My Newfound Love of Herbs

Autumn's first frost has brought the beginning of the end to my gardens. Plants are fading and drooping just a little. My heart feels droopy too when I think of the cold, gray winter ahead. Reflecting on this summer's gardens, my absolute favorite crops were herbs. Don't get me wrong - I love my veggie garden and greatly appreciate all of the food it provides, but my heart is happiest in my potager with its beautiful, fragrant herbs and flowers. Cooking with foods grown and harvested from your own garden is rewarding and fun.  Adding fresh homegrown herbs elevates those foods to an entirely new level.  This year I discovered the magic of rosemary and it has been life changing! Ha!  Ok, maybe not life changing, but palate changing for sure! My family has fallen hard and next year's potager will include lots of rosemary.

Herbs are fantastic little plants with so many more uses than I ever imagined. Clearly, they are wonderful to use fresh in culinary endeavors. They are nice to dry and cook with throughout winter too.  They can also be medical powerhouses when used in teas, tinctures, and infusions. I won't pretend to know all about that since I've only begun learning and experimenting. Lastly, I enjoy the scent of herbs. I love to run my hands over the plants and then smell their fragrance on my fingers. Once in a while I'll open a mason jar and smell the dried herbs I store in them. Another way to enjoy those lovely fragrances is making sachets to place in dresser drawers so clothing and linens smell fresh and lovely too!

Here is a video tutorial where I make them:

How to Make an Herbal Sachet

The direct selling event I mention in the video is on Saturday, November 6 beginning at 10:00 AM:

Ladies Day Out

Black Jack Hills

13450 Chapman Rd

St. George, KS 66535

If you love beautiful scents, also be sure to visit HippieHenHomestead on Etsy!

Until next time...I'm wishing you a beautiful autumn weekend!

Raising Chickens for Meat - A New Venture

Learning is my passion and homesteading is a continuous process of gaining new skills to tuck into my toolbelt, so it's a perfect fit for my personality. Knowledge has historically been handed down to the next generation through storytelling and hands-on learning by working alongside parents, grandparents, neighbors, and the community. Some occupations still use this model, but it isn't the norm like it was a hundred years ago. 

I grew up in rural areas and watched my grandparents and dad butcher hogs and chickens. My husband and sons butcher deer after hunting season. So while I haven't actually learned that particular skill set, the concept isn't foreign to me. I used to love eating chicken. My grandma would go out to the chicken house, catch a chicken, butcher it, scald it, pluck the feathers, cut it up and fry it in a lard-filled cast iron skillet. I've never eaten chicken so delicious since my childhood. These days I honestly don't eat chicken often, because the commercially-raised meat from the grocery store is flavorless and fatty. Grandma's fresh fried chicken set the bar high! 

When I first began homesteading, I found the Pioneering Today podcast with Melissa K. Norris on Spotify (also melissaknorris.com) and listened to almost every episode. Melissa is a wealth of knowledge and produces great "how-to" content that is extremely valuable. I bought her books, found her YouTube channel and dug through those resources for information. Through her content I encountered Joel Salatin of polyfacefarms.com and his system for pasture-raised, organically-fed meat chickens. I was intrigued, but hesitant. Could I actually butcher chickens after spending months raising them from cute little chicks? 

Two additional women homesteaders who inspire me are Shaye Elliott of theelliotthomestead.com and Angela Reed of www.parisiennefarmgirl.com. These lovely ladies host and produce the Homemaker Chic podcast and listening to them I became convinced I could remain a well-rounded woman who appreciates literature, art, and music and still butcher a chicken to provide quality food for my family. Funny how I thought I could only do one or the other instead of both.

Having worked through those mental blocks, I began raising thirty chickens to be butchered later this month. This was to be a trial run to track costs and gain new skills. If successful, I would build another chicken tractor (mobile coop) to use next spring and summer allowing me to raise enough chicken to sell in my community. My goal is to create diverse income streams to grow my homesteading business and in doing so, gain new knowledge and skills - my favorite things! 

Unfortunately, my first attempt to pasture-raise chickens in a chicken tractor was a disaster!  I came home one afternoon after running an errand and found that my dog chewed through the chicken wire covering the side of the tractor and killed every last chick. I was beyond devastated! I cried, penned up my dog, and cleaned up tiny chick carcasses - an awful experience. It wasn't the financial loss that hurt the most, it was the fact that I'd put a lot of hard work into building the chicken tractor being sure to follow advice from the experts. I also invested a lot of mental energy and felt emotionally responsible for the lives of the tiny creatures I was raising.  But I learned a few things as well: tailor expert advice to your particular circumstances (I have a bird dog, so heavier wire on my tractor is a must), think ahead to possible scenarios that could be problematic and plan for those, and remember that your first try at something new won't produce perfect results. Give yourself a little grace and be open to input from those around you.

This was a particularly humbling experience for me. I had decided not to finish this blog post, but then realized that maybe someone else could benefit from my mistakes. Through the winter, I'll revamp the chicken tractor using hardware cloth/hail screen rather than chicken wire and add tin to portions of the coop for more protection from rain and wind. I also plan to run electric fencing around the tractor to keep predators and pets away. This will all require more work when moving the tractor, but the result will be well worth the effort.

Have you put your hands to a new venture recently?  Did it work as planned?  Let me know in the comments below - I love to hear from readers!

What IS Modern Homesteading?

It’s really all about the food!  And sustainability, self-sufficiency, freedom, slow-living, families (of many different configurations), community, and a new American Dream. Modern homesteaders are a diverse and varied population. Some live in the suburbs and maximize the land surrounding their homes to garden and keep chickens. Others live on rural acreages of all sizes allowing them more options. Are you physically and mentally exhausted, constantly hurrying from one activity to another, or working a stressful and unfulfilling job? Most of us have been there at some point in our lives. Many homesteaders are folks who simply tired of that lifestyle and made a new choice. They work at home to create an old-fashioned, simpler lifestyle growing and raising their own food, cooking and baking from scratch, and hand crafting many of their necessities. Cooking foods you've grown and raised is much more fun than simply buying it at a grocery store AND they taste better!  

So what do homesteaders DO all day?  EVERYTHING! We garden, care for livestock, cook, preserve food, create products for our families and communities, run businesses from home via the Internet and social media, set up produce stands either on our property or at farmer’s markets, and care for our families. Since it is almost September and I live in Kansas, I’ve harvested and preserved most of the produce from my gardens for this season. I've moved on to planning next year’s gardens, constructing new garden beds, and ordering seed for crops to plant this fall. Caring for livestock is a daily chore year-round. I currently have ten laying hens and hope to add more soon (when I have a larger chicken coop). Tomorrow I receive my first ever delivery of thirty chicks to raise and butcher for meat. We live seasonally, so our daily activities ebb and flow. During cooler months, I make soap, body scrubs and creams, and candles for my own use and also sell them at craft shows and direct selling events. Homesteaders are NEVER bored and are always looking for new and exciting ways to grow and improve which is my favorite thing about this lifestyle!

Let me know in the comments what homesteading activities you enjoy (even if you aren’t a “homesteader”) or what activities you’d like to try in the future!

Welcome to the Farm

I began homesteading in 2020 after living on a working farm for over 28 years!  My husband, Rick, was the farmer and I worked “in town” helping support the farm and family.  The urge to cultivate fresh food (due in part to going through cancer treatment in 2017) prompted me to investigate this thing called “modern homesteading.”  What began as an experimental garden grew into the renovation of a cattle lot we rarely used.  We removed old fencing, lots of limestone rock, a few trees, and then tilled a proper garden space!  Over the winter we added fencing to deter wildlife from enjoying our veggies.

In the farm shop, my husband and I built a chicken coop reusing materials stashed around the farm. When finished, Rick moved it to a spot near the new garden using his tractor and bale fork.  We then set to work building an impenetrable chicken run where my new chick friends needn’t worry about predators!

 

Water and electric lines were trenched out to my new domain completing the infrastructure. 

And so it began.

The homestead grows as I gain confidence and identify new opportunities.  Skills learned building the chicken coop translated to building a chicken tractor this month and I’m awaiting the delivery of 30 Cornish cross chicks from Murray McMurray Hatchery.  I’ve never butchered a chicken, but I’ll learn and acquire yet another new skill.  

Welcome to my happy place!