Happy New Years!!

I have never been a big "go out and celebrate" kind of girl on New Years.  We have made a little ritual of getting out all of our seed catalogs and making lists of what we have and what we want.  I am so proud of how many seeds we have saved ourselves.  This should really save us some bucks.  Since yesterday was so nice, I had a chance to go outside and get some stuff done.  While I was out there I realized how many plants we have that will come back next year.   Here is a little list; kale, swiss chard, lavender, mint, money plant, jerusalem artichoke, ground cherries (should re-seed themselves), sage, and hopefully our mustard greens.  That is just the stuff we have at home.  We shouldn't have to do too much planting, and should have plenty of stuff to eat and sell in the spring.  Up at the farm we did a little experiment with our collards.  Since the ones we planted last year did so well again this year, we let them go to seed and dry out.  We took out the old plants and shook the dry plants over a 20'x5' area.  When the snow melted a couple of days ago we checked them and the little plants that grew in the fall and still alive and should provide us with a TON of collards.  This was one of my favorite things we grew last year so I am really excited to get so many.  We have a few restaurants in mind that we could try selling any surplus to.  I still have about a half a baby food jar of collard seeds left that I have nothing I can really do with them.  I also made a list of where we want to plant stuff.  We just spread some manure on the garden at the farm so we are hoping things will do much better there this year.  A lot of things will be planted here at home and at the farm.  That way if they fail at the farm we should still have some here for us.  That is another thing we need to work on, providing for ourselves first.  Also I want to drastically reduce our grocery bill next winter, so having a functional root cellar is really important to us.  I made a list of the storage veggies we want to grow, and how many bushels I think we will need.  We always struggle growing carrots, so this is something we really want to work on.  The problem is they need weeded so much, and we aren't at the farm enough to weed.  We don't have enough room here to grow too many.  Things like this make us realize how much we need to build our house at the farm.  We are going to see some companies next week to look at houses.  So many things to do, sometimes it seems so overwhelming.  All I know is I am so excited for this year!!  Last night we decided to pig out on Chinese food to bring in the New Year.  We have a great little Chinese place down the street, but since we are trying our hardest to save money, I have started to make it at home.  For some reason this always intimidated me, but I find it surprisingly easy.  I used this recipe for Egg Rolls,

and cashew chicken, which I just used this brown sauce recipe (I add ginger and garlic to mine), and added cashews, carrots, and chicken and served it over rice.

What a great way to start the new year!!