The Five Acre Woods

  This summer has been hard for a garden. Extensive heat, and lots of rain.  Seems like everything we were hoping to get big yields of, didn’t produce. No yellow squash, no zukes, no cucumbers (well maybe one or two).  Yesterday I took some of my grandchildren out to the garden to pick peppers. I knew we had some, because I saw them the day before. I know how much the kids like to pick, so I left them. All summer we’ve been checking our greenbeans. Nothing happening there, I had just about give up. Lo and behold, yesterday the plants were loaded. The kids were so excited. Lots of peppers, and greenbeans, a few eggs, and some tomatos….our gathering basket was full, and overflowing.  I had planted both yellow and green beans and they looked beautiful in the bowl. The peppers will be frozen for later use.  I won’t have enough green beans to can, but I am so thankful for what we did get.  I am recording all info about our garden this yr. What worked, how much sun it got, production, ect…hopefully I can learn from it, and our garden next yr will do better. Purchasing bees, and improving our soil in the raised beds are in the works for next spring.  If you garden, leave me a comment about how your garden did this yr.

  With all the trouble we had with our meat chickens during the spring/summer, we ended up only having one to process.  That in itself was a big dissapointment.  When we came across some information about Dorkings (a breed of chicken), we were excited to learn that they are a good meat bird, will go broody and raise their own chicks, and are friendly.  We put an order in for 20 chicks and also ordered 2 Blue Swedish ducklings for my daughter.  Weeks went by, and no word from company.  We called and still no response, we began to worry if we’d been had!!!  Yesterday Bob sent another e-mail, and we got our response quickly. Due to a death in the family, they had been unable to tend to business. So sorry for their loss, and relieved to get a response.  They will not have  ducklings at all, perhaps til spring.  They cannot fill our order of chicks until late Oct. That is too late for us, as it will be too cold to move them outdoors when they are feathered out.  Keeping chicks inside that are that big is not an option for us, so we had to cancel our order. I am dissapointed to say the least….no meat birds for us until spring.  We had hopes of having fresh chicken throughout the winter.  Our garden did not do well, now no meat birds.  We also are not sure if our goat is pregnant.  She does not look that big, and since this is our first go at raising a goats, we have much to learn.  Time to dig out the books.  Homesteading is hard work, and sometimes not so good results, sometimes no results. Again, looking back to a time when homesteading was a way of life for some folks, I am not sure how they did it….I guess sometimes they didn’t!!  If we had to survive on what our land produced, we’d be eating lots of tomatos, peppers and eggs, a few green beans, very few cucumbers. Very thankful we can rely on stores until we get this way of life down.  We are still considering a pig to raise for the winter/spring, so we’ll see how that goes.