Time for the weekly list of accomplishments! This is my way to stay motivated and accountable in my productive home progress.
This wasn’t a super impressive week in terms of “to do list” activities, because there was a lot of personal stuff that took priority, including last-day-of-school activities with the kids and supporting a family member who had surgery.
If you want to list your own weekly achievements in the comments or on your own blog (share the link!), please do. We can give each other virtual fist bumps for doing what we can, where we are, with what we have.
Planting & Maintenance
- Everything is just chugging along now.
- Basic watering and weeding.
- Another big weeding effort in the food forest.
- Continued training my indeterminate tomatoes.
- Helped my neighbor tend her vegetable garden.
Harvested
Everything is starting to happen. I wish I had planted peas this spring – I miss them now!
- Beets! (I pulled this beet bouquet from my neighbor’s garden cause I’m helping her out with maintenance and watering for a bit and get to harvest whatever is ready. Real community, guys – it’s like gold!)
- Lettuce is booming.
- Tons of cherries on now.
- Chard, kale and mustard greens
- A few more strawberries have ripened.
- Herbs continue to be insane.
Preserved
- Got a big batch of kombucha into primary. I’m gonna do some experiments on the most reliable way to bottle carbonate kombucha.
- Pitted and froze a bunch of cherries that my son harvested.
Cooked
- Egg rice. Because we’re still dealing with a counter top full of eggs.
- Dealt with refrigerator dregs – all the tiny leftover scrapings and random half-eaten jars of applesauce. I think of this as turning ingredients into food and whenever I do this the meme below flashes through my brain and I giggle.
- Made a huge batch of waffles from the fridge-dregs. Kid didn’t finish his applesauce? Waffles! Half-eaten jar of yogurt? Waffles! The strained out rhubarb purée from when I made shrub? Waffles! He asked for a second glass of milk then didn’t drink any of it? Waffles! All of the above? Waffles!
- I cooked duck and it was delicious. I’ll just leave it at that.
Animals
- Basic daily flock maintenance.
- Redid the duck’s access to their bathing tub – went from cinder blocks to a shallow wooden ramp and cleaned the whole area up. (Patrons, you’re getting a video about this on Monday.)
- Last Saturday we got kitties! Picked up two little calico sisters from the humane society. Tiny little fluffballs of energy and napping. So there was all the basic pet maintenance stuff, plus integration of the kittens with our old man cat (he was lonely – he’s been so nice to them!). And of course we played with them. This is very important for their socialization. Yes, yes, that’s exactly why I snuggled with the purr-monsters so much. Socialization.
Projects
- Cleaned up the back patio. This was a full 2-day project because the patio had become a dumping ground for everything. It’s really nice to have that space back!
- Scrubbed down the outside of the greenhouse. I may yet plant it this year! What seemed hopeless two months ago seems in-reach now.
Business, Finances and Frugality
- Broke over 100 awesome Patrons and $300 per month of direct funding on my Patreon page! Whoot – love how Patreon is going.
- Despite a full week, we only got food out as a family once. We consider that a win. Nick also picked up food at the hospital while supporting a family member, because priorities, obviously.
- We spent a lot of up-front money on kitty supplies.
- Way behind in logging our expenditures in GoodBudget. Dang it! Need to catch up.
- Overall…not a great week in the frugality department but for pretty justifiable reasons I think. Family and fluffy.
Energy Use & Solar Panel Production
- Total electricity used: 174 kWh (The duck filter pump is kinda killing us here, but the spend on energy saves so much on water.)
- Total solar energy produced: 209 kWh (= $112.30 in production incentive)
- Energy “sold back”: 35 kWh (= $3.68 in net production)
- Total earned through our solar panels this week: $115.98
Homeschool
- End of year field day! So much fun!
- Continued to work on class registration schedule for next year.
- Debating schooling over the summer – how much and how that will look for us.
- PS: if you missed it, here is why we homeschool.
Planned & Researched
- How to fix some of the several dozen annoying things about my website without breaking the whole thing. Specifically: odd sized images from back when 600 pixels was considered a big image, how “clean” the site is on mobile cause 70% of you visit from your phone, how to give people more options in how they print recipes, why my related posts plug-in just disappeared one day, and how to make the Patreon wide-bar image at the bottom of every post not be a tiny little half-size image on desktops. There’s this whole back-end side to blogging that’s really fiddly and interesting but also kinda hair-pulling sometimes.
• • •
Finally I get to harvest SOMETHING!
Peas, first strawberry, first red currants. That all makes me so happy.
Comfrey hit six foot and was crashing with the height in the heat. Chopped and dropped quite the pile around my new plum trees.
The rest of the week has been travel for work = frugality fail.
I’ve been harvesting a lot of comfrey too. Usually I put half back down as chop and drop and take the other half and feed it to my rabbits and chickens
I didn’t plant beets this year. Your picture makes me sorry I did not!
All home tasks took second place to gardening. Our season in Alaska is short—it hailed and snowed Memorial Day weekend (glad I waited to set out tender things! And we had to run the heater in the greenhouse to save those things) and now it is in the 70s, so the last 10 days have been an insanity of direct seeding and transplanting. I had planted a row of scallions in the greenhouse, since they would be done before the tomatoes took over and shaded everything out, so harvested those–got a quart bags full for the freezer. Harvested lambs quarters and fireweed and chick weed and used them for the greens in a stir fry. Free food that I didn’t have to plant. Love it.
Been a busy week here for me. Picking strawberries every day. Have more lettuce than we can eat so I shared it with some friends and family. Hilled my potato planting at my house (4 4×8 raised beds) earlier in the week and gave it a nice top dressing of rabbit manure and waste hay. Weeded my other garden plot (~3,000 square feet currently in production) and watered today. Then hilled the potatoes out there (~250 row feet).
Been really hot here in southern Wisconsin for early June. By Tuesday we’ll have had 5 days this year already 90 or above. There are some summers we never hit 90, or only for a couple weeks later in July or August.
Processing some rabbits for sale and personal consumption tomorrow night.
Frugality/sustainability:
Practice more with hearth bread: first in the new gas oven. Lovely and sour with some rye in the sponge. Love that I’m using mostly Washington grown grain&grinding my own flours.
Veg stock for dinner, and this week I also froze smoothie, lunches for hubby and 2 kinds of simple syrup I made (lavage & rhubarb). Dried herbs. Dried pears from the farm box.
Planted:
More things that didn’t start well after the raccoon carnival, but also divided some potted stuff, and more microgreen batches.
Harvest:
Lettuce, sorrel, basil, microgreens, baby kale, bolted parsley (for stock).
Projects/general ongoing:
Fed stuff, cleaned and organized the sunroom so I can use it better, got pots ready for all those new starts, and cut bouquets from unruly flowers and the house.
We finished the back fence that we have been picking at since last fall. We can officially move to the next phase of building out the rest of the garden, which is super exciting. Might be able to get the rest of the tomatoes in the ground yet!
Harvested:
– 40 lbs of early potatoes yesterday. This opens up space for the sweet potato slips that arrived this week, which I hope to plant today. Hooray for well-timed succession planting!
– Softneck garlic. May have been a bit early, but the rust was getting out of control, so I pulled it. Hardneck is just putting out scapes. Melon seedlings should be ready for the empty half-bed within a week.
– Lettuce: salvaging about 1 heads in 3 before they bolt. Loading up the fridge for salads before the beds gets re-purposed for bush beans.
– Snap and snow peas are taking over the world. Stir fry for dinner tonight (with your sauce recipe)!
Need to do better with eating from home, with all this produce. Hopefully next week?
So glad to start harvesting strawberries this week. According to my garden calendar this is about a week and a half behind normal. At least we’ve been getting peas and garlic scapes. Also, I’ve been able to not buy lettuce at the grocery store for a few weeks thanks to some succession planting success!
My husband was able to restock (bake more) sourdough bread and english muffins, enough for his lunches and breakfasts for a month at least.
Planted:
Sunflowers
Harvested:
Lots of arugula and peas!
Projects:
Did a ton of weeding and rearranging our potted plants.
Made muffins out of the cooked rhubarb leftover from making shrub.
Made mustard (recipe from Erica’s book, of course!)
Made arugula pesto – will DEFINITELY be making this again!
Frugality:
Weekend in Seattle for work. Yet to tally up those expenses – although some will be reimbursed.
We borrowed some lambs! to eat down the orchard grass. No fruit this year from a late frost, but at least the lambs will fertilize the ground.
Finally starting to get caught up….http://www.anntorrence.com/blog/2017/06/homestead-log-week-of-june-5-11.html
Erica,
I love love love your wit and the simplicity of your recipes. So I’m already A Fan.
I need help with something. We have a surplus of heirloom veg. seeds we’d like to donate to home schoolers and community gardens. I don’t know how to get in touch with righteos homeschool groups without opening myself up to everyone who just likes free stuff. I don’t want anything in return, just convection with the right people to support.
If you can point me in the right direction, that would be great. I’m also happy to send you any seeds you’d like. I do not want any secret backlinks. DID I MENTION HOW MUCH I HATE SEO?
Let me know if you know how to reach Central Control of Homeschooling.
xo
Mia Myers
Hi Mia! I just emailed you directly with some thoughts. Cheers!