One year!

We have officially lived on our 5 acre homestead for one year! We stayed 100% debt free this past year too. One full year of not owing anyone anything feels good. Work is a lot slower up here for my husband so we had to attempt to stick to a budget. We also managed not to kill each other living in a tiny 400 sq. ft. house over the long Wisconsin winter. (last winter was pretty mild.) Now its autumn and we have to start preparing for winter all over again. This is what the seven trees look like that we cut down last spring to make room for our micro orchard.

My friend Sara and her husband Jody came up for a visit. Jody went wild and started splitting logs and drinking rum and coke. A couple hours later he had everything split and ready to be stacked. This wood will not be ready to burn until about February or later.
We moved the split oak from last year from its curing spot to the new woodshed. This is one oak tree worth of wood and a small aspen. It doesn't look like much but it was a full trailers worth.
We also bought a trailers worth dry wood and will probably have to buy one more. Moving and stacking wood is still hard work.

Finished job. One or two more trailers worth is needed.

My husband got cleaning the stove pipe out from all the soot from last winter's heating. It wasn't as dirty as I was expecting. He did end up looking like Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins by the time he finished.

I killed my first squirrel. I saw this red squirrel in my bird feeder, he was climbing up my siding and clawing up my screen then taking a flying leap onto the bird feeder. I was baking cookies for the Halloween bake sale. I grabbed my .22 and shot the shit head. Next time I think I will try eating squirrel.

Since it cooled off I have been able to start making soap again. This time I made a Tea Tree & Lavender soap. It smells wonderful. I played around with colors this time. I used a purple and sparkly light green. I made plenty of lip balm too.

Some friends of mine and I did some painting. I painted the birch trees in my yard. I'm happy with the way it turned out.



















Fall mushroom hunting has been super fun. I went to a women's mushroom foray hosted by our local mushroom expert Tavis Lynch. 67 women came and between all of us we found 303 varieties of mushrooms. A few edible, 1 that has psychoactive properties and the rest non edible. I also went on a mushroom walk with my son's class and lead a spore print activity with the kids.

The Foray offered wine pairings with mushrooms. It was really cool.

My husband finished drawing Werepugs #2.

 I write it and he draws it. It's about two adorable pugs Frank and Potatoes, on the full moon turn into blood thirty killer midgets that go around their town murdering.

On a sad note, my pug Ewok passed away and got buried.