Well, it’s certainly been a while since I’ve blogged anything about our house plans. Up until this Month, there really hasn’t been very much to write about. Until the past couple of weeks.

Eric has been spending months writing lists, making phone calls, going to appointments and researching everything house and farm in order to present all of our finances to the bank. We had our final meeting with the FSA Wednesday morning and “signed our life away” to our farm and officially have our operating and living loans for 2014! We are so excited that this step is done. Although it is new and scary living off of the FSA/bank, we are excited to learn farm budgeting and implement our own budgeting tools for our new life.

After we got the go ahead from the FSA and the Farmers and Merchant’s Bank, we finally got out on our land with the contractor who is digging and pouring our foundation and got the placement of our house flagged off. I’m not normally an orange kind of girl, but I’ve never been so excited to see little orange flags all over our property. We are working with a local company, specifically a guy named Doyle Roth. He has been super great to work with and we feel so comfortable and confident hiring with him. He knows so much and it’s really great getting started off on our house with someone who has done this for so many years.

We are officially less than 20 days away from the first possible day of planting, which means things have been really busy, especially the past week or two. After getting the planter out from the shed last week and getting all the maintenance done, it was time to focus on fertilizing. We started by spreading all of the manure from last year’s cows in the places where the natural soil had been eroded by the wind and rain. It’s not always obvious seeing the eroded places from the road, but I was really surprised at just how eroded it was once we got out into the field. Nora and I loved riding around in the tractor that week. She had a blast watching Daddy and Kim load the spreader up, and loved watching the manure go flying through the air even more.

Around these parts, it’s quite normal to see trucks and tractors pulling around big tanks of anhydrous everywhere you go. After spreading the manure, anhydrous fertilizing is the next step. Eric and Kim have been busy bustling to and from the Milford CoOp and getting all of our corn land sprayed. We spray just the land that the corn will be planted on and not the beans because the corn needs more nitrogen to grow properly, so that’s why we only spray half of our land. Nora and I haven’t been able to ride around in the tractor for that, since it has such a strong smell. They still have about 3 or 4 days left of spraying, but they have been slowed down the past couple of days because of cold temperatures. Hopefully this week they will be able to get it all finished.

Sheila, Nora and I planted the first part of our garden this week! Let me rephrase that….Sheila did most of the planting, while I chased a screaming Nora while she ran after Eric in the tractor. That child could care less about anything else when she sees a tractor, even if it means an afternoon of playing in the dirt. I guess it just confirms that she is a farm girl at heart, right?

 

Nora pointing to where our new house is going to be from our lane. Little gal loves to watch the ducks swim around on our pond!

 

So as you can see, it’s been pretty busy for us the past few weeks. Looking forward to the next few weeks before the crazy month of planting begins! We are so excited for our first official year of farming and are excited to see how God is going to grow and change us over the course of the next year!