Author Archives: Seasons of Grace

About Seasons of Grace

A little about me.......I'm a God fearing wife and mother to a wonderful family of FIVE! We get through this hectic crazy thing called life by totally relying on God's unending grace, mercy, and strength. And also a little bit of "mommy time outs." This blog post will be all about my many different seasons with homeschool, family, marriage, ministry, infertility, T1D and how we survive them. I hope you stay awhile and enjoy the bumps and slides along the way! God Bless!

Tuesday Homestead Update

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Hey everyone! We have officially put new eggs in the incubator. Hopefully since they will only be 3 weeks behind our first ones, we can just incorporate these chicks in with them when they hatch. We added mainly our blue eggs to it this round. Hopefully we can hatch out some pretty colors that also lay pretty eggs!

I’m loving having these chicks in the house. Well, so far. They are much cleaner than the meat chicks were when they were inside. The smell is WAY down! Thats a huge thing with me.

We completed our rabbit tractor and moved our first set of growouts to it. Only supplementing with feed will hopefully bring our feed costs down by a good bit. Here is what we made!

It is 4ft by 3ft and the only thing we had to buy to create it was the staples to secure the fencing to the wood. We reused old tin we had lying around for the roof, milled the lumber from a fallen tree, we had spare fencing from building rabbit cages already, and we used a magnet to hold the kick stand up when it’s not in use. We also made a feeder to use and carry so we wouldn’t have to cut into the fence. Mainly due to the fiasco of the escaped rabbits last week.

Our next doe kindled this week also! She had 8 kits, but the runt died. So she ended up with a total of 7. She has been an excellent mom so far. We had one incident where she peed on them, but I think something spooked her. So she was covering their scent. It hasn’t happened since that first time, and we cleaned them up and got a fresh nesting box for them. So it ended well!

Our only delimma on the farm is I haven’t been able to get any seeds in the dirt. It’s killing me. I’m so ready to garden! Have you been able to start your garden where you are?

God bless,

Grave Revival Homestead

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Count The Cost

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The man at the pool of Bethesda was paralyzed for 38 years. That means he probably had never been trained in a trade or had proper schooling. So when Jesus asked him if he wanted to be healed, it was almost like He was asking him to “count the cost.”

In Jewish culture at that time, begging was a profession for people who could not work. They had to have a legitimate reason such as paralysis, blindness, or lameness to actually be a beggar, but the Jewish people would gladly be gracious with what they had to help provide for these men and women.

So if Jesus healed this man, he would no longer be allowed to beg. He would have to find a way to provide for himself. He would ultimately have to figure out a new way of life. Some people do not want to be healed. They are content with how their life is. They have gotten comfortable and know how to use whatever ails them to their advantage.

This is what Jesus asks us at salvation. Do we want to be healed? Do we want to be saved? Have we counted the cost? Its a free gift He wants to give us. But when we walk in relationship with Jesus, we will have a completely new life. The world will not understand. Our friends and family will not understand. We will lose alot, HOWEVER, we will gain everything. Every good and perfect gift comes from the Lord.

Do you want to be healed?

Tuesday Homestead Update

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Good morning yall!

We hatched chicks this week! We put 14 eggs in the incubator and 10 hatched. We are so excited. These tiny chicks will be used to replenish our laying hens. Prayerfully we get more hens than roos from this batch. I will definitely be incubating more soon to hopefully sell some to friends.

We have them set up in a simple brooder inside our house for now, since our brooder room is still incomplete. We have a small tractor ready for them to move into once they can go outside.

We also started building new cages and tractors for the rabbits. We are hoping to move our bucks to just one side of the rabbitry and move our grow-outs to rabbit tractors. That way we can feed more greens and just supplement with pellets. One of our goals is to have every animal in a movable enclosure. We can rotational graze them while also being able to take our fencing with us when God moves us to more land.

I spent a morning this week chasing baby rabbits. They managed to escape from their cage by pushing the feeder out. So off I go, in my pajamas and barefoot, sprinting after tiny puffs of white fur. The last one put up a fight, but I caught them all! I had to lure it out from under our feed room with pellets and then drop on top of her, wrap her in my shirt as she was screaming, and carry her back to her very upset momma.

The culprits after the chase.

With all of God’s Blessings,

Grace Revival Homestead

3 Ingredient Dishwasher Tabs

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I found this recipe on Pinterest and I wanted to try it out before I shared it. Just to make sure it works well and really cleans my dishes. After 4 months, I can truly say these work and are way more cost effective than store bought. Plus you know exactly what is going in them.

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups Baking Soda
  • 1/2 cup Citric Acid
  • 2 tablespoons Dish Soap

Mix the dry ingredients, then add the dish soap and squish it into the dry ingredients until you can form a ball with it and it stays together. I use my hands to mix so I can test out if it will hold its shape as I go, but you can use a spoon if you want. Then fill your mold with them and let them dry overnight. Pop them out and store them in a jar or whatever you have for storing! (Beware, if you have a cut on your finger, the Citric Acid will let you know. So wear gloves if you must)

I just throw one into the dishwasher before I start it. I do have hard water, so if I have vinegar on hand, I’ll put that in the rinse aid section of my machine to help, but it’s really not needed.

Tuesday Homestead Update

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Hey everyone! Some crazy things happened this weekend, but we are all ok and back to stepping forward. We began construction on the new brooder room. All of the lumber is being milled on our sawmill from fallen trees in the area. Such a huge money saver, especially now with how high prices are. I’m sure we’ve already gotten our money back from the price of the sawmill just on lumber.

This spot use to be a horse stall. The roof is rotting and alot of the old boards. So we are building and tearing down as we go. The roof has to be replaced for sure! In the end, this is where our baby chicks will be housed until they can be moved to the coop outside. We will also be moving our animal feed into here until we can redo the feed room.

Do you see that grassy spot right past the room we are building? Our kids were clearing up that spot while Dj and I worked on the room. It was in that spot that my youngest son chopped the tip of his thumb almost all the way off and broke his pointer finger. Yep! That happened. He picked up the machete my teenager put down and just swung it. After a trip to the emergency room, and a hand surgeon, everything is alright. They sewed his thumb back together and glued his pointer finger closed. Thank you Jesus for your protection and grace!

To say this weekend was one for the books, is an understatement. Thank goodness God was there for comfort and peace and wisdom. You could definitely feel him and I know Mason did. He was such a brave little man. Never cried, except for right after he actually cut himself. He handled getting stitched way better than I would have. Literally never cried! And of course, the day he cut his fingers was the day we cleaned out the coop and under the rabbit cages. YUCK! So the doctors had to really scrub his poor hand.

So back to the farm work, we have lots of babies being born here! We have a total of 17 babies so far. With one more (possibly 2 more) does to go!

We were also given a few more rabbits from a man Dj works with. They are quiet smaller than ours, but hopefully we can see about breeding out bigger kits by mixing the small males with our larger females. I don’t know alot about genetics, but we shall see! I’m excited to see the colors we get in the future. Here is our two new males! We received a doe also and she was in a cage with a male for the ride here. So we are assuming she is pregnant for now.

That is all for today folks! We will see you back next week, hopefully with another batch of kits!

With all of God’s blessings,

Grace Revival Homestead

Tuesday Homestead Update

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Good morning everyone! It’s almost spring time! One of my favorite/least favorite seasons. I love it because everything is new and shiny. We can get seeds in the ground, baby animals born, and the farm really starts churning. However, I have the absolute worst allergies. So if I miss even one day of Zyrtec D, that ruins me for over a week. It’s crazy!

So on to the good stuff, we have a new litter of baby rabbits! Plus two more pregnant does due this month and next. So many things to look forward too! Im hoping we just had our last cold front, and this litter survived the cold, so we are smooth sailing.

Our broiler chickens officially went to freezer camp this weekend. We had an average live weight of 8lbs and ended up with over 70lbs of meat after processing and sealing. I’m not going to lie, processing chickens is harder than processing rabbits. By the end of the day, my back was killing me and I was over it. We started at 3pm and finished everything around 9 that night. I’m sure it took us way longer since it was our first time. The next batch I want to cut that time down by alot!

We sealed 6 whole broilers and then cut the rest up for individual meals. We ended up with one bag of tenders, two bags of wings, seven bags of boneless skinless breasts, and four bags of leg quarters. All of those have enough meat to feed us for a night plus leftovers for Dwayne’s lunch the next day. Financially, if you look at the price of chicken right now, we came out on top over $200!

As for our review on the Cornish Cross broilers, we are more than satisfied with them. They were easy to raise, had a ton of meat on them, and the grass where the chicken tractor was has never looked better! We have an order of fifty coming in May. I’m not looking forward to that processing day!

I will see you all back next week with some cute baby bunny pictures! I didn’t want to uncover them with this cold front here.

God Bless,

Grace Revival Homestead

Fighting For Your Family: week 2

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First, I want to apologize for not remaining consistent with the Fighting For Your Family posts. I’ll be vulnerable here and admit that an attack happened that immediately intimidated me. Which in turn stopped me from posting about prayer. But God stepped in and reaffirmed my faith. So here we go for week 2!

This week I want to tell you what the most important part of prayer is. It’s……Listening. Soaking in the presence of God and waiting for Him to speak into us. Without God speaking into our life, we run the risk of feeling unworthy, unloved, unheard, unseen, and unwanted. Which creates in us this need to either perform to get the Father’s attention, or shut down because we dont believe we have His attention. When He never called for us to do any of that.

In light of this, let us approach the Throne Room with open hands and listening ears.

Praying For Yourself

Dear Heavenly Father.

Thank you for your Holy Word and the Holy Spirit. Thank you for giving me ears to hear, for speaking to me and for never leaving or forsaking me. You are so good to me!

Abba, I ask today that you would give me ears to hear your voice. Remove the things inside of me that keep me from recognizing your voice. Create in me a pure heart and renew a right spirit within me (Psalm 51:10). I open myself up to you Lord. Search me and know me, test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way inside of me (Psalm 139:23-24).

I surrender myself to your will. I surrender the plans I have for my life and accept your holy plan instead. I surrender my attitude, my judgements, my emotions, my thoughts, and my actions to you. All that I am is yours.

Lord, I ask for you to increase my faith and discernment. Help me to be patient with my children, loving towards my spouse, and a good steward of the gifts you’ve given me. I love you Abba and I ask all of this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Tuesday Homestead Update

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Hey everyone! The chicken tractor is complete! It’s kind of funny because they are only going to be here for another week or two. However, we ordered another batch to be here in May. So it’ll be ready to go when they arrive.

As of last week we had an average weight of 5lbs. We are waiting to dispatch until they are around 8lbs. With a 30% loss, that will help guarantee an average of 6lbs of meat per bird in the freezer. This should stock us well until our next order arrives.

In other news, we should have a new litter of rabbits born by the end of next week.

Thats all this week! Hopefully I’ll have a little juicer information for next week. Some weeks are just the flows of life.

With All Of God’s Blessings

Grace Revival Homestead

Easy Homemade Sandwich Bread

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Ingredients:

  • 2 Tbsp active dry yeast
  • 2 Cups Warm water
  • 1 Tbsp Honey
  • 1 Tbsp salt
  • 1-2 Tbsp oil or room temp. butter
  • 5.5 cups flour

Directions:

Mix yeast, warm water, and honey together in your mixer. Let sit until bubbly.

Add in oil/butter and salt. Then add the flour. Attach dough hook and turn mixer on low. Leave it to do its job. I normally take this time to do dishes or fold laundry. I kind of just keep checking back until it’s the right consistency. Once it pulls away from the sides, I let it knead for a bit. Until it looks like this.

Then I set it out to rest and rise for another round of laundry or dishes. Normally until it has doubled in size.

Before rising.
After rising.

Now I seperate the dough into 2 halves, punch them down, and form them into loaves. Then I set them in an oiled bread pan for the second rise.

They rise for about 30 minutes, or until they fill up the bread pan. Like this

Then bake at 375° for 30 minutes or until golden brown. We make these every week. It’s super easy and super low maintenance. Plus I can adapt this recipe to make other breads.

A little to much rise this time, but it still tastes the same!

I got this recipe from The Hollar Homestead. It is my favorite bread recipe so far! Go check them out on YouTube!

Tuesday Homestead Update

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We have garden beds!! Im so excited! My husband was finally off work long enough to get those made for us. Completely cost free, thank you saw mill. I also went out and bought all the seeds we need for this planting season. All I need now is for my dirt to get delivered and we are up and growing.

We plan on layering tree limbs on bottom, mulch in the middle, and top soil on top. Then we will add the rabbit manure from out back to give it extra nutrients. We will use one whole bed for corn and green beans, since those are staples in the house. The other bed will be filled with other vegetables we eat regularly. We do have another tree waiting to be milled to make two more beds, but that is a toss up of when it can happen. So for now, we are only planting vegetables and herbs we use frequently.

You can see the white board we were using for measurements and drawings. This bed we kind of messed up the measurements on. So it has a bigger area than I originally wanted, however it will work great for a corn crop!

We also started to build a new chicken tractor for our broiler hens. It will give them some much needed space so I’m not having to move the tractor so often. We have it all put together, just need to get some tin for the roof. So fingers crossed, that will be complete sometime this week and we can move our broiler over. Then we just may order another shipment of them.

Burning the wood to keep it from rotting as fast. Since we milled this wood ourselves, it is not pressure treated. Hopefully this will help keep it up and running for a few seasons.

We had a very busy weekend of building and got so much accomplished. Praising God for the extra time we had to. It was amazing and the weather was awesome. Just an all around good weekend. By the way, say hello to my little friend!

Thats right! We have a new addition to the farm. She doesn’t have a name yet, but in time she will get one. Please offer some name suggestions! I personally like Daisy.

With all of God’s blessings

Grave Revival Homestead