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The Kids’ Gardens

August 12, 2015 By Laura 5 Comments

After intending to for far too long, I am finally sharing with you our kids’ little gardens, today!

All 4 of our kids help in our family gardens at some point or other through the gardening seasons; although some do with more joy and ambition than others. There is always some weeding, dead-heading flowers, or picking vegetables, that needs tending to. I do much of it myself, but sometimes I could use another pair of hands, and the company is nice sometimes, too.

But just prior to the gardening season in 2013, I pitched the idea to the kids, of having their very own little garden.
I explained that they could plant and grow whatever they wanted, but they were also responsible for keeping it up. That meant keeping it weeded, watered, dead-heading their own flowers, and generally tending to it with love.  Not only that, but after their father built the frame base, they had to be a team and prepare the bed themselves. They all loved the idea, and each have had their own little garden ever since!


It may have been more work than they anticipated, that first year!  Because although we have had loam brought in by the truck full for our other garden beds, we had a perfectly good dirt pile next to the driveway that we didn’t really want there.  It had been overgrown with weeds and grass, though. Basically, it was less of a dirt pile any longer, and more like a grassy hill, riddled with rocks! So they did work hard, like a team. The boys dug the hill up, pulling and shaking out the grass and weed clumps, and putting shovel fulls earth onto the handmade screen on the wheel barrow.  The girls sifted the dirt through, to remove all of the rocks, and then wheeled the barrow over to the garden bed, and dumped the dirt in.

That was the less than fun part. But they made the most of it, and it was good and done for many years to come.
Now let’s look at their gardens, today…. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Gardening, Homeschooling, Parenting, The Big Picture, The Homestead Tagged With: Catholic-blogs, Catholic-families, Catholic-kids, Celosia, creative-gardening-for-kids, garden photos, Gardening, gardening-ideas-for-kids, homeschooling, kids-gardening, kids-gardens, lessons-in-gardening-for-kids, painted-garden-rocks

Photos from Around the Homestead – May, June, July 2015

July 9, 2015 By Laura 6 Comments

*Hello Friends!  First, there are a whole bunch of photos to this post here, so you really need to NOT scroll, and just let them load for a minute. Therefore, you might as well just read this brief intro, if you are one who usually just looks at the pictures.  ๐Ÿ˜‰

About the title: I always use the term ‘homestead’. So just so you know, yes, we do understand that we do not technically live on a true homestead, by definition. But we still have taken to the word. We are simply referring to our home and the little tiny property we live on. We’re going to keep using it, because it works for us.

Lastly, it’s been quite an unusual spring and early summer for us all.  Kind of tough, but it’s all good. I am finally starting to get around on my own two feet, following my wicked broken ankle and torn ligaments in mid-April. That kept any usual projects and activity off the table. But God has taught me much through it all, as I knew He would. Things like patience, Psalm 46:10, and all of that good and hard stuff. I didn’t realize how much transforming I had to do but, um….I see it in full color now!

Anyway, the photos are probably loaded now. Just some brief descriptions from here on out. Hope you enjoy……
  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Gardening, Our Chickens, Photography, The Big Picture, The Homestead Tagged With: calibrachoa, chickens, family-life, flowers, geraniums, homestead-photography, pansies, photography, photos, verbenas

Our First Natural Hatching of Chicks

June 21, 2015 By Laura 2 Comments

It was while we were all gathered around our dinner table as a family one night, somewhere around the 3rd full week of May (2015), that we made the spontaneous decision to not collect some of our chicken eggs in one nesting box, and see if any of the hens would get broody, and naturally hatch them to chicks.

The next day, and the day following that, we left a total of seven eggs in one nesting box, for them to care for.

For any newcomers here, we should note that our original flock are all pure breeds, and each of our 6 chickens are a different breed. So we knew that any new chicks that hatched would be part Welsummer (because we only have one rooster), and part one of the other hen breeds. (Also known as ‘barnyard mixes’.) It was going to be fun to try and figure out whose was whose, if any hatched!

It was Plymouth, our White Plymouth Rock, that stepped up to the plate….errr, nesting box, first, and took on the role of Mama hen. She was so completely committed to caring for those eggs, and not leaving them, that we had to lift her out daily, and put her out in the big run, to go eat, drink and potty.  It was really only then, that she’d take no more than 30 minutes, to do those things, recharge, and maybe sneak in a good dust bath. And then it was right back to her volunteer duties. The mothering instinct obviously comes quite easily to her.

We started with 7 eggs, because we assumed not all would develop or make it, and so we’d end up with 2 or 3, which is all we were really hoping for right now. We didn’t know that chickens have a better natural hatch rate, than artificial incubation, as we had done before. So when we candled all of the eggs once, at day 10, and saw veins and a dark moving form in every single one, two things happened.

1. I began to panic. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Our Chickens, The Homestead Tagged With: baby-chick-photography, brooder-ideas, broody-hens, chickens, hatching chicks, hatching-mixed-chicken-breeds, hens, naturally-hatching-chickens, where-to-let-chicken-eggs-hatch

Gardening FAIL: Growing Strawberry Plants in Rain Gutters

June 4, 2015 By Laura 93 Comments

I’ve been feeling an urgency to get this blog post update out, because I have been seeing ridiculous growing traffic on our Strawberry Planting in Rain Gutters post.  And I think we should let you all know, that growing strawberry plants in rain gutters hasn’t turned out so well for us.  And by that I mean….well, they are all dead. Big gardening fail. It’s true. Take a look for yourself.

Are we missing any signs of life here, People? Yeah, we didn’t think so.
<Sigh.>
I had such high hopes. It was this photo below, that I saw online, that really had me daydreaming, about growing a wealth of strawberries from rain gutters, like this……
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Gardening, The Homestead Tagged With: Gardening, growing-strawberries-in-rain-gutters, strawberries, strawberry-plants-in-rain-gutters-not-thriving

Our First Homeschooled Child Graduates from High School: College Bound

May 30, 2015 By Laura 12 Comments

When she started out homeschooling, we felt like we had a lifetime ahead of us. Certainly any thoughts of high school, graduating from high school, or possibilities of heading off to college, just seemed like….another lifetime.  It was something I would always be prepping for anyway, for someday. But, it was so far off. And there was a whole lot of living, loving, and learning to do, in each day, between now and then.
And we did a whole lot of all of those things. But like any of the most precious times of your life, in what seems like the blink of an eye……

Well, here we all are.  On the other end a lifetime, I guess, with the oldest of our four children. With our first homeschooled child. The one we always called our ‘Trail Blazer’.  She is graduating from high school, and definitely college bound.
We’re here at the end, and yet, a whole new, beautiful beginning.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Homeschooling, Life In General, The Big Picture Tagged With: college-after-homeschooling, high-school-home-education, homeschooling, homeschooling-encouragement, homeschooling-through-high-school, Philippians-4:13, Saint-Anselm-College

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