We hope that you all had a wonderful Christmas this week with your families. We enjoyed a nice holiday at home. This week has been all about working on little things that have fallen through the cracks through the years. We constantly have To-Do Lists going and being edited. We have things on the list that have been there since we moved into the house five years ago. I am sure all of you can relate. There is so much to do and never enough time.

We passed winter solstice which means a couple of things. The most important is the days will be getting longer again. As much as we love the darkness outside forcing us inside to relax and watch a movie after dinner, it definitely hurts our productivity. The second major thing that this means is that the ducks and chickens will start laying more eggs. With the limited daylight and cold temperatures, we see a significant decline in the number of eggs we get per day. We have lights in the duck & chicken pens to help, but it still isn’t the same as natural light.

So, what is on the horizon for 2020 on the ranch? Well, the next big project is to install a solar panel system on the backside of the garage & new lean-to roof. After that, we hope to take a break from big projects for a while. We hope to get the To-Do List back to a manageable size and hopefully knock some of those little projects off that have been there for years.

As for animals, they are constantly rotating. We have a lamb that currently needs to get harvested. One of our ewes is pregnant. 100 Meat chickens, 60 meat turkeys, and 40 more laying chickens were ordered for deliveries between January and June. We also plan on adding another cow to the herd this spring and are playing with the idea of adding hogs again this spring/summer.

We want to say Cheers to everyone for the amazing year that was had and to an even better one ahead!!