Happy New Year! It has been six months since our last post. As you can imagine, things became quite busy with our little 'farm', continued building on the cottage as well as our house, and some work as well! If I'm really honest as well, I just didn't make time for blogging. I will try to make this more regular, for you and for us to have a record of our progress! How were the last six months? We lost quite a few chickens to a fox that is occasionally fed by some neighbours. We moved into our home in July and we have been loving it ever since. We are still loving having chickens! They're entertaining and fresh eggs are amazing. We filled our freezer with a great deal on a half a cow, a quarter pig, and 45 meat chickens that we raised and then butchered ourselves. Our potato harvest wasn't as wonderful as we had hoped, but a local farmer did well so we have a hundred or so pounds of potatoes in a makeshift cold cellar. We plan to actually build a cold storage spot this summer for better use. We will need to do some soil testing and building up of our soil before we plant this year. We have been learning a lot!
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| The Chicken Lover |
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| An early-summer raised bed |
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| Supper in the new chicken coop! |
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| Our latest animal- Toffee! |
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| Fermented vegetable soup base |
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| Austrian Baking for Christmas |
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| Happy New Year from our family to you!!! |
Just before New Year's I ordered our seeds for this year, having done an inventory of last year's seeds. I am SO excited to get planting this year! Then we spent a few days up at our cottage, shoveled a place on the ice free that we could skate and plan hockey. It was a great winter 'camping' experience. The only downside is using an outhouse when it is below zero!
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| Elena checking the ice depth |
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| Our first day was beautiful and the ice was 8" thick all over! |
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| Ice hockey in the snow |
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| The days end in front of the woodstove. |
Now we are back at home and are making lists of projects for this year. It has been a relaxing and rejeuvenating time. And so I will leave you with Jonathan's summary of our first 3 years in Canada- created but unpublished in November. God Bless as we start this New Year together. Let's go out is Faith, Obedience and Praise!
3 Canadian Years in Review
We moved from Austria to Canada on the 21. of November 2017. Now that was three years ago. Since then we got to know a lot of different people, we played some Sports which we had never tried before, we have had more time to spend together (especially up at the cottage), we bought 16 acres of nice land and now have moved in to our house that we started building in 2019.
Some people (still) ask if we like Austria or Canada more. That is an impossible question to answer, because Canada is just missing some things (hills and mountains, at least where we are; some friends and one side of the family, because they didn´t move with us; Austrian Food and baking, although we can make ALMOST everything they don´t have here). But Austria didn´t have some things either (Some sports, snow for Christmas, our 16 acres of land, the other side of the family).
So looking back at three years... What did we do? Here are some pictures from the 21. November 2017 to the 21 November 2020.
