Adventure Update

For those of you who have read about our ongoing journey and offered encouragement, support and friendship, your kindness and generosity just mean the world to us. Thank you!

Here’s an update of our adventure, and an attempt to answer many questions we’ve had –

No, we do not have a set timetable for when the move will be finished. We hoped to be down before the weather turned too ugly – the roads to our place I don’t want to traverse in ice and snow. I’ve gotten to a point I never thought I’d reach when we first went down to look – I no longer hold my breath at certain spots along the way, and I can even look out the window (and down!) without that unsettling feeling in my stomach. The children got such a kick out of that initially, when they’d say, “Wow, Mom, look!” And I’d look, and squeal, close my eyes, and try to slide more to the middle of the vehicle (more for their giggles than anything, ahem).

We’ve moved some of our beef cattle down (we have a two-horse livestock trailer where we can fit two cows in the back and a calf up front) as we’ve already fenced them a paddock where their water is at their barn as well as three additional connected fields that we can open them into as they need. But we are still waiting on the electric wire we need to come in (why are so many supplies so hard to get right now!? Yikes!) so we can run electric for the fencer and water lines to the other (dairy) barn, before we can move the last two dairy cows down. Thankfully we’ve kept the calves on their mothers so we’re not milking everyone, which simplifies life for us, as well as our two Saintly friends who milk for us in the evenings when we go down to work each week.

Our schedule is so fluid right now nothing is the same one week to the next, and I’m amazed how resilient the children have been, because Mommy feels nothing but haggard (why is it so hard to sleep when you’re so tired! I’d really like to have a Big Red Button to shut my brain off, as would my husband). It makes me laugh, and sigh, when one child or another asks, “When I wake up tomorrow, where will we be?” Or “Where are we sleeping tonight?” Quite the ongoing camping adventure. And only one more license plate to collect… Hawaii!

And more than anything right now it’s a matter of clearing back the brush, brambles, and forest to find the old fence rows (anywhere from 10-50ft back so far) so we can pull out the old 5 strands of barb wire and rotten posts before putting up the new fence, or figuring where we need to clear to make our own new fences work for our cattle, pigs, and sheep – even the garden and orchard are getting 6ft fence with barb wire on top – Lee said it looks like a military compound haha. But deer and turkeys beware – I am not working this hard to feed you instead of us! We’re at a good place right now, steadily working along on fence for the pigs, while waiting on the electric wire.

We’d decided to only take down a few sows, the boar, and a feeder who’ll be ready before spring, and while we’re up in Ohio have gotten some of the other pigs into the freezer – better they feed us than we feed them, and easier to transport! So that’s been a fun fall job, and our Happy Thanksgiving project, although the sound of Lee and ALL the children crunching on cracklings for some reason is like nails on a chalkboard to me, wow.

And as one of our good-customers-turned-dear-friend once said, one of the beautiful things about farming is the diversity of the work – if you don’t particularly like today’s job, there’ll be another tomorrow, or even after lunch!