Happy New Year!

This time of year I look forward to the cold weather that prevents me from doing a lot of outdoor projects. This was especially true this year. I feel like I have done nothing but put up new fence for months. It feels nice to finally catch my breath and slow down. The work reached a fevered pace in fall and by the time Thanksgiving came I was done. I don’t remember the specific week, but I declared fencing done for the year! The sheep were sufficiently contained and I did not feel like I was trying to out run them [insert exhausted sigh].

I managed to take some photos during the year and what follows is a short recap of all that we managed to accomplished this year.

January

We started the year off by beginning the process of cleaning brush from the old perimeter fences. This was slow going and involved quite a bit of chain sharpening after I ran the saw into the fence. The good news is I’m getting good at sharpening chain. We also cooked up one of the roosters that we harvested late in 2022 and made “rooster tacos”. They were delicious. That marked the first meat that we raised on the farm. Also in January were the first eggs from our hens.

February

We taped the maple trees and after what felt like endless boiling (40 gallons of sap make 1 gallon of syrup) we ended up with 6 pints of homemade maple syrup! This lasted the family up until the fall of this year. We also had an unusual ice storm that covered all of the trees in ice and knocked out our power for a few days. During the night of the storm we could hear branches breaking while we lied in bed attempting to sleep, just hoping one didn’t hit the house!

March

We started some cleanup after the ice storm (I am still not done yet). One of the large trees next to our house lost some big limbs so we cut everything that was hung up so it didn’t come down later. The ground was beginning to thaw so we started to dig some ditches/swales in the back pasture. After the swales were dug, we planted apple trees on the down hill side.

April

As spring approached we located a Great Pyrenees puppy at a near by farm. We brought her home in anticipation that one day she would guard sheep. We named her Daisy. We also built a shelter that we could move the laying hens to in the summer. This “Chicken Chalet” would be movable so that we could one day move the hens on to pasture. The hens were also starting to lay many eggs.

May

As the grass began to green we started work on a fence for the garden area. As luck would have it one of our hens went broody and was sitting a dozen eggs. These hatched and we had baby chicks running around in the chicken coop. At this time we also moved the adult hens and roosters to their summer quarters in the “Chicken Chalet”. The garden was also planted.

June

We continued to build the garden fence and also moved the young chickens and mamma hen back with the rest of the flock.

July

At this point we were in a drought and we were watering the apple trees as best as we could. At first I filled up a garbage can on the trailer and drove that to the back, taking a five gallon bucket to each tree. Later I bought a PTO driven pump and ran piping to the ditches we dug in spring. The pump would take all day to fill up the ditch from the pond, but at least this was helping to water the trees. We also finished the garden fence this month. Sheep were to be the next addition to the farm so we found a small farm outside of Rockford that needed to downsize and after a nice visit, the sheep were delivered the following week. Three mature ewes, one ewe lamb and one weather lamb were not eating the overgrown barn yard!

August

We started building fences to extend the small barn yard, which was the only properly fenced area on the property. I feel like every daylight hour that I was not at my regular job I was fencing. I started digging holes, tamping posts and stretching wire. Some days a swear I did it in my sleep.

September

Everyday the sheep would eat more pasture and I’d fence more in. The motivation to not let them run out of grass kept me moving. In the spring we decided to host a farm to table dinner on the farm for a fundraiser for our kids school. We hosted that dinner at the end of the month. We served appetizers, ratatouille, coq au vin, mashed potatoes and a desert made with ground cherries. Most of the food was grown right here. It was a beautiful evening!

October

My notes for October are pretty sparse. It snowed on Halloween and unfortunately we lost our barn cat. The children had decided to call him “Twinkles” when we first found him. Twinkles had arrived the previous fall as a stray and was an excellent mouse hunter. One time I found a dead rat at the doorway of the barn. Thinking to myself that it was an odd place for a rat to die, I looked up to find Twinkles perched on the box of tarps that he had grown accustomed to sitting on. I then realized he killed the rat that night, I have never felt more proud of a cat! Unfortunately Twinkles fell ill and we lost him in the night. He was a great barn cat.

November

It was in this month that I finally called fencing quits for the year. We had secured a strong perimeter fence and I felt that the sheep would be safe. It felt really good to be done with that major project. On the day after thanksgiving I fired up the family Honda CRV and drove to a farm to buy a ram. I remember looking up “ram for sale” online and being frustrated that the only result were from Dodge dealers, but I should have expected that. It is so easy to buy most consumer goods online, but livestock are a bit of a black hole, we have used mostly social networking sites to find leads. I felt so excited driving home with a ram lamb in an oversized dog cage in the back. I almost stoped for a coffee along the way just to see the faces of the folks working the drive thru, but decided against it. We almost lost that ram when I got home, but that is a story for another day.

December

By the time we got past Thanksgiving I was just happy to nearing the holidays. Most of the outside work had drawn to a close. I spent most of this month moving the sheep on stockpiled grass and cutting trees for firewood.

Looking back we had a great year and put a lot of work into infrastructure that will help us out in the coming years. I am looking forward to a bit of down time and excited for what this new year will bring.

Happy New Year!