Having a homestead comes with many blessings. And many responsibilities.
Working on a farm requires months of commitment and planning and preparation. And it’s taught me to look ahead and use a calendar.
Both of which I’m not used to doing.
I usually don’t even have my birthday plans figured out until the day of.
Oh, how times have changed since moving onto our small farm and having a baby.
Now I plan out our meals a week in advance, make winter plans in the spring, and I feel like a year really isn’t that long any more.
Time is speeding up.
By no means, do I have this whole homestead thing all figured out. I think that I’m just starting to understand how much effort is involved and that one of the best qualities I can strive for is being humble.
Reflect on last year’s summer
Last year, I thought we would surely plant a summer garden and have more veggies than we could imagine.
I bought a pressure canner. I watched videos. Oh yes, I was excited.
But with having a new baby and some urgent home repairs to attend to, the gardening just didn’t happen.
Instead, we focused primarily on our new role as parents, our small livestock, and each other.
It was a pretty simple year. And a good one!
But this year, I am not stopping. A garden is going to grow… something. Come hell or high water.
Pencil out your homestead goals for this summer
Planning and preparation go hand in hand.
But it’s kind of hard to prepare for the summer if you don’t first have your plans mapped out, right? And your plans should be defined by what your goals are for the summer.
Our summer plans hinge on the following goals:
- Growing our own food (a first for us!)
- Milking our goats & making cheese (another first!)
- Weed & pest control
- Home and barn repairs
- Barbeques
These are just our goals… yours may look different, of course.
I think the more experienced you are the more you can expect of yourself and add to the calendar. But for us, we are still in our “season of firsts” and I have dialed down our calendar accordingly.
Our summer farm goals explained
The garden
My husband and I were not raised with any of these skills, so the learning curve here is steep.
While we have raised our own meat and eggs, and preserved fruit from an existing orchard on our property, we have never started our own successful garden from scratch.
This year is will be the year!
So far, I’ve dived deep into learning the pros and cons between raised beds and in ground beds, the best gardening soil options, and how to grow your own starters indoors from seeds.
I’ve also been learning about irrigation options but that will need to be for another year.
The dairy goats
We have taken care of our two dairy goats since they were just a few weeks old. Now they are two years old and have babies of their own.
It feels like such an achievement!
In hindsight, it probably would have been easier to just buy some nanny goats, but these is the route we took, so we are going to celebrate all the hard work that brought us all here.
Weed & pest control
Last year we had a major wasp and hornet infestation, which meant we couldn’t enjoy our backyard patio area, our deck, or our shed.
They more or less kicked us out of our own spaces.
This year, we’ve gotten a head start on the issue and will not wait until summer to address things.
Home and barn repairs
A hundred year old farmhouse comes with a lot of charm and a lot of… repairs.
We need to take advantage of the warm and dry months to get some deck flashing and siding repairs done.
We also need to build barn doors because our barn doesn’t have any!
All of our tools, hay, and extra wood is being exposed to the elements and theft, which is not ideal. We are looking forward to changing this as soon as we can.
Barbecues
What good is a homestead if you can’t enjoy your home with each other and company? We hope to spend as much time outside as possible and will definitely be inviting the neighbors, family, and friends over.
After you identify your summer goals, do a “mind dump”
I love this part of the exercise because at any given moment I have a laundry list of “to-dos” that are just rattling around in my noggin.
It feels good to “dump” all that data and see all those tasks written down in one place.
No need to try and memorize everything or organize it now.
Nope, it’s all about just getting it written down.
Cataloging your summer tasks
Don’t tackle your summer preparation tasks randomly. Instead, catalogue by the following:
- tasks priority
- who should do which task (assuming it’s more than just you on your farm)
- which tasks hinge on other tasks getting done first
- grouping each task by month
My husband is usually volunteered to do things like removing and spraying hornets nests. And I am usually doing things like pulling weeds and making bread.
We play to our strengths. Might as well, right?
We are also taking advantage of the longer days and nights so that we can get a lot of these work done during the weekdays and preserve as much of our weekends as possible for family time and weekend outings.
Figuring out how to plan out your farm goals by the month
It’s easy to get overwhelmed, isn’t it?
Any homestead will come with a never ending list of projects and potential.
This is why it’s important to first identify your goals, then list out the actions you need to take, and then, group those tasks by the month–so you know exactly what you need to get done each month.
I’ve learned this the hard way when I tried to pull weeds in June instead of March.
Wow, the timing matters.
Maximize your efforts by identifying which month it’s best for your to do those specific tasks.
Just in case it helps you plan out your summer, here’s a sneak peak into my spring and summer plans:
What our monthly spring roadmap looks like
I decided to bucket out the six areas of our homestead that seem to command the most attention and outline exactly what we need to do in the spring to prepare for our summer goals:
March
| Home | Food & Pantry | Garden | Livestock | Weed & Pest Management | Lawn & Landscaping |
| Pull any damage or ill-fitting clothes out of the closet | Clean and organize spices, pantry, and freezer | Pulling weeds | Prepare for barn and pen for baby goats | Knock down any known hornets nests | Gather sticks and fallen branches into burn pile |
| Build & install DIY baby gates | Make a list of bulk items to buy | Researching garden bed options (raised vs. in ground) | Monitor pregnant momma goats | Weed around house walkway and garden area | |
| Order Azure haulCostco | Purchase seeds & starter containers | Weigh & monitor baby goats | Empty pond and any standing water |
April
| Home | Food & Pantry | Garden | Livestock | Weed & Pest Management | Lawn & Landscaping |
| Clean shop | Start new sourdough starter + bread baking schedule | Plant starters indoors | Build a goat milking station | Finish weeding around the backside of the house | Level garden area in preparation for planter bins |
| Start building barn doors for our large barn | Make my own tallow face balm | Install raised beds | Build a new hay holder | Hang up hornet deterrents | Fix mower |
| Paint bedroom & living room | Milk our goats for the first time! | Order soil from local nursery | Build a teeter totter | Spray any problem wasp areas | Burn pile |
May
| Home | Food & Pantry | Garden | Livestock | Weed & Pests Management | Lawn & Landscaping |
| Assess deck and siding damage & make a plan for repairs | Make goat cheese | Harden off starters | Repair goat roof | Clean wood shed and any mice dwellings | Prepare chicken coop |
| Gutter maintenance | Make dried sage herbs (we have a sage plant) | Plant starters | Install auto rabbit feeders & waterers | Knock down dead trees | |
| Apply moss powder remover to roof | Stock up on homemade granolas & hiking snacks | Decide on whether we’re getting chickens | Trail build |
June
| Home | Food & Pantry | Garden | Livestock | Weed & Pests Management | Lawn & Landscaping |
| Soft wash roof, siding, and deck | Stock up on hay for the fall and winter | Monitor mole problem | |||
| Deck flashing & siding repairs | Process rabbits |
July
| Home | Food & Pantry | Garden | Livestock | Weed & Pest Management | Lawn & Landscaping |
| Paint exterior house + barn |
August
| Home | Food & Pantry | Garden | Livestock | Weed & Pest Management | Lawn & Landscaping |
| Preserving | Preserving | Decide whether we will breed our goats again | |||
| Keeping a field journal of garden growth (what worked & what didn’t) | |||||
| Consider drip irrigation |
Hard work in the spring makes for a fun summer
That’s my hope anyways.
I’m hoping that doing a deep cleaning and organizing of our freezer, pantry, and shop will make all of our summer festivities go more smoothly.
For example, we will be DIY’ing our home repairs and having a clean and orderly shop to work in makes everything much easier.
Getting a head start on our weed and pest management in the spring will hopefully mean preventing the summer overgrowth and hornet infestation that we dealt with last summer.
I’m all for working extra hard now to enjoy the best months out of the year later.
Planning and preparation is great… but it isn’t everything!
One of the biggest drawbacks about being ambitious, and having so many goals, is that you tend to focus on the outcome more than the process.
In other words, you rob yourself of enjoying yourself along the way from Point A to Point B.
Whenever I think, “oh, I’ll just get one more thing done”, I try to check in with myself and ask if I’m actually focusing on the right thing.
If I’m getting overwhelmed with how much we have to get done, sometimes it’s better to take the foot of the gas and just coast for a while.
Somehow, everything comes back into focus. And the irony is that sometimes I get more done than when I’m trying to cram everything all at once.
So while I do think it’s important to plan and prepare and take action… I think, perhaps, the most important part of the plan is enjoying the process.
This way, if things don’t work out, or you need to pivot, it’s really not a big deal because you’ve been having fun the whole time.
And, it makes the whole homestead experience a bit more easy going for everyone.
How about you and your homestead? How are you preparing for the summer ahead?
I would love to hear all about it in the comments below!
