Updates on the homestead

It's been a very busy month in our household. We recently sold our house in Iowa and moved to a town a few miles from our homestead. The house belongs to my parents and while it gets us by, it's a bit small for our growing family, so hopefully we'll be able to get into something a little roomier, and on our land, in the near future.

I've been slowly developing my own law practice. Ideally, I'd like to have a book of business to keep me busy about 1/2 to 2/3 time, so I can spend the remainder of my time doing other things, such as teaching and working with the kids, working our homestead, and doing other odds and ends just for variety. I recently updated my website, thanks to many late nights and the help of a college friend. You should check it out. www.lawsteger.com

The chickens are adapting well to their new coop and are enjoying having the outdoor run we built for them. They eat a lot of kitchen scraps, which has cut down on their feed consumption considerably. We also have 2 of the hens laying eggs now, so hopefully the rest will follow suit soon. We eat a lot of eggs in our house.

As I indicated in a previous post, after a lot of thought and research, I decided to purchase a Berta rotary plow for the BCS tractor. After spending an afternoon getting it set up, and servicing the BCS and adding wheel extensions, I got it up and going and tried it for the first time yesterday afternoon. I have to say the tractor had to work harder than I expected, but it should not be a surprise, as the area I was plowing had been in hay for many years, which meant it had not been plowed in quite some time, had been driven on plenty for the hay harvest, and had some very big alfalfa roots in it. Couple that with the fact that the land is mostly clay, and has a number of rocks, and the BCS and plow had to work really hard.

I tried to toss out the rocks as I went, but a couple times I would hit just the right size rock, and it would get jammed between the plow and the shaft and kill the engine. I have to say I was plenty happy that my BCS has the smaller engine (only 9 hp), which meant that when the rocks got wedged, it killed the engine before anything broke.

I'm hoping to get all the garden plots for next year worked up yet this fall. We'll be at least doubling our garden size next year, so I'm excited for the spring. I might yet try to get some garlic planted before the snow flies.