Cozy Christmas on the Homestead

With our homestead blanketed in snow, we are all ready to get ready for a cozy Christmas on our high desert homestead. Also, we are so excited to share with you our special announcement!

Welcome to our High Desert Homestead where we inspire the dreamers to make big plans in small spaces! We have lived in four different U.S. States over the past eight years. In that time I learned to cook from scratch, bake with sourdough, and grow gardens wherever we lived. I grew blueberry bushes at a rental where I couldn’t “garden,” I grew tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, beets, radishes and flowers on our apartment balcony, I grew herb gardens in sunny window sills, and began my journey towards growing our homestead on our one acre property here in the high desert.

Let’s learn and grow together wherever we are on our homestead journey!

For more how to instruction go to
highdeserthomesteader.com

Are you new around here?
Check out this playlist!

Take a stroll through my high desert market garden-you might learn a thing or two!

Let’s preserve food together!

Grow a little Fruit Tree with me!

Grow a pasture on ONE ACRE of land!

Our home build from start to finish!

Raise your own meat

My favorite tools:
Soil blocker https://amzn.to/40G84bn
Capillary mats (for soil blocks) https://amzn.to/3KVORwI
Digital Pressure Cooker https://amzn.to/40Bg6lS

My seed starting set up: https://highdeserthomesteader.com/soil-blocks-for-seed-starting-using-a-capillary-mat/

Pruning Fruit trees (to keep them small)

Prune Fruit Trees: How to Keep Trees Small

Grow an Indoor Herb Garden

How to Grow an Indoor Herb Garden on your Sunny Windowsill

Design a Therapy Garden

How to Design a Therapy garden

About Me

About Me

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The first snow of the season has blanketed our Homestead there’s always something special about the first snow and this year it feels even more special the kids pulled out the snow clothes and we all dressed quickly with anticipation if you’ve ever dressed kids for winter it’s quite the ordeal but this time it

Was worth it we spent hours outside exploring and playing in the snow till dark I walked around checking on the various parts of our Homestead the rabbits tucked in cozy all of them super warm with their hay they seemed joyous as well as you look over you can see where

Our poop is going to be and yes with all this snow there will be definitely a little bit of a delay getting that going again I also wanted to check on the seeds that I had planted Outdoors a few weeks ago and they are looking great and still growing despite our super cold

Weather I’m guessing you are all excited to hear about our announcement and I’m so excited to tell you about it but first we need to get our new place ready for Christmas when weake the birds and see the sun our are Done one of my most cherished memories that I had at Christmas time growing up was that after Thanksgiving our family would bundle up pack the hot cocoa and donuts travel up the mountain and we would hike around in the snow covered mountains to find the perfect imperfect Christmas

Tree and I have been so excited to be able to share that tradition with my kids and this year there was like no snow until right up before we went went you see any good Trees Tim there’s a lot of hype around creating and finding and decorating the perfect tree but there’s something in my heart that just loves an imperfect Christmas tree and what that symbolizes for us and I love just letting my kids go crazy and decorate it all on their own

I had been in search for the perfect Christmas candle that didn’t burn my eyes or give me a headache and there was the cutest little Boutique shop on the Main Street in the town near us and I had a feeling there would be a good natural option for candles at this place

And there was so I lit the candles we lit the tree and enjoyed the warm glow of our Christmas Tree as we’re getting ready for Christmas there is one project that I wanted to make we don’t have a place to hang our stockings in our previous home we had a fireplace where we could hang those from and it was perfect but in this home we do not yet that is

Something I’m dreaming of and hoping of but it’s definitely down the road I saw plans for the perfect stocking holder need from wood and so we have tons of scrap wood from our chicken Co project and I’m going to go ahead and see if I can make that right now

As I mentioned before in our previous home we actually had a fireplace with a very cute mantle that we made but before that we had lived in apartments or rentals and there was never a good spot for us to hang the stocking so I wouldn’t hang them up and we would just

Set them out on the couch on Christmas Eve with their goodies inside and the kids could come and get them in the morning but I wanted to have the stockings be more a part of the decor in our home and so about 5 years ago I had made stockings knowing that we were

Going to live in a place where we could hang them on our fireplace and now we’ve moved and we don’t have a fireplace and I don’t want to go back to just setting out our stockings on Christmas Eve I want them to be a part of our Decor but

I also didn’t want to spend a ton of money on buying or creating a way to hang our stockings because I wasn’t quite sure how permanent this situation would be knowing that someday I really want some kind of fireplace or wood weding stove in our living space and I

Tend to rearrange furniture for a year or two of living in a new place just to get the space right and so I did look online for stocking hangers you can buy them and the cheapest one I could find was about $65 and the reviews were awful it talked

About how it was just plastic poles that wasn’t very sturdy and it just didn’t seem right to spend that much money on something that wasn’t going to be a very good option and so I decided as I mentioned before to look up some plans and I found this plan made by Anna white

If you’ve ever built something you probably know her name she has lots of free plans on her website and a lot of them come with a video so this one came with just a quick video and so I could just look at that and see how to do it

Because of how simple it was but that was exactly what I needed because I didn’t have a lot of time and energy mental space to spend on creating an elaborate talking H there but I also wanted it to look pleasing to the eye so when I saw these plans I felt like it

Checked both of those boxes and I went ahead decided to get started on that and as I was building it it was just really satisfying to know that I could make this for basically the price of the hardware because we had the wood already that we had purchased from our C CU

Otherwise I don’t really have a place to put ouring all right are we going to stain it yeah so I need to sand it first and then we’ll stain it and then we’ll put little hooks on it on the front so I’m going to try to sand our stocking holder

Right now I really hope I can get to staining it today but the only problem is that our stain is behind all of those things so I might been maneuvering around our chicken Co walls to get it out I really want to get these walls up but alas one thing at a

Time right we also need to find the extension cord I found it because that’s the next step oh there’s a spider all over this I I remember walking that back window what is that is it a black widow it might be hopefully not yeah dead things so maybe it wasn’t

Anything maybe it’s just like a wrapped up bug I really like when a project is something that I can get done by myself I really like working with my husband on projects it’s a fun experience and it’s fun to gather the whole family but when we have to wait to do things together

Because of either I like to think things through with him just so that I don’t get it wrong or I’m not strong enough to be able to maneuver large pieces of lumber around then I have to wait for him and it just makes a project take a

Lot longer as you can see with our chicken coup so it’s been fun to work on this little project with my son and just be able to get it knocked out in just a day or so I was able to pull the tint off of that box and I was able to get the wood stain the wood stain I want to use this is special Walnut and we used it on our mantle in our old house and I loved that color so I think there’s enough left of

This to be able to use for our stocking hang hangers so we’re going to go ahead and get staining this and once we get done staining it we will be able to hook up the little hooks and hang up our Stockings cuz if you go on too dark then it will be darker than I’m hoping oh you can just can’t see on that side but we can that’s why we’re a great help Finished staining and it’ll probably dry really quick cuz I just did one light coat it’s not going to go through anything heavy duty so I don’t worry too much about protecting Elon and then we’ll put on the hooks our family has really been getting into making our own pastas we put on

Some Italian music and shape the dough that we’ve made and you could make it in all different shapes and sizes and it still tastes so good when they float to the top that means they’re almost done are some floating yeah so we whipped up some pasta and had a yummy pasta dinner

Before heading back out and finishing the stocking hanger it’s dry let’s bring it in Nate’s going to help me measure so I it’s properly Done I picked up a couple packs of these hooks from just our local hardwood store and I knew they would look perfect with the black that matches in our home to line up all along the top of the stocking hanger so I was opening the packages but my husband was definitely

He’s the one who is really just particular about measuring out things in the perfect spacing and I I just tend to eyeball things and a lot of times that works out really well for me but I didn’t want to get it wrong with this because I felt like that black hook

Against just the beautifully stained wood would would really show if I made any sort of mistakes so I took charge of taking care of the baby and warding off any kids who tried to attack the stocking hanger before it was finished while my husband tediously measured each spot for these hooks

Let’s talk about the stockings we have so about four or five years ago I had this idea that I wanted to make all the stockings for our family and I found a pattern online and I wanted just a classic Christmas material that would just look really good for a really long

Time and I I made extras I made I think I made three extra stockings at that time knowing that we were going to have more kids in the future and so we had a bunch of these stockings we weren’t really sure how many we needed to have

And each year after year we would grab one of those extra stockings after we had a baby and I even kept I bought extra tags so that I could stain the tag and color in their name on that stocking and it felt so good to be able to pull

And have that matching set already done I didn’t have to go searching for a new stocking each time that we had a new baby and guess what we have one stocking left and that is our special announcement our family is growing by one more baby girl

And she will be due in April and we are so excited to meet her and have her be a part of our Homestead Family Oh