Healthcare Homesteaders

We have a couple more projects to share before we batten down the hatches for winter. The first is the completion of the gravel driveway around the Morton. It only took us a year, but we can finally drive through and around our building! The five-inch thick concrete pad was literally a cumbersome hill to…

We’ve been working on a lot of odds and ends, and it was only recently I thought we’d done enough to be post-worthy. As if we don’t have enough trees, we started to think we needed more. Maybe it was the fact that we’d still been working our way through the piles of downed trees…

This wasn’t originally going to be a post, but since we’ve had quite the trials, I thought we’d share in hopes of helping someone else, even if it’s just for a good laugh. Most of the dirt on our property is clay. It doesn’t absorb water quickly; thus, it’s a major contributor to the land’s…

A while back, I talked about giving new life to old things being a big part of our homesteading philosophy. Repurposing is another means by which that can be accomplished. I wouldn’t say we figured out how to give new life to an unsightly pile of base gravel left behind from our concrete Morton floor,…

It may be hard to believe, but this is the culmination of our recent serendipitous day. Here’s what happened. Since this summer, we’ve had a good portion of our fridge occupied by prairie seed, both the mix we buy and the mix we make. After the building site was cleared, I purchased more of the…

Around here, pole barns, machine sheds, and Morton buildings are all terms used interchangeably. Morton is sort of a proprietary eponym, like calling a cotton swab a Q-tip or a facial tissue a Kleenex. It’s a popular brand, and the one we chose. After the first day of breaking ground and tree removal, it took…

The culvert area was an issue on which we went back and forth. We knew we needed the pipes, but we weren’t sure how exactly to go about placing them and designing the surrounding landscape. One tube or two. Flared ends or no flared ends. The culverts aren’t traditional culverts. They aren’t located in the…

This post is a little different than the others. I intend for it to explain the inception of us becoming Healthcare Homesteaders. I was once called a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Not original words, as it’s a statement by Winston Churchill referring to the Soviet Union in 1939. I’m not sure…

For those of us middle-aged folks who grew up in the Midwest, we remember summers full of catching fireflies (lightning bugs), hearing the deafening chirps of the cicadas, and seeing the evening air thick with swarms of insects. We’d even pick monarch caterpillars off the milkweed on the side of the garage, put them in…

We love plants, living things, things that grow and change, making things better. Maybe that’s one thing that links our healthcare life to our homestead life: improving the current status. We do everything we can to make our patients better—to leave them in better condition than they were in when we started. That’s what we…