Welcome to 2026 !

Hello Followers! Goodness again it has been a year, and honestly I have been running like a mad woman! I am going to try to include photos in this blog the best that I can. I am still learning how to do all of this. Last year after my update, we were SLAMMED with an insane amount of snow! It reminded me of winters from my childhood. In just a mater of days we accumulated 8+ feet of snow. It was a lot, and a lot at once. At this time we were homeschooling, and the kids got almost the entire month of February off from doing any school work, because we spent most of our time moving snow! Everyday we still had our normal chores on top of snow moving, which included, snow blowing, and roof shoveling. The snow banks were so high that we could walk off our second story roof onto the snowbank, I was standing over my top wire of fence walking the pasture daily to pull the wire out of the snow.

The horses run in shed, after snow removal.

View from sitting on top of the run in shed.

Another view from the run in shed, under that 10ft snow bank is our flat bed trailer, which had the axels break from the weight of the snow.

We had so much snow before it packed down that Turning the horses out became extremely concerning. The ground never froze before we acquired all of this snow, so we could not snow blow them a path to their hay, nor could we snow blow the snow away from the fences.

We had to take the chance every day that the horses would respect the one exposed fence (gate) that we had. If they got loose they would only be able to head down the driveway down to the road, so to ease our mind we tried our best to place round pen panels around the bit of open yard/driveway we had incase of the horses blowing through the one spot of visible fence. Why not move them to another farm? Because everyone was in the same situation, and all of my friends with indoor arenas were in fear of their buildings collapsing, many of them did. At one point on social media there was a running list of how many buildings collapsed from the snow weight, there were hundreds, many were not counted. Any road you would turn down, had at LEAST one collapsed building, homes, garages, barns, sheds... So much was lost.

Tom removing snow from the sides of the horse barn to keep the weight off the walls.. These banks were so tall I could stand on them and be level with the first roof line, and use the roof rake to pull snow off the top of the roof.

Fortunately we did not suffer any losses here at our home and small farm. Thankfully Melvin had already been shipped off for processing. Our goats could all fit into 1 stall, the tricky part of that is we had them due to kid, so we had to do some building and configuring to keep the does separate. But when there is a will there is a way. We cobbed together a pen in the Isle way for Juniper. I wish I still had all the photos of this. It was a lot of ingenuity and trust in our animals to respect fences.

The 10th of Feburary at the begining of the snow storm.

Things were not all bad though. March came, snow began to settle and things slowly started to return to normal for us, as well as we gained a new game plan for next year and moving snow. Right from the start we have been moving snow in anticipation for being dumped on again. We also decided we Loved the gates set up around the barn that we invested in swinging gates as a permanent fixture . It gives us an added security of, "if something happens" while we are bringing the horses, and Juniper in and out, and honestly, June has slipped through the gate a few times so it has been very helpful. The goats kidded out with only a little drama. Coco had triplets and Claira had... well she had triplets, sorta. one was not fully formed, it was super interesting. The "dumby" kid was blocking the two live kids from coming out, thankfully Tom was home and was able to assist me, because I was dumbfounded when we reached in. The two live kids were absolutely beautiful and thrived.

All the goats together.

Coco's Triplets 2 boys and a girl.

We have since sold all of the goats. Unfortunately the snow fall in February completely destroyed all of the goat fencing . It also destroyed 3/4 of the insulators on the horse fence and we had to make a choice. If I were to rebuild the goat fence in anticipation for this amount of snow again I would have had to spend 2k plus on just the smaller part of their pasture. The horse fence itself cost over $300 to fix in insulators, and then adding a 4th line so we could put Juniper out there during the summer and feel comfortable . June is not as big as she should be for her breed, and Merida loves to chase her, its in her breeding.

After spending weeks fixing fence. It was time to order our logs. Courtesy of BL Gardener we received another BEAUTIFUL load of logs for our firewood. Usually we have our wood all done before summer hits. BUT with all the other things we had happening this last spring that did not happen until late fall. Our summer this past year was extremely hot. Hay season started early in the month of June and wrapped up for us in July.

We had some beautiful hay this year and we are extremely grateful for it. A lot of crops got done too late and they are not the best, due to the drought we faced.

The drought took its toll on a lot of crops, 2 weeks after taking this photo of the kids in our beautiful corn crop, it dried up and we never even got ears of corn. It was setting up to be so lovely. But due to extreme heat and lack of rain it failed. We did still feed the corn stalks to the cow though so it wasn't a complete loss.

Our garlic and onion harvest was pretty much the only successful crop we had. Emma also decided she was finally brave enough to start driving the 4-wheeler. This was a posed photo, anytime she is actually driving the machine, she has a helmet on and (usually) Mom or Dad sitting behind her. We are so excited she is getting braver to drive the machines, because it helps save time. Now we can hook the manure spreader to the 4 wheeler and let Emma go spread within eyesight of the adults. We spent a lot of time in the pool this year, but half the summer was the neighbors' pool because towards the end of the previous summer it was discovered that our skimmer line had collapsed to our filter, and we needed to rip up the concrete to fix it. The summer was HOT and as previously stated we were in a drought. We ended up having both the barn and the house wells go dry. And then come fall we had to completely rebuild everything to do with the barn well pump. So good news, its all been replaced... and everything is now set up in a much more productive manor, more on that in a future blog post. Fall has come and gone, our entire house came down what I can only assume was the flu, we missed out on Halloween, and Emma's birthday. We were sick from before Halloween to the end of November. Of which Emmett is having lingering issues from. During this time, the kids also decided that they wanted to try to go back to public school. So they were enrolled in December. They are thriving and having a great time. I miss them greatly every day, even though Emmett is actually home right now due to his side effects from his cold. It brings me a sense of normalcy having him home. While they are at school, I have been re organizing the house and taking the time to make some of our spaces make sense again, as well as finishing some construction projects that have been done to 90%. Its really exciting to see the house come together in a new way. I am enjoying baking, and preparing dinner with no rush. I am hoping to start being more active on the webpage as well as social media again. I have left out some events from last year to save the length of this blog, but I hope you have enjoyed the update as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Happy New Year. Here's to a calmer winter (hopefully) and to much success to you all however that may look.