Ready to kick off a new year on your homestead? Start by planning your homestead goals and dreams using this free worksheet! Cheers to making it the best year yet!
2018 was an amazing year! And you know what’s even more amazing? Every year that I get to live this way, I fall more in love with life! So I know 2019 will be amazing an amazing year, too!
Now don’t get me wrong, there was also plenty of stress, frustration and tears. But, honestly, I feel like the trials of building a homestead are there to make us stronger and kinder as humans. Everything in this life truly is an opportunity! And we get to choose if it’s an opportunity to grow and become stronger or to sulk and let life pass us by.
I hope this new year brings you lots of love, joy, tears and butt-kicking opportunities!
Homestead Dreams & Goals for 2019:
I’m already buzzing with excitement for all the projects we want to accomplish in 2019! Just take a look at some of the big projects we hope to accomplish this year!
I’m a visual person. I’m also a list person. So writing things down and seeing them on a daily basis is truly important to our success on this homestead! It keeps all those projects at the forefront of my mind so that I can better plan for them and focus on them.
I created the “Homestead Dreams” Goal Planning Worksheet to do just that! It’s a beautiful way to keep track of your goals and projects in the new year! It’s themed to match the 2019 Homestead Management Binder, but it can also be used as a stand-alone worksheet/goal tracker.
Here’s how to use the “Homestead Dreams” Goal Planning Worksheet:
- Download and print out the “Homestead Dreams” Goal Planning Worksheet (click on the blue button below to access this worksheet and all the other freebies)
- Think about everything you would love to do this year! Then, write down each of your dreams! Write one goal in each of the honeycombs cells.
- Display your “Homestead Dreams” worksheet in a spot where you will see it on a regular basis to encourage and remind you of the things you will accomplish this year!
- As you complete each one of your dreams/goals, color it in! By the end of the year, you will have a colorful honeycomb and a record of everything you accomplished! Just like a worker bee, your daily activities will create something beautiful!
Cheers to you and your homestead in 2019! And just for fun, here’s a look at some of the highlights from our homestead in 2018!
2018 Zenstead Progress & Highlights:
I went back to school… well, herbal school:
In January, I enrolled in the online Herbal Immersion Program through Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine. This is a 2-1/2 year intensive program designed to increase your knowledge of all things herbal medicine. It has been a challenge to figure out how to incorporate all the extra studying and work into my already busy life, but I absolutely love the program! I already feel much more knowledgable about organic gardening, garden stewardship, plant botany, biodiversity, herbal medicine making, and how to use herbs in everyday life.
If you are at all interested in increasing your knowledge of herbal medicine, I highly recommend this program. Please let me know if you are interested in starting the program, as I can answer any questions you have about it and even give you a referral code for an enrollment discount!
I quit my full-time job:
We took a giant scary-ass leap this year! I transitioned from full-time employment to part-time employment. This change has had a significant effect on our lifestyle and our bank account! Since Lindy works on commission and my pay dropped by 75%, we really have to be careful – like really, really careful! But it’s allowing us to be more creative and make better use of our resources. Which we actually have time to do now that we aren’t so frantic all the time. It’s truly amazing to be able to spend time focusing on developing our homestead. Our stress level and lifestyle have changed immensely and our homestead is already more productive!
We continued to renovate our home:
When you buy a neglected fixer-upper, the to do list never ends! In 2018, we finished renovating the two spare bedrooms. One of them is now our home office/craft/sewing/herb-drying room. It also happens to be where our DIY chick brooder lives, so it’s definitely a multi-functional space!
We continued to work on the kitchen (a never-ending process!). In 2018, we finally got tile up on one of the walls and installed open shelving that we made from locally-sourced rough cut lumber. I can’t believe how much extra storage space we have for our canned goods now!
Outside, we built a large deck that will be used as an outdoor living space. In 2019, we hope to add an outdoor kitchen to the space. This will allow us to do a lot of our cooking and canning outside! We re-seeded our pasture and continued to renovate the goat shelters. We also laid a lot of weed mat and bark around our property in an effort to reduce the amount of weed-eating that is needed to keep things under control.
We completed our hay barn:
In early Spring, we finally finished the hay barn! We started building it in September of 2017. We got the walls and roof up just before winter hit. In the Spring, we painted it and finished all the trim work. We’ve done pretty much everything on this property ourselves, but the hay barn is definitely the project that I’m most proud of! It was a beast to build – especially for us two tiny women! At one point, the neighbor did come over to help us hoist the particle board sheets onto the roof because he said he was sitting in his kitchen looking out the window and didn’t want to watch us kill ourselves when we dropped a board! ? At any rate, the hay barn is finally finished – and it was built from start to finish with our own hands!
Our goat herd grew… and then shrunk:
They say goats are like potato chips – you can’t have just one! Turns out they are very addicting! We originally had dreams of immediately starting to sell raw milk locally, so we expanded our herd quite a bit in 2017. But after some come-to-Jesus talks with ourselves, we realized that we just aren’t ready for that yet. Our property still needs so much work! We just don’t have time to care for or support that large of herd and business. So we decided to get our ducks back in a row and downsize for now. We are keeping just 4-5 does and 2 bucks. This smaller herd will still provide plenty of milk for ourselves and our immediate family. Maybe someday, we will begin selling our products, but it’s just not our focus right now.
These are just some of the many things that happened on our homestead in 2018! I know that 2019 will be another year of growth for ourselves and our property! And I’m excited to share it with you all! Here’s to another great year! ?
What are your homestead dreams for the new year? Share in the comments so that we can cheer each other on!
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