Gardening, fencing, and potty training

We had a very busy weekend!  Last weekend I knew that I wanted to tackle the boys' potty training this weekend.  I started on Thursday by giving them multiple vitamin C tablets.  That may seem like an odd way to start potty training, but I had my reasons!  We had two boys with "issues".  Jedidiah has been number 1 trained for some time now, but number 2 freaked the poor boy out.  Jonah insisted he was terrified of the potty and would scream bloody murder if we tried to get him to wear underwear or sit on the toilet.  Sigh.  So all week we talked about how their diaper days were coming to an end on the weekend. 
Well things went pretty much like I thought they would.  Jonah was fine about the underwear...for about 20 minutes!  Then he went bonkers when he realized that he couldn't have a diaper on.  He screamed, and cried, and screamed and cried.  I had to put the diapers up high, out of his reach.  Oy.  BUT that being said, he only had two accidents for the whole day.  On top of that he stayed dry both nights!  Which is weird because during the day he was running to the toilet every 5 to 10 minutes, but could hold it all night.  Jed on the other hand could hold it for hours during the day, but can't make it through the night.  Either way, both boys are going potty all day long!  Yay!! They got a ton of stickers and fun tatoos for their efforts.  Even Aubrey has taken interest in trying to go on the potty again.  He had the unfortunate incident of coming down with a bladder infection the day after he decided he wanted to be a big boy and wear undies, and the pain freaked him out and he has been scared of the potty since.  But he wasn't about to miss out on all the sticker fun!  He still has a long ways to go, but I'm just glad that he is taking interest in it again.

This past week Saoirse took to making a list of all the foods she wants to try to dehydrate.  Her first attempt was an apple and some bananas.  She set right to work, and is checking off her foods as she accomplishes dehydrating them.  Too cute.

Saoirse, cutting up the bananas.  A really good choice to begin with as it is easy to cut.

I was able to get the flexible sheets for my Nesco, this has opened up another avenue to dehydrating.  It has been very, very handy to have saved the Nesco.  I was going to get rid of it, pass it on to someone else.  But with these sheets it is now being used...a lot!

Saoirse's little set up.  She is sitting on a booster chair, set on the ground.  She is using a plastic lid to cut the banana on, which is set on the boy's plastic tool bench :-)  She put the dehydrator try behind her.  Her only problem, which was a very serious one....her siblings kept sneaking in and eating the food!!  She was not happy about that.  Dehydrated fruit doesn't stand a chance lasting more than a couple of hours in our house!

We  accomplished a lot over the weekend outside.  Jeremiah put up the fencing for the boy goats. It's not ready for them to move into quite yet, but it should be by next weekend.  I can't wait!  Our milk tastes great the first day, but by day two there is an off taste.  This has never happened with our goat's milk before.  We are suspecting that it is due to the females and males being housed together in close proximity.  They are separated by a fence, but that is all.  The boy goats will eventually be moved to the other side of our house, giving enough distance to not interfere with the taste of the milk.  For now, since we can't have raw milk anyways, I'm heating up the milk to 180* before turning it into yogurt.  I would prefer to make raw milk yogurt, but I don't want that taste in our yogurt!

Above you can see my very special veggie markers.  Um, yeah.  This is called, wait till the last minute to plant your seeds and write out the veggie names with marker and run the paper through the laminator.  I had tried to paint rocks, but that wasn't working.  Currently the rocks are holding down the above marker in place at the beginning of each row.

Flannery wanted to paint the veggie names on wood.  This was a great idea, and you can see she did a cute job. The only problem?  We only had one piece of wood! 

Flannery and Saoirse joined me to do half the planting in the warm afternoon sun.  Later on we finished the job with Moira and Aubrey joining us.  The girls decided that each seed spot needed to be marked with a stick.  So now we have all these small sticks sticking up out of the ground!

Saoirse moving the mulch out of the way.  You can see some her sticks behind her hands.

Now I have to say I was plenty impressed with how dedicated Saoirse was to getting these seeds planted. She isn't exactly known over here for following through and finishing the work she is supposed to be doing.  But she planted many rows of veggies all on her own.

I suppose we won't be winning the "Most Organized Gardener" award anytime soon :-)

Above you can see my 'shovel'.  Yup, that green stick!  Somehow small trowels go missing whenever you need one.

Speaking of sticks...some may remember that I had a stick, from the mulch above, stab me in the foot about 9 months ago.  The doctors who saw my foot insisted that nothing was left inside.  Um, yeah, tell that to my foot!  About 2 months ago I noticed that the area, which has remained raised since the accident, was now pink/red. Then it started to itch, and get a bit painful every once in the while.  Not two weeks or so ago it began to blister!  There is something in there...trying to get out!!!  I think I will head to the doctors as it still seems to be lodged, but clearly my body is trying to get rid of it. Isn't the human body amazing?!

My rock/laminated paper veggie markers layed out in the order that I planned to put them.

We all got a bit of sun today, with pink cheeks and for some, pink shoulders.  It was finally warm!  Not the warm because the sun is shining, but still cool/cold air, but really and truly warm.  Ahhhh, it felt so good to be out there soaking up the sun and digging in the dirt!

See?  Springtime bliss :-)

These are our naughty chickens.  The two younger girls and the two older boys had just spread this straw out over the herb garden.  There was one small area on the right where the straw bale sat, and so there was a bit of straw on the ground.  But these naughty girls were digging through it, looking for goodies, and you can see all the straw outside of the rock border!

Flannery suggested I take this picture...a *hands full* of dirt....a play on my blog name. 

Our new mantra...."Grow, garden, grow!"  Ha, ha!  It will be interesting to see if I find any of the girls talking to the plants or our baby trees. They thought Jeremiah was silly for telling them that talking to plants help them to grow.  But he insisted it was true.  We'll see if they believe him :-)

A long awaited dream, coming true

It is funny when I think back to pre-family days, and the dreams I had for my future.  Although those dreams did include being married and having a large family, not much else is the same.  When I first became interested in gardening, some 13 or so years ago, one of my desires was to have fruit trees.  As we've had more children that desire increased :-)  Fruit can be expensive.  I'm still wondering if it is possible to have our own banana plantation!  Ha, ha.  I'm only joking...sort of. 

Each house we've lived at I wanted to get some fruit trees.  But alas, it wasn't so.  When we were in the midst of building this house and I was serious that we were never moving again under any circumstance, I wanted to plant fruit trees before we even moved in.  At the time Jed was a newborn, and well, we were in the midst of moving.  And so the dream remained, in my thoughts. 

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of getting online and choosing our first trees!  With a budget to work with I chose 5 apple trees, and one each of peach, cherry, plum and almond.  Last week a very large box arrived, the delivery man stating that it was a box of trees.  I tore into it.  Well, I suppose I would have torn into it if it hadn't been for the many gazzilion of monster staples that I had to pry off first.  And yesterday, in the very cold and windy weather, Jeremiah and I planted those dream trees.  I suppose it was mostly Jeremiah doing the planting, now come to think of it :-)  My job was to help find where we would plant them, and then after the holes were dug, I was to hold the tree in place as Jeremiah filled in the hole.  Of course I had the very important job of taking pictures.  At least that is what I tell myself. 

Before we get to the pictures I must share what happened immediately before we went out to plant the trees. Over a year ago I was in Walmart when a gentleman approached me.  He asked me why I had so many canning jars in my cart when the canning season was over.  We started a discussion which ended with him giving me his card and an invitation to come to his home to pick apples this past summer.  He told me that if I could keep track of his card, to call him and we could come and pick as many apples as we wanted.  The summer came, and I had kept his card safe for those 9 months.  I called, but never got a response back.  All eventually was forgotten...until last night!  This gentleman called and apologized for never calling me back!  He said he had been out of town, and when he returned the apples had all dropped.  He explained that he and his wife's health has been poor and that he plans on giving up the apple trees.  He said that we could come by and take a look at them and pick out any ones we wanted.  I think the plan is that if we care for the trees then we can have their fruit!  I told him that we were just about to go out and plant our baby fruit trees and what a wonderful opportunity it would be if we could come by and learn how we should be tending them.  In the meantime, as we wait for our trees to mature, we will have this opportunity to still have fruit!  He also mentioned he had peach trees, but I'm not sure if we will be doing anything with those, he wasn't clear on that.  I am just excited to learn about orchard care from someone who has been doing it for years, and excited at the prospect of a source of fruit! 

Here are the pictures I was able to take yesterday:

All nine trees in a bundle.  I had just untied the small ropes that held them all together, and opened up the plastic bag surrounding the roots.

 The digging part :-)  I stood faithfully by taking pictures.   Except for the times I needed to run into the house to look up information (can tree roots grow around rock, do fruit trees have tap roots, and such).  Or take the baby inside, or get my boots on, or...ok, so I stood by some of the time.

 Jonah insisted on me taking a picture of him.  He and Aubrey we very interested in the tree planting process.  At one point they needed to be brought in as they were getting a little too close to the action.

 Flannery trying her hand at digging. I think she found it easier to use the pick ax.

 Hard work, I tell ya.

 There were only so many pictures to take of holes, so I found other subjects :-)

 More action shots. 

 Of course using my new camera for the first time had nothing to do with taking pictures of everything else!  I will have to tell that camera story some other time.  Let's just say that it will take some getting used to a new camera set up and getting used to using an SLR after being without one for a year.

 Total cuteness, even when blurry.

 Who can resist cute little booted feet?  Too large pants all scrunched up, wearing his older brother's sweater. 

 Our plum tree!  It's funny because when I woke up this morning I looked outside my window first thing to see my trees...except that from that distance they look like large sticks!  Ha, ha.  If it weren't for their tags still being in place I would have had to really look for them!

 We bought our trees from a site called "Trees of Antiquity".  They have a selection of about 150 trees!  Many were already sold out when I was ordering, which helped to narrow my selection.   It is pretty difficult to pick out apples based on a written description of their taste.  I went with a couple that we already eat, and a few that I've never heard of, like this Holstein above.

One last picture before I took the baby back in.  He was getting chilled.  You can see he is no longer wearing the sweater that he was in the above pictures.  He had already gone inside, gotten wet while trying to wash his hands, and re-dressed.  Here he is saying, "Cold, inside".  So in we went.

It was a great time working together on a project.  Many times Jeremiah or I are working on something independently.  But it is neat when we are able to work together to get things done here on the homestead! 

Finally, some pictures

Hey, I like pictures :-).  They make a post a lot more fun!  I've got some odds and ends ones.  After a busy few days I thought I would catch up with pictures. 

 Jedidiah was quite pleased with himself that he earned his reward for passing a long awaited milestone.  Potty training.  Yes, he's much older than most children who are potty trained at the tender age of 2 or 3.  I've shared here before that I was quite sure we would not be among the group of parents with an apraxic child who doesn't potty train until the age of 6.  Yes, six.  This is a very common thing among children with apraxia.  No one knows particularly why.  Sensory issues?  Miss wiring?  Not sure.  I'm happy that he beat the age six dealy, but not by much!  Not to mention he still has to tackle nights.  But, hey, I'm just glad he is day trained!  We had a much coveted reward waiting for him when he tackled the day time potty challenge.  Pet Shops.  Yes, the small, cooky looking animal thingies that are a craze?  Definitely not on my list of 'keepers'.  But hey, desperate times, call for desperate measures :-). 

He thinks the mailman gave them to him!  Ha, ha!  He was very excited to open up this box.

He takes them everywhere!  I try to limit where he can bring them, more for fear of him losing them, and a meltdown ensuing.

While the boys were on Plymouth Rock with the new Pet Shops, I was making a list, or lists as was the case.  Getting ready for our Boot Camp 2012.  Things are falling into place.  And lest anyone thinks this may be a bad thing, I can assure you I have a lot of FUN planned.  We have a hard time staying on target when we try to do some child training.  So I thought by adding some fun, good family time, and some fancy 'team' shirts, we would be on our way to a splendid Boot Camp.  I am looking forward to this challenge.  It won't be easy, but I think we will come out the victors, with some well behaved children, a renewed love for each other, and some fond memories to boot.

This is the pile of composted dirt we had dropped of the other day.  Not as impressive as I thought it would be.  It will still come in handy, we were just expecting there to be more of it!  Thankfully we found a free source of composted mulch.  We have plans to use the mulch pretty much all over our land.  No, really.  We considered renting a dump truck for the stuff.  No, I'm not joking.  Most certainly not after our fiasco tonight.  Currently, as I write this, Jeremiah's pick up truck is stuck.  Really, really stuck, right in our back yard.  It's under belly is in the mud!!  It's not going anywhere any time soon, especially when it's supposed to rain tomorrow.  We are seeing if we can get a hold of a chain to pull it out with our van.  Fun times people, fun times.

Speaking of fun times, we all had fun at a recent birthday party we went to over the weekend.  I still have not gotten Flannery's official birthday picture up (her birthday was on the 20th of this month)!!  But this wasn't Flannery's b-day party, her's is this coming weekend.  The party we attended was for a friend, who turned 5.  It was held at a local park.  This was good and bad.  Good, lots of room to run around, bad because there was lots of room to run around :-)  Trying to keep track of the boys was very hard to do.  Jed was obsessed about running around this fence.  Jonah...
 

 ...he was obsessed with finding all the balloons he could get a hold of.  Aubrey?

He was obsessed about trying to climb the stone stairs.  Stone.  Baby.  Not a good combination.

At one point as I was grabbing the baby away from said stone stairs I caught Jed chasing his balloon.  He was just running out of sight when I called out to him.  I really try not to think about what could have happened, but that can be hard to do.  After I called him back, we went together to get his balloon.  Had he ran after it himself he would have gone all the way out by the road.  And I can assure you he would not have found his way back!  Scary.  This is why these types of events stress me out big time.  It only takes a moment for a child to get lost, in a big, big park.  Thankfully all ended well.  We had fun, Jed got his balloon back, and I'm still sane....sort of.

Saoirse peeking out of one of the old buildings on the park's premises.

We seem to have a new problem here at my house.  A problem between Flannery and I.  You see Flannery has fallen in love....with bokeh.  Oh, yes!  Don't know what bokeh is?  It's the blurriness you get in the background, or sometimes foreground in photos.  Like the picture above, you can see the flowers, but the background is a blur of color.  I have to practically wrestle my camera away from Flannery to get a turn with it!  And this has gotten worse, *after* we just bought her her own camera!  When I brought up the fact that she has a camera of her own now, she responded with...yeah, but it doesn't do photography.  Ha, ha!  She's talking about the bokeh people!  Too funny.  But I will say that she's getting pretty darn good at this photography thing.
  

For the record, I love bokeh too :-)  I also like this picture I was able to capture as we were leaving the park...ya know, after I wrestled my camera away.  I like it in color and b&w.

A beautiful sight!  Our front herbal garden is complete.  Well, except for the actual herbs.  That will be the easy part!  See all that dark goodness on top?  That would be the free composted tree mulch.  Black gold!

A Flannery picture.  We went out in the back yard to start on the corner garden area.  It's filled with weeds, vines, brambles and such.  Flannery decided to take pictures.  That wasn't helping to get the weeds up.  But after all the work we did I was hoping she did have a picture of "before".  Unfortunately this is the only before picture she took of the area.  Trust me, it's a lot worse in real life.  This looks tame to what we had to deal with.  I may have to bring my camera out the next time we work on the area.  It was kind of discouraging to work, work, work and stand back to see that we didn't get too far!!  Some before pictures may help boost the moral of our crew :-)

Another Flannery picture.  Warning, bokeh not only in the background, but the foreground as well.  She loves when that happens.  I only have about 1500 pictures of her trying to get the best angle and bokeh from a shot.  And NO I am NOT kidding.  My memory card can only hold about 500 pictures at a time (I lost my bigger mem. card), and I've had to delete the card multiple time in the last two weeks.  Multiple times.  I have enough goat pictures to last me a life time!!  But hey, that's how we learn...by doing :-)

Because when you keep practicing, and keep 'doing', you end up with something cool like the above picture.  This is a picture that Flannery took today.  Maybe not amazing (although I think so), but for a ten year old?  Hello!  I was taking a picture of my sister making bunny ears over my brother's head at ten years old.  Wait...I don't think I used a camera till I was in my teens.  Keep up the good work Flannery!  (yes, she reads my blog :-))

Some Answers to Prayer

In my last post, on the happenings around here, there were still some things that needed to be bought or found.  We were disappointed in how much dirt actually got dumped in our yard.  We have been looking on Craigslist for free composted trees/yard stuff.  So far the pickings were slim, and very small in quantity.  But yesterday we hit the jackpot!!  Jeremiah didn't even want to contact the person as he was tired of finding out that each place he called/emailed only had a small quantity of compost (maybe a garbage can full at most).  I urged him to at least email this one guy, I mean, you never know unless you ask, right?  Come to find out this gentleman is in the tree clipping business and has aged composted trees/brush.  LOTS OF IT!!!  Jeremiah estimates he has about a third of an acre of huge 8 foot hills of aged composted tree material.  He picked up two truck loads of it last night.  The stuff is WONDERFUL.  It's exactly what we were looking for.  We need a LOT of it to cover all the garden areas that we plan on having.  Not to mention I wanted to put some down in front of our goat barn to help absorb the wetness that always accumulates, causing issues for us and the goats.  Right now it's raining, so I can't get out to take a picture of our 'gold mine'.  It will take many, many more trips to get the amount we need, but we are just so thankful that we found what we were looking (and praying) for, for FREE!!

My other answer to prayer came after talking with someone from church who has taken over the veggie co-op I used to be apart of.  I am grateful for all the healing we have seen on the GAPS diet.  I know we could have been having more success if we could obtain 'real' meat... the natural, grass fed kind.  There are still various health issues that more than one of us are still dealing with.  And although we've gone from these issues causing us to have to use antibiotics, to them just being a daily annoyance, the fact is we are still dealing with them!  But we can not afford to buy such meat, not unless we could cut costs elsewhere.  In the meantime I wanted to put us on a juice feast to help jump start our bodies healing from these health issues.  But that led to a dead end as well since we can't afford for all of to juice.  I felt trapped.  I gave this issue over to the Lord.  I wish I did this more often, as He seems to be able to take care of things so much better than I can :-)  I asked the woman who is doing the veggie co-op if I could come with her one day to see about buying some bulk produce.  I knew it would be cheaper, I just wasn't expecting it to be THIS cheap!!  Apples, 45 cents a pound, 50 pounds of carrots for 12$, etc.  I mean, WOW!  The kick is you have to buy a bushel of apples, or the whole 50 pounds of carrots, or 50 pounds of potatoes, etc.  With the large quantities we will need for juicing this will work out just fine.  And for future purchasing, this will save us money to put towards the grass fed meat we need to be buying.  I can buy in bulk and *dehydrate* the leftovers, and use them for the weeks we don't go to the farmers market. 

We haven't started our boot camp yet.  I came down with the tummy bug last night, making any kind of work impossible.  I can work through pain, but NOT nausea.  Yuck.  Call me a wimp, but I can't handle nausea :-P

Additions to the homestead

If any of  you have read my "Big Changes" series then you know that we are taking our family vision seriously.  With the illnesses we have been experiencing we have had some relapse into old habits (more from the adults!). But we are determined that we are not going to fall off the wagon.  Maybe our wagon was stalling, be we haven't fallen off.  During the past few months Jeremiah and I have been discussing how we were going to use our tax money when it came in.  I am sure there will be many who may not agree with how we decided to spend that money.  I can assure you it was with prayer and thoughtfulness that we made our decisions.  Like many people, we have debt.  I am glad to say that the debt we do have is about 90% or more medical debt.  Not that I am happy that we had such things come up medically that it got us into debt, but at least it wasn't from reasons that got us into debt in the past.  We made a promise to pay off some of our debt with this tax return, so we can chip away at it.  However the rest of it was needed to further our family goals.  One of our goals is to be debt free, but our priority is in capturing the hearts of our children, something that we had lost.  Seeing the results that we have gotten so far from the changes we've made all the more cemented our resolve to do what we could to further the relationships within our family.  Although I hate the idea of owing people money, it is much more woeful to have lost your children.  We can continue to work on paying off our debts as we are able.  I am sure we will make greater strides once we are all working together, here at home.

Alright!  So all that to say....we made some purchases to further our wee homestead.  There are still a few more purchases that need to happen, some will come in the next few weeks, and others will have to wait for a few months.  We tried to stick with the idea, 'what God gave us in the here and now' to work on, and some of the 'things we would really like to try.  With all of our purchases there has been a renewed excitement to work on our homestead.  Here are a few of the things we have obtained so far:

Meet Red Beard, or Buddy.  Not sure how Buddy can be the nickname of this goat that they decided to call Red Beard, but hey, I leave the animal naming up to the girls, and this is what we got :-)  This is our new Nigerian Dwarf billy goat.  We recently bought a Nubian billy this past fall.  Now we will be able to have our means to securing milk :-)  This will not enable us to expand our herd, as we would need more males, but this will give us the milk we need in the coming years.  Maybe in the future we can work on herd diversity and expansion.  But for now we are happy with our current herd size.  Along with drinking the milk we plan on using some to make cheese.  The cheese supplies are something that is on the "buy in the next few months" catagory.  We also plan on making soap with the milk.  You can see below that we bought the supplies for that venture, now we just need some milk :-)  I do have a few gallons in the freezer that we plan on using to try our hand at soap making.

 Next up, supplies for our gardening venture. Above you can see our new shop light, that we hung from the bottom of one of the shelves that we have in our laundry room.  The trays you see below will not be orientated that way.  The girls were just trying to figure out how many trays they could fit underneath.  After hanging the light we realize that we will probably need two lights.  But for now, this set up will do.  Tomorrow we have a truck load of dirt/compost being dropped off so that we can make up our garden beds.  I envision lots of outdoor work in our future :-)  In the next few weeks we will be purchasing some fruit trees and possibly some more heirloom seeds.  A friend of mine offered us some blueberry bushes!  I am so excited about that.  We have plans to put them in our backyard, along the back of the house.  I think those are all the near future plans we have for our garden.

 We took the plunge and purchased an Excalibur food dehydrator.  After pondering all the ways one can store food, we realized that for our size family, dehydrating would be the best way to do so.  The number of canning jars we would need to store food for our family?  Oh my.  I have been buying 3 five gallon pails from Walmart each pay period.    In the next few months we will be purchasing a food vacuum saver along with some oxygen absorbers and vacuum bags. 

   These are our soap making supplies.  These will also be used to make some hair conditioner and cleaning spray. I purchased most of my oils from the Soap Dish.  The prices were reasonable and they were quick to deliver.  If I had more money I would have bought a lot more as the shipping was pretty high, but mostly a flat rate, so in the long run I would have saved  more money,  but I can only do what I can do :-)  The essential oils and the castile soap were purchased from Vitacost.  They are always quick to deliver and so far have always had the best prices of what they carry.  The crock pot you see will actually be used for our cooking.  I bought it for soap making, but it is a nicer model than the one we have for our food making! So I will trade my intended purposes for each crockpot.  This crock I picked up at the Goodwill.  I forgot to take a picture of our stick blender.  Oh well.  If you are not sure what a stick blender is I am sure you can do a google search.  My camera is currently in use :-)

There you have it!  Lots to look forward to.  Along with the above we have a major outside 'spring cleaning' that we need to do.  Thankfully it has been a mild winter and we should not have any problem with getting out there to do so.  We have some fencing to put up so that we can make another area for the goats to live in.  Goats are very, very prone to worms.  In order to keep them healthy you need to have separate areas for them to rotate living in so as to cut down the worm population.  In the mean time we will focus on what we can do, which is to make one extra living area (they need more, but that will definitely be a future project), put down some diatomacious earth, and supplementing their diet with herbs and greens.

I tried to add a new button to the top menu of my blog.  Let me just say, for the record, I computers are like a second language for me...foreign! Ha, ha!  I want to be able to record our homestead's production.  I want to be able to know what has worked for us, and what we need to try differently.  It is hard to do that just on memory.  The girls started notebooks for this purpose, but I would like a back up to make sure we don't loose our information.  

Gardening plans

Taking a wee break from the last two posts in my Big Changes Series.  I thought I would put up our plans for our garden expansion.  I am sure we could do so much more, but for now this will have to do.  We made some great headway in the herb garden, but looking at these pictures, and the abundance of warm weather we are having I think we had better get to work!!!  Pronto!!  You will have to excuse the wobbly lines.  Our mouse is on the fritz and I was having a hard time getting it to move more than a cm at a time :-) 

Above is our current garden beds.  The red outline behind the beds is where we would like to expand.  Without moving the laundry line we can get two more beds in that space.

I would like to put a bunch of strawberry plants here.

This spot is in the dog area.  The back of our house faces south, so most of our planting needs to be done back there.  With the front of the house up high on a foundation it casts a long shadow on our front yard, making at least half of it unusable.  Our back yard is not as large, and most of it is full of trees.  The above spot would make a great blueberry area.

This area is further along the back of the house, on the other side of the back stairs that you see in the previous picture.  You can see that we need to cut back a bunch of brush.  Not sure what to plant here.  Maybe one or two elderberry bushes and some other veggies.

You can see we've made progress on this area up front.  This is the area that I took a picture of with the rocks bordering it the other day.  This will be the herb garden.

This area is furthest from the house in our front yard.  We want to put a bunch of dwarf fruit trees here.  Again we have more brush to remove.  We have a gentleman who will be dropping off the chipped trees and brush that he gets come spring.  That will hang out along our woods line.  We are hoping to get some free windows to make a makeshift green house/ cold frame.  We saw a stack on craigslist the other day.  We'll have to keep our eyes out for some more.

Along with this we will be putting up more fencing for our goats so we can rotate their living area.  It does no good to keep goats when they are too sick to drink their milk.  Along with rotating them we will also use the chipped wood to help dry up the soggy areas around the barn.  We also need to give the barn a thorough cleaning.  We think at least one of our goats is pregnant.  We think she is due around the end of April.  Plus we've been thinking about our chicken situation.  We have many chickens, but few eggs.  Our egg production has gone up since giving them the oyster supplement, but not enough compared to the number of chickens we have.  We've talked to the girls about 'retiring' the older chickens and bringing in some new ones.  There is a very good reason why many people get a new batch of chick every two years.  After two years the egg production of a chicken goes way down.

Shared on Simple Lives Thursday and Homestead Barn Hop