April 24, 2019 Updated Entrance

Four years ago in April we brought out a weed whacker and cleared just enough of an area to get one of our trucks onto the land. Prior to this there was a human made goat path which started at the place where someone cut through the chain link gate. Yesterday I finally made the changes to the front fence which will allow us to put up our Farm-stand.

Day one of our Project:
"It's like a jungle sometimes.
It makes me wonder . . . "
How we kept from going under.

We finally got the inside of the fence cleared a year later.
We put in some gates shortly afterward.

Today we have an empty place to sell our produce.

April 23, 2019 New Graphics.

I haven't posted the business graphics I have done for quite a while. So I'm dumping these here so that I can get them or look back fondly some day.

Post Card Front
I ordered these printed from Vistaprint.com
and then noticed the typo the very next morning.

Post Card Back

This is a 2' x 8' Market Banner
to stretch behind the Produce Stand.
I ordered the thing from Vistaprint.com

Creekside Badge Logo
Doing round is difficult.

Egg Label

Christmas Letterhead

April 19, 2019 Battling the Gopher

A shot of the Farm from the South-west corner.
(Click on it for the larger picture.)
The chicken run has a Prayer flag pavilion.

This week the biggest thing to write about was that the gophers all woke and started in repairing the extensive tunnel system they had been working on for decades. I bought some gopher traps last year out of the misguided notion that I wanted to kill them and, so far, I have set these traps a few times. But it seems that I am as good a trapper as I was a fisherman, so the gophers are pretty safe with me setting the traps. I had tried incendiary smoke bombs last year a few times, but these too failed to deter the furry little varmints. This year I saw a Youtube video of a guy using road flares in place of the smoke bombs, so I tried it. The flares last maybe twenty times longer and put out a tremendous smoky mess of sulfur dioxide so I figured the smell might get the wee beasties to move on down the road. So far I've spent forty dollars on flares, with little luck.

The field mice also became visible this week. They are very cute, but they can create a bunch of trouble in the greenhouse. I built a better mouse trap out of a five gallon bucket but the thing isn't catching. But this isn't new, or news.

The weather is the biggest story on Creekside Farm this past week. Early in the week we had rain nearly every night but the days were dry. Toward the end of the week the rain finally quit and we were able to finish up a few projects that had to wait for drier days.  The rain stops building plans, but accelerates growing things too.

These Strawberries are planted in the
Strawberry Tower we invented.

The potatoes started showing leaf. We put four varieties in the ground this year: Kennebec (the best masher), Pontiac (little red), German Butterball (the best all around spud), and Viking Purple (a new variety we are trying which has purple skin, but is white fleshed). The first three went into the ground in late March, the Vikings came late from Gurneys due to the first lot being damaged (so these planted this week between the rain showers). We will begin harvesting baby sizes of all of these after they flower, then finish harvesting the larger potatoes once the foliage dies off. We took a large amount of seed potato when we harvested last year and we're hoping to market seed potatoes beginning next Spring. This would make potatoes a year around crop for sale. We will definitely eat well in the coming year.

The Strawberries we put into rows last month are all up and doing very well, as are the plants we put into our Strawberry Tower invention. Ann spent a few days weeding the rows and they look great. But weeding is a lot of work.

The idea of these towers is to take much of the hard labor out of Strawberry production. All the bending and kneeling is hard on older bodies and the knees of pants. If the tower allows the same production then we hope to use these as the basis of an consumer uPick strawberry farm. If the one we have does well we will begin putting towers up and taking row planted berries out next Winter.

The plants in the Tower are doing very well.

The Tower is one of the things we have thought up to work around projects where time and labor is in high demand. Solving problems requires some measure of creativity and allows us to pinch pennies well. The Farm is an expensive proposition and money must be well managed if we are to succeed in this.

These were the rows we made
using the row tool we invented.

Another tool we dreamed up and built was a simple tool to drag behind the tractor and tiller. It takes the soils directly from the tiller and directs it into neat rows for planting. Our previous rows were all made using rakes and shovels to pull the freshly tilled soil into shape. The labor of involved in making each row was hard and had to be re-done every year.. This new tool does large areas quickly and easily. Since all of our planting goes into rows where it can be managed easily, this row making tool will save us many hours of back-breaking labor every year.  Saving cash, time, and labor, is important if we are to survive and thrive in farming. Many of the things we need to do are difficult physically tough , but the scale of our farm doesn't allow for buying expensive tools  from off-site vendors.

The weather is improving, the days getting longer. It won't be long before we have plants up and produce for sale. We can't wait.

April 13, 2019 Adding Some Color

There is so much going on this week. We added just a few things to the list and checked off  a few as well. But this doesn't make us even, just a little bit behind.

The soil report came in this week. Forty-seven pages intended to make the County believe it is doing the right thing in approving our house building plans. We'll rejoin the permitting efforts Monday and see if we can finally write a check and buy the permit. History tells us that there is something the County hasn't told us yet. Some new wrinkle in our fully ironed out plans. So as we get the permit work done, we continue with the everything else.

This weather vane now sits at the top
of the center pole of our Prayer Flag Pavilion

We put up the Prayer Flag Pavilion over the chicken run and found out we will need more strings of flags. There was a wind storm that day, so it seemed the best time to do something like this. Still, it looks really nice and very colorful. As you drive past the Farm on the Highway you will see it if you are heading west (just past the Jim Dandy Farm-store on the left, look to the right. If you are heading in from the coast look left just past Snack Jacks on the right). The chicken run sits near to the Flower Garden, where the Tulips are starting to open, and the Daffodils are nearly through. The Farm looks pretty colorful in that corner, a nice change since we cleared the fence completely.

Yesterday, as we came home from shopping, it seemed that our little stretch of Sell Road has changed significantly. When we found our Farm the whole length of road looked beat down and abandoned. Now it seems like people might live there.

We began to open up the space on the west fence, behind the Chicken Run, and so moved all of the stuff we had stacked there to new locations. Each time we move things they get a bit better organized. We take each opportunity to solve the problem of where things will live. Most of the stuff we have collected is now sitting around the shipping container, but at least we can get to it. The space we opened up was once a very ow priority. There were some wild plum trees, a few berries, almost no trash. But the new neighbor is fixing up his property on that side and so we felt obliged to make his view better.

We finished making seven lettuce row covers, intending to protect the lettuces from the tiny wild bunnies living all around us and under the ground. The lettuces are all going into rows in front of the Greenhouse and this space seems the most protected from rabbit predation from the creeks side of the Farm. Each cover in the lettuce patch is sixteen inches high, thirty wide, and eight feet long and each row takes four covers. We will continue to build covers as needed but seven will get the season started. These covers turn into cold frames as frost approaches (by stapling plastic over them), extending the lettuce season by six weeks. We will plant three types of leaf lettuce under them in flights of seventy-two plants every two weeks. There ought to be a whole lot of lettuce, enough to keep a colony of rabbits fat and happy, or very disappointed, depending on if our row covers work or not.

I did some work on the fence, putting up "new" top rails damaged by fallen trees and left bare by our clearing efforts. The fence looks complete once more, but in truth there are still a few areas needing repaired. I also bought the posts to change the gate area in front. We need to open the area for the Produce Stand, which we are making slight progress on. I will change the front fence in the next week.

We went to the Farmer's Market orientation this week. We are only doing one of these, to get a feel for if we like it. They have a whole lot of regulations and rules, but some farmers do as many as eight of these every week, all Summer long. This is too much time away from the Farm, if you ask me. We are hoping to draw our customers from the Banks-Vernonia Trail. (And just mentioning the trail here move us up the list on Google so: Banks-Vernonia Trail, Banks-Vernonia Trail.)

We decided to put a small feature garden in the front of our tiny house cabin and planned on doing it today. But it is raining and we did a whole lot of work this week, so ambitions are running a bit low. Monday seems a better bet for building a new garden. But we did fill our large strawberry pot and plant it with very grateful berry plants, so things are moving ahead.

Aside from all of this we did our regular planting schedule and did some field burner weeding in the Market Garden. The burner does a great job of permanently knocking down baby weeds, but kills good plants too, so we can only burn the rows prior to planting. After that we weed by hand. The Strawberry field is one of these big weeding projects I need to address in the next week or so. I am not looking forward to it.

The Greenhouse plants are all getting big, Ann transplanted quite a few of them to larger pots and many of them will go into the dirt in the next week or so. The new pots came in and we will be planting them in coming weeks with strawberry plants to sell. We also received a large number of bushel and half-bushel baskets for marketing efforts, and also a bunch of pint and quart baskets to sell berries in. Needless to say, things are a bit busy right now, but we look forward to thing getting much busier in the coming months.

The Spring has arrived, the rains came with, and our world is about growing things. With any luck we'll get the go ahead to build a house  this month and the time we have will be all sold out.

April 4, 2019 Watching time go by . . .

If you look at the column to the right of this text, you will find an archive of posts from previous years gone by. Some of it is worth reading, most of it is simply recognition of some point in time. When I started writing this journal the idea was to somehow capture the Farm as it evolved into whatever it will eventually become. I have never been much of a journal keeper, but the scope of this project looked like it deserved to be chronicled with a bit more care than had the rest of our lives.  By looking back I hope to keep track of where we are.

April will be a busy month this year, so much to do, so much in process, so many little items checked off of our never ending list.

• Last April, on this date, the fruit trees were flowering and I was building the Greenhouse. 
• The April before that we were clearing space and cleaning up the trash. 
• The April prior to this, our first days here, we cleared the first path onto the property.

Many of those flowering tress are now gone because they needed cut down to allow for other plans. While this is bit tough on the trees, homesteading is a tough business.

The Greenhouse has also had a tough year. The Winter snows collapsed the roof (now re-built), rusty irrigation water stained the clear film to a nice shade of red, there are now many holes in the plastic, and the thing isn't completely square anymore. But the space still works as it should, one year after building it, and the temporary space will certainly last the few more seasons.

Early in the week the Greenhouse got its end walls rebuilt and some salvaged screen doors installed. The doors open the space up for a bit of Spring cooling, but keep the wind and animals out. We also built supports for the tomato trellis hooks we bought using re-purposed aluminum extension ladders. The ladder supports are very light weight, quite a bit stiffer than pipe or cable, and run end to end inside of the Greenhouse at about seven feet off of the ground. The trellis hooks will eventually hang down from these ladders and allow the tomatoes to climb for the entire season with full support for the vines.

Thursday I spent the morning tilling beds inside of the Greenhouse. One row of open soil is for Spring lettuces, carrots, and radishes, the other row for the hanging tomatoes in Summer. The carrots and radishes we tried last year did so poorly that we decided to try them indoors this Summer. Carrots and radishes like to be planted directly into the soil and don't like being transplanted. We have Spring Dikon and French Breakfast Radishes in half barrel planters right now, along with another half barrel full of Spring carrots, but they are not growing very quickly right now. The lettuces will all move outdoors once the weather gets a bit hotter, but we want some salad early and the plants are nearly ready for planting today. While I was in the Greenhouse tilling beds  Ann weeded out the Flower Garden.

The flower garden didn't exist last year in April, so it seems we are making progress. The bulbs we put in during the Fall are doing very well. Our Tulips are up and ready to bloom. Daffodils are in full flower. The Crocus flowers are all spent. Ann tells me that the hostas and peonies are already coming up. So things are definitely moving in the flower garden which, for the time being, is for propagating plants.

It is likely that we won't sell many fresh cut flowers this year. Perhaps we will sell some potted flowers, but we are mostly growing plants to use in the Themed Garden plan. We will need a great number of every sort of plant to complete the work of making this a garden spot worth walking through. Many of these plants will come from sources we have yet to find, but part of our plan is to forage for native species in the coastal forests of northwest Oregon. Collecting Ferns, Trillium, and Shamrocks will be our focus this year and the  this year's collections will go into the Flower Garden to grow until we can begin planting the Themed Gardens.

The weekend looks very rainy. This is bad for getting things done, but the potatoes, onions, garlic, and Strawberries, will all get a good soaking to start the Spring off right. The rainy weather puts our foraging and planting plans on hold, but there is still much to do.

Last year, in April, we moved into our tiny home, having already cleared the property quite a bit, and tilled the raw Market Garden space. Two years ago we made the decision to build the tiny home and were beginning to buy parts. Three years ago we began clearing a very distressed  property. Four years back we were working to finance buying a Farm, a property we hadn't seen yet.