Small Homestead

My Small Homestead was included in several carnivals this week.  I have found that carnivals are not only a great way for other people to discover my blog but also a wonderful way to find other blogs that interest me.  So this week, I decided to share some of my favorites.

The first post that caught [...]

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There is nothing worse than going into the garden and finding that something other than you is eating your vegetable plants.  There are a host of pests that will cause havoc with your vegetable garden and there are as many ways of combating them.
Squash Bugs
I have picked squash one day and gone out the next [...]

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My six year old grandson is visiting us this week.  I was worried about keeping him entertained for days at a time with very few games and toys.  We stay fairly busy at this time of year with animals, garden, grass and the normal repairs and don’t have time to really take a day off [...]

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R and I live on a little less than $10,000 per year.   It seems like an impossibly small annual income, however, neither of us feel poor.  It actually gives us quite a bit of freedom.  I suppose that we don’t have a lot of material things but we have a nice house, vehicles that run [...]

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There has been so much going on in my life over the past month or so that the carnival has gotten away from me so this edition is going to be HUGE.   I hope that you will check out all of the articles.

Canning
Carolyn presents The Barber Bunch: How to make Strawberry Jam posted at The [...]

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I envy people who have ugly, gross garden pests.  Some fat caterpillar or some ugly beetle that you could pluck off and smash without guilt.  Or sprinkle a little sevin dust on your plants and do away with the evil little beasts but no, I have to have sweet, cute, soft and cuddly garden pests.
I [...]

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When I was a child, my mother decided that we were going to homestead.  We lived in the country so it was an easy shift to put more focus on growing your own food.  We gardened and we raised animals for food.  We had magazines on goats, chickens, making your own cheese, shearing your own [...]

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Our cucumber plants have been going wild.  We are getting four or five cucumbers per day so I decided to take advantage of the surplus to make Bread and Butter Pickles.  I found the recipe over at Get Rich Slowly and followed it pretty closely.  They have great pictures of the process.
Here is my version:
Bread [...]

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I am not sure why our garden is surviving.  We have been battling wire grass and even tried spraying the wiregrass with weed killer.  It worked great except that the wind blew it over onto the beans and we wiped out half a row of beans, a few tomato plants and a couple of peppers.
No [...]

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