Our 2nd Month Homesteading - What We've Accomplished and What We're Learned So Far

We've just completed our second month of homesteading!! And it's been a doozy. As I mentioned in my We Got Chickens! post, a friend of mine was looking to lighten her cost and chore load as we go into Winter, and sold me her entire flock of chickens for a steal! We quickly bought and put together a coop, and picked them up.

We've never had chickens before, but they have easily become my favorite part of our homestead. The baby loves chasing them around, giggles whenever the rooster crows, and I just love watching them hunt and peck around the yard and woods. My mom even FaceTimed with one of the chickens yesterday!

The best part, though, is the healthy, home-grown eggs.

Look at how beautiful they are! And now that we've been letting the chickens out for most of the day, they have hardly been eating any feed -- which is saving us money! I've taken to cooking up some potatoes, spinach or kale from the garden, and eggs from our hens at night while I'm making dinner to have a quick and healthy breakfast in the morning. Now all we need is to grow potatoes, and it'll be 100% home-grown.

After dinner every day, before his bath, the baby and I go out and put the chickens in for the night. It's become our little ritual. We say goodnight to the chickens, goodnight to the moon, and then go in and take bath before bed.

Except one night...

Hahaha. One Friday hubby was out at a poker game, and time got away from me. I bathed the baby, was skyping with the step-daughter, and night fell before I could get back out there to tuck the chickens in for the night. I went out with my flashlight and counted the chickens in the coop. Twice. I was missing three of them!! I looked all around the coop, in the woods next to it where they like to hide...and couldn't for the life of me find them! Then I looked up. Three of them were perched in a big pine tree next to the coop. I couldn't help but laugh. I shook the branch and escorted them to their proper roost. After that night, though, they've been much better about tucking themselves in at night.

I've also started adding the brush that we've shredded to the vegetable garden. I want to eventually do a Back to Eden garden, but don't want to put fresh mulch too close to the young, live plants because I'm afraid it'll burn them. Once the garden is finished giving us food for this year, I'll bed the rest of it down in shavings to prepare it for the Spring.

We also took these (pretty ugly) scalloped brick pavers that were strewn about the house and shed and built the foundation for our wood pile. These pavers, instead of becoming trash, will serve the purpose of keeping the wood logs off the ground and away from the shed. Just the first level of wood is going lengthwise to give the rest of the logs something to sit on. We've also separated out the cherry and apple wood that we'll use for smoking meat, instead of in the fireplace.

As we go into Winter, check out a post I wrote on my blog about the 12 Ways to Use Wood Ash Around the Homestead.

And I transplanted my first baby pear tree. My mom has a 300+ year old farm house in Virginia that has this MASSIVE, ancient pear tree on it. I mean, the thing is as big around as a VW beetle and Lord only knows how tall. It's faithfully produced pears for YEARS without any intervention from humans. But it has really bad center rot. I grabbed a handful of pears a few years ago, and started these trees from seed. Now that we have an orchard, it's time to transplant these bad boys. I put this one in, but we need to finish clearing out the brush in the rest of the orchard before we can plant the others.

So What Have We Learned?

To take things slowly. Enjoy the process. It's only been two months and we're both already struggling with burn out. We get excited about all of these projects, and then dive head first into them, only to realize we can't get it all done in a day. We're both fairly healthy, my hubby works out a TON during the week, but you don't build the same muscles working on a farm as you do in a gym. One night I was massaging my hands, commenting on how much the muscles in my hands hurt (it was a weird feeling!) when my hubby laughs as said "that's called work". Burn out has led both of us to lose our patience - when it simply isn't worth it. We'll never be at this stage in our lives again - baby will never be this young again, we'll never be this new at homesteading...we need to slow down and enjoy the journey.

Take projects one at a time. Part of where our stress has been coming from is having multiple half-finished projects at one time. I'm the most guilty of this. I follow my passion and let it direct me to what I want to do that day. Unfortunately, that means the walk-way got only half-weeded, the red bud seeds got only half-harvested, and the orchard is only half cleared. It's mentally exhausting.

On the other hand, breaking up tasks sometimes makes them more enjoyable. Shredding a brush pile for 7 hours is AWFUL. Mowing the field for 7 hours is AWFUL. Sometimes, breaking up a project into smaller tasks and adding some variety makes the job a lot more fun.

Manage expectations. In project management, the most important part (in my opinion) is the managing of expectations. Your project can come in late or over budget, but if your stakeholders are expecting that, it won't be that big of a deal. Managing my own expectations is MUCH harder. I want to get everything done NOW. And it's when I can't that I stress myself out. Of course, the day I have the most planned, is the day the baby's cutting teeth and wants to be held all day. It's when I need my husband the most that he has to travel for work. If I simply accept the fact that I will get done what I can during the day and nothing more, than it takes the pressure off. The work is never-ending. It will always be there. My happiness needs to come first.

Enough rambling from me! We're entering our third month, and things have started to slow down. We'll focus on clearing out the orchard and building the wood pile. If the weather allows, we'll build an overhang off of one of the sheds to protect the tractor from the rain and snow. But these are all projects that we know will take awhile, so we'll manage our expectations, and work on them as we can.

Now it's your turn! What are you working on? What's your greatest enemy? Yourself?

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