I know Ive probably said this a dozen times before on this blog. Like, “we are getting so close to becoming a farm” or “oh my gosh I’m so excited our place is looking like a farm”. So please, forgive me for the repetition of excitement, and I give you permission to roll your eyes each and every time! But, I just can’t help it. Every time we get a step ahead, every time we add a new animal, build something or make a farm purchase. The excitement and happiness that comes through involuntarily explodes out of me. I’m left with no choice but to express this immense emotion in some way. If you know me personally, you get a call. If you follow me on social media, you get a post with my never ending use of phrases like “y’all, I’m so happy right now!” You get it, I’m super excited!

I know it’s been a while since my last blog post, I’m really sorry about that. I have a really bad habit of taking on a million projects and overwhelming myself. That’s no excuse because this is supposed to be a journal to look back on, so I should be documenting everything here like I do on my social media accounts. With that said, here’s what all we’ve been up to.

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In February I started building a permanent garden fence with pallets. We expanded our garden, brought in truck loads of mulch, planted fruit trees, built raised garden beds, started a YouTube channel (which I have neglected as well), began redoing our well setup, and began building our new chicken coop and run. Also, started hatching our own ducklings and chicks, so we’ve quadrupled our number of ducks and doubled our chicken flock. Needless to say we have been putting in work! There’s much left to do and finish, but at least the foundations have been started and we are working on them.

Just because we’ve been doing things in the right direction doesn’t mean that things have not gone wrong. I’m having major troubles with my flock of chickens. Something is killing my roosters and I have yet to figure out what is going on. I had bad luck with my chicks but great success and luck with my ducklings. We had infestations of plague proportions this year with pests that ate all our vegetation and new fruit trees we planted. We basically did not plant anything. What little we did grow was devoured by the time the main planting season came around. There were thousands upon thousands of grasshoppers that swarmed us leaving nothing behind. We had a very long dry spell after winter that created the perfect habitat for them this year. My birds had a good time eating them, but they barely made a dent. They could only eat so much of them too before getting bored. It was quite disheartening. Now we are at the point of reconsidering our entire growing operation and where we will grow our greens and perennial fruits in the future.

I am going to have to research a ton on the life cycles of grasshoppers, what they do not like to eat and how to fight back against them. Unfortunately, it may be an uphill battle because we live right in the middle of thousands upon thousands of acres of grasslands. They may still end up swarming our place no matter what we do to prevent them on our soil.

Besides the battles we’ve had, there’s much to be happy and proud about. My dad gave us a bunch of animals that I am so grateful for! Making our place feel like a real farm. And I’m sure I’ll say that a dozen more times throughout our journey. We’ve added pigs, and a pony to the mix! The plan is to be able to move the pigs and plant some perennial grasses behind them, creating pasture to supplement everyone’s feed, plus regenerating our soil and creating water retention. THAT IS THE PLAN. Whether it works or not we’ll leave it up to nature!

We have loads of new projects to come and again, am so excited for what the future holds for our little homestead. Until next time! God bless!

-Cristina