Honestly, not a lot. The weather has been crappy this year. The wind, severe. Snow, lots. Now it’s raining of course, I’m trying to get stuff done but blah. We have all the things to put up new obstacles on the obstacle course and I’m just waiting for weather to cooperate.
I’m also waiting on the garden. This year I’ve ordered wood chips and I’m buying compost and I might weed fabric. This better work out for me because I have the worst time growing things.
Still have pigs though we’ve added a mini pig who is satanic (jumps in the air to try to bite us). That’s a story because we were basically tricked into taking her. Blah!
I have found the pigs to be surprising in their usefulness. Yes, they are delicious and extremely cheap to keep spring through fall. I didn’t expect the million other things they’ve done for the property and those that live here.
First of all, when we bought the pigs we had a problem. I actually asked game and fish to come out and try to figure out what was murdering all of our poultry. We lost a lot of them; peacocks, ducks, chickens, etc. It was determined it was likely a raccoon and we couldn’t catch it because it kept breaking out of our live trap. I had just accepted the end of poultry keeping. Then Joey was brought to our property and suddenly the killing stopped. We haven’t lost a single animal since getting Joey 4 years ago. So, highly recommend putting a boar in your barn. Apparently nothing wants to mess with one!
Next pig benefit is the way they roam the property digging randomly. Our property needs some disruption. It also unearths things for the poultry to eat. They love to follow them around picking up things they’ve dug up for them.
One very unexpected thing is that the pigs have absolutely no problem breaking the ice in the waterers. I try to make sure they have fresh, unfrozen water twice a day. It’s cold while I’m at work though. It freezes over. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone out to give them more water to find the ice broken and random animals taking advantage. I’ve found the cats in their water. The chickens, of course. Wild birds and rabbits. Water isn’t found often around these parts and in the winter it gets rough. The pigs are personally responsible for hydrating every animal on our property.
They also keep the chickens warm. I’ve found the chickens sleeping on them when it’s real cold out. Oh piggies, I do love you!
I have always had a problem keeping a neat and tidy house. The clutter gets to me. It makes me feel anxious and out of control. I try to not buy things, decorations and the like, so that I don’t have things out looking cluttered. I do have a wonderful, big family though and they like to shower us with lovely gifts. I do love the decorations we’ve received but add decorations to every day clutter and toys and it really starts getting out of control quickly.
So, I am trying to embrace minimalism. I will never really be “minimalist” because there are things we just need to keep for our various activities. The basement has shelves holding home canned goods and the supplies to do that as well as slaughter, process, seal and grind our home grown meat. I also have a fair amount of tools, hoarded nails and pieces of wood that I will keep because you never know when you might need to patch something in the barn or a fence, etc. So, I am going to have more “stuff” than a minimalist would. I’m ok with that.
What I have done is start with my closet, which is huge and yet was hard to walk in and finding something to wear was difficult. I got rid of everything that didn’t fit. Anything with a hole in it was thrown away. Then I started looking at the clothes I was keeping, which let me tell ya, was still a ton, and started picking over it. I don’t want to have to get up in the morning and stand in my closet overwhelmed by the selection. I want to just go in and have clothes that fit and I know are nice and pull them out quickly. I’m not there yet. I’m trying to do a little bit of it a week. It’s coming along though. The first two pictures are before, the third one is in process. As you can see I still have a million clothes, but my closet is much improved.
Then I started de-cluttering decor. I had pictures stacked in my bedroom because I didn’t have a place for them. So the pictures I love are now hung up and the rest, the rest have been donated. I hope someone else finds them and appreciates them.
For some reason we had 3 drink blender bottoms and a motor. Why?
Toys and the kitchen are things that are pretty constantly gone over because they are high traffic, high use areas. Even still we pared them down even more. I also went through junk drawers and closets throwing things out, donating things and organizing what is left. If you saw the closet in one of the bathrooms you wouldn’t probably see a huge difference. There is still wrapping paper, veterinary supplies, incubator and rags. Lots of things still in there but when I see it, I got rid of half of what I’d kept. It feels really nice.
My goal is to feel less stressed. To have a nicer house that isn’t difficult to manage. To not spend so much time picking up. Time that I haven’t been able to play with the kids. I want to have more time for my babies and my passions, which isn’t house cleaning.
I’ve had a lot of garden experiments happening and I feel confident in saying I can’t garden. I try and fail spectacularly.
2 years ago I added rotting bedding and manure from the barn to my garden rows and I really though that would be spectacular. All of that hay mixed up with poop had to be the perfect garden fertilizer/mulch. It was a decent mulch but I can’t say that anything I planted into it did better than anything else. A depressing failure.
I have lined my in ground garden with newspaper several times and then mulched over the top of that with wood chips. With the transport equipment we have (nothing more than my car) buying wood shavings in bags is the best I can do. This does very little to suppress the weeds and even though it has been breaking down over the years it seems to not be feeding the soil at all.
I get giant bags of leaves from my work. I happen to know they do not spray so I feel confident taking them. I will say that things grown in the leaves do do better than the other growing mediums, however the leaves have a very difficult time sticking around in our Wyoming winds.
So come spring I have a new plan, one I have resisted for ages. I am going to weed fabric. But more than that I have to do something to help my soil. I’m going to collect as much cow manure as I can (in rubber maid tubs, transported in my car). I plan to manure and then weed fabric. I might put wood shavings over the top of that. I’m undecided. I think it will be ugly but I am so hoping it helps me grow something, anything.
I will be sharing another post full of my greenhouse woes. It is not holding up this winter unfortunately. It was also a disappointment during the growing season. While things grew very large in it I did not get very much fruit at all, and that is with us
I have two hives this year and I want them to make it through the winter. On advice of a local bee expert I took the boxes with honey and condensed the bees into a single box each. As such they absolutely need to be fed. I wanted to be able to feed them without having to open up the body of the hive while it’s cold out. I also want to prevent the bees from having access to the empty box where the food is to be. Being cheap, and searching the internet for various ideas, I made this up out of items we had in the garage.
Strips of wood, this is cut from our porch. I cut them into 1 foot pieces.Excess window screen.I stapled it around the wood long ways first.Then I folded over the ends and stapled it. This makes it firm and helps prevent the bees climbing out the ends.Nice, firm bee feeder.Can hold 3 jars along the length.AND it’s in.
The most dangerous building project yet. Dangerous because we bought a 25′ rope and 25′ turns out to be incredibly high in the air. It was pretty touch and go as we lifted this 16′ beam into the air. It turns out we only went 17′ into the air. Even then, very scary endeavor! We had some nice tips to help out this time though.
The first tip given to us was to put some boards up ahead of time to hold the beam in place while we get it situated. We had some spare 4x4s I screwed up with 8″ lag screws. It worked perfectly. Then we used the same lag screws to tack the beam into place while we bolted it in. Unfortunately I did not get any pics of the bolting process, but you get the idea. Same as everything else we’ve bolted in.
We intend to put three ropes up. I have a swivel bracket on the very edge, overhanging. Two ropes will go in the middle.
We intend to dig a pit on one side of the obstacle and pile the dirt on the other for a ramp. That will make swinging on the rope easier, as right now it’s pretty iffy if you’ll swing nicely or hit a pole. The bracket that hangs on the outside of the poles will be the climbing rope, no pit will be dug there.
