The ground in the north east is covered with snow and the air has a bite to it. I am not a winter person, but it has its purpose. It is a time to focus on other things. A time for planning. Our whole year gets planned out in January / February time. I have taken inventory of our seeds and have ordered what we will need for the upcoming season. Trying to stay inside a tighter budget, I have ordered everything we will need for the next 12 months, including fall garlic. To resist the temptation of ordering more seeds, I am recycling the seed catalogs and they come in the mail. Which is so difficult. A seed catalog is like a romance novel for me. It is full of emotion and lust, dreams if things just out of reach. I did keep one, the PlayBoy of seed catalog, in my opinion. I just like to look at it and dream.

This week we have been focused on Menu Planning and rotating food in the cellar. We maintain a root cellar, a canning pantry, dry goods pantry and multiple freezers. Our basement is a grocery store. We have been so blessed with abundant harvests and blessings. For the most part all we have is raw ingredients. You are not going to find a frozen pot pie or pizza in my freezer. However, I have all the ingredients on hand to make either one of those. All things are possible with God and good planning. Our current challenge for ourselves, is how long can we go between store trips. We are hopefully going to make it till April.

Another focus we have right now is splitting firewood. I know this should be a summer task, but my boys hate splitting wood in the heat. So it is a winter family warm up activity. We are blessed to get lots of logs from the tree companies in the area. Allowing us to heat our house with our labor. We are very thankful.

All the goats are in with the buck, hopefully this will mean babies at the end of the school year. I work in a school and struggle managing school and kidding. We will have them ultrasound the first week of March to get a baby head count and rough due date.

I hope you are having a productive winter on the homestead. Stay warm. God Bless.