March was mostly work for us. Besides 5 hrs of farm chores each day, Jeanne cranked away on our taxes, which are getting more and more complicated with the rental business, buying and selling homes, the capital gains associated with that, farm related activities, and then we're members in another LLC, the one that owns the land that we live on - whew! We tried to get a tax attorney, but after they heard what was involved, their fee estimate skyrocketed from affordable to not.
Linc cooked most of the meals (same old thing just about every day!!), helped a bit with the chores, and spent most of each day cranking away on the unoccupied fixer upper home we'd purchased in early February, refinishing wood trim, remodeling part of the kitchen, painting, repairing appliances.
We both worked on concluding the sale of our second former rental home down valley, located in Austin. With it sold, we went from owning two fixed up (by us) homes 25 and 30 miles away, to two that are both within 2 miles of home, but both still in need of plenty of renovation work. At least one had rented by this time, so we had some income coming in.
With the gains from selling the two down valley homes, we didn't qualify for any assistance from the ACA, and with an annual income predicted around 10k, we decided that 12k/yr for catastrophic health insurance coverage wasn't affordable this year, and did our best to not injure ourselves or get sick.
Linc had a great idea to spread the compost pile out in the pasture for the chickens to pick through so there would hopefully be fewer of the seedling-eating pill bugs in it this year.
Permaculture in action!
The only problem was that one day later it looked like this.
And a few days after that it was just a big flat brown spot on the field. Those chickens work fast! But, it probably worked. We scraped it up a while later and piled it back up elsewhere for the garden.
And here's just a nice photo of Eggplant and one of our Midget White Turkey hens. Eggplant LOVES getting her back scratched and if there's no human around to do it, she's happy to encourage a turkey to fill in!
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