July 27, 2018 The Farm is Beginning to Feed People!

We have been eating produce from MacGreggors Market Garden ,and giving produce away to friends and co-workers, for about a month. The idea is to open a produce stand outside our front gate and sell our stuff out there.  Our hope is that we'll get this step done in August.

The plate is fourteen inches.

This morning is something of a proof of the concept. A bit of proof that we are on the right track.

 I pulled a bunch of Romaine Lettuce out, along with some pickling Cucumbers and about a pint of Strawberries. Not a huge harvest considering what must be produced to sell produce. And before people start appreciating the stuff, the quality must go up too. 

But the above is certainly enough to make us happy about a good one-day picking.

July 25, 2018 Sprinklers!

There is always more work to do here than there is time, and more plans than we can possibly work on as well. But little things get done every day and big things almost weekly. Our house in town took all of the available time for quite a while. But once we got the house sold (we closed yesterday) the problem became getting the house building ball rolling. That being done, it was time to start laying out the Farm. This week the farm plan said it was time to install an automatic irrigation system for MacGreggor's Garden.

The irrigation system wasn't expensive but there were a great many parts to it. The biggest factor in all of this was the planning. I wanted a design didn't use the ground poorly, didn't block tools and feet, and didn't add a bunch of stuff to get in the way. On top of all this the thing needed to water the plants quickly and without my having to add much labor to it. It took two very hot days to build, but eventually I figured it all out.

The system wraps around the outside of the Garden but dips under ground for about six feet so that I can drive the tractor into the Garden if needed. I split the system into four parts to spread the load on the well out. Each zone waters about a quarter of the garden, three of the zones are outside, one in the greenhouse. I put the four parts on four electric valves operated by an electronic timer. The timer allows quite a bit of flexibility in watering very early in the morning, or when I am not here to water the plants.

Now I can work the garden real early in the morning (where I had been spending about an hour and a half moving the watering hoses and sprinklers to the plants). This will shave about two hours off of my morning routine and allow for the next big thing to happen.

No telling what the next big thing will be.  But things are definitely happening at Creekside Farm.

July 19, 2018 Trash Update

A few weeks ago I ranted about the trash on Creekside Farm. I suppose the it was all part of my process... Anyway, we have (perhaps) found a semi-efficient solution. I built a sifting machine that makes quick work of removing the millions of small pieces of stuff littering nearly every inch of the Farm.

The shear size of the problem  required something to make cleaning it up more efficient. We had been clearing an area by first picking up the big stuff, then raking the smaller stuff up, and then picking out the miniature stuff by hand. Every shovel load of ground contains glass, plastic, textiles, wood, plant materials, and stones. This stuff roughly takes up half the volume of the load, the other half is just plain old dirt.

Some of the places are merely horrible.
A large area is really horrifying.
And a few are much worse than this.

This sifter is in two parts. The first is a screen on a frame which can be handled by two people. We put the unsifted stuff in and agitate it. Anything under one-half inch, like sand or dirt, falls through to the ground when you shake the sifter hard enough. What remains gets dumped.  The other half of the sifter is a table-like apparatus to make the job easier. The sifter sits in the top of the table and can be agitated back and forth on bearings.

I made the whole thing wide enough to load using the three cubic foot loader bucket on our mighty little tractor. I also made it so that the tractor can carry it around. We have to split the bucket loads into three or four smaller bites, but it gets the job done quickly and leaves only the smallest of debris. Last night we used it for the first time and got about two hundred square feet cleared in less than two hours. We sifted out about a yard and a half of debris, leaving about the same volume in a pile on the ground below.

After sifting we have almost nothing left to clean up.
Very small pieces of trash remain after sifting so
this dirt will have to be used for hole filler.
(We won't use it for planing.)

July 19, 2018 Garden Update

MacGreggor's Garden is starting to show a great deal of progress. In fact, the whole Farm is beginning to show progress. We aren't ready to open the Produce Stand yet, but we will have enough in early August.

The new patch is in the upper left corner (being watered).

We're eating lettuce and strawberries regularly now that the rodents have gone away (for the most part). The greenhouse tomatoes are beginning to ripen and we should see some red very soon. Potatoes, onions, and garlic are very happy. Beans, peas, peppers and tomatillos are coming along nicely. Melons, pumpkins, and our magic plants are all doing well. The garden is nearly a sea of green flowery happiness. So it's time to expand.

This morning I tilled another large area of the West Meadow to begin planting flowers and decorative stuff. The new garden plot is only about half as large as the vegetable garden. There aren't enough hours in the day for much more as we get ready to build the Farmhouse.

More to come on this later.

This is the Strawberry patch.
The Marigolds and Nasturtiums keep the bugs out.

July 7th, 2018 Progress Report on the New House

We sold our old house in North Plains so quickly that we had no real plan to put the new house on the Farm. We had sketches, ideas, and some knowledge about what it would take; but we had no permits, surveys, contractors, or the other people needed to do these things. All we had was the house we had picked out and put a deposit on about a week ago and a dream of having enough money to make the thing happen without incurring debt. But we sold fast, and we sold right, so the money thing ought to work out pretty well providing that the unknown stuff doesn't add up too high. Last Sunday I resolved to get the permits on Tuesday, needless to say it, but that didn't work out as simply as planned. But progress was made.

Tuesday morning I rolled out of the house at eleven, having done Farm chores, meals, and drew up a preliminary site plan on my computer (so that I would not look like a new guy). Arriving at the planning office I got loads of help, but I had to go back after lunch to talk the the guy making  the decisions. But this guy was okay, once we got together after lunch. He gave me a preliminary nod, which is not the same as a preliminary permit. He said it would be no problem so long as we got a survey showing that we are not below the Base Flood Elevation of 225.3 feet above sea level.  We were also going to need the Septic system checked out. So I rented an excavator to arrive on Thursday.

The Fourth of July celebration at Creekside Farm was only spectacular in that we did nothing at all.

Thursday the tractor came at ten A.M. and I launched into finding the lost location of the septic tank, figuring that, from there, I could get a clue about the other parts of the system, so that they could be checked. It took five hours, and I dug up a whole lot of things that looked septical, but were not, and which then had to be re-buried. Eventually I found it, but the tank wasn't in very good shape. A steel tank (we had hoped for concrete) that was a bit out of shape with a really bent lid. The drain field, which carries the black water out to drain off, was probably going to have to be replaced as well because the pipe they used turn very brittle.

After finding the tank, I used the remaining tractor rental time  to tear apart the last of our really big last huge trash piles (for sorting and disposal). And they I started digging out stumps and knocking down trees until it was too dark to see.

We re-buried everything but the tank and the Farm is generally none the worse for the wear. It will be no fun in the sun to sort through all the trash I casually tossed around with the excavator, but we'll sort that out this month and get it hauled away.  Trash is an issue always on Creekside Farm, but we're more interested in building the house than of the ubiquitous and ever present trash. What we need it contractors.

The problem of finding a survey guy and a septic take guy are that people are very much in demand in this area. Today we got a visit from the septic guy who said $12K minimum for a new system. So I called another guy and he comes Monday afternoon . . . It looks like I'll have to do a ton of trench digging to put the new septic system in or repair the old one.

Contractors of all sorts are busy enough that they might not answer the phone on the first or second try. We eventually got calls from a surveyor yesterday, and also one from a septic guy. Things will be looking good once we have both of these things set up, and the electrical plan comes through from PGE. Soon we will have our permit!

The house will take about four months to complete at the house factory, another few weeks to set-up on the Farm. So in between these things we will need to bury the electrical stuff on the electrical plan. We will also need to bury the water pipes, move the water system, get hold of the propane guy, and pour a really large slab of concrete for the house to sit on. Nothing to it.

If all goes well we will be warm in our new Farm home by December this year.

July 4th, 2018 Strawberry Fields Forever

Yesterday we found one perfect strawberry out in MacGreggors Garden. It was large, nearly ripe, and the only berry we have had (so far) worthy of its name.

 So we ate it.

We have been trying to raise strawberries, like the one we ate, for a few years. So far having little success. In truth, the berries we put in at the old house went wild and did better than any intentional action we took.

Strawberries were always a part of the plan to get people to come to the Farm. But we are doing all of this without any real experience, so we have to do much of it by trial and error.  When we began thinking seriously about raising Strawberries, we bought one-hundred plants in four varieties.

Each of the many dozens of type of Strawberry plant has its own characteristics. Some varieties are "everbearing" and should produce the whole warm season, some only produce seasonally.  Some are red throughout, some have white centers. Some plants make little berries, some make them as big as your fist. We chose our plants by reading up on them and deciding which might do well.

Our failed experiment.

I am a big fan of vertical farming for berries, but this can be tricky since there isn't many examples of the practice to follow along behind. We made special planters for the four hundred plants we bought and put them out into the garden. The idea was to turn the barrels slightly every day and distribute the sunshine evenly and our hope was to build rows of these. But the barrels turned out to be a buster. We got half a pie out of them before giving up. The barrels didn't seem to let the plants behave as they should, heat built up and the plants struggled.

Eventually we had to give up on the idea and the plants were left to fend for themselves until we planned our permanent move to the Farm about a year ago. Since then our Strawberry plants have had a rough year.

• They were removed from our garden barrels and put into one gallon pots where they struggled without being tended, fed, or otherwise noticed very much.
• Then we moved the pots into the greenhouse (once it was finished) and took them out of the pots where they lay stacked tightly in low planting flats, waiting over two months for planting.
• We moved them from the flats into the Garden a bit late in the planting season and into brand new soils which were not quite ripe for planting.
• And, once in the garden, they were viciously attacked by gophers and moles which ate their roots and knocked them out of the soil. We replanted some of them three and four times.
• All the while our dogs ran through the garden and some were torn from the ground and had to be replanted.

Our plants are beginning to produce,
but we have no idea about plant variety.

Once they were relieved of all this adversity, the soil cooled down by time so that they could grow, they have begun to thrive. Most plants have become these wonderfully bushy things with shiny leaves and many runner babies. It is from this that our first strawberry came. We just wish we knew what sort of plant it came from.

When we bought the starts a few years ago, we had each plant location carefully mapped to see which variety would do the best in the barrels we had built for them. But as time went along, and we moved the plants out of the barrels, we got them pretty jumbled and lost track of which plant belonged to each variety, so we really don't know which plant is of what variety. It could be that keeping the varieties separated won't have any down-side. It could be that the Farm dictates what happens there and, no matter how carefully we plan, things will always get jumbled.

Each and every strawberry variety is good enough for people, but this lack of knowing might become a problem when we eventually build the permanent strawberry fields in the East Meadow. For now we will simply accept what comes of the field we have. And so far only one berry has shown up. But it was a good one and others just might show up.

We are planning to build a "vertical" Strawberry field.

One type of vertical Strawberry farm.

This is where the we put the plant rows into stacking planters. The idea is to allow people to pick the rows without having to get down on the ground or spend time bending over.  There are many types of vertical Strawberry farms. Some are pyramids, some are stacked pots, some are hydroponic, most are in commercial greenhouses. The design we want to try is a large hanging planter set-up with its own built-in greenhouse cover so that the plants are protected in Winter. These are placed into rows and look like they would be nice to stroll through. I'll build one of these in the next few months to see how it works.

No matter how, what, or when, we will take what we are given. The one berry was delicious.