December 23rd, 2024 Our Christmas Letter

 

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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.

May 12th, 2024 Hurrying Up So That We Can Wait.

 

Our two rows from
last year as of today.

We've been pretty busy here on the Farm. Working the planting plan, sprouting seeds, and putting what plants we can into the ground. But the Springtime weather is a bit too wet and a lot to cool to make a while lot of headway in growing things. Still and all we are getting some things going while we wait for the Summer.

Our two rows when
we started this year.

Right now there are many hundreds of plants either in the Greenhouse or on benches nearby. Every type of seed. We have quite a few varieties of Peppers, tomatoes, corn, beans, peas, and most other garden veggies that come in seed packets. There were enough plants this year that we had to come up with some way of keeping track of them. Managing what we have, what we will need, and where they are in the growing cycle takes a lot of time. In the past years we tried jotting things down on paper, but this got confusing and really didn't tell us too much unless we spent hours compiling the numbers for analysis. Then we started journaling things using Google's Calendar, and this was a bit better because the numbers would show up on a wider variety of computer screens and fit in our pockets. The calendar almost made it work, but again we had to pull the information off of the computer and put it into a spreadsheet to make sense of it. Last year we moved everything over to a Farm BLOG, something like what you are reading right now, but without all the great writing. But in the end we raand into the same problem, pulling out data and then trying to analyze it.  All of these things had one central theme, journal what you did today. 

So this year we are trying to do something simpler. We came up with a string of numbers for each type of seed and are journaling each type on a separate page. The form is simple and handles one thing well: planting seeds in dirt. This is the form:

z-x/y-1:2-3:4 ______________________

• z is the seed name. Usually we are planting more than one type of seed of the same kind. Like two varieties of watermelon or three varieties of lettuce. So we give each a separate letter for each variety at the top of each page. 
• x/y is the date of the entry. The x is the month, y the day. 
• 1:2 are greenhouse numbers where 1 is the number of seeds we have showing leaves and 2 is the number of seeds we have planted in the Greenhouse. (So if we have planted eighty seeds in trays or otherwise and eighteen of them have shown up bearing leaves the thing looks like this 18:80.) 
• 3:4 are the plants in the dirt out in the garden where 3 is the number of plants growing in the garden, 4 is the number of plants we need growing in the garden. (So 5:24 mans we need 24 but have 5)

Since we get around to looking at trays of seeds as we need to, the new numbering system keeps track of what we have, what we need, and where we are in the process. This cuts way down on  journaling what is actually going on.  There's room at the end for notes. Like fertilizing, or if we run into something out of the ordinary.  A typical record changed to look like this for watermelons:

 Sb- sugar baby - 48

W - watermelon - 48

W-4/11-0:44-0;48 greenhouse

Sb-4/11:0:36-0:48

W-4/23-37:44-0:48 sprouting 11

Sb-4/23-25:36-0:48 sprouting 50

W-4/26-39:52-0:48

Sb-4/26-24:24-0:48

Sb-4/29-21:66-0:48

W-4/29-57:74-0:48

Sb-5/1-31:96-0:48 

W-5/1-44:52-0:4

So we can tell just from looking that we have ten sugar baby watermelon sprouts out of thirty we have planted in pots, there aren't any out in the garden yet, but we plan for forty-eight eventually. If there's something that doesn't make sense we can find out what just by counting the plants and looking at the trays.  Eventually we might develop something that tracks the harvest, but we decided to keep it simple for the time being. In the current format we can see how long it took to sprout the seeds, then how long it too to get them planted in the ground. And since we track plants separately we've got nothing to sort out later. we're hopeful this will work, but journaling is a big part of getting things going in the right direction.  

Other than this I am spending a lot of time preparing rows for planting. Each row must be weeded out because we don't weed them in Winter. We don't weed them because in our no-till system the roots of weeds is part of the natural cycles which add soil organic matter below the surface. Weeds can help protect the soil from ice and rain damage too. After clearing things off the surface, I use out broadforking tool to make sure the soil isn't compacted. Since we don't till the dirt and don't walk around on it either there's little chance the soil is going to be compacted, but we check anyway. Then I sift out a load of leaf mold compost and spread it onto the beds. This compost will feed the soil, the worms, and the microbes that make nutrients available to the plants. In the end we have a nice light and well drained soil that holds water and plants well. Planting is a cinch and the plants have plenty of room to grow. 

Eventually, once we have plants in the dirt, I will put the irrigation system together and make sure things get water in Summer. For now the water in the ground that comes to the surface from below is plenty enough, and it rains all the time anyway, but once the plants start fruiting we need to keep the leaves dry as best we can. 

As it turns out, farming is hard work. But it gets a bit easier every year as we learn how to do things better. Right now we're doing the hurry up and waiting thing. We go out each morning and get all that we can do done until we tire out. Eventually we will be forced to wait until stuff starts ripening and then we'll have to market everything the best we can. 

It takes a marketing plan to sell produce, this is certain, but until the crops become reliable putting anythiing more scientific to the plan makes little sense. But we will get there.