Homesteader Life

Last night we planted the peas. The sugar snap peas we planted in a double row. Down the center we put up chicken wire for support. The regular peas we planted in one foot and a half wide row. This is an experiment. From what I read using the “Wando” peas this way works well […]

Reclaiming the Orchard
My uncle Bill’s boy is spending the week out at our farm. I’ve taken the opportunity to work the little feller up on the hill in the evenings. We worked on reclaiming the old orchard last night. Wow, what a job. I don’t know when the last time was that anyone even noticed […]

Old Feed Mill
I spent the Lord’s Day at a feed mill. No, no I wasn’t buying feed. Thats were we had our worship service! We are still cleaning up the church from the flood damage. One of our members just happened to own an old feed mill that we could use. We had services […]

Heritage
We are starting to make some progress on the new homestead. We are for the most part treating it as a separate business from the dairy that we run with my folks. I have for a long time been very interested in small scale, sustainable, direct market farming. We have made improvements on the dairy […]

Birds
I like birds. They are neat little creatures. I have, over the years, grown into a bird watcher of sorts. The new homesite is a bird watchers paradise. We put up a couple of different feeders out by the big window in the kitchen. Yesterday morning at breakfast I saw the following group of feathered […]

After all the rain we have been blessed with a spell of warm weather. Hence the grass is greening. The pastures are started to turn from the dead brown color to living green. We have started getting the fence chargers out, replacing lost insulators, charging up 12 volt batteries and such. Soon, very soon we […]

Well, here’s the deal. I’ve decided to limit the “layered garden experiment” to a 12ft by 12ft square. Its taking a lot of time to build and I don’t want all my eggs in one basket anyhow. I think that will be big enough to grow my tomatoes and peppers. The rest I’ll grow in […]

When I started Homesteader Life I thought if I was lucky, it would be read by my 4 friends and my wife. I was was really surprised when I started getting emails from folks all over the US and Canada that wanted to get back to the land and live a more simple way of […]

Garden
John and I are still hauling the base of the “workfree” garden. Leave it to a dairy farmer to make it into more work than a traditional garden! If I had started last fall like your supposed to it would truly be “workfree” this year, but you know me. I think will start posting some […]

Praise God for the birth of another Baby Degenhart! We rejoice that Chad and Kelly have added another arrow to their quiver.