Happy New Year

by Evangeline | Jan 9, 2021 | Animal Slaughter, Before and After, CSA, Dairy Goats, Happy New Year, Homestead Yearly Recap, Milking Goats, Noah's Cabin

The year 2020 was an over the top sensational year for us as a family. We kicked ass and took names! While the world was busy being distracted by a disease that was never isolated or identified, we continued to move forward as a family, building, repairing, organizing, and recommitting our lives to becoming more sustainable.

Sustainability is one of those red flag words used by large corporations to greenwash their products. That’s not the sustainability I’m talking about. Some might call it “primitive” living but that’s a red flag word as well! When we think of primitive, our minds conjure images of living on a dirt floor with no electricity or running water.

Is that really what primitive means? How about technologies from the 1700s? Are they primitive? Dom and I have watched one of our favorite youtube channels for years called Townsends and I love how they have been able to reenact and bring to life American History from the 1700-1800s. Now, I’m not a fan of reenacting and trying to recreate anything historic, however, I’m thankful to those who find it thrilling to geek out when they find obscure historic texts hidden in books long forgotten and then POOF! they bring it to life.

Such, I think is the case with the Townsends. I SWOON over the kitchen they created (pictured below). Not because it rejects modern life, but because it is a truly sustainable kitchen. Would we go without a modernish stove? Nope, we plan on utilizing a stove that was built in the era prior to obsolescence. That’s about how modern I wish to remain.

It’s a melding of different ways of doing things to reach our own specific goals and outcomes.

That’s all we can do really in this life. We have no desire to live fully in some romanticized historical past OR future.

We’re moving forward our way and we’re not interested in maintaining the status quo or just going along with the program. The program sucks and just as the “elite” (I call them bottom feeders) want to push for some great Reset, I would caution against thinking that this is a great idea. Remember it is the World Economic Forum (again, bottom feeders) calling for this reset because they FAILED. They are the biggest failure EVER and yet because most worship money, they think the Klaus Schawb holds the key to a new forged future. No. Just no. He, the biggest bottom feeder of them all has failed so much so that he’s crying for a do-over while blaming the little guy for all the problems. Anyway, the World Economic Forum’s plan I don’t consent to.

No thanks.

But I digress!

Back to my Happy New Year…

We managed to thrive in 2020 emotionally, physically, and even financially. We kicked off last new year with a baby skunk getting to our house, our water heater busting, our toilet needing to be repaired, and some pretty wicked colds. That was just January!

Here’s a recap of our year…

This beautiful little spotted skunk mama kicked off our 2020 New Year with sadness and resolve to save her baby that had died in a trap we had set. The baby, no more than maybe 6 inches from nose to tail found his way into the house and died. Dom buried him out back and she found his little body in a burlap bag and refused to leave the dead baby. She wouldn’t eat or drink and died within three days of exposure to the extreme cold. We heard rustling about a month later only to discover that the baby skunk had a sibling. This little guy thought he was a part of the family. He would come in and out of the pallet walls looking for food or just to sit and watch us go about our business.

We finally caught him and released him a few miles away from our land. That ended the skunk saga of 2020. Haha

With our bathroom out of commission because of a busted temporary water heater and a busted toilet line, it became an opportune time to put walls in, sand and finish the floor, install the new tub, and put in a much-needed window. The windows we found under some garbage that was left on the property.

We started collecting more pallets for future projects. With the price of lumber going through the roof we began to reuse pallets rather than pay through the nose for dimensional lumber, only purchasing it when absolutely necessary. Once insulation, drywall, and exterior siding is installed, does it really matter what the inner wall is made of? Sure we look like hobos for awhile while it is all coming together, but in the end we save thousands of dollars and we get an even stronger structure than if it was just a conventional stick-built building.

This year we will be building out of pallets, a storage shed, a greenhouse, and a large office space off the side of my coffee roastery for my second business, Status Select Professional Services. 

Dom started carving spoons. It was something he has wanted to do for years. 2020 was The Year of the Spoon for him. 😉

Our son Noah came home to build his own cabin, save money, buy a car, and go to school to become an EMT and Paramedic. So far, he moved into his cabin not too long ago, and now he’s saving for his car. School starts in the spring! He’s doing fantastic.

The beginnings of the chicken coop was built. However, part of the way through building it, we realized that Noah really needed his cabin first. There wasn’t a reason I could imagine where a bunch of chickens should have a home before my son. So we switched gears and Noah and Dom started building his cabin. See photos of the process below:

We got a very small but productive garden going as well. We didn’t start until LATE, but still, it was good to have my hands back in the soil. Farming and caring for animals is a part of my calling, so to finally be able to grow food again felt like a huge return to my values. We were on such a crazy odyssey over the last five years that no matter where we went, farming was on my mind but it broke my heart that I couldn’t spend the time growing food or raising animals.

We can now! When we first started farming ten years ago, we went all in and bought seed, bought trees, bought animals, and we did so without any infrastructure in place. That meant that we spent a huge amount of our valuable time spinning our wheels getting makeshift housing ready for animals, trying to jerry-rig watering systems, and really didn’t have a full plan in place. Even so, we had a very productive CSA with lots of members as well as retail stores purchasing our produce.

I can’t in good conscience do that to us again. We’ll celebrate our second year on the land in April, and even though we are still putting infrastructure in place, it has been worth the wait!

Below was our tiny experimental garden. I wasn’t expecting much since it was really the first time I was really growing anything on this piece of land, but I was pleasantly surprised by the sheer volume of food produced. We plan on making this little garden area the new Blueberry Sancutary.

As fall and winter approached, we began to shift our thinking a bit. We decided to build the fencing for our ducks and geese. The area would not be used right away for ducks, but instead, we would have dairy goats in the area to take down the weeds in the market garden area. Eventually, we would move the goats to their new area located behind the coffee roastery near where the commercial kitchen would be located.

Dom got busy building the fencing for the goats. We located a farm two hours north of us and planned on purchasing goats from them.

The only thing left to put up are the three gates. Their structure is in place. We need to build them a milking stand, although we don’t plan on breeding the new doelings until they are a year old. We will be purchasing a pregnant Nigerian Dwarf so that we will have milk this year.

Below are our new babies. They were just born a few days ago. We will be bringing them home when they are weaned from their mamas.

We purchased our first cow and helped process it. It was an amazing experience! After we build our walk-in refrigerator, we’ll start processing all our animals on the farm.

I love butchery and now I’m excited to harvest other animals as well. We already process ducks, chickens, and turkeys.

Noah got a puppy from the same people we got our goats. Her name is Zelda. She’s a border collie, blue heeler mix.

Simmi also is getting ready to move into her new bedroom.

Today I’m painting her room. Dom will be laying her carpet soon and putting trim up. We’re getting there…little by little.

Every time something new gets completed, we moved one step closer to gutting the rig. Simmi being able to have her own room is that crucial next part of the plan. It will take a bit of detailed planning to gut the rig because that will involve taking out my office equipment for a few days. I might need to set up my office in my bedroom while the rig is being remodeled.

2021 is looking brighter every day!