2023 in Review
2023 in Review
I'm hoping next year I will be bette about more consistently blogging. When we got the Facebook farm page up and running, it made it a lot easier to just post pictures that way, but I know you all want the glorious details that don't accompany the pictures. (Or you don't, but I like to include them so that WE remember what all we have gone through).
Here's a quick rundown of every major thing I remember happening last year.
The year started out great! Moana (our Meishan sow) had her first litter of nine in March! She ended up squashing one, but that's kind of to be expected with pigs. There are some things you can do to decrease the likelihood, but it's still likely.
We sold all of the piglets except one which are keeping to raise for meat next fall. Nonni named him Kevin Bacon, haha.
We even learned how to castrate pigs--which wasn't near as bad as our brother-in-law made it sound. Sorry, Brett!
I was asked to write a homesteading article for the Catholic magazine of the Diocese, and the editor came and visited our farm to take pictures! We had three baby goats born while he was here, and that's when everything went downhill.
The goats were in a pasture with our donkey Pancake at the time, and he saw baby goats as a threat. Five minutes after this baby was born (about thirty steps after we finished picking them up and petting them with the kiddos), he grabbed the only girl by her neck and snapped it. She died in my lap right in front of the children and the magazine editor. Probably the saddest day we've had on the farm yet.
We moved the Momma, her babies, and her pregnant sister to the turkey pen (Moana was dangerously sniffing the baby goats) to wait out the other babies, and she had three within the week! Triplets are not common with Nigerian Dwarves--normally they have twins.
We noticed almost right away that Annie wasn't letting one of her triplets eat. Every time she tried to latch, Annie would walk off. It got to the point where the littler girl was so weak she could barely stand. We brought her inside, bottle fed her, warmed her up, aaaaand ended up keeping her in the house until she was old enough to sell.
Having a baby goat in the house was certainly an adventure!
She even got to go on a roadtrip with us to Bowling Green.
While we were busy raising a goat in the house, Annie got really sick and stopped feeding her other two. They died overnight and we found them the next morning with their hooves missing and part of them eaten by rats. It was HORRIBLE!
We took Annie to the vet and found out she had a Worm Bloom; something we didn't know could happen. We wormed our goats but apparently, you need to worm them right before birthing or their weakened immune system will allow the parasites to exponentially grow. We gave her medicine, but she died within two days.
Fast forward about a month, and Jacks got hit by a car. He and Lilly follow us when we go over to my mom's house (at the end of our driveway basically). They got a little too brave and were wandering across the road to the neighbors. (Lily has been known to go play with the neighbor's kids and even keep some construction workers down the street company despite our best efforts to disuade her). A guy came up over the hill, and Jacks got hit in the hind end by a car. Not just any car. He got hit by the dog warden of Harrodsburg. Sigh. Luckily, very luckily, he was fine. He had some bruising from what we could tell from the limping, but he didn't have any broken bones!
Fast forward another month or so. Remember those crazy wind storms we had in Kentucky this year? The first one ended up with tornado sirens going off right in the middle of class. The students and I camped out in the hallway (with baby Luke who I didn't have a babysitter for that day) until the power went out. We stopped by Pippa's on the way home to pick up the other two and ended up having to spend more time in her basement while more tornado warnings swept the area. Soon, I was getting a call from Sam.
While he was resting at home on the couch, he heard a GIANT CRASH. The hickory tree right next to our house fell, missing our house by mere inches, smashing the deck, smashing the pool fence, breaking part of our sliding door, and ripping off part of the gutter. We missed thousands of dollars in damage by a hair.
Luckily, we were able to talk to insurance, and they were able to get us some money to help with the tree removal and replacements to the deck, gutters, and fencing that we needed to do.
Fast forward a couple weeks, we are out looking at the garden or something, the kids are chasing the dogs, it's a beautiful day, and Jacks ran into the pile of sheet metal we have stacked next to the hoop coop waiting to be turned into animal housing. It's been there for over a year, but he hit it just right to tear through his Achilles tendon. He was bleeding so much we had to wrap him in a towel, scoop me and him up in the back of the car and drive two houses down the street to the vet. By the time we got there, I had to take my boots off because there was so much blood on them, my jeans were soaked, and so was the towel.
They took Jacks back for emergency surgery and was able to get him stitched up and the ligament reattached.
We spent the next couple months visiting the vet multiple times a week to get his bandages changed and his wound cleaned.
FINALLY he was given the go ahead to come out of the cast. He ran around the farm like you wouldn't believe. He was so happy! We did notice that the ligament didn't reattach exactly correct, so instead of walking on his pad like dogs normally do, his hock hit the ground making him look like he had one giant foot.
I started noticing he was wearing through the fur on the bottom of his hock, and I tried to limit some of his running time by bringing him in when I noticed bleeding on the pavement or sidewalk. He needed to build up calluses to protect his leg on the joint he wasn't used to touching the ground. Or so I thought.
He was limping badly within three days and upon inspection, he had worn through the skin all the way to the joint and even part of the joint was missing. He had run too much on the paved driveway!
We took him back to the vet and they said our only option was amputation. After the thousands of dollars we had spent on him already, we wanted a second opinion. We found some custom hock splints you can order online to keep that joint off the ground and did our best to do exactly what the vet had been doing over the next couple of weeks. His skin started to heal, and with the antibiotics and everything, the infection was going away.
When we finally got in to see a new vet, they convinced us that the hock was not going to be the permanent solution we needed for Jacks to have the most comfortable life. We had to schedule to get his leg removed.
Rosie had a surprise litter of four that I found in the back of the barn when I went to feed the pigs one day!
We went on a "hiking" trip to Bryson City with Sam's parents and his sister's family! The kids had a great time, and the cabin was GORGEOUS!
While waiting for the upcoming surgery, I got another devastating phone call from Sam. He lost his job. Corning has had some problems with production lines going down and needed to make some cuts. Without going too much in detail, let's just say he didn't exactly get along with one of the people in charge of firing (in fact, no one did. But this individual really disliked Sam).
This ended up being a blessing in disguise. Between switching from night shift to day shift every four weeks, I felt like I was a single parent with three kids trying to manage a farm and the house by myself. Sam was always tired and always grumpy because he couldn't get any good sleep with the schedule like it was. Truth be told, his sleep is still screwed up almost a year later.
We took the next month of him home to get some things done around the farm that had been on our to-do list. The biggest thing we tackled was building a four quadrant pasture for rotational grazing for our pigs and goats.
This involved installing rebar posts into the ground and hooking up three strands of electric around the entire thing. 
We had lots of problems with pigs escaping (which explains why we have a pig due on December 30th), so we've since upped it to 6 strands.
I think we got two of the quadrants done (enough to put the boys in one and the girls in the other) when Bruno, one of our male goats, almost broke my arm (I had to go get an X-ray to be sure it wasn't). We were trying to get him and the male pigs into their cube houses so we could move them to the new pasture (so much easier to do it this way than lead the pigs with food. Trust us.) I took that as a sign from the Holy Spirit that now wasn't the time for goats after everything else that had happened. So, we sold our goat herd and got another male Kune Kune (that was named George Kune) to breed to the younger girls.
We also spent the time installing some feeders on the corners of the barn for the main chicken flock and the rooster pen so we wouldn't have to go up everyday to give them food (or refill their feeders as often). They hold 6 50 lb bags of food (and I learned macrame in the process)!
Sam also taught me to drive the tractor while we were doing things around the farm, and I even started and drove it all by myself (to do something I can't even remember at this point). All I know is, he told me to leave it in gear when I parked so that it wouldn't roll, because the parking break wasn't as strong as it once was.
The next day during naps, I heard a big crash. The tractor rolled down the hill and smashed into a tree and the side of Sam's car.
Sam had JUST finished getting the brackets made and painted for the front loader a few months before, and the front loader was now bent like crazy.
Other shenanigans that went on this past year (not in the correct order):
I made and we installed a farm sign up front. The idea is to take down the boards when the item is no longer available. The sharpie (under the poly) is starting to fade a year later, so I need to take it indoors and touch it up. 
I bought Sam a new ring (he lost his two years ago) that was made with meteorites and dinosaur bones (mine and the kids interests). It's beautiful! We went back to the Red River dam for the first time since he proposed. I made him and the kids hike through the rain to about half way to "our spot" before we gave up with the storm.
Mom and I tapped her trees and our trees for maple syrup again this year. We have since decided to start a Maple Syrup tree sharing program. People can pay a lower-than-market-maple syrup-price to have us tap their trees and give them some of the maple syrup from their very own trees! We didn't have too many takers for this upcoming spring, but we are still excited.
We put up three swarm boxes--the bees chose a tree over all three. We cannot reach them, and we cannot harvest honey from the tree. The hole they chose has been long inhabited by squirrels, so we don't know how far it goes down. We don't want to use a bee vacuum and risk not getting the queen. So we are hoping to catch a swarm from this new colony this upcoming spring. Fingers crossed.
We bought five turkeys.
I wanted more turkeys to breed with the two we have so that we can increase our chances of turkeys hatching. The hatch rate is SUPER LOW, and at this point we've only been able to hatch one. It got moved to the barn and lived a couple weeks before it died.
Then all of our turkeys we bought died.
We found out that a) if the turkeys run out of water for more than 12 hours they have a give up on life switch and just immediately die, and b) you have to keep them "off the ground" or constantly moving around so they don't succumb to parasites. We added more feeders and an 11 gallon water tank to the coop. The people we bought them from felt sorry for us and allowed us to get more turkeys from them (they were having similar issues and wanted to get out of turkeys). By growing them in the chicken tractor, we managed to only lose one more turkey this time. By the time winter came, we were able to move all five mature turkeys into the rooster pen with our other two.
Only then, Don developed gape worm, couldn't breathe or eat despite the medicine we gave him, and died within a week. Turkeys are the worst.
We also got ducks from the people we bought turkeys from! We had lost all but two of our ducks over winter/spring, and they were a father daughter pair. I think we've lost two or three ducks to predators since we got them this summer, but the others are hanging on strong.
We fixed up the chicken coop we built in Georgia many years ago and lent to my dad, but the ducks hate it and won't go in. (We think it's an issue with the ramp).
I wish they would because searching for the eggs they lay in the mornings is the worst. They almost never lay in the same place.
One of our duck hens got eaten while nesting this past spring. They lay before 9am, and there was a predator that had found her clutch and was going there to eat her egg every morning after she laid it (and before I could get there). And then she disappeared.
We did managed to hatch one of the ducklings, and that's the daughter duck still alive in our duck flock today! 
We also managed to hatch quite a few batches of meat chickens as well as some easter Eggers, olive Eggers, and Wyanodotes.
We converted a junk chicken pen we found behind my parent's house into a second chicken tractor and used them to grow the meat chickens (and unwanted roosters hatched of the other breeds) to butcher size.
We kept all the females and butchered the males--ending up with 20-30 chickens in our freezer. They are small, mind you, and somxe of them are a little chewy but it's progress! We are getting closer to raising all of the chicken we need for the year.
Or so I thought. Right at the end of the season, our male New Hampshire Red of our breeders got his head stuck in the feeder and died. We did go ahead and purchase 15 new chicks which stayed in the brooder until almost the beginning of December. Fast forward to now and 13 of them have died due to various problems with rats. And I'm not convinced that one of the remaining two is a male, so now I'm not sure what we are going to do! I've tried posting to the Lawrenceburg Chicken Swap page before about NHR, but no one had any. They aren't a super common breed. Most people just use the Cornish crosses for their meat breeds.
Let's see what else.
Rylee played t-ball for the first time!
We drained the pool and started trying to do some crap removal.
After ten hours of working, we only cleaned about four feet in one direction--very disheartening. We still aren't sure how we are going to clean it out efficiently. I told Sam we need to have a farm work day, but he doesn't want people down there messing with the funky water.
We had an amazing garden set up in the basement last spring to start seeds, and everything was looking AMAZING!
Until all the plants just stopped growing. No idea why (though we do have some speculations). Even after bringing them outside when spring was over, they didn't grow. We kind of lost motivation after that.
We did a little with lettuce and managed to have one batch of peas (which were definitely the best peas we had eaten) and a couple meals with kale. Mostly, the garden got overgrown with weeds and we didn't have a great watering system down yet, so it was kind of left on its own.
We did end the season by tilling a larger portion of the yard to use for the garden this upcoming year. And I ordered some cover crops to plant to help amend the soil. We really want to use a no-till method as much as possible, but we also can't afford the amount of compost we would need to cover the ground with like 8 inches of compost. So for now, we are attempting the cover crop method. You plant the crop, let it grow over winter, then press it down flat, tarp it for ten days, and plant directly in the dead plants (they will act like a mulch weed barrier).
We did some work on the septic tank (which needs more work to be honest).
Sam got a new job working for the state mid summer. He works in the water permit department (there's an actual official name for it) and has been in training for a while. He almost finished his training when a co-worker retired and he got offered that job instead. So now he's a WET analyst/scientist/engineer or something. They are still working on the official title, haha. But he gets to work from home two days a week, and it's very low stress (even if he does have to drive 45 mins to work the other three days). He's very happy with it, and it's been SO much better for our family than his previous job.
Our grape vines pulled through the winter! We didn't get any grapes off of them this year as we still need to get the watering system figured out, but that was exciting!
And our fruit trees are also doing fine! Again, we didn't get to eat any apples or pears, but it turns out we didn't need to! The neighbors gave us a CRAP TON of apples, and we picked pears from an elderly lady down the street. I ended up canning somewhere around 20 quarts of pears and just as much apple sauce.
Which meant we spent a lot of time in the kitchen this fall playing with my new juicer! And mom and I did something new as well. Once I was applesauce out, we used the apple puree to make apple fruit leather (the fancy name for fruit roll ups). They were SO good.
We even used some of the leftover grapes from CCs house (after everyone had made jelly) to make some grape fruit leather, and it was SUPER DELICIOUS.
Mom and I sold at the craft fair again this September and then were invited to sell in Paint Lick about a month later! We had a blast, as aways, and ended up making a few new things this year.
One of the new things we made were Peacock feather pens and feather earrings! The earrings turned out SO cute, and the kids and I look for feathers almost every time we go up to the barn now so that we can make more.
Mom and I also sold in the 127 Yardsale for a few days this August while the kids, Sam and I stayed in the camper overnight by the stuff. We were testing it out for future vacations.
We took the kids camping in the camper, and it was super fun! We kayaked around the lake, saw some herons and an otter, went metal detecting on the beach, and geode hunting! For our first run at camper camping, it went pretty smoothly!
I made our Halloween costumes as always! We went as Jasmine, Abu, Aladdin, and I was the lamp (with a genie in my belly!)
The second vacation we took did not go as smoothly.
We went to Florida after Thanksgiving( a little cold but it was the only time we could go) to Ft. Pickens. We did make a small stop in Athens to visit Cynthia (and our old house!) on our way. We had a great time catching up, and the kids loved Aunt Cynthia. 
The beach was cold and windy, but we went for three days in a row and had a great time. Rylee got to use her early birthday presents to build sand castles, and Sam and I used his metal detector to walk to beach. We found probably about $2 in change, a frame from an old pair of glasses, a bunch of trash, and two rings! One of them was just a mood ring, but the other was a titanium ring with a little bit of gold inlay. It's blue with dragons, so not exactly our style, haha.
The kids got to see the Blue Angels fly overhead almost everyday we were there, and Luke learned to say "WOWWWW!" which was hilarious. The campground was right next to the airport, so there were fighter jets taking off constantly. We also got to tour around the old fort and a few batteries where they used to keep their cannons. Rylee was scared of the tunnels, but the boys and I certainly enjoyed it!
Will came down with a cold that night, and we took the morning off to go shopping to get them some sun hats (we forgot ours) and warmer swim pants for Rylee (we could only find swim trunks). I also didn't realize how fat I'd gotten (with baby #4!), so I wasn't fitting into my swimsuit bottoms, haha. We tucked William in some towels and under the makeshift wind blocker I made with the beach chairs while Rylee made sand castles, Luke chased the seagulls (that tried to steal our lunch) and Sam and I metal detected. We managed to spend a couple hours at the beach that day before the storms rolled in.
That night, William woke us up not being able to breathe very well. He had sort of been wheezing the last couple of days from congestion, but nothing like this. Luke also woke up with a fever. We had four days left on our vacation but it was looking like it would be best for us to head home. We started packing at 3 in the morning and left the campsite at 6am.
A couple hours into the trip, William was retracting. That's when it's so hard for them to breathe that they get a little dip in their chest. It's scary! We had to stop at the nearest ER and spent 4-5 hours there. He went through 3 breathing treatments, an oxygen treatment, a steroid shot, and an oral steroid before they FINALLY got his breathing under control. They diagnosed him with croup and sent us home with instructions to go to the ER if he starts retracting again on the way home. Luckily, we made it to BG and stayed overnight with Sam's parents before returning home in the morning.
Rylee came down with it the next day and then Luke, and he had to go to the doctor for it as well. His breathing was fine, but we couldn't keep his temperature down. I was having to give him medicine every two hours, and his fever was returning an hour after the medicine. He tested negative for Pneumonia, strep, COVID, and flu, so they said there was nothing they could do (since he was breathing fine). We kept him on Tylenol and Ibuprofen for a few more days and it FINALLY went away.
Which now a month later the kids are coming down with colds, my niece has bronchiolitis, my cousin's baby has RSV, and my grandmother is in the hospital with COVID, pneumonia, strep throat, and had a mild heart attack. (Stay healthy, everyone!).
We also lost Sam's grandmother this past month, so that's been a big adjustment for everyone. We are nervous and anxious to see what becomes of her complicated estate over the next few months.
While all of this has been happening, Luke turned 1, William turned 3, and Rylee turned 5! Rylee is starting to read, which is really exciting. We had a bit of a scare with baby Philomena Grace (in my belly). The docs found a cyst on her brain but assured us it sounds way worse than it actually is and usually goes away on its own. Thank the Lord this was the case! Baby Mena is healthy as can be, kicks me night and day, and is due April 6th. (Here's the cutest ultrasound of her sleeping with her mouth open).
We also got a new dog that needed to be rehomed to a farm. She's a one year old Aussie that was bored at her last home and (we think) got in trouble a lot. Sam is really excited to train her!
We FINALLY had a farm work day to clear up the hickory tree and managed to set aside a large portion of the trunk for Sam to use his new chainsaw mill on. We similarly were able to get some large trunks of a maple tree that fell down in my grandmother's yard. Both of them have some spalting, so we are pretty excited! It will be beautiful wood.
Writing has been going well. Aunt Caroline finished illustrating Baby Caterpillar, so I'm waiting to get accepted by an agent so I can get it published! I also found an illustrator for my Catholic children's books, and we are started a company together called GravissiMum. It will provide educational resources to parents and teachers to introduce young children to the catholic faith in simple and unique ways. We are aiming to publish our first book May 2024 or 2025. Probably 2025 since we both have ADHD and she has a full-time job away from the home, haha. 
And lastly, Christmas went well this year! Well, we had to postpone our BG Christmas a little since everyone came down with a cold and my grandmother ended up having COVID a few days after we saw her but otherwise, it was great! I learned how to make Pioneer Star trivets and made a TON of them for presents. 
I also made these adorable dress towels for my parents to hang on their oven and have a few more crafts up my sleeve to give to the BG bunch when we finally make it over there.
Rennovations to the house have all but paused since last year when we did the refinance as our own finances have slowed, haha. I've used the time to improve what we have, adding a few rugs and mirrors here and there, organizing a few rooms and closets, improving the school room, and bunking the boys so they share a room. I'm pretty happy with it overall, right now. Mostly, I've been focusing on getting into a good routine that I can stick to for laundry, dishes, and cleaning the house. If you want to know some tips for doing this with ADHD, little children and little time, let me know! I'm happy to tell you what I've learned, haha. But at least I feel better now knowing that my floors have been swept and mopped more recently than like five months ago, haha.
And that, my dears, is everything...I think. It was a busy, productive, troublesome year. But through everything, our guardian angels watched over us because it could have been so much worse. And actually, some of it turned out for the better!
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