A new year... a new start

Ah, 2010 is here, snuck up on us, but here it is nonetheless.

Since I started this blog I've always been pretty dutiful about having a well thought out list of goals and aspirations for each new year. This year I don't. Well, to be honest, with the way our year ended; accident, Thanksgiving, visiting relatives, Christmas, work deadlines and a New Year, all lined up bing bang boom, I didn't have a chance to really reflect on what I wanted to do in 2010.

I did manage to pull a few ideas out of my hat though, so let me lay them on you:

• I want to complete my greenhouse evolution. By evolution I mean progressing it from being the mere shelter from the elements that it currently is, to a functioning respite for tender plants to hold over, if not all winter, at least through the fall and early winter and into the new year of 2011. I'll need to bulk up on the thermal mass, provide proper shelves and work spaces and find a way to generate some sort of supplemental light and heat for the winter. Good news is that I have all summer to do it so the prospects are promising.

• Last year we made a goal of 1500 pounds of food from our yard. Because of a terrible bout of squash bugs and perhaps just a little over exuberance in our estimates we came in short of that with a mere 810 pounds. (I of course say that very facetiously, I'm way way happy with 810 pounds. Who wouldn't be?) This year, I think that very realistically we should be able to get to 1000 pounds. So that is goal number two.

• Getting back to basics. A lot changed this year for A~ and I. She started working part-time (this was planned for next year but the right opportunity presented itself so we acted on it) and it really threw us both out of whack. I knew I depended on her as my partner, but I had no real idea of HOW dependant I was on her. We really struggled throughout the year to find our balance and to be able to maintain our lives the way that we had worked into them. Because we had some extra money for the first time in a long while it was really easy for us to fall into some habits that we hadn't had before because we were so conscious of our income. Eating out more often than we wanted to and not effectively using all the food we were able to grow, not keeping up with making our own organic cleaners and not making the most use of the time we did have available because we were just feeling hectic we welcomed the chance to relax. This year A~ and I want to re-ground and get back to our basics. Time to re-group.

• Finally, now that we've been able to get a new computer up and running, I want to get a little more consistent with my posts. I really needed to give myself a break last year after blogging for a couple of years I was getting to a point where I was losing focus on what was important to me. Not that you're not important to me of course, but family time... isn't that really what it's all about? I began to feel like I "owed you" a post on a daily basis. I don't know what made me think that I was so fascinating or important that I would need to be constantly updating the world, but I did. I'm now nearing the end of my third year blogging and what I want to do this year is to concentrate on being more consistent and regular with the things that I say and to try to keep the posts interesting and informative. Rather than quantity, I want to focus on quality. On this note I also have some other interesting ideas that I want to pursue, but details of those will have to wait a little longer until I know for sure what I can do.

I think that about does it for what I can think of. The goals are more modest this year, and I think to a certain degree a little more ambiguous than I've given in the past, but I'm happy with them. I'm looking forward to a good year 2010 and I hope you'll accept my invitation to go through it together.

All the best to you all...
P~

2008...finished, 2009 Here we come!!

So we're nearly done with another year... how did it go?

List of 2008 years goals.
• My goal for personal health this year is to get to 190 lbs consistently. I want to get to this goal by June 1st. At this time I want to begin exercising more vigorously to increase my muscle tone.Well, this one went well to begin with but finished off pretty weak. I made a good point in the beginning of the year to get on the stationary bike and got myself in good shape to ride to work, which I did. Late in the summer, though I had a few things get in the way, and had a long cold that kept me from riding and from there it pretty well went down the tubes. I'm still lighter that I had started at, but not at my goal of 190.

• I want to start phasing out more meat in my diet. I am not planning on going fully vegetarian, I love meat too much, but I have over the last year realized that I feel more healthy and full of energy when I eat a mostly vegetable diet. I'd like to get to a point where all the meats that I do eat, either come from local producers, or that are meat or fish that I harvest myself. I think I will be much happier and healthier, eating really good meat once in a while rather than poor quality meat regularly.I think I did pretty well on this. I do still eat meat regularly, but we've really integrated a lot of different things like TVP, grains and such. Still have work to do on it, but progress has been made.

• For my garden this year, I want to really get a head start on it. I want to prepare early and get a good start so that I am able to get a good early season crop. I also want to make an effort to plant things that I can over winter, such as potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, squash and onions. I made available a good bit of space in the yard this fall and I want to make sure that I use it.Did really well on this I think! I was able to get a lot of early cool season crops of lettuces, peas and cabbages in and added a few new ones like kohlrabi

• I want to begin moving my garden towards having more open pollinated and heirloom varieties and to begin a seed bank for myself to save seed from one year to the next..Once again, I feel pretty good about this one. I managed to save seed from four tomato varieties, radishes, coriander, basil and carrots. It's a start and I'm happy with it so far.

• Another thing that I want to start doing is recycling. I know I know, I should be already, but it's not readily available to us, and we haven't been making the effort other than when we have a bunch of cardboard..This has made a huge difference in our home. We set up a small pale in the kitchen that we collected all of our recyclable materials in and I regularly dropped them off at my office. A welcome side effect of this, that should have been expected, was that our trash can was rarely full through the year. There was a noticeable difference in our waste stream; a welcome site!

Food production totals for 2008:
This year A~ and I set ourselves a goal that, although we didn't advertise it, was to reach 500 lbs of food grown in our garden. I'm very proud to say that that goal was exceeded! Our final, end of year total for homegrown produce was........drum roll please...... 521 pounds!! And that's not counting the eggs. Even though our girls didn't start producing until July 12th, they blessed us with 771 eggs through today's collection. It still amazed me how fast they add up. I forgot to mention so I'll add it now, but I did a little experiment from Nov 12 - Dec 13th. I didn't mean for it to end up as exactly one month, rather to test how long one bag of our feed would last through the winter when the chooks are eating a lot and it is primarily feed based. I wanted to see what kind of egg production I got with little to no additional lighting and during the short daylight hours. The result was 135 eggs in 31 days. That translates to 11.25dozen or approx. $33.75 (based on $3.00/doz) to a $13.00 bag of feed. Good return for a slow production period, but I digress...

So then, what to do for 2009? I have a lot of things that I want to do, some reruns from 2008 and some new goals for 2009. Let's run 'em down...

List of 2009 goals.
•I want to basically redo my personal health goal for this year. I got close and, honestly, I think I can do better.
•A~ and I have a lot of garden goals for this year. We have already added quite a few feet of new garden area in the form of the lasagna beds this fall and we want to add another whole section to the front side yard as well. All in all we're hoping to be able to triple our harvest this year and shoot for 1500 pounds.
•What to do with 1500 pounds of food? Well, we hope to also increase again the amount of food that we put up and preserve throughout the season. We're also hoping to be able to participate in our local farmers market, to at least a small degree, and met a woman from a local women's shelter that would be more than happy to take any extras that we have throughout the season. We both agree that finding ways that we can give back to our community is a goal worth making!
•Finally, as I mentioned in a previous posting, I will be participating in the Master Gardeners course this year. Besides that being the realization of a longstanding goal of mine, I want to parlay that into even more community activity. This year I want to again host a beginning gardening course, but even more than that, I want to begin laying the foundations for a community garden in my home town of Syracuse UT. There will be more to come on this so stay tuned.

Another thing, although not really a goal per se, is with regard to blogging and writing in general. I was able to realize this year that when I put my mind to it, I'm a pretty good writer. I've been honored to be invited to write for a couple of other venues and look forward to doing that this year. Perhaps I'll even have the opportunity to make a small income from it this year as well. I also have some ideas that I'm working toward for this blog. Nothing concrete yet, so again...stay tuned for more.

I want to take the opportunity to say thank you to everyone that's stuck with me this year, and wish a very warm welcome to those who've just found me. I look forward to a great new year with all of you, building community, sharing information and finding all the possibilities in life.

Happy new year all, and God bless.
Peace...
P~

Refocusing (For the record.)

Alright, now that I've had my weekend off, indulged myself in football playoff games and managed to generally talk my way out of working on my projects for a weekend it's time to refocus. This is not one of my strong suits. I'm a good starter, nay a great starter, but I die in the stretch. My attention's a little sporadic I guess. So here I am again, reiterating my goal.

I will finish my projects before I take time to relax.

I really want to get all of this stuff wrapped up before the end of February. The beginning of March is the time that I plan to start dilligent work towards preparing for the planting season so I do need to get it done.

Ooops I was snoozing..(resolutions '08 additions)

Alright, if you happened to notice the posting time on my resolutions post from yesterday, you will have seen that I posted it up at 1:15 AM. I was snoozing I think, because there were two pretty significant goals that I omitted. I want to take a minute to get those on the record if you'll bear with me.

• I want to focus this year on changing a behavior of mine that is a nuisance from time to time, a stress in my marriage and just a plain bad habit. That is to finish all the things that I start. I have a tendency to be very eclectic in the things that inspire me from day to day. I think this is a good trait in itself, but when I zing off to the next project before I have finished the last one, I end up with a bunch of half finished stuff around the house. This needs to change.

• My second amendment is to make an effort to stay on top of my clutter. My garage is probably my greatest testament to this problem. This is something that my wife and I both want to work on. That is to say I want to work on cleaning up my clutter, and she wants me to work on cleaning up my clutter too! Kidding aside, we talked even just today, about making a conscious decision to dramatically reduce our purchasing. We will try to dramatically de-clutter and then take a serious look at whether a potential acquisition is a want or a need before getting it.

Well, there they are, the last two things (for now) that I want to work on this year. It should be a good year. I'm looking forward to it, and the challenges.
Again, be safe, and enjoy the Holiday!

Happy New Year!