I’m not all that into New Year’s resolutions. I gu
ess the term “resolution” means there’s a problem that needs to be resolved. It holds a negative connotation to me. I prefer to use “goals” which is much more positive. I realized my failures this year and am now moving forward.
Of course my biggest goal this year is to be become more productive on the produce front. As Christmas came and went I realized I didn’t make enough preserves so we need to produce more fruit. Our pizza sauce was such a hit that we now have people wanting to place “orders” for it next year. That can only really happen if we increase our tomato yields.
Besides growing more food I’ll also need to do more preserving. It’s clear that we don’t have enough pizza sauce, fruit preserves, pickles, hot sauce, applesauce, escabeche, ketchup, and barbecue sauce. Of course for some of these items we were limited by how much our garden produced.
One of the things I’m going to have to do is suck it up and use black plastic this year to help out the heat loving plants. We’ve got some experience using black plastic and I know it will at least last several years here before being unusable. I also plan on using cut lengths of it so it can be rotated with the crops. So a length that was used for tomatoes this coming year can also be used with the tomatoes that will be in a different spot next year.
For the livestock I’m going to make sure to keep track of all their food, healthcare and equipment separately. I want to get a better picture of who is using what and which animals cost the least to take care of. My suspicions point at the goats being the most expensive, followed by the rabbits, then the chickens and then the turkeys. The turkeys may be hard to determine though because our dogs seem to have a pretty big hankering for poultry feed. We’ll need to figure out a way to keep them out of it.
We also need to get our greenhouse built, extend the goat/chicken barn for more storage space, add levels to the rabbit hutch and build a storage shed. We also want to turn the water tower into a pantry.
Tom is also determined to put more wild game in the freezer. He’s starting on New Year’s day with pig hunting. We’ve been out of pork for awhile, so I’m looking forward to having some. I want to do more foraging, especially for mushrooms, but this year has been so dry we haven’t been able to find much other than some dried up specimens.
I’ve got high hopes and lots of energy to tackle this coming year. What goals do you have?
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Great goals. I’m inspired by your drive to get better and better at this. One of my goals is to improve my seedling growing skills. All my current ones seem to be giving up the fight. How do you start your seeds and handle the transfer to the garden?
From experimentation I’ve found a good way to get seedlings going. I’ll make a whole blog post about it!
I work at IES San Francisco now. I saw your bio on the IES newsletter.
I wonder why you think the rabbits cost is high? I used to have a few rabbits way back. My Dad taught me that rabbit manure is the only ferilizer that doesn’t need to be “cured” for lack of a better word. You can plow it directly in the soil with out worrying about high levels of whatever is bad in chicken manure or cow manure. You can’t beat the reproduction cycle of rabbits for food.I hated butchering them though.You can bring back rabbit skin purses too.
Have fun
Compared to our chickens and turkeys they go through a lot more feed. It’s one of the reasons they are also more expensive to buy at the butcher. A friend of mine did a cost breakdown of raising rabbits and you break even if you can find them at a butcher for $8/lb.
Hi Rachel,
Happy New Year and thanks for posting goals instead of resolutions.
Goals for 2012:
-> Get better at eating and preserving the harvest and reducing waste (This will involve not planting too much of any given plant and learning how to eat out of the freezer we added last summer).
-> Purchase fewer seeds (due to seed saving last year).
-> Add more egg layers which will be “dual-purpose” (As a newbie farmer, I promised my original flock they could stay as long as they wanted. I will keep my promise, but from this experience, I learned, that method doesn’t provide enough eggs).
I can relate to not wanting to use the black plastic, but sometimes it is the answer. Bi-Rite Farm in Sonoma used it last year for their heat-loving crops. Cheers….