Wait…I still have a blog?

This is horrible, I have neglected my poor blog, nearly a year since I posted last and it feels like I have lived two.  Our first year in our home, with out bigger than we should have started with garden was a success.  We are still consuming the fruits, or more appropriately, the vegetables of our labor.  In addition to the produce we produced not 100 feet from our back door – I was fortunate enough to get a few deer this fall as well; as a result we are living high on the hog with lean, truly free range protein and garden vegetables and preserves.  Aside from our garden last year we planted a couple of peach trees, -which seem to have made the winter, found a neighbor who is also a bee keeper willing to keep a hive here – which is fascinating to watch and spectacular for pickle production and we put in a compost bin.

We also did some landscaping and got a couple of cats, well actually we got one cat we rescued from being coyote bait, he was scrawny and malnourished, someone thought he needed a friend and as such we got him a friend.  But let me tell you what I have learned about cats, cats are not dogs – good grief these two HATED each other when we brought the second one home, hated, would not tolerate each other.  Because of their deep seated hatred for one another we created the friendship cage – maybe a little obsessive but we did it and after several months of the friendship cage and slowly acclimating them to one another and then allowing them to be together we have a couple of cats who seem to be the best of friends, in fact Hazel the second cat we brought home will cry and cry and Finley, the first is out of sight.  Who knew cats could be such a pain?  But they are barn cats – and thus they live in the barn, but fear not the ‘cat condo’ as it is known is quite posh and climate controlled, these are the yuppiest barn cats one will meet.

As I write this our seedlings for this year a growing away in the science fare experiment that is my grow box, surely I will write more about the grow box in the future but is my attempt to liberate my seedlings from the pillaging of the mice and provide them with a climate controlled location to thrive prior to being subjected to the outdoors.  It’s also as close as I think we are going to come to a greenhouse, even though it is in the basement, like I said more on this later.

In addition to the garden this year we are going to be adding some chickens to our portfolio for eggs – we are getting them for eggs.  Well more correctly I am more anxious for the chicken poop they will leave behind I can use to build up my garden, but the eggs will be a nice bonus.  We have a bit going on here but I wanted to make sure I remembered how to use this thing before we get started on another summer season, one with hopefully some updates.