Making progress

Winter is truly the time to hole in and do a lot of planning and organizing on the farm.  I am taking that to heart this year.  Revisions were made to my daily chores list and a new one has been posted to the refrigerator.  It still requires some tweaking but the house has stayed much more tidy this week as I endeavor to complete the basic tasks every night.  Many of the household chores were being neglected without something or someone to hold me accountable.  The month-to-month farm plan, while in its infancy, is also working well.  Spare minutes find me pulling it out and tackling a task to completion (like ordering my garden seeds for this year) or allocating time each weekend to ensure progress.  With an extra day on the farm this weekend I am hoping to knock out a couple of extra tasks weather permitting. 

In the past week:

• I have found the work bench in the back shop which was long ago buried under miscellaneous tools, associated scraps dropped there between one or ten quick fixes of various items, and any number of items left on the desk or kitchen table in the kitchen which were just dropped on the work bench as a place to get them out of the way before dinner.
• Two chickens were dispatched to the freezer to decrease our flock to a more manageable size.  New bedding was placed in the chicken coop. 
• Nest boxes were disinfected and placed in cages with two of the three rabbits which I bred this month.  Unfortunately one of the does discarded her entire litter a little more than a week early.  I am not sure exactly why as she appears very healthy but am thinking that she might have gotten scared or upset at something outside the garage.
• All of the pictures of Little man from birth to 24 months have been edited, cataloged and prints ordered.  There remain a few photographs taken by family members which I want to collect to complete a few photo collages, but otherwise, having gone through and edited over one thousand pictures is a pretty huge accomplishment for this girl!
• Garden seeds inventoried, old seed discarded, storage box cleaned out, list of seeds to order for our much smaller garden this year completed, online order placed for same, shipping notification received.  This past week of warm temperatures has tempted me to get outside and work in the yard or start seeds in flats in the basement, but it is still too early.  I resisted as temperatures are predicted to plunge back to the single digits and below zero over night next week.
• Semen located and ordering details ironed out and veterinarian lined up for the end of the month when, if my calculations are correct, pig will be ready to be bred.
• Progress has been made on the electronic filing which has backed up since our computer had hard-drive issues this summer.  Each night I have allocated fifteen minutes to catching up with all of this accumulated paper; at this rate I might be caught up by the end of May.

This weekend's goals include:

• Putting the plastic back on the hoop house as this past week's warm temperatures (for January) have loosened up the top layer of lawn providing access to the base of the greenhouse again
• Locating, cleaning, sharpening and oiling all of the tree pruning equipment and then finding a single location to store all of it so I can find it when I am ready to prune fruit and Christmas trees.
• Clean up and burning of the pine tree branches which are strewn around the back yard from the late December ice storm.
• Repair of the shed roof where Little man's father broke it while trying to get the tractor unstuck from the above mentioned ice.
• Repair of the roof on pig's house where a small leak has developed
• Thorough cleaning of the chicken coop and the rabbit cages.
• Complete the new chicken feeder which didn't get done last week as I got side tracked by an indoor house cleaning project.
• Making at least one batch of jam or jelly from juice which was frozen after harvesting berries this summer and fall.
• An hour or so to read a new book from the library
• Perhaps some time split between house cleaning and catching a glimpse or two of the NFL playoff games (a girl can hope).

If I can manage to stay on track and not get dissuaded by the big picture and continue focusing on this task based approach, I am confident that we will make progress this year.