Homesteading: Why we have chosen to move to a home with land - Part 1

Since moving to a home where we have land, one of my goals has been to provide our family with all of our food right here at home. Why? I think first and foremost, my desire comes from the instinct to take care of my family, especially my children. For the past five years I have been learning about different food ideologies. There are many, including myself, who are very passionate about providing our bodies with the healthiest food we can. No matter where my research has lead me, one thing I could consistently take away is that our food today, whether organic or not, is void of much of its nutrients, caused primarily because of poor farming practices. So, what can I do? I could choose the route of adding supplements to our diet to help fill out was is missing in food. However, for me there is one problem with this approach. I don't believe we truly understand vitamins and minerals yet, especially how they work with one another within our body. It's why there is a steady flow of changing information on what to take for the best overall health. Instead I've decided I'd rather focus on growing the most nutrient rich food I can in a sustainable way and allow it to nourish our bodies.

Beyond the overall nutrition, I realize it's also not just enough to feed my children, I also feel it's important that they understand food; how it's grown, where it comes from and why it's so important for their bodies. I hope as they work in the garden, and this year start a garden of their own, they can begin to learn to appreciate nature and how God called us to be stewards of the land.

It's time to start blogging again! What we've been up to...

It's been weeks and weeks and more weeks and I haven't gotten a post up. Life has been going at full speed for so long now that I think we've begun to forget what it looks like to slow down! But it's all good, because what's been keeping us busy are the kiddos and learning how to be more self sustainable on the land we moved to.

Our first eggs from the chickens we've raised and oh how good they were!

I hope this will be the first of many posts to share what we have been learning about and boy learning is something that we have been immersing ourselves in.

learning how to...

• home school our children
• create a healthy environment for our chickens
• build a chicken run and how to most effectively use it
• slaughter and butcher our own chickens

My children are learning first hand where their food comes from and we showed them how to slaughter and butcher the chickens they've been helping us raise.

• gardening using the Back To Eden approach (thank you to the person who shared this approach with me on FB)
• make a root cellar in our home
• preserve food in more ways
• butcher a pig and turn it into all kinds of delicacies

My husband and brother butchering a whole pig we purchased. My brother has been staying with us and helping us our. It's been a wonderful blessing.

• use all parts of an animal so nothing goes to waste
• use our land to raise other animals next year
• hunt small and large game

My husband's first deer and the beginning steps of butchering it for our dinner table.

• utilize what we have and being content with not having more
• help others with what God has given us 
• build what we need or want with our own hands
  

  

  Building a new kitchen table for our growing family.

Even more importantly learning...

• to be well balanced parents who are patient and loving and who focus on raising our children to know, love and understand who our Lord and Savior is
• how to completely and totally rely on the Lord for His guidance and wisdom in all parts of our lives
• how to have fun and enjoy all that we are doing, even when tiredness would cause us to feel and think otherwise

Besides learning we have also certainly been enjoying ourselves.

• Seeing our children run and play covered in dirt and full of imaginative play
• Watching our youngest make her first smile and seeing my oldest make her laugh for the first time

• Opening our home to a beautiful couple and watching them walk down the isle and commit themselves to one another before the Lord

A beautiful wedding in our backyard.

• Harvesting our own food and for the first time in our lives enjoying meals where everything on the table was grown and harvested by us

Unearthing sweet potatoes.

• Taking walks through our woods and land and seeing the many wonders of God through His creation
• Celebrating birthdays and new life

I had fun making these cute lego cupcakes for my son's birthday this year.

• Watching the sun rise and starting the day in God's Word
• All running to the windows or heading outside in the evening to see the amazingly beautiful sunsets that happen just about every day
• Watching the geese fly over, the turkey and geese mothers and their babies walking by on their way to who knows where, the snapping turtles wondering up the driveway, the deer grazing nearby, the chickens making themselves at home, the herrings roosting in the trees and the many other animals that make a frequent appearance
• Seeing my children use their imaginations as they play with sticks, rocks and sand and watching them explore what is around us

Looking at the sunset out our front window.

These last months have been both amazing and joyful, filled with thankfulness. But to be fare I don't want to make it out that life has been perfect, while it has been wonderful in many ways it has also be exhausting. I have squeezed a lot on our plate trying to prepare us for some goals for the coming year. More than one tear has been shed on my part and there have certainly been many a day where I've wondered if I can make it through it when all I and my husband want to do is collapse on the couch and take a break... oh and sleep. I had forgotten just how tiring it can be to be up all night nursing a baby (yep my little one still nurses several times a night) while trying to pack in an extremely full day. I have struggled with not knowing where everything is at and not being organized since we are still making a place for things since our move. It hasn't all been fun and games and it's been a lot of hard and tiring work, but it's been good... very, very good.

Stay tuned as I begin to share more of our experiences and of course a mix of recipes and some crafty and artistic creations. The posts may come far and few between at times, since my relationship with the Lord, being a wife and a mother all come before anything else and take a good deal of my time, but the posts will come.

What I've been up to: unpacking, preparing for baby #3 & homebirth, gardening and many more projects

The blog has been quiet lately. I'd love to say that will change, but I'm one busy momma at the moment and living life versus writing about it is taking far higher priority!

One of my favorite plants as a child and it's growing right out our back door!

We have moved to a wonderful 19+ acre property and are enjoying the beautiful land and the inviting home that we feel God has blessed us with. We first found this property back in January and now that spring is here we are for the first time getting to see what is growing around us and what is exactly all here. One of these days I need to get a book to identify all the many wild plants growing that may be edible. We also get to check out the many wild animals. We now know that there are many deer, pheasant, wild turkey and a huge array of birds (with plenty of hawks and eagles mixed in), all hanging out right behind our home. Our neighbor, who we recently met, mentioned we can basically sit on our back porch and hunt! :-) I'd believe it too. We hear the many pheasant daily and have seen them on several occasion while working in our new garden. Now to just learn how to hunt!

Gardening and Chickens, starting a new adventure

It's been a long day of packing and baking a cute, little birthday cake for my soon to be two year old. My back has let me know that it's best to be done with the standing and the bending over trying to fill boxes, so I thought I take a moment to write a little post about some of the things we are planning for.

I have been packing, because in a very short amount of time we are leaving behind our little apartment and heading to a new home with land that we've purchased. I can't begin to say just how excited I am to be moving to a home where we can have a beautiful garden and some chickens. Down the line we may have more things, but being in my third trimester of pregnancy and only having so much time, the garden and the chickens are all we are going to attempt for this year. Now next... well that's a whole different story. I've already have plans in my head, but for now it's time to focus on the current coming seasons.

Photo credit: http://www.superizon.com/vegetables-garden-ideas-with-stylish-designs/

2012: A year of big changes, including baby #3 being born in May

I'm laying on my couch as I type this. I have managed to come down with the stomach flu (Viral gastroenteritis) twice in the last six weeks. Both times while we were traveling for the holidays. Ugh... I've decided that stomach/intestinal issues while pregnant make a superbly horrible combination. When motion makes you feel ill and you have a little one rolling around in your belly, eek, not such a good sensation.


Since I actually manged to get my kids down for naps today and I pretty much can't do anything else but lay on the couch at the moment. This seemed like as good of a time as any to write about some of our plans for 2012. It's going to be a big year for us, with lots of changes, some of which will affect this blog. 

Our Christmas Tree Excursion - What a Beautiful Place We Found

The first significant snow fall had fallen the day and evening before. It was a beautiful, white covering that clung to the trees and coated the grass with a pristine whiteness. Little puffs of steam came from our mouths as we got out of our car and bundled our children in snow suits, hats, gloves and boots. It was our daughters first time in all the snow gear and she stood apprehensively looking at us and wondering if we really expected her to try and walk. Our son was excited and ready to run, jump and roll through all the snow he saw.

We headed to a small, charming little barn, decorated for the holiday festivities. As we walked up we were warmly greeted and shown where saws and sleds were to use, where an outdoor fire pit was to warm up and shown a map to know where to head for the type of tree we wanted. A tractor was also making hay rides available out to the field of Christmas trees, but we opted for the walk and placed the kids on the sled for a fun ride in the snow.

 
 
The fresh air and the beauty of the fresh fallen snow covering the trees was all that my soul could have asked for on this afternoon. I was thrilled to be outside, even in the cold. We were in aw of just how many beautiful trees there were to choose from. All the trees were $40, no matter the size and unlike some tree farms we've gone to in the past, it certainly didn't take too long to find the perfect one for us.

We've moved. FNALLY!

I've decided it's time to take a break from the unpacking and take a seat on our small deck and enjoy the sun for a moment while I write a couple of thoughts.

We started (emphasis on started here) the moving process to our temporary apt. on Monday. We were in a pretty good place with most of our things already down in our basement and garage and virtually all the packing done except for those things we needed to use till the last moment and then all the odd and end things that don't seem to fit in a box or have hidden themselves in the numerous random spots throughout the house.

Packing has been an adventure. We are living temporarily in a place (until we know what our next step is, more on that on another day) that is about 1000 sq ft smaller than our last place. We went from a 3 bed, 3 bath townhome with a 2 car garage to a 2 bed, 1 bath, no garage apt. Neither my husband or I wanted to spend money on storing our extra "stuff" especially since we've no idea where we are moving to next, so we set out to sell and give away as much as we could. We did pretty good, but I'd like to say that selling things on Craigslist takes a ton of patience. There are many people who say they are going to show up to buy/take something and then never appear and you never hear from them again. I had to work hard against getting extremely frustrated.

Updates and a big boys 4th birthday with a special cake!

Time continues to fly by and I've yet to get a single post up that I've wanted to do for, oh I don't know, about 3 months. Oh well, that is how it goes sometimes. We have been staying incredibly busy on various projects, the biggest being the one that finds us a new place to live. In about three weeks we will be moving and we only found out where a couple of days ago... FINALLY! Not knowing where we were going to move hasn't been the most settling of feelings, although I've been working at trying to not be stressed and simply hand over the whole situation to the Lord.

Over the past couple of months we've tried making an offer on three different homes. Our last offer has finally paid off, or at least we hope, since we still need to have inspections done. I'll be sharing some of the things we'll be doing with this new home, since it pretty much needs to be gutted. It will hopefully be a fun (although tons of hard work) rehab project and one that will leave us with a home ready to re-sell in the spring. More to come on that later.

My son loves to help in the kitchen. Here he is being goofy, helping me make his bday cake.

Last weekend we celebrated my sons profound (at least in his mind) fourth birthday. Oh the anticipation! My son has been talking about his birthday just about every day for months.

When he turned two, I started a tradition of making a three dimensional cake. For his second birthday it was a firetruck, for his third birthday it was a baseball and this year I went with a pick-up or dump truck. My son has been asking for a special cake for weeks, he wanted a firetruck cake, because he remembered the cake from his second birthday, obviously a smashing hit. Since I'd done that already, I went with the next best thing, for him at least. 

a quick little update on the quietness of this blog

For those of you who may have noticed, my blog has been rather silent as of late. I've been taking time to do research on my next real food post, along with a couple of other subjects and also take care of home life. I find that I can only take on so many projects at a time, while still being the mom I want to be for my children.

My husband and I have been spending the last month or two trying to evaluate what we can do to pay off a significant portion of our debt, so that we only have a school loan to pay on. We decided that it was time to start selling things. So the last couple of weeks I've been going through everything in our place trying to decide what we need, want, like, don't use, etc., so we can decide what is best to sell. Plus, we are hoping to move some time this summer and I want to get rid of all the "stuff" that accumulates over time, but has no real purpose. I've basically gone through every closet, storage place, drawer and even the garage trying to get rid of things. As I've been doing that, I took a hiatus from blogging. I've also been spending a lot more time reading the Bible and praying, trying to make sure that i keep the Lord first and for most in my life. I find it far to easy to have the Lord fall by the waste side while I try to get all the many things done that plague my mind on a daily basis and that was becoming a serous issues once again in my life. I think I'll always fight not taking on too much and keeping the Lord first, but for now He is up front and revealing so much to me that I can't help but enjoy every moment in prayer and reading His Word. It's been wonderful and rejuvenating.

The blog will be silent for a couple more weeks, while we head out to visit family for vacation. Then June will be here and I have many posts I hope to share, especially ones focusing on "how to" versus specific recipes. Like how to make lard, kefir, different types of cheeses. The month will be kicked off with my next post in the Real Food Series I started several months ago (Click here to check out the Intro and Part 1 and Part 2 of How Our Diet Changed in the 20th Century).

Also, if you haven't noticed, my recipe and art page haven't been updated since last fall. I hope to get those back up to speed soon and there just might even be a new website coming in the near future. Lot's of updating needs to be done!!!! Oh and if anyone has recommendations of how to get a soon to be 14 month old to sleep through the night, let me know! How I can't wait to have a full night sleep again and not be tired so often! :)

A first birthday for my little girl and some thoughts.

It's been a year... a whole entire year... wow, it's hard to believe in many ways... my daughter is already one!

We enjoyed a chocolate and vanilla coconut flour cake with a whip cream frosting. I used boiled down beet juice to color the whip cream pink.