Spring Homestead Preparation When Life Feels Unsettled

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Follow along as we prepare our Spring Homestead with decorating, baby chicks, garden planning, and faith-filled reflections on homesteading when life feels uncertain. 🌱🏡

We might be moving.
Or we might not.
And somehow… spring is still coming.

Funny how life doesn’t wait for things to fall into place.

Today we’re refreshing our home for spring, adding some spring vintage prints, setting up a brooder for baby chicks, dreaming about gardens, and choosing to prepare this homestead — even when the future feels blurry.

Right now, we’ve placed a re-evaluation date on those moving plans and decided to move forward with a semi-normal summer here. Which feels both grounding… and strange.

For the first time in five years, we aren’t planning on raising pigs. That feels like a chapter quietly closing — or maybe just pausing. I’m hoping just pausing! Who knows with how wishey washy we’ve become with our moving plans, we might just end up with pigs anyway!

The plan is that instead of expanding, we’re refining.

Instead of building new systems, we’re optimizing the ones we already have.

After three years of our own babies coming and going full speed into homesteading, there are areas of our home and land that simply need attention. Paint that’s overdue. Soil that needs softening. Systems that need simplifying.

So this spring feels less like expansion…and more like tending. Join me today as I do some light spring homemaking and homesteading. We’re going to be in the kitchen a bit, making some basic scrambled eggs. I actually don’t have a recipe of the week, which is the first time that’s happened in over a year. So if you like new recipes, be sure to pop back over again because I’m sure I’ll get the recipes going again soon. We’re also going to be refreshing some home decor, planning out some of our gardens, preparing our brooder for chicks, and visiting our local co-op to get 10 little baby chicks for our flock. Welcome to Healing Home. I hope you are encouraged and inspired by your time here.

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Our Imperfect Homestead in a Season of Waiting

This season of life has a different rhythm than the one I once knew. Things that used to take an afternoon now stretch quietly into weeks. A coat of paint that once covered an entire room in a single day, plus ample time to spare, now happens one half wall at a time, one quiet pocket of progress squeezed between snacks, diaper changes, and little voices calling my name.

The work itself isn’t harder, but it moves at the pace of small children and full arms. I’ve learned to close off freshly painted corners like little victories, guarding them from curious hands and toy trucks, and reminding myself that slow progress is still progress.

I remember painting entire rooms in half a day. I’d redecorate, cook dinner, and still have energy to run to the grocery store.

Now? I’m on week five or six of painting our living room. It’s this beautiful Burnt Almond paint color from Behr Dynasty that is a one-coat paint, which actually works, so it should be going fast, but it’s not. I actually can’t believe how slow it’s going. Between homeschooling, work, homesteading, babies, and life, it’s taking me exponentially more time than I ever would have anticipated.

I paint one section at a time. I close it off before little hands find it. I work in small, faithful increments before the house melts into chaos again.

And in a strange way, there is something beautiful about the slowness. The house is never perfectly still long enough for grand transformations, but it is alive with the small, ordinary moments that make a home. Laughter echoes through half-painted rooms, sunlight spills across unfinished projects, and the work of homemaking unfolds in layers rather than sweeping changes. What once felt like an interruption now feels more like the true work itself. This season may stretch time in ways I didn’t expect, but it also fills it — richly, noisily, and faithfully — with the kind of life that cannot be rushed.

We are choosing peace over perfection.
Progress over pressure.

Spring in the Kitchen

Spring always seems to arrive in the kitchen before it arrives anywhere else on the homestead. After the long, quiet winter months, the chickens begin laying again, slowly at first and then with steady faithfulness. We don’t use a heat lamp in the coop during the dark winter months, choosing instead to let our hens rest the way nature intended. So when the eggs begin to appear again in the nesting boxes, it feels like a small celebration of the season turning. Baskets begin to fill on the counter once more, and the kitchen returns to the rhythm I love so much—homegrown eggs sizzling in the pan beside pork from our own freezer.

There is something deeply satisfying about cooking from what the land and animals have provided, especially after a season of waiting.

This is also the time of year when I begin leaning again on the simple systems that keep our home running smoothly. In the corner of the kitchen hangs my small blackboard where I write out our meal plan for the week. It isn’t complicated or rigid. Sometimes it’s nothing more than a short list of dinner ideas scribbled in chalk, but even that little bit of planning brings a surprising calm to our days.

When the afternoon comes, and little boys begin asking what’s for dinner, I already have a direction to move in. It leaves room for flexibility—swapping meals when life inevitably changes—but it keeps the quiet stress of decision-making from creeping in at the end of a long day.

There’s something about spring that invites this kind of steady kitchen work—the slow fermentation, the kneading, the waiting. Just like the garden beds outside, the kitchen begins producing again, little by little. Eggs in the basket, bread on the counter, dinner written on the blackboard. Simple things, but together they create the kind of peaceful order that makes a home feel ready for the new season ahead. 🍞🥚🌿

Spring Decorating Ideas for a Cozy Farmhouse Home

One thing that’s been quietly bothering me?

My vintage Christmas prints are still hanging in the living room.

In March.

So today, we’re changing that.

I really love the Christmas vintage prints that I was able to create with AI last November, but this time around, I decided to create something even more personal. I took scenes from past YouTube videos — the geese looking over the gardens, my boys planting seeds with me, Wylder running toward the chicken flock and gardens, and Waylin and Dan watching new piglets — and used AI to reimagine them in soft, vintage spring tones.

Muted greens. Faded florals. Worn paper textures.

If you are interested in seeing all the photographs I had ChatGPT recreate, I have a Canva document here.

There’s something poetic about it — using technology to preserve memory. Don’t always assume that AI is 100% bad. Yes, there are certainly some issues with it, but there have been issues with every piece of technology that has taken the world by storm. AI is no different.

I printed them on regular paper, gently distressed the edges, and brushed a thin layer of Mod Podge over the surface to give them that aged, almost canvas-like texture. It’s imperfect and slightly wrinkled in places… which somehow makes it feel more like us.

Spring often leads us in closing one season and opening another. It happens quietly in a home — not with grand changes, but with gentle ones. A winter print comes down from the wall, and something softer takes its place. Deep evergreens give way to muted greens, warm creams, and the pale colors of new growth. The light shifts through the windows a little differently, and suddenly the house feels ready to breathe again. These small touches — a new print, a lighter color, a simple rearranging of what we already have — become our way of welcoming the season, of saying that winter has done its work and now it is time for something tender and new. 🌿

Setting Up a Chick Brooder for Spring on the Homestead

Our country store was getting chicks on the day I recorded this video, and I was really hoping to make it there before they were sold out.

It would have been slightly devastating for the purpose of this video if they were already gone when we got there — but that’s real life on a small-town homestead. Thankfully, we got there just in time and left with 10 baby chicks peeping away.

This year, I decided to stick primarily with egg-producing breeds. Practical. Steady. Dependable. They had Americanas, Amberlink, and Black Sex Link. All of those are great egg producers, but Americanas are my favorite because over my eleven years of keeping chickens, I’ve found that they are one of the breeds that does really well in our Minnesota winters.

Later this spring, I’m hoping to add some grown chickens to the flock, plus some more ducks and geese.

But if I’m honest? I’ve also been dreaming of some breeds that maybe are not as practical.

I’ve dreamed about the towering presence of an Indio Gigante — massive and dramatic in the pasture. I’ve dreamed about adding more Ayam Serama — tiny, upright, almost regal little birds. And I would absolutely love a Mille Fleur d’Uccle — those speckled feathers feel like something out of a storybook.

Will we get them? I don’t know.

But I love that homesteading still gives room for dreaming.

As I said, we’re also planning to add more ducks and geese this year, and if we do that, we will need to add a pond somewhere. I’m in the planning stages of that. I have a raised deck in mind that would allow me to put a self-draining pond in. The water would be great for gardens! It’s still in my head, still scribbled in notebooks… but stay tuned.

We got our 10 baby chicks home and set them up in the brooder we’ve used for the past three years. I decided to add two new touches this year. I’m using puppy pads under our pine shavings, which I’m really hoping will cut down on the mess they create. Secondly, I’m using a new heat source for them. It’s working even better than I thought it would! The first night I had it on, I actually woke up thinking about them, and I was convinced I would need to go add a secondary heat source that morning. I had myself so worked up that I was halfway convinced that I was going to lose all the babies. When I went out the next morning, all 10 babies were perfectly healthy and happy. The heat panel gets a HIGH recommendation from me!

Our 2026 Garden Plans: Refreshing Last Year’s Layout

Last year’s garden taught us a lot.

This year, we’re simplifying and refining. If you remember last year’s Spring gardens update, I basically said the exact same thing. This year, I’m hoping that our simplifying and refining will bring in a better harvest. I can only hope that the first year without a baby in four summers might help that goal.

Our kitchen garden will once again hold broccoli, peppers, tomatoes, radishes, cucumbers, and beans — practical staples for summer meals. We’re going to plant more peppers than ever because I personally really like lacto-fermented peppers. We’re also dreaming of getting a freeze dryer, which would really level up our preservation ability!

Our tomato fencing system worked okay last year when we stayed ahead of tying the vines — but if we miss that window, it turns into a jungle fast. Plus, I need to rethink our free-ranging system because the chickens, geese, and ducks helped themselves a few too many times last year.

The lettuce has permanently moved to the porch in raised containers where it won’t bolt in the summer heat.

The pumpkin patch? Two years ago, we planted thirty plants and harvested zero pumpkins. The soil was compacted and stubborn. Last year, Dan moved a bunch of new soil, and we really tried hard to plant pumpkins again, but got zero again. I’m not exactly sure what we’re doing wrong because we’ve had HUGE pumpkin harvests in years past. I may need to test our soil again with a Redmond Soil Testing kit to make sure we have the proper nutrients for growing.

Our preservation garden — tucked behind the pine trees — will hold onions, potatoes, squash, and gourds. I’m thinking about doing a pumpkin patch over there, but I’m not entirely sure yet.

And honestly?

With five boys and a possible move, we’re keeping things purposeful but practical.

Looking Forward to our Spring Homestead and Submitting to God’s Plans

There’s something deeply symbolic about preparing a homestead when you don’t know how long you’ll actually be here.

But maybe that’s the lesson.

We don’t prepare because we’re certain.
We prepare because we’re called to be faithful.

“Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established.” — Proverbs 16:3 (ESV)

And also:

“The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.” — Proverbs 16:9 (ESV)

Spring is coming, whether our plans are finalized or not.

So we paint.
We hang new prints.
We prepare the brooder.
We plant seeds.
We sustain our home by the grace of God.

We trust that the God who brings seasons will establish our steps — whether that’s here… or somewhere new.

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