October 28, 2017 MacGregor's Garden Footprint

While not quite as big as I planned (it really never is) the footprint for my first market garden will be a vast area of forty feet by one-hundred feet. About fourteen rows. We mowed it flat and then covered it with thick black plastic. This does two important things:

• First, it takes the light away from the existing grasses and weeds right at the time they ought to be storing energy for winter. Instead they will expend nearly all of their stored energy trying to reach the sun. The plants will either die outright, or go dormant with few reserves on hand to start the new life in Spring.
• The second thing this does is to warm the soil and bring moisture to the surface, encouraging the millions of seed trapped in lower layers of soil to sprout. In about six weeks we will come out and pull the plastic back for one week, then cover it up again. Those plants which sprouted will run out of energy quickly

In December we will come and deep till the soil, but we will need to cover the ground once more. Seeds buried a hundred years ago, but brought to the surface when we turned the soil, will sprout and covering the garden one more time will wear these out.

Weeds are perhaps the biggest ongoing problem in new gardens. Hopefully these early steps will help to keep things a bit easier to maintain.

Creekside camp fire.

Perhaps on the best, and last, weekend in October, we ventured out to burn a medium pile of branches and logs found all around the home site near the North eastern corner of the Farm. We also came to cover over the MacGregor's Garden site in 6mil black plastic.

We got all 'As' in Fire Building 101.
This pile was hot, and short, leaving a low pile of charcoals.

It was a nearly perfect day. I hope that on another day , something just like today, I can invite people to come see for themselves.

The view from my bench seat near the fire.
Beers in hand, roast beef sandwiches for lunch.
A sky so blue it almost hurt your neck from staring at it.

October 28, 2017 The Fall Sky

October 24, 2017 Fall Colors

We decided at dinner to take a trip out to the Farm and begin clearing the ground for MacGregor's Garden. The only problem with our plan was that by the time we got out there the sun was already below the horizon. But the fall colors were very good, even in the heavy dusk, so I took some pictures.

You can drive along Sell Road the entire length and not find a stand of deciduous trees with such good color. I had thought that we might have to plant some color in the public right-of-way. The idea being that we want a place where people want to go and see what is going on. Our little stretch of road is a riot of Reds, yellows, and regular Oregon golds.

A nice view of the East Meadow.
Most of these are the Plum trees we have left after removing hundred of others.
Most of these won't remain where they are, we will need the space for Apples and sunshine.

Oregon native trees don't usually stay colorful, they tend to devolved into browns before dropping their leaves. The trees along the road are a mix of species, some native, most not.

Since these pictures were taken with low light, the colors a a bit lower key than the real thing. After dark they glow, collecting what little light there is in the atmosphere and shining it back into the world around them.

On the farm property itself, we have Maple, Walnut, and some others, mostly colorful, but mostly doomed to fall to our chainsaw as we open more ground for planting. Our hope is to plant many new species.

This tree is likely to remain with us.
There is a willow behind it which will not

Each of our new trees will be picked out carefully for the amount of interest they will bring the whole year around. My thinking right now is that we will use the Mimosa Tree very heavily along the path at the back of the property nearest to Dairy Creek. Mimosa has a good structure, great leaves, and flowers all summer long. Then they turn vibrant reds and yellows as the seed pods ripen to a gold color. In winter the leaves all fall off, leaving the seed pods to turn dark brown. The only time when the trees are not very pretty.

We spent the evening walking around the place until the darkness and mosquitoes chased us out. Then we crossed the road and walked a bit of the Banks-Vernonia Trail in the near darkness.

Eventually we hope to have a tree-house deck built into this little grove.
It will sit just to the right of our home site.

We didn't want to leaf. (Sorry.)

Our Walnut. Doomed!
But very pretty in the last light of Fall

October 20, 2017 Farm Update

Things are moving at a good pace these days.

• The rains came a bit early, but this isn't a real problem. 
• Carmen had her litter of pups last week, money is rolling in. 
• The spraying we did to the Blackberry plague has worked well.
• The tiny home is nearing completion. 

And the Plan for our first market garden is coming along nicely.

I had been working on a plant knowledge database for about six weeks, amassing a large amount of abstracted data intended to point me toward which crops to try and where to put them.

The darkened area is called MacGregor's Garden.

We have a "market garden" planned in the overall Farm picture called "MacGregor's Garden (from the Peter Rabbit book). The area where this garden will be built was never used for much, never had a house on it, and we haven't subjected the land to much herbicide, so anything we grow there should be fairly clean (chemically).  It is all of one-hundred feet east to west, and about seventy feet from north to south, next to the proposed Farmhouse. This is a large project, intended to give us produce to sell at a produce stand at the front of the property (a set of little maroon squares near the driveway at the bottom of the picture).

This is a low resolution copy of the layout.

The produce stand itself is not really intended to show a profit, just get us on the market and let the people on the Banks-Vernonia State Trail know that we are in business. The garden itself is intended only to allow me to get my hands dirty as a farmer. There will be a significant amount of crops there.

The plant knowledge database was intended to provide inputs that I would use to make a garden plan on graph paper, I had already taught it to make a graphical time-line to point out significant dates for what plants to put in first, which to sow in a hoop house (a sort of greenhouse structure). As I began looking seriously at drawing out the plan I found a nifty online application which did most of the stuff I had already planned, but a bit easier, called Garden Planner. I highly recommend this application for quick precise, and nearly complete home garden planning. It gives you both the visual plan itself, but also generated plant lists, irrigation plan, and structural stuff as well.

Garden Planner also allows you to order plants and seeds from many of the major catalogs, but I probably won't because prices and availability varies quite a bit. And I have a large number of plants and seeds to be ordered.

You can click on this to get a better look.

This plan is estimated to produce something in the range of 3500 pounds of produce through the year, all to be sold at our "honor" produce stand. (where we put the stuff out there and the people coming to buy simply take what they want, and pay what the will, by leaving cash or checks in the box. This is a time honored traditional means for small farmers (particularly small farmer's wives) to gain earnings on excess produce without putting a great deal of time into the project.

The above detailed plan also contains a small chicken run, to produce eggs, and a large hoop house to allow us to get things started in late winter (before the ground warms). The amount of things we intend to start in the hoop house is nearly as large as the complete list.


Providing that we get the ground till before the freezing in mid-December, we should be able to have the hoop house up in January. Only time will tell.