Question- What The Hell Happened to Homesteading???

 

 

 

Question- What The Hell Happened to Homesteading???

I stumbled onto this Youtube video (link to article in Substack Jill Winger Substack) and was blown away. I had been thinking the same things for quite a while now. Video here, please comment on what you think? My comments on Youtube and Substack below video-

 

My comments- 

Really great post on Substack, interesting comments. I'm a little different where my husband and I started a little urban homestead back in the 2010 or so. I grew up in the city in Southern California, mostly in apartments and never had a yard until I was an adult. I got married and raised a family with a wonderful man who loved gardening! I started blogging in 2011, Little Homestead in Boise, which I still do. I thought it might be fun just to sort of document what we were doing as we did it and it's actually really great to be able to look back and see what we did over all the years. I think my grandparents would be proud! I grew up in the city with the only set of grandparents I knew who had fruit trees, avocado tree, Concord grapes and strawberries in their little tiny urban backyard. My grandmother also knitted, crocheted, embroidered, canned foods, made everything from scratch. That was the generation that were adults during the Depression. I'm almost 70. After I became a Master Gardener we bought our current house where I really wanted to pursue more self-sufficiency type skills. I had stumbled on to a California family that were doing hardcore "urban homesteading" and Permaculture. It was really inspiring to me. I didn't know what else to call it, so "urban homesteading" fit for me. So after we moved in we planted fruit trees, medicinal herbs, low water use plants (high desert here), got chickens, and planted another summer garden like our two previous houses. Almost all of this was done frugal and DIY. Sadly my husband has vetoed beekeeping as he is afraid of liability issues! Oh well, what can you do. My husband luckily had parents that were hardcore gardeners also, in Portland, Oregon. His Mom grew tons and tons of homegrown produce. Eventually I learned how to can and dehydrate foods, etc. I never really made any money off of my blog. When I started to see YouTube taking off years ago and a lot of bloggers going there or even just switching to Facebook I just sort of shook my head. I really didn't want to lose my privacy by going online and posting videos of myself doing stuff and I didn't really think there was much interest in it anyway. Boy was I wrong. While I'm not sure if I thought it was a movement, it was something. When chickens became a "thing" for instance, I saw a huge onslaught of cheaply made, inappropriate sized instant chicken coops for sale. I saw a lot of people buy a lot of chickens and a lot of them died. People didn't know what they were doing, but it sounded fun. I did about 6 months worth of research before we ever bought our three little chicks and built a nice sized big coop. We've been successfully raising chickens for years. Sadly many of my blogger pals who were around the same age or maybe younger have either stopped blogging or passed away. I used to have a real regular group where we crossed pollinated each other's blogs with comments and now I'm down to one or two. Sad.  Now we have the cosplay farmers and homesteaders who have millionaire husbands and dress up in overly expensive, quaint clothing and say that they are farmers. They have large families (some of them) and promote all their sales and/or services and the attitude of "you can do this too without any money"! It's also easy to raise lots of kids when you have lots and lots of staff doing most of the work. I do feel sorry for the children in that scenario as the ones who are all over social media have no choice in that sadly. I see a lot of therapy in their future. Good job on your post and you made some excellent points! Will be putting a link to this on my blog. Will be curious to see any comments. 

 

Summer and Chick Condo, Day Trip, Windmill, Bees & A Basket

Chick Condo-
Summer is finally here I think! It was 87 yesterday and finally harvested our first radishes this week!

Yard is looking great and deck finally cleaned off-

We've kept our turf since it's so shady and the grand kids love to play there. If it was sunny I'd have other plans for it!

  

It was about time to finally be able to get the chicks outside. With the unstable weather and the pouring rain on the weekends we just couldn't do it before then. They've gotten to be the right size, feathered out and pretty spunky! Chicks generate tons of dust and they were in my "office". Boy did I deep clean later!!!  We were out of town Saturday on a day trip, so Sunday Dave and I designed and built a little temporary condo for them. Basically they stay outside for about a week so while the two older hens can get used to them and vice versa. Nobody gets killed, life is good. This system works really well and I've done it several times before. Basically I asked Dave to build it in about the same area we have before-

Scrap wood setting up in place, keep them out of the veggies

It's up against or cedar fence that goes into the easement behind our house. I saved some scrap cardboard from a large box, we had scrap OSB, cedar boards and lots of leftover chicken wire. Basically Dave and I cobbled together a little condo area with pine shavings in the shelter and the rest of it a little run. Basically it's triangular-shaped. We had to go around a tomato. Using my long cardboard I saved, adding chicken wire. We also covered the top with chicken wire to keep hawks out-

Added pine shavings under the roof

  

Food and water set up

They enjoyed the indoor area this afternoon, siesta time-

They have shade and shelter and if we get any heavy rains this week I'll put them into the coop, separate them or bring them inside. There's a chance of some thunderstorms Wednesday night so I'm going to watch the weather closely. A few sprinkles would be fine but not if it's pouring rain. They seemed to do pretty well the first afternoon, so I decided to leave them out overnight since it was only supposed to be 65 degrees, not too cold. I went out this morning, they were in the pine shavings in the sheltered corner and I said "where's Mommy's little girls?" They all came running out and started eating and drinking. Life is good!

Day Trip-
With all of the Covid craziness Dave and I really needed to get out of town for the day. We tried going the last two weekends, but we got rained out big time.  This weekend it was supposed to be mild and possible sprinkles. So we drove up to McCall up in the mountains where there's lots of trees, water, very green and beautiful. It was a nice drive up Hiway 55,  a winding road along a river up to the mountains and trees-

Hitting the flat part of the valley, pastures and cattle here and there, cloudy, no rain-

 It started drizzling just a little bit outside of McCall, but it was about 70 degrees and mild. Coming into town you hit a tee where the Payette Lake is straight ahead and the hotel on the right is where we've stayed for anniversary in the past-

They had a cool old Range Rover in front! Dave thought it's the same make and model that's in the BBC series Rosemary and Thyme- 

We had our usual lunch at McCall Brewery, great food! Later in the day we stopped at Stacy's Cakes, an amazing bakery! We got some desserts to go for that night. I love their menu and sign! 

We drove around the back of the lake, took some photos and a beautiful whitetail deer crossed the road in front of us, sorry no photo, happened too fast-

Funny to me on a certain level, fresh air used to be good for you!

We stopped at a little thrift store that we've been to before and I scored some fun items! For my beach table and wall, total $3.00-

$1.50 for flowers-

We stopped at the McCall Store and I got Dave a new tee-shirt for Father's Day and scored some local Huckleberry syrup-

We needed a new back door mat, our was trashed. I found this really gorgeous one at the local Ace Hardware store, love the design! McCall is an affluent resort type of town so they always has always have some fancy-schmancy things. Twice as thick as any I've ever seen before, longer too, hopefully will last a long time- 

Heavily knotted 

When we left McCall we took the back route home on Hiway 95, thru gorgeous valleys, then farms, ranches and the flat lands. It's a hour longer drive but a much easier drive-

We had burritos on the way home and crashed. Great day, glad we went! 

Windmill, Bees & A Basket-

Some fun scores lately! Recently I bought a sweet little windmill from LTD Commodities for the garden! It was $20.00 and heavy steel, happy dance. Then at Joann's Fabrics I bought a little clearance-priced framed bees print, $6.00, about 12" x 12", cute, hangs in the dining room-

and a little basket for the floor next to my end of the couch, on sale $10.00 -

Rain Rain Went Away! New DIY Walk Way Done

Rain, Rain Went Away!

The weather the last month or two has been kind of crazy. We had warm weather (87),  then cold, (38) then warm, then cold, then cold. Last Wednesday we had record-breaking rain, 1.2 in in the Boise area. I was working that day from home and looking out thinking maybe our house was going to start rising and float away! My poor seedlings almost drowned-

I put the chickens in mid-morning because they were soaked, locked up the coop and gave them a snack-

I figured two hours later I could let them out, but it was still pouring!!! Finally about 5:00 pm or so it started drying up and I let them out. Everything was super saturated. The rain stopped the next day, just a sprinkling. The low Thursday was supposed to be 38 degrees. Yes you read that right 38 freaking degrees at the end of May. There is something wrong with this picture. We covered up our tomatoes and peppers that were outside already. I'm really glad we didn't plant everything else at that point. It's in the 70's this week, 81 today so hopefully this is the end of the cold rainy weather. However one never knows. I don't feel too bad as I know people in the Midwest and the East Coast are getting slammed by tornadoes, floods, etc. Other sad news is it appears there is only a handful of peaches on our peach tree. I suspect one of the evenings when it dipped into the 20's after the tree has blossomed pretty well killed most of them. The good news is we have lots of apples and lots of pears! I think I have a few frozen peaches left from last year, so I may hold out on those as long as possible.

New DIY Walk Way Done-
Last December we went and visited my husband's family in Portland, Oregon. We saw how my brother-in-law had his garden path redone in his backyard with crushed stone. We had a high-traffic pathway of round pea gravel on the north side of our house that is always a mess, even with all of the pavers we added years ago. Sadly round pea gravel moves around a lot-

buried pavers

Dave always wanted to redo it with something else and we went back and forth about what to use? One of the problems with the pea gravel it was always moving around making it a pain to take out wheelbarrows, mower,  garbage, recycling and city composting. Then there's bringing things in! After I saw the material that my brother-in-law had installed I told Dave that's what we should use! The same exact materials weren't available here. It was actually a lot cheaper than most of the other materials we could have bought, the whole thing came around $300.00 for three yards and renting a small and large tamper. We felt it was a good home investment for the long term. We rented a small tamper to basically smash the stone into place for compaction-

It was for the long stretch on the North side of the house, the small area in front of the gate going into that, and the entrance going into the veggie garden. We had the delivery done Friday as Dave took the day off. The broken edges of the crushed stone are really key as once it is laid down, tamped and watered as it won't go anywhere. We will be reusing the pavers somewhere else, possibly is the floor for the new coop we're thinking about building. Nice thing about crushed stone is it also lets the water go through it. It's permeable. It's also slightly rough so if it gets icy on that side of the house, which it occasionally does, we will still have good traction.

Here's the steps to doing this- First measure the area several times. Figure out how many yards you'll need, price, color, etc. It pays to shop around! We scheduled delivery since the truck we could borrow couldn't handle 4 tons! There are online converters to convert from square feed to yards. Here's the prep...

First remove the old gravel and soil-

 Most of the excess soil went into the various flower and veggie beds-

Next decide on your edging, we chose pressure treated wood, nice and natural looking. Measure and cut your lengths-

Temporary storage

Build and install your edging, using common galvanized nails, we used survey stakes, cheap and re-usable in the garden. They hold the edging in place, once stone's in you can pull them out -

Level as best as you can-

Delivery time!!!

We also got some shredded bark in the mix, oh joy! 

Dave separated the mulch as best he could, there was much more than we thought!

I did call the stone place we bought the rock from and complained that we wound up having 2 large garbage totes full of the mulch! I let them know we weren't very happy. Driver should have checked his truck before loading, wound up being a real mess! 

Next start adding rock to the path, rake as you go, after doing half water well. Next tamp down, do other 1/2. Water and tamp down again!

Dave did the entrance to the garden and then the entrance into the coop, both of which tended to get pretty muddy-

 

Before

It was also uneven after years of sinking in. Dave went and bought a couple more pieces of lumber to frame in the areas-

I suggested we widen the path, good idea!

So after Dave Tamped down the first layer watered it and let it sit overnight next he added the second layer of crushed stone. Watered it in and tamped it down. It turned out to be pretty loose still. After doing some research we decided it would be best to rent a steel gas powered tamper that we can press the stone a lot more and leave a much firmer surface. So the next day we went back to the rental place to pick the BIG one up. It looks like this-

It weighed a few hundred pounds and was very tricky to unload out of our Outback. We used two 2 x 4's  (my idea) to push it back up when done. NOT FUN, more of a 3-4 person lift!

Dave did the path several times, then we took back to the rental place, Dave watered well. 

All in all we love it! Dave did a great job, with me contributing more ideas.

All done!

There was a little mulch mixed in the rock in the two small areas, but we can live with it. It will bio-degrade over time. We'll use the 2 totes of mulch in the garden. Rosie the hen came to inspect-