Plans for 2020

Well January is here and there are plans to be made. Plans for the garden, plans for the homestead, plans for this website, plans for my family… I love January and its clean slate of new plans, don’t you?

But first, a little look back on the past. If you follow me on Instagram, you would have seen a few pics of last week on New Years where we were without power for about 24 hours. What a start to the new year! We still had a great time and it was actually a great reminder to stay off of our phones and iPods and really spend some quality time together (in between the snow shoveling and the calls my husband had to attend being the fire chief of our area). We hung out and chatted, played our new board game (Ticket to Ride America), and Pat and the kids spent hours working on a new puzzle we got for Christmas. You can check out some of the highlights on our Instagram stories.

The power outage was a good reminder to keep up on our emergency supplies and realized we were out of AAA batteries for a few of our flashlights, our drinking water supply was very low, and a few other amenities as well. We could have run the 30 minutes to town to get some of those things right away if we desperately needed to, but since we were mostly prepared, we stayed off the snowy slick roads and rode the storm out.

Thankfully, we have our woodstove and we were able to stay warm, cook with our cast iron pans and melt snow for washing up water.  Having the woodstove was also fantastic for drying our outdoor gear fairly quick.  

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Both the whole power outage ordeal at home and the much bigger ordeal so many are going through with all the wildfires in Australia have served as a great reminder to always be prepared in case of emergencies. I will have a few more post coming soon on this topic and here are a few I’ve written in the past.

Related Posts:  Safe Travels and Emergency Preparations

• How to be Prepared for Emergencies around the Homestead part 1
• Being Prepared for Emergencies part 2
• 8 Tips for Winter Travel to Keep Your Family Safe and Healthy
• Blizzard of 2017 – In Pictures

Plans For the Garden:

I love this time of year for the garden, the clean slate, the potential that this might just be the year I will keep on top of the weeds (not likely, but a girl can dream right??). January is the time I am watching my favorite gardening videos on Youtube, reading my favorite gardening books again, perusing seed catalogues and potential orchard and nut tree ordering sites. I look forward to sharing more of these with you this year on this site! 

So far, I am planning to add a few more fruit and nut trees and bushes to our small food forest. I don’t know if it will get done this year, but I’ve been so inspired by the raised garden design of Casey and Jason from The Lawrence Network that I would love to do something similar in our backyard.

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Our current garden space is wonderful, but I think it would be better suited to growing the larger and longer season crops of vegetables like potatoes and winter squashes and perennial veggies and fruits like asparagus and strawberries. The raised beds surrounded by lights would be more our kitchen/potager garden, filled with the faster-growing things like lettuces and radishes and baby carrots. Of course, I will try my best to share our gardening adventures with you.

Plans for the Homestead:

We currently have no chickens or outside farm animals! And honestly it is kind of nice to take a break for a few months in the winter. No shoveling paths to the coop, no carrying water out, no worrying about them in the cold weather. But the downside of course is no fresh eggs!  Chickens are really quite easy to keep and I look forward to getting a fresh brood in the spring. We also need to add building a new bigger coop to our to do list. 

If possible, I would love to finally get goats this year. We have a bit more fencing to put up and also build some kind of shelter for them so that is on our list of to dos as well. Fingers crossed we can get this done!

As for other homesteading ventures, I plan on upping our canning, dehydrating and fermenting efforts this year in the homestead kitchen. I’d also like to try my hand at making our own soap and maybe even candles.

Plans for Travel:

I am so excited about this year for our travel plans! Well, more my travel plans really. For the first time in 20 years, I’m going on an international trip finally. This will actually be happening pretty soon and I am super excited to share it with you all. I won’t say much before I go, but I will tell you, I’m going somewhere warm to meet up with my mom and her partner on the SVkootenay! Read more about the SVKootenay here, where I did an interview a few years ago.

As well as that big trip, I’ll be doing a few of our usual road trips around B.C. this spring with my daughters’ sport team and my eldest daughter to go shopping for grad outfits! I know, I can’t believe she is graduating already.

All that and a couple weddings will make this spring and early summer a little bit nuts!

I can’t wait to share our crazy lives and all the things I learn along the way, and I hope you enjoy sharing them as well as sharing your own lives with us along the way. I would love to hear of your plans this year of 2020 and feel free to share with all of us either in the comments or email or chat with us on our Facebook page or my more favorite place, Instagram.

I will sign off here with a little funny my husband shared with me and has been stuck in my head since Jan. 1^st!