Gardening and house work

We’ve begun another week of work. It is a blessing to have the opportunity to labor on our own projects here on the homestead. It involves a lot of sweat, soreness, and tiredness at times, but there is a simple joy in such work. I think I often take for granted the situation we enjoy in which there is no one dictating my activities. Reporting for a “regular job” every day with a supervisor telling me what to do would not be nearly as enjoyable.

I’ve been working on our new house. You can read a little about my efforts on my Cedar Ridge Farm blog. It feels good to be making some visible progress on it.

While I’ve been devoting time to house-building (and more extreme composting soon), the children (all four of them) have been taking on more responsibility for the garden. They’ve been pulling a lot of weeds. The boys mulched some of the potatoes the last two days and will mulch more plants today. They also pick potato bugs off of the potato plants. I do pay them a little for removing the bugs as an incentive. We’ve found that if you pick them off and then keep up with them, the number of bugs is greatly lessened to where they aren’t much of a problem in a couple of weeks time.


Here is a photo of the field in which I planted the beans for dried beans. It also has squash, winter and summer, and several rows of popcorn that I just planted this week. I also planted a small plot of red indian corn near a compost pile in another place. The Wapsie Valley field corn that I replanted hasn’t come up yet, and the crows are actively picking the kernels out of the ground.

We have lots of roses blooming. There are some light pink and dark pink ones. The children love picking them and presenting their mother and mammaw with bouquets. These roses apparently were started in years past by the residents in the old cabin and have spread over time.