New Year's Resurrection

January is a time of new beginnings-- despite the fact that the growing cycle to which I am anchored begins not in January but in spring. As I write, the ground is frozen hard and snow covered, but to me the deep winter is an incubation period. A time to plan and dream, a time when growth is unseen, like a baby in the womb or a seed under ground, but no less real and important.

All that to say that I have decided to pick up this blog again and try, once more, to record the happenings and my reflections on Pleasant Places Farm.

A number of factors have kept me away from the blog. During the last couple of years I have needed to take a break from concentrating on the farm. My work at The Learning Center! and family concerns have claimed the bulk of my attention. My daughter's interest in horses, which we wanted to support, meant that our hillside pasture and bottomland were given over to their feeding and excercise needs for awhile. After the first push to fence and build outbuildings, my husband needed a well-deserved rest. It is very difficult to run a farm and work a full time job, though most farmers do it. It is even more difficult to build a farm from scratch in your "free time".

We saw that, with both of us employed off farm and our daughter a full time student, we needed to rethink or farming choices. The dairy goats went first, because as cute as they are and as delicious as the milk was, dairying is a full time endeavor--every day, twice a day. Way too confining for us. Now, with our daughter, about
( I think) to leave the nest, the horses have also moved on. We loved them too, but they are a very needy group on the whole, and we never seemed to be able to give them the hours of attention they deserved.

So in the winnowing out process some things have gone, but others have stayed. We have in the last couple of growing seasons constructed a small raised bed garden that has been very successful. We will continue to expand that as well as add more fruit trees and berries. The chickens have stayed and will stay, being easy care critters who earn their keep.

We are considering some additions to our farm. We have learned that to fit our growing system, our land and our lifestyle, whatever is added needs to be short term, easy care and in some way profitable. Not that they all have to turn a monetary gain, but they must make a positive contribution to the farm system. That means either they or their product can be sold at profit, they add valuable manure to the soil, they eat bugs, scare away predators, they till soil to prepare it for reseeding, they control weeds...you get the picture. No freeloaders. We are thinking of maybe getting some goats in the spring, meat goats this time, for weed control, carrying them to fall and then selling them or having them butchered. I am also considering more chickens and perhaps a couple of turkeys. The chickens would be for eggs and perhaps I may raise a few extra heritage breed pullets for sale. The turkeys would be for own consumption. And, in the back of my mind, there is the idea of a pig. We have so much waste from school that it might be a good idea to get one in Fall and feed it on food scraps until about February or March. Then to the freezer he goes.

So while the snow flies, I have more than enough to do planning the garden and making decisions about livestock.