January 6, 2026 Creekside in the New Year

Creekside Farm stopped trying to sell produce last Summer and stopped selling eggs a bit earlier in the year because investment increases didn't produce sales increases. But we are still planting in the Spring and spent quite a bit of time building a new greenhouse and garden space last year to get restarted in a smaller format. What we are planning is to use the growing plan we had, scaled down to the crops we can make the best use of ourselves. So, many of the same plants, in ones and twos will be planted instead of the fifties and hundreds we did a while ago.  We also rebuilt our flock this past Summer, twelve instead of forty, and so our free ranging girls are giving us about a Dozen eggs a day.

The new greenhouse is about ready for the planting months between March and May. Nothing really grows in our cold dirt until June so our plants will live confortable lives in the new Greenhouse until we can get them into the ground in late May. We will be tilling again this year. No-till gardening works well for making good soil fertility but our soil condition is a bit wild right now. Lots of grass out there.Our soils are every bit as good for composition as they were two years ago and we have perhaps sixty yards of compost for use to get things going. We'll till a bunch of our leaf mold and mature compost into our rows sometime on April and the soils will be very ready in late May.   This year we'll take more steps to put down weed blocking between rows to keep the weeding workload down a bit. We've plenty to do. 

My dream plan is to put in a wooden porch floor this Summer if time and money permit it. We had always envisioned a concrete floor under our wrap around porch roof but the little bit of concrete work we did wasn't really good enough to want a lot more of it. Paying for concrete workers was always out of reach and dry mix concrete is much more expensive now, so we're looking at a wooden porch floor. Wood is quicker and far easier to work with. Until Summer comes we are keeping busy on Winter house projects and it looks like we'll be working in the kitchen this month. This afternoon we found the tile for putting in a backspash over all the counter spaces. We might get to painting in the Kitchen this month, but things here seem to follow their own schedule, and always have. There's always more to do and too little time or money to do them. We only have a few weeks to get things done.

From February through April we will be very busy with a litter of puppies. Pricilla Pixie Stix is having her first litter and is doing very well. We spend a lot of time with our girls, trying to make them comfortable and their pregnancy as easy as we can, but it is still quite a big thing for a dog with such short legs. Lucy had three pups in her first litter and it was fairly easy on her, but most of the time a litter is around eight pups and can go higher. It's a lot of work for everyone and there's only so much you can do to make things easier.

I have always used New Year's Resolutions. Last year I resolved to lose thirty of the pounds I had packed on being depressed. I achieved the goal in August and then went back to eating normally for a few months. This year the goal is another thirty pounds. Weight loss isn't a difficult formula, it's simply not eating when you aren't hungry and eating less when you are. Lots of rice cakes, fewer cookies, hungry all the time, that's the plan. 

Life goes on at Creekside Farm. If anyone needs a garden space to grow food this year, or eggs, give us a call and we'll get you growing.  

October 14th, 2025 Ten Years Later . . .

 It was ten years ago, September 30th of 2015, when we went to the County Tax Office with Collette Kramer to pay off the property tax lein and then contracted the purchase of what would become Creekside Farm. So much has happened and time is still flying. Ten years where we noticed each day and counted this place among our many blessings. Ten years of toil, love, and more blood than we expected. 

Up until last year I had kept a fairly complete journal of the history of Creekside Farm on this BLOG. I told the story as it happened and all those words remain here, published for the world to see. The story documented our bringing the land back from the lifeless and trash strewn landscaping nightmare, through the two years of hard work it took just to remove the trash. This BLOG journaled our home building effort as we first came to live in a tiny home and then built a place to call home. And since we were building a farm I told the story, as best I could, of our learning about plants and organic agriculture.

We have good soils today even if we are no longer trying to run a profitable farm which sells produce. All of this changed in mid-Summer of 2024 when I slipped out of my regular manic depressive cycles, which were more fun that anything worrisome, into a proper depression. I have mostly come through it and returned to smiling once more. But there is still much work to do.

 I was always a manic depressive sort, it was a large part of my creativity and endless optimism. But the above is enough said on the issue so I am going to leave this open discussion of my state of mind here. To be concise: the depression continues, as does our lives. I find my creative work in writing and art and the game Fallout 4 are the places I go to stave off dark thoughts when they come. Returning to a more communicative public persona is not in the immediate future. This is not to say things are at a dead stop here. I will talk on the positives when I find them. And there are a few to talk about today.

We are putting the finishing touches on a new greenhouse workspace so that we can sprout plants for our kitchen garden and work indoors on some other projects. The new building is twenty by eight feet with framed walls and an up-cycled roof. We used eighteen recycled storm windows for windows and the south facing wall is essntially glass from the floor to its ten foot ceiling. We get Winter sun at a fifty-three degree angle  so the greenhouse will be in full sun the whole year around. In Summer the high heat of mid-day will be well shaded by an eight inch thick foam and aluminum roof  we repurposed from Craig's List. The east and west ends also have large windows and a door which has been a part of all of our other greenhouses. The trailer we built the greenhouse on was damaged while building the house and no longer road worthy, so it has a new life as a foundation rather than being scrapped. The siding is also recycled so there will be no more film greenhouses to fix and no more all night snow vigils. We electrified the new greenhouse for lights and heat, then built a new chicken run right up close to it. There are fifteen new chickens and four new ducks living in there now.

There's been two litters of puppies since the Summer of 2024 so our income plans are still in place. We added one new female to our pack of hounds to extend the breeding project a few years. Today we have eight Bassets, four of which are still in our breeding program. This weekend the last puppy of the most recent litter goes to her new home.

While there is not an excess of cash in our living budget we bought a newer BMW. The newer car is an X1 with the big motor and all the buttons and bells. Higher off the ground is better since our bodies have begun to age a bit and gravity is not our freind anymore. Our older BMW was the low slung rocket coupe we bought to drive down to Las Vegas and meet Elvis at the alter. This Vegas trip was the beginning of our Creekside Farm Project. Both the car and the goals we made are over. New goals are needed. We already have the car.

Work on a new book progressed as far as 185 pages (an anime inspired saga based on the Fallout game). But I lost the muse so the half book has done in the half a book filed for the time being. Another book I started twenty-five years ago is front of mind right now. A compendium of stories I have wriitten through the years with new transitions. Writing gives me joy when the word come easily. 

Life continues. 

December 23rd, 2024 Our Christmas Letter

 

Click anywhere for a larger image

October 21st, 2024 Checking In (Part One)

 I have been in a depressive state since we decided to give upon Market Gardening and focus on things which present a better outcome financially. It took me a while to see what was happening, but there has never been a time when I was not ambitious. No matter what I have always been optimistic and scheming for a better future. It is worth exploring what happened so that we can move on and move forward from where we are. FIrst up: Counting Our Blessings.

We made big plans in 2013, the bulk of which are written in the early pages of this BLOG. The actual start to all of this happened in 2010 when we decided on a try for law school. I was in my third year of undergraduate studies when we decided to add a farm to our plans. We had bought our first home in 2005 and started breeding Bassets soon after, so things were going very well as the path was extended into farm country. Like everything else we do the path  too many unexpected turns.

Cancer took my voice in 2014 (literally) and the law school dream evaporated soon after. But rather than lament the loss we pressed onward into the Farm aspect of our extended plans and, as graduation came nearer, we found Creekside Farm. (A trash strewn wreck of a plot of land with many issues.)  The past ten years have had ups and downs.

We got through my having been damaged by a treefall. Surgery never stopped the plans, even for a minute. I recovered quickly and began building our home a few months after the tree nearly killed me. It took five years to accomplish  a two year goal, but we got there.  This was almost three years ago when we moved into the new house and two years since putting in the last nail. Then it was on to farming for effect.

The farming thing started in 2013 when we planted our first food and bought our first chickens. We were still living in town so the effort was small, but the stuff we got out of it was wonderful. After much sacrifice, in 2016, once we moved to the Farm and into our tiny home. I built a greenhouse and began the practice of gardening with the goal of growing food for profit.  The early success did not scale up as the garden plots became larger. The soil on the Farm had serious issues and it took a lot of trail and error to find a way to make the ground fertile. But eventually we did get good growth and great produce. But it was never a commercial success.

Our crops were large enough, but not quite large enough for marketing. Our crops came in at odd intervals too. So we had a ton of tomatoes on week, corn the next, others coming as the would but none of it at the same time. We built a produce stand but the cash coming in was a trickle and we tried many different ways to sell what we grew. All along the way we continued to build our knowledge base and formulate new alternate plans and contingencies. Eventually we aged to the point that keeping up on the work, without any success in profitable enterprise, no longer made sense. So we decided to put our energies into things that made money. The bigger project must move forward by removing some of the drag  on our plans. This brings us to this year, but we accomplished so much.

The Farm exists, where it did not at the beginning. The House exists where it was a dream before. We are healthy, despite all of the hurdles. All along we learned to garden in a big way,learned to build a house, and loved each other more and more. Our lives here are very good.  Our business is good and we are self sustaining financially.  As for blessing to count, there are so many. But it remains that I am in a depression because the grand plans,the end results we made, have largely failed.

We planned for failure when we planned the Farm.  We decided to build a farm as part of a bigger plan. Law school was part of the bigger dream. In truth, everything we have done here was only a stepping stone on the path toward the bigger goal of creating a wedding venue farm. But the bigger dream was always a bit unreasonably grandiose. That we haven't achieved it, and perhaps never will, doesn't lessen what we have accomplished. But our Plan always took the possibility  of failur einto account and the failure points were: 

• Acquisition of the land. If we only got this far then we were ahead of the game.
• Building a house on the land would mean we were ahead.
• Creating a Farm meant we had become self sufficient in many respects.

Failure to progress past any of these points would mean failing at a higher level and not going backward. We progressed past these points, with some provisions still needing worked out, and so when we decided farming wasn't a winner, we failed at a very high level and with many possible paths into future success. But it is likely tooo late to build the large wedding venue ideas. So here we are trying to find our next step. Hence my depression.   The question now it: what next?

I know that this lack of direction won't continue. I will rise from the ashes of this broken dream. What is needed is a big dream to replace the broken one.

Update: on October 27th my depression broke and I returned to the land of the living. I felt like going to work again and my creative juices are once more flowing as they always had. To wit; . . If American English were more true to it's Germanic roots we might speak differently than is done today. I wrote this sentence in an unrelated post this morning: "But we are certain she is integrating into her group very well." So if the German influence were strong we might break this into two clauses: We are certain she is, and, integrating into he group very well. This might be spoken as two words with an indicator, rather than a toolbox of smaller statements pushed together to form meaning. "Pixie weseeincluding wellinthegroup".  Not all of my ideas are good ones, but I have a lot of them and am glad to have them back in my head.

July 27th, 2024 Changing Things Upward

 

Lilly's babies are a week today

This is the fifth Summer of trying to become a Market Garden Farm. This is a specific term used to describe what those guys you see at the Farmer's market do for a living. And so far . . . it has been a winner when it comes to learning how to grow things, but a real loser when it comes to making a profit.  We have been working hard to improve the planning and execution of our plantings. We have learned how to make fertile soil without chemicals, make the ground ready without tilling, steward the soil and the plants from seed to compost. In fact, if the only goal was to grow things, we have done it. But as a business it has been a real buster.  So we have decided to change things up.

There is always a Grand Plan, something which was in place long before we found this place and built our home and business. The bare bones of the Grand Plan was to find some way to build a home and business, which makes money, without too much effort. And it's not as if we are afraid of working or there has been no success either. But this past week, when we were sitting vigil over our newest litter of beautiful baby Basset Hounds, we had time to talk things over and do a bit of math. Here is the short answer to the question of Market Garden Farming: If we are doing well, which we are; and we have food to sell, which we will eventually have; and we sold every speck of it at two dollars a pound, which we cannot do for many reasons; then we will make a net profit of minus two thousand dollars without paying for the labor it took to lose that investment. 

Our ducks have kept the bugs down

So farming, as a business, something which has always been a part of our next step of funding our next investment, for five years now, has pushed us in the wrong direction even if we did learn so much. And if we scaled the whole thing up to every inch of space we would only go farther behind in other parts of the Grand Plan. So it is time to change things up, free up the time and money, and move forward.  But this takes a bit of time and effort to figure out the next move and we still have a lot of crops in the ground to sell this year, even if we do so at a net loss. It is no use to leave what little money there is on the table, about thirty-five cents on the dollar (best case). 

The problem is not growing things.

Some of the things we do pay off, if a bit too modestly. Our Basset Hound business is a happy one and, if things go well, it adds to our ability to move forward into the Grand Plan. For the past five years we have been putting the Rocketdog returns into farming so this move out will free that money up for other uses once we figure out what to do next. So Rocketdog stays and might even grow a bit, as it always was part of the Grand Plan. Bigger boarding, same amount of puppies. We haven't been able to move into boarding and grooming as we had always planned. 

Our Grand Plan was to terminate in becoming a wedding venue, where the real money may be. But the plan was made over ten years ago and we have aged quite a lot since then. We are now five years behind in our goals, so perhaps the wedding thing won't happen. Some plans, especially those with lofty goals, fail to make it to the end. We planned for this and included failure into the plan. If we never add anything new to our income stream we will be poor, but happy and not uncomfortable. So perhaps this is where we are headed. But there are some good ideas to work on and we have the time and spaces to do them.

The problem is not growing things.

One of these things is perhaps going into herbal remedies based upon the herbs we have space to grow. We have been using our products for a few months and the results are nothing less than fantastic. One product we are using is a tincture of Purple Dead Nettle, a seasonal herb which grows in our rows in early Spring before our crops have gone into the dirt. This herb, once steeped into a daily dose, has made our lives so much easier and reduced our pain tremendously. So perhaps I can find a market for it. But there are many other herbs which we are trying out, things with potential. We might be able to grow these things and make useful remedies for sale. 

For now we will continue to work the Farm, but next year we will scale back the planting effort and begin rebuilding our plans. Time will tell whether we ever do make anything of the place. But if all we get is good food on our table and enough income to keep eating, we are going to do just fine.