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.