Summer always seems to go quickly around here. No matter what happens, the garden seems to get away from us. We were actually on top of getting things in on time this year, but then our chickens decided they wanted to be free range chickens and started flying out of their pen. Okay, fine, you do you, chickens. Except we realized too late that they were tearing up our garden. Now it looks like it’s another year of just pumpkins and squash. No more free ranging chickens…

That said, we’ve been pretty busy with lots of other things around the homestead. Sometime around when I had the PE, Rachel and I agreed that we wouldn’t embark on any new projects this year and we’d spend time just cleaning up and ‘beautifying’ the place. Some may said that aesthetics don’t matter in homesteading, but I respectfully disagree. You want to be proud of what you do, so make it look good! We more or less threw things up when we moved in 4 years ago, and things have been steadily ‘building up’ over the last couple of years. Like the three separate piles of scrap wood I had… yeah, it’s definitely time to clear out and organize.

Everything was exacerbated by last year’s construction project (I think we referred to 2019 as the year that fell through the cracks – what a joke now that we’ve seen the craziness that 2020 had in store!) In fact, just a few weeks ago our backyard still looked like this:

Since then we’ve gotten rid of the dirt and seeded. The scrap wood is pretty much gone save for a few boards, the chickens have a new coop, we have a strawberry patch going, and a couple of pear trees to go in. We harvested some garlic and started pickling some cucumbers for bread and butter pickles. The ‘little barn’ (or giant shed, whichever you want to call it) has been cleaned out and (cough) organized. Sort of. At least we can walk through it. Some days it feels like we’ve hardly made a dent in getting everything cleaned up, other times we realize that we’ve accomplished a lot so far this summer.

Plus, I think I have some good ideas for what to do for our garden next year. Not quite ready to share those ideas on here yet as they’re still in the brainstorming phase, and with all that’s happened in 2020 who knows what could change that. But hopefully 2021 will be the year we actually have a garden with more than just winter squash.

Hopefully.