Happy New Year

It’s hard to believe it’s January first, but here it is.

Remember when you were a kid and time seemed to drag…you couldn’t wait until you were old enough to _____ (fill in the blank)…go to summer camp, drive, get your ears pierced etc.  Now time seems to fly by and I am really in no rush for that to happen.

I do, however, love the start of a New Year.  Even though it is only a date on a calendar it is a fresh start, a day full of promise, hope and new beginnings, of making, and hopefully keeping New Year’s resolutions.

I have made three resolutions that I plan to work really hard to keep…we’ll see how that goes a couple of days months from now :).

1) Read the Bible in one year. If I can make it thru Leviticus I should be able to make it to the end of the Bible.

2) Write a blog post weekly.  There are certainly more than enough daily occurrences to keep me typing away so I just need to be more disciplined.

3) Get organized and stay organized.  In November I was in NY visiting my Dad, and saw just how organized he was…everything was neat & had a place.

This got me motivated to organize once I got home and so I spent hours, literally, on my tablet combing thru Pinterest for organizational tips (you can view my Pinterest link to see all my pins).  I realized very quickly that there are A LOT of gals out there who are really really really well organized and they are happy to share what they know…here are links to a few of my favorites:

A Bowl Full of Lemons  I Heart Planners  Clean Mama

Let me catch you all up date on what I didn’t blog about this year, that way I can start off the New Year with a clean blogging slate.

Belle’s little fluff balls grew faster than I could have imagined.

They went from squirming, dependent, tiny pups

 to running yapping wrestling and general mischief making teenagers.

We kept two of the pups as we had planned, and sold the other 6, all of which went to great homes.

Goliath was the largest of the litter

 Boo was the smallest, but she is growing fast.

 At 5 months old, they are quite full of themselves with Boo being the more assertive and bossier of the two.

Goliath is more like his dad, Adam, who is just a big goober and reminds me of Astro from The Jetsons.

 

2 more of our girls, Malibu and Ourania will be having crias late spring early summer and we will have other girls that we will breed in the spring.

 

 

We did very well with our Heritage Breed Bourbon Red turkeys.  We sold quite a few at Thanksgiving and several more at Christmas.  Everyone raved about the flavor of the birds and said they had never had a turkey that was so moist tasted so good. We kept 3 toms and 11 hens for breeding in the spring at which time we will incubate as many eggs as possible for turkey sales in the fall.

Our 2 Appaloosas, Scout and Angus, are doing well, although they have yet to be ridden…right now they are just eating their way through our hay and are basically useless ranch hands.

In October, we were lucky enough to adopt Shasta from a family friend and she is just wonderful.

I have been riding her bareback and hope to get a saddle for her sometime in the near future.

I was one of those horse crazy girls when I was growing up and most likely drove my parents insane asking for a horse.

We currently have about 65 laying hens with a mix of purebred chickens as well as what I would call a barnyard mix – our one rooster, who is a Delaware heritage breed, was busy in the spring jumping on anything that moved.

We hatched about 20 roosters out of the group of eggs we incubated and they are now peacefully residing in our freezer :).  This is definitely one of the big advantages to raising your own food, you know what it ate and what conditions it was raised in. Our girls have constant access to their coop as well as a large outdoor area that we rotate in order to keep healthy pastures and fresh forage.  They have plenty of fresh air and sunshine and spring thru fall, all the bugs and grass they can eat. The meat is not like anything from a grocery store and the eggs are rich with bright yellow yolks.  Not having grown up on a farm, I had no idea how good chickens and eggs could really be.