2007 in earnest... (Alan for a change)

This being a New year I thought I'd break with tradition and actually write something in this blog. For those of you interested there will be a number of things I'll try and do through the year. Apart from growing the usual, (and hopefully as plentiful vegetables as last year), I should be raising a couple of Vietnamese pot bellied pigs. You can't beat sweet and sour pork. As well as this we'll be getting some replacement chickens to make up for the ones that we ate and the few the dogs hunted down. There will be new dog control systems this year involving keeping chickens and dogs strictly apart unless our friend Lois comes again at which point the dogs behave much better, (must be us at fault).
I will be starting a very small scale fish breeding system with Carp instead of the Tilapia that I have worked with before. As part of this I will be looking into building a Stirling solar powered water pump. There's also going to be at least one solar shower and I'm going to look into building a grey water recycling set up. We have an extra field this year so I will be growing Maize Sunflowers and Lucerne (clover), as well as extending the grazing area.
The house renovation is nearing completion and we hope to be able to rent one of the houses out to holiday makers. I've put an advert on one of theses holiday web sites but its hard to know how to reach the right people, basically people who are interested in organic growing etc. and being in a very rural setting.
I'm going to try and make this a habit as it helps when things seem too much to be able to look back and see how much you have achieved.