Small Homestead

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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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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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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I have been working my way through the Seven Deadly Homemade weedkillers.  I have had various degrees of success with each based on the type of weed that I was using it on.  Bleach and Vinegar both worked but only on the grasses, not on any weed with any substance.  However, I have found one [...]

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Don’t forget that the Carnival of Homesteading will be hosted by Meadowwood Gardens this week.  This will be the Vegetable Gardening edition so they will be featuring gardening posts.  Get your submissions in soon, this is going to be one you don’t want to miss.  Submit your articles here.gr
The Carnival of Homesteading has been published.  [...]

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About a month ago, I wrote about our little garden tractor blowing up.  It took a couple of weeks to find all of the parts we needed.  We bought the connecting rod on ebay for a song and finally found the oil seal on the extra parts shelf at a local parts company.
The tractor was [...]

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My own personal gardening nightmare has happened.  We can’t run the cultivator and after years of being a yard, the garden is being taken over by wire grass.  I swear if I wanted to grow grass it would be barren but I have found no effective way to eradicate wire grass without creating a wasteland [...]

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Saturday I started an experiment to see which of the Seven Deadly Homemade weedkillers would be the most effective at killing weeds along my fence line.  I started with Bleach and you can see the results here.
On Sunday, I tried vinegar.  I mixed 3 parts of vinegar with 1 part of water and sprayed liberally [...]

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