Spring Has Sprung!

 It is springtime here in the Ozarks and that means getting the garden ready.  This is our third garden since we moved here.  We are learning as we go.  The first year we planted in a side area on our yard.....Big mistake!  The soil was so rocky that it tore up our nearly new tiller.  I'm not talking pebbles, but rocks the size of your hand.  And then there are the tree roots!  All the big beautiful trees, well they have big, not so beautiful roots.  We had a great crop of green beans, a few tomatoes and peppers but not much else.  

Year two we moved the garden back near the orchard.  Yep, we have an orchard.  Well at least that's what I call it.  It has a peach tree, two pear trees, a cherry tree and this other tree that blooms but doesn't ever bear fruit.  More on the orchard later.  So we knew that we would have to fence in the garden to keep the critters out, so we had moved a bunch of chicken wire from our house in Colorado.  For fence posts, hubs cut posts from our woods in the back.  

These posts were still green but I was shocked a few days later when they sprouted!  Haha.  The fencing was all set up but we still needed a gate.  It had to be wide enough we could get tillers and wheelbarrows in and maybe in the future a tractor.  But we were trying to keep the cost down.  I remembered seeing some metal posts in the fence row.  There were a bunch of them laying there so I showed Randy where they were at and asked him if there was a way we could use them for the gate.  Well, he has a welder, so he welded them together and trimmed them with some boards that I had salvaged from one of those cable reels.  He painted the metal with some spray paint we had on hand, added a wheel off of a broken little planter and I think it turned out beautiful!

This gate served us well all last year.  And for $0!  We added and electric fence to the bottom (we already had that too).  This year, we decided to expand the garden.  We cut down a tree that was giving it to much shade and too many roots, had to buy some fencing, and we changed the electric fencing to solar power.  We only needed an additional 50 feet of wire which ran us about $37.  The solar fence charger was on sale and we were able to pick it up for $120.  And it will power up to 5 miles of fencing!  Enough for our goats!  Yes, I said GOATS!  

Last year our garden gave us lots of tomatoes, peppers, green beans, peas.  We had a few squash and cukes but not as many as hoped for.  Potatoes and onions and sweet potatoes struggled.  In researching the reasons, we figured out that we needed to enrich our clay soil.  This year we have treated it with Gypsum and compost.  Our neighbor has horses and offered us some of his manure and we jumped on it.....well not literally.  He even delivered it!  So far the soil looks much better but we only have a few things planted so only time will tell.

Our weather is rainy and dreary today so it is a perfect time to be indoors getting ready for my first craft show of the year.  Yes, I have a lot going on but I like it like that!  I hope your day is great and the sun is shining where you live  

Blessings.

On the homestead...

I started Living on the Cheep! nearly ten years ago.  Then, as they say, stuff happens.  We are now living on a five acre property in the Missouri Ozarks, and other than missing my family, I am loving it here. 

We get asked often why we chose Missouri.  I like to say Missouri chose us.  Both of us in our mid-sixties, my husband with some health problems, we knew if we wanted to own our own home with property, the only way we could afford to stay in Colorado is if one or both of us kept working.  So we did some internet searches and found some affordable fixer-uppers in southern Missouri.  My husband took a few days off and we jumped in the car, intent on finding our dream property.  But wait a minute, not so fast.....

We met with a realtor and looked at five properties.  OMG!  They looked so good in the pictures.  One was missing part of its roof (stolen) one had no pipes or furnace (also stolen)  One smelled so bad that my eyes were watering when we opened the door.  We did find a beautiful affordable farmhouse on 18 acres that we loved.  It did not have any central heat or air.  The three bedrooms were upstairs and the only bathroom was downstairs.  Did I mention we are in our 60's?  I think we would have jumped on this had we been in our thirties or even forties.  And although we do not mind some sweat equity, this would have been a bit much.

As we got back to the hotel that night, we were really frustrated.  My husband showed me another property about an hour away.  It looked nice but so did the others.  But since it was on our way home, we contacted the listing realtor and asked to see it.  We met with her the following day. 

The house is small.  It sits on five acres.  There is a full basement, a detached garage and so many trees.  My husband was hesitant.  I was in love.  Was it the home of my dreams?  No.  But it was well kept, great condition, and a beautiful setting.  We made an offer.  That was March of 2019.  We finally closed the end of June.  To say moving after 25 years of accumulating stuff was hard would be an understatement.  It was one of the toughest things I have ever had to do. 

We just loved the green lushness of the property!  So different from the mountains of Colorado and the deserts of Arizona.  We both had grown up in the midwest but had spent most of our adult life in the West, so its easy to forget.  

Fast forward through our first year on this little hobby farm/homestead.  We moved our chickens and added to it.  We planted a huge garden with little success.  We painted the outside of the house ourselves and worked at a remodel of the bathroom, all while juggling doctor appointments, intensive care for a tick bite, and a total knee replacement.  

We are living our dream on a tiny little budget.  I love sharing what we learn (usually by our own, sometimes painful, mistakes) and what we do to enrich our lives and home without spending a ton of money.  Hope you stay tuned!