Our Homestead Right Now: Baby Chicks, Dairy Cows & A Tour of My Favorites

Good morning friends. It is the start of another day and another week on our little homestead and we are starting out with some baby chicks. This is the first time we've actually hatched our own eggs. I should have shared that whole process with you guys but we've been really busy with a ton of different projects lately but we hatched out five little chicks. These will be egg-laying hens hopefully. Hopefully they're not all roosters. That's the thing you never know when you're hatching eggs. This little one is so cute and sweet. It was stuck in its shell. I had to help it. It was a very delicate procedure making sure that he survived that but it fluffed up happy and healthy. Now what had happened was it pipped through at the wrong end of the egg so it didn't have enough room to move around in there and like bust itself out. So we waited a while and then read up all on how to do that and hatched it out successfully. So that's super exciting. A couple other exciting things to share with you today on the way outside but let's stop and admire the olive tree. I showed you guys in a little video I ordered a bunch of stuff from FastGrowingTrees.com. So happy with everything that came. The olive tree is like my pride and joy. I'm so excited. I know it's tiny right now but it's gonna be big and beautiful. I got this pot at Walmart for like $25 and it is perfect. I literally could not be happier with the way that that turned out. It's kind of everything I was envisioning for this little space. I just wanted something that will grow up a little, fill in some space, add some green, and be really beautiful. And one day this little suite will grow actual olives which I think is just so cool. Listen it's a mess out here. This is the catio but come on out I want to show you a couple things. I call it a catio because this is where Winslow lives. He's our nice cat. We have some allergies so he can't live inside but he's like the friendliest cat in the entire world. And so we don't want to like just let him be an outdoor cat. All of the outdoor cats end up, once they get big, they just kind of venture and into the woods and then they just do their own thing mostly. But he is like just a baby. See, just a baby. So he lives out here. So the greenhouse is almost empty now. I did transplant most everything except some jalapenos that I had started. I don't actually like spicy things so I'm not sure why I have so many jalapeno plants this year. But I do want to make pepper jelly. Is it sweet pepper jelly? You use jalapenos. Jalapeno pepper jelly? I don't know. I had it for the first time in my life last year with cream cheese and like Fritz crackers and it is so good. So I want to make my own. I did start some cantaloupe. I had some old seeds. I wasn't sure whether they would germinate or not but they did very beautifully. And then these spaghetti squash. Again, these are from 2022. But it looks like one, two, three, four, six of them have... Don't pull that off. You let it, it'll do it by itself. That's the cool thing. So yeah, we will be transplanting some of these cantaloupes outside where we had some watermelons that sadly did not make it. And then I'll have to find a spot for the spaghetti squash. But I'm moving on to my fig tree. It's growing. It has new leaves. I planted her. We're calling her Bernice. If your kids have seen The Chosen Adventures, that is the joke. She came a little bit dried out and like sad looking. So the kids were like, oh no, Bernice, what happened? So now we just call her Bernice. Anyway, she's so happy. We put her, I put her in a bigger pot. She is gonna go in the garden at some point. But for right now I just wanted her to have more space and get strong and kind of get used to the weather because I think she was grown in a greenhouse. This is a black raspberry that I did not put in the ground this year because I couldn't figure out where I wanted it. It cannot be near my blackberries and raspberries because they can transmit diseases. So it's just living here for right now and I'll probably put it out in the fall for next year. And then I wanted to show you guys my green stalk. I got green stalk planters years ago, probably five years ago, and I've used them a few times. I haven't like the last couple years. I think I just didn't know what to put in them. There's something growing there and I don't know what it is. It's funny. But I did this year, I went ahead and I just put strawberries around the top. I did just plant cilantro in this row down here. It has not germinated yet. That was literally the other day. I actually have bush baby watermelons that I planted in here. I know it's a little crazy. They're gonna end up, that one's coming unrooted, they're gonna end up sprawling out. But I'm okay with that. I'm okay with a little bit of chaos back here. And then I threw just two extra tomatoes that I had in here which they've like taken off because they were a little bit smaller when I put them in here. So that's what I've got growing in the green stalk right now. I have another one but I was gonna give that one to my mom so that she can have a little planter in her porch. But she's cute. These are a great way if you don't have a lot of space or like the idea of starting a big garden overwhelms you, this is a wonderful starting spot. You would be amazed at what you can grow in these. You can see I have two different sizes stacked here together. These shorter ones and the longer ones. You can buy all these deeper ones and grow deeper things. You could even grow carrots in this thing. But I've seen people grow all kinds of stuff. Like I said, melons, it just is gonna sprawl out a bit. You can get them taller, as many tiers as you want kind of customized. Just grow your herbs even. Basil, oregano, those kinds of things. I told you I planted cilantro around an entire row because cilantro bolts really quickly in the heat and it's already pretty warm here. It's going to be like somewhere I need to keep an eye on it. That way I can harvest it. My plan is to just grow a bunch of it and then puree it with some oil and put it in the freezer so that we can have fresh cilantro anytime we want it. Because when you dry it, it just loses so much of the flavor. I really don't like dried cilantro but I love fresh cilantro so that's my plan for that. This is the other thing I got from Fast Growing Trees and they're looking a little sad right now but they like bloom over and over again. If you guys have never smelled a gardenia, put it on your bucket list because they literally smell like like a sweet vanilla perfume. I don't know, kind of like honeysuckle and vanilla maybe? Honeysuckle and vanilla, like it is so good and so sweet. These are gonna go in my front porch, in front of our front porch eventually. But they're too small right now to withstand the like really hot heat on the front porch. That's where we get most of our afternoon sun blazes right there. So I'm letting these guys grow in grow pots until this fall and then I'm gonna transplant them out front. That way they don't have to withstand all that summer heat while they're still growing and working on their roots. And then next year they should take off. They can get up to like 10 feet wide so they should be able to like crowd our entire front porch area. This is a mystery to me. I thought I planted carrots and I do see there are some carrots. It really was one packet of seeds, John. I don't understand. Do you see the carrot? This is a carrot, carrot, carrot. But what are these? They look like some sort of like maybe cucumber or something and I just don't actually understand how they got in there or what's happening. This looks like tomato, like a tomato? Does that look like a tomato or marigold maybe? I don't know. Well, I gotta put it down. Did you plant something in here? Yes, I did. What did you plant? These are carrots. Okay. Scratch you. That looks like a tomato too. He's got mosquito bites. He wants me to scratch. You got chomped up by those mosquitoes, buddy. John was so sweet. He bought me some, I was, I gave my crocs to one of my girls and then I'm constantly like, ah, can I borrow your shoes? Can I borrow some shoes? So he saw that need and went ahead and ordered me some cute little garden clogs. He did not learn from my mistakes and he got me a cream color, which I love, don't get me wrong, but my crocs were also cream color and doesn't stay that color for long. So, oh, last, okay, update for my fast-growing trees order. This is a pomegranate bush that I still, I'm still trying to decide where to plant it. It might go on the corner out here. It might go over here. It might go by the garden. I don't know. So she's living there for now. These girls are the queens around here. Mostly these two. Yes, you Annie. This is Ann and this is Eden. They are our Jersey dairy cows. We get our milk, milk for my iced coffee from these cows. So up there is Olive. That is Ann's baby. She's two years old now, so she is getting ready to get bred. And then this is, this one is Barbecued. And Barbecued is half Angus. That's Eden's baby. So she will be raised for a few years and then she will be processed for beef. And the beautiful thing about it is that we get to care for her, love her, give her a good life, and make sure that she is treated humanely, ultimately killed humanely, and we know where our food comes from. And it's not something that I take for granted, and it's like a very kind of somber thing, something we handle with reverence and great deep appreciation for. And it's hard and it's bittersweet, you know, to provide for our family that way, to have a freezer full of meat. And it saves us a lot of money, but we still love our animals and care for them. And yeah, nothing about it is easy, but I think that that's what makes it, you know, beautiful and special kind of work, if you will. These girls are hanging out up here right now with hay instead of, normally we would be rotating them around in this fencing on our pasture. We had a lot of drought this year, so we've gotten them set up in a smaller area where we've been hay feeding them. We haven't started rotating them, even though it started raining, because we are getting ready to build a pasture fence, which has been a long time coming. I've been waiting for this for like three years now, but we are going to be fencing in our entire pasture so that they will have more space. We'll still rotate them, but it's going to take a lot of the work off of John and I from the way we were doing things, so we're really excited about that. Oh God! Hold on, come on! Hold on, come on! That was a big bump, huh?