Happy New Year! Welcome back to the Sunshower blog (don't worry, I thought I had stopped blogging too)! Lately lots of new things and some of the same old stuff as always. 

First, we finally have our pizza oven done!

It has been done since November and we have had 4 pizza nights so far. Perfecting a good crust has been hard, but our favorite so far has been the America's Test Kitchen NY style pizza recipe. 

The rest of our outdoor kitchen is also coming along nicely. We had a lot of gaps in progress when our stone mason Jim was sick, but now that he's feeling 100% he is really cruising right along with the work. Our EVO and grill were installed yesterday and we had a delicious dinner cooked entirely in the outdoor kitchen. It was delicious and a big moment for us! Right now we are waiting for the stone counters to be put in to match the counters of the oven (see above) but the plywood counters we have now are totally functional in the mean time. 

Christmas was really fun on the farm. We did stockings and a homemade gift exchange with all of our WWOOFers.

Ashley had me for secret santa and painted a beautiful mixed media piece of me and Doug. 

In the new year, we have had a lot of turnover in our employees. In the past couple weeks, all of our fall WWOOFers have moved on to new endeavors (be on the look out for a documentary from Amira, Ashley and Natasha!) and we are welcoming our new spring WWOOFers. It is bittersweet as of course we miss our fall WWOOFers but it is also exciting to welcome new people into the Sunshower family. 

Our other new additions to the Sunshower family are our seven pekin ducklings! We got them last week and they are the most adorable animals in the world. I thought our chicks were cute last year, but these ducklings are unbelievably cute. 

We are not naming them, as we cannot tell them apart and also some of them will be eaten eventually. But for now, we love cuddling them and feeding them left over micro-greens. 

Finally, we have been expanding and improving a lot of our garden beds. Scott re-worked many of the beds in the field to better flow with the curvature of the hillside and to prevent erosion.

He planted them full of greens, carrots, radishes and edible flowers. They are producing even more than he thought possible - which is a huge blessing and great success! 

We are also adding edible landscaping in the garden beds in front of the house - by expanding the bed we already had there and by adding another bed. Be on the look out for the before and after pics of those! I will post as soon as we are done.