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| Our garden 3 1/2 years ago |
We’ve been slowly building up our urban farming operation over the last 4 years. We started with gardening and slowly grew our farm – moving to chickens and then acquiring goats and then rabbits. Soon we’ll have our own bee hives and we’re looking into doing pigs, chickens and ducks in the future.
For Thanksgiving we drove to Wyoming to spend it with my family. Jeanette was brave enough to take care of the farm in our absence. Halfway through the week she confessed to me that she was rather overwhelmed and wasn’t sure if what we were doing is something she wanted to do after all.
I reassured her that she could do it and that she was only feeling overwhelmed because she went from caring for one dog, 3 cats and some chickens to caring for 4 dogs, 6 cats, 18 chickens, 6 rabbits and 3 goats. The transition from where she is at to where we are at has to be gradual in order to avoid feeling overwhelmed.
Of course it doesn’t help that our dogs and cats are enough to make anyone overwhelmed all on their own.
We have one of those dogs, you get exhausted just being in the same room 😛 I'm with you on the starting slow front though. We have our system down and pretty efficient for the chickens and turkeys now, but it took time. We'll work on the bees next spring, and maybe the following spring add goats, and maybe move the chickens. If we tried to do everything at once we'd be so overwhelmed we'd be tempted to move to a condo! 😉
I was worried that our farm sitter would be overwhelmed, but since she had grown up on a farm she just found it mad fun with all the critters. My past 2 sitters were a bit overwhelmed and they didn't even have to milk the goat. It's a lot. I know as I added each animal/food item, I just gradually adjusted my routines. I didn't even realize how much I had been doing until I dumped it on someone else. Funny how that happens.