Winter Weekends on the Homestead

Since one of my driving forces in life is always to spend more time outside, living out in the country makes a lot of sense. On these Winter weekends, with camping slowed down and the garden slumbering away, our family spends the days outside working on projects around our place. Sometimes it rains on us, sometimes it’s chilly, but the past couple of weekends have been sunny and mild. We’ve even had some 60 degree days! The kids were out there barefoot on the rope swing most of the time, broken up intermittently by lending us a hand. It felt good to get so much done, and complete all these projects with our hard work and ingenuity being the bulk of the cost. We’re getting to be pros at homesteading on a tight budget.

Sometimes while I’m pushing a wheelbarrow or swinging a shovel, I think about the homesteading movement that occurred during the Great Depression, and all those families who focused their efforts on self sustainable living just to stay afloat. There were those very hardy souls who moved out to wild places much like their homesteading predecessors of the 1800’s, but many just hunkered down and tried to do what they could to feed their families off the land, whether that was a small acreage or a yard in town. Often times I feel like I can really relate to those folks. While the current economic situation isn’t quite as dire as those times, it’s not all that good either, so I am heartened to see people taking up the homesteading movement on their own modern way to create a comfortable life in times of tight resources. Every time I hear about someone putting in raised beds, wildcrafting for edible plants, starting a flock of backyard chickens, canning, or making things by hand, I feel a growing sense of hope. Homesteading is all about using the resources at hand in practical and creative ways. We take the concept of “Reduce, reuse, recycle” to whole new levels.

The past weekend’s projects began with the greenhouse we built last year out of salvaged materials. This structure served us well, but its placement in the chicken pasture to ensure bug control around the perimeter, led to a general state of disrepair. You can read about that project here: The Resourceful Greenhouse. Basically what happened was that the chickens kept all the bugs out, but they broke through the plastic on the door flap and the other end wall, and came in to have wild dust bath parties all Fall and Winter. It looked like the morning after a frat party! It was a terrible mess! We were also having issues with the dogs getting into the chicken field through the gate and eating the table scraps, so we decided to re-do the fencing to keep the greenhouse entrance and a compost area accessible without passing through any gates. This way the chickens could still patrol three sides of the greenhouse, but would stay out of the front door. My husband put in new t-posts so the fence did a little jog and built a new, sturdy gate out of salvaged pallets beside the greenhouse. This should keep the dogs out and the chickens in.

Once that was done, we set to work patching the greenhouse back up. I am sorry to report that the flap-type door did not hold up very well. We made a new frame from some wood we had on hand, secured it on one side with hinges, and re-purposed the last vinyl shower curtain we used before switching to a washable hemp one. We had already used it as a drop cloth for painting, but all it needed to do was let some light through. So, we stapled that on to the new door and the vent window in the back. The back wall was buttoned up with a plywood scrap since we didn’t trust those chickens to not peck through it again. We spread more wood chips on the floor, re-filled the beds with more soil, and we were ready to go for starting seeds in the coming weeks. That structure you see in the middle is the garden-row chicken tractor we built last year. We decided to maximize this new, secure storage space for the time being. Soon enough it will be full of seedlings.

My husband built these compost bins out of some of the pallets to break down yard waste and chicken coop straw. We haven’t been very active composters thus far because our chickens eat all our kitchen and garden scraps. Our yard waste pile was just getting torn down to nothing by the chickens as well because it was in their fenced pasture. Now, with the compost bins outside the chicken area, we should be able to get down to some real composting. I’ll be excited to use it in our garden one of these days.

While pruning roses around the edge of the house, my husband found another Orb Spider egg sac just like the one the kids found out in a patch of wheat this Summer. We made great friends with our garden spiders this past year, and are looking forward to the next generation eating up the mosquitoes and troublesome garden pests. We thought it was quite a fortuitous find.

Our wood chip mulch had taken a beating over the past year, and I realized my mistake in not laying down cardboard first and not piling the chips on thick enough. So, we re-did the entire path around the house with cardboard from the recycling bin behind a local natural foods store and free wood chips delivered by our local utility company. Then I scooped the straw out of the two raised beds where we grew potatoes, and moved the raspberries out of the way so my husband could build a third bed. He did all of them out of some lumber we had on hand, knowing it wouldn’t last forever, but that we could re-do it with cedar or bricks later on. I did have to buy a load of soil to fill the beds, but it will be well worth it to have our rhubarb, asparagus, and strawberries growing where they are not competing with weeds and I am not constantly weeding!

Here are the end results. The entire area is sheet mulched, the raspberries are moved to border the edge of the bamboo fence, and all three raised beds are filled with soil and ready for planting. That area between the berries and the beds is ready to go as the building site for our quail coop. And all this I get to look at out the kitchen window every day. What a view!

With all that construction going on around the chicken yard, we let our flock out to roam under our supervision. Their scratchings in the garden this time of year are more beneficial than anything else, and the only thing we needed to keep them away from were the sheet mulched areas. Chickens do a number on sheet mulching, leaving many holes for grass to pop up through. Little Lucy, our bantam White Crested Black Polish, had a lovely time wandering about the garden eating bugs. She was one happy hen.

As we were working away, I noticed these daffodils popping up through the brown leaves. What a welcome sight it was! The thought of our field dotted in all the bright, cheery daffodils I planted in the Fall was a pleasant end to a long day. I love watching all our hard work and efforts grow!