Chaos Managed Homestead

05/26/2026

05/26/2026

First batch of dandelion salve turned out amazing! Not to mention beautiful!

Dandelions are a highly nutritious, edible herb packed with vitamins A, C, and K, as well as calcium and potassium. It is widely used in herbal remedies to support digestion, reduce inflammation, and promote healthy liver and kidney function. The plant is loaded with antioxidants that combat free radicals, reduce chronic inflammation, and protect cells from oxidative damage.

I can’t wait to start using it on some of our achy muscles and joints!

05/25/2026

We added a couple of new faces to the homestead this week. One of our barn cats, Hermione, welcomed two sweet babies and we are so excited! We have one other sweet girl that had babies but we can’t find Petunia’s babies yet. But we just stuck an air tag on her so we can hopefully track her and bring them home! (And before anyone comes at me for bringing more cats into the world, our cats are fed, loved, and wanted, and we plan to spay them all when the time comes to do so!)

04/20/2026

We have new Kikiriki babies!!!

03/25/2025

Sooooooo true!

03/15/2025

I said I’d never do it again……I lied.

03/12/2025

As a sort of follow up to my chicken math post, I put 22 eggs in my incubator again today. I love blue eggs. I love all egg colors, but the blue ones are really exceptionally beautiful to me. I have a true Lavendar Ameraucana rooster (I had a hen as well, but the extreme cold that we had did not treat her well) so I decided today that I would hatch all blue and green eggs. Well, of course I didn’t have enough to fill the incubator, so I threw my white eggs in and as an afterthought, I added two silkie eggs. My incubator now full, so starts the 21 day journey to chicks.

I’m considering getting another incubator and selling some chicks as well. They seem to be in short supply everywhere. Would anyone be interested in some beautiful barnyard mixes?

03/08/2025

Have you ever heard of chicken math? It’s a real thing! I put 22 eggs in my incubator three weeks ago. When I candled them this week at lockdown, I wound up taking five of them out because they weren’t any good. There were a couple that I left in that were iffy. As of this morning, I have nine that have hatched. But I just went to town and came home with 10 chicks! And when I went to put them in the brooder, I found that my Kikiriki, the teacup chickens, have hatched four on their own! So instead of the 9 that I was counting on this morning, I have 23! Now if that ain’t chicken math, I don’t know what is!

03/01/2025

We were blessed with a beautiful day for some yard and home improvements!

02/28/2025

This is the prettiest part of my yard right now. After receiving a sweet gift of this beautiful grape hyacinth, I picked up a few others that were past bloom at my local discount store, and I put them all in the ground. It’s not quite March yet, but it’s going to be in the 80’s today, and I was anxious to get my hands in the dirt. No worries though….I have a few pop-up green houses that will fit perfectly here if the temperature gets too low. But the proverbial seed has been sewn….and I’m heading out to get more flowers!

02/22/2025

You can have plenty of eggs without having a rooster. But to hatch chicks, the roo is a necessary part. Twenty-two chicken eggs are in our incubator, including five silkie eggs, and hopefully in about two weeks we’ll have babies!

There’s a real science to incubating eggs. Humidity, temperature, and rotation are all important aspects. Plus a good bit of love! Each hatch is special, and we do everything necessary to make sure they all make it through the hatching process. And sometimes that means making hard decisions if a chick hatches but doesn’t thrive. (Side note here: I used to bury every individual one we lost. But I’ve learned that I can bury them in my working compost just the same and their little lives go on to be part of our living homestead.)

I promised my youngest that we’d buy chicks when the local stores/farm supply stores have them, so I’m just getting a jump start on our flock expansion.

I’ve got an animal wish list a mile long….Nigerian Dwarf goats, call ducks, emu, guinea hens, are just a few I’m wanting. So what are your thought? What do you suggest we add to our homestead this year?