Life/Homestead Update: What We’ve Been Up To…

Hello my lovely readers, and welcome to another long overdue life update..!!! ❤

Since my last update, there have been two more tornadoes that have swept past our area (thankfully leaving us untouched) that have absolutely destroyed some of the neighboring communities. The storms this year have been unreal, and it has caused us all to hold our loved ones a little close at night. We’ve never had THREE tornadoes within a month’s time here before, so this is certainly a new side of Mother Nature, but we are rolling with the punches and taking things one storm at a time.

Speaking of holding our loved ones close this year… Hubby and I had to attend a funeral for a close family member on hubbies side this week. We have been doing our best to help our family through this loss these past few weeks, which was part of the reason for the long gap in blog posts.

Now, honestly, there has been a lot more personal reasons as to why I haven’t been able to write this past month. But the reasons above are just a ‘few‘ of the reasons we have decided to take a break from the online world and focus on family this past month.

This summer has been going by way too fast, and it’s hard to believe that Autumn is here already! The leaves are starting to fall, but the trees remain green for the time being. The holiday season is steadily creeping up upon us with party plans and people already requesting days off for the upcoming holidays!

Of course, with all of this time spent offline, we have still been keeping busy on the homestead, so here’s an update as to what we’ve been doing on the property…

The neighbor just gave us a big stack of pallets, which we are going to use to make some more raised garden beds out front! With this stack of pallets, we will be adding at least two more garden beds to the front, making a total of ten garden beds for next year’s gardens! 🙂

Hubby finally got another swing put up! The black swing on the left has been up for about a month or two now, and the swing on the right finally got put up yesterday. We have one more swing we still need to bring over and hung up, and then our swing tree will be complete!

The chickens are still doing amazing, and Big D (the rooster) has found his voice! The neighbors have all thankfully found it amusing to listen to Big D learn to crow the past few weeks, and every morning (and sometimes in the evening) he loves to crow as loud as he can to let us know that the sun coming up! Still no eggs yet, but we’ve been told that they will probably start laying later this fall.

We finally got the garage cleaned out as well! A feat that, admittedly, we haven’t done since we moved in.. We threw out three moldy wheelchairs, a bunch of old shingles, and made room for all of our holiday totes and outdoor stuff that will need put away before winter. The garage is now very organized with free shelves I got from work, a work bench that was already in there from the previous owners, and a bunch of totes I had gotten to keep stuff safe from critters while it was in the garage.

The summer craft fairs are now over, which leaves me plenty of time for making Christmas presents and crafts for the family. Below is a picture of some ‘Practical Magic’ inspired coasters I had made for my mother, and there is quite a bit of crafts leftover from the markets that is going to be used for Christmas presents!

As the sun slowly is slowly setting in the backyard, I shall call it a night and head back inside before the mosquitoes start to make their presence known and come out for the night. I am closing my laptop, putting the cushions inside the garage, and calling the chickens in for the night after I type this.