Homestead Updates: The Long Overdue New Roof and Garlic/Wheat Harvest Edition

So I told y’all about butchering the cow. Boy howdy is she tasty in tacos, casseroles, stews, burgers, liver and onions, and just about any other way you slice her (ha!). I’m also pretty sure her offspring holds a grudge.

For weeks after we took Cholula into the butcher her daughter Vaquita kept causing trouble in our garden and around our homestead and every time she just stared at us like we had stolen her mother, brought her to the butcher, and ate her for supper for months.

She’s vindictive, that one.

Anyway, we butchered that cow in April and it’s past the middle of June. Needless to say a lot has happened in that time.

New Roof

We built the cabin as an extension to the camper we had when we moved onto our land. So, by simply walking up two steps one moves from the cabin to the camper. Because of this a portion of the cabin juts out from underneath the cover of our larger 20×20 roof that we have been catching rainwater off of.

So when it rained around here our cabin got a touch damp (if by a touch you mean a light river flow under your kitchen counter and a few puddles on the floor and in your bed, and the occasional constant stream running down the wall). Knowing that the baby was coming and would be sleeping in said bed with me next to said puddle we thought it best to shore things up a bit.

She was actually born on a night following some very heavy rains and the roof was promptly built within a week of her birth. Having a new baby and no major flooding during the next rain was a real treat.

Plus the additional roof line in front of the cabin gives us a bit more catch water ability for our kitchen garden (update on that coming soon!), and a nice place off the ground to place our solar panels.

Garlic Harvest

Last fall, when we first arrived on the land, we planted a winter garden. The kale got eaten by the chickens. The lettuce was taken out by the cows (maybe that’s why she tastes so good). The cilantro was eaten many a times and has now given us a whole bunch of seed. The parsley is still hanging out and finding its way into all sorts of things.

And then there was the garlic. We planted one small row just to see how it would go. We grew a ton of garlic up north one year, but we weren’t sure how the very different soil and climate would treat one of our favorite aliums.

The Lord preserved the garlic from various predators and we pulled up some gorgeous large and small heads – our first real harvest here in Texas! We are saving all of it for seed which will be planted again this fall for, hopefully, a much larger garlic crop next spring.

Wheat Harvest

Our neighbors gave us the opportunity to glean wheat from their field in an old-fashioned hand harvest. I did almost nothing in harvesting the wheat, but got some pictures of the process.

The threshing was also done by hand. Our family and two others got together for a 12 hour day of beating the wheat from the heads, separating the chaff from the wheat, and of course a couple of pot luck meals and lots of fellowship.

I promptly ground it up a couple of days later and made bread to test it out. Food always tastes infinitely better when you are involved in the production process.

That’s just a smattering of the fun stuff we’ve been doing here on the homestead. The next edition of updates will involve more fowl, big machinery, a kitchen garden, and great big holes.