restoring the roost

North Carolina Country Living and Farmhouse Style

North Carolina Country Living and Farmhouse Style
since 2010

Homesteading

Abandoned but Beautiful….

· Homesteading

I thought I would share with you today some farm scenes I shot while in Martin County, North Carolina. I’m sure you all know how much of a sucker I am for old farmhouses and outbuildings 🙂

a frame barn or pack house sits along the path to other farm outbuildings at the Bowen Farm
The Bowen Farm, whose main house is a frame “Triple-A” I-house with exterior end chimneys and a rear ell
 

an unidentified set of outbuildings sits at the back of a dilapidated farm complex
an unidentified farm house overgrown and in need of some repair

I dream about the day we might have our own cluster of farm buildings to restore and land to revive either for crops, pasture, or forest. Oh how fun that will be!

For now though, we will enjoy our modest little garden and flock of chickens while waiting on God’s timing and his direction for where we will go and what we will do.

 

Spring Garden

· gardening, Homesteading

I love this time of year in North Carolina. I’ve been meaning to post a spring garden update for quite some time and now that it’s almost summer I’m finally getting around to it! Such is the life with toddler twins…

collards

Even though most of our free time is occupied busily raising seedlings and transplanting them into the garden, planting new seeds and prepping garden beds, and trying to stay on schedule with our garden plans despite the weather, I feel that the season offers hope of new life, rebirth, and the excitement of a new growing season (and hopefully a better harvest!).

sugar snap peas

beautiful sage

This year was our first year of actually testing the soil in each of our raised beds and sending the samples into the state lab for results. The testing showed that our beds has an abundance of phosphorus–far too much. And the ph was off. To remedy this, we added various amendments to help balance out the soil in order to make it healthier. As you can see, it has definitely helped and we have greens coming out of our ears!! We simply cannot eat all the kale, collards, lettuce, and arugula fast enough –we have SO much.

arugula

this raised bed holds kale, collards, some onion, and sugar snap peas along the back

We also cut down a few trees around the raised beds that were shading the plants too much and preventing much needed sunlight. Our yard doesn’t get a whole lot sunlight anyway from being so wooded, but hopefully this will help a little bit.

some of our raised beds

We started seedlings in February and again in March for broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes, peppers, and herbs. Using our DIY grow light, we cared for the seedlings until the first batch was ready to be hardened off for a couple of weeks prior to transplanting.

this raised bed holds tomatoes, carrots, and spinach

Don’t have enough space in your raised beds? Try planting tomatoes or peppers in post, like we have with this cherry tomato below.

cherry tomato plant in a pot

tiny cherry tomatoes- I can’t wait until they are ripe for the picking!

We also sowed seeds directly into the garden starting in March and each week have planted a little more now that temperatures have really warmed up and we are past the threat of frost. I’m not sure if it’s because we don’t get a whole lot of sun, but for some reason when we try to plant cold-weather crops during the early spring when it’s still fairly chilly, they don’t do well despite claims that certain cold-weather veggies thrive in colder weather.

a bed against the side of our screened porch holds turnips and beets

Right now we are growing  kale, collards, peas, onions, beets, turnips, arugula, spinach, lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, peppers, okra, radishes, pole beans and a variety of herbs. Also planted are squash, cucumbers, potatoes, and bush beans. We recently harvested garlic in May and planted in its place radishes and more peppers.

this bed in our side yard contains potatoes, squash, cucumber starts and October beans

a recently transplanted pepper plant

lettuce mix

New additions to the garden include strawberries and a blueberry bush. The strawberries are showing signs of growth but I doubt the blueberry bush will be fruitful until next year. Overall, the garden has definitely improved from last year and I’m so excited to see how the rest of the plants do (and I’m patiently waiting that harvest of the first ripe tomato!). Then comes the hard work of preserving all the veggies so that none go to waste!

chives and pretty chive blossoms 🙂

Happy Gardening,

Recipe Organization

· Homesteading, recipes

When cooking, I prefer to use recipes that are written down or onto something, rather than from a computer tablet or phone. I like to be able to see a recipe simply and clearly and it’s important that I can access it very quickly. I still like to use the internet as a source for finding great recipes, but if it becomes a regular favorite I will write it down eventually. 

I tend to have a lot of recipes stored in different places. Some are in my little family recipe box, shown below, some are from magazines stashed in folders, and some are saved to my pinterest board for recipes.

My mother-in-law gave me this recipe box with family recipes inside as a wedding gift 🙂

I will say I find it easiest when I see a recipe online to save it to my Pinterest board first so that I don’t forget about it and at least I have it saved.

recipes from magazines to try out by season

As for the recipes in magazines, about every six months or so I will go through the magazines we have and tear out all the recipes I’ve dog-eared, then I arrange them by season (according the the ingredients that happen to be fresh) into folders that I then gradually will use to try out each one. I keep all the file folders in a big expandable folder.

I also use a lot of recipes from cookbooks. It’s tough to remember to try new recipes from my cookbooks, because we tend to get into a habit of making certain dishes and forget about Below is a picture of our cookbook collection.

an open shelf in our kitchen holds all our cookbooks in one place

Some of my favorite cookbooks I’m using right now…

Only the best recipes in the folders that I continually come back to again and again make it into the wooden recipe box. My recipe box mostly holds family recipes, but every now and then I add some new favorites that we tend to make often. I do this by reprinting the recipe on an index card and then placing it in the box according to the type of dish. I just hope I don’t run out of room!

I’m thinking about finding another little antique box for favorite recipes that are real-food based organized by season and leaving the smaller one simply for family recipes.  Do you have any tips on how you organize recipes?

Homestead Basics: To Buy or DIY?

· Homesteading

There is so much out there on making DIY products–everything from cooking staples to beauty products to cleaning products.  While I love the notion of making so many homemade products and homegrown food that aren’t tainted with preservatives, additives, or chemicals, I’ve often wondered whether it is worth my time to simply purchase an organic, natural/wholesome version of the product instead of making my own.

For example, there is a local grain/flour mill that is probably 15 minutes away from where we live. Their products are organic and wholesome, and they make a sprouted spelt flour that you can purchase in 3 lb bags (only $3!) or buy in bulk 25 lb bags. Is it wiser for me to purchase the sprouted spelt flour from them or to try and make my own, having to invest the time, effort, and resources into milling my own grain, soaking, it, etc.?  Would you really be saving money when these days so often time is money?

The same is true for sweet potatoes in our region. North Carolina is one of nation’s top producers of sweet potatoes, and you can find them in the grocery stores for most of the year and when in season they are SUPER cheap. Should I invest the money in buying slips and the time in planting and harvesting sweet potatoes when I can get them local, organic, and inexpensively right here in my state?

I’ve made a list to sort of help myself figure out which things are worth making and which products it might be worth just to buy. Since my time is very precious (I’m usually busy raising 16-month old twins), it doesn’t make sense for me to DIY everything! 

Things to DIY:

– chicken and beef bone broth
– homegrown produce (except in the cases where it is cheaper to purchase a local and sustainably grown product)

– Household cleaners
– laundry detergent
– jams, jellies, pickles, sauces, and preserves

– butter, yogurt, buttermilk, and some cheeses from local dairy
– eggs from our chickens and guineas
– limited amount of meat from our chickens guineas
– dried herbs
– firewood

Things to Buy:

– flour, sugar, and other dry goods staples
– deodorant
– shampoo and conditioner
– beauty products
– local cheeses that are harder to make
– local milk and cream products (until we have a source of our own)
– local pork products (NC is a top pork product producer and we aren’t ready to get pigs just yet!)
– local grass-fed beef
– local poultry
– local seafood when available
– local honey (until we get our own honeybees!)
– local fruits when in season (until we have our own fruit trees and berry bushes)

So, what can you add to these lists? I’m sure there is lots more I can DIY that I’m not thinking about that isn’t too time-consuming!

Guineas!

· Homesteading

We got guineas!!! 

A few weekends back I made an impulse decision. I saw an ad on Craigslist for a trio of guinea fowl and I just couldn’t pass it up. We already had a pen that was ready and empty (former turkey pen), and guineas just sounded like fun to have. Plus, we are already getting EGGS from them!! Yay!

our guinea eggs

We think we have either two males and one female, or two females and one male. It can be difficult to tell the sex of guineas–most people say you can distinguish the gender from sounds they make. We plan to let them free-range in our yard and the surrounding woods once they have stayed in their pen long enough to know it is their home.

I just hope they don’t wander off or “go wild,” as some tend to do, and I worry about them going into the road eventually and getting hit We may need to breed them every year to keep our numbers up as I’ve heard they are sometimes easy prey.

As I was reading up more on guinea fowl, I also learned these cool things:

  • Guineas are incredible foragers and if allowed to free-range, will not eat much in feed.
  • Guineas serve as excellent pest control, eating ticks and other unwanted insects. You can turn them into your garden and they will eat the bugs and pests but not the garden crops.
  •  Guineas do not scratch as much as chickens do, and thus don’t tear up landscaping when free-ranging.
  • Guineas are great at sounding alarms when something is amiss or there is a predator. (Our guineas are actually not loud at all except when sounding an alarm!).
  •  Guineas make great meat birds. The meat is mild-tasting and they dress out at a nice weight compared to heritage chickens of the same age.
  •  Guineas are entertaining. I love watching large flocks of guineas run around together. They have such a strong flock instinct.

I was worried about them being loud, but so far they aren’t loud at all! Just sweet little chirping noises. So far the guineas have been nothing but delightful to have, and their eggs are delicious 🙂

slightly smaller than chicken eggs, guinea eggs have a more triangular shape

Those of you that have guineas, what advice do you have for me in my new adventure?