I’ve been a busy little bee lately, and it feels like I get nothing accomplished. That’s life right? This year has been a total disaster as far as my food growing plans went, and other stuff I guess too. We had a terribly cold spring with lots of late frost. Then, the grasshoppers and squash bugs came in full force. They ate all of my seedlings minus the corn, not to mention the 5 rogue hens that have made my life impossible getting into the new raised beds I made. It has been chaos. But amidst the chaos, there have been some exciting things like, we got a goat named Butterscotch, who by the way is NOT nice, one of the rogue hens had a hidden nest in weeds and hatched 14 chicks, we got two Muscovy adult females; one had three ducklings of which only one of those survived our bloodthirsty duck and chicken killing dog, we also bought a Drone! It’s probably the most exciting piece of equipment we have right now. The tractor is on hold until the end of summer, and I can hardly wait for that! We have a list of things in order of priority that we need to get done on the homestead and it sometimes feels like we will never get to them. Patience is something I need to practice well, otherwise I will go insane waiting!

While we wait for the bigger things, I’ve been doing a lot for my future garden area. I’ve built some raised beds and have more ready to be finished. I’ve covered the ground with cardboard to kill weeds. I have hay and mulch to spread over the cardboard and I’ve been building a fence with pallets again since we have to wait for the permanent fence to be done.

I also started harvesting our Cornish chickens!

There are some things I learned after we saw the property on the drone. It gave us a good idea on what needs to be done and where to start:

1. We don’t even use an eighth of our entire property as you will see. My perception of where I thought things should be has completely changed! The drone will aid us now in planning out our farms layout and design.

2. We have a mess. We are super embarrassed by it, but at the moment we can’t do much about it. There’s trash that was here before us that we picked up and piled, trash that is still scattered, there are buildings that need to be tore down, demo from the remodel needing to be hauled away, wood that needs to be neatly piled, and trash from this past wind (spring) season that needs to be collected and thrown away. All of that needs to be done while our truck is still in the shop, Ken working 6 days a week, 13 hour days, I taking care of the kids, 6 dogs, 30+ chickens with 30+chicks, 16 ducks, a goat, the pond, my garden, the house, laundry, dinner, cleaning, washing dishes ahhhhhhh! Needless to say, it’s not easy, BUT NOW WE SEE just how much we have to do and what we can do.

3. I know now exactly what we are capable of doing with this much property. The drone was able to really give us a good perspective of our land and how we can utilize it. There is so much potential here than we ever imagined. Seriously, the drone gave us the visual we needed. My garden needs to be bigger, a lot of things we have going on need to be bigger! And spread out further. But geez when you have to actually walk the space, it seems like a mile away. And when you have animals, you want to keep them close just in case something bad happens. I save my animals daily from stupid things they get into and do, because they are near I can keep tabs on them. So maybe the next thing we need to invest in is a 4 wheeler or Polaris side by side. That may need to be bumped up on the list of priorities!

More on the Drone. We purchased a Mavic Pro that takes pictures and video in 4K. So you get really crisp photos and video! I just need to practice my maneuvering skills so that my videos are smooth and cinematic. We are still so stoked about it! I don’t care how old you are, this is the ultimate toy for an adult who never had expensive cool toys! Lol

This is about 3/4 of the property. The other back quarter is not pictured. See how much we have to work with? All of this wide open space we are not using yet. We still have to figure out where we want to put the workshop. Do we want it on the other front side or by the house?

Here is a video I made of an area that used to be fenced in for livestock. It just needs new wood posts or t posts. It’s in the top right side of the aerial photo (below the road) by the small building. When we had first bought the property we let people come and clean, but they took all the t posts, and obviously did no real trash hauling. Thankfully, they left the barbed wire intact. There are also structures that the wind tore down but the wood posts remain. We can build them up and make some shelters for whatever livestock we decide to keep there.

The area needs to be cleaned up of junk as well and lots of building material. Some of it is still good to reuse!

I’m so happy that we are finally able to share our place and show you where we are on our progress. Things are moving along slow but steady and I have faith that one day we will look back at these images and videos and say “wow we have done a lot and have come so far”! I do sometimes wish we had extra hands around to help as it does get hard, but then I have this feeling of great accomplishment and pride of everything we have done on our own!

Until next time, god bless!

-Cristina