INTRODUCTION
Homestead Roots Newsletter - 12/5/2024

The temperatures finally cooled down in our neck of the woods! After a warm and dry fall, winter came rushing in and it has been colder than normal now for about a week. We have had several highs only in the teens during that time, including today. We have been picking out a few warmer days for projects and looking ahead to this weekend with temperatures back near 40 degrees. Life has definitely slowed down but there is still work to be done!

HOMESTEAD UPDATE
Deer Hunting and Some Other Homestead Happenings

To tie up loose ends in my last post I mentioned that our skid steer was dead. The plan was to replace the fuel filters and hope for the best. Good news! The fuel filter swap worked and the skid steer is up and running again. What a relief. The next steps were going to get pretty expensive!

After getting the skid steer back up and running we had a couple of nice days and got some good work done. We were able to get compost loaded on our homestead garden. We are able to do this with the skid steer alone. Just driving on the beds and dumping compost. We have found with our no till system the compaction issues are non existent. Ingrid also planted a few more of our grafted apple trees in between the beds of the homestead garden. We grafted these a couple of years ago and they have been growing in a small nursery area every since.

With temperatures cooling we’ve been burning wood nearly everyday. We usually get the house up to about 72 and then work to maintain it. We can usually keep it within 3-4 degrees by adding a log every couple of hours.

The annual Wisconsin deer opener was Saturday November 23rd. Espen joined me hunting opening day in the morning and the evening. A friend who was hunting with me got a small buck on opening morning. At the same time he shot we had one in range as well but couldn’t find an opening in the brush to take a shot. Saturday night was quiet at our stand but as we walked out we saw a few deer in the fields around our spot. We planned then to hunt some of those deer that were coming out to feed on Sunday evening. We carried out a little ground blind and set up. Right towards sunset a group of deer came out into our field. They spotted us and were slowly moving away from us. Thankfully the biggest buck in the group gave me a good shot and I knocked him down at about 180 yards. He was a nice little 8 pointer. Espen and I got him field dressed and loaded into the truck. We got the hide off that night.

A few days later it was butchering time. This was a process that used to take me hours and hours. Thankfully these days the knife knows where to go and I can usually get it done in about 2 hours. Ingrid then grinds the trim and packages up everything else. The kids are usually around pitching in as well. We ended up with close to 40 lbs of ground venison plus a handful of nice roasts.

Ingrid and I did a fun little day date out to some local Amish farms. We needed some bulk dry goods and had heard there was a farmer willing to trade roosters for store credit in his hardware store. It was a fun adventure and we were able to move along a few roosters as well! Later that day a gentleman from the cities reached out about our 37 laying hens that I had for sale. He came that night and took the birds. We were thankful in both cases! We are now down to our smallest chicken flock in a long time. Only about 20 birds. Most of them are young and just starting to lay. We intend to keep the flock about this size for awhile. We will see how that goes!

Elias our duck farmer sold off most of his ducks recently. He has decided to focus on one breed (Welsh Harlequin). Previously he was managing 5 different breeds. He used some of last years earnings and purchased 17 new chicks to kick start his egg production in the spring. The timing of the chicks wasn’t ideal as the temperatures got very cold. So he has been brooding them in our basement! We think they will be able to go outside to the brooder this weekend.

We had a blessed Thanksgiving holiday with family. Good food and fellowship! On black Friday we pulled the trigger on a back up generator for the house. It runs on both propane and gas. We intend to get it connected to our house’s propane tank for longer term backup. The sole purpose of the unit is to keep our freezers cold during an extended outage. I did heavy research into some of the solar and battery options as well and would like to someday make that happen but for now this makes the most sense.

We made a little more room in our pasture by cutting down another balsam tree and using the top 9 feet for our Christmas tree. We have a couple of trees left before they are all used up. I would love to start a few trees for future Christmases as well!

MARKET GARDENING
Winter Project: Germination Chamber!

The garden is sleeping soundly these days. I am guessing after all this cold that everything is dead, even in our high tunnel but I am looking forward to peeking in there as the temps warm up this weekend. The kale that is outside actually still looks pretty good! What an amazing plant. We will see how it looks when it warms up as well.

We are currently in our rest period of the gardening season. Seed catalogs have started to arrive but we aren’t really opening and looking at them yet. Aside from some bookkeeping and tax prep we are just taking a break.

We did however make one recent purchase that we are hopeful will help us level up on a challenge we faced last year. We were plagued last year by poor germination. This is an absolute killer when it comes to efficiently running a garden business. Poor germination means we are leaving bed space open, which means we aren’t optimizing our space and are losing money.

So this winter we plan to build out a germination chamber. This will be a warm humid environment for some plants and a cooler environment for some others. Most seeds like the heat but lettuce does not. I found on FB Marketplace an old Norlake laboratory fridge! It was really cheap and is going to work perfect. We will use a crockpot full of water on the bottom of the unit to create the perfect environment. At the moment I am trying to source some casters so we can get it on wheels and move it around. It will likely live in our seed starting space. Like anything there will be additional challenges that we face even with this unit but hopefully in the long run it will really help us! I will keep you posted as we work on the project

CLOSING
Pain, suffering, frustration and then SUCCESS!

Fixing things is certainly just a part of life for farmers and homesteaders. It can be both extremely gratifying and horribly frustrating! This past Sunday I had planned to sneak out and split some wood. Wouldn’t you know it the splitter wouldn’t start. I pulled, and pulled, and pulled… nothing. It was probably an hour long ordeal with me beginning to take it apart to try and figure out what was going on. Not to mention it was only about 15 degrees. With finding no success I decided to fire up our UTV to pull it to our garage so it could warm up a little bit and I could work on it. Well… wouldn’t you know the UTV wouldn’t start either. That one was simply a weak battery from the cold weather. So I went back into the house having accomplished nothing.

A couple of days later I took another stab at the splitter and took it apart. I discovered a cracked piece of tubing that helped the engine in the starting process. I called a local spot and they actually had a replacement part. So I went over and grabbed the part as well as a new spark plug and got the machine put back together. And…. the machine fired right up. So lots of frustration but then ultimately there was the sense of accomplishment for getting the machine back up and running.

To me this piece is one of the addicting things about this lifestyle. Whether it is problem solving, planning projects, growing food, building buildings or fixing machines. That feeling of accomplishment and success after working hard on something is just the best. Do you have things in your life that help you feel like that?