INTRODUCTION
Homestead Roots Newsletter - 5/2/2024

Wouldn't you know just 2 hours after sending out last weeks newsletter in which I shared about helping our kids build resilience. I get a photo message from Ingrid of a mangled finger and a "what should we do?" question. The finger was Bergen's, it was attached to the same arm with the broken wrist. The kids were doing some crafting at their homeschool nature group. The task was pounding copper pipes into bookmarks. Bergen got her finger between the hammer and the copper and did some major damage. UGH. So off to Urgent Care we went, with more lessons learned (hopefully). They put in a couple of stitches and found that she broke the tip of her finger as well. All should heal well and we are actually hoping to get both the cast off and the stitches out this week. Just in time for piano and violin recitals. Bergen did great through it all and received many complimentary words on her toughness through the whole process. I am proud of her for that but ready for a break on the traumatic injuries!

HOMESTEAD UPDATE
Moving Out The Pigs, Turkeys on the Way

We are into our summer routine now on the homestead. That means feeding all the animals in the morning, checking waterers and getting status updates throughout the day and generally enjoying the presence of our summer livestock. The big adjustment from winter to summer is milking and the addition of our pigs. Ingrid and Espen have been doing a great job on the milking and things are going really well there. They are milking 4 goats and seeing milk production ramp up. As of now we are drinking all we can produce along with making yogurt every couple of weeks. Soon we will surpass our drinking volume and start making some cheeses. I really do love having dairy on our homestead. Definitely extra work but such a luxury!

Pigs had been in the barn since they came to the homestead. With stable conditions we decided to get them outside to their outdoor pen. This meant climbing into the stall with them, catching them and getting them into a dog kennel. Easier said than done! If there is one thing pigs hate it is having their feet off the ground. I wish we had captured video but it wasn't going to happen in the moment.😉 I did grab video of them in their pen after the move, and explained the process a bit: https://youtu.be/biUd_iBUkOY. It is good to have them outdoors. We still have them locked up in their hub for the time being but hope to open up the gate to allow them into their pasture this weekend.

Elias is taking a break on running ducks through his incubator so we are sneaking in a batch of chicken eggs or two. We purchased a couple dozen from a friend who has a Buff Orphington rooster and a barnyard mix of hens. We have a Swedish Flower Hen rooster and a mix of hens as well. We will run through some of our eggs too though we have 60 hens and one rooster so fertilization might be a bit low. We will see. We also picked up some turkey eggs from a local homesteader! Those 6 eggs are in the incubator now. They will take 28 days, chicken eggs take 21 days. At the suggestion of the homesteader who sold us the turkey eggs we will add some chicken eggs to the incubator a week after setting the turkey eggs. This way the chickens will hatch at the same time as the turkeys. Turkeys apparently aren't as instinctual as chickens and need more help finding food and water. The baby chicks should help them figure it out. Fingers crossed! We raised a couple of turkeys last year for thanksgiving and decided we will try to make that happen every year! SO good!

Lastly we now have bees back on the homestead. The boys with their homestead mentor Dean set up 3 new hives with fresh bees. We had 2 hives last year and lost both of them over the winter. Espen saved some honey money and was able to purchase 2 new bee colonies for his hives. The goal this year will be to keep those bees happy and healthy over the winter.

MARKET GARDENING
Irrigation Project Update, Open for Business!

The farmstand is open for business as of May 1. This was the day we pinpointed as opening day though we actually opened about a week early because we had veggies and eggs ready to sell. Ingrid and the kids and 1 farm worker have been hard at work getting things planted, harvested, weeded, etc. Yes it is work but it is good work. Feeding people good, healthy food is a noble cause and something we enjoy. Coming out of the garden now are radishes, salad mix, mesclun mix (we call it super salad, it is a hearty mix of unique salad greens), spinach, chives, microgreens and bok choi. We are still harvesting everything from inside the tunnel. The outside stuff is really coming along as well. Tomatoes are doing OK. They got sun scalded (this happens when you grow plants under lights, they get burnt when they see actual sun for the first time, in past years we've done a better job of hardening them off, this year it was sink or swim I guess!) so some looked rough but we are starting to see our first new green growth from the plants and I think we are going to be OK out there. I am anxious to see if we get tomatoes early.

I dug into our irrigation project last weekend. I made progress but many issues arose! Most notably the fittings I purchased from Menards are pretty hopeless. The system is worthless if it leaks, as the idea is to leave it on and let timers run the watering. We had a lot of leaky fittings.😞 I have ordered some more professional grade options and they arrive today. I am looking forward to getting them installed. The second issue was my timers didn't work like I wanted. I am still trying to figure that out. It could be bad batteries? Or else they got wet from all the leaking fittings and the rain? Though one would expect a timer built for watering stuff outdoors would be able to handle the wet. Hopefully I have everything squared away soon! I will share an update with glowing success next week!🙂 

CLOSING WORDS
The Importance of Learning Skills

One of my absolute favorite parts of this homesteading life is the constant learning. As we progress and advance in our self sufficient journey there is so much to learn and so many new challenges to address. To many of our grandparents and great grandparents the things we are learning were common knowledge. Things like canning food, preparing and cooking food, general preserving, butchering, raising animals for food, gardening, managing fruit bushes and trees, etc, etc, etc. Today of course you can live a life from zero to 100 without any of those things! How crazy is that "progress" in just a couple generations. Progress in quotes because while it is progress has it really made us better? I will let you decide, I bet you know my opinion.

So why bother learning and doing this stuff when you don't have to??? For us it comes down to many reasons I will share a couple here. The first is that we have a very hard time trusting that today's big food producers have our best interest in mind. We desire to know exactly how our food was raised, whether that is a pig, chicken or stem of broccoli! Food is medicine, and is so IMPORTANT. Our world seems to be waking up to this. Of course we aren't 100 percent off the food grid but we work to get closer all the time. The second big reason is just feeling like we are prepared for anything. We got glimpses of what life could be like with COVID. That wasn't remotely as bad as it could be as far as supply chains and panic buying. If the grocery store has no food, what are you going to do? The system is fragile and we love the idea of knowing we have backup plans and aren't relying on others to live.

Skills are learned and then need to be practiced. I can't tell you how many times I've walked into a project fully confident after a few YouTube videos or some book knowledge, only to be quickly humbled by the task at hand. Life skills require practice and repetition, we know this from every other area of our life. We need to also use it for the most important elements of our life, like feeding ourselves.

So many of these tasks can be easily taken on! Plant a garden, it can be one pot on your deck or you could tear out some of that sod in your yard and put it to good use!🙂 Just plant it and tend to it and harvest it. Learn to produce your own food, it is so empowering. Cooking, canning and food preservation are such good skills to know! Do some research, buy some bulk fruit or veggies from someone you trust and go to work!

There are so many benefits to this lifestyle! I can't help but want to share it all with you. The work is hard but so fulfilling!