One Year Later | Part 2: Starter Homestead

As promised, I am back with another One Year Later post!

Last time, I gave you all a brief walkthrough of the renovations that the farmhouse had undergone.  Each room presented its own challenges: carpet, wallpaper, flooring repairs, cracked ceilings, etc.  Every wall needed some spackling and a fresh coat of paint.  But what else needed a fresh revival was the acreage outside!

Out back used to be a kitchen garden that had become overtaken by grass.  Upon our arrival, I thought that flat bit of land was interesting and quickly found out it was indeed used for gardening.  Well, perfect setup to do our own thing, right?

That's exactly what we did this year! Not only did we start experimenting growing our own produce, but we also fixed up the outside of the house, as you see snippets of in the collage below. 

Sunflowers were planted out front, mom fixed up the exterior of the back porch, and we planted rows of zinnias (with the goal in mind of selling cut flowers, but we'll try again next spring and summer).  It's been a huge undertaking, but well worth the effort of learning to work the land and just live differently than that suburban town lifestyle.

Honestly, transitioning into homesteading life is not as hard as I thought it would be.  I love digging in the dirt - and if memory from previous posts serves correct, I may have mentioned perennial gardening was my free-time hobby.  Before we moved out here, I was thinking of doing some backyard homesteading in case the sale of the new house didn't go through.  In a way, I'm glad we ended up out here as there is room to expand.  

Now, what would I be expanding to?

Potato farming!

While we grew everything this year - garlic, onions, carrots, tomatoes, watermelon - the one thing that grabbed my attention was the number of potatoes we harvested.  The expectation was that the crop would be small, but the potatoes had other ideas! When my sister and I started breaking off the stems, we'd find one - then two - then three and more - red and gold potatoes of varying sizes that we easily lost count of!     

I remember standing in that little patch as an epiphany hit: there's opportunity to become a potato farmer!

Now, I didn't know that PA is the largest producer of potatoes in the country.  It makes sense with how much land there is and how fertile the soil is out here.  So, I'm starting out small with my own potato patch away from the revived kitchen garden.

Am I a little crazy for doing this with no tractor and just a tiller and hand tools? Yes! But nothing ever got done living a comfortable lifestyle.  The Wright Brothers spearheaded the invention of airplanes by doing crazy stuff with whatever resources they had, so what's stopping me? 

The thing I'm finding is, just because you don't have big machinery to do large scale farming, doesn't mean you have nowhere to start.  Plus, I'm enjoying the process of forging a new path and finding that the life I thought I'd be living is not where I'm supposed to be.  For those of you that are people of faith, please pray for a blessing on this potato patch!

Now you're probably wondering, what about the kitchen garden?

That's going to be a joint project between me and my sister.  

Since the snapping of these photos, we've gotten cow manure and ash mixed in as fertilizer...

And we've connected the two patches to create one giant bed! I didn't get a picture yet but that will be forthcoming!

So that's where we're at - and I'm really excited to see how we do next year! My hope is to get my potatoes sold at the Farmers Market next summer, along with other produce.  Guess I better get hopping with planting that garlic!

I'm leaving this post right there as there will be another part to this One Year Later series.  Cats are next on the agenda - because who doesn't love cats?

See you in the next post!

~Gigi