Sullivan Family Update...

With the birth of our first child, I haven't had much time to keep my blog up to date. Gracie Anne is doing wonderful and is such a joy to be around. Jesse and I are getting used to being parents and I am enjoying being a stay at home mom.  Gracie is a very happy baby and loves to smile, here are some pictures of her to enjoy...

She has started to hold onto things and loves to cuddle with her bunny.

She also loves the "baby in the mirror", she thinks she is pretty cute and likes to talk to her.

Here is Jesse singing and playing his guitar, he loves his little girl and is wonderful with her. 

She has started eating a little bit of rice cereal and it has been quite interesting teaching her to eat.  She loves it and it stretches out her nursings which makes mom very happy!

Here is Gracie getting her first look at a baby goat, she is still a little young to get too excited, but touches them and smiles when they make noise. 

In the last week we have had 8 baby goats and 1 lamb born on our farm.  I am now back to milking after a few months off and it is going well.  I am raising some of the kids as bottle babies and milking thier moms twice a day, increased chore time, but increased milk which is great!  All of the baby goats can be seen on our website: http://www.caprikodacroft.com/  Here are a couple pictures...

Here is a picture of our adorable little lamb that was born on Good Friday, a great reminder to the sacrifice that God made for us...

It has ben fun catching up, talk to you soon!!

Yes, we are still here...

I have been thinking of updating our blog for quite a few months, but somehow never sit down to do it. At this point, I am not even sure where to start! I will do a few posts over the next couple of days to try and catch everyone up on the last 7 months at the Sullivan Family Farm.


Our biggest news of the year is that we are expecting our first child! The baby is due November 29th and we are getting very excited as time is nearing closer and closer. We have chosen to be surprised as to whether we are having a boy or a girl. I have been busy getting the nursery setup and think we are just about ready, although I am sure when the baby is here we will be completely lost!!


I will blog more about the nursery and post some of the baby shower pictures in the next post. This post is a pictorial tour of some of our highlights from the year...


Jesse had built a chicken coop for a friend of mine and it opened the floodgates. He built quite a few chicken coops and marketed them on Craigslist during the Spring and they were a huge hit as more and more people are moving towards sustainability. There was quite a movement of people adding chickens, even in the city to provide a source of eggs for their families. This is one of the styles of coops he built, he created many different types of coops depending on what the customer was looking for. The link to his website is: http://www.caprikodacroft.com/sullivancustom.html






This is a picture of our garden from the barn roof. This picture was taken sometime in July. We look forward to our garden and what it can provide us each year. Jesse spent a lot of time improving it from last year and each year it will get a little bit better. We were blessed with lots of fresh vegetables all summer long and we canned quite a bit as well. It is exciting to be able to provide ourselves with food that we grew all winter long. It is one step in being sustainable, which we both enjoy.

This is a picture of the top portion of our property which shows part of the sheep pasture to the left, the goat pasture and the buck housing towards the back.

One other crop Jesse focused on this year was the strawberries. He did an amazing job getting them established and they are going to be beautiful this next year. It was hard to not allow any to grow this year but is important in creating a better crop next year. Melas, Jesse's dog is happily posing amongst the berries.

Here is some of our garlic that was harvested, this year we planted it in October and are looking forward to our crop next year.

Here are some of our onions that were harvested.

One item that made canning so much easier this year was a kitchen island that has been indispensable. Jesse built it for me earlier this spring, he is so good to me and made sure that it was ready before canning season. Our kitchen is fairly large for our house, but counter space is not abundant, this has been wonderful.

Our chickens are another way that allow us to become sustainable. They provide us a source of eggs as well as meat. This year we hatched out a number of chicks from our fertile eggs to raise chickens for meat. A friend of mine had a chicken that wanted nothing more than to set and she raised 3 sets of chicks for us. We learned a lot in the process and will work on improvements for next year.

Throughout the summer we enjoy hanging out and fishing along the rivers near our place. This is the Alsea river and Kodi and Melas enjoyed going with us on this afternoon. It is hard to believe that Kodi just recently turned 15! She still loves nothing more than hanging out with her mom wherever that might be.

Of course a year would not be complete without a crop of baby goats! We had 13 kids this year and below are pictures of a few of them. We will be breeding 11 does for 2010 and the does can be seen at: http://www.caprikodacroft.com/Breeding.htm

This doe kid will be retained in the herd, however she is still needing a name...

Jesse is such a wonderful husband and really outdid himself in providing me with a milk room complete with custom built stanchions in the barn. It has been so nice to be able to milk in a closed environment free of the dirt floor of the barn. I have the milking machine setup and currently milk 2 does once a day. I was able to find a stainless steel double sink and countertop on Craigslist that was a perfect fit for the room. We were able to find matching windows at a recycling center. Eventually it will be drywalled and cabinets built in, but for now I couldn't be happier!

Another project Jesse worked on this fall was a root cellar. He had help from a friend at church in digging out a hole 6 feet deep with a tractor. The tractor only went so deep, so he finished the rest by hand, which included making a stairway. The roof has a layer of straw bales on top for insulation and then is covered with all of the dirt that came out of the hole. We currently have our potato crop stored down there and so far they are keeping very well!

This year was my first year to go Salmon fishing, in this picture, I am 36 weeks pregnant and holding my first salmon! It was quite exciting to reel her in, on this same day Jesse caught one as well and then went out again and filled his tag. We canned 2 of them and smoked the other one. I absolutely love smoked salmon and now we have enough frozen for the year, yum!

Can't miss us now...

I haven't blogged in quite a while, so I thought I would post a few updates to our place.

For Christmas, Jesse made me a wonderful sign for my goat business. A majority of it is hand carved and I was blown away by it! Today we posted it out on the road in front of the new fence that he built.

We decided to put a decorative fence up at the front of our property to add a little privacy as well as frame the front of our property. Our goal is to have a bunch of bushes planted in front of it and it will be so pretty with the plum trees in bloom later on this year. We also still have to figure out something for the top part of the fence.

Looking forward to Veggies year round...

Jesse has been working hard the last week or so building our greenhouse. It is 10x12 and will be such as nice addition to our place. We will start our vegetables in there starting sometime this month. He did a lot of research on greenhouses and I am very impressed with what he built. It is double walled which will mean more insulation value for the winter time allowing us to grow vegetables all year in it.

We have been waiting for the weather to be nice to put the plastic up, so today I took the day off and we spent a few hours attaching the plastic. There are still some finishing touches to be done, but here are a couple of pictures of it.

New Blog

Our blog has moved here from: caprikodacroft.wordpress.com, to see any old posts, you can visit that address, Enjoy!