Freeloader Farms

We had big plans for our little homestead this year.  Our hopes, dreams, and expectations for 2017 were beyond optimistic. Just to name a few:

-Continue our successful chicken farming

-Become successful dairy goat farmers. Get buckets and buckets of goat milk, never have to buy milk again, make our own goat milk yogurt, maybe even make our own soap. Sell the baby goats and make some money for more livestock. 

-Harvest enough garden produce to can and freeze to feed our growing family through the next year with enough leftover to sell at farmers markets. 

-Start a vineyard.

-Add more trees to our orchard.  Harvest some apples, peaches, and pears 

-Add a pig named Christmas Ham and maybe some turkeys to our little farm. 

This was just the homesteading goals.  Also on our to-do list were things like "refinish the kitchen cabinets," "add a mud room in the garage," and "knock out two windows in the living room and fill in the existing one." 

Oh, and raise three children. And there's that place my husband has to go to every day so we have money. 

So let's take a look at how all of our goals panned out so far this year. 

-We lost 21 chickens this past winter in three separate horrifying coop invasions, including a few chickens that were beloved pets. We replaced them with chicks that grew into chickens that refused to lay for so long our toddler would chase after them shouting "You bunch of freeloaders!"

-Mr. Goat died under our care. (We actually lied about this to our children because they were already too traumatized by the chicken massacres.  We just said he went back home.  I thought it was worth lying to save their little hearts.  GD figured it out though.). One of our own goats died. We got one cup of goat milk total. We kept the baby goats because they're cheaper than therapy for the boys.   We now have freeloading goats.

-We got a late start on our garden. It got flooded three times. Then it got overtaken with weeds. Then we didn't get rain. Then we got bugs. Then the baby goats ate half the stuff. And then we stopped caring. We froze a couple bags of beans. I thought I would miss the excitement of canning. But I didn't at all. Walmart has plenty of frozen vegetables. 

-Everything else failed so we didn't test our luck with a vineyard. 

-We had about 50 gorgeous bug free peaches we were so excited about. Some critter came and ate all of them just before they were ripe enough to pick and left us nothing but a pile of peach pits. And we had lots of pears but they tasted bad. 

-We were too traumatized by the chicken massacres to add edible livestock to our plate (pun intended). 

The only produce our farm harvested this year was 100 lbs of apples we picked out of ditch down the road. Just call us a bunch of freeloaders.