Profit and Loss

Well, it’s been a tough couple of weeks.  If you’ve been following the blog you know that we’re trying to build a legitimate homestead.  Not only do we want to sustain ourselves and serve farm-to-table meals at our B&B, we want to build a real agricultural business as another revenue stream (albeit small) for the business.  We’ve set numerous goals in this respect, and we’ve had some great successes and some disappointing setbacks.

First off, the bad news: I killed our rabbits.  Not in like a crazy, Lenny kind of way, but because of my inexperience raising them I made a mistake.  Apparently you can’t move rabbits to fresh veggies and fruits right after weening, and though I thought I was being extra nice, what I was actually doing was messing up their digestive system.  Now I know better, but I feel horrible about those baby rabbits dying.  We still have our breeding stock but we sold our previous litter to farm supply store in town.  Also, our incubated chicks hatched, but only five hatched and survived out of the 40 eggs we incubated.  We broke open the rest of the eggs after we were sure they wouldn’t hatch and found that almost all of them had fully developed chicks in them.  Another problem to solve, saving up eggs for a second run starting next week.  Time to rebuild…

On a lighter note, we made our first sale as a business!  Murdoch’s (the farm supply store in town) buys rabbits to resell, they told us our first batch was very well-behaved (I tried to handle them whenever I fed them).  This is a huge milestone for us, we wanted to start developing income streams from the property and here is one!  We also attended a cheese making class to learn how to use our goat’s milk (part of our goals for this year is to raise goats), and have had so much fun making cheese together!  I’ve mentioned it before, but you Missoula folks need to attend the GFS class on cheese making, this fresh cheese tastes so much better than stuff from the store.

Next week I will be in Seattle while Erin is attending a small business incubation seminar here in town, called Start-up Weekend!  We already ordered her some business cards and worked on refining the business plan, she’s going to kill it!  This week we have a meeting with architects to plan the development of the inside of Primrose Station, and our National Registry of Historic Places app is finished!  Thanks to the historian, Jon Axline, for the awesome application he put together for us, we learned so much about the history of our property!  If we didn’t have feet of snow on the ground we’d be busy building raised beds to prepare for the impending growing season, but that will have to wait.  Guess I’ll learn more about brewing beer while I wait…

Oh yeah, some family and friends came to visit and I got to do some of that stuff only uncles get to do, like dragging the nephews behind a tractor on a plastic lawn toy!