2015 was a big year for us.
I’ve been spending the morning sipping really expensive coffee and going over what we’ve been through in the past year. It’s wild to see how far we’ve come. I spend so much time looking ahead at where I want to be that I forget sometimes to look at where I came from.
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In the last year I’ve learned how to ferment foods and successfully made sauerkraut, and preserved lemons (that are killer in a Greek salad), we had our first goat kid born on the farm, I learned how to hand milk a goat and we had delicious raw milk from Phoebe, we built another paddock and shelter for the billy goats, I learned how to make cheese, my blog was successfully moved from Blogger to WordPress and I own my own domain, I made jelly from the dandelions growing in our yard, successfully gardened in an old gravel parking lot, came out of the closet about my meat eating, added 13 more chickens to our flock (5 of which were ex battery hens, and 2 are our completely home raised chicks – conceived and hatched here), butchered our first rooster (he was tasty), added another doe to our goat herd, bred our does to our bucks for goat kids in the spring, have heated the house up to this point with wood that we got for free (a labor for goods deal that we gladly accepted), filled our freezer with locally and pasture raised heritage pork, packed the cold cellar with home canned goods, filled the freezer with goods from our garden and supplemented from the farmers market when needed, and found a source for local fully raw honey and bought 30 pounds of it (because honey is delicious).
Goodness. Gracious.
But our list still seems never ending. I suppose that’s just life on the farm.
I hope 2016 will be just as big.
I hope it’s the year we have 3 does in milk.
I hope it’s the year we build a greenhouse.
I hope it’s the year we put in 2 more paddocks.
I hope it’s the year we expand our flock of chickens yet again to keep up with egg demand.
I hope it’s the year we finally get the courage built up to raise our own meat chickens. (Butchering is hard ya’ll!)
I hope it’s the year we add ducks to the farm.
I hope it’s the year we really start paying off our debt.
I hope it’s the year my tomatoes don’t get eaten by my chickens.
I hope there is just as much delicious food (or more).
I hope it’s just as good as last year.
And Amen.
