I admit it.

I’ve been very negligent of the blog since 2020 began.

If you know us, you know we bought our farm July 2019, and you know we had a million plans and ideas. I swear, I had great intentions of keeping everyone informed on how we were doing, what we were raising, showing off things we were building. It started off well. We spent the summer remodeling the house and cleaning up a lot of trash the former owners left us. We spent the fall building raised beds for the garden and fencing in the back and putting railings on the deck. We spent the winter shoveling soil into the new beds, planting fruit trees and berries, putting an electric fence round the new orchard, and we lost one of our pups to Lepto. (If you live in the country and don’t know about Lepto, do your pets a favor and look it up. It can be deadly. There is a vaccine.)

Then 2020 arrived.

Wow! It’s seriously a blur!! I started the plants inside in February and March, planted cool crops in the raised beds in March, transplanted the starts in April. After that, I don’t remember much…

Good morning, sunrise.

Summer is the busiest time on the farm. Work begins at sun up and ends at sun down with still more to do tomorrow.

The garden was super successful this year. Making jam, drying herbs, canning and freezing veggies took up every weekend, all weekend. Now that September is almost here, I’ll admit, I’m a little garden-weary. Do you feel like that at the end of the season? I still have luffa, lima beans, sunflowers, and tomatoes growing, and I planted some cool-weather spinach, lettuce, and summer squash, but I just really don’t even want to walk into the garden. I’m pooped. I’m picking up strawberry plants in September and have asparagus crowns in the fridge to plant, so I cleaned up two beds for them, but I have a big negative attitude about cleaning up the rest. But, hey, look at this pantry!! And that’s only one wall. The other wall looks the same, well different stuff, but you get the idea.

Outside of gardening and food prep, we kept ourselves super busy this summer, including the fact that we were both working from home 40+ hours a week. We built a rabbit hutch in April and got four bunnies to help fertilize the garden. We built and stained shutters for the house in May and picked up some Comfrey plants for the bun buns. We stained the 1000 square foot deck (and all that fencing and deck railings we put up) in June. We processed 25 Cornish X chickens in July. We put together a gazillion-piece greenhouse in August. We put a new roof on the barn last week! (Now it might look like someone actually lives here!) Sometime during the middle of that, we had three massive storms blow through, one that knocked our power out for a whole week, another that nearly knocked down two 150-yr-old oaks (requiring Farm Hero to buy a new chainsaw), and a third that put a branch through our roof, so add that to Farm Hero’s honey-do list.

We’ve accomplished a lot this year between holes in the roof, snakes in the coop, rats in the barn, flies, spiders, and the occasional wasp sting. I got stung once, Farm Hero got stung about four times. And stupid ants. What’s up with the stupid ants??

Coming up? Sleep? No, I wish. We’re building more raised beds in October, ordering soil and shoveling in November, and replacing the master bedroom floor in December. At some point I should Spring clean. LOL. You don’t actually believe that, do you?

Did I mention we have really, really big plans for 2021??

One of my big plans is to blog regularly. Seriously. I promise.