June 27, 2018 Trash, Trash, and more Trash

Just one shining example of trash.
Once the vegetation is cleared
this is what remained.

When we found what came to be the Farm, the place was a real mess. There was (literally) many tons of trash on the property.

We scraped and we cleaned up trash, loaded trash into many sizes of dumpsters, and spent every available dime we had to get rid of the stuff. But just as soon as one pile cleared up, another took its place.

The people who had owned the property had piled the stuff up, accumulated it, collected it, and even threw some of it over the back fence. It seems that they did this since the seventies, operating a business which created trash that they didn't really think about as it collected in the corners.

De-trashing is a process.
It takes time and money.

But the previous owners were not the only trashy types. The woman we bought the property from was a hoarder who, following on her divorce, had her hoard loaded into a shipping container and moved onto the property as well. The container probably never had anything of value in it when it was moved, but twelve years on what was left in the container was entirely trashy stuff. The container was opened up and the stuff spilled out, or was carried, until it covered a large area at the center of the property.

This was AFTER we cleaned it up quite a bit.

But wait! There's more!

After the gates were breached, following the abandonment of the property by all concerned, some of the locals began bringing their trash to the property to avoid dumping fees. They brought couches, tires, and old Christmas lights to the place and added as much as time allowed. We even found a new pile of debris unloaded on the place after we began cleaning it up.

It is needless to continue to write about it, you might get the idea.

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Enter the Smith's (us). With dreams of farm based weddings, foody experiences, and maybe some light antiquing. . . .

We bought the place cheap, knowing that it would take months of time and money we did not have to clean the place up. We bought in and began work. Eventually we got the place to resemble an open field (of sorts).  This brings me to my point: The place itself seems to generate trash all on its own!

It might sound strange, but once any area is completely cleared of trash, down to brown dirt, without a speck of debris, weeds, or trash, anywhere to be found . . . Within a week the Farm has somehow brought more trash to the surface of the otherwise clean dirt. And this is weird.

One expects weeds popping up everywhere (and they do (repeatedly)) but it is completely unexpected to walk a path through what ought to be clean dirt . . . Only to find a saw blade, a table spoon, and unlimited amounts of broken glass, wire, and bits of plastic strewn across everywhere.  That is what is happening every day on our little Creekside Farm.

Even in McGreggor's Market Garden, land which has been tilled deeply, raked to a fine powder, re-tilled, and then planted, continues to vomit to the surface myriad sorts of trashy stuff. It creeps up out of the soil, falls from the trees, and then lays hauntingly under the leaves of potatoes or squash plants. I even find trashy things in the Greenhouse dirt, for which there is no accounting since I bought the dirt somewhere else. Surprisingly the only place I don't find trash is in Gopher mounds. (But don't lets move into that horrible area of conversation.)

It is possible that this may go on for years, but we have years to clean things up and are resolved to win over the trashy past of Creekside Farm.  We are always thinking about some means of sifting the dirt more efficiently. Searching for a tool we might make or buy that will sort the trash from the soils. Our hope is that, someday, we might walk a clean Farm that stays that way. But until we find, or fight the trash out of the place, we must continue the work.

June 26, 2018 Time Marches On: The New Coop Story

The weeks have clicked by so quickly that there really wasn't much time for writing or keeping track of things. But things ought to be settling down into some sort of pattern, only time will tell what that pattern might eventually come to look like.

Since learning of our good fortune (the sale of our house) two days ago we have been spending time building our new deluxe chicken coop. Prior to this we have been using a large coop we found at Costco as our first chicken experiment, the plan being to learn about chickens before moving to the Farm and building a larger flock. We have arrived at that point, so a large coop is needed.

We decided to base this new coop on a trailer I had once used as a landscape maintenance trailer tool carrier. Since I closed that twenty year business I had no use for the trailer but figured I'd find some use for it. The new coop seemed a likely thing.

This new coop is eight feet long and four feet wide, and about a foot and a half off of the ground while sitting on the trailer. There are five large nesting boxes which sit next to a transom door so that we can collect eggs. There is an automatic chicken coop door at one end which opens in the morning and closes at night, and this sits on a larger door which allows us to clean the coop as needed. But cleaning is also thought about as a daily thing.

My building style is eclectic. I get some wood and hardware, then begin building. This process isn't as haphazard as it looks. I have a plan, but it's just not on paper. The general shape is defined and thought through properly before building starts and I have a vision in my head which informs me as I build. The particulars are not considered, but things I build usually turn our fairly well and do the job they are intended to do. We bought four large oil drip pans (the sort you would use under your car to keep oil off of the floor) to put down on the floor of the coop. These protrude slightly for the side of the coop so that we can pull them out of the coop to clean things easily. We will use construction sand on the pans because: the chickens like it, it is cheap, and when used can be added to the compost pile to make good soils for growing.

The nesting boxes are nine inch by fourteen inch Teflon coated baking pans. Large enough to make the hens happy, mobile enough to allow us to move a broody hen to the brooding coop (the old Costco coop modified for brooding) so that chicks can be made in the safety of a fenced off area. These pans also are easily cleaned, but we will keep nesting materials in them instead of sand and clean them more often. Clean eggs needn't be washed and washed eggs have to be refrigerated. So the eggs will last much longer and be fresh longer at room temperatures. We will refrigerate the eggs anyway because people have become accustomed to the practice. But it really isn't necessary to keep farm fresh eggs chilled.

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The chicken crop we are working toward is intended to primarily produce eggs for eating, selling,  and hatching into hens for laying. And to do this well we will need fifty, or so, hens.

About seven weeks ago we bought ten new chicks, each about three inches tall. Since we had always thought that our favorite variety of chicken is the Rhode Island Red ,we bought five of these. But since we got our big rooster Biff (the Buff Orpington), and we liked his size and looks, we also bought five of these. All of our new chicks are purported to be females, but there is about a ten percent chance of at least one young rooster among them.

If we get a new rooster, the plan is to castrate the thing to make a Capone. A Capone is a large roasting chicken, a style which fell out of favor in the United States a long time ago when people gave up home raised chickens. When a rooster is castrated (at about four months of age) they retain their primary sexual characteristics while maintaining the size of a male chicken. If this is true we ought to be able to produce a ten pound roaster rooster, perfect for the holidays. The surgery itself is fairly simple. The testes are located under a wing and there are few problems with pain or infection, so the castration isn't anything like castrating a mammal, and less messy. A Caponized rooster doesn't compete with the breeding rooster so there is no fighting, or competition for females (which is very hard on females). I believe that, since people are again raising their own chickens, Caponized roosters might make a comeback and become a commonplace market crop, probably for holiday eating.

We moved the chicks out to the broody coop last night and moved the big chickens to the new coop. The chicks could not have been happier because they have been cooped up in a small plastic wading pool since arriving on the Farm, but the big chickens did not like being moved and fought back. We spent about an hour last night trying to convince the big chickens to get into the new coop, but eventually had to give up and throw them in bodily. We will trying to let them get themselves back in the new coop tonight, but throwing chickens is an open option too.

The chicks will stay locked in the brooding coop for a few days, to get used to being outside and around big chickens. The big chickens will hang around in the new temporary chicken run getting used to having the chicks around. We hope this will keep the violence to a minimum. Chickens are hard on each other and if they were all mixed to early one or two might be killed.

This weekend we will open the gate to the brooding coop and mix them up.  If all goes well we will find eggs showing up in the new coop in about three months. But as with all things, time will tell what the Farm has planned.

June 26, 2018 Onward toward Victory

Yesterday we went to a real estate agent's office to list our house. Instead, he showed us an offer and we sold it prior to listing. Got our asking price (plus a bit). No commissions. But this posting is really the end of a much longer story. . .

We had been working toward making this phone call for many long months. A complete renovation of the property, inside and out. The work we did fought back quite a bit, a great many hurdles to jump, hoops to crawl through, and it took much longer than we expected. But eventually came out right and, once I knew we were a week away from completion and the time to sell had finally come, I called a real estate agent last Monday (an old friend from when I was involved in City government). The agent came around a looked the place over right away. We figured out the price and schedule and both of us left soon afterward.

 A few hours after we parted I came back to finish some minor detail one the house and found the agent walking the property with his wife. She announced that the house was perfectly suited for her daughter and fiance (who are getting married next month). 

Long story short: We sold prior to listing. So last night we ordered our new Farmhouse and sat around in the surreal fog, needing to celebrate, having no idea of how to do it. There was no time to plan any celebrations.

June 13, 2017 Garden Update.

The inside of the greenhouse is where the bulk
of the tomatoes and peppers are planted.
All of the heat loving tomatillos are in there

View from the north east corner.
These are corn rows.
In the foreground we have marigolds and nasturtiums.
These are natural bug barriers.

Our first market garden nearly completed. The work was mostly heavy but no part of it was very large. But the garden is in and growing. Though not everything has gone according to the design.

We had a plan that so well considered that the entire thing had to be scrapped in favor of doing what was available to do. The Farm has it's own schedule and nothing you or I might do will change the weather. So things are placed where they made the most sense at the time. And there was also much to learn and little time to learn it.

Mistakes were made. (S'all I'm sayin'.) 

These hills are Patti-pan and Butternut Squash .
Potatoes fill the rows in the upper left corner.

 This past weekend there was a Spring rain storm, about a half an inch or more of rain. This was just the thing we needed. Seeds sprouted and everything got watered in deeply.  The dust and pollen settled too, so our  allergies took a break as well. The weather cycle is off and on hot, so the early growth is a bit slow. Once the heat comes on fully growth will be much better. Despite the unhelpful cool temperatures we are doing well. It has been something of a fight with the local wildlife that has slowed us more than anything else.

Finding a solution for watering is
still more experiment than anything else.

A few weeks ago the world noticed our little garden and sent moles, gophers, and a rabbit or two into the garden and the fight was on. We didn't really want to kill the little creatures, just encourage them to leave peacefully. 

The first thing I tried was a daily collapsing of their tunnels, but this did nearly nothing. I tried drowning their burrows, they just laughed at me. We got tough with the gophers and bought some smoke bombs, this was no help at all.  Eventually we found some electronic ground stakes which, over time, has nearly done part of the job. I also learned how to properly collapse tunnels and flood burrows. The fight is a good one, they are not going quietly.

We have three rototillers.
The smallest one makes good rows .

We haven't seen two Strawberries yet, but we did get one and it was delicious. 

My Mother worried that we had too many plants, but the idea is to have thousands and we merely have hundreds right now. These hundreds of plants were transplanted four times this year as we moved front city to Farm, and had little time. So it's little wonder that we haven't had fruit yet. But we are hopeful that we might do better next year. For now we will be happy to find more plants next year. The fruit thing will figure itself out.

This view shows our lettuces and basil between'
strawberries to the left and cucumbers to the right.

June 6, 2018 The Little Things

It seems so petty, but we have been planning this for three years and had bought the parts one year ago.  The opportunity just didn't present itself until today