One Year in Retrospect

One year ago, my wife and I moved from our rented condo to a 1.9 acre property with a house from somewhere between 1870 and 1900 (the records building burned down!). At the beginning, we knew we wanted to garden and a bunch of other things, and got to work as quickly as possible. We turned out 6 garden beds, fenced it in, and spent the rest of the growing season weeding, ferrying water, and loving every second of it.

Year 1:
Started our first ever garden
created 12'x3'x2' of compost
trimmed trees
learned how to fix a garden tractor
fixed up a derelict chicken coop (still needs gutters, paint, and a little more love, but it's got chickens!)
raised chickens and harvested eggs
fought off squirrels
foraged for berries
loved every minute of it.

Now that we're heading into year 2, we've started expanding. Year 2 goals:

Bees (currently on week 3 with our 2 hives! One painted yellow, and one blue :)  )
a small orchard (7 trees planted: 2 pears, 2 asian pears, 2 peaches, 1 apple; would have been 2 apples but one went out of stock)
blueberries (3 bushes planted, planning on having somewhere around 10-12 eventually, some as harvest-able hedges)
a cutting garden (seedlings in pots, working on it!)
Small garden stand in our front yard
finish chicken coop
remove burn pile (gotta be somewhere around 250 sq ft of piled up sticks and logs. half burned so far, took a week of evening fires)
Install water collection near garden (and never have to walk watering cans out there again!)

I'm sure there's more, but I'll look forward to seeing this post a year from now and seeing what we managed. I'll add a couple photos for fun, thanks everyone here for all the helpful articles, it's been really fun reading :)

Old apple tree trimmed to see if it will produce again

New orchard saplings

It's also been fun discovering what flowers were already there before we moved in. I didn't manage to get photos of all of them, but I've seen:

Red and white dogwood
Some kind of pink/red magnolia
lilac
tiger lilly
daffodils
naked ladies
ornamental cherry
crocuses
Siberian iris
peony
pear, sour cherry, and crabapple (they all have flowers, but those are more of fruit trees so not sure I should include them)
redbud
morning glory

Pretty fun so far, wonder what I'll see this year :)