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.