My plans for this spring/summer are to finish setting up my annual garden and start working on making guilds in our orchard. We already have laying hens but we are getting more and will be moving them through different paddocks in the summer with moveable fencing. We're also getting chicks for meat birds. Then if we get a good apple harvest, I want to make sure to can and put away a lot more applesauce this year. I'm also building a little free library/little free pantry!
Overall, in the future I want our orchard to be a permaculture food forest with several varieties of fruit and nut trees (right now it's just apples) and berry bushes, I hope to get sheep (Shetland ewes, and a Gotland ram) to help take care of the fields so we don't have to worry about the forest taking over the patches of meadow and so we can harvest wool, milk and meat. A couple pigs too, but we have some work to do on our barn before we get there though!
The end goal is to have a farm stand to sell our homemade sheeps milk soap, our eggs, baked goods, and to give away our extra produce for free. I want to produce enough meat for ourselves to live year round without having to buy any (though I will trade some with a local farm that has beef). I want to learn how to make cheese, though just for ourselves. I also want to learn how to spin our wool (just received a huge load of wool from the Canadian Co-Operative of Wool Growers to practice with!) and sell skeins of naturally dyed hand spun yarn online and at local craft markets.
