Heritage Homestead

07/06/2024

My new peeps

09/07/2023

We are ready to send these roosters off to freezer camp in the morning.

08/02/2023

Teepees from our sunflower stalks are staked and pole beans have been planted for the fall. This is the 1st year with the wood chips and they aren't broken down yet so I had to dig down to the soil.

06/12/2023

Other happenings on the homestead:

Our Elderberry bush is getting full of flowers!

Our Merlot Redbuds are just beautiful all year round with their burgundy leaves!

Our peach tree has a few peaches this year…they will got to the insects and birds this season.

We have crab apples!

06/12/2023

Our first harvest!

Bed was prepped by chickens with mulch, tarped, broad forked, planted and deep mulched. We planted with marigolds and as of now we have zero pests!

We did buy plants from Ross Seed in El Reno this year as we were so busy we didn’t have time to start things from seed. We purchased them during their plant sale day and looked for heirloom varieties. A flat of plants was $15. If you have a hard year, there is no shame in buying plants!

We are excited to have a dinner of squash and peppers and planning on matching chocolate zucchini bread with the giant!

05/18/2023

This past year we have made the decision to focus on poultry!

We just built two new chicken tractors. We will have one with our waterfowl and one with our chickens! They will still free range at times but this gives us an easy way to keep them contained while still getting all the grasses and bugs from new patches of land each day!

We are now breeding Saxony/Khaki Campbell mixes and full Khaki Campbells! Soon we will be breeding Delaware/Welsummer chickens! And hopefully we will be breeding geese from our three White Chinese!

These ducklings are fresh out of the incubator!

05/10/2023

Building two new chicken tractors for our chickens, ducks, and geese! We love this model! This time he modified it to put on metal roofs. It does make it heavier than the tarps but the tarps have to be replaced so often in the Oklahoma wind. Excited to raise more chickens for food!

04/23/2023

We are starting to get some sweet potato slips. Most of the sweet potatoes are in the clear tub with soil and mulched with wood chips. A few are in a 5 gal bucket with no soil just partially decomposed woodchips. We only have 1 potato making slips so far in the soil and they are small. We have the most slips and healthiest slips coming out of the wood chip bucket.

04/06/2023

You should use a chick feeder/waterer BUT we have raised a lot of chicks and these shallow fiesta dishes work too. Just keep a closer eye if you are going to use a shallow dish and make sure babies can get out if they fall in! We have our chick feeders/waterers ready to go for when they go to the outside brooder!

04/06/2023

04/06/2023

🐣Chickens and Geese🐣

We lost all our Delaware hens last year to dogs. One rooster along with our ducks survived! We have planned to order more chickens this spring and add a few guard geese to maybe help us keep our stock alive.

Sooo, I was going to order birds from a great hatchery up north, Deer Run Farms, where I purchased our Delawares but they are sold out tell late June and triple the price of our local feed stores.

I just happened to find the breed I want at our local Tractor supply! I’ve been wanting Welsummers and I usually don’t see them.

So I was excited when I spotted these!

I think it is wise to order from a good hatchery but if you just can’t make it happen, you do the best with what you have! If we need to, we will order a few good roosters later on from Deer Run Farms to help with our bloodline.

We ordered 3 white Chinese geese from Metzer Farms! One male and two females so that we can hatch eggs. We purchased our Saxony Ducks from them and they were very good birds!

We are excited to raise geese from goslings and see if we can bond with them before they start their important job of guarding! We plan to introduce them to the chicks as soon as it is safe and let them grow up with our mature ducks.

I’m hoping we can keep our flock and hatch out more birds to fill up our freezer!

I hope more people are responsible with their dogs in the future and don’t just drop off dogs in the country. A lot of people don’t realize how big a problem dogs are for homesteaders…it seems they are more dangerous than any other wild animals in our area. They aren’t scared of people and will wipe out an entire flock in one attack.

Picture is of our makeshift brooder in our Landry room closet. Our large metal brooder is too big for inside the house and temps just aren’t high enough for them to go outside yet even with a lamp. We always use a large rectangle box for our brooders with the heat lamp one one side so that they can get to the other side of the box if they get warm. Always secure your heat lamp that clamps on with a rope so if it falls, it won’t hurt your chicks or start a fire!

08/31/2022

Crimson clover attracts beneficial insects, fixes nitrogen to make nutrients available to your garden, and is a beautiful addition to flower beds and borders… need we say more? Crimson clover is a fast growing and hard working cover crop that will quickly restore and protect your soil over the winter, as it is frost-tolerant and hardy down to -10 degrees F. Check out our article to learn more about cover crops and which ones will benefit your garden this year! https://bit.ly/3K1XV2i