Homesteading teaches flexibility.  I was absolutely certain that I would have time to finish weeding the beds of garlic and spring seedlings this week and that Mark would have time to fence in our first chicken pasture.  In reality, we each got about halfway to our goal.  It just seemed more important to visit Mark's mom and my dad, to get the irrigation system back up and running, and to cut the weeds before they were too high for the mower.

I felt a bit bad about leaving the chicks in their coop over another weekend, so I tossed in a bag of weedy grass clippings.  The shady side of the yard came up in a dense stand of chickweed and bittercress this winter, and I didn't get the mower over there before these weeds went to seed.  I figured it was a better idea to let the chicks pick through the weedy clippings than to put them straight on a garden bed, and the chicks agreed.  "These are tasty!" they exclaimed, then proceeded to play king of the hill.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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