Southern California Homestead stories

Almost August
As August nears, the weather is heating up, and heat-loving plants are thriving. For those less fond of the sun, I’ve added shade. This year, I tried a second succession planting of beets with shade, and it’s working well so far. My parsnips are also growing strong with no signs of bolting.
It’s fruit preservation season, but my freeze dryer broke down. No worries—we’re canning and freezing instead. My shelves are filling up, and my freezers are packed (we have 4). This week, we added 12 quarts of cherry pie filling to the shelves and froze blueberries, lychee, dragon fruit, mangosteen, and rambutan. I was also able to start a new batch of peach scrap vinegar.
June bugs are after my peaches, as usual, but we’ve picked all the ripe ones, and they’ll leave the green ones alone. Our plums are nearly ready, and today we’re harvesting the last of our oranges.
In the herb garden, we’re making pesto from our basil and enjoying purple basil tea—a delicious summer treat I highly recommend.
Most of my rose hips are ready to pick, but I’m leaving them on as long as possible, hoping to fix the freeze dryer soon. The issue is with the pump. Still, the rose hips are beautiful and abundant this year, which makes me thrilled.

Another Homestead Story
Over the years, I’ve learned to take life as it comes. Each August, the online “Everything Counts” food preservation challenge reminds me that this phrase applies just as well to gardening.
I grow using permaculture principles and chaos gardening, a method distinct from conventional approaches. I avoid insecticides and herbicides, choosing instead to work with nature rather than forcing it to bend to my will. The trade-off is unpredictability—it’s impossible to know exactly how much we’ll harvest. But I’ve adapted. I no longer cry when a plant dies in the garden. I might mutter a curse if it’s due to my own mistake or the cats’ mischief, but I’ve learned to let go. Instead, I celebrate our successes. This year, for the first time, I grew enough berries to freeze-dry some for later. My black tea and coffee plants are thriving, too, even if they’re not yet ready for harvest.
There’s irony in gardening, and I’ve come to appreciate it. This year, I tried the Three Sisters method—corn, beans, and squash grown together. Only one bean plant climbed a cornstalk as planned; three others latched onto sturdy weeds instead. Meanwhile, rats are nibbling my corn. On the flip side, collard greens are sprouting where I planted sorghum, defying their cold-season reputation. A volunteer broccoli (another cold-season crop), parsnips, and beets have popped up unexpectedly. It’s puzzling, but I’m not complaining—fresh greens are rare this time of year. And while aphids and powdery mildew are killing the cucumbers in my raised beds, self-seeded cucumbers thriving between the beds are doing just fine.
Change is part of the cycle. With our kids leaving home, our need for produce has decreased. This shift frees me to focus on my passion—herbs—and to experiment with grains. I can skip growing tomatoes and peppers, which only the kids enjoyed. Needing less space also means I can leave sweet potatoes in the ground, harvesting them as needed. Left undisturbed, they’ll become perennials, sprouting again when temperatures rise.
I take a relaxed approach to gardening. While we actively manage the rat population, I don’t dwell on lost produce. In life, you lose some, you gain some.
I’ve been gardening since childhood, but my formal training is limited to a few classes. I’m still learning, and I suspect I always will. Every time I think I’ve mastered it, Mother Nature throws a curveball. I’ve removed trees to plant better ones, watched a banana palm regrow after being cut down (a lesson in resilience), and battled the relentless spread of blackberries that seem determined to take over the world. Gardening never gets dull. It’s a masterclass in life, color, art, and compassion—a chaotic blend of sights, sounds, smells, and tastes. It stimulates the senses, heals the mind, and soothes the body. It brings peace, clarity, and a reminder to slow down, think, and simply be.
Gardening inspires me to improve, to push the boundaries of what’s possible. It grounds me when I want to escape and supports me when I’m weak. It shows me that life is full of possibilities—if I just take the time to look.

September on the Homestead
September brought wild temperature swings and occasional rain to the homestead. My husband spent much of the month battling rats, which devoured 90% of the corn I planted. Grasshoppers also invaded, munching through my parsley and beans. On the bright side, the chickens and ducks have been thrilled with the fresh greens and grasshoppers.
This month, I harvested 5 pounds of pigeon peas and 50 pounds of collard greens. It’s been an odd year. Our multi-variety peach tree produced plenty of fruit, but the late-season peaches turned bitter. Birds stripped our elderberries clean, so next year, I’m covering them with netting. Gophers claimed one of our tea plants and most of the cassava, despite our efforts to protect them. At this point, I’m growing cassava out of sheer stubbornness.
On a positive note, we’ve harvested abundant herbs and Florida cranberries. Our banana plants, split and expanded after our move, are thriving, with three large pups ready to be transplanted. Bananas are one of my favorite crops to grow. We also harvested sorghum, hoping for a second yield before the birds get to it.
Indoors, we’ve started seedlings for October and November planting, once the soil cools. They’re looking good, though I made the mistake of seeding radishes indoors—they don’t transplant well. Today, I’m seeding more plants and moving some into larger pots. We also dried enough rosehips to fill two quart jars, but I still need to deseed them.
We processed more meat birds to prepare for chicks arriving in October. So far this year, we’ve harvested over 1,600 pounds of produce, nearly 3,000 eggs, and about 200 pounds of meat, totaling roughly 750,000 calories and a value just under $10,000. My goal is to match or exceed last year’s vegetable, grain, herb, and spice yields while increasing our meat production.
Preservation has had its challenges. Despite my careful cleaning, two quarts of green plums and some kraut went moldy, and I’m still puzzled about why. I’ve been focusing on freeze-drying meat and making meals ready-to-eat (MREs) to send to my daughter at college. The freeze-dryer is currently full of bananas, with raspberries next, thanks to a great deal on organic raspberries ($1 for 6 ounces). I’m also steaming sorghum grains before freeze-drying to make flaking easier and prevent cracking.
It might sound like I don’t can anymore, but I do. This year we made orange sauce, lemon curd, plum pie filling, prunes, Asian plum sauce and Victorian BBQ sauce. Plus many many gallons of broth.
We’re out of hot cereal and granola, which we make from scratch. Granola will wait until we harvest sweet potatoes, but I can start on hot cereal once the grains are steamed. Soon, I’ll harvest ginger and turmeric, both of which look fantastic this year after I missed some roots in last year’s beds, giving us an early start.
We’re reorganizing to tackle our rat problem, which stems from a crowded garage and an unsecured crawl space. All herbs and teas have been moved from the large pantry to the kitchen, freeing up space to relocate food from the garage to the pantry.
That’s it for now. It’s time for me to deal with more herbs, and of cause the raspberries

Wow! The narratives and photos in these posts are so incredibly inspirational! Thank you so much for taking the time to share them with us!

Alana Rose wrote:Wow! The narratives and photos in these posts are so incredibly inspirational! Thank you so much for taking the time to share them with us!

Thank you. I am glad you find them useful. In the beginning the blog was more for myself than others, so I m extra happy people find them useful.

November
November on the homestead marks our final transition from warm- to cold-season crops, and it’s when the chickens molt and stop laying eggs. I’m grateful for the freeze-dried eggs I preserved from their spring overproduction—we ended the year with just under 3,000 eggs, which feels like a small victory.
A truckload of compost arrived at Halloween. We’re topping off the raised beds and giving the fruit trees a generous feeding so they’ll keep thriving.
We added five new trees this season: a Yerba Mate, two sapotes, another avocado (a Fuerte to complement our Hass), and a Surinam cherry. The sapotes fill a gap in our fruit calendar, giving us something to pick nearly year-round. The Yerba Mate looked forlorn at the nursery, so it joined my expanding tea collection—black/green tea, mountain tea, banana berry (a Florida native), hibiscus, lemon balm, and bergamot.
My coffee experiment is thriving. The larger plant has doubled in size and looks robust; now we wait to see how it handles winter.
In the raised-bed garden, we pulled two beds to fight a Bermuda grass invasion. The grass is nearly gone; once it is, we’ll lay double landscape fabric, rebuild the beds, and fill them with fresh soil and compost.
We’ve begun transplanting lettuce and brassicas started indoors in late August and September. I’m trying two new lettuces, broccoli, and cabbage varieties—excited to see how they perform. Succession seedlings remain under lights, ready for planting every two to four weeks. Lettuce has been absent all summer, so the first harvests of arugula, radicchio, mustard, and butter lettuce feel like a gift. They’re perfect tossed with pomegranate arils, nuts, balsamic, and a drizzle of honey.
Garlic is in the ground; onions started indoors are moving to larger pots before their final outdoor planting in January.
Harvest is winding down. We still have herbs, ginger, and sweet potatoes to bring in. The last big basil haul is done, but hibiscus, tarragon, comfrey, rosemary, rock rose, and toothache plant remain. Indoors, next year’s parsley, chives, shiso, and chamomile are already sprouting.
Once the beds are empty, I’ll direct-seed carrots, radishes, beets, parsnips, daikon, and wasabi.
Three new raised beds are next: one permanent home for cassava, two for strawberries. Then it’s time to prune the forest-garden shrubs and trees.
A gardener’s work is never finished, but it’s a labor of love.
My youngest daughter left for college and is discovering how expensive food—especially herbs and spices—can be. She now understands why I grow 30–40 culinary and medicinal varieties each year. At her request, I shipped twelve jars of homegrown basics. She’ll be home for Thanksgiving and can take whatever else she needs. My herbs are fresher than anything in stores, and this year they’ve saved us over $800.
I’ve started a catalog of every plant I’ve grown or attempted—variety, location, method, success. Memory fades with age, and tour guests always ask for details. Using AI to organize the data turned an overwhelming job into a manageable one.
Seasons turn, years slip by. Before we know it, the kids are grown. In spring my son heads to college; soon only our oldest daughter will remain at home.
Here is a link to how I grow and process turmeric: Growing and processing turmeric
Here are some tips for dealing with the transition between cold, hot and warm seasons: Strategies for transition in zone 9 and 10

Ulla I hope your daughter is enjoying living at college and I'm glad your gardens are so robust all year long!  You are so inspiring.

Riona Abhainn wrote:Ulla I hope your daughter is enjoying living at college and I'm glad your gardens are so robust all year long!  You are so inspiring.

She is at southern Oregon university, so she is probably closer to you than me right now. She loves it there. Here she has always struggled with the heat, and she has friends close by there, so she is very happy. She loves being able to walk to everything, hiking and she is in a D&D group she loves. She is studying psychology, wanting to become a therapist.
In April her twin brother is joining her. Those two have a hard time being away from each other. They have always been very close. Since she left, they have texted constantly and do video call every day. It will be hard for my oldest daughter though, since she is also very close to the twins. She is struggling with health issues, and has a hard time with school because of it. She is getting better though, so hopefully she will be able to start in college or vocational school soon.

I'm so glad she is enjoying herself.  I'm up at the top of OR and she's at the bottom, but you're right she is geographically closer to me than you presently.  And I'm so glad her beloved brother is joining her there, twins can have such a special connection and I'm glad they don't have to be apart for too long.  As for your oldest, her path can be different, and that's okay.  Timing is different for all of us.

We have spend the last month going through our seasonal transitions. I harvested 7 pounds of ginger, which I am very proud off. I also got around 60 grubs from the same bed, which was fed to our chickens and ducks.
My husband got a shock the other morning, when we went to fill the chicken water. After unlocking the door, he glanced up and saw a raccoon hanging on the inside of the door, like it was part of a Disney movie. I don’t know who got the biggest shock. He told me, that for the first minute, they just stared at each other before he pulled himself together and took hold of it. It was then relocated back to the national park, it had come from.
Life on a homestead is never boring.
One of our cats brought a live rat into the kitchen and left, but before we could toss it out, our second cat killed and ate it LOL.

Crazy raccoon moment!  They're so cute, and have a lot of aggression potential, and are so cute! )))

December 2025
Another year has almost passed here on our small homestead. It has been a year of successes and failures, surprises, and lots of learning. That’s how it will always be, since I love experimenting and pushing the limits of what and how much we can grow. I absolutely hate it when someone tells me what I can’t do—it usually makes me want to prove them wrong. We’re in grow zone 10b, so we’re able to grow food in our gardens all year round.
We didn’t reach the metric ton we achieved last year, but I’m okay with that, and I know why. We grew over 1,600 pounds and raised more meat than ever before, so we’re still in good shape.
Here are the two main reasons we didn’t hit our goal:
1. Rats ate all my corn. I had two 4’ x 8’ beds filled with beautiful corn until the rats found them. Next time, I’ll have to put a cage over them or maybe rub red pepper flakes on the ears.
2. I forgot to add potassium phosphate to my sweet potato beds, and then the irrigation broke. When I harvested the first bed, we only got 16 pounds. Last year, I got 200 pounds from that same bed. I decided to leave the second bed for another year.
Here are some highlights of the year:
1. We built a strong trellis for black pepper, long pepper, Yerba Mate, and tea (Camellia sinensis). They’re all thriving. The tea plant had lots of flowers this year. I also added mountain tea, Florida tea, purple basil, and bergamot to my collection of plants and herbs for brewing. Purple basil tea is a new favorite.
2. We added three new raised beds and placed them in the forest garden. The beds are for strawberries and cassava, with some onions thrown in. We planted 150 new strawberry plants. The strawberries are around the edges of the beds so the berries can hang over the sides, away from slugs and bugs. The cassava is in the middle, so they can provide shade during the hot season and are kept away from gophers and rats. The onions will also help repel wildlife. We have another 25 alpine strawberry plants coming, which will go into my wishing well planter. We now have seven different varieties of strawberries that ripen at different times of the year. We should end up with fresh strawberries 8 to 10 months of the year.
3. We also added a Fuerte avocado tree to complement our Hass avocado. Once it starts producing, we’ll have avocados all year round.
4. Since we have a few months without homegrown fruit, we planted two sapote trees to fill the gap. Sapote is a favorite for us all. Now we wait and see if they produce. I forgot to check whether the trees are male or females, or have been grafted to have both. Once I know, I may have to do some grafting or buy another tree.
5. I had the largest turmeric and ginger harvest yet.
6. We got plums for the first time.
7. My coffee plants are thriving, so I’m hoping for berries next year.
8. I had 40 people show up for tours this year and have been asked to teach the community how to preserve food. This will be possible now that Peter gave me the outdoor stove I’ve been pining for over the years. Now I can do my canning outside, away from a hot kitchen.
9. I finally figured out the best hibiscus for tea. I grew Florida cranberry (roselle) hibiscus and will grow more of it next year.
10. The easiest and best plant for chicken feed turned out to be pigeon peas. I had two plants this year and have harvested 20 pounds of peas so far, with lots more to come. As a bonus, the hummingbirds love them—there’s always a flock feeding from the flowers. I’m definitely planting more in spring, and I hope they behave as perennials here. Livestock feeds have gotten very expensive.
11. Because I found a bird’s nest with eggs in my collards this year, I decided not to harvest until it was empty. This resulted in them going to seed. I now have collard greens growing all over the backyard, in and between the beds. Free food for our chickens, ducks, and rabbits! I’m planning to start growing duckweed for the ducks, as they are picky eaters.
12. We got grasshoppers this year, which is a sign that the garden is very healthy with plants having high Brix levels. This is good news, but I’m not happy that they ate most of my parsley and now have devoured all the red cabbage seedlings I just transplanted. Catching them and feeding them to the chickens, will give both me and the chickens some exercise LOL.
As you can see, there are ups and downs, but that’s life. Nothing will ever be perfect, and that’s okay. It’s a balance, and something we can learn from. Two years ago, I was sure the gardens were done and that I’d only need to do maintenance. Well, I was wrong. A gardener’s job is never done. There will always be new challenges, things that don’t work out, or that Mother Nature disrupts. As the years pass, the trees and shrubs will grow bigger, and I might not have room for my strawberry/cassava beds—but that’s okay too. I’m sure I’ll find more space somewhere. We’ve already planted our first tree among the raised beds in the backyard, and we have a volunteer peach tree we’re also moving there.
Gardening has also brought us closer to our neighbors and community. Delivery drivers ask for tours and tips, and so do the nurses when I’m in treatment (LOL). The neighborhood kids frequently stop by to pick flowers, pet the animals, or get a snack from the trees or bushes. They know I don’t mind, as long as they don’t clean me out (LOL). I’m looking for places where I can install a fairy garden and a garden gnome village. A plan for next year is also to install a bamboo fence. I found a type of clumping bamboo that produces edible shoots in spring. They will provide much-needed shade for our rabbits.
Now I’ll go and pack up some freeze-dried foods for our daughter to take with her when she returns to college in Oregon on January third. She has now learned just how expensive food is in the grocery stores.
Happy New Year to everyone here. I hope you all have a blessed year in 2026.