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!

When you dedicate a day to processing the summer's finest tomatoes, you're not just chopping veggies—you're pouring your heart and soul...

Happy Labor Day! The weather is teasing us with fall-like temperatures and lower humidity... it might just be fake fall here in Virginia,...

Peter and I make dramatic changes to the garden, which feels like a big loss, but find wins along the way...

“Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food.” — Hippocrates “A sad soul can be just as lethal as a germ.” — John Steinbeck...