Goals for 2018

Happy New Year! Hard to believe it's already 2018. We accomplished so much last year, and we're so thankful. We have some big goals for this coming year, and can't wait to see what happens.

Livestock: We're starting the year with 8 laying hens, and plan to double that this spring. We also hope to add hogs for meat this spring. Hopefully our beehive will make it through the winter, and we'll be able to harvest honey this summer, and possibly double it into a second beehive.

Produce: Last year we had a small garden, which we plan to triple this year. Our goal is to produce as much fresh food as possible, as well as set up a small farm stand on our property near the road to sell our excess produce. I will also be doing more canning this year, particularly jams, to preserve our harvests and have extra canned goods to sell. We plan to remove some old, dead, or diseased trees on the property to make way for several young fruit trees and several flowering trees, to provide food for us and our bees.

Property improvement: In addition to removing and replanting some trees, we have a large pile of dead tree branches and scraps that we'd like to turn into mulch. We also plan to run electricity out to the barn so that we can have better lighting and heated water bowls for the livestock.

Renovations: There will always be a variety of little projects around the place, but the big ones planned for this year include the master bedroom, master bathroom, and office/craft room. The bedrooms won't take nearly as much work as the bathroom - that will be a major overhaul. How exciting!

What are your goals for this year?

2017 Year in Review

Hello! We are Honeycreek Farm, a small family homestead in central Indiana. We bought our fixer-upper home on six acres last December, and moved in full-time in April. This has been our first year homesteading, so we started out small, but it has been a wonderful year and we are looking forward to next year!

Shortly after coming home full-time, right around Easter, we bought eight fluffy baby chicks. They were just so darn cute! We had a few setbacks, but managed to successfully raise them in a makeshift brooder in our living room until they were old enough to be moved outside. After seeing the outrageous prices for premade chicken coops, we decided to turn a corner of an outbuilding into a coop! I'll make a post about that process later, but suffice to say we have been very pleased with the result, and have not lost any chickens to predators. We have eight laying hens now, and average about 6-7 eggs a day. They are seriously the best eggs we've ever had!

We started our first beehive in the spring as well, and though we've had a few issues and setbacks along the way, so far our bees have survived. Now that the weather has turned cold, they're all hibernating in the hive as they should be. We're hoping that they make it through the winter and we can harvest honey next summer!

Our first garden was fairly small, about 4 feet by 7 feet. Our local soil is very heavily clay, and though we tilled multiple bags of mulch and compost into it, the soil stayed very heavy and thick. We had a rainy spring, which waterlogged the soil, and then a heat wave, which dried and dehydrated everything. Between the soil and weather issues, and some local wildlife (deer, rabbits, etc) who decided that my salad was THEIR salad, we didn't produce nearly as much this year as I was hoping for! The tomato, basil, and parsley plants did give us a bountiful harvest, and I managed to get a few decent salads out of my lettuce and spinach. The sunflowers and marigolds also gave us beautiful colors for many months! We learned a lot from our first year garden, and have plans for raised beds and better soil quality next year!

Our house is a pleasant ranch-style, built in the 70s, with three bedrooms and two full bathrooms. It hasn't really been well cared for in the past few decades, and needs a lot of updates to be really comfortable, though it is certainly liveable in the meantime. We are renovating it, room by room, as we have time and funds. Hubby is wonderfully handy, able to do everything - electrical, plumbing, drywall, you name it! - and so we have saved a lot of money by doing the work ourselves. Since moving in we have completed renovations on the guest bathroom and guest bedroom, as well as several smaller projects that make it feel more like home. We are very proud of the quality and beauty of the work we have done so far! Next year's projects include the remaining bedrooms and bathroom, and eventually we hope to completely re-do the kitchen, living room, and family room as well.

I hope to use this blog to document our homesteading adventures. Thank you for stopping by!