Everything's new. Everything's changed. We have moved. The Lord God made it clear to us in many different ways that we needed to move to a different house and property, so we picked up and moved to Willard, Missouri a year ago. It's kind of at the other corner of the Springfield. Instead of being at the northeastern side of Springfield, Willard is at the far northwestern corner of Springfield. Actually, we are about five miles north of Willard, which puts us nearly at the north edge of Greene county. So, you my ask, why am I even bothering to pick up this farm blog, anyway? Good question. Two answers. One, I always do like to write about all the projects I have going on at the farm, I guess I get that from my father. And, two, I recently purchased another wood-fired cookstove and we will be installing it in the kitchen during the summer when we remodel the kitchen and living room, and I enjoy writing about my cooking adventures with the wood and cooking on the stove. I don't have very many photos of the new house to share, but what I do have, I will attach. More photos to come. New potatoes. Now new potatoes may not mean much to some of you, but for those of you that have had new potatoes, there's really nothing like the flavor of new potatoes freshly dug from the garden. It's a little hard to explain at this point, so I guess it's best to just start at the beginning. This is the best photo I have of the new house right now. I'll get a better one later. The Lord God led Brenda and I to this listing at exactly the same time a year ago. The house was a mess, but we were convinced that it was right for us, so we bought it. It has a huge heating fireplace upstairs, which has been a real blessing this last winter. It has a really big kitchen, which I love. And, I will be installing a wood stove in the kitchen this summer, and we will be enlarging the living room to make more space for living room furniture. So, all in all, it has worked out just right for us. We have 14 acres here, which is more than enough space. We had 12 1/2 acres before, but we were getting new construction on both sides of us before, so it was getting closed in. Here, the trees keep us very private. Lots of farm land, wide open space. The farm pond is full of big trees, so it will need to be dug out and rebuilt, but no rush on that. We raised a pig last year and butchered it. About 400 pounds, I would guess. It was huge. Massive. I was blessed by some good friends from church who came to help me butcher it. I could never have done it by myself. It took us about five hours to do the job. It was exhausting. It was well after dark by the time we were done. We gave a lot of the meat away to the friends who helped me with the job, and we have since given away a lot of the meat to friends and family. We still have hundreds of pounds in the deep freezer, so we aren't going to raise another pig until this meat is consumed. We are still working on the rabbits, the deer, and the sheep from last year. Rabbits. Wow. Rabbits. We got four rabbits from some friends. Two of them were really good at having baby bunnies. Really good. We got 40 babies in one year. That's a lot of rabbit. We still have rabbit in the freezer. It's really good. Tastes like chicken. I'll bet you didn't know that a rabbit has white meat just like a chicken, but in a different place. That's true. On a rabbit the white meat is along the spine, on the back. Beautiful white meat, just like a chicken breast. Since we have so much meat in the freezer I decided I would concentrate on the vegetable garden this year. I am doing something new, called a drip watering system. You may be familiar with a soaker hose? Well, a drip watering system is better. It has a tiny hole about every 8 to 12 inches, and it's on a very low pressure system, so the water just drips (right!) out very slowly. You lay out a line along each row of vegetables, so that the water goes directly to the row of plants. That way the water goes only to the plants, not to the ground in between. It's much more efficient than the old water sprinkler, where you would put a sprinkler somewhere in the middle of the garden, hoping to cover most of the garden. Turn the water on all the way. The garden right in the middle gets sopping wet. The garden at the edges stays bone dry. All the paths get lots of water, even though they don't need to be watered. Very inefficient. This is much better. Early girl tomato. Ripe tomato 50 days after transplanting. That's what it says. I guess we'll see. Right now I have several tomatoes on my Early Girl plants and it's been about four weeks since transplanting, so we may make it.