High 62  Low 34  Clear and slightly warm.

Visit www.songcroftnaturals.com to support our family farm and to get great all natural skin and body products!

Visit the Farmers Market Thursdays 3-7pm

I’m not even going to put the date on this entry since I am embarrassed how long it took me to get around to writing. You see, it’s spring and although it has been the wettest April in Washington’s history, there are still a lot of spring shores to be done!

• Have planted a thicket hedge of prinsepia to help keep the neighbor dogs from coming over.

• Planted a variety of willows in blue, red, green and yellow along the creek.

• Trimmed back the rugosa, raspberries, woody herbs and several other plants

• Mucked the goat shed, cleaned the stall mats in them and sanitized all of the feeders and water buckets.

• Made a new perch for the chickens.

• Bred the rabbits.

• Got help re-doing parts of the goats sacrifice area as well as their browsing areas.

• Brian added on to the chickens poly-carb covered roof on their summer home (okay, they are a bit spoiled).

• Deconstructed some keyhole beds so I can reconfigure parts of the garden and add vertical growing space as well as an outdoor room.

• Fed the bees (It’s been so cold that they rarely go out and things are blooming late)

• Harvested lots of greens.

• The kids and I planted lots of carrots, radishes, lettuce, bok choy, peas, leeks, cilantro, potatoes, onions, and flowers in the garden beds.

• Planted a ton of seeds in trays that are now overcrowding the greenhouse (snow and hail in April!)

• Made compost tea and applied it to a test garden. (Amazing difference!)

• Taught two soils science class and composting class.

• Planted a berm with edible berries and trees with my apprentices.

• Planted a perry pear, cider apple and medlar tree.

• Planted forage plants including Nanking cherries around the summer chicken house.

• Did all the mom things like helping both kids enter project in a science fair and droving kids to and from swim classes.

• Did the homestead stuff like baking bread and making cheese.

• Got our www.SongCroftNaturals.com business ready for the Snohomish Farmers Market.

• And so the list goes on…

Soon I will be at the Snohomish Farmers Market every Thursday.

You might be asking yourself how I find time and energy to do all of these things. It is really more simple than one might think. I don’t have to go to the grocery very often and I don’t watch TV. I eat a healthy diet that includes very little processed foods and I have a positive attitude, even in this rainy season.

Attitude is everything!

See you at the Snohomish Farmers Market!

High 33   Low 20

Snowing with high winds!!!Whoohoo!

(If you want to learn even a little of what you are reading here, our apprenticeship program starts Jan. 15th. Last call for registration!)

http://songcroft.com/index.php/the-songcroft-school-of-self-sufficiency/

Folks email me all the time saying they get tired reading the list of things we do. Well, you might want to grab yourself a cup o’ tea and kick your feet up ‘cuz this is going to be a long one because I’m going to give a summary of 2010!

All in all, it was a good year in many aspects. We accomplished some of our goals and completely failed on others. Okay, failed is pretty harsh. We just didn’t get everything we wanted to get done done. I am sure we got more accomplished than the average bear since both Brian and I are ‘Type A’ Capricorns.

Our apprenticeship program filled up and we had 3 teens all year!

We had a successful Fish Camp here in conjunction with Wolf Camp.

We took a few camping trips as well as went to our favorite seasonal gathering.

The things we didn’t get done were due to a matter of lack of weather, money, time or energy. The early part of Spring was very wet.

When we went on a camping trip, the chickens got out and scratch up much of our garden beds. I replanted and got things under control, so I thought, and one of the kids didn’t latch the gate so the chickens rearranged everything again. It is amazing what they can do with my tidy little rows in an hour! Of course, they left the forest garden alone since it would’ve taken more effort to walk over there.

We lost part of our duck flock, we think to neighbor dogs, so we are down to just three. Our son was heartbroken when he found his pet duck “Blackfoot” dead in the field.

We sold lots and lots of eggs all Spring and Summer. That was a nice supplement to the family budget.

We also sold a few goat kids too. We got a lot of milk and enjoyed the cheese.

Brians workshop was built and we will finish it in the Spring.

Our cabin was transformed in to a classroom and manufacturing facility for our SongCroft Naturals Personal Care product line. (The ingredients are so safe I can use them on my babies!)

We grew a good garden that is still providing us with fresh vegetables. We had tomatoes until early December and ground cherries too!

I “put up” lots of canned meat, fruit and vegetables, pickles, kim chi, as well as dried fruits, herbs and vegetables too.

I caught two bee swarms and hived them.

We put in the forest garden in April and it’s looking good.

We are one year closer to harvesting asparagas!

So, to the coming year. What are our goals? Well this is what I have settled on:

1. Finish Brian’s shop!
2. Enjoy our apprentices
3. Launch SongCroft Naturals our all natural Personal Care Products and have a Farmers Market booth.
4. Grow a bountiful garden that is well and truly chicken proofed!!!
5. Have more of the family’s help with harvesting more often so our production stays up and our waste in minimal.
6. Preserve more foods and herbs than last year.
7. Learn to smoke different meats.
8. Clear the spot behind the cabin so I can plant new beds. I haven’t decided what to plant there yet though.
9. Plant an evergreen edible hedge on top of a berm to create privacy as well as more perennial food.
10. Plant an evergreen privacy screen near the road.
11. Make more soap than last year. We ran out and I got too busy to make more.
12. Plant more trees for firewood.
13. Which reminds me, reinforce the goats browse area.
14. Fix all of the little jobs like greenhouse door handle, hinges on the compost bins, etc…
15. Re-design the lower part of our land.
16. Build new hay storage.
17. Build a new rabbitry.
18. Expand the summer chicken yard from 16×30 to something like 30×30.
19. Host Farm Camp.
20. Host Illumina Girls Camp.
21. Host Fish Camp.
22. Camp more, play more
23. Sing more.
24. Dance more.
25. Breathe more consciously.

I hope you enjoyed reading our summary of 2010 and being witness to us setting goals for 2011. Somehow it makes it a little more of a commitment if others know that the goals are set. (Maybe I should mention the 10 pounds?)

Oh, and if you come by for a visit, feel free to roll your sleeve up!

Thanks for reading. Your comments are welcome. Please do share our blog with others that you think might be interested. Happy New Year!

High 56             Low 45                 Warm afternoon breeze

Spring ahead? Not us, we’re taking giant leaps! There’s been a ton of stuff happening at SongCroft this week. Where can I begin…?

Over the course of the week we brought in a bit more hay to get us through until it is haying time here in the area. With a couple extra goats this past Winter, we went through more hay than usual so our estimate in August was a bit off. But no worries, I hauled the bails across our land. It is rugged terrain as we haven’t filled that side of the property yet and it is very uneven. It is hard to keep a bale on a hand-truck since they all want to fall downhill. Then I had to stack them under cover. At eighty pounds a bale, this job takes that take all by 5’4” frame has to offer. To keep the goats from leaning from their stall over in to the hay storage area, I installed a wooden barrier. Now they can only look at it longingly instead of gorging themselves until they look like someone ought to tie a line to a hoof so they don’t float away as giant goat balloons.

We also got almost all of the fencing around the vegetable and forest garden done. We just need to install a few gates. This means even if the goats do get out, they wont be eating my cabbages and strawberries!

The Winter rabbitry was converted in to a brooding house for the 17 pullets and 6 ducklings we are raising. We also have a hen on a nest in there. It is a good use of a small space. I will post photos and a video later.

All but the vegetable garden beds got compost on them. I will make another go at it over the coming week. The goats ate part of the garden in front of the house, that’s what happens when the kids leave the gate unlocked, so I put the compost down there first hoping it would help the poor plants survive. Even our big horse trough full of bamboo looks like Giant Panda’s attacked it!

Rhubarb and asparagus were planted. Only a few more years until we get our first harvest. (That was sarcasm incase you didn’t notice)

We cleared out an area so that we can bring in soil to level the land on the side of our house. This will make getting to the hay a lot easier. This is going to be major work.

We taught both our first year and second year courses from Saturday through Monday. We covered soils science, composting, fertilization and pruning. It was really busy and a lot of fun. Folks learned to do soil samples, test for ph and how to make compost. We mixed bedding and goat poo with a beautiful combination of scrap vegetables and juice bar compost. The colors were amazing and the results will be powerful. We also made a worm bin and were able to send it one with one of the student’s family. I truly love being with all of the course participants and am blessed to live such an amazing life.

Sometimes the songs here are the chirpings of birds and others times they are the grunts made while heaving bales of hay but it all makes for a beautiful rhythm that we love to live in.