Last year we bought our forever home on 13 acres with big dreams and plans to turn it into a homestead. We call this farm of ours, “October Acres”. Over the past year we’ve been working hard clearing land and building barns to bring in animals and start our garden and orchards. It has taken us a bit longer than we had planned to really get things going, mostly due to being the parents of two young kids and trying to run our 3 businesses. So, with that said we decided to take a look at what is most important to us in life and realized that we were missing out on too much by constantly working and decided to scale back one of my husbands businesses. That decision has been a huge blessing! We hope that one day when our house is in order and the kids are older that my husband can reopen the business we closed if that is where his heart still is.

Anyway, back to the farm. It feels a little funny to call it a farm just yet because we only have chickens at the moment, but soon enough when the warm weather hits we will have an overflowing garden and more animals. We started with 11 chickens that we adopted from another family that had to get rid of theirs when moving. It’s been about 2 months since then and we are seriously obsessed with our feathered friends. The boys love helping out by bringing them their food and collecting the eggs. Our older son, Blake is even helping to wash and package the eggs for selling them. He made his first few dollars doing so last week and he’s excited to keep up this little business of his.

We have plans to build a farm stand at the end of our driveway this year where we can sell our eggs, produce and cut flowers. Eventually we would like to make our own honey, but i’ll be honest i’m super nervous about dealing with the bees! We’ve also been busy this winter making maple syrup. We have countless sugar maples on our property, but we started with tapping 12 of them and let me tell you, 12 is A LOT of work. It’s been a fun learning experience this year and we’ve managed to make almost a gallon of maple syrup for ourselves. We are excited to up our production next year and have enough to sell at our farm stand.

I had a few people message me about the egg carton stamp at the top of this post. I made it myself in photoshop using stock font and graphics. Save it as a .jpeg and upload it to any custom stamp making site (I used www.rubberstampchamp.com). It cost me less than $15. If DIY isn’t your thing, I found some really cute ones on Etsy.

I’m so excited to update you more on our progress. Any other homesteaders out there? Share your tips with me!