Where to begin…

I’m ba-a-ack!  Just like catching up with an old friend that you haven’t seen in years, it’s hard to know where to begin…

The past year has been a whirlwind, not the least of which adding two children to our family within a six month time frame.  My husband and I are certified foster parents, and we were brought a little girl about a year and a half ago.  I just so happened to be four months pregnant with our now-almost-one-year-old baby boy.  Crazy?  Maybe.  Through a series of events, our foster daughter was “freed” for adoption, and we gladly are receiving this blessing into our family.

Through this time, I’ve had to set aside many of my homesteading efforts and use some of my old shortcuts (Store-bought bread anyone?  Cold cereal?  Not the healthiest things, but we were focusing on more important things, like blending a family together).  It’s hard to write a homesteading blog when you have little material to write about!  And although life remains challenging every day, I have much to share and feel like this is an avenue to share it.

So here’s what we’ve been up to on our homestead this year:

• Losing all but 2 hens, a rooster and a duck to a fox who liked to hunt in our pasture around 4pm
• Re-stoning our very.long.driveway
• Canning our not-so-much produce last summer (remember I was very pregnant….)
• Learning how to cook on a woodstove over the winter (and I have some recipes to share when cold weather returns!)
• Preschool homeschooling program for our 3 year old
• Starting 40 Delaware chickens this summer as layer replacements, as well as meat
• Building 4 new raised beds for the garden (thanks to my wonderful husband!), along with one for the kids to grow sunflowers and pumpkins, and a mostly-finished-cold frame
• Gathering as much wild fruit as possible from our land (raspberries and apples so far!)
• Beginning to research about raising meat cows
• And last but not least – raising our 3 little ones, taking it one day at a time!

In the next weeks, I’ll try to catch up with updates and photos of our garden this summer, which is doing fabulously thus far thanks to the new raised beds and plentiful rain (except the broccoli and cauliflower…the woodchucks keep getting to that before I do!).

I’m looking forward to sharing the many things I’ve been learning, and hope you’ll join me over the coming months!