The Homestead Monthly: April

Baby Ducks on the Way
Fingers crossed! Lady Duck is sitting on a big ol’ nest full of eggs, expected to hatch in the middle of May. I collected ducks eggs for a little over a week and then put them all in the duck nest, hoping that one of the ducks would get the itch to sit on them. They didn’t. I kid you not, after a few days I went out with a bucket to collect the eggs back and whaddya know… she’s sitting on them! And not a moment too soon.

Lady Duck is two years old and will be a first time mother. If everything goes right, in a couple weeks we should have a whole bunch of ducklings running around! So far she’s been great and fully committed. Oh, and she’s sitting on about 20 eggs. She might be a bit of an overachiever…

The Big Garden
This will be our second spring and summer on the homestead. And while I would have loved to have a “big garden” last year, we weren’t sure exactly where it would go, and wanted to get a good feel for the land before we jumped into anything.

Now that we have a vision for how we want to mold our property, we broke ground on the new garden this month! Karl got to use his tractor for the first time, and plow for the first time- with the guidance of his dad, who used the same plow some-50 years ago.

We’ve got the garden plowed and raked. We’ll be fencing it in to prevent the chickens, deer and bunnies from eating it all before we plant at the end of May.

The Hives are a Buzzin’
We lost one hive of bees this past winter and wanted to replace it, so this month we ordered a new “package” of bees. We picked them up from the local supplier, let them hang out on our kitchen table for most of the day, and waited until the evening to put them into their new home.

See just left of the farthest hive on the right? That is the wooden and screen box that they came in. They rode from Georgia on a truck with hundreds of other boxes of bees. So far so good. They are bringing in lots of pollen, and I saw the first dandelion yesterday, so they should be collecting nectar soon as well. Crossing our fingers we get some honey this year!

Buried Treasure… Well, Kind Of
Karl was walking through the woods when he spotted a rusted piece of metal. Pulling it from the earth revealed that there was more where that came from. He dug a little deeper and discovered a rusted, crumbly metal container holding a pair of antique leather shoes and a half-disintigrated pocket watch. Thoughts of buried treasure raced through his mind as he sprinted to the house to get me, before digging any further.

We ran back out to the spot with a shovel and started to unearth the treasures that lay beneath the soil. It was cold and raining- Karl dug for almost two hours, pulling back the layers of… well, stuff. We couldn’t stop!

So what did we find? What we believe was the place where the previous owners (our house is 100+ years old) dumped garbage that they couldn’t burn, probably between 1910-1930, and mostly metal: sardine cans, Prince Albert cans, paint cans, a metal egg beater, a metal bicycle wheel, several pairs of really old leather shoes, tea cups, a stoneware mixing bowl, a decorative oil lamp, a few brown bottles- it was all broken. And there were no jars full of gold coins or old jewelry. Come on!

It was a fun adventure though, and gosh were we excited (and apparently mis-lead) after finding the initial pair of shoes and pocket watch. Was it someone’s buried get-away stash? We know that our house was used as quarters for the hired farm help back in the early 1900s. It is also known that Jesse James and his gang traveled through the area back in the day, and it is believed that they stashed gold that has yet to be discovered. We admit, it was pretty fun to let our imaginations run a bit wild out there…

Enjoy reading about what’s happening on our little Homestead?
—> February/March Homestead Monthly
—> December/January Homestead Monthly
—> October/November Homestead Monthly
—> September’s Homestead Monthly
—> August’s Homestead Monthly

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