It's all fun and games...until I get the 2015 planner. Then I get ambitious and start making lists, and poor Mark has to put his nose back to the grindstone.

If you're a relatively new reader, you might find this post about our annual tasks helpful as you plan out your own homesteading year. I even included a spreadsheet with our yearly planting dates at the end of that post --- the first seeds go in the ground around here at the beginning of February under quick hoops unless the ground is ultra cold, so you don't have as much planning time as you might think!

We haven't added any big projects to our list this year, but we are spending some time expanding certain systems. First, we've decided to streamline our mushroom operation, perhaps with some sort of small shade house to keep the mushrooms cool and moist on summer days (since sticking them under the fruit trees just didn't cut it), and we're also splurging on two new colonies of chemical-free bees for which we'll be returning to our original Langstroth hives. Meanwhile, if Abigail is pregnant, I'll be learning to milk, and we'll definitely be growing more goat fodder plants in the garden during the summer months. Finally, we had so much fun with our limited sugar mapling this past winter that we might expand a bit this year, and there are always new perennials on the horizon. So stay tuned for lots of furry, leafy, and sweet fun in the year to come!