January 30, 2018 Farm Update

The left most glass is before filtering.
The right side is clear after we added the filter.

I have been spending most of my time at the Farm this month, trying to get it ready to do what it might. The priorities were mostly centered around making a place to live worth while. Water, electricity, septic, heat lights, and plumbing were all the priorities up until a week ago. Once we had the toilet hooked up we found a film growing on the surface of the tank water, so we sent out a sample of the water for analysis.  Nothing bad in the water, but a lot of iron, and a bacteria which eats iron as well. We treated the well and flushed everything out real well. But the color of the water was off a bit so we added a filter to clear it up. But the iron imparts a taste in the water. They make filters capable of removing all of the iron, but we don't have need of this right away. Eventually we decided that the water, no matter how clear, had a slight iron-y taste, and we didn't have to put up with it. The water is fine for washing and flushing, but drinking it gets on your nerves so we settled on putting in a water cooler and bringing bottled water to the Farm. This is a temporary thing.

Otherwise the Cabin is entirely finished and we may spend the weekends there from here on.

This is the Cabin as it is today.
The only change is that we added a large work bench to the shed.

This is the dog house.
The floor is not the floor we will use.

As you can see in the above image we have come a long way. We built an eleven by twenty foot lean-too shed to give me a place to work when it is rainy. (in winter this is daily) and to keep the dogs. One slight miscalculation made the plastic of the roof  hold about eight hundred pounds of water after a heavy rain. But this was funny, at the time, and proved the structure was sound. The frame had to be re-designed a little bit, and we had to replace the stretched out plastic. In the end the shed works very well.

I screwed the whole thing to the ground using geo-anchors, so nothing takes flight in the wind, and enclosed the shed with a low wire fence and twelve foot gate so that we can keep the dogs out there until we build the kennel. I built a custom built dog house with a heated floor. The dogs will eventually come to love it, but I'm guessing they will complain at first.

We added another gate to the entrance and added a chip
path to the entire thing so that we can keep the mud out a bit.
Now we can gain access without opening the big gates.

Though this is not a good picture of the thing, as it is today.

We have a place to stay, a place to work, and a place to keep the dogs during the work day. . .

After we finished the shelter, our priorities shifted to building the Market Garden. This plan requires that we build something of a greenhouse. This is a big project, even if only in size. Our Hoop House will be roughly twelve feet wide and sixty feet long when finished (though I will only build the first thirty feet of it now, to save time and money). The parts are fairly inexpensive and easy to put up, but takes a space as large as the shed to bend all of the steel tubing, so I needed a work bench large enough to handle the work without having to work on the ground. I built the bench in one day and it works like a dream.

I am ready to start in on the Market Garden and have the work-space needed to begin the greenhouse construction; the ground is tilled and ready to plant (once things start growing in the Hoop House); and we are about to order plants and seed, and have already ordered some of it.

Life is good.

January 14, 2018 An Unseasonale Day

We had a warm weekend in January so Ann was able to get a coat of paint on the Tiny Home Cabin. The paint was a mistake I made a year back when ordering paint for a client's house and we wound up with four extra gallons of the front door color. I always figured I'd use it to paint the barn some day. But it looks really good on the Cabin.

Yesterday she got the water hose that feeds well water into the Cabin insulated and heat wrapped while I spent two days trying to finish the plumbing (and still didn't get the job done).

Ann 2 - David 0

December 25, 2017 A White Christmas at Camp Creekside

Oregon gets a lot of snow, but the lowlands only get it occasionally. This is a good thing too. We tend to stay home and hibernate for a day, maybe three, and then go back to work. Christmas snow is very rare here, but this year we got some and it made a mess of things for some. Not for us. Camp Creekside is beautiful in the snow.

Yesterday, in the early afternoon, we went out in the snow to deliver Christmas candy to a number of old friends. The only time the weather got in the way was when we tried to cross the West Hills on Cornell and the ice made the trip impossible (even in a BMW with good traction tires). But eventually we got all of the boxes put out and spent some quality time with a few people.

On any usual year Ann would make snacks for dinner, but this year was different. This year thing are changing, moving toward the Farm life with speed and certainty. So instead of cooking all afternoon we bought take-out sushi and were back home before dark and the hounds were happy about it.

Late in the evening we ventured out into the deepening snow and freezing rain to watch Charlie Brown on our Creekside Cabin's couch. The newness of the Cabin has yet to wear off. The lights of the tree, the roaring fake fire in our fake fireplace, and the fact of Christmas snow made for a fine time. We sat for a time in the dark and enjoyed the quiet night. It is remarkable how quiet the place is despite being fairly close to the highway. We made it back to the house to spend the late evening with the dogs. Life is good.

January 11 2017 The Entry

We decided on really big steps to get us up and into the Cabin. Steps that Basset  Hounds can lounge on.  So we built eighteen and twenty-four inch deep steps on railroad ties. Heavy.

As it turned out the was also the least cost option.

Then I got a yard of cedar playground chips and made a quick-y path from the driveway. We often enter the place through a sort of "side gate"that runs behind the really gate and this sort of ruins the idea of clean shoes.  If I can't clean it up, I can at least cover the crap up.

January 10, 2018 Nearly Complete Cabin at Camp Creekside

January 9, 2017 Cooking at Camp Creekside

So it's not much, but the very first meal is being cooked in the kitchen of our Creekside Cabin.  Noodle soup, cooked on an induction cooker because we haven't got the gas hooked up to the stove, and Cheese-its .