As the World Turns

The world really does keep turning, even when you're not paying attention. In just a couple weeks, the blogs 1 year anniversary will be upon me. Hard to believe it's been a year already. I miss my home computer, the time I get to play at the library is so short, I hardly have time to review everything that's happened over this past year.

I remember finding Mayberrys blog, Shy Wolf at Wolf tracks blog and The Johnson Family blog one late November night. it was one of those "I can't sleep, surf the net nights". I'd been mulling over how to get a bit of traffic to the old geocities website and found out how easy it was to use blogger. Now look where we are! Now I can actually interact with like minded people.

Over the past year I've talked about raised bed gardening(one of my favorite ways to garden), container gardening, growing my own food, baking my own bread, how I use the livestock I raise to feed us. I've really enjoyed the blogging, it's made me feel like the world is right there with me on each of my adventures. Even when I was failing miserably to make cheese, the support I got from you guys kept me trying until I got it right. Sharing what I do here kept me pushing to get more and more done each day so I'd have more exciting stuff to share on the blog. It's really been a rewarding experience.

So, if you don't mind, I'd like to recap a little with you all about this past year on the self sustained farm we fondly call the Double M.....

Here's I post about Self Sustained Living and one on container growing...one about growing coffee and tobacco, here's one I did with full step by step directions for making soap. Then there's the very first wheel of cheese and some of our home butchered meat made into sausage... looking back at the first wheel of cheese and realizing how far I've come with just that, all I can say is wow, what a cool new skill!

Then spring finally arrived and we had that inland hurricane and my lifestyle really proved to be top notch, keeping us moving along without much inconvienence.

We've even been thru some hard times this year, hubby getting hurt, workmans comp not doing anything to help his injury and sending him back to work without any real treatment, the mine letting him go after a few days back. We should have seen that set-up coming. Our lifestyle has once again proved to be an asset by keeping us fed, warm and dry. We can't pay the mortgage but we're not hungry! LOL gotta look on the bright side of it at least......

I'm already planning for the next growing season here. All the new things I want to try growing, the old tried and true stuff too... the new orchard and the berries, a new strawberry patch, the potato patch, I might even grow some gourds this next year. I've got these cool books on gourd carving, had them for a few years now and just the other day I sat down to read in them and got excited about gourds all over again. This next year we'll do a whole series of gourd carving posts and try a bunch of stuff with them. I'm even thinking of growing those great big bushel basket sized gourds. I think we can find some cool uses for those.......

So many things still to do and so little time..... stay with me and have the adventure with me......