I would like to take a couple of minutes to introduce our family and give a little hindsight on how our homestead came to be.
Ours is a blended family of 11. Yep, you read that right, 11. Now, before anyone gets too excited, let me clarify that we do not all live together as several of our children are adults with little families of their own. Currently, there are 4 of us that reside on our homestead.
When Brett and I started our homestead, we lived in an HOA neighborhood, on a 1/3acre lot, on the corner. We talked about what we wanted to call our homestead. Because every good homestead needs an official name, right? Long story short, after doing some genealogy research on Brett’s family, we discovered that his family had, at one point in the 1800s, owned a homestead on a corner that was affectionately known as “Cover’s Corner”. We LOVED the name, and it was a perfect fit with our home on the corner, at the time. However, we wanted to add our touch to it and relate that we were a suburban homestead. Hence, Cover’s Corner Suburban Homestead was born!
We built an awesome homestead, doing what we could within the confines of the HOA rules. We eventually built our garden to over half of our backyard. Peach and apple trees, raspberries, blackberries, a huge strawberry patch, and EVEN grapes were planted in our small space! I was able to preserve many jars of food grown in our organic garden. Plus, we ate many meals with vegetables fresh from the garden. Life was great!
But the one thing we wanted, we couldn’t have. Chickens! Or any “livestock” for that matter! Still, we did what we could with what we had, and made the best decisions to allow us to eat and live the way we wanted to. We obtained our beef and pork from local farmers. We even procured milk from a local dairy that delivers right to our house!
Fast forward 4 years, and we’ve now found ourselves on a beautiful 2-acre piece of property. Although we are still in a “suburb”, we no longer live on a corner. We had many discussions about how this would affect the name of our homestead. We both loved the name! After talking and “sitting” on it for many months, we decided to keep the name as it is! We keep the Cover’s Corner portion in homage to Brett’s ancestors. As for the rest of it, we decided that the word “Corner” didn’t have to mean a physical corner, but our little corner of the world. And, well, we are still a suburban homestead!
We are excited to start our adventure (Brett’s first time) raising chickens, turkeys, rabbits, and other small livestock! We will be forgoing the larger animals as we do still have neighbors relatively close. We will continue to get our meats from the local farmers.
I hope you will join us and watch as we turn this homestead into our little corner of paradise!
Thanks for stopping in!
Stephanie and Brett
