The Homestead
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It is Fall, the second-busiest time of year on the homestead!
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It is Fall, the second-busiest time of year on the homestead!
I have 2 apple trees that I have picked and preserved, and I am starting on the third tree which is peaches. THEN I can kick back and have a bit of fun before it is time to lift the sweet potatos. The “heat dome” killed half of my garden and it set the sweet potatos back for perhaps 6 weeks, but it is cooler now and the plants have mostly recovered. And, when I peeked last week I saw that the sweet potatos were only about an inch and a half thick. By the calendar I should have been digging them around August 4th but they were flat out not ready to harvest in August. I grow Beauregard and Georgia Jet because they are short season sweet potatos and we sometimes have cold Springs. When the weather sets the plants back then a short season plant will probably give me a harvest, while a longer season sweet potato might not yield anything at all.
Like most modern-day homesteaders I get most of my food from the grocery store, though a couple of hundred pounds of produce all nicely put up in the Fall is most welcome indeed!
I cannot help but wonder how the old time homesteaders did that along with cutting and threshing wheat for their bread, shelling the peas, cutting the firewood so it has a chance to dry before winter, mending the house/barn/tools, etc.
I salute them all.
How are you folks doing on your places?
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5 Replies
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Good morning, we’re getting ready to add goats to our homestead we’re picking them up tomorrow. It’s cooled down enough to start breeding our rabbits. We’re also cleaning up the garden for replanting. It will be mainly brassicas.
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what type of rabbits are you raising?
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cucumbers are done, the cabbage experiment failed with the triple digit weather and no rain, voles devastated parts of the garden, tomatoes grew up put the heat kept production minimal. Hopefully they will get a second wind and produce some for me. Pepper pretty much the same, I see quite a few growing. Planting a fall garden, Cabbage again, broccoli, beets, peas, garlic and greens.
Now I am trying to figure out how to feed my 10 goats without hay. If we could find it, it would be $100 a bale. Going to try to make “hay” with weeds and tree leaves and limbs. I have to figure that one out.
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My sweet potato yield will be tiny this year, and it is getting too cool to allow them to stay in the ground any longer. And I had such hopes for them.
Starting on Monday we will be doing some repairs around the place. Hopefully they will all be done before the weather turns ugly
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We had a heavy frost last night. Glad I had the sweet potatoes in the shed already. It was the best crop of sweet potatoes that I have ever raised (over 200 pounds). Yesterday, I picked all the red tomatoes, bell and banana peppers which also did quite well this year. The summer has been dry, not as bad as Kansas, but I can pump water out of my pond when I need it. I had to chuckle when I was picking the tomatoes because the soil was muddy from watering two days ago.
Also had great crops of Concord grapes (now making 5 gallons of wine), blackberries and more blueberries than we could eat.
Our major problems this year was keeping the cucumbers and squash alive. I could pump plenty of water for them, but the sun was so hot (uv was very high) that the leaves would wilt in the afternoons.
Mid-Missouri Zone 6A
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