My Homesteading Adventure.

Hi all!! My name is Mindy, and I wanted to introduce myself and what The Quirky Homestead is all about. I've always lived in rural southeastern Kentucky and I'm a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom of two. Josh, my wonderful husband of 16 years, works his tush off to make sure our family is provided for and has made it possible for me to follow my dreams of starting a homestead. I want this blog to be a place where anyone can follow our homestead journey and see the things we do right and the things we do wrong. Mistakes are part of the learning process, and I plan on posting about all the good and the bad. We have around an acre and a half of land currently and have been slowly building a garden over the last several years. It started with 4 large (like 2 to 3 feet wide) garden pots. I planted 2 bell pepper plants and 2 cherry tomato plants. That year I was overrun with cherry tomatoes but didn't harvest a single pepper. I used the winter season to plan my next garden and figure out why my peppers didn't grow. The next year I expanded to four 44x24 inch garden beds I made from free wooden pallets from my husband’s work. That’s when I started thinking about how I could have a garden like my parents, aunts, uncles, and Mamaw did when I was young. One big enough to actually produce enough to feed my family, not just a hobby garden.  So essentially homesteading for me started out as just wanting to learn to do things that our ancestors did. I've always had the mentality that, it's better to know how to do something and never need the knowledge than to need to know how to do it and not have the knowledge. When Covid shut everything down in 2020, it really hit home that I was very underprepared and didn’t have the knowledge I needed to survive if push came to shove (I may or may not be turning into a conspiracy theorist, end-of-the-world, zombies are gonna take over, doomsday prepper. See where that “quirky” comes from in the name of the blog). So, with that in mind, I started expanding my garden. Each year I've tried to expand the garden in some way and see what works and what doesn't. For example, I didn't plan the location of the original garden boxes well and they were in a shaded area for a lot of the day. Of course, I didn't get good harvests those years. I also had tick infestations from the area and would end up abandoning the garden halfway through the season because I didn't want to deal with all the ticks. I switched the location, and the harvest increased (and the ticks decreased). February of 2023, I jumped into chicken ownership, and when I say jumped, I mean jumped. You can read about that and how chicken math took over here. Then I jumped into goats March of 2024, another story you can read about here. Can you tell I "jump" into things a lot? I've realized through this homesteading journey that I like to do things without a plan. Which is why we always have a lot of unfinished DIY projects, and my husband is going gray in his 30s. In the last year I've been learning how to can the produce from my garden and to forage for wild plants and "weeds" that can be used as natural medicines. Last year we also started processing our own deer and chickens. And let me just say... that was an experience!! But we managed to do it, and this year has gone much smoother in the meat processing department of our homestead. And that is where we are right now. I’m still learning, and I’d love to bring you along on the journey with me. I’ve done a lot of things right but I’m pretty sure I’ve done even more wrong and had to redo it. So, if that sounds like something you’d like to experience with me and maybe learn from my mistakes, then check out my other posts for some quirky homestead adventures!