Homestead Reflection and Goal Setting

It is year-end and one of my favourite tasks to prepare for the next homesteading year is to review the last one!

Do you set goals and action plans for your year? It is so incredibly helpful to making progress on your homestead, or really anywhere in life.

This year I had newborn and 4 year old which was very challenging for growing a garden.

My saving grace was having a plan in place of what I was going to grow and how I was going to do that, especially in the first 2 months of recovery and adjusting.

If you are struggling with why you never seem to get anywhere with your homestead, goals or life, then you need to develop a proper plan.

Why you should review your goals

If you want to know where you’re going, you need to know where you’ve been.

Reviewing your progress, or previous year will show you what worked, what didn’t, and give you insight of where you need to make changes.

These changes can be pivots to your plan or minor tweaks that can have a big impact.

You should be checking in with your short term goals daily, and longer term goals, monthly. Looking at that year as a whole gives you the big picture plan.

By reviewing you also get to celebrate your wins! What were you successful at? What did you accomplish? What did you learn? Where did you challenge yourself?

After a few years of reviewing your overall year, it’s really fun and inspiring to see how far you’ve come.

How to set up the next year for success

Jumping off of the review of last year’s work helps you set a course of action for the upcoming year.

You’ll be able to implement the changes that need to be made, and set an action plan to get them done.

If you’re starting from scratch for this year, choose what things you would like to accomplish. Choose a date you would like to see them completed.

Find the milestones you’ll need to meet along the way, and choose how often you will do a review of your goals.

It’s really important, and easy, to set out your plan for the next year. To help you get it done correctly, you’ll want to follow this method.

Once you have your goals set for the next year, you’ll need to get started on researching the actions and tasks you need to complete in order to research them.

I like to take the last two days of each year to do this step. It helps me modify my goals and set up the path to success in my mind’s eye.

Start your review by listing out what got done. As I go through and make my list, I’m able to fill in the other sections too. What worked, what didn’t, what I learned, new skills, what got done, what didn’t, and goals for next year.

What got done

New Garden Patch

This year, unexpectedly, I made a new garden patch! It was a delightful surprise that I managed to do it with two young kids and no plans to tackle it this year but where there’s my mom to help, it gets done!

Each year I’ve been trying to slowly expand our garden footprint, and explore different ways of keeping the weeds down.

Free Strawberry Plants

Through getting to know local organic farmers over the years, I was able to acquire 100 strawberry plants for free! And get them all planted.

I will eventually rehome them to a different area of the garden but for now we have a start on it!

This is going to jumpstart our strawberry self-sufficiency. We usually pick about 45lbs of strawberries each year for smoothies for our son.

Free Trees

We live around fields and have a much smaller tree patch than I’d like. This year we stopped cutting the grass and let the saplings grow.

With free saplings we could replant, our forest is growing! We also drove 3 hours, and harvested and planted fruit trees from a distant family member.

A total of 53 trees and bushes were planted this summer, with about 300 more saplings still to move. My goal was 2!

Windbreak Planted

Some of the trees we planted in an area alongside the garden to make a windbreak. We used a combination of fast growing poplars and bushy pine trees.

This will help protect growing plants from the strong and drying winds.

Compost Bin

Last year I built and started a compost bin. This year I added the roof. Next year I’ll be focusing on utilizing it properly to turn the compost into soil.

Meal Plan

With two kids I finally forced myself to make a meal plan long term. As in, making my brain understand that meal plans are just what is done around here now.

It’s been one of the hardest challenges (sticking to it takes mental work as it takes a couple of months to hone your plan), but so freaking rewarding to have this task moving to autopilot.

My day runs smoother and my brain less stressed. I even have more time!

Free and Fixed Greenhouse

Our greenhouse was cleaned out and roof window fixed. Through connections with a local greenhouse, I managed to score the plastic from them redoing their greenhouses.

It’s enough for me to recover my current greenphouse and make a much larger one next year.

Organized Garage and Workshop

I took the time this summer to organize the two spaces that are continually overrun and cause a lot of stress trying to find things (and park cars).

Well worth the few days and $100 in supplies it took.

Free Wood Chips

Found out the local dump allows you to take mulch from there for free so I got a couple of loads for the garden. Well worth the effort for free chips!

Fixed Chest Freezer

We had an old chest freezer that hasn’t worked since we moved here. A little research and some troubleshooting later and I got it up and running. Saved us about $1,000 getting a new one.

Free Shelving

My sister was cleaning out their basement and gave me three metal shelving units. They are going up in the cold storage room I’m making for all of our harvest and canning goods.

What Didn’t Get Done

As much as you can plan, sometimes things don’t go forward as you’d like.

Although there were many twists and turns this year, the most notable ones were:

• No chickens, coops, or chicken tractor
• Front garden beds were only partially conpleted
• Mulch wasn’t spread
• Garden watering system wasn’t set up, had to use a sprinkler again.

What Worked

I was very excited for the two garden changes that did really well.

The Hugelkultur I planted with acorn squash and they just took off. The Hugelkultur worked so well that I started building two more this fall.

This year I planted potatoes from organic store bought potatoes that had sprouted. They did incredibly well in the small area I had for them.

We harvested around 10-15 lbs. Not bad for my first time growing them!

What Didn’t

With everything there are things that just don’t work. That’s why it’s so important to check in with your plans and see where you can make small tweaks or improvements.

This year I tried container gardening to make it easier with having a baby.
The planters didn’t get as much sun as I thought they would, and they also missed out on watering, far too often.

I would still do container garden again and have learned what to do differently next time. Just being able to get out and water more would have helped for sure.

New Skills

With each year comes new skills. The most notable for this year is blogging. I’ve really put in a concerted effort to learn and grow this blog more and its paid off handsomely!

Other new skills from this year are:
• Container gardening
• Operating tiller
• Growing potatoes
• Life two kids
• Sourdough

What I Learned

Each year it’s a must to go over what you’ve learned. Not only to see your progress but also to keep those lessons alive in your mind.

• Plans help save time and keep you focused
• Meal planning takes a lot of work to set up but it makes the rest of your life so much easier
• Consistency is key and your current habits are where to start

Next Year’s Goals

Going forward into next year I will have a tiller. I have started raising money to buy one.

Although I would like to have a permaculture garden, right now the bigger garden space too full of weeds to keep out of my smaller garden area (we have a full acre garden plot which I currently only use a portion of).

In 24 hours I raised $620 selling things and I have a DIY project to sell that should bring in a couple hundred.

I will lay cardboard and mulch in all of the garden areas which are being used, to suppress the weeds.

For the harvest, I will grow enough of 6 crops to sustain our family of four for the year (acorn squash, pumpkin, butternut squash, peas, potatoes, and tomatoes).

I will can 100 jars of our harvest.
I will homeschool my son in French.

These are just some of my goals for next year. My husband and I also go through our goals when we review our annual budget and make plans for the expenditures of the next year.

Reflection

Looking back on this year, I’m surprised at how much I accomplished with a new baby and having two kids. I believe that was in part because I was determined to continue moving forward but needed to have better systems in place to do so.

A lot of household systems were made out of necessity, including ones I fought for so long. Makes me wish I hadn’t!

I’m also incredibly grateful and appreciative of how many things we got for free this year. Homesteaders are a community of people willing to share to help another.

Connect with your community. Be willing to offer your own resources and skills and put the word out for what you need. Self-reliance is great but community building is also amazing.