Closing Out the Summer

We've been crazy busy as of late. Still working on the house but at the same time trying to milk every last "summer" weekend for what it's worth.

A few things have gotten done on the homestead front... we finally gave the goat house a coat of stain paint to protect it over the winter. James picked out a bright barn red and I love how it turned out. We still need to re-attach the windows and add a bit of cheesy to the house (I'm thinking maybe a flower box or two).

We also finally built them an alfalfa feeding trough... it was another episode of "Building with Sarah and James" (queue bickering and lots of sawdust). It turned out to be another beaut, made out of scraps found in the garage!

And the goats loved it!

Especially Willow!

We did a few more blackberry harvests (I did some real climbing to reach the motherlode of berries) but next year I hope to be more consistent with my harvests and hopefully make a pie or some jam. This year, most of the berries ended up in our bellies, straight off of the vine... but some of the berries went into some crafting as well! (Oh yeah, and all of the baby bushes that were growing on our ATV trail were harvested and thrown over the Sage, Willow and Jones. Twas a real feast, I think blackberry brambles are their most favorite!)

Blackberry paint

My mom made this dream catcher as a prizes for one of her disc golf tournaments

Our biggest project for the summer, though, was step 1 of Project: Mud Free Homestead. We've always had to deal with muddy pup paws, even at our old house, but we knew that we had to take some proactive steps before the wet season this year, especially with our bedroom as the main thoroughfare. We plan to soon have concrete poured underneath our canopy so that we will finally have a real patio but we also wanted to create a mud free pathway out to the stairs that lead to our goats... so we decided to do something that would eventually tie into the patio once it is done. Below are the before photos of the area we were working in.

First, we dug out and leveled (for the most part) the pathway, which was very hard work. Much of it was very hard dirt that James had to bust up with an ore first... we both got a ton of blisters after the long day of work.

Next, we threw down some weed barrier and got to lining the pathway. We brought home a huge truckload of large river rock that a friend was giving away... loading and unloading that was another rough task but we were super grateful to get all that great rock for free!

End of day one! We celebrated with wine and some one-on-one goat time...

The next load for old Darrell (our truck) was the pea gravel... we started with 2 cubic yards and that puppy was loaded down (you can sort of see all of the pressure on the tires in the picture below).

Spreading out the gravel was the easiest part of the whole process...

And here is the final product...

In the corner behind the dog pin is where we will start our veggie garden in the Spring!

Along the house, on the right,  I plan to grow a whole bunch of lavender!

While James was getting one more truckload of the pea gravel, I decided to spruce up the dog area a bit... here is the before...

And the after... we were planning on installing artificial grass in the rest of pen so that there would be no possibility of mud, but then we realized how expensive that was (which is ridiculously expensive). Sooo, we plan to put down bark instead and hopefully our pups dont decide to do any digging!

I am really excited to get our patio poured so that we can get some furniture and have a nice little sitting area... but next summer, it's on to create an awesome patio space! Until then though, it's hopefully going to be much less of a challenge keeping our pups and our floors clean!