Wisconsin Homesteaders Diary Series | Spring Update

Come along and see what’s new on our Wisconsin homestead this spring.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve sat down and actually wrote out a blog post that shared about what’s new on our Wisconsin homestead! And there are definitely lots of things happening since the last update I’ve shared here!

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, here 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 eventually we’re hoping to add pigs and beef cattle (so far, all of our calves have been heifers, and they will expand our herd rather than serve our family as food). We forage, hunt, and fish. In the summer, we grow enough food in our garden to preserve to last us through the winter; I buy very little outside of what we’ve produced. 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.

Now let’s get into some of the exciting things that have been happening here!

Around the Homestead

If you’ve been with us since the beginning, you know we built our house starting in the fall of 2020, and we moved into our house in July 2021. We’ve almost been here a full year! It is amazing how much we have accomplished, yet also daunting at how much there still is to do. Yet, it is a good reminder for me that things take time and patience is important. It will all be done and beautiful someday (it already is in so many ways); it just takes time!

Landscaping

One of our biggest projects this year is getting our landscaping done. Our kids are just really longing for a place to run that isn’t full of holes, rocks, and mud. Once road limits are removed, we’ll quickly begin working on that so that we can get grass planted sometime early this summer.

D and his dad worked most of a weekend to complete a flower bed project I’ve been dreaming of for quite some time. Along the whole south side of our house, there are now beautiful layered flower beds! I collected some favorite perennials from my grandma and mom this weekend, and planted them all up beautifully. I’ll be sure to get you a picture in one of my weekly emails once everything is established and growing.

Outdoor Time

The kids have been almost impossible to keep inside now that the weather has turned spring-like, and each time they come in they are almost always covered in mud. I can’t say that it makes me too terribly upset, though…I am too grateful that they have such a love for the outdoors to get too angry. Though, it does wear on my patience when I find myself doing quite a bit more laundry than normal…

We’ve all been enjoying the birds that have returned, and we noticed a robin couple who have built their nest in the little ash tree next to our temporary clothesline. We watch her each day, hoping that we’ll see little heads popping out of the nest soon! One of my favorite parts of spring is the return of the sounds- and the songbirds are a big part of that. We’ve been lucky enough to see an oriole, cardinal, grosbeak, and lots of redwing blackbirds within the last couple of weeks!

Livestock Updates

There is so much to do with our chickens, and so little time!

We currently have 40 meat chicks in our garage, along with 5 Buff Orpington chicks, who will grow into future laying hens for us. The meat birds will be processed mid-June, and with the warm weather finally here, D is working hard to build them a moveable chicken tractor to get them outside. Not only is it hot in the garage, but they will love to get out to eat bugs and grass! And, if I’m totally honest- they stink. I’m really looking forward to them being away from our house and outside! Then we will all be happy!

The Buff chicks are a bit behind where the meat birds are growth wise, which is to be expected. We’re hoping to get them outside soon too, but the urgency isn’t quite as strong for them. Our goal is that they will follow the cows around in a chicken tractor, eating fly larvae from the cow pies and helping to lessen the fly population overall. We’re excited to try it out and are hopeful it will be a natural help to a problem.

Rotational Grazing

We have a good, solid plan in place of how we want to divide our pasture up for rotational grazing on our small Wisconsin homestead. Now, the bigger question is WHEN will we find the time? We know that in order to get the most from our pasture, we need to rotate the cows through. Cows really enjoy young grass, which means that they tend to eat in the same places over and over. That leaves a lot of pasture to grow up into hard, old grass that the cows don’t touch and ends up getting completely wasted. If the cows are in a smaller space, though, they won’t be able to be as picky and will eat all of the grass instead of just the young grass that they love the most.

Our plan is to divide up our pasture into about six sections, rotating the cows weekly or so. We have the fence posts, the soft wire, and t-posts… Now it’s just a matter of getting it set into place. And, we’d better do it soon because the grass has really taken off these last couple of days!

The Garden

There is SO much work to do in our garden, but we are so ready to get out there and do it now that we finally are having nice weather.

We should have a lot more in the ground than we do, but there is a lot of ground work to be done before planting can happen.

We’ve expanded the garden quite a bit again this year, both on the east and west side. Our goal is to be able to have a nice planting of sweet corn and potatoes in each of these new beds. We are really excited about the possibilities that they will provide for us!

Within the garden, some things are already up and growing! The rhubarb is looking great, as is the garlic. It won’t be long before we’ll have rhubarb to start preserving into jam and garlic scapes to make into pesto!

Within the hot frames that my brother-in-law built me, we are seeing spinach and radishes that are growing well! I am so excited about these! Soon enough we’ll have fresh spinach and radishes on our table once again! Fresh vegetables are definitely something I am missing majorly right now…. I am so done with potatoes, frozen corn, and canned green beans! The garden’s bounty will be such a welcome gift once it begins to produce.

One more thing…

There’s a reason I have been way too exhausted to post here, besides the fact that I’m finishing up my school year with my home kids and my virtual school kids.

We’re having another baby!

The whole family is excited for this new blessing who will enter our family this year. I had some pretty terrible sickness the first few weeks, but am glad that part of the pregnancy is now in the past. Now, the exhaustion sets in….and there just isn’t room for exhaustion! I keep thinking about homesteading mothers of the past and what their lives were like. They definitely didn’t have room for exhaustion…and they probably weren’t complaining either! I try to keep them in mind as I force myself to do things when I’d rather be sitting on the couch.

Thank you so much for coming along on our journey. We are thankful for you!

-Sadie

Looking for more?

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