Mid-Summer Wisconsin Homestead Tour

Come along and take a mid-summer Wisconsin homestead tour with us to get a glimpse into what mid-summer homestead life looks like.

Welcome to our mid-summer Wisconsin homestead tour! It is sweet summer time! This means life is incredibly busy with projects, as it is the short time of year we have before the cold weather sets in and limits us here in Wisconsin. It’s time to grow food to put away for winter and time to get infrastructure projects completed. I’ve told D that this feels like the time of the year when I’m truly alive! The world around us is alive with birds and insects, plants and trees. And it makes me feel alive, too.

I’d like to bring you along on a Wisconsin homestead tour of our place, giving you a glimpse into what life looks like here for us mid-summer.

Table of Contents

• About Us
• The Garden
  • Bulk Vegetables for Canning and Preserving
  • Summer Staple Vegetables
• Livestock
  • Meat Chickens
  • Pigs
  • Cattle
• Around the Homestead
• Looking For More from our Homestead?
• More Posts to Read

About Us

If you’re just joining us for the first time, you can read our whole story here. But just in case you’d like the short version of the story, this is who we are.

We are D and Sadie, high school sweethearts raising our family on a 40 acre property in Wisconsin. We work hard to try to grow as much of our own food as we can here on this land by working hard and living simply. Our family milk cow provides us with much of our dairy, our laying hens provide us with a healthy supply of eggs, meat chickens provide our family with meat, and just recently we’ve added pigs and a beef cow. We forage, hunt, and fish. In the summer, we work hard to try to grow enough food in our garden to preserve to last us through the winter. Our dreams for this place continue to come to life as we develop and grow this land to be exactly what we’ve always hoped for.

The Garden

The garden is growing more and more each day! We’ve been really grateful for a few warm days and even some rainy weather mixed in. That combination has really helped the garden take off!

This year we’ve grown quite a bit of some of our favorite varieties, while still keeping our favorite fresh vegetables around too. We made it a priority to give most of the space in the garden to the vegetables we know we’ll be preserving, while still making sure we get to enjoy some of those fresh vegetables we love to snack on so much!

Bulk Vegetables for Canning and Preserving

Some of our “bulk” produce includes:

• Tomatoes: Preserved as tomato sauce, pizza sauce, diced tomatoes, and tomato starter for soups
• Peppers: Hot peppers are pickled and canned, green peppers are diced and froze
• Potatoes: We did a large bed of potatoes this year- around 1600 square feet!
• Sweet Corn: 400 square feet of sweet corn in its own bed, each kernel individually planted by hand!
• Onions: These will be cured and stored in our basement for our off season consumption. We planted 150 onion plants this spring.
• Green Beans: These will be primarily canned for a vegetable side dish in winter, though we may do a few pickled “dilly” beans as well. We planted two 40 foot rows.
• Cucumbers: Cucumbers will be used as a fresh snack, but also as those wonderful, crunchy dill pickles our family loves!
• Carrots: We hope to get a good crop from the two 40 foot rows we planted! The carrots will be primarily canned as a winter side dish/filler.
• Cabbages: We were graciously given 40 cabbage plants that we had hoped would become sauerkraut for us. The deer had other plans. I was pretty furious! Now, we’ve been just trying to eat as many as we can before the deer overtake them completely and figure out a better way of keeping them out of that garden bed.
• Garlic: This is about ready to be harvested! It was planted the previous fall.
• Pumpkins: These will be used for both decoration and preservation. We puree the pumpkin and then freeze it.
• Berries: We have our own strawberry, raspberry, and blueberry bushes, but still need to supplement with foraged berries (or locally purchased strawberries) to have enough for the year. Eventually we hope our bushes will produce enough, but for right now, our family consumes more than we can grow.

Summer Staple Vegetables

For fresh snacking/summer eating, we’ve planted some of our favorites too:

• Zucchini and Spaghetti Squash
• Peas
• Lettuces
• Beets (I’m putting this on the list here, since it’s our first time growing them. Hopefully we will like them and want to grow them as a bulk food in the future!)

We also have various herbs, like dill, basil, oregano, and parsley growing for fresh eating and to enhance flavor during the canning process of some of our vegetables.

We are so looking forward to the bountiful harvests that are to come! What’s your favorite garden vegetable?

Livestock

If you’ve been keeping up with our weekly newsletters, you know that we have added on and expanded our livestock operation! Our goal has always been to raise as much as we can for ourselves, and in the meat department we’re hopefully going to be reaching the 100% mark this year. This is extremely exciting!

Meat Chickens

We processed the meat chickens mid-June. This means that they are now in the freezer and out of the field. We were really happy with our production this year, as we were able to grow 5-7 pound birds, completely pasture-raised. Out of the 40 birds we started with, we only lost two as adults, which was really a great number! We were even able to sell some of the birds we’d raised, which also helped us with feed costs for the animals.

Pigs

We now have pigs! They really are quite adorable, which I’m hoping fades as they grow. The goal is to process the pigs sometime this early winter, hopefully before it gets too cold. They are really fun to watch, but I am trying to keep my distance a bit with them to prevent attachment. It’s an interesting relationship you feel with animals that will someday become food. There is a respect, gratitude, and kindness that is held, along with a hope that you can provide the animals with a good life while they are here on Earth. It’s humbling, too, to recognize that something else must die so that you may live. It draws you back to the connection that God has created between humans and other living things.

Cattle

We now have a young Angus steer calf (named Angus)! He is currently grafted onto our family milk cow, August. He’s a wild little guy, full of energy and spunk. He’s been growing quickly with the help of August’s rich milk!

It’s now breeding season for us here for the cows. We are hopeful to be able to get all of them bred to have a late spring/early summer calf. Dandelion, our first heifer born with us, was just artificially inseminated this week. Hopefully it took and she will be having a calf this spring! Rosie (the black Limousin/Jersey cross) and August (our milk cow) should be coming into heat soon and we will AI them within the next couple of weeks.

Sunflower, our 8 1/2 month old Jersey heifer calf who had broken her jaw, is still doing well! She grazes and seems to be doing ok despite her injury. Eventually, she’ll get the wires in her jaw removed and will hopefully be completely healed.

We’re also going to be getting another Jersey milk cow within the next couple of weeks, along with her calf. The goal for her is to be a main milk provider for our pigs to help them grow fast and well with their time here. Hopefully the cow goes along with that plan!

Around the Homestead

We have been continuing to work on completing our yard, and hopefully, soon we will be able to plant grass! I am really looking forward to how beautiful that will be!

I have filled the flower beds that D built for me with lots of beautiful perennials from my mom and grandma and a few annuals to fill in some gaps. Is there anything more beautiful than flowers in the summer time? I love looking at them so much!

Everything’s been going really well for the new baby on the way, too. We’re about halfway done now, and I’m enjoying getting to feel the little one move around. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to carry this new little life, and am looking forward to meeting him/her when they arrive. What a true gift and privilege it is to be a mother.

Looking For More from our Homestead?

If you’re interested in more posts like this one, be sure to sign up for our weekly newsletter where I share our personal journey on our Wisconsin homestead. Just one email from me each week, one friend talking to another. I hope to see you there!

Thank you so much for stopping by! What does your homestead look like mid-summer?

More Posts to Read

• HOMESTEAD CHECKLIST FOR STARTING A HOMESTEAD
• WHAT LIFE LOOKS LIKE ON AN URBAN HOMESTEAD
• THIS IS WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE YOU START HOMESTEADING
• WHY IS SIMPLE LIVING SO HARD IN TODAY’S MODERN WORLD?
• WHAT 200 HOMESTEADERS WISH THEY WOULD’VE KNOWN WHEN THEY STARTED
• HOW TO BECOME A HOMESTEADER: HOW THESE FAMILIES STARTED THEIR OWN MODERN DAY HOMESTEADS
• HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT HOMESTEADING IN WISCONSIN
• OUR HOMESTEAD JOURNEY: BUILDING OUR HOMESTEAD DIARY SERIES