New Goals for a New Year

I want to start by saying that I hate resolutions and I'm not going to make any. I mean, really...how many people find themselves in mid-January having completely thrown their resolutions out the window? No, sir! You won't find me in that crowd.

But I do think it's time to evaluate what we'd like to accomplish next year as improvements to the garden, the farm and ourselves.   Here's a list that I've had in my head for a couple of months:

• Organize the basement, laundry room and pantry, including a database to keep track of what food items we have and their expirations.
• Learn to make our own bread and eliminate store-bought bread from our diet.  J. keeps talking about a sourdough starter.   Bring it on!
• Take a class or read a book on how to use our wizz-bang camera, an older Canon Rebel XTi EOS 400D SLR. I'd really like to improve on the quality of pictures on this blog. :-)
• Finish the renovations on our rental house and get it sold.  Before we do that, I'd like to get our two remaining full-size apple trees transplanted over there so they can provide pollination for our trees.  Hopefully, the new owner won't cut them down.  This goal is very important to our plan of getting completely our debt.
• Finish the renovations on our travel trailer and get it moved up to the real farm.
• Finalize our water management plans for the mini-farm so that we're not using city water for the garden or chickens
• Diversity the plants in the garden to include more varieties of heirloom tomatoes, pickling cucumbers, carrots, garlic and potatoes.  That list may get bigger as I go through all the seed catalogs that are now showing up, but it's a good start.  And I'm going to try to start everything from seed.
• Get healthier.  J. and I have both packed on some mid-life pounds and we need to take some steps to get rid of it.  I'd like to see us get outside more and into a healthier pattern of eating - less processed foods, less eating out (even if it is convenient!) and more eating food that we've grown ourselves or from the Farmer's Market.

That's a pretty big list and it will take us all year to get this stuff done.  Whew!  But I'm excited to get started on that organization item today.  I'll be posting pictures of our progress for you shortly.

I'd love to hear what goals you have for 2012. Please let me know in the comments below!

View more posts just like this on Homestead Revival's Homestead Barnhop #43.