INTRODUCTION
Homestead Roots Newsletter - 7/18/2024

We have had some the most beautiful days of the summer this week. Finally the humidity has dropped and we aren't dodging rain drops. The nights are cool, the days are sunny and the temperatures are moderate! This follows a weekend of heat with temps into the 90s. It has been a welcome relief and makes it nice to work outside again.

HOMESTEAD UPDATE
Turkeys Keep Dying, Likely It Is Our Fault!

Not too much to update you on the homestead front. We've been coasting a bit on some of the homestead projects and work. I purposefully didn't plan any big projects for this summer. The pressure over the past few years has been pretty intense and we needed a little break. Most of the time those bigger projects get worked on in the evening which means our family time is a bit cut short. We've been enjoying some fun nights playing games and just spending time together.

I have done some work recently with the new brush mower. Man what a machine! And it really does a nice job! Keeping the brush under control is a big job. I am thankful for the brush mower and looking forward to putting it to really good use!

We lost another 2 turkeys. We now only have 1 remaining. Sad. We started with 6 eggs, 5 of them hatched and have slowly died for no apparent reason. We did do a little research and found that turkeys actually need to be fed differently from chickens. We have been keeping the new chickens and the turkeys together and so we've been using chick starter feed. Turkeys apparently require significantly more protein in their feed early in life. The might be why they've been dropping like flies. We had no idea of course! After looking for a feed options at Fleet Farm we have failed. I just reached out to our bulk feed provider to see what he can do. Trying to save thanksgiving dinner here!

We had a big party Saturday to celebrate summer and our church. Lots of church friends joined us for some grilling and socializing and rousing game of kickball. I love finding ways to use our beautiful property. Makes me wonder about other ways we can use this property to help with our farm income???

Feed was delivered for our meat chicken cycle this year. The baby chicks will come next week. We order the feed in bulk and order a bunch of chicks, we've got 4 families involved raising the chickens at their place and then butchering them together at the end of the cycle.

MARKET GARDENING
Busy, busy, busy!

The farmstand has been very busy recently. We had some really busy weeks and then a bit of a break over the 4th holiday and now we are busy again. It has been good, no complaints! It feels like we are keeping up. It has felt that way before and then we hit a rough patch and run out of stuff. There are certainly a few items that we run out of but our main crops have been doing really well. Ingrid has been harvesting every day. Our goal is not to be harvesting every day but to keep up it has been necessary the past few weeks.

We've been harvesting and selling tomatoes this week. After a hot weekend we had a big harvest on Monday. We need those warm, sunny days to help the green tomatoes ripen up. I had a nice harvest this morning but of course everything sells really quickly. I will likely take off a day tomorrow and then harvest again on Saturday. We've had a little disease in the tunnel for the first time. It looks like a leaf mold of some kind. I am sure it has been caused by the humid, cloudy weather we've had. Even in a high tunnel you can't prevent everything. We've been working hard to trim off the diseased leaves and stay ahead of it. There is really only so much a person can do. It certainly won't affect the fruit which is good. It might just mean a shorter life for the tomato plant as a whole. I don't expect the impact to be too great. By September most people are sick of tomatoes anyway!

CLOSING THOUGHTS
Why Homestead?

I was thinking about this the other day. The homesteading movement still seems to be going pretty strong in our country. We have people everyday leaving behind the rat race of the city for a quieter, simpler existence in a rural area. Homesteading is really popular online as well, YouTube and Instagram are full of homesteaders sharing content. As a quick aside... Ingrid and I had a post go viral this past week on instagram. We enjoy posting and certainly aren't aiming for viral videos but I guess we got "lucky". In the video Ingrid is using our cherry pitter and pitting cherries. The video has been played 759,000 times. Our next most popular video has 3,000 plays. So you can see that this is definitely out of the ordinary. We are of course receiving nothing for this viral post. I did add in a little promotion to this newsletter in the post, but I don't think that has amounted to much of anything.🙂 Back to the topic at hand, the values of homesteading have clearly struck a never with our country. Simplicity, self sufficiency, peace and quiet, being outdoors, there are any number of reasons why this is the case, people are craving it.

For us and likely for a lot of you it is a combination of factors that lead you down this path. For us we love the self sufficiency piece of it. We enjoy projects, working together, eating good and saving money. These are just a few of our favorite things about homesteading. My question for you is why do you homestead? Or why do you want to homestead?