Urban Update #10

It’s almost Thanksgiving. Are you ready for the holiday festivities? Here we are getting ready for the feast and all the work that comes along with hosting a holiday gathering. I usually host Thanksgiving and other family members take Christmas and this has work out good for our family. We are still working outside getting everything ready for winter and yes still preserving in the kitchen. Let take a look at this weeks Urban Update #10 and what we are doing this week at Becoming Homesteaders.

November 11, 2023

Happy Veterans Day!

First of all, thank you to all our Veterans. Thank you for your service to our country and for your families sacrifice. We are all so very grateful for our service members and are so proud of our family members that have served and are still serving. We have family that have served in the Army, Navy, and our son continues to serve in the Air Force. Thank you to everyone.

In The Garden

This week the temperatures were warmer, and we were able to get outside and finish up some projects that needed done before we dip to low with the temps. We have two large rain barrels that we use to water our gardens, and these always get brought in for the winter months. I have definitely made the mistake of leaving it outside only to find the following spring a giant crack down the middle. With our hard winters if they are left outside with even a little water this will happen. Those were emptied, cleaned out, and brought in for storage.

Tomato Garden

The fenced in garden where we planted the tomatoes finally got a good cleaning as well. I still had tomato vines that needed to be pulled out and thrown away. These went to the garbage and not the compost pile. This is due to the fungal disease that my tomato plants struggled with this year. If you have any plants that were diseased never add them to your compost piles. This will just give that disease a nice warm place to hide over winter and then when you use it the next season you will just spread it again.

We just bagged all the bad, diseased plants up in very large paper garden bags and take it out for the garbage trucks to take away. Not ideal but I definitely don’t want that fungus in my compost or left in the garden to hang out either.

Using Grass and Leaf Mulch

I also finished up mulching all my cold hardy plants with grass/leaf mulch. This will give them an additional layer of protection from the cold and help retain moisture too. Everything still looks so good and I am so very pleased with how things have grown so far. I wanted to get that layer of plastic over each row this week but I ran out of time. Hopefully this will get done next week. Our temperatures at night have still been above freezing so I think I still have time before I need to really worry. Plus I still have the heavy weighted frost covers out to pull over each row if it dips too low.

When we mow the lawn, we use the grass as mulch. This is my favorite way to mulch my veggies and the easiest for us. Now that we have lots of leaves, this is an added bonus to the grass clippings. They are mowed over, and this chops them up nice and small and helps them to break down over the winter months. Come spring you can barely tell it was even there.

Cut Flowers

This week was also the last week for cut flowers from the garden. Most of the summer and fall flowers have faded but there are still some plants that are nice enough to bring inside for some dried arrangements.

I love the summer ornamental grasses in the fall when they produce those long wispy seed fans. When you cut them and bring them in the heat from indoors opens the pods and they are light fluffy fans that adds a nice touch to other dried arrangements. We have zebra grass, maiden grass, and another variety the name slips my mind but they all are beautiful.

My hydrangea’s this year did better than last year but still disappointing. I like to leave these until the flowers dry up and then use them in the house for a fall arrangement. I have a couple varieties and this last bunch I picked still had some pale blue hints to the blooms. Another was that beautiful wheat color and a great fall bouquet.

In The Kitchen

Whole Chickens

This week we purchased several whole chickens, and I tried my hand at piecing them out. This just means cutting the chicken up into pieces. I watched a video over on Instagram from The Homesteading RD. She is so very good and gives lots of great homesteading tips. I highly recommend checking her out over on YouTube and Instagram. She shows you step by step on how to cut up a chicken and I did it. Legs, breast, thighs, and wings. Perfectly! If you would like to check that video out here ya go “Piece Out”.

This was a big confidence booster for me and now I do feel that meat birds will be a great first animal for our family when we move and have a larger piece of property to house them at. This has always been on my “must do first” lists. I of course would love to have hens for eggs, but I have always thought meat birds would be a great way to be more self-sufficient since we eat a lot of chicken.

With all the chicken I made White Chicken Enchiladas, Chicken Wild Rice Soup, and I froze some for future meals as well. Once I removed most of the meat, I used the carcass and bones to make broth. I ended up with 14 quarts of beautiful chicken stock to add to the pantry shelf. Feeling accomplished again. I will use this on Thanksgiving to make some yummy noodles.

Having A Well-Stocked Pantry

This week I made a Thanksgiving menu and a grocery list. If you need a quick and easy dessert for Thanksgiving check out these Apple Pie Bars they are so good. I am feeling so good about cooking and using all our items in the pantry. Just looking over my list and looking in the pantry I am so very thankful for everything we grew, canned, froze, fermented, and dehydrated this year. I really can’t even put it in words the feeling of accomplishment and pride I have. When you make a grocery list, and you are able to fill 90 percent of that list with items you have worked hard to put up for the winter it just brings such a feeling of peace and happiness.

I do need to do a pantry tour of our very small but adequate pantry. Just sitting down there looking at everything and going over my Thanksgiving list, I thought to myself “wow I can really make almost anything I want”. And that is what it is all about. Getting your cookbooks out and looking at them and saying wow I really do have all the ingredients I need right here, and it was all homemade home canned items.

Wrap Up

I hope you are all making your Thanksgiving plans and feeling thankful as I am this week. I have so much to be thankful for and sometimes life can get in the way of seeing that. This week I was reminded, and I hope this feeling continues throughout the holiday season. I wish you all Happy Cooking! See you in next week’s Urban Update!