Black Cat Homestead

06/06/2026

Here’s what we’ve been up to lately.

05/28/2026

Local folks…I’ve got allllll the eggs. Hit me up!

05/12/2026

Hi yall, I’ve got eating eggs for local folks! Holler at me! $6/dozen

05/09/2026

I’m not sure if anyone will remember this BUT…last year we planted the following plants:
Five apple trees
Two cherry trees
Boatloads of strawberry plants (~50)
Several pineberry plants
Loganberry (1)
Boysenberry (1)
Several jostaberry bushes
Two gooseberry bushes
Eight raspberry plants
20 blackberry plants/canes
Several blueberry bushes

Over the winter one of our apple trees got killed/eaten by something but otherwise everything is doing well. Remember last year when I got a single berry?!? Just one berry from all of that. It’s fine. We are in it for the long haul and knew there wouldn’t be much/any production the first couple/few years.

Well! Guess what! It looks to me like we are gonna have berries!! As long as I protect them from alllll the local animals, that is. But eeeeeee!!! Berries!!!!

The pink flowers are the pineberry flowers. The others pictured are jostaberries and gooseberries. I’m soooo pumped.

04/27/2026

HI folks, I'm participating in the community supporting another family whose special needs three year old will have a very big time surgery. Feel free to donate and enter these drawings. There's a boatload of prizes and DNA testing by me is one of them! Black Cat Genetic Testing

04/24/2026

Yeeeeppppp

I thought the reasons that we don’t use AI would be obvious to most of our followers - but best not to assume. 🌿

So here’s why:

* AI is individualistic and anti-community: it encourages people to do everything themselves instead of asking for help, and to rely on the machine instead of fellow humans.

* AI is massively environmentally destructive- from the amount of fresh water it uses to electricity, to buying up farmland for data centres! There’s just no ethical way to use it - especially not for random chats and picture generating.

* AI is bad for our brains - outsourcing our thinking is the equivalent of couch-potato lifestyle for our brains. 🧠

* AI steals from artists, writers and designers and it is making finding work difficult for the creative community.

* AI does a bad job - it’s easy to spot when people use AI for images, posters and text. The images all look similar, all look too-glossy and quite creepy and the text is inauthentic, too drippingly emotive and all follows the same tired pattern.

This is why I said that “AI is not an example of something you’ve made” in my logo post, and I certainly won’t be using it to make our logo.
I’d rather work on it for weeks, outsource it to our community and/or save to pay a human to do it.

Let’s do better 🌿🐑

04/21/2026

Local folks, I’ve got eggs if you need them!

04/20/2026

We have soooo much mulch. I'm tired of moving mulch, yall. I told Tim to get out the burn barrel because we cannot store this much mulch. I have tried to give it away. I have tried to mulch around the property but Chip Drop really outdid themselves in the sheer volume of mulch brought to us.

I've been mulching, yall. I ended up with about 800 bites from some kind of weird biting flies but I've been mulching. My husband and I moved a BOATLOAD of mulch during the week last week. Friday was a marathon 6-7 hours of mulch moving in anticipation of a compost/soil delivery. Can you see all the mulch in the piles out near the tree line? Yeah, that is about 1/10th of the extra mulch we've got. I'm literally begging folks to take mulch. Chip Drop is awesome but daaaang, you better be prepared for MULCH.

We have replaced the mulch in both chicken runs (one is 12' long and one is 16' long (both 8' wide). We mulched around these garden beds. We put mulch out in the area where no grass grows anyway (out by the tree line). I think half the mulch is still out front in the giant pile too. Holy mulch, batman.

03/31/2026

Hi y’all, I made this post on the genetic testing page I run but some of yall don’t follow that page so I thought I’d ask here: what do we know about growing mushrooms? Too late in the season to start them? Holler at me with all the info.

Hi collective, what do we know about growing mushrooms? Am I too late to start mushrooms? I looked some stuff up and it sorta indicated I needed to seed them in the fall, which made me a bit sad but I can wait if need be. What do yall know about it though?

Here's a mushroom doodle I did for my kiddo's lunch for tax.

03/22/2026

Local folks, I’ve got eggs. Anyone need them?