INTRODUCTION
Homestead Roots Newsletter - 12/18/2024

I can hardly believe we are a week from Christmas! For many reasons this season is my favorite season. The food, the tradition, the family time and of course the birth of our Savior! I hope you all find some quiet in this busy season to really appreciate all that you have. Not to be depressing but soon it will be January 2nd and it will be over. Such a sad thought for me! For some of you that might be a pleasant thought! I hope even if the holidays are a challenge you can find some joy this season.

HOMESTEAD UPDATE
Winter Projects, Preserving Food and Splitting

I had the wood splitter humming last weekend. We are making a small dent in the large pile of logs that need to be split. Without a wood shed we just sort of piled wood up in random places and now we are needing to work through it, get it split and stacked. A side benefit to this will be added organization on the property. The wood is of course piled up just behind the house which I am sick of looking at. So we are killing two birds with one stone on this project.

Ingrid helped me get the logs stacked and then started the process of getting our tree guards on the fruit trees. Without the guards the rodents feast on our tree trunks inevitably killing our trees. Time, work and money are invested in each fruit tree so it just makes sense to add a little protection to protect our investment. We’ve used different methods but at this time we just use the plastic wrap style guards. They seem to work just fine. We have a few trees that are more mature that we don’t wrap but any tree 5 years or under we get wrapped up.

We are still working through food preservation believe it or not. We have a bins of cabbages, turnips, carrots, kale and apples in the walk-in cooler that we need to get taken care of. It is a tough time of year to prioritize that stuff, some of it will likely need to wait until after the holidays.

The kids participated in a kid focused barn sale a couple of weekends ago. They spent a lot of time thinking about what they were going to sell and then working to make it a reality. Elias hand carved coffee stirring spoons, Bergen made goat milk caramels and tea blends and Espen sold his honey. It was such a fun day! They had great attendance and made some good money for their efforts.

MARKET GARDENING
Preparing to Plan

With the recent cold everything in the garden is now dead. We will move on to garden planning next month. It is a fun time of year for me, Ingrid enjoys more of the hands in the dirt part of gardening and for me it is the planning, processing and working to create a successful future project. We are using a piece of software called Heirloom that allows us to easily create our plan. After building last years plan in the tool we are able to effectively copy over last years plan to this year and then just make the tweaks we want to make from what we learned last year. That will involve going through last years notes, defining the challenges and then working to create a plan to fix it for this coming year. Once we have a good plan we will get to work ordering our seeds. We do a little shopping around but buy most of our stuff from businesses we trust. Germination is so important, it just isn’t worth saving money on seeds only to have them not pop up!

So for now we are resting, my brain is thinking a little bit but we are really just enjoying the time off. The forced rest is worth it, to be fresh and ready to go in the new year.

CLOSING
Celebrating Christmas!

Ingrid and I got a last minute invite from her parents to join them at a Christmas concert at Orchestra Hall. What a fun adventure that was! We don’t often make our way into the city but this was a worthwhile trip. We heard the college of Concordia Moorhead sing beautiful faith filled music accompanied by an orchestra. It was fantastic and such a nice way to enter into the Christmas season. Many of us have mixed feelings regarding the holiday season. Family time is hard for many, this reality makes me so sad. Culture and the world would have us believe that this is OK. That if your crazy uncle believes something different from you politically it is OK to no longer invite him to holiday meals. My hope for everyone this holiday season is for peace filled family time, joy, good meals, rest and much more. The family bond is such a powerful force yet at times it can also be extremely fragile. Blessings this Christmas season!