It has been a very long time since my last post here at Simple Steady Home. It has been with good reason though so let me back track a bit and fill you in.

What the New Homestead is Like

Last year at the end of May we sold our dream home for a dream farm. As you can tell by that statement, I’m still trying to grow and love the house that is so different from our last home.

Where our last house was modern, open and large this house is smaller, farm style design and originally built in 1860. It was the first house homesteaded in this area by two dutch brothers. Those fun little facts have made me start to like the house a bit more. In the last year we have worked tirelessly on updating the house. Lots of lath and plaster have been taken out. I have more square nails that I ever thought possible in this lifetime. In a way it has felt like uncovering a piece of history every time we take on updating the house.

The barns on this property are for raising pigs and that is exactly what we intend to do with them. We have been trying to decide between my husbands dream of raising show pigs or simply using them for ‘easy money’ and renting them out to commercial producers. Making a decision between the two is not something we are taking lightly.

Family Updates

The family size has grown since my last post. When I last shared a guest post, from The Mom’s Relationship Support Network, I was pregnant with our third son. Yes that’s right another boy and I’m overjoyed about it. We now have three boys and farm living is good for them. They are still homeschooling which we have found to be a wonderful but also challenging thing for them. Watching them grow and change with the farm has been an amazing thing to experience. I say this as my oldest is running in from the chicken coop to see if his brand new laying hens have laid any eggs this morning (can you tell he is excited?).

Little pig farmer of the family.

As for me, I have been busy with a variety of projects since we got here. We moved in May 2019 and I promptly farrowed 55 bred sows starting the next week. The most I had with pigs on them at one time was 30. Those gals needed to be hand fed and watered multiple times a day so they were pretty much my entire summer last year.  We did get some serious work done on the house and landscaping around it. Over the winter it was inside house projects, trying to unpack, homeschooling and attempting to make the new place feel like home.  With the start of spring here it is on to getting a garden in this year.

Our new property is larger than our last but the soil is a bit less than stellar. We have very sandy soil here. It has been great since we do not need a sandbox for the kids and they love finding a variety of different rocks (never thought I would need to study up on geology). Finding a place with nice rich soil has been a huge challenge. So, with a determination like never before I, with some help from Sir Swine, am reclaiming an area of field into lawn and a previous swine lean-to feed area into a raised garden area and eventually a greenhouse. There is still much to be done but I have my first bed in and the second is in the works. Be sure to watch for a post on that next week.

In all honestly our house and family life has been anything but a simple steady home and that is why it was so hard to write here. Sometimes our real life does not always seem what we were hoping it would be. As for now. I am going to just keep going until we get back to that calmer state of life.

Happy homesteading.