Hi y’all! My name is Dee from The Porter Homestead and I’m taking over this awesome account for the next few days! I am so excited I got asked to take over this account as the FIRST pregnant mama with no babies on our homestead yet! I decided to use a throwback picture from when we announced that we were expecting. Now I am almost 34 weeks pregnant due on August 7th with our surprise gender little nugget! Here’s a bit about our homestead so you can get to know me: My high school sweetheart,
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Jayson, and I have been married for three years this June and have been living on our 7 acre homestead in Upstate NY for a year and a half now. When we bought this house and property it was a complete wreck. We took two months to fix the house up before we could move in and we have been building everything from scratch on the property. We now have 30ish chickens (chicken math is a real thing y’all!), 5 feeder pigs that are around 3 months old, two barn cats, two indoor cats, and our German Shorthaired Pointer Effie!
Neither of us grew up on a farm or in a food growing or animal raising family. I got the homestead bug and became obsessed right after college and my poor husband has been dragged along into this crazy, amazing lifestyle. Jayson is a talented technician at the local Polaris and Can-Am dealerships and I am a dairy equipment sales rep and travel to dairy farms across NY State. We are sooo beyond excited to become parents and to bring this precious baby into this world and raise him or her knowing where our food comes from!
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Animals are what basically got me into homesteading. I grew up with my parents owning a bar and a restaurant for 18 years. I begged and begged them for every animal on the planet and to take horse lessons, but they knew they couldn’t run the business and handle a bunch of animals at home, so I was told no. Once I graduated college, I realized that I now had my own money and could buy whatever I wanted. So, I bought a horse. Nothing like starting small right?? I loved riding my horse and taking him on trails, but it just made me want more animals.
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When I was researching into all of the animals I wanted, I realized that I can’t just have all of these animals for pets, they needed to have a purpose. Which of course led into homesteading. We started with laying chickens and then added more laying chickens, meat chickens and then tried out pigs last year. Pigs are soooo much fun and I really enjoy raising them. And c’mon people, BACON! Raising these animal under the beautiful sun and bright blue sky while providing quality grain and plenty of water makes for the best meat and best eggs we could ask for. This is what homesteading is about! Knowing where your food comes from and how it was raised and cared for!
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Our freezers have been full of pork and chicken that we’ve raised ourselves, along with venison and different game birds we’ve hunted locally as well. We can’t wait to see what the future holds for what other animals we can raise for meat. And I cannot wait to watch our child become just as in love with animals as their mama is! He or she will know what it’s like to work hard and take care of them. They will know how immensely happy and incredibly sad raising animals is but that it will be all worth it in the end. What got you into homesteading?
Let’s talk gardens. And gardening while pregnant. Number one. The next baby I’m going to have will not be when a pandemic is happening. Not that that can be planned but that would be my preference. And number two, maybe not being so pregnant during gardening season. I dubbed this year as the weedy Garden of Eden. We do the Back to Eden Gardening Method which worked fantastic for us last year.
