Hello, all! We’ve been weeding, harvesting, preserving, traveling, and baking over here in late-summer homestead land, so it’s about time for an update.

BUT BEFORE THAT. New classes for fall 2025 are up on the In-Person Classes page! Come out and learn to decorate cakes, make cardamom buns, and bake so much stuff that your family won’t leave you alone. And, as always, if you’re looking to set up private events (like cool parties, team building events, or small classes for your friends and family), check out the Private Events page and send me a message. Slots are filling up for the holidays already! Okay, end plug.

Onto the update!

The Crops

Lots of produce is either popping off or finishing up these last few weeks of solar summer!

Our peaches just finished ripening earlier this week, and I’ve made peach baked goods, as well as a bunch of peach jalapeno jam with our plethora of hot peppers.

We have all kinds of fun in the pepper bed, thanks to abundant sunshine and a decent amount of rainfall – jalapenos, firecrackers, carrot bombs, banana peppers, and more have been keeping us busy, as well as providing some spicy (and not-so-spicy) goodness.

Hooray for okra! We have three varieties growing – Clemson spineless, Jing Orange, and Mayan, all with different colors, levels of mucilage, and texture, and all delicious.

Meanwhile, our cucumbers are on their way out, the cushaws are getting close to ripeness, and we even have a big fun watermelon that Preschool Homesteader is checking every day to see if it’s ready (alas, still not today).

Meanwhile, the maypops, as well as the milkweed, have utterly taken over about a quarter of the front of the property, which has been great for pollinators. We’ve seen tons of bees, monarch butterflies, and even a few hummingbirds hanging out with the zinnia blossoms. Never got that with a lawn.

Hoping to get a good number of maypops for curd this year!

The Pretty Stuff

I mean, all of the crops are pretty, but we have a few things that are growing that have been adorning our house pretty much every day. Such as…

The aforementioned zinnias in a bunch of colors! I also finally got sunflowers to grow (and get beans to trail up!), and managed to get my front-door coleus container up and running again.

Fun With Wildlife

Wildlife has been, erm, interesting to me this year. In all the throes of harvesting, mowing, and weeding, I’ve been stung again by yellow jackets while trying to pull up poison ivy and porcelainberry. I eradicated the next I uncovered while doing so, then proceeded to mow, now that I was safe from yellow jackets.

Only to be stung again near the blackberries. Apis malefica is my friend (the supplement. And I guess the bees, too. But not the yellow jackets, because they’re jerks).

But at least the chickens have been all right. Marsala had a case of bumblefoot, which sounds a lot cuter than it actually is (a foot abscess – ew), which we successfully fixed. Yay, animal husbandry!

Other than that, we’re just enjoying the cooler weather, slowdown of crops, and creativity that comes with late summer/fall baking. Until next time, happy homesteading!