Yes! Still Dreaming of a Homestead

A sweet and relaxing Thursday evening to you, dear friends!  Finding yourselves cozy, I hope?

My feet are up and my cup of tea is near, the hum of the dishwasher is quickly making me quite sleepy and, thankfully, the house is quiet with the babies sleeping peacefully.  Daniel is away on one last mission from these two weeks of intense training.  I won't lie. I will be thankful when tomorrow morning comes and a long weekend can begin.  We have been on what they call "reverse cycle" these past weeks, meaning that we have Daniel home for breakfast and he heads to work around 2 in the afternoon but doesn't return home until early early in the morning.  Sometimes 3 am or sometimes not until 8 am, depending on the mission.  What a man he is to endure this training and to thrive in it!  I am exhausted just watching and I hate to admit it, but the "reverseness" (I think I just created a word and we are going with it!), the "reverseness" of it has really thrown me off-kilter and has affected me more than I had anticipated.  Alas, I think I am out of the irritated-annoyed-what time is it-which meal am I serving? bubble I have found myself in and am back to a somewhat re-oriented-with-normalcy type of routine.  

Somehow I was hoping to write about homesteading… um… let's see… how to transition?

Well, yes!  I am glad you asked.  Our hopes of homesteading are still alive and well and although we can not do much here in this yard of ours in Savannah, we are trying to do all that we can.  Our garden.  Well, yeah, that was not what we had hoped.  Why is it that we can't grow anything?!?  Well, we think it's because we don't receive enough sunshine here in the back yard. Or maybe, too, it is because we have a HUGE pine tree right in the middle of our garden which lends to the soil being more acidic.  Either way, we did not get a big harvest last year.  In all honesty, there was not a harvest at all.  Maybe one tomato?  

We tried a few kale plants and cabbage and carrots over the winter but that seemed to fail as well and so, we have just planted our last effort for a Savannah garden and we planted onions and potatoes.  So far so good but that is how all our other attempts have begun and so we will wait and hope.

And for our animals, we are loving our chickens.  We actually just made quite the big change to our flock.  We had two laying hens but they had come to the end of their prime for eggs and so we, well, we made them into delicious stewed hens.  Might that be a good way of putting it?  

Daniel was the brave one here, as always, and once again, it would seem we always have an audience on such occasions (remember something about a neighbor boy with a bag of chips and us chasing pigs?).  The neighbors just happened to be out, enjoying a gorgeously Spring afternoon when we decided it was time.  And so Daniel just stated over the fence what we were doing and not a minute later, there were the 3 young neighbor boys, already over the fence and standing, mouths wide and eyes wider at the chickens hanging upon our . .  clothes-line.  

Not to waste a beautiful bird, they were into the pot

plucked and cleaned and into the refrigerator.  We enjoyed one this week actually!  I put her in a big stock pot with water covering her and let it simmer for about 6 hours.  Then I added some onions, carrots, green beans, and potatoes and we had a delicious and nourishing chicken soup.  Delicious!

But that wasn't the only change.  We now have 5 new ladies we welcomed here.  3 Barred Rock and 2 Americanas.  They are not quite old enough to be laying yet, we are hoping for mid June.  But they are beauties and we are thankful for them.  Snow White seems to be the only name Tirzah has been using for all of them, so we have our sweet flock of SnowWhites and we are set for now.

We weren't quite happy with our coop set-up however, so we moved it from one side of the yard to the other and we put up a fence so the girls could have an extensive run to enjoy.  And in the move Tirzah found and communicated in the clearest way (loudest scream ever imaginable) that a snake was in our yard.  Thankfully it was just a brown snake, but he was a good two feet long and added quite the adventure to our back yard morning work!

Hard to see here, but to the right of Daniel and Tirzah, hidden amongst the pine needles and leaves is the snake!

Tirzah took this picture, actually!  Us in motion moving the coop.  That thing might not look heavy, but let me tell you!  I think my arms are just now over their soreness… Daniel was the muscle and I simply steered.  

So, yes, we do still dream of homesteading, and we do still love doing what we can, right now!  Never a dull moment, of that I can assure you.