Homesteading

Ever wonder if sourdough bread is really that different from "regular" bread? Other than the fact that sourdough bread and sourdough bagels use a sourdough starter to leaven the dough (make the dough rise), while most "regular" breads use yeast, are they really that different? And if they are different, does it really matter?

Last week I talked about how we harvested jewelweed to be used in our jewelweed soap and jewelweed salve.  Once Greyden and Emery collect all of the jewelweed, it's time to process it. Jade does "quality control on it first".

In years past, we have spent many hours canning, dehydrating, fermenting, and freezing our fruits and vegetables.  Lately, the children are eating more and more of the produce straight from the garden, so I find there is less need to preserve.

I am a big fan of perennials because you can plant them once and they come back year after year.  In our vegetable garden, the only perennial "vegetable" that we plant is asparagus.

Over the years we have planted many different kinds of herbs. We like to cook with them, eat them raw, and use them in our soap! Some of our favorites are basil, parsley, and rosemary. If you've never done much cooking with fresh herbs, you'll be amazed at the difference. 

Having access to our own fruit is absolutely wonderful.  In our orchard we plant not only tree fruit, but berries as well.  At the new house, we're working on establishing our orchard.

There are a lot of vegetable plants that benefit from being supported.  For our tomatoes, we generally use tomato cages* that are strengthened with t-posts*

In the past I've had a greenhouse.  But to be perfectly honest, I always found it a lot of work and I never enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed gardening the rest of the year.

Once we had all of our garden beds built, we had to decide how to lay out the plants within the beds.  We try to spread out our vegetables so we have a little bit of everything everywhere.