Oregon- New Beginnings

Here it goes.

I have been meaning to get on here for so long and get to letting everyone know what we are up to. Life is fantastic up here on our mountain and I would not change this experience for anything. 

Let's start at the beginning. 

Moved up here in the middle of May this year, still snowing here. Ugh. 2 kids and myself and my husband crammed tight in a small camper trailer. That was interesting enough. We had not planned on snow so we were ill prepared. However about 2 weeks later the snow let up and we were really able to get to work.

Preparations began with cleaning up the property. 4.63 acres of unkempt land to rake, dig and move debris. This has been fun and is an ongoing project as we focus on one area before moving to the next. We designated an area for the kids toys, though they follow us around a lot trying to help and learn what we are doing.

My hubby dug some garden beds for us and we set out 15 planter pots in one of them to get our seedlings started. Currently we are growing 4 types of beans, 2 peas, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, 3 lettuce, 2 carrots, 2 onions, brussel sprouts, kale, beets, corn, tomatoes, squash, zucchini, cucumbers, 3 melons, strawberries, radish, and 4 peppers. The numbers are the different types of each food, we have way more than we will probably be able to eat. The plan is to store most of it for winter and give some away to some of the wonderful, kind people we have been meeting along the way up here. 

We were blessed from a gentleman leaving the mountain top with an RV full of useful things. This saved us some money as well as gave us a second place to store things as well as for me and my husband to have a space to get homework done and just take a break once in awhile. 

There are two ponds on our property. They are beautiful and teeming with frogs and other pond creatures. We have hundreds of little tiny frogs about the size of a dime hopping around the gardens all the time and hundreds more growing legs in the pond. :) There are several animals that come and visit the pond daily. There are blue herons, robins, falcons, and even a family of deer. We were blessed to watch two of the deer come and eat some grass by the pond last night, they were there for about 10 minutes before they took off. The kids really enjoyed it. 

My husband is currently working on getting the day room up so we can have a place to go on rainy days, as well as a bigger area for when winter hits. He has done an amazing job and even built a loft area we are going to fence in for the kids to play in. Even the door will be gated so they have to have help to get out, do not want any falls happening.

This fall we are trying to get our daughter into a head start program so she can attend school. She has been asking us for at least a year to go to school and we think that it will be wonderful for her. I am kind of sad and happy about this all at the same time. My hope was to home school her and my son, but she informed me she wanted to go to regular school with the other children. So we decided to let her try it and see if she really enjoys it. I am sure she will, she is such a social butterfly. She is also smart as a whip, learning her letters and how to write them already and we believe she could benefit from some schooling, since we are limited in the time we have each day at the moment.

Other then working our butts off all day getting things done we enjoy going on walks through the woods with the kids and teaching them about the world around them. We are working hard now, so that when winter comes we have the ability to take it easy, and not have to work so hard in the cold. By then we will have a green house and will still be growing our food so that we are never without. Plus we want to have seedlings ready for next years planting.  

This has been a wonderful adventure and I would not change a moment of it. Our family has gotten so much closer to each other and we are growing daily.