|
This is my first post here. I'm excited to have a place to write about our journey to learn more about homesteading. We have 3 horses, 2 beef cows(soon to be 3 as a calf is due any day), several chickens, 3 dogs and a cat. We're expecting more chicks in the mail this month. One of our dogs is a guide dog puppy in training-so he's not ours, but we sure do love him! We homeschool our 3 children. Hannah is 11, Jonah is 9 and little Susanna is 2.5. We use Unit Studies and various other things, but love having our life experiences be at the forefront of our learning. This all started while we lived in a nearby city. We knew when we got married that we wanted to live in the country. We saved and learned as much as we could. Our apartment looked as down home country as possible. I actually loved that apartment. I had it just like I wanted it. I learned how to can things there and bake bread froim scratch. I had a little flower & vegetable garden. It was tiny! But, it felt good to grow things. We bought our 42 acre property 4 yrs after we got married-found a great deal. We did lots of work to it-cleaned out garbadge left behind, filled in an old foundation, tented there (while pregnant with our first child). We put in a driveway. My dh did that himself. It's a long driveway. He used a borrowed back hoe & dump truck to haul out river rocks from a farmer's property. That river was flooding his corn fields, so it was good for both of us. The driveway took 76 (full size) dump truck loads of river rock. That got spread out and set for a year. Then my dh got used gravel grindings for free from the highway dept and rented some equipment to spread it out. A friend of ours ran a drill rig, so he dug our well for us. He'd never done domestic wells before, but was game. My dh had everything ready. I'll never forget Jeff (our friend) handing from the drill rig with a cup in his hand-he wanted the first taste of our water. He mostly got rocks flying in his face. Our well is 42 ft and it is the best tasting water we've ever drank! We actually hit an underground spring. My dh dug the foundation (he has lots of heavy equipment experience). We built a pole barn. We lived in that quite a bit. We had to move out of our apartment as the house sold. We moved in with my in-laws, but it was a long drive back and forth and we were both working. So, we spent weekends in a borrowed pop-up camper and cooked on an open fire with a 2 yr old and a 4 yr old. When the pole barn was done, we spent lots of time there-sleeping on air mattresses on the cement floor. We built a timber frame house (not a log house-more like a post and beam) and had to sand and put linseed oil on every post, every beam and all the tongue & groove for the ceiling. Hannah (4 yrs old then) helped and Jonah (2) had a high old time playing in sand, crushed stone and just being dirty 24-7. It was great when we got the well and ran it to the barn. By then I was cooking on the grill and could heat up water. They took baths in a kiddie pool. I rather enjoyed taking solar showers. LOL Looking back on that time, I miss it. At the time, I couldn't wait for the house to be done. Taking care of a toddler and a preschooler was difficult and I was working part time as an RN. I used to go to work early so I could get a shower before my shift started. I never thought I'd miss those days, but I really do! For every step of the house building, we either did it, helped with it and had lots of friends helping, too. We helped 3 friends build their houses before ours went and they, in turn, helped us, when it was our turn. Our house is still a work in progress, but it's almost done! My dh finished all the window trim this past winter. When this all started, he cut down a bunch of our maple trees, took them to a friend's mill where they were cut and kiln dried. All our cabinets, shelves, trim & molding are made from our very own trees. I designed our kitchen and a friend built them for us in trade. Anyway, that was all the start of our country living. Every year there's a new project. This year we're working on a pond. It got started about 3 weeks ago, but got too muddy due to rain. So, we'll finish it up this sumer this time. The neat thing is that my dh taught Jonah (now 9) how to run the controls of the track hoe and let him do some work with it, too. Last year our new project was raising chicks and butchering the roosters. I don't care to butcher roosters again (some friends came and helped us since they had done it for many years), but I do love my chickens and their eggs. There's many things I want to learn-how to make soap, spin wool, make candles. But, all in time. I'm learning to sew now. I already learned how to make fancy cloth diapers, but now I'm learning how to do clothes. It's very exciting!! So, that's us in a nutshell. I'm looking forward to journaling more about our journey!
|
Comments
|
|
|
|
|
Posted by
|
|
|
|
|
Posted by
|
|
|
|
|
Posted by
|
|
|
|
|
Posted by