Our Fall garden is doing so well and I can’t believe I’ve never tried this before. We recently harvested our first squash from the Fall garden and we are eagerly anticipating more!

Our fruit trees are also doing well and we should have some figs and an orange soon… these will be the first fruits other than a peach and a couple of handfuls of berries earlier this year that we have gotten from our trees.

I don’t have any pictures from this week but the garden is growing daily and looking great. It’s yucky outside or I would’ve grabbed a few pictures right now but I’ll try to get some more up soon.

One of the things I think that helped a lot was the addition of fresh worm compost and compost tea. Earlier this year we bought some worms from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm and started composting. Our current setup is pretty simple with the worms living in a large tote under the pool table in the living room! No one even knows they are there until we tell them.

When I was ready to replant the beds I asked Mr. Awesome to sort through the compost bin and he pulled out a bit of compost that was ready and then we let it sit for a few days to give any eggs a chance to hatch. I then sorted through it with some screens that we had purchased on Amazon.

I used some of the compost directly on the plants in the beds but then I made some compost tea with a kit that we bought on Amazon so that I could get the compost to stretch a little further for the fruit trees. It doesn’t look very pretty but the plants love it!

I’m getting more and more excited to see how our ‘food islands’ are progressing and I’m hopeful that we will have a ‘Food Forest’ before too long… it will be so wonderful to just be able to walk around the yard and pick fruits and veggies to snack on! I know the kiddos will love this too!

I’ve been watching a lot of permaculture videos and doing a ton of research so that we can try to incorporate more of these methods here at home. We love having the animals to ‘help’ us around the yard and gardens. The animals also benefit from the fresh grass and vegetation but they are being kept safe in the ‘tractors’… so it’s a win-win! We recently made several more ‘tractors’ for some of the other birds and we put the geese in the pen with the goats so they can act as protectors for them.

We’ve also been letting the other birds out to free-range in the afternoons. We were a little worried that the guineas may not come back but they have been behaving so far. They like to ‘patrol’ the fence line and will immediately let everyone know if they find something interesting or if they deem something too dangerous. We are patiently waiting for egg production to pick up and hopefully, these changes will help encourage them to start contributing a little more!

Our little ‘homestead’ needs quite a bit more work and we have an endless list of projects but we just keep doing things a little at a time and we are really starting to see some of the progress lately which encourages us to keep going. There aren’t a lot of people who can just spend a lot of time or money to get everything just perfect in a short amount of time… anything worthwhile takes time, work, and a lot of patience. You learn from your mistakes but you have to start somewhere to even see progress.

If you remember we started out with plastic totes last year. Then my dad helped out with some raised beds this year and I added a few planting areas around some fruit trees a little at a time. It’s definitely been a slow process and we hope to add more garden space and a greenhouse soon as well as some more animals to help provide food sufficiency but we know that it is best to add things slowly and not get in a hurry.

We are trying to evaluate the things that we purchase on a regular basis so we can try to grow more of these whenever feasible. We also need to figure out the space we need to store these items for the long term so we can decide how to best accommodate this storage in our home. It is an ongoing process as we try to become more and more self-sufficient and learn skills that we need so that we can become efficient with them and pass them along to our children.

By increasing our food production we have also increased the need for a dedicated pantry as we have already filled our freezers… this seems like a good problem to have though. I recently bought a pressure canner and have been stocking up on jars. I have added jars and lids to our Amazon wishlist as well as I know we will need many more as time goes on!

I just want to remind everyone that social media can create stress because we are always striving to do what others are doing and have the picture-perfect lives that others are having but in reality, no one is perfect! We need to enjoy our lives and enjoy those around us while we can … create memories, learn, and teach new skills to be passed on.

We may will face challenges here and we need them to help us grow. It’s easy to want to pray that the challenge will resolve quickly but sometimes we need to slow down and just listen for the lesson we are to be learning from it. Sometimes we also have to humble ourselves and let others help us when we are facing challenges and difficult times. Trust me when I say that we’ve had more than our fair share of challenges in the past several years but God has brought us through them all and we’ve come out stronger each time!

Don’t wish away the difficult days because our time here is limited and we need to make the best of it. When things seem out of control we just need to hand them over to god… completely. We can still feel sad or upset but don’t linger on that feeling. Find things that bring you joy, happiness, and peace. Be around people who make you laugh. Try a new hobby you’ve been wanting to try. It is so easy to lose joy but we just need to keep doing things and it will find its way back with time.

We might have a bad day, week, or month but we can do things to change that by starting today and taking it one day at a time… or 1 minute/hour. Stay encouraged no matter where you are in your journey and remember that a step forward, no matter how small, is progress! This road we are on is leading us to our home in heaven… heaven should be our ultimate goal so keep on keeping on and doing the best you can every day. If you mess up then it’s okay… try not to do that again. We are always going to be stuck in sin without Jesus… he is the way!