HOMESTEAD WIFE LIFE

THE PRINTABLE LINK IS BELOW: Starting Fall Seeds in August (and Why the Soil Comes First) Garden shelf | Companion to the video and the [Fall Seed Starting printable] The garden looks finished right now. The squash vines have gone leathery, the lettuce bolted back in June, and everything that is still alive is alive out of stubbornness. It is easy to look at all that and decide the season is over. It is not over. This is the week the fall garden starts, and the mistake almost

There is a quiet wisdom in allowing winter to do what it was designed to do. Many perennial flowers and cold-hardy plants require a period of sustained cold before they will germinate. This process — known as cold stratification — is nature’s way of protecting seeds from sprouting too early. Instead of forcing the process in a refrigerator, we can work with the season and let winter handle it for us. In this guide, I walk you through the winter seed sowing method using simple

For In Episode 2 of the Planning a Pantry Garden series, I’m sharing how I take a full seed inventory and decide what actually earns a place in the garden. This is the step where planning becomes intentional — looking at varieties, purposes, and how each crop supports the pantry we want to build, not just the garden we want to grow. I walk through my complete seed collection, explain why I choose certain global and heirloom varieties, and show how I map seeds to future meals,

This garden isn’t planned plant by plant — it’s planned by purpose. Each year, I plan our garden as a pantry first, choosing what we grow based on the foods we actually cook, preserve, and enjoy throughout the year. This approach keeps the garden manageable, intentional, and deeply connected to how we eat at home. In this post (and the accompanying video), I’m sharing the real, paper-based system I use every year to plan our pantry garden — starting with the garden we already

Hay bale under the soil Let’s talk about filling tall raised beds—because if you’ve ever built one, you know they’re wonderful until it’s time to fill them. That’s when you realize… you’re going to need a lot of soil. And if you’re doing several beds at once? Oh my gosh. That adds up fast. As I get older I have been replacing the raised beds we have with even taller ones to help with a back issue. I can’t imagine trying to buy enough raised bed soil to fill even one much le