lucky with a few DIY tactics, and mostly squishing these bugs seem to have been left at bay…. For now. I’ve also been breaking up tiny rooster fights in the brooder, oh geez what a life! But those little pullets are out in the chicken run now and they’ve been making their way cautiously out and about, doing a little bit of co mingling with our older hens. They grow up so fast!

Random Fact of the Week

I’m not really sure what to write in this part of my post, so it may not always show up. But since this is my inaugural weekly update I figured I should challenge myself to include it. Soooo… Did you know that there are many fantastic u-picks around Edmonton area? This week we went and picked Haskap berries, sometimes known as a honeyberry, which are becoming more popular as u-picks around the town. Our favorite to visit is Prairie Berry Farm just east of Edmonton on Hwy 14! The owners are fantastic and while they mostly have a huge Saskatoon berry orchard, they have the lovely haskap bushes as well. These berries are so unique and yummy! If you can’t find a u-pick try and find some at a local market, because they are tart and juicy, we love them plain but they make a fantastic jam for all those yummy breakfast treats!

I hope you continue to stick around for my weekly update, I would love your suggestions on if you like the format? what you want to hear about or see?Or anything you’d like to leave in the comments, please do!

“We think we are nurturing our garden, but of course it’s the gardening nurturing us”
-Jenny Uglow

Doing it All

Do you ever feel the excitement of being over ambitious, only to have it bite you in the butt later on? A garden can most definitely do this to you.

In the winter, when the ground was quiet and the world was white, we planned and planned, went over every detail, found space for everything we wanted to do. We used the wonderful GrowVeg to create a massive garden on the computer and it was beautiful! Now, it’s almost July things are growing and things are also not growing and the list of forgotten things is long. Beds were mixed up in the rush to plant seeds, things that were started, died on the deck in the May +30 degree heat, and we had a whole 2 garden beds demolished by bugs no matter how hard we tried to beat them. But when I turned to the hubs and said with a sigh “Well, you can’t do it all I guess” we both signed and agreed, this is okay.

It’s disappointing, but also relieving to utter those words. You truly can’t do it all. Over the past year we’ve been learning to live slow and simple and the garden should be no different. So we didn’t get to plant sunflowers this year because we just plain forgot, chalk that up to two toddlers running amuck and not enough hours in a day to get it all done. We do need to sleep I suppose. We will miss out on some favourites, but it will all be okay and we can plan for them again next year.

It’s still inspiring and uplifting to look around and see the things that are working out. The garden is no easy job, we knew that but maybe truly didn’t understand the scale of it with two small kiddos, and we needed to reframe the plan from time to time. I know there will absolutely be plentiful harvest in the coming weeks, and that is so exciting.

And speaking on you can’t do it all, well as you can tell this blogs posts are VERY few and far between, so I’ve sat with my thoughts about it and I want to do it so badly, I want to have the time (and brain power) to craft perfect posts about interesting topics to share with you. Well, that’s clearly not happening, but this isn’t a sad story! I want to continue to post on here, so like the garden plan, it’s time to reframe.

I follow a wonderful blogger, homesteader, and fellow Instagramer, Ross Roost, and I absolutely love her Week’s Peepin. (not to mention her blog and podcast are also my faves!) This is what I’m going to try to adopt, for now, until the posts roll into my head more often, or I feel like I have time to edit my backlog of posts already written. Just a weekly “what’s going on” post. A few photos, maybe a story or two, and just to keep you in the loop on our backyard farm. With rabbits, and chickens, and plants (oh my) life is busy, but writing about it is too much fun to give up.

I hope you’ll enjoy some (hopefully) more frequent posts about life here, if you want to keep up just pop onto that subscribe button and you’ll get the post via email, even easier! But I know we all get a ton of emails, so I hope if that’s not for you, you just check back when you can.  

Home Grown Microgreens!

It’s a sunny March day here in Alberta, Canada and I can just feel it, spring is coming. No matter what the naysayers of Alberta say, once March comes and a few warm-ish days arrive, I know that things are on the up and no one can bring me down from that! (Not even the fact that it’s still -10 and the 20+cm of snow from the weekend can bring me down!)

Before we head into spring though, I wanted write a post a little bit on indoor gardening, while the snow still flies. My husband, the Bee, he’s a true gem. He doesn’t like to call himself a handyman at all, even though I’d think he’s 100% a handyman. He adds so much to our home and life with just a few skills and a lot of Youtube and research, that would otherwise cost us so much. Last year, we had a lovely little makeshift spot for our seed starting, and while it was great, he needed to change it up this year from a 1 layer, 1-2 tray holding light deck, to a two (potentially three) story Seed Starting Sanctuary (as he calls it, it should be noted it started out as the Seed Palace, but a lovely friend pointed out it needed some alliteration to truly make it geeky, I mean ring, so now we have the SSS)

January is a little too early to start seeds even in Alberta, but I was dying to test it out. So, we pulled out the packs of Mumm’s Sprouts seeds from long ago when I used to do these in a jar in our kitchen and it was always a mess because I would forget about them and they wouldn’t work or go mouldy, but with lights not only could we do sprouts, we could harness the amazing benefits of microgreens!

We know I have a few goals for this year, one being getting my kids super involved this gardening season, no matter how much my perfectionist self want to take over. So naturally, little O wanted to help and I was thrilled, because after the fact, I found him snacking on sprouts all the time! Seriously, I had a bowl on the kitchen table and at one point I caught him on top of the table, picking out sprouts from his mini-garden, dirt and all! But a little dirt doesn’t hurt a kids immune system I suppose.

So here is how everything went down for our first run at home grown microgreens.

We germinated our seeds upstairs in the natural light on the kitchen table, the sun beams in our windows and this was the warmest and funnest spot to watch them being and learn fancy words for a 2 year old, like germinate. Once our little guys were popping through we took them down in the SSS under the lights and waited for the magic to happen.

Within a 1-2 days we had our sprouts, and by day 5 full microgreens.

We did a full tray of Kale (O’s choice) and ¾ tray of sunflower seeds, and a little bit of broccoli.

Our faves were…. All three! I love the sunflower greens for smoothies, since they have a subtle taste. The broccoli and kale are great on top of toast, eggs, potatoes… anything! But the little guys loved the teeny tiny leaves on the broccoli and kale so much, he just couldn’t stop staring and snacking on them!  

A few things we learned:

-we need a tiny indoor watering can or something? (Ideas anyone?) I had a makeshift one where I stole one of the kids bath toys and filled up a giant water bottle or kept running up and down the stairs, no sink near the SSS sadly.

-The greens only lasted about 3-5 days before they got bitter, they weren’t inedible but they just weren’t the same. Luckily, it was a set of super cold days and the chickens really enjoyed the treat of some greens and dirt to scratch around in. 

-2 seeding trays at a time was way too much for us, I couldn’t keep up, so a little succession would have been better. (Or what I’m trying right now, which is a small salad box in the window. Fingers crossed that works out, hopefully more on that later.)

Growing your own sprouts or  microgreens at home is even easier than this! All you need is a sunny spot or a place on your counter for a small box or a sprouting jar and you’re set. I believe the benefits and the fun of growing something for yourself are all around wins. Do you have anything you love to grow inside? Favorite sprouts? I’d love to hear from you! 

When life gives you tomatoes…

This summer I was excited about preserving, but with a 2.5 month old, well you can imagine most of it did not in fact get done. Thank goodness for a massive deep freeze, as that’s where mostly everything landed this year.

One trait about me, that I’m sure some of you must share, is that I’m notorious for planning really well but then not great at the follow through. Today’s post comes at you from that exact place. As I planned a delish meal plan for this week, thinking about all the yummy treats awaiting us in the freezer, meats to be taken out, and then promptly forgot to take out anything this morning for the yummy supper I was telling my toddler all about.

So as I grabbed the tomatoes from downstairs, gleaming at their beautiful red skin, perfectly preserved by the freezer and then began searching how to turn these frozen tomatoes, which I’ve heard is actually great because the skins fall right off upon thawing, into the sauce for tonight’s dinner. I did NOT order any from the grocery store purely based on the fact I have SO MANY TOMATOES in my freezer, so I needed to turn this into sauce! I began to realize. “Oh no, this is not going to happen, a few hours to thaw… at least 3-4 hours to simmer What the heck am I going to do?” No back up plan for dinner either…

Enter, my instant pot.

I love this thing. I frequently tell the Bee (who is impartial to our IP) that at least it makes food, even if it’s not the best food… it’s food on the table and with two small kids sometimes that’s all that matter. But sometimes in a pinch like this it’s also (maybe) super handy. I was reading this lovely post from Making Our Sustainable life about her frozen tomatoes into sauce and thought “Awesome! This is what I’m going to do” oh wait… 5 hours to simmer. Looks at clock… it’s already 1:15pm… Great.

I thought to myself… I can probably thaw these in the instant pot, right? So after a quick google search and really just flying by the seat of my pants I decided, yea why not!

I popped the tomatoes into the pot, (pre washed before frozen) added 1 cup of water and set for 10 mins and crossed my fingers.

While I was hoping this would be a glorious blog post about how well that worked out, it did not. I knew as soon as the pot started to pressurize, they are already thawing and ten mins is going to be way too long.

Here they are post pressure cooker in a wrinkly, bubbly mess. What was I to do, this clearly had not worked out as i had intended, but why not continue to throw caution to the wind and just see what I could make of it.

With a variety of sieves and kitchen utensils, I actually did salvage them into some kind of sauce with very little skin mixed in. It seemed thick enough once I had got it altogether so I didn’t even bother to reduce and I also ended up with a great tomato vegetable broth for future use this week. And in the end, my lasagna soup worked out and it was a major hit, for me and my 7 month old… not so much my toddler but I suppose tonight was noodle hating night.

I’m not really sure what I would do differently, maybe not put it on for so long or maybe just actually think in advance and let them thaw out naturally. So really, this post is not helpful at all… but I did write it and post it and take pictures for it all in once day, so I’m patting myself on the back!

If you have any quick fix sauce making tips, let me know! As 2018 is all about better preserving, while we pick the garden now, I think about next fall when the harvest rolls in and I need to kick my butt into high gear to save all that wonderful food!

 

The Garden

The Garden

Winter has been rough so far this year and it’s pretty depressing to look out at once used to be a lush, green, amazing garden space is now a white and brown mess.

So let’s go back to those summer days, because we can all use a little summer love especially as we are in the thick of winter can’t we?

This year our garden looked awesome, I have no idea what other word to use, I’ll probably say it every year, because I am super impressed with what we were able to do with everything that’s going on in this house right now! We ended up having 7 total garden boxes (5 large and two small), three green boxes on our deck, (which didn’t really work) and five crops in the ground (also, didn’t really work) so here’s what we loved, and didn’t love about it.

 

The best thing we decided to do out of everything was purchase these boxes from Costco  at the beginning of the season. The Bee was going to make our garden boxes with wood, but with the little time he already had and other things on the go, when we saw these pop up to be on sale in the catalog we decided to give them a go instead. They worked out wonderfully! I loved the aesthetic of them and you could easily turn them into 4×12 boxes instead of two 4×4’s. We ordered them online, they arrived at our door shortly after, and by May they were set up to be planted in. Easy peasy!

What we planted.

We started with 5 boxes this year and plan to maybe add more of these this Spring as well. This year we really had no idea a) what we were doing and b) what to expect. So we thought we would try some plants in the boxes and some crops in the ground to see what would happen.

In boxes:

Greens -lettuce, kale, spinach, swiss chard
Eggplant*
Squash – zucchini mix, butternut*
Peppers
Peas and Beans*
Brussel Sprouts*
More spinach
Tomatoes
Asparagus
Strawberries
Radishes
More Spinach… we had a lot of spinach.
Cucumbers* and Cucamelons*
Some random things like Marigolds, Dalphenia, and Basil

 

In our rock solid ground (eye roll)

Beets
Carrots and Onions*
Pumpkins*
Potatoes*
Corn
Sunflowers

The * denotes the many things that of course didn’t work. But I guess that’s the way it goes!

I loved this garden, I loved looking out at it, I loved seeing my little guy run through it to pick and demolish strawberries, and as much as I hated them I also loved scaring the deer away from it..And the birds…

What we didn’t really love.

The watering, so much watering. Watering any garden sucks, but we didn’t have our rain barrels set up this year so we missed out on a lot of free water. Dragging the hose around the beds was not ideal and it also meant we were filling up our cistern more than usual. Now, we did let Mother Nature really take control on the majority of the watering, but it was still a pain. Hoping for a drip system at some point and taking advantage of the summer storms with free rain.

What we hope for 2018.

You may think that while snow lies on the ground there is lots of time to think about the garden, but nope! Ours is mostly planned (I’m sure there will be lots of tweaking yet) our seed starting sanctuary (as the Bee calls it) is set up in the basement, and we cannot wait to get going on things in the next month or so. My hope for this years garden is it will flourish just as this one did but more honed in on what we want to grow, eat, and preserve. I need to really learn about the art of preservation this summer before Fall so that we can keep these lovely garden goodies for winter eating all next year. That’s my biggest goal coming up.

Even though it was a learning curve and many things did not work at all, or a deer came by and ate literally all our strawberry flowers and bean flowers in one night or the fact that we had so many beets, heads of lettuce, zucchini or swiss chard we could barely give them away, but not one butternut squash ended up working. The value placed in learning all this, trying to do better this year, and being excited about what each and every day would bring was amazing.

Do you have a garden, big or small? I’d love to hear your favorite parts too!

Get it done!

 

To say life with children is tiring is an understatement. Solidarity to all my sleepy mamas out there who are covered in spit up and goodness knows what other sticky substances on their yoga pants and that messy hair bun is flopping fast. That’s pretty much me in a nutshell most days.

So let’s add up what’s going on around here:

A two year old
A baby
8 7 chickens (sadly we had to lose one gal before winter as she wasn’t doing so well)
Wintering ALL the garden boxes (and doing things with the food in them… like the 20 tomato plants)
Over 500 sq ft of other garden stuff
Lawn, so much lawn!
Harvest and canning
Dishes, cloth diapers, the usual laundry so we sometimes look clean

Oh and we just decided to potty train too.

Okay okay, of course when any mom lists it’s going to look like a lot (seriously do it, you’ll feel like super mom, and you are!) but how do we actually take of all this stuff!

I joked at the beginning of the summer… Something is not going to make it through the summer this year. Between adding chickens, the garden and a newborn all within weeks of each other, the main thing we couldn’t let die was quite obviously, our new child! Luckily he’s thriving so no worries there, as did most of the other stuff too! But here’s how we divy up things currently

I am lucky to have a stellar husband. The Bee does basically all the outside chores and he even washes the diapers and does most of our laundry. Totally awesome! We split our chores up on a weekly basis now. Daily things like dishes, laundry and diapers are a whoever gets to those first kind of a chore and the rest we try our best to equal out. But what about the “farm” stuff?

Firstly, props to my actual farm mamas out there who run real live business farms. Seriously how do you do it!

We used to have a whoever gets there first system for opening the coop, however thanks to the Bee and his Dad, they made us an ever so fancy automatic opener this summer that opens with the light and closes at bed. What. A. Lifesaver! No more squawking ladies in the AM when we all sleep in a bit and no chilly night time visits to their coop! A post coming on the coop mods soon.

I usually grab the eggs during nap time. Our ladies have a pretty predictable schedule and by noon everyone has laid most of the time. We’ll see when our new little chickies do so, but for now I can easily run out to grab the eggs while the two little snooze. However, currently all the ladies have been freeloading and on egg hiatus… so that chore hasn’t even been a problem lately, but I miss it a ton.

Feeding and watering for them is done every few days by the Bee. I spoil them with kitchen scraps throughout the week. And he has babied our garden all summer too through weeding, planting and re-planting, watering, and we both harvested once an evening or every second night. With that harvest I’ve been doing all the preserving after the little ones hit the hay in the evenings. I cannot wait for a more frequent sleep schedule though so I can feel energized to can even more things we’ve stuffed away in the freezer for the time being.

As for the children, it’s pretty much a split as much as we can gig. Currently the littlest is 100% breastfeeding so he’s taking up a lot of my days and nights. But we divide and conquer to get out of the house, sometimes at breakfast when everyone is up with the sun, or at supper time when this mama is tuckered out and needs the help!

I guess you could say that we are a divide and conquer household as a whole. We don’t follow the whole pink/blue chore system but sometimes it happens that way. Hopefully next summer when littles can frolick more as we work I’ll be out in the muck with him as much as he needs, and he’ll continue to be that amazing husband who cleans our dirty diapers. It’s really a win win all around here and things get done. It’s great!

What do you do to get things done in your home? I’d love to hear!