Join me as I go about my daily homestead chores and bake in our European Farmhouse kitchen.
Homestead life is so sweet in many ways, but there are daily challenges we face too. Let’s talk about the Real Homestead Life
Recipes in this video:
Homemade Soft Sourdough Pretzels
Other delicious European Farmhouse Recipes:
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00:48 Feeding Broiler Chickens
2:19 Milking Cow
03:53 Milling Flour
04:04 Soft Sourdough Pretzels Recipe
09:20 Working in the Vegetable Garden
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[Music] hello and welcome my name is Teresa from the blog and YouTube channel freeof flower.com where I share our simple life on our European Farm Homestead living from scratch cooking raising animals and growing our own food hit the Subscribe button if any of those are things that interest you today I want to talk to you about the real life on a homestead there are so many joys to living on a farm but they’re definite challenges too so let’s dive into some of them come along let’s get some morning chores done and let’s touch on the topic of a real Homestead life right off the bat which is there are so many things that need doing around the farm and I am so fortunate in that I have a lot of help so we tag team together with my husband and other people that come to help us occasionally at the farm and somebody takes care of one task one day and another task another day otherwise it can get very heavy to have to repeat the same task day in day out both physically and mentally so I would suggest this as tip number one for anybody who is looking to start a homestead make sure you have some people on hand that can support you either when you’re away from your farm or when you just need help because we all do we raise 100 meat birds um twice a year so 200 per year uh we raise Broiler chickens it’s quite a lot of work but we found that we absolutely love home raised chicken meat our boys eat a lot of meat and so we go through a lot of it and this is definitely worth it for us but it’s one of those things that when Slaughter time comes we absolutely need help as well as towards the end when the chickens are bigger need a lots of feeding having help on hand is just invaluable you can see we keep a bunch of horses and we recently welcomed a new fo to the herd which was so sweet she is adorable just so little but already so full of energy and this is another area where we definitely get help it’s much easier to get help with horses than almost any other animal because people just love horses and we have some friends come and help and then they can ride in exchange and honestly we kind of run it like a small family farm with our friends so whoever wants to chip in and help comes along but we also keep somebody on hand who helps us pretty much year round with two small kiddos and a bunch of other businesses that we run I’m not sure how we would get everything done we would probably need to downsize quite a bit and that would take away the joy of homesteading in a lot of ways and this way we get to support a whole another family which we absolutely love doing so here I am milking our cow Heidi Heidi is also expecting a calf in a late summer we’re really excited for that um very often with dairy cow people ask me you know how do you do it every single day and this can be one of the giant challenges of Homestead living and it goes back to what I said at the beginning I milk the cow on some days and on other days are a farmand lady milks the cow or somebody else will come help out this has been massively liberating for us and it allows me to attend to things in the kitchen a little bit more like I’m here I’m Milling my own flour this is something I started doing very recently but I’ve noticed that my sourdough is just so much better when I Mill my own flour I just decided to get the attachment for the kitchen aid that works perfectly well for me and my sourdough starter and all sourdough Rises so much better when I use fresh flour so so here I am making my homemade soft sourdough pretzel recipe with freshly mold flour this is an extremely rewarding recipe but I’m going to be completely transparent with you it does take quite some work so the dough is pretty simple and straightforward you add flour water some honey a little bit of salt sourdough starter of course mix it all together and then go and let it proof that is pretty straightforward I have found that the time needed for proofing the dough for sourdough pretzels can vary luckily I have my proofing box which allows me to standardize the temperature in my house a little bit more throughout the seasons so that makes it a little bit more predictable but it definitely takes a little longer than bread in my experience if You’ like the full recipe for to print out or just to read you can head to my blog ffl.com I will link it in the description box below where I include all of the directions including the fermentation times and all the ins and outs if you’ve never made pretzels before they are incredibly similar to Bagels in that that they are also first boiled now this was something that stopped me from trying to make sourdough pretzels or bagels for a really long time I felt really intimidated by that step but let me be the first one to tell you it really is not that dramatic and it’s so much simpler than it seems if you just follow the directions on my log in the recipe you will end up with delicious sourdough pretzels that are great crowd pleaser I love making these for parties or if we have some visitors coming as they just make really nice finger food especially to have with beer which is a big thing here in the Czech [Music] Republic one thing that people often don’t realize unless they live on a homestead is quite how much work there is to do at practically all times and there is never a point where you get to the end of your list I don’t think I realized this before we started living here full-time either so it’s really important to have ways to balance work and life a little bit those are not always perfect and we are not perfect at them either but we do follow a lot of rhythms in our daily and weekly and monthly life to ensure that we don’t completely burn out on farm work and all the other work there is to do we always try to have a rest day at least once a week we have periods of day when we rest I take an afternoon nap on Sundays religiously it’s one of the things I look forward to all week long and when all else fails the best thing we found is to just go on a day trip we pack up the kids we pack up our things and we go to one of the nearby castles or other sites and we get ice cream we eat out and we just get away from it or for a few hours now this is possible if you have help or if you don’t have help as you leave and come back on the same day so all animals and chores and everything else will probably still be fine but we have found that it is so much easier with having help of course because we don’t have to worry about whether all the chores are going to get done on that one day or not that being said we are a very small farm and so many of the things here do depend on us doing them personally so for example my husband is the one responsible for all the renovation Works building works construction work and there’s always something going on we are currently comp completing the construction of a horse round pen which if you’re not familiar it’s just another tool for training horses and it’ll be an area to ride on horses when the weather is not great we are also building out some cool new things that I am going to introduce to you in a later video I don’t want to spoil the tea on that one quite yet and we’re also working on our garden I’ve mentioned this before but we have converted our garden to a permaculture garden and we are implementing a pretty elaborate plan that’ll take us probably 3 years to complete so talk about work overwhelm oh my goodness but so far it has been so rewarding I’m going to do a full Garden Walk Through soon you are going to see how much everything has grown over here I’m planting some beets and other seeds that get planted in late spring early summer and by now which I am recording this voice over about 3 weeks later the Cardon has just erupted it is a forest in all of those raised beds which is exactly what we want to see and one of the reasons that we converted it to a permaculture Garden is so that we have a lower workload weeding and constantly dealing with pests and disease is such such a joy killer when it comes to Growing our own vegetables we’ve experienced that last year and we did not want to go there again so we decided we were going to do a little bit of extra work up front which is starting a new Gardening System so to speak in order to have less work as the season goes on and as we’re starting to get a harvest in and need to preserve and can all the things [Music] one of the things that is really important to me in life is honesty and transparency and I feel like a lot of the homesteading channels out there are just not honest and transparent about what goes into running a farm and they’re definitely not honest in telling us about all the help that they get and so we are often left on the other side of the screen thinking that these people just get it done all on their own while being perfectly rested and happy day in day out and I’m just here to tell you that that is not true first of all just like with everything else help is needed and most of these people do get help and so I am so proud to say that I get help is it as much help as I would like maybe not I could always use more help but is it enough to make this doable and to help me see the joy in it every single day [Music] absolutely thanks so much for coming along to do my daily chores with me if you enjoyed following along please hit the Subscribe button I post a new video every week all about life on our European Farm till next week
1 Comment
Hello. Nice farm. Having so many animals is hard work every day. You are well done😊