Whoohoo!  Three more seed catalogs came in the mail today!  Tonight when I'm done with all my "stuff" I'm going to sit a peruse with a highlighter in hand.

Today was unbelievably warm again -- 60 degrees -- in late December.  Too strange!  The big project for the day was cleaning out the van.  This fall our poor little mini van has been stuffed with bales of hay, straw, lots of feed bags, one of which tore, a large smelly nubian buck, and our year's worth of grain (for us!) that we ordered from the local buying cooperative.  Not to mention it never got totally cleaned out after the farmers' market season and had various baggies, twist-ties, tent weights, and other paraphanalia still stuck in the back.  It was a wreck so we spent the whole afternoon totally emptying it out, washing the interior, vaccuming, beating rugs, stain-spotting the floor, etc...  It looks so nice!  Too bad it won't last....

I'm wanting to get a few projects on the homestead finished before we start lessons back up next week.  Here they are, somewhat in order of importance:

1.  Extend the electric fence so the goaties have more pasture to munch down.  I should have done this before the ground froze, but with the recent warm weather I'm hoping it's not terribly hard.

2.  Finish the rabbit cages I've been working on.  We're going to be adding wascally wabbits to the menu at DaisyChain farmstead.  We're trying to break free from supermarket meat and want some sort of red meat occasionally.  I'd like to be able to afford a side of grass-fed beef from a local farm, but that is NOT in the budget right now - neither is organic meat from the store.  We won't have any more goats to eat till late summer at best so we figure a few rabbits would provide us with something besides chicken and turkey.  We raised rabbits several years ago and learned the hard way to quarantine new animals when we bought a new bunny that ended up having a disease that quickly spread and wiped out ALL our rabbits.  Not a fun experience.  Otherwise, rabbits are super-easy to raise.  As soon as I get the cages made up we'll be buying two does and a buck.

3.  Pick up more straw and hay. I need to borrow my mom's truck and get a load of each so we won't have to worry about running out when the weather is yucky-cold.

4.  Trim hoofs -- all our goaties need footsie-trims to keep them in good condition.

5.  Get the two pups their shots and the female spayed before we end up with puppies!

If I get these things done we'll be in pretty good shape.  We should be able to plow through the list having several full days for me and the kids to be able to get busy.