Another month has gone by and we still haven’t made any major progress on our big homesteading goals. There are a variety of factors that go into this, but we decided until we have more exciting news, it made sense to do summary posts each month. So, starting with today and going forward each month, even if we don’t have other exciting news to share, we’ll make sure to do a monthly homestead update.

With that said, let’s jump into it!

New Furniture for the House

While we’ve been at the homestead for over six months now, we’re still pretty sparse in terms of furniture. Actually, there’s a lot of things we are missing around here. But, one of the biggest gaps was definitely the lack of seating inside. Specifically, we had no form of living room seating.

So, earlier this year we purchased both a set of reclining sofas and a TV stand a couple months ago. And, in the month of June we received our new living room furniture and got it all up and running. While this isn’t an important part of our efforts in self-sufficiency, it really feels good to have a proper living room setup -now we just need to get a bigger TV!

Update on Jadzia

Jadzia is settling in here nicely. She is still fairly small, but she’s definitely grown in the last month. In terms of her doing her job as a livestock guardian, she hasn’t really taken any interest in bothering the chickens, but she also doesn’t have the opportunity. We plan to leave them in the chicken run for the foreseeable future, but maybe as Jadzia gets older we’ll let them out.

Regardless, our livestock guardian dog spent plenty of times around chickens when she was younger, so I expect she’ll do nicely. One thing we’ve both noticed -she doesn’t bark nearly as much as we expected. Everywhere we looked online, people claimed Great Pyrenees would bark at their own shadow. Her cute little bark is not something we hear that often, so that seem like a good thing.

Victoria’s Birthday!

For the first time ever, Victoria was summoned for jury duty. And, she was summoned for that jury duty on her birthday! So, her birthday didn’t exactly start out great. Despite this, we spent the afternoon celebrating as best we could. This means eating lunch in Trenton, checking out antique shops around Crystal River, and eating out at an Irish Seafood restaurant in Crystal River as well.

In fact, that Irish restaurant had some of the best key lime pie we’ve ever had. 10/10 would recommend. Regardless of any shortcomings, Victoria got to enjoy her birthday. In fact, a week later we went to St. Petersburg and checked out a beach there with family. Since we no longer live near the beach, that was a fun change of pace as well.

Waiting for Our First Chicken Eggs

One final update we want to give is around our backyard chickens. As the month is nearing a close, we are expecting to get our first eggs from the chickens in the next 2-3 weeks. So, over the next few weeks, we’ll be on close watch each day in hopes we find a present when feeding our chickens.

In case we don’t see you before next month, make sure to check back for another summer update at the end of July. Until then, we’ll see you around the homestead.