Summers Acres

We appreciate each and every one of you and hope you continue to stay connected with us as we go through these growing pains.

Blessings,
Jon and Ann

Few fruit say summer quite like a tree-ripe peach, dripping juice down your chin and hands all the way to your elbows. Although you are unlikely to find this perfect peach at the grocery store - peaches do not continue to ripen more once picked — you can enjoy this treat if you grow your own. Growing top quality peaches is not without its challenges. If you are prepared, however, you can conquer them with a little bit of knowledge and regular attention.

We have been living in our new home for three months. We have been super busy with all of our projects and moving.  We left the last upstairs bedroom untouched for sometime as it was not needed immediately.  This is a rectangular upstairs bedroom with a closet built into the attic space that was mentioned in an earlier post. This will be our guest bedroom which will not be used often, except when Jon's son stays with us during the summer. It was a relief that we did not have the pressure to fix it right away as this room was in the worst shape of all rooms in the entire house. But we had the realization a few weeks ago that Nolan would be here in a month and we had not done anything but close the door!

1940's Farmhouse Upstairs Guest Bedroom Makeover

Here is a simple easy recipe to make your own natural, non-toxic pine floor cleaner with just a few basic ingredients and essential oils.

Although we have had 3 Nigerian Dwarf does for a couple of years now, this year was our first experience with kidding goats. In the early morning hours of February 22nd, we welcomed our first newborn doeling and buckling into our world.  We only "participated" shortly after Strawberry, the mama goat, had already delivered both. Exactly one week later on February 29th, we were blessed with our second and last batch of baby goats for this kidding season. This time two of our pregnant does began birthing within just a few minutes of each other while I was home by myself.  I had a brief "mini panic attack" because Jon was supposed to be here and I was NOT supposed to be here by myself!  I quickly called him to get home from work, gathered my wits, and proceeded.

Mulberry (Buckling) Resting After All of the Excitement

The kitchen is the most important room in every household, and as such it must be taken good care of. The kitchen is the place where the entire family gathers every day and spends most of its time there. That is why the kitchen needs to always be perfectly cleaned and disinfected so that it is a good environment for your family. But even the cleaning can sometimes be dangerous. Using a bunch of chemically induced cleaning products will not make your kitchen any healthier or safer, than being dirty. The trick is to clean it in a way that you do not do even more harm. That is why this article will tell you how to clean and disinfect your kitchen in a way that it really is cleaned, not just from dirt and bacteria but from dangerous chemicals as well.

We have officially been living in our new home for a week now. There are a few random things we still have to move, but we have everything we need moved and most of it unpacked! Now that I can breathe just a bit, I wanted to share the changes we made to another upstairs bedroom to make it over into a game room. This has been completed for over a month, but we just have been so busy there has been no time to share. This is the makeover of the square middle bedroom we mentioned in our last post.

1940 Farmhouse Game Room Redo Before and After

The upstairs of our 1940's farmhouse has not seen many (if any) updates to it. The upstairs has three small bedrooms. Two bedrooms are rectangular and have closets that are built into the attic space. The third bedroom in the middle has no attic space to utilize for closets and is square. We only have our youngest who is 14 that still lives with us.  We let her choose which bedroom she wanted. Not surprising, she chose one of the rectangular bedrooms that had a closet and had the best window view overlooking one of the hay fields.  The bedrooms are a little small.  Adding to the challenge, she currently has an excessively large bedroom at our current house. To compensate for the space, her bedroom will be the one she chose and the square middle room with no closets will be a game room. Today, we will discuss the updates to the bedroom so that it functions well and suits a 14 year old teenage girl.

1940's Farmhouse Upstairs Bedroom Makeover - Before and After

We are just weeks (maybe a month) away from our move to our "new to us" farmhouse. We have been quite busy and we have failed miserably at keeping the progress updates flowing. We took a week off from work after Christmas with plans to get a lot accomplished at the new house. Although, we did stay very busy, the excessive rain we received delayed much of our moving and work outside. Although it was still wet Friday, it had dried up enough that we Jon was finally able to make some progress on the outside tasks. A big part of our move is of course moving our chickens which requires constructing a new chicken run.

Beginning Structure of the New Chicken Run

Our next big priority was to get the room we planned to use as our office ready.  This room was originally setup like a bedroom when we viewed the house, but it doesn't function well as such and we had other plans. It is somewhat of an irregular trapezoidal shape with three doors to the kitchen, living room, and bathroom.  We believe the original function of the room was more of a parlor or "sitting room" back in the day.

1940 Farmhouse "Sitting Room" aka Office Before and After

It'll be two weeks tomorrow that we closed on our new home. We have been busy non-stop ever since! There is a long list of things that must be done when buying any new home like getting all of the utilities called, scheduled, and connected. Jon has been battling multiple "old home" water issues as well. Those things are top priority. With all of the other things we plan on doing, the next challenge was trying to prioritize and decide what to do first. We decided to start on our bedroom.

1940 Farmhouse Bedroom Before and After

We have pretty much been nonexistent on here lately, but we have some very exciting news! We just closed last week on our new/old farm house!

If you are lucky enough to live on a homestead, there’s no doubt you’ve probably learned some very impressive skills. Homestead life can be tough, it can be challenging, but it can also be highly rewarding, especially when the skills that you’ve learned can be put to good use elsewhere.

It’s interesting to note that there are a lot of homestead skills that can be transferred over to survival skills. This means that if you fancy becoming a bit of a prepper, you should already have a lot of skills and knowledge that will help you to get through a survival situation.


Some of the skills that transfer over can be found below:

In March of 2013 we planted five fruit trees at the house. Of those trees two were semi-dwarf peach trees, one was a majestic peach and the other a reliance peach. The first year we planted them they both had tons of little baby peaches, but we had to force ourselves to thin them down to just a few. That year we got one cute little peach that the bugs decided to share with us. Then last year we had lots of blossoms and we still thinned them, but the bugs and fungus were horrible and we got nothing.

This year we had a late frost. We tried covering our fruit trees with sheets, but they are about to get too big to effectively do that. Our majestic peach tree blooms early and did not fair too well because of the frost. However, the reliance peach tree blooms later and is a beautiful sight this year. Just look at all of those peaches!

First Real Production of Our Young Semi-Dwarf Reliance Peach Tree

After our fun at Dry Falls and Bridal Veil Falls we headed on up to Whiteside Mountain near Highlands, NC. The hike to the summit of Whiteside Mountain is a moderate 2.5 mile loop. After an initial steep start we reached the point where the loop splits to the left and the right. The left is less of an incline, but will take longer to get to the top. We chose to take the right which is steeper and includes some steps as well. I find the older I get the steep inclines and steps are actually harder on the ole knees coming down (just another reason to go right). The first small opening along the path is a beautiful tease of what is to come.

First View Along the Whiteside Mountain Trail

With Jon's new job and all of the animals it is hard for us to take a long vacation right now. Over our 3 day Fourth of July weekend we took a trip about 4 hours away to the mountains in Franklin, NC. We had a short stay which included a fair amount of rain and not a lot of time to do everything in the area, but we still had a great time. The first thing we did after arriving and settling in was drive a short distance to see Dry Falls and Bridal Veil Falls in Highlands, NC.

View of Dry Falls, Highlands NC from the Walkway

There has been so much going on that we have been giving many updates these days. Things are all good, but there has jut not been any time to "blog" about what we have been up to. Even this post is a little late, but better late than never. Since we started keeping chickens we had longed for the day that one of our hens would go broody and hatch out her own baby chicks. Several times we even left some eggs to encourage this to take place. It seemed our girls refused to brood just to spite us. So we've tried our hand at incubating a few times as well as continuing to buy baby chicks. But alas, Bertha, one of our Ameraucana hens, decided to brood.

Bertha Took Her Job Quite Seriously

Organic, All Natural, Free Range, Cageless....What do all of these egg labels mean?


It can be confusing.  Most of the confusion is by design. The big companies want you to believe their product is better than it really is.  Sorting through all this misinformation can be daunting, but we are here to pass on what we have found in our research about what all of these things mean.

We generally try to go on a little weekend getaway for our anniversary each year. However, there was just too much going on this year around our anniversary with Jon's new job, church events, Sarah's soccer, Sarah's birthday, and Ryan's high school graduation. We were going up to Morgantown, WV for Ryan's graduation and needed to get Jon's Mom along the way. So our trip to graduation was going to be about 10 hours of driving in one day. Yeehaw! After the graduation, we stayed the night with Jon's Mom in WV. We had planned on trying to hit a hike somewhere along our way home to NC the next day. A couple of years ago, we had visited Coopers Rock State Park, Babcock State Park, and Valley Falls State Park nearby so we wanted to try some place we had not already been. We settled in on Hungry Mother State Park in Marion, VA. It was just a short drive out of our way as we headed back south.

Molly's Knob Hungry Mother State Park, Marion VA