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Whole-Fed Homestead

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You are here: Home / History / The Homestead Monthly: April

The Homestead Monthly: April

April 30, 2015 by crystal@wholefedhomestead 2 Comments

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 on eggs

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.

Karl plowing

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.

Bees spring 2015

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!

Diggin junk

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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Filed Under: History, Homestead Tagged With: barnyard, chickens, ducks, garden, homesteading, honeybees, monthly update

Comments

  1. Mandi says

    May 4, 2015 at 9:34 AM

    I think your buried “treasure” is fantastic, even if it’s not worth much monetarily! I think it’s fascinating to find things like that. Congrats on your ducks and bees too! :)

    Reply
    • crystal@wholefedhomestead says

      May 4, 2015 at 8:59 PM

      Thanks Mandi! :)

      Reply

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🥔🎉 I haven’t finalized this year’s potat 🥔🎉 I haven’t finalized this year’s potato list quite yet. If you have an absolute favorite variety, I’d love to hear it! Here’s what I have so far:
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German Butterball: this is our favorite potato! A must-grow for sure. It’s an all-purpose variety, and it’s a gorgeous grass-fed butter yellow inside.
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Papa Cacho: the most amazing red fingerlings, digging these looks like pulling red bananas out of the dirt because they’re nearly a foot long! They are so fun!! Delicious too and gorgeous rosy inside (pictured above).
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Upstate Abundance: this is a new variety for me from Row 7, who specialize in good-tasting varieties. It’s also supposed to be high-yielding and fairly disease-resistant.
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Norkotah & Burbank Russets: we’ve been growing both of these for years. I was hoping a winner would emerge and I’d just grow one of these types, but so far that hasn’t happened so I keep planting them both! They are good but I’d love a russet type that blows me away.
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What say you- what are your must-grow potatoes?!
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#potatoesarelife #homemade #homegrown #fromscratch #spuds #homesteaders #homesteading #homesteadlife #organicgarden
Thanks for all your enthusiasm yesterday for the k Thanks for all your enthusiasm yesterday for the kick-off of the grow along, and thanks for following along!
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On that note, today is the start of The Great Grow Along!! A whole bunch of us gardeners are getting together to share real-time updates from our gardens every week on Wednesdays —> find us all here @thegreatgrowalong and thanks to our sponsors, @tractorsupply and @gurneysseed.
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