January: Looking Forward!
I am a procrastinator. The fall out of the New Year is still rolling out for me. I'm feeling a fire under me and am excited about the year before us! I spend a lot of time in reflection and to start to feel that shift to looking forward puts a spring in my step that I wish would send me flying directly to Spring.
But, I am glad to have all the time, every day, to work towards the new visions we are formulating for the ranch. I feel like so much of the content I've been sharing has been very family/self-centric, which makes sense. The winter season slows us down. Having a baby, a new family member. It is such a big blessing and deal! So much to process and adjust to.
Having Clancy has taught us that we will always be in some state of metamorphosis and adjusting to that. The second time around brings plenty more change, but now we are in the know. Being in the know of just how life-altering kids are makes all the difference!
So January has been a month of it is a new year, so now what? Well, I will tell you what!
It started out by dropping a small financial fortune on 10 more 7-800 pound big bales for the cows and horses and two cords of split pine firewood for our woodstove. The hay won’t see our animals to grazing season, but we hope the firewood will see us through this winter and spring. Once we run out of big bales, we will feed the stockpile of 75-85# horse hay in the barn. We hope to start grazing at the end of March. We estimate the big bales to get us to the start of March.
Eventually, we aspire to harvest our own firewood from the surplus of Juniper trees that need to be managed and thinned on our property. This year may be the year! At least to start. Wood for burning in woodstoves has to be very dry. We only have so much dead standing. Live trees must be cut, stacked, and stored for a couple of seasons so it isn’t ‘green’ but dry to burn. Juniper is a lovely wood to burn; it makes scorching fires, but the bark is inherently dirty with blown and settled high desert sand, which quickly dulls chainsaw blades.
January had a really nice mix of weather. Sweetly falling snow that we had an epic ranch hike in and lots of sunshine. Central Oregon usually has a midwinter false spring and it often falls sometime in January to the first of February. It is salvation. But when the cold winds commence cutting straight to the bone again, wow, does it cut deep on every level.
At this point in the season, it is hard to keep positive through the whipping wind, wintry squalls, and sunless days.
That is where the greenhouse comes in. A microclimate within the world that is calm and warmer, at least once the sun hits it after about 9:30 am. It can be 30-40 degrees outside and even 70 degrees inside! Being out of the wind makes a huge difference, even when it is freezing temps all day.
Our greens are still meager and growing slowly. I am trying to water more frequently, but it is by hand and Livi has to be asleep in the stroller and give me enough time to get it done. I need to use my drip system, but the filter froze and cracked; I am not sure I should use it without it.
We are waiting for the 2023 growing season to kick off mid-February—once the daylight reaches ten hours! Then we can plant more cold-season greens. I will need to start seeds soon too, but to do that I have to have a grow op area. A project for a weekend very soon.
Our chickens haven’t been laying all winter but they started popping out an egg here and there. Very egg-citing! We turned our attention to making it easier for all of us to collect eggs by installing a nesting box into the Fort Cluck fence!
We had envisioned building a stationary coop here but have decided not to do that. Now we have a clear vision of a small mobile coop for sleeping in with a chicken wire floor—poop falls through and is left behind as we move it around there pen. No coop cleaning needed! Nathaniel will be fitting that in between bookcase installs.
Having the eggs accessible from outside the pen will be very nice. Clancy can’t open the gate to Fort Cluck. He can open the back and collect eggs by himself from these nesting boxes Nathaniel whipped out with all scrap material!
The back hinges and swings up and then has a folding arm that props it open for collecting and maintaining, all of which Clancy can do himself! The trick is getting him to remember to close and latch it ;)
In the workshop, Nathaniel turned his focus to a custom pedestal for a taxidermy trophy deer mount to be displayed on. The customer wanted it to be modern yet natural, a fresh take on the traditional pedestal. Nathaniel designed this and was able to really stretch his artistic touch by applying power-carving to give the modern walnut wood and angles an organic feel. The quick shots of this piece do not do it justice. It is a beautiful work of art! This will be shipped to the taxidermist in Utah once we figure out how to do it!
January did bring with it a surprise.
As soon as I declared that I would do nothing with the intent to make money… I became obsessed with figuring out how to increase the ranch’s agricultural income to maximize our agri-tourism income. Here is a little inconvenient truth about our ranch life: we can’t make more from agri-tourism enterprises than our agricultural enterprises. Money is in agri-tourism. Not agricultural, especially at our ‘family farm’ scale. So it sucks, but it is this way to protect food-producing farm land from being turned into resource-consuming resorts. Unfortunately, it really hurts the small acreage parcels of land, like us, that have a hard time being that agriculturally productive, as in supplying a part-time, let alone full-time, income.
We love sharing the ranch with our Hipcamp guests, and I would love to invite people out to our ranch for more occasions. I went down a federal document rabbit hole trying to figure out what the hell we could do agriculturally to allow more ‘tourism’. I discovered that horse therapy, boarding, and lessons are all a loophole. There is nothing agriculturally necessary about a horse these days(I am a horse owner, so I can say that). Especially when we are talking about boarding pleasure ponies and giving therapy sessions. I then found an old article about goat yoga and that they were hoping to have it included by changing ‘equine therapy’ to ‘livestock therapy.’ That led to a meeting with the founder of Goat Yoga™. I learned, despite her efforts, that had not been accepted, and while goat yoga would be the most magical thing to do here at the ranch, it would be far too successful for us to do legally. I am so bummed.
I’ve dreamed of having yoga out in our pastures here for years, long before I knew anything about any of this. But bloody bureaucracy squanches my dreams constantly.
But that still got us feeling rather inspired about goats. We love them.
And next thing you know… we were at a local Nigerian Dwarf Goat Dairy shopping for goats!
Why? Well, rather than starting a horse riding lesson program, which would be a big ordeal and ruin my resolution to start nothing new this year. I began thinking about how to maximize our current enterprises. Get them to earn more for us. Hipcamp and cows are our two main enterprises. Hipcamp really encourages hosts to have ‘Extras’, essentially value add on services, goods, or experiences. Feeding chickens, ranch tours, and interacting with goats is an excellent way for us to make more from the bookings we already get.
You can view our listing here and check out our ‘Extras’ we will offer this year! Alone, it isn’t much, but it really leverages getting paid for what we often find ourselves doing with a good percentage of our guests—interacting with them and facilitating their interaction with our ranch.
Goats are fascinating; we knew we wanted them back in our lives again just for our enjoyment. We picked out two yearlings to be bred. This means we will have more goats to sell for agricultural income. The idea of goat milk and cheeses is also intriguing since this could offset our current expenses since we pay for a local raw milk share and buy goat/sheep cheeses.
Now to figure out just how to make more from our cows…
I really want this ranch to take care of us and our homegrown life together here.
