i love your blog and everything you post! you are basically living my dream life, and i sometimes despair of ever achieving anything close to it myself. part of me wonders how you accomplished this feat of owning a small farm in the mountains and taking care of these animals (though you obviously don’t have to explain!) bc i’m not sure i’ll ever be in a position to buy property at all, much less enough land to live on in this way. anyway. my real question, if you’re willing to answer (or haven’t already somewhere i didn’t see!), is—does your farm produce? like, are you growing crops or maybe intend to sell llama fibre? or is it more of a hobby farm? (which is not a pejorative term, just in case anyone is unfamiliar with it! just means a farm that isn’t run for profit, essentially)

Hi, I’m glad you like this blog <3 I don’t mind questions, though I prefer to answer more personal ones privately (off-anon.) But as for your last question—I initially intended to use this land to start a small business, but unfortunately I moved here in mid-2019 and so I was planning on using my first year to get settled, look for local artisans etc. and then start construction work in the spring of 2020. Which turned out to be as we all know the ideal moment in history to embark on such an adventure. It was hard to get anything started in 2021 too, we were still having national lockdowns until almost halfway through the year and I couldn’t plan anything in advance as I didn’t know what the rest of the year would look like. Then this year with the Ukraine war and the huge increase in the price of just about everything + shortages of various materials it’s been difficult to plan for things / get things done as well (and I’ve had to revise my entire budget.)

So yeah I had exciting plans for this place (I even did a presentation at my region's Chamber of Commerce back in 2018, and had their support) but they got completely derailed by Current Events for the past three years, it's a bit discouraging. But we've all been having a hard time since 2020 haven't we, and I’m really lucky that I get to live here at all (and that I got to spend the lockdowns in a rural place.) I’m also glad I got my animals in my first year here; at least I have company as I wait to see how things will unfold ! Plus taking care of animals makes it hard to look at the past year and feel like you’ve accomplished nothing, because they would disagree.