Megan Posts

This is an introduction post. Annie said I have to have to post weekly, and I will try. I hope you guys like cheese. I am going to write a little bio type post for now, so at least I will have posted something and I can stop feeling like a jerk.

My family and I, a husband and daughter, live in the foot hills of the central Oregon Coast range. It's a rain forest! We have a little farm with Nubian dairy goats and chickens and a big black dog. We have a big garden and an old crookedey farm house. We bought this place almost exactly a year ago and are trying to bring it back to life as a sustainable family farm. We are super new at this venture so there is a lot to learn about animal care and husbandry, dairying, gardening, plumbing, composting, pasture management, forest management, butchery, water treatment, sustainable energy, and a thousand other things I can't think of right now.

Now I will brag. Just this once. This house and farm was originally part of a 500 acre plot that made up almost half of the "town" we live in. It's still insulated with Finnish newspapers and moss in some of the older rooms. We have the house and a chunk of pasture and hilly forest surrounding it. We have three naturally occurring springs that feed the house, animals, and garden by gravity. We have a barn with attached workshop, a huge greenhouse (which was installed by some creepers who intended to use it to grow the marijuana. For reals. It's a good story), and a creepy shack that was apparently, any will be again, a tractor shed. We have a sweet little meadow in the back with some tiny cabins that some other creepers built there to be a weird, militant church retreat for mean people (another good story). One of the springs runs through the meadow and then there are some old paths that lead to the river and up into the mountains. The place backs up against BLM property so you can hike for miles and miles, if you are not too scared of bears and cougars and asylum escapees. We got the deal of the century with this place and we feel unspeakably lucky every single day.

Our plan is to "update" the house, mostly with insulation and some more energy efficient options that they didn't have in 1908, while still maintaining the character of the house. We also plan to help this place feed us! We currently have the goats for dairy and meat, chickens for eggs and meat, and the vegetable garden and green house. Next year we plan to add pigs and ducks, to increase the garden by almost 100%, to add a pond for drainage, and to figure out where we would like to grow berries and fruit trees. And to continue the home re-model! Oh! And to start plotting out a rotational grazing plan for the goats. So, no big deal, really.

Sometimes I sit down at the end of the day and I have a glass of wine and snuggle in and I say "I have been so lazy today!" Because I feel like I just had a fun good time all day. Like you are tired and content after backpacking. And Mike says: "what did you do toady?" A typical day would go something like this: I milked goats, cleaned all the milking stuff and the rest of the kitchen, made bread, made something else baked, weeded in the garden, did some laundry, watered in the greenhouse, stared at the chickens and demanded that they lay eggs already, planted something, picked something out of the garden and made dinner, milked goats, made cheese, and then sat down with my wine. See, I am practically sedentary.

So that's me in a nutshell. What should I write about next? What would you all like to hear about?