Too Many Projects, Too Little Time In 2015

     I can't believe it's almost the end of January and I haven't wrapped up 2015 yet.  We ended our 2015 on more rain than I was interested in seeing, and started 2016 on piles and piles of snow.  The rain certainly was a change from the beginning of the year which was especially hard on our electric bills, even harder than our first one here, and the snow piled even higher.  There's certainly been some changes around the whole place as we're entering our fourth growing season at this home in a few months.  Come take the journey with us over the course of the last year:

Scaredy Cat and Purrball playing snowball ice hockey on
the quite icy driveway in February.

     When we started 2015, we had Momma Buttercup and nine of her twelve offspring running around the place keeping the rodents and bugs at bay for us.  Most of them waited for us on the steps and corncrib each time we returned home from a long mid-week "weekend" at my in-laws, and were full of love and energy.  Unfortunately, since then, we have just six remaining: Gravy and Whitey from the first litter, and Blue Eyes, Little Gray, Purrball and Tiger from the second litter.  The rest, being farm cats, all decided to head out across the fields one day, and we have not seen them since.  Perhaps, like Gravy, they'll come back after an extended absence (her's was only a little over a week), but we are not holding our breath, and instead loving on those we have remaining.

     Due to a break out of eye infections that soon spread across all of our cats, rabies shots, and needing to get a bunch of them spayed or neutered, the cats, to say the least, cost us a bucketful last year that we were not planning on.  Our hope is that we can reduce their medical bills and food bills in 2016, but for now I'm ashamed to admit their cost almost topped that of our springtime project...

     By spring we decided to add some feathery friends to entertain the cats... okay, we wanted eggs and meat, but they do certainly entertain the cats!  Seven fluffy chicks in May turned into four laying hens and three roosters who never shut up!  (Their alarm clocks are clearly broken.)  During this time, we raised them from three days old in a makeshift brooder in the shed, constructed their chicken coop on steroids (i.e. a "pastured poultry palace"), dug over a foot down to bury their main run, and we are now presently constructing their tunnel run and rotating pastures.  As of the end of the year, our stubborn hens have given us 81 eggs in all, and we still haven't come up with the time to thin the rooster flock.

     Their coop, and the whole chicken enterprise, cost us a rather hefty sum as well (more so for the fully enclosed runs and all the hardware cloth than the actual structure).  I'll let you guess how much the going price for "farm fresh" eggs is around here, to calculate just why we need 4,813 eggs to break even.

     The garden was another trial that happened to be occurring right alongside the chicken project.  Our 38' by 78' main garden, paired with the less well-kept upper garden and some random patches about the yard certainly kept us in food this year.  It was the first year we experimented with cover crops and mulching, and the chickens certainly enjoyed buckwheat treats throughout the spring into the early summer.  To say the least, things got a little weedy around the place as the season progressed and we tackled our other projects.

     I'm also happy to say, if you don't calculate the equipment purchase into the garden costs, we actually saved money gardening!  Fortunately, when I make my financial spreadsheet for everything we do, equipment doesn't fall into the garden costs!  However, the equipment set us back a little as well...

     To make things a little easier next year we added yet another project to our list: fixing up the implements for a David Bradley Super Power.  The Mr., with some help, got the Super Power running in early fall.  Now, we should be working on wire brushing, painting and repairing all those implements that we'll need for spring; however, we're working on chicken  runs and pastures and...

     ...started yet another garden project as well.  The Mr. really, really wanted to have the greenhouse up before planting season begun in early winter, so he called some of his family members fairly last minute in December and they  managed to get all four walls, rafters, and eleven of the windows installed in a single day.  Talk about teamwork!  If everything goes as planned, we'll at least have some seedlings growing in the greenhouse, even if the seeds are still started on the seed starter unit the Mr. built for us for this past spring's planting.  (Of course, this was the plan, prior to 30" of snow being dumped on us.)

      As the cats continued to vie for our attention, the crops and weeds were growing, and the chickens needed the permanent home put up, we still needed to do something with all of that produce.  For some reason canning season begun in mid-winter for me this year, and continued through until mid-fall (even though there are still things that need canned down in one of the deep freezes right now).  It was a lot of work to put up all of that food, and I can definitely say that in the next couple of days I'll be inventorying what we still have in stock to start making the final adjustments for our 2016 garden.

     The financial spreadsheet wasn't showing black by the end of the year, and I'm going to write that off on "creating a life we love living" by building up infrastructure, and hope we do better next year.  This is the first year of red, after two years in the black, so one can hope that 2016 we won't be seeing red again.

     Yup, can you believe it?  It's almost February of 2016, and certainly time to start thinking about the garden and projects for next year.  What big changes have you seen around your place this past year?