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Happy New Year from Chayotix Homestead!
Here’s to a new year! I can’t wait to see what’s in store for us for 2025. My ankle is still in a poor state so I can’t do much of the manual preparations yet. But I’ve already got my almanacs! I buy the Llewellyn’s almanac every year from a local metaphysical shop. (I got
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What We’re Leaving in 2024 and What’s New for Us Next Year
With the year coming to a close, I’ve been thinking about how this year went for us. We had a somewhat successful growing season for being new gardeners, put in some additions, and test drove some new skills. Of course, playing anything by ear comes with fumbles and screw ups. The Garden This year we
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Winter Planning for the Coming Year
There were plans to prep the yards and work out some building concepts for coops and a rabbitry over the winter to be ready for building up come springtime. Life had other plans, and I am sitting here instead in a boot from a major ankle sprain. Plan A The tilled plots are expanded and
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Can We Talk About Homemade Sourdough?
I’ve tried sourdough repeatedly this year. I made temporary progress with a starter I began in February, but by May, a missed feeding invited bad bacteria to pop up. It took an unfortunate amount of time to disinfect the jar and bamboo lid, which seemed to keep regrowing mold each time we’d get it clean.I
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Joining a Holiday Baking Challenge
After the summit this year, I joined as a member of the School of Traditional Skills. Alongside all of their classes, they hold challenges here and there. I missed the composting challenge this year but was right in time to join a baking challenge. How it worked They start their challenge by selecting a class,
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Planning to Add Elderberries, But First a Workshop’s Lessons
It’s no secret that I do a ton of research before I jump into a project. The fact is everything is too expensive to throw away on trial runs. My social media has been full of online summits, seminars, trainings. A couple of months ago, I stumbled on a weeklong web series of teachings on
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Mapping Out the Grand Plan for Chayotix Homestead
Leading Up to the Plan Somehow, I forgot to share what the main plan for Chayotix Homestead is! A couple of years ago, I bought a book about being self-sufficient on a quarter acre of land. It happened that the land I bought mostly matched the imaginary set up the book gave as an example
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Building Up the Traditional Tilled Plots with Drip Irrigation
Irrigation Setup: Take One Running into dehydrated plants this summer, we looked into automating the watering. We stumbled on an inexpensive drip irrigation kit online with bending adjustable sprayers. We’d already harvested what was available in the traditional plots but wanted to test if we could manage pumpkins before Halloween. (We couldn’t- squash bugs. Enough
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Moving Forward with Blueberry Plants After Our Class
Finally Getting the Ball Rolling I’ve wanted to buy blueberry plants and wanting to get started with berry growing since long before we took the berry class in September. Taking the class just strengthened the goal and gave us a path to take to accomplish it. On Veteran’s Day, we called Bluegrass Berries back up,