Homestead Happenings | Winter 2025-2026
If you’re new around here, welcome! I’m here with my Winter Homestead recap. I’ve been sharing these for a couple years now, I used to give monthly recaps but turned them into seasonal ones instead. It’s a type of journal my family can look back on, give family/friends an update of our lives, or maybe it’ll give you some inspiration for your own homestead.
So, here’s our homestead from the 2026 Winter season! Hope you enjoy!
kitchen
I’ve been spending more time in the kitchen again, and it’s been nice. I’m still working on less take out, but getting there. I’ve cut out using vegetable/canola oil from our kitchen – butter, animal fat, coconut and olive oil are my go-to’s.
For the past month I’ve 100% been making our own bread. We’ve made lots of sourdough breads, and white sandwich bread.
We’ve made MANY baked goods, like my favorite sugar cookie recipe for Santa. We made cinnamon rolls, and used up some of our frozen homegrown raspberries for Lemon Raspberry Rolls.
Speaking of homegrown food, winter is also the time to use up last year’s garden bounty – we’ve eaten lots of frozen berries, spaghetti and butternut squash.
I’ve always wanted to learn how to make tamales, and love seeing people’s Christmas tradition of making them. I thought no matter time than now – so, I taught myself how to make tamales. They turned out amazing, a little time consuming but not too difficult.
Garden
We had fairly mild winter weather, so the bugs are going to be bad this year. The slugs have already destroyed over 10 plant starts I had planted within a day. Everything seems to be waking up 3 weeks early.
End of winter I was very busy cleaning up and preparing the garden, and food forest. Hours of weed removable, adding compost, and pruning perennials.
Things are popping up beautifully. The stinging nettle was the first thing of the season to be harvested and dried.
Winter is the time to plan out my garden, and get seeds started. Above is the peppers, celery, and tomatoes – I may have went over board with the tomatoes 30 plants. I plan on doing a lot of canning. Not pictured is cool season crops, flowers, and herbs. I grow most of our stuff from seeds, however sometimes seeds don’t start and I buy starts.
Check out my list of Top Beginner Plants to grow, click here!
Livestock
When I went to check on the bees last month, I found they had absconded sometime just before winter. What I could see was a varroa mite problem. It’s been such a process cleaning out the hives, but thankfully I’ve been able to harvest a lot of the honey and save drawn out frames for the new bees arriving in April. It was very sad to see that my colonies didn’t make it, but I am thankful it wasn’t a complete loss.
Chickens are all doing well, producing eggs and doing chicken things. Now that it’s garden season and predators have been out like crazy they haven’t been able to free-range the 4 acres. We’re also looking for a new home for the second rooster now that he’s a year and not enough ladies.
homestead projects
The homestead projects slow down most of winter, towards the end they start ramping up. We’ve just been doing general clean up of the property. Burning lots of brush – sorry neighbors. And spring cleaning has begun.
We saved so much electricity this winter with running the woodstove. I’m so thankful for our log splitter and all the wood we had stocked up.
Pruned and weed wacked lots of blackberry bushes that were taking over the Food Forest. Also pruned fruit trees, berry bushes, and herbs. I planted an artichoke and moved the 4 blueberry bushes to new spots. I started a few more perennial flowers to add here also.
life & what i’m loving
We had a good holiday season, my Mom was sure missed but we still managed to do some celebrating. We did a lot of our usual traditions like Elf on the Shelf, our town’s tree lighting, zoo lights, crafts and so much more. I also took Piper to her first performance of the Nutcracker – it was great!
Piper won “Best Non-Traditional” Gingerbread house with her beehive made out of a tissue box at school. She is such a talented artist.
We went to Great Wolf Lodge for part of a family Christmas gift.
I rang in the New Year with a Polar Bear Cold Plunge, it was great! Then we just did a lot of school activities, hanging out with friends and family.
We enjoyed one of our favorite traditions of the year, searching for Monkeyshines on the Lunar New Year. We did eventually get a day of snow, but it was in March and school was still in session.
We had a very scary call while at a restaurant during winter. Piper choked on one of those hard mint candies, thank God I knew what to do and was able to get it out with the Heimlich. If you haven’t taken a CPR class, I strongly suggest you sign up. You just never know when you’ll need to use it.
