Living simply, made from scratch, growing our own food and homemade homestead.
Hey Y’all!
I’m Marian and I’m so excited to share with you mine and Andrew’s journey of building a homestead on an acre of land. Join me and my family as we strive to live a simple, natural, healthier life. Each week we’ll bring to you DIY inspiration around the homestead and in the farmhouse, tips and tricks in the garden, made from scratch recipes, farmhouse decor, and sourdough tutorials. I love to document how our homestead is growing with the animals, the garden, and the farmhouse. I would love for you to follow along in our everyday life in hopes of providing you with some inspiration and ideas around your home.
My husband and I are a retired military family that thought traveling the U.S. in our RV was the way to live retirement. But I’m not a fan of reading, and there’s not a lot of room to store things for craft projects, plus hauling potted plants in and out of the RV with every stop got old quick. Now, while my husband was perfectly content going for a walk a couple of times a day and chatting up the neighbors, I was going stir crazy. I needed a bigger oven, a garden to grow things, a place for our dogs to run, and chickens sure would be nice. So we landed in Central Florida (close to the kids and grandkids) and began renting a home, for more space, and to figure out exactly where we wanted to purchase a home.
In 2019 we began looking and the price of property around here had really begun to climb. Our choices turned out to be, 1) the amount of land we wanted and live in the RV (which meant we’d have to put all of our belongings in storage, ugh!) or 2) settle with a smaller piece of land that had a home on it. So we went with number 2 and still long for more property but it’s amazing how much you can do on a small piece of land. Currently, we have about 40 chickens, 14 Pekin ducks, 2 Nigerian Dwarf does, 30 Cotournix quail, a dog, a cat, and 2 KuneKune pigs arriving soon with plans to add two Nigerian Dwarf bucklings at the end of the year. We’ve raised 50 Cornish Cross chickens (at once and the first time ever). I’ll admit it was a little overwhelming so from now on we’ll be raising 25 each spring and fall which we do with a hoop house that we can easily move daily to keep them on fresh grass.
And I haven’t even mentioned the Garden! My lovely garden. My haven. My place of peace. It started out small but quickly grew across one end of our property. We’ve harvested 52 lbs. of peanuts, grown corn, potatoes (both red and sweet), tomatoes, peppers, etc. We’ve added arches to create beauty and to be able to add even more crops by planting vertically. There’s a 160′ of muscadine vines, blackberries, citrus trees, elderberries, fig, herbs…it’s a beautiful thing.
So let’s go y’all! It’s getting crazy out there and I it’s super important for us to start growing something, anything, to help care for ourselves and our families.
Happy Homesteading!
Marian & Andrew