Review of 2024: Successes and Failures
The year 2024 marked our first year of working on this website and blog, making it an important year for us. Each year comes with its successes and wins, but they also come with their hardships and failures. When I would stop to think about homesteading and trying out new things to be more self-sustaining, I often look at it through rose colored glasses. It was a fantasy to me. My vision showed production of successful crops in our garden, including fruits and veggies, collecting enough chicken eggs for us and our family and friends in the area, and finally, starting to produce our own animal products such as goat milk. Well the truth is, I am slowly learning that not everything in my fantasy is as easy and successful as I was hoping it would be.
Our Wins for 2024
I am going to start out with the positive. We did have some wins in 2024. I would consider the publishing of our website that you find yourself on right this very moment, a win. Other wins consisted of raising some new chickens and safely introducing to our flock, discovering we have roosters (hello, 2025 baby chicks!), grape production, a beautiful and productive flower garden, building a stock tank pool to cool off in for the summer, taking a family Trip to Europe and successfully starting to homeschool our son. Ciera has also been packing on some extra pounds as she grows the littlest baby Dumyahn 🙂
The not so great for 2024
When you are homesteading and learning, there are bound to be failures. Some of these failures come due to lack of knowledge and some of these come from not tending to certain things with enough time and effort due to the many other things we have going on. Our three largest issues and things to grow on consisted of vegetable garden production, egg production and breeding our goats. Regarding the vegetable garden, we had very little production and couldn’t seem to mend the issues. Our garden is going to take a higher priority this summer and I am determined to improve our production. I believe the issue is a combination of soil quality, insufficient water, and the stifling Arizona heat. For egg production, the six original hens that we started with are getting older and their production slowed way down. This issue has been remedied with the addition of our new 2024 summer babies. We also are in the process of incubating eggs so we can raise our own baby chicks this spring/summer. The biggest bummer of all (at least originally) was the fact that we took our goats to get bred and neither of them took. For months we were duped into thinking they were pregnant and their bodies were changing, to find out that nothing came to be. On the bright side of this we feel that we may have dodged a bullet as far as not allowing ourselves to get overwhelmed with another big project when we already fight for time to get things done.
Other difficulties we faced included, but were not limited to keeping up with our blog posts and business nights, keeping the kids on task with their weekly chores, a hot tub conversion malfunction during the winter (the time we want to use it most),and keeping all of our plants and trees in a healthy state.
Overall, this is just a small post to update you on some of the successes and not so successful ventures of our part-time homestead this year. It also serves as a reminder to us that there will always be wins and losses, but in the end staying happy and healthy is the biggest win of all. It is important that we do our best to learn and streamline our processes in the coming years so that we can be more successful, and at times just more realistic of what we can achieve. Especially with a human baby on the way, we are all going to need to slow way down and savor this transitional season!