Well, Friends, I’ve decided that I won’t be opening the farm again this year.

The 2020 Riverside Wildfire continues to affect our lives even into 2023. We moved into our new home almost a year ago and have spent the last year finishing that building project, finishing Peter’s shop so we could begin working on Marimbas again (and making an income!), and beginning to plant the perimeter of our home so we weren’t living in a mud pit. The Autumn of 2022 was cut short, if you remember, and our project productive season was halted sooner than anticipated. However, we did get the land graded, the beginning of a new driveway, a perimeter lawn seeded, 2 stone patios set, a greenhouse built, a tool/potting shed built, a woodshed built and split wood to fill it for the winter.

This year is all about landscaping, re-planting our forest, building a couple more sheds, getting fences back up around the orchard and home garden, managing the forest we still have, taking down all the fencing that is up in the interior of the land since we don’t have horses here anymore, cleaning up the grassy areas of logging debris so we can mow, replacing a couple of raised beds in the home garden that burned, splitting more wood and finishing a handful of projects on the house. Those are the projects I can think of right now. Of course, there will be more and we have folks to help us finish them.

As you can see, there is still a ton to do just to get back to a baseline of life for us. I need to be home to get these done. I want to be home. I don’t do well with divided energies. I’ll be using this Spring to test out my new potting shed and greenhouse system to begin plant starts at home. Hopefully, I can smooth out the bugs before I’m making starts to take over to the farm next year. I also intend to finally learn how to use my watering system at the farm and master the timer so I can have some relief from all hand watering next year.

Thanks for understanding my situation and, hopefully, I’ll get to see your faces at the farm stand next year. Blessings on 2023!