A Homesteading Day

Saturday - April 4 - What a feast we had tonight - a meal fixed completely with chicken and veggies we raised ourselves. Sauteed kale, cabbage, garlic, green onions and mushrooms topped off with home canned, home grown chicken. Dessert wasn’t completely home grown. If we’d had our own goats milk I would have used that for the coconut cream pie but it did have our own egg yolks Still it was very satisfying to know we raised most of what we ate today as lunch was left over beef (home canned at least) stir fry with our own veggies. Bud ate the left over omelet from our eggs, mushrooms and herbs. No homemade cheese or butter til the goats start producing again … soon, but not soon enough for me. I can’t wait to milk again. Here’s some pictures of today I thought you’d like to see. We worked (WORKED is more like it) hard in the garden and yard for 5 hours this morning and still didn’t get everything done we wanted to but we decided we earned the privilege of crawling under the electric blanket to ease our sore muscles before we started up again this afternoon.  John made time to work in his workshop, making the two youngest grandsons’ birthday presents - treasure boxes. Full day is an understatement.

Here’s the start of homesteading meal - mix of lettuces/greens in the salad spinner, Pac Choi on the left of sink with green onions (on plate), kale soaking in sink, cabbage and broc in calendar, asparagus on towel at bottom right. Mushrooms were already picked, washed and in the fridge.

Doesn’t look like much work was done - but it took some major weeding to get the onion sets and potatoe rows cleaned up! (only partial rows shown)

Here’s our fancy landscaping …. resin pups (Labs, of  course), a recycled bowling ball on top of a broken chicken feeder, held in place with a broken brooder lamp shade. But they look good by the curry - which smells like hickory nuts to me. I bought it only for the smell. This bed has huge rosemary bushes as well and spearmint, garlic, iris, several ornamental bushes (prior owner’s beautiful plantings) and a 7 Sister’s Rose I’ve been trying to exterminate for years - it has the sharpest thorns. Don’t know why I planted it by the pool slide….

The perinial stock is blooming bright purple but a finger print on the camera lense makes it look dull.  Wonder if we’ve got a fingerprint on the lense we look at life through  and that makes it look dull when it’s really very bright… so enjoy the laughing pigs’ view of life. There’s one laying on his back, belly laughing straight up in the air, but he’s hiding in the thyme.

Almost lost this sage a year ago, a leak in the soaker hose had repeated drowned it, but it’s come back stronger than ever. It will bloom purpe also in a week or so. Spring is purple in the herb gardens - the rosemary has purple-blue blooms, the lilac was in full bloom two weeks ago.  The lamb’s ear (top right) will bloom purple spikes soon as will the hyssop.

I tried to get the butterfly in the picture but it’s so little it’s hard to see. It’s right above the smudge in the middle. The lilac is almost done blooming but the smell is still strong when you’re down wind from it.

We didn’t get the 20+ tomato plants in but I’m glad as tonight’s temp is suppose to be 25. Ugh. Enjoy your day and may life bloom Royal purple for you!

This entry was posted on April 6, 2009 at 08:00 am and is filed under Homestead living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.