August 2025 Homesteading Update: Back To School Madness

If you want an update on semi homesteading life for August 2025 here in the Midwest, then this article is for you! I’ll show you what is going on with the garden, in the kitchen, with the chickens, and with life in general.

August brings about back to school, back to kids’ sports, and back to crazy schedules and timelines. That often doesn’t leave much time for the garden and cooking, although this is often when the harvests start to amp up as well!

With these updates, I hope to do more of a “journal” type of post at least once a month to keep you updated on life here. Hopefully, it will allow you to get to know the person behind these articles (me!) and how we run our semi homestead a bit more.

This will allow me to share the loads of photos I take on my phone instead of having them collect dust in my camera gallery. (You can also look for updates on Instagram if you want to follow along with me there, too.) I’ll also try to link to posts that might be relevant to what happened during that timeframe.

Hopefully, you enjoy getting to know a bit more about our life here in Illinois and how the homestead is going – Both the good and the bad!

Our August 2025 Update For The Semi Homesteading Life

Back To School & Sports

While homesteading and homeschooling tend to go hand-in-hand, our kids go to a local public school. I have absolutely nothing against homeschooling. This is just the option that works for our family and our situation.

So our kids started back to school during the month of August. My son is a Junior and my daughter is a Freshman, so two high schoolers for this momma! Both were ready and excited to see their friends again, although they were not looking forward to having to get up early in the mornings! (Nor was I!)

In addition to starting school, my daughter also started playing volleyball for the high school. After a summer of recovering from a foot injury, we are all excited to see her get back on the court!

The Garden Issues – August 2025 Homesteading Update

With being back on a tight schedule, the garden starts to get a bit neglected once August arrives. Some of the plants are on their way out, while others are just starting to produce.

Thankfully, many plants are still going strong. Late-season crops like our heirloom tomatoes and peppers are just starting to come on and provide us with something to harvest. Other plants like our determinate tomatoes, zucchini, and cucumbers are starting to slow way down on production.

Our sweet corn started to get hit by corn aphids. But since the pests seem to be only affecting a couple of plants, I let nature (i.e., ladybugs) take care of them for us. Also, a couple of our tomato plants were starting to get hit by late-season blight, unfortunately. It’s hard to avoid in our location this time of year, despite my best efforts.

I am pulling out the plants that are getting diseased or dying off, so the garden starts to look a bit bare. Here in Illinois, we usually still have most of September and sometimes into early October to be able to harvest our crops before we are hit with the first frost, so I’ll leave the producing plants as long as possible.

Harvesting Peaches

This was our first year getting a good harvest from our one peach tree. We planted this tree several years ago, but have had to deal with hungry deer nibbling off the limbs. We put up a deer fence finally this year, and the tree has finally been able to flourish.

The young tree was loaded down with peaches! I was so worried we were going to lose some limbs to wind or just the weight alone, but thankfully that never happened.

I was able to get three big harvests from the tree as the peaches became ripe. We waited to pick them until they easily pulled from the branches and the peaches had a slight give.

I preserved loads of canned peaches as well as froze a bunch to use in smoothies and other goodies. And, of course, we ate our weight in fresh peaches during August!

Sweet Corn – August 2025 Homesteading Update

With the addition of our in-ground raised beds, we were able to plant and grow two different rounds of sweet corn this year. We had our ups and downs with the crops, including getting completely flattened during the month of July.

However, we were still able to get a decent harvest from it this year. While the ears weren’t as large as the sweet corn my parents grow in their fields, it was still nice to be able to pick some corn from our own garden.

In addition to our sweet corn that we ate fresh, we were able to freeze and put away several quarts of sweet corn from my parents’ field. It’s always a nice treat to thaw out a bag during the snowy winter months!

Preservings & Harvesting

Along with the peaches and sweet corn, we were able to harvest and preserve lots of other produce from our garden.

One new product I tried this year was canning rotel-like tomatoes. We always use the store-bought variety, but I tried a recipe that is a great (and delicious) alternative. It’s always nice to be able to swap out a grocery store product for something homemade!

We also put the dehydrator to good use in August, making lots of dehydrated zucchini chips. It’s one of my favorite ways to use up zucchini. I’m a salty snack fan, so having zucchini chips as an alternative to potato chips is nice. Plus, I get to be in control of the flavors and seasonings!

In addition to the zucchini chips, I also dehydrated some of our dill to make dried dill weed. We had a great crop of dill this year, so I froze several batches to use. However, I also wanted to dehydrate some as well.

Some other canned products I’ve made this month include roasted tomato sauce, canned chili peppers (never again!), pepperoncini peppers, and dill relish.

Flowers Growing – August 2025 Homesteading Update

The zinnias have been showing off this year! We have several different varieties growing in the garden, so it’s fun to walk around and see all of the different shades and bloom types.

We’ve had tons of butterflies, bees, moths, and even hummingbirds visit the zinnias daily. I tried to get pictures of the hummingbirds, but they are too fast!

In addition to the zinnias, the marigolds, nasturtiums, coneflowers, and cosmos are still blooming strongly. The lantana, portulaca, and snapdragons have taken a pause on blooming for the most part.

Some Recipes I’ve Made

I always like to show you some of the things I’ve been making in the kitchen as well as our garden. Some are season-dependent, and others are just recipes our family is in the mood for.

We’ve been enjoying our fill of seasonal favorites like sweet corn and watermelon. In my opinion, there isn’t much better than those two sides with a juicy BLT sandwich this time of year!

Another one of my favorite seasonal treats is tomato, cucumber, and onion salad. It is such a delicious (and mostly healthy) way to celebrate the flavors of the garden!

The other images shown are homemade hot chocolate fudge, chicken and green bean casserole (one of my favorite quick go-to meals), pepperoni pizza casserole, and jalapeno popper dip.

Miscellaneous Pictures – August 2025 Homesteading Update

As usual, I’ll leave you with some miscellaneous homesteading pictures. I take so many different pictures throughout the month that it’s hard to get them all on just one post so I like to do a photo dump at the end of my updates.

Most of these involve different vegetables growing in the garden. We’ve been able to harvest some big tomatoes this year, including multiple over the one-pound mark. We are making sure to save the seeds from the biggest ones!

During this month, I also got the garlic we harvested in July cleaned up and ready for storage. I separated out the big bulbs that I want to save for planting in the fall, and the others will be used here in the kitchen.

There are a few other random pictures included, but that’s the gist of semi homsteading update for August 2025!

Until next time, thanks for stopping by!
– Chelsea

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