The Homestead

We live on a quarter acre of land in a small rural town in Missouri that we bought in 2019. We fell in love with this house pretty quickly, there were a couple of houses we looked at after this one. However, we just kept talking about it and decided to come back for a second viewing then started the process of buying it. There were enough rooms for our kids to have their own space plus a huge living room and an office. It has an attached garage that later doubled as a chick brooder and a shed that is now the chicken coop. The garage has never been used for our cars; it has been used as the shed for as long as we’ve lived here. This left the shed pretty much unused until we bought our first flock of poultry in 2022. This property had six fruit trees, and two grape vines established. Two apple trees, two pear trees and we think two peach trees. The two peach trees never produced anything and only had leaves on them the first year we lived here. One of the pear trees died in 2023, we believe due to the flooding that happens on that side of our yard during heavy rains. The grape vines are thriving, especially after pruning them for the first time in 2022. I feel like they exploded in 2023, however our goats had access to them in 2024, so they didn’t produce as much fruit. Other trees include two sweetgum trees, two maple trees, a flowering dogwood tree, two wisteria vines and a Japanese flowering quince shrub.

The sweetgum trees are in our front yard and one of the maples is in the side yard. Th second maple tree was in our backyard but wasn’t surviving too well, the little dogwood was planted near this big guy. Our first year here the electric company called asking if they could cut down any of our trees that were near the power lines. It was a resounding no for our sweetgums and the maple tree in the side yard. Sadly, we did give them permission to take down the maple in the backyard. Several of the top branches were dead or dying and looked like a good breeze would knock them down. Tornadoes and severe thunderstorms are a norm around here. As much as it broke my heart to take this beautiful tree down, the risks were too high to keep it standing. We gave some of the wood to Drew’s parents and a coworker, as they have fireplaces to help them heat their homes through the winter. We kept some of the smaller pieces to use in the fire pit we added to the back yard. The good news is this area became the flower garden! Before the stump started rotting it was a nice place to sit and read or just enjoy the flowers and nature.

The wisteria vines were planted by the back patio and were climbing the pergola over the patio until it fell (due to storms and a rotting post). The Japanese flowering quince is next to the compost area in the back corner of our yard. Beside that was a raised garden bed, it was roughly raised six inches off the ground with a border of landscape timbers. Our first garden here was pretty lackluster, and we quickly learned all the things we didn’t like about the setup. We took out the timbers and built taller raise beds made from barn tin, wood and metal pool legs. The first bed we made was quite large (12x5x2) and the only one we had for a bit; you don’t realize how much dirt it takes to fill a raised bed until you have to. We definitely underestimated the amount of work this big of a bed would take. In all honesty, we were busy hauling our kids around to various sporting events, so we didn’t have a lot of time to commit to the garden. But it was the beginning of our current garden, the next bed is about half the size of the first and the two that followed this one were smaller yet. Regardless it was still quite the task to fill them all (ask Drew, because he did the last three on his own).

We have made a lot of changes to this property since 2019. We did not realize in the beginning that we were going to become homesteaders, but with our love of gardening and animals and learning the advantages of homesteading, it just made sense. Follow this blog to see what we have done, the good and the bad, and you might find something that will work on your homestead!