As a firstborn, with tendencies towards tenacity, just-do-it-ed-ness, and people-pleasing, I love these two little words... good work We are all called to some kind of work: in the home, out of the home, in our families, with our friends, in our communities, in an office, in the quiet hours of a night shift, or in the bright hours of a day job that keeps you outside no matter the weather. My thoughts are not meant to be a megaphone-shouting match to tell anybody what their ca

Last fall, Peter and I had a brilliant idea: why not bring chickens into our lives come the spring of 2026? Clearly, nothing says "perfect timing" like juggling full-time jobs in Washington, D.C., living in a suburban townhouse during the week, and escaping to our homestead on the weekends. Who needs rest when you can have chickens? We hatched a plan to spice up our weekend warrior homestead with some feathery friends. Our mission: find gadgets and gizmos to automate chicken

Not far down this homesteading path one realizes that poo is everywhere. But poop is sort of the point. Wait, what...? Well, on our little postage-stamp-of-a-farm, whether it's chicken, duck, rabbit, worm, black soldier fly, and hopefully someday goat and pig, the waste is an ever-present reality, and benefit, of raising animals. It's actually key to the regenerative farming cycle. There are countless ways to do this, but the goal is always the same--using plants, animals,

Meet Ruth, my grandma (my mom's mom), and oh my, was she a lovely woman in all the ways a wife, mother, grandmother, and friend can be lovely. Ruth was a schoolteacher and loved her family and community well. She kept charge of her home in a gentle, orderly, and masterful way, ensuring everything was in its place and ready for company at a moment's notice. Ruth was an excellent cook and cookie maker and had funny rules about bread bags being cut down so there were no long pla

Peter and I knew that this was the year of the chickens for our little homestead. We planned and prepared over the winter and early spring, ordering the baby chicks, building the coop and run, and learning all that we could... except we thought we could "bend the rules" of everything we were learning to push the boundaries of what it looks like as part-time homesteaders to add chickens to the mix. Looking back and knowing what we know now, it was a silly notion to think we co

A long overdue tour of everything going on at the homestead...Peter and I have been working hard and expanding gardens and adding new animals to the farm.

Today the Japanese beetles showed up. This year we are slightly more ready than last year, and we actually hired 4 farm employees that will be here in a little over a week. We planted "trap crops" to attract the beetles away from the crops we want to protect...amaranth and lots of zinnias. Problem - trap crops are not in full bloom yet, so not trapping anything. I caught a bunch to try to feed them to our chickens. The chicks were interested, but the beetles' crunchy texture

Meet our chickens by name...also confession, it is really hard to tell Astralorps and Barred Rock baby chicks apart for me as a newbie...so inadvertently family and friends named chickens not necessarily according to the original assignments. But it turns out the names suit each chicken well... Australorps - Ellie, Dessie, Rosa, and Amelia Eggheart Barred Rock - Lafawnda (Napoleon Dynamite favorite), Girl George, Agape, and Pickle Pee (video game character) Brahmas - Kalico,

Sad and good and hard and productive day here on the homestead... As we anticipated, it is possible to lose baby chicks and indeed we did today. This little chicken nugget was one of our mystery birds and never quite got the hang of drinking and eating. We tried to help, but it was very weak and slipped away this morning after a last-ditch effort to revive it. We buried it in our homestead cemetery with our feral cat, Finnbogi and the Bina bees. However, homestead life goes o

I did not begin my day thinking that today was the day I would get the call that our chickens have arrived in NoVA... I received an email that they were at the Minneapolis Airport last night and delivery was set for Friday. Great, we have time to finish getting ready! This morning at work I got another notification that our chickens had arrived at Dulles and delivery was going to be tomorrow (Wednesday). No sweat! Just before lunch, the post office called and said, "we have y

Part-time homesteading and vacations looks an awful lot like more work, but Peter and I are enjoying our highly anticipated spring break week together at the homestead. Today we built a Hugelkultur for our remaining potatoes...we had 50 pounds to plant and ran out of room in the raised beds. So, we have soooo many potatoes and will need volunteers to help us eat them all this fall! BTW, hugelkultur is a form of gardening that Peter stumbled into that uses dead wood (which we

When you are the set designer and stage manager for an upcoming Easter Pageant, one of the unforeseen benefits of said role is being able to rescue foam boards that have been used in productions from days gone by that were headed to the dump (good call Peter!) in order to insulate your chicken coop. If these set pieces could tell the story...they would say how blessed we are at our church to have a music and drama tradition of excellent and creative events that share the Good

Some days are just a mix of really hard and really exciting... Peter and I had to say goodbye to our sweet Finnbogi (the first feral cat that befriended us) today. She showed up at the homestead a few days ago with a severe leg injury. She recently recovered from another severe injury, and we knew she was the outcast amongst the feral cat community and would often show up looking rough around the edges. She is at rest now. We buried her next to the bees. That's the really ha

A sad thing caused my heart to worship and tell God thank you... This weekend we discovered that the rest of our honeybees (Bina, part 2), the remnant who survived the bear attack and graciously welcomed a small wild swarm that a friend gifted us late in a season, died. We suspected something was off as we hadn't seen any activity from the hive even on the slightly warmer days in a couple weeks. What we found when we opened the hive was beautiful comb (mostly empty, but a few

Confession...I almost gave into temptation yesterday. Chicken temptation. The newest Murray McMurray catalog arrived and page after page it showed the loveliest chickens and even some Swedish ducks. I got hung up on the Orpingtons and found myself on their hatchery website with chicks loaded in my basket. The chicken math in my brain was working like this...my sweet Peter is building us a coop that can hold 12-15 chickens, and we only have 9 chicks coming in May, so there is

Not much to say about this other than it is just a part of our fall routine... Join us as we get our garlic planted (in super-speedy fashion) for next year! Our garlic is from Keene Garlic . Great products with great resources for anyone who wants to grow beautiful garlic!