2019 Year In Review of Our Homestead Happenings

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It has been a great and frustrating year, all at the same time.

Our garden didn’t grow well, I lost 35 lbs, changed the name of this website and had lots of trouble with my teenagers.

What a year!

Of course, this is a homesteading website, so I won’t go into the details of our personal life. You are here to hear about my garden, animals and other homesteading adventures.

Here are the plans we had for 2019 that I wrote about at the end of last year: Our Homesteading Year In Review and Next Year’s Goals.

So let me break it down for you.

2019 Year In Review: What went wrong

Let’s start with the bad stuff. Then we can only go up from here.

Garden

We had a late snow (May 20), which just happened to be the last week of school for the kids.

So, needless to say, we got a late start in the garden. No spring veggies at all.

When we finally got the seed starts transplanted from indoors, they had a rough time of it. Peppers and tomatoes just don’t like the cold, even if you put walls of water around them.

Then, June 21 (the summer solstice), we had a freeze that wiped out my transplants. I had to go buy plants at the local nursery, which was very frustrating.

We used water troughs in part of the garden as an experiment. More on that below. They had many great qualities for a good garden, but we had several flooding incidents that killed the plants inside.

Overall, our garden did not produce as well as usual. I’ll talk about the harvest below, but let’s just say I didn’t have much to put away for the winter!

Animals

Rabbits

We decided to get rid of our meat rabbits this year. We were just feeding and watering them without utilizing them for meat. We did enjoy the fertilizer they produce, but it just wasn’t worth the cost or effort if we weren’t going to breed.

Chickens

We have battled predators on our homestead every year, and this one was no exception.

We lost several chickens to a badger, which the dog found and killed.

We lost 2 to a cold snap in early September.

We had a couple just die, not sure why.

So out of 12 chickens, we only have 3 left. We have moved them to a small coop, close to the house for the winter. We will reevaluate our chicken situation in the spring.

Orchard

Our fruit trees started off well. Several of them bloomed and produced fruit.

Then we had some windy days mid summer and all of the fruit was blown off. Therefore, we had no fruit harvest this year.

2019 Year In Review: What went well

Now that the whining is over, let me tell you what went right this year on the homestead.

Garden

We started a new gardening system with water troughs this year. I love the look and functionality of the troughs. They have several benefits, including:

• Blocking the moles that are digging in our garden.
• Less bending over to weed.
• The garden looks clean and neat.
• We can control the dirt (our soil is too clayish for gardening)

For the most part, the first year was a success. We know what we need to do to fix the flooding issue and the troughs are much easier to maintain overall.

We will be moving them to another part of the garden next year, but still using them.

To find out more about our garden experiment, check out this blog post —> Building A Metal Water Trough Vegetable Garden {an Experiment}.

The harvest from the garden was not nearly as much as in past years, as mentioned above. But we did harvest some vegetables to eat fresh (not much canning this year). Here is what we harvested:

• Banana peppers
• Squash
• Zucchini
• Tomatoes
• Beets

Yard

We planted 3 large evergreen trees in our yard this fall. We have been wanting to do this for awhile, but they are pretty expensive.

We may plant 2 or 3 more next fall if we have the funds.

Solar

We have had solar electricity at out house for over a year now and it’s working great. We produce more than enough during the summer and year around except for the occasional snow storm in the winter.

Our electricity bill for our home is $30 a month, which is just the fee to be grid tied. You can find out more about our solar package in this blog post —> Our Solar Power Experience: One Year Later.

Overall, this year was just okay. And that’s okay.

Not every year homesteading is going to be amazing. Life happens. Weather happens. Your kids are teenagers and have their own minds (when did that happen?).

Here are some other years I wrote about our homestead so you can get some perspective of different ups and downs in homesteading.

2018: Our Homesteading Year In Review and Next Year’s Plans.

2017: Homesteading Heartbreaks and Breakthroughs: A Year in Review 2017.

It is good to record what happens on your homestead so you can look back at the end of the year. This helps you learn what needs to change and see how much progress you’ve made each year.

I am thankful for this homesteading life and all the things I am learning along the way. It may get frustrating at times, but when things go right it makes it all worth while.

How was your homesteading year this year? Let us know in the comments below. And if you found this post helpful, please share. Thanks!