First Weekend of 2018!

I didn't realize until this moment that I spent this past weekend, first of the new year, doing farm chores.  Wait, first weekend of the new year?  Shouldn't that be like a special occasion or some sort of celebration!  Well, I probably should have at least gone fishing, but that didn't even happen.  Nope, just worked on the farm and here's my latest updates.

As usual we've been busy wrapping up small projects on the farm.  I spread the load of gravel we had delivered and it covered the driveway in front of the shop, it's going to take a lot more rock to finish what we want done.  Just more time and money is all.

I also hauled the piggies to market.  Actually, to the processor and once the processor has finished their work then we'll have lots more to do.   Since the hogs are gone we also removed the panels and posts this weekend and will clean out the area of barn so we can add our desired horse stalls now.

For our hog I only had them do the fresh cuts, so we'll be grinding and making all our own sausage.  We'll also be canning a bunch of pork for storage as well.  We'll only freeze the chops, bacon, ham, and some roasts.  The cut orders for the pigs we sold were a mixed selection of fresh cuts, smoked, and ground sausage.  It's going to be great pork and we learned some valuable lessons this first round of raising hogs.  In the future we'll be processing our own because the butcher is not cheap! 

Last week I also finished Zach's closet and installed the organizer rack.  After some drywall work I painted the interior of the closet and with what we thought was matching leftover paint I put a coat on the surrounding exterior wall only to discover is was a different shade of light blue, more like a light slate color.  Either the paint was old or I didn't mix it well enough, either way it's going to take repainting his room to make it look right, so I'll need to finish that up this coming week so we can get the base trim installed.  At least the base trim is stained and ready to go.

New Organizer in Zach's Closet

It's not all hard labor though, I've been having fun too.  This past week I worked on one of the projects I've been tasked with and finished some nice coat hangers for Theresa.  Simple horseshoe hangers made from cutting some shoes in half then welding, a coat of paint, then nailing onto a nice stained piece of oak.  It's part of the motif in the entryway.

First New Coat Rack Hung

New Horseshoe Coat Rack

I also spent some of my weekend working on trapping some moles that are digging up the pasture.  Didn't have any luck catching yet, several traps were tripped but no moles!  I picked up a couple bigger traps and will continue working on the sets until we make a dent in the population, so many moles in the valley and they're really tearing up the pasture.  They'd make quick work of the garden so we've got to get that problem nipped in the bud.

We also worked on some pruning and trimming.  I took the week wacker out along the pasture and cut more blackberry growing outside the fence along the roadway.  Theresa worked on trimming the bushes back around the house and pump house.

Oh, I'm sure there was more things accomplished but I need to work on remembering to capture a few more pictures to share the visual excitement, maybe a few smiling faces after the job is done.  Overall we started the new year out right and made a list of our projects to work on...it's a long list and every day I think we'll realize that "other thing" we forgot to add to the list.

That's farm life, 24/7-365.