2016 Christmas Letter

Dear Friends and Family,

The time has come for the year to end, and usually people start reflecting on the year and how it went.  So I figured I could do that, and since I usually don't get letters or cards out... this might work for me this year.  Maybe next year I will do cards... who knows. :)

So the last year has been crazy, I quit my job, and we moved to Washington state.  I found a new job, we lived with some of our awesome friends for 6 months while we looked for a place to buy.  We went through many different types of property... there were many different plots of land that we looked at and walked on, and dreamed about... until we found this little place in Winlock.  It was 7.5 acres, had a double wide on it, some fruit trees already established... some hill, but not too bad, and privacy.  It was a project!  There's tons of overgrown weeds, an old barn, some weird structures that make us ask... "What was going on here?"  I had fallen in love.  Paul even liked it, give or take the house.  The house I love because our initial move onto our property didn't have to be focused on building a house of which I do not know anything about... instead we can focus on building our food forest, raising our flock of ducks and one day add some chickens.  And at some point we can look at building ourselves a nice little round house or something.

We have our ducks, and they are wonderful, it's fun to see how they follow us around, watching what we are doing, trying to figure out their new life here on Broomberry Farm (that's the name of our place!  Do you like it?!)

There are a ton of projects to do with the house, the land, ourselves... tons of things.  So we just keep a list, and knock out some things at a time.

Some of our accomplishments thus far...

• moved all the old carpet from in front of the shed to be the start of sheet mulching where the old trailer was, the future duck fodder area. 
• Paul has started making our swale pathway following the curve of the land using our A-Frame to help find that curve, he's cleared out tons of blackberry vines and other shrubs.
• We built a duck pen!  With a little help from our friends... And now we are duck people!
• We have planted some plants!  still have some to go into the ground, but we've started doing it!
• We picked a bunch of apples, and made dehydrated apples and apple sauce, and have even stored some for the winter (should probably check on those)
• We created a plan for our land using paper, and our permaculture training to add things to the plan.
• We created a pathway through the Broomberry woods to do some exploration!

Some of our future projects... literally just some of them cause otherwise I would be too long.  Maybe these are like the spring ones, the ones that are next on the list.

• Painting the inside of the house our rainbow of colors, so that we aren't just institutionalized with dreary white!  
• Building a chicken coop, we've talked about location, just need to do some clearing... build a structure and coop, and get some chickens... easy peasy. :)  We'll see.  Looking forward to the eggs.
• Building a greenhouse using recycled windows, have some from a friend we are going to get, and then will plan on looking for some from other folks. 
• We have to put siding on the shed, we have some in the shed but need to figure out if we have enough.  
• Clean out the shed and organize it some, there's some old stuff in there from the previous owners still, and just would like to create some system.
• Continue building our swale along the contour line, it's a pretty big project.
• Make a duck pond!
• Create a water collecting system to fill the duck pond!

That's just some of the things, there's a whole list.... 

Anyways, lots of busyness.  There is an open invitation to folks to come visit us at any point.  We welcome the visitors but you may be asked to help with the ducks from time to time. :)

Looking forward to Christmas this year because I will see my mom and dad, and sister and her husband and kids.  It will be a good visit.  So in preparation for that visit I need to cut this short and get back to doing laundry and packing.  

I pray that everyone has a great and wonderful Christmas and New years.  

Until next time! Adios!