I know in the grand scheme of things my land probably wouldn't be considered a "homestead". It is only .25 acres and the majority of that land is taken up by the house and our deck. Compared to what I always imagined owning, it is a postage stamp. I can mow the whole thing by hand in about half an hour and it is fenced in so our dog Jovi has a little bit of room to roam, so I can't really complain.
With the woods to our west side and a large maple tree in our back yard, leaves become quite the problem in the fall. We also have a decorative maple tree in the front yard that requires me to bag my lawn this time of year.
Typically in the summer I just use my mulching blade and I allow the clippings to work their way back into the soil for nutrients. Really that is just a fancy way of saying I am too lazy to bag the yard year round :)
In many respects, this post is more of a "photo dump" from the last weekend, but I took some shots around the house and I wanted to share them.
I took out the garden a couple of months ago when it finally stopped producing. We got some decent zucchini, tomatoes, and peppers from the garden this year. Probably some of the best bell peppers I have ever grown. I think the fact that we were home more due to Covid and I was able to regularly water the garden made a huge difference.
Our garden sits right next to our shed and eventually I would like to set up a rain barrel to collect the run off from the shed roof and use that water for the garden.
This picture is from early June when I had just planted the garden.
With the garden out of the way that gave me plenty of room to spread some of the bagged leaves that I had picked up with the mower. I laid down a good base of about one foot of leaves between my buckets. I will let the winter weather work its magic on them and then in the spring I will rent a tiller and work what is left into the soil.
We had some abnormally beautiful weather this past weekend, so we spent a good deal of time in the front yard trimming back our trees and cleaning up the leaves to put in lawn bags at the curb.
We have these decorative trees in our front yard that need to be trimmed back every fall otherwise the branches grow to the ground and start getting in the way. You can see this one and the one to the right in back of this one.
We usually save the branches that we trim off and use them for kindling when we go camping in the summer. This year we had two full recycling tubs full of twigs. That amount will probably help us start at least 15 campfires next summer.
I also picked the last decent looking rose from our two rose bushes and I trimmed them back to the ground for the winter. It always amazes me the capacity for regrowth they have. I always worry I am cutting them back too far, but every summer we have bright beautiful flowers.
Even though we had put all of our patio furniture away, we pulled out our new camping chairs and sat on the deck for a little bit Saturday and Sunday night.
Jovi even spent some time relaxing with us.
I grilled some dinner(steak for me, chicken for my wife), and she made some macaroni and cheese. She bought this cheddar powder online a couple weeks ago that is supposed to be much better for you than the stuff that comes in the packet with the blue box. It is very good and she has become pretty masterful at turning it into a sauce for everything from broccoli to mac and cheese.
The steak tasted as good as it looks and was grilled to perfection. Occasionally I actually get things right :)
For dessert we had some homemade "whoopie pies". The recipe for the cake actually uses a standard cake mix and Greek yogurt for the other ingredients instead of the traditional eggs, butter, oil, etc. It gives the cake a very moist texture without being quite as bad for you. The copious amounts of whip cream I use more than makes up for that.
Finally, we settled in each night and blew through the seven episodes of "The Queen's Gambit" on Netflix. It was a really awesome series and you should give it a watch if you get the chance. 
Nearest Green was a former slave and is actually the guy who taught Jack Daniels how to distill whiskey. It actually was only fairly recently that this bit of information came to light. Before that the company line had always been someone else (read, someone white) taught him how to distill. In honor of him and his story, a woman started the Uncle Nearest label and is producing a couple mixes today in honor of him. Funnily enough, I believe their base comes from the George Dickel distillery and not Jack Daniels.
Anyway, this got long, but that was my weekend at my "home"stead. I hope you enjoyed it!
All pictures taken by myself or
