Homestead Update: Week 2
This next homestead post has incorporated the last 2 or 3 weeks, but realistically, the days have been blurring together and it has totally felt like one loooong week! So I’ll just catch you up on our homestead and call it a post!
First bit of exciting news; our homestead grew by 26 creatures! We bought our neighbor’s entire batch of baby ducks and will be raising them to keep the females along with a couple of the males and butcher a few of the males for meat. They are currently very happily making a mess in a giant stock tank in our basement, splashing water and food everywhere and peeping at all hours of the night. I have to say, keeping them in the basement is a huge improvement over our first baby duck experiment about 3 years ago where we kept them in the bathtub. Between the bathroom smelling like a barn and having baby ducks randomly escaping over the side of the tub and running through the house, that was not one of our better plans.
On a not so fun note . . . Jeremy came home from work with a cold over the past weekend and everyone has gotten it to some extent. He used my Echinacea tincture the first few days, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have gotten, and I think I was able to avoid getting a full blown cold by keeping up on Echinacea and oregano as well. It’s fun to actually see herbs working to help your family stay healthy! My toddlers don’t have more than a very runny nose, so we are encouraging them to stay hydrated and treating them to some yummy elderberry syrup.
Speaking of Elderberries, we are making some more Elderberry syrup using my recipe here. . . I doubled the batch and will probably be using it up pretty quickly trying to keep my little family of 5 healthy with the onset of spring colds. I did learn the hard way not to let it stay out on the counter; mine got moldy overnight. It did sit next to the crock pot on a 10 hour cycle, so I am wondering if it may have gotten too warm, not just room temperature, which is in the 60s here this time of year. The kids love taking it and helping me make it so we use it as a fun hands-on learning project too. (I do reserve some elderberry syrup without the honey for my 8 month old) We are also ordering 6 Elderberry bushes to add to our berry collection so we can hopefully keep ourselves supplied with Elderberry syrup in the future.
My girls have been loving getting out in the garden with me! We have finally cleaned out all the various garden beds just in time to plant things for spring. They are a little overenthusiastic with their weeding at this point, but hey, I’ll take all the help I can get before our veggie/herb plants start coming up & I have to supervise the weeding more carefully! We have our cold weather garden in and it has finally started sprouting since we’ve had some rain the last few days.
We also just planted a bunch of herbs and a few pepper plants inside to hopefully sprout successfully this year. Always forgetting to water my indoor plants is one of my homestead shortcomings, so I am planning to set an alarm on my phone & tell the 3 year old to remind me to water.
Something I have been planning to do for many seasons, and have FINALLY gotten around to this week is making myself a tangible, written planting calendar based on the last frost date/first frost date for fall planting. I based our last frost date off Mother’s Day, the folk lore planting date around here in zone 6. I numbered a page of lined paper from 1-31 for each month from March to October, labeled the frost dates, and marked the weeks before the first frost counting backward (-1, -2 etc.) I then marked the weeks going forward with +1, +2 etc until the late summer where I switched to marking -8, -7, etc up to the first frost. Since I’m finding this very helpful so far, I am working on trying to convert my design into a word document or pdf file to share here on the blog.
Some of my goal for the coming week include finishing up the weeding in my front garden bed, getting some of my herbs to sprout , finding a supplement I can add to my ducks’ water or food to help them stay healthy, helping my family get back to feeling well, getting our plant order placed, and designing my planting calendar to share it with you all.