How We Homestead - Part 1: How It All Began

This is Part 1 in a 5 weeks series called "How We Homestead" hosted by Staci at Life at Cobble Hill Farm. Be sure to visit the other lovely women, linked to at the bottom of this post. 

~~ Before we begin I want to say Welcome! to all the followers that have joined me in the last week. I'm so glad you are here! I also want to say thank for all the sweet comments on yesterday's post. You are all so wonderful and encouraging. I am so blessed. Now, on to the post! ~~

I think homesteading for me began a long, long time ago. I've always had a love and desire for "the old ways", simple ways, and doing it myself. I love the idea of farming, raising your own food, and living off the land as much as possible. Thankfully, I married a man who shares my desires and love of old ways and things.

Honey Whole Wheat bread

I think it officially began when I made my first loaf of bread. The twins were little little, we were in our second place, our second year of marriage, and we didn't have a ton of money. We ate a lot of bread between toast and sandwiches and I realized it would be a lot cheaper if I made our own bread. It was all downhill from there!

I loved it! Getting my hands into the sticky dough, kneading and punching and working, smelling that intoxicating, heavenly aroma as it baked, and finally tasting the sweet, chewy, scrumptious end product of my work. "I made this, and this is awesome!" I was so proud of myself. And I couldn't help but think of all the woman of generations before me who did the same thing, providing food for their families. It was just bread, but it sort of grounded me, and encouraged the part of my soul that said homesteading was the way it should be. This was right.

Blueberry Freezer jam (I was feeling lazy that day)

A little while later I decided to make and can jam. We had been using store bought grape jelly and I was kind of sick of it. I grew up with a grandmother that put up a lot of stuff every year when I was younger, so I was no stranger to canning (well, the idea of it anyways) and I wasn't afraid.

And it helped that I had a box full of plums from my mom-in-love and I had to do something with them.

That first batch was an interesting experience. My pot wasn't big enough, so the jam boiled over and made a mess of my stove. I didn't having a canning pot, so I had to make do with my large stock pot and a towel on the bottom to prevent the jars from breaking. I didn't have a canning funnel so jam dripped all over my jars, and I didn't have jar tongs, so I ever so carefully and precariously lifted jars in and out of that pot with regular cheapo tongs, which resulted in a lot of burning of my hands. But I made jam! And it too was awesome. All the work and pain was worth it. (And we haven't bought a thing of jam since then.) A little while later my grandmother blessed with me a brand new pressure canner (which I can also use for water bathing) and the tongs and funnel. I was one step closer!

Our first three years of marriage were spent in an apartment. I can not even begin to describe the ache I had for a little bit of dirt to grow a garden. It was painful. I wanted to plant. I needed to grow something. I'd never planted anything in my life, but that didn't matter. I had watched my grandmother's luscious gardens produce more veggies than she knew what to do with. I wanted that.

The before. Everyone thought we were crazy for getting such a fixer upper.

 In April of 2009 we bought our little house, on our little 6500 square foot lot (actually I think it's less than that), and a year later we had our little garden and raised beds set up. I haven't been able to grow much, as I work ever so slowly to improve our dismal soil. But I was growing something. (If you want to feel accomplished, plant a zucchini seed. It will grow anywhere, in any soil, and you will start thinking you're living out Little Shop of Horrors.) And it was wonderful.

Once we moved here and I was able to really dig in, that was it. My heart was gone. Forever in love with homesteading and doing things ourselves. Over the past four years I have read and researched and thought about this way of life and how much I love it. It feels good to work hard and provide as much of our own food and things as I can, even it means still having to buy the ingredients, but making the end product myself. I've picked up soap making, sewing (a bit), cheese making, and a few other skills.

As I said, I was blessed with a man who has the same thinking, who shares my dream, and I've been doing this since the boys were babies, so getting my family on board hasn't been hard at all. Ben's mother, my precious mom-in-love, did all of these things before me - she baked and ground her own flour, canned and put up food, made soap, and sewed. His dad builds and fixes things and does it himself most of the time. They aren't ones for waste. He grew up in that, so that is just "normal" for him. (In fact he told me the other day that I am severely under quota for soap. I didn't even know there was a quota. ;))

And here we are now, a little ways in, with so much farther to go!

~ * ~

 Visit the other women of the How We Homestead series:

Staci from Life At Cobble Hill Farm

Daisy from Maple Hill 101
Tammy from Our Neck Of The Woods
Amber from Making A Home 

~Meg

It's A Wonderful Life

This past week has been extremely frustrating in the emotional department. It seems like nearly every person I've talked to (who isn't family) has said nasty things about their own children, or been shocked and disgusted when they have found out that I have four and I stay at home.

The protective side of me wants to yell at them and tell them how awful they are and that I love my children deeply and wouldn't trade anything. But I know that arguing with these cruel people won't get me anywhere.

So instead, I'll just say

You sad people have no idea what you're missing.

~Meg

The "How We Homestead" Series

I'm so excited to tell you about a project I am going to be a part of!

Staci from Life at Cobble Hill Farm had the idea for a little series on Homesteading and I will be joining her and 3 other women in sharing our journey, how we do it, and where we are hoping to be in the future.

We are starting next Wednesday, the 15th, and will post each Wednesday for the next five weeks.

The other wonderful women who are a part of it are

Daisy from Maple Hill 101
Tammy from Our Neck Of The Woods 
and
Amber from Making A Home 

I'm so honored to be a part of this and I can't wait to learn about the others and their stories!

Meg 

The Picking and Eating of Berries

The boysenberries are upon us! This morning I picked two and a half pounds, and that is just the first harvest of the season. There are SO MANY more to come, all in various stages of ripeness. This is when I start picking berries every two to three days. I think they are better this year than they were last year. They are so sweet and tart, I think I ate a half pound just while picking.

I have many plans for berries this year! I will be making jam, both with and without seeds, and I would like to make some syrup as well. I'll be freezing some for cobblers later, and I think I might make a tart or galette for dessert tonight.

The berry plants we have are Thornless Boysenberries. This is what Wikipedia has to say about their origin:

In the late 1920s, George M. Darrow of the USDA began tracking down reports of a large, reddish-purple berry that had been grown on the northern California farm of a man named Rudolph Boysen.^[4] Darrow enlisted the help of Walter Knott, a Southern California farmer who was known as a berry expert. Knott had never heard of the new berry, but he agreed to help Darrow in his search.
Darrow and Knott learned that Boysen had abandoned his growing experiments several years earlier and sold his farm. Undaunted by this news, Darrow and Knott headed out to Boysen's old farm, on which they found several frail vines surviving in a field choked with weeds. They transplanted the vines to Knott's farm in Buena Park, California, where he nurtured them back to fruit-bearing health. Walter Knott was the first to commercially cultivate the berry in southern California.^[4] He began selling the berries at his farm stand in 1932 and soon noticed that people kept returning to buy the large, tasty berries. When asked what they were called, Knott said, "Boysenberries," after their originator.^[5] His family's small restaurant and pie business eventually grew into Knott's Berry Farm. As the berry's popularity grew, Mrs. Knott began making preserves, which ultimately made Knott's Berry Farm famous.

Fun Fact: My dad used to work at Knott's Berry Farm when he was younger! I have still yet to visit that theme park.

Finding the perfect time to pick a berry is hard. I've found that they are perfectly ready when they give a bit of resistance, but still come off easily. If you are smashing the little cells when you pull, they aren't ready yet. Give them another day or two. If they cover your fingers in juice when you barely touch them, they are past their prime.

When you bring them inside fill your sink or a bowl with water and a splash of white or cider vinegar. Let them soak for a bit, swishing them gently as you put them in the water. The vinegar will kill a lot of the little bacteria that accelerate spoilage, making them last a bit longer in your fridge. When you do store them, place them in a shallow dish so that you have only two to three layers of berries. Any more and the ones on the bottom will crush. They should last a few days that way, maybe a week if you are lucky.

One of my favorite ways to eat berries is fresh, and maybe with a bit of sweet whipped cream if I'm feeling naughty. ;)

Are you harvesting anything yet?

Meg

The Big News, And Other Things

Morning Glory

Blueberries

Boysenberries

"Mmm mmm"

Well, I meant to post our big news last week but we got caught up in Life and Stuff! It's probably not as awesome to everyone else but:

Ben got a new job! He started this morning! Hurray!! If y'all have been following for awhile, you know that he's been working 10's and 12's six days a week for nearly three years now, and we finally couldn't take it anymore. There was no end in sight.

And this new job? 40 hours. Period. They even say that if you get called in on a Saturday, you get Monday off.

Even better? We found out Thursday that during the summer they change their hours to compensate for peak energy hours. So instead of getting off in the early afternoon, he's getting off even earlier than we thought! He'll be coming home while the kids are still taking a nap! I'm so, so excited to finally have him back, and awake. It's been a very hard past few years of him falling asleep as soon as he sits down after dinner and being exhausted and at work all the time. I'm very thankful for this new job and I hope it works out as well as it sounds like it will and he will finally have time to rest and relax.

We were at the beach over the weekend, for the "men folk" in my family to take my grandfather on a fishing trip. It was his Christmas gift from my brother-in-law. It was a nice little trip and the weather was beautiful.

We came back to a monster dust and wind storm. On the stretch of road from the freeway back into town the dust was so bad you couldn't see past maybe half a mile. It was crazy. I have never seen dust that bad. Once we got into civilization the dust wasn't as bad, but the wind was still whipping things around. My poor grapes are so wind burned and sad looking. I think I lost most of my bunches that were blooming. I'm really bummed about that. But today is beautifully breezy and cool, with puffy clouds floating through the blue sky.

The blueberries and boysenberries started ripening over the weekend. The boys and I wandered around after school this morning and munched on berries. Munchie loves berries. I would say "Do you like the berries? Are they good?" and he would reply with grunty "mmm mmm"s. The first week or two of boysenberries is wonderful. The weeks after that are a little tiring once we're swimming in berries. And there are a LOT of berries coming this year.

I didn't get a lick of knitting done while I was gone. I spent our sitting time just relaxing, doing crosswords (my brain needs exercise haha) and enjoying the weather and the company. We squeezed 15 people into a tiny little two bedroom house. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, and it was nice to have so many people around to play with the kids, so I could really unwind and not be on alert.

Well, I think that's enough babbling for now. Ben will be home in a few hours! :)

Happy Monday y'all!
Meg