Ketchup Time

In this post we will be playing a little catch up to highlight what has been done to date on the homestead. We began work on the homestead in March of 2018, but I didn’t have much time to commit working up there until I left my full-time job in February 2021. Even with the limited time spent being up there while working, I still learned a lot during those three years. Most lessons were learned the hard way (as most lessons that stick with you go) and I will definitely go into more details about these adventures in future posts. For now though, I present four years on the homestead in one post!

There was the first trip there with Archer where we learned all about ticks and how hard it is to dig in clay.

Then there was two straight years of learning why it is a poor choice to camp in the direct sunlight when you are outside doing physical labor all day…

…which lead to building a shack in the woods to escape the sun and bugs. It was also nice to not have to set up and take down a tent every trip.

In the battle of truck vs. mud, mud won.

There was the trip I took down my first tree and found out I am down-right awful with an axe.

Many trips have been spent trying to improve these skills.

There was one summer where I had grand plans to build an outhouse log cabin style as a way to practice notching logs for our future home.

Only to realize that winter comes up quickly and building a log cabin takes a really long time. It worked out for the best though, as I was able to build a much simpler outhouse with aspen saplings from the homestead in about a week. We plan to raise livestock on the homestead, so now I can design what was going to be an outhouse into a really sweet smoker in the future!

And most recently, we had a gravel drive way installed and 1 acre of the wooded area cleared for our future homestead living space!

And there you have it!! Those are what I would consider the big ticket items over the last four years. Let me know in the comments section below if there is a particular story you would like to hear more about first!