Welcome back to another episode of the Homegrown Liberty Podcast, this is episode 38. And today I’m going to be doing a homestead update episode! This is where I tell you what all we’ve been up to, how things have been going, and what we have coming up! But I can’t tell you the secret just yet. I promise I’m working hard, but there’s lots of exciting things happening all at once and I have to pick and choose my battles! Only so many things get my attention each week and that particular thing keeps getting pushed back just a little bit. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to let you guys in on some part of it!
But let’s just get into what all has happened recently!
A Rough Summer
As most of you regular listeners know, we had a rough summer. I got sick with something like the flu after Catie was starting to recover. And I dunno exactly what it was but it took me out for at least a week. During that time, Catie didn’t know all the things that needed to be taken care of, added to that, she was still weak and recovering, and all three kids were also getting over being sick as well. And we lost a ton of seedling trees. You see I arrogantly assumed I would be able to handle taking care of all those seedling trees by myself out near the garden. I thought, “I don’t need to install any automated irrigation. I need to check on things every day or every other day anyways, so I’ll need to be out here anyways. I’ll just water by hand, that will be easier.” Well guess what…. I was wrong. Out of the ten thousand seedling white mulberry trees, I might have 20 left. The five thousand or so black mulberry, there are two left alive. Lots of other losses… 1 of my chinese chestnuts remains alive out of 20 or 30.

The garden is a wreck. After that two week period of time I just threw in the towel and chalked it up to a lost cause. I’ll chop and drop, then cover crop for winter and see how it goes next year with a different purpose. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The point here is that no matter if you think you can handle doing things yourself. It’s always best to set yourself up for simplicity and ease of maintenance. If I had set up automated irrigation, then I would have been fine. Catie could have just looked at things to make sure everything was working fine and been done with any nursery work. We would have kept thousands of dollars worth of trees alive, and had the seedling trees to plant this winter. Now I’ll be another year behind because I’ll have to wait another year to stratify, sprout, and grow up the seedlings for another year before planting.

If you can automate something, DO IT! If you can set up your system for easy, low time cost maintenance, you set yourself up for success. I’m going to be doing a lot more automation this winter and going into spring. I don’t want to have those same types of problems in the future. So I’ll be documenting how I do all that so I can teach you how! I want you guys to be able to learn from my mistakes and bypass years of lost time and skip tens of thousands of dollars in lost finances due to preventable and costly mistakes. I plan on being your guinea pig, the one who takes the hard hits with trying out things and learning what works, and what doesn’t. I hope to be able to show you shortcuts to success, and help you figure out practical cost saving methods to build resiliency in your life.
I Hate Ducks
There I said it… I severely dislike our ducks. They have to be the most annoying bird I’ve ever had the mispleasure of dealing with. I much prefer chickens. Ducks are annoying, they go where ever I don’t want want them, eat everything I don’t want them to eat, destroy things for no other reason than seeming pleasure of destruction. They don’t do any real meaningful work for me. There just aren’t enough good reasons to keep them. If I had good fencing up to keep them on the lake then maybe I wouldn’t mind them as much but they are just loud,