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.  Ten years where we noticed each day and counted this place among our many blessings. Ten years of toil and more blood than we expected. So much has happened and time is flying.

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 of our education in organic agriculture as best I could.

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 gone in the half a book file 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. 

June 24th, 2024 Purple Dead Nettle Farmacology Experiment

 

An Update on our purple Dead Nettle Experiments from early April.

We found out about this wonderful little plant this Spring when it was growing voraciously throughout our garden beds. I looked it up and found this cousin to the mint family had certain medicinal qualities and tried it out simply by chewing a bit of it and spitting it out. The anti-inflammatory effects were nearly immediate and a problem which has caused me endless knee joint pain for years decrease significantly because the swelling went away. So we did some research and decided to make a medicinal tincture from it.

The process took eight weeks and used a quart of organic potato vodka (so it doesn't trigger Ann's gluten allergy) to draw out the medicines. The processing was simple and we had done extracts before, so knew something of how to keep the downsides out of the mix. In the end we made three different jars, one was straight Purple Dead Nettle (not purple, not dead, and not a nettle at all). The second jar was Purple Dead Nettle with some Spearmint leaves thrown in for flavoring. The third we added Chocolate Mint. All three jars had to sit in the dark for eight weeks.

When we pulled them out I tasted them all using a kitchen teaspoon and put about a tenth of a teaspoon under my tongue at a time. Taste wise, the Chocolate Mint brew was better tasting so we bought a few tincture bottles, the sort with an eye dropper in it, and filled one of them with the stuff. Then the real experimenting started.

I began using this last Tuesday at breakfast. I simply pulled about a half of a teaspoon into the eye dropper and squirted it under my tongue and left it sit there for a half minute before washing it down with juice or whatever I had in my glass. Because of the alcohol content, putting the stuff under your tongue imparts the medicine almost directly into the bloodstream and the effects are nearly immediate.

For the past three days I haven't thought much about my knee, the pain dissipated, any swelling disappeared, and the joint became useful once more. When I sleep I am no longer awakened by twinges of pain from my knee and it is no longer sensitive to being positioned less carefully. The knee joint was always painful, even when sitting or laying down, and it caused me to limp noticeably most of the time. I injured it by misusing the thing and never wearing knee pads, so this has been a long time of often intense pain which could not be avoided. The pain is mostly gone today.

Today I am walking almost normally and beginning to put weight on the leg when climbing stairs and rising from the ground or chair. Being able to work on conditioning will only make things better over time. There simply is no swelling and the nerve endings have calmed to a point where I can walk naturally. I gave up using Voltaren (a topical analgesic with side effects and warnings) this week as unnecessary and go half the day before noticing my knee except to notice there is nothing wrong with it. My knee is still physically injured, this is only going to be fixed by surgery on the meniscus tendon. But using the tincture of Purple Dead Nettle it looks a though I won't need to have things fixed at all. The stuff is amazing.

Ann has had Osteo-Arthritis in her lower back and hands for the past four years, some days nearly debilitating, all days suffering some ill effects. She too was doing half a teaspoon in the morning and it was doing her some good. She was using Voltaren on her hands at bed time and in the morning to help stave off the pain and allow her to work. Today she upped the dose to a teaspoon and is moving around normally. She still has some twinges of pain, but the pain is not associated with the swelling, it is of the bone itself. Her pain was much more acute than mine, but it too is beginning to slack off and allow her to do the work we have to do here.

If you want to try some of this tincture out. Get in touch and we will hook you up. No side effects to be expected. Nothing in it that might hurt you that we know of. It is something of a miracle in a two ounce bottle and makes me wonder what other good ideas we might find out in the garden.