monday's mountain musings

Ahhhhhh, New week, new year, same stuff! Back to school today realizing that two weeks really flies by and that it did nothing for my state of mind. It is all good though, only 4 more weeks and I am done with this round of yukkiness and can move on to the next. How is that for new beginnings? In all honesty, I am ready to be back to school and it was very difficult to not open the "books" for the entire 14 day period. I even considered doing all my reading and note taking for one of the courses just to add some structure to my vacation time, but didn't.

Speaking of new beginnings... the goats look to be due quite soon. Chloe is now waddling around the pasture and Abbi is almost friendly. The only time she is ever almost friendly is near kidding time. No, I do not write down a breed date or possible breed dates, they either eventually produce a kid (or three) or don't and I can pretty much tell when they will be due without the use of a calendar to tell me. I am also home all the time to keep a close eye on what goes on and only have two goats to birth so I know I will not be overrun with kids when they do drop them . Another thing I do not do is make resolutions at the beginning of each new year. Just like rules, resolutions are made to be broken, so why make them to begin with. I do make goals for each year that I would like to accomplish, however, even those I do not keep track of to see how I am doing as I know they are all attainable if I simply apply myself. Some of my goals for this year are to keep up my A average in school, learn more on herbs and their uses and keep going down the path to self sufficiency. I would also like to build the goats an earth bag shed, set up a small aquaponic system, and take baby steps with some solar powered equipment purchases. I still have my "goal" from several years ago now of becoming freezer free although I am beginning to think that it would be easier to go without a refrigerator rather than the freezer.

The cabbage outside are still trudging along and I think still growing albeit slowly. We may have a nice spring harvest of them at this rate, which is all good with me. Most of the other outside stuff is pretty sorry looking right now but almost all of it looks like it may make it through the winter months and grow back. I am still picking some mesclun salad mix from outside as well as turnips, green onions ,carrots, and collards. In the GH things are still growing as well and providing us a meal or two of greens or salad a week. It is not much but it is nice to have them when we want them. It will be cole crop seeding time here in the next couple of weeks and I have some experimental potatoes chitting for a very early planting. It does not seem like it is already time to be thinking about gardens again.

I will be putting together my seed swapping list here in the next week or so and posting it for those interested. There are a few other projects in the works that I would love to tell ya'll about but have decided to wait and see how they progress before I write anything about them.