Finding an Affordable New Homestead

Remember over six months ago when I shared that we were shopping for a new homestead for our family? After many months of searching for the right property at an affordable price, we finally found our new home. On the first of this month we closed on our new homestead!

Remember that post I wrote way back in December on our  Homestead Property Shopping Wish List? Well our new homestead has everything on that list except a root cellar which means we just have to figure out how to make one. Our new homestead has:

• A house with more square footage than our old house
• A shop for my husband to set up his mechanic and wood working tools
• Six fruit trees (apple, pear and apricot!) plus a ton of other well established shade trees
• Outbuildings for animals
• A deep well to supply the house PLUS an additional irrigation well!
• Almost 4.5 acres of pasture so plenty of space to put in a garden, greenhouse, chickens and goats
• A nice sized pantry
• Still in Missoula County and actually closer to my part time job than our old house

Gratitude Sunday 7-28-2013

We've been busy working on our new "fixer upper" house and slowly moving to the other side of the county so we haven't joined in Gratitude Sunday for a little while. We had a really wonderful day yesterday which got me thinking how much we have to be grateful for so thought I would share. Here are a few of our gratitudes from this last week:

-Deciding to take a spur of the moment trip down the Bitteroot Valley to spend the day at the Hardtimes Bluegrass Festival. The festival was held on a ranch with the stage area tucked in a lightly treed pine forest so we enjoyed some wonderful live bluegrass in the shade on a super hot day.

How to Maximize Your Wild Berry Harvest

It is finally that time of year here in Montana when our favorite wild huckleberries are ripe enough to start picking. Today we headed out to our secret huckleberry patch that I wrote about last summer. We were excited to try out our new berry rake to see if it would help harvest more berries without destroying the bushes. This handy gadget called a Berry Picker isn't perfect but it definitely helped us harvest double the amount of berries in a short amount of time!