A Productive Year

You may be wondering how our little farm turned out this year and if your not, I'm going to tell you anyway.

Animals:

We started out with the opportunity to get one free chicken from my kid's school. When we went to buy feed for it, we got 6 free chicks with our purchase. Turns out only one out the seven was a hen. We wanted multi-purpose chickens (meat and laying hens) anyway but we were hoping for at least half of them to be hens. Looks like we won't have to buy chicken for a few months now. In case you haven't been around chickens, having 6 roosters is a BAD thing. They will brutally kill your hen...not on purpose of course but they all want in on the action and it is a constant battle. All of them were getting along fine until a few weeks ago when the roosters must have sensed it was about time for little miss hen to start laying eggs. She is now comfortably in the garage until we can thin out our roosters. Not pleasant but a must unless you like to watch your flock hurt one another.

A few weeks ago, we acquired a goat. Sweet Ms. Daisy joined our farm. We are looking forward to the future when we can add in a few more goats. My parent's used to have some as pets which always seemed kind of strange to me. Now I understand.

Gardening:

This was my first year raising a garden and I think we did pretty good! We definitely learned a lot but had a considerably productive year. There was a fierce battle with tater bugs, then some major destruction from the crows, and finally whatever bug it was that likes beans. Even with these issues, we still managed to freeze almost 20 quarts of corn and 5-6 quarts of green beans. We should have enough potatoes to get us and our family through the winter. I'm already missing the fresh squash and cucumbers but we'll have more of that next year. The tomatoes did the best of any I've ever grown, not enough to can but we had just the right amount for sandwiches and salads throughout the summer. We still have a few green ones that are slowly ripening as we speak! I'm going to miss the fresh tomatoes this winter. 

Future:

Next year, we're doubling the size of both of our gardens which will make it a total of  around 9000 square feet of garden! Whew, that's going to be a lot of work but it's the best work I've ever done. Nothing feels better than to come in and be tired from working your land. We're also hoping to start fencing in our property so we can add animals to the herd at any time. This is a daunting task that may or may not happen next year. Maybe 3 years from now we will have it complete. Also, in the spring, we are ordering hens instead of playing Russian Roulette at the feed store.

Thanks for keeping up with our little farm this year! I'll leave you with a few of my favorite pictures from the year...