May 31, 2019 Open for Business

The week started off slowly, but ended with a burst of speed. Our weather was mostly sunny, the temperatures got into the seventies every day and warmed a few degrees every day. Friday it hit eighty.

Friday was a good day. I got email from the County Planning Department on Friday. This is a good thing since they approved the siting of our new house. This is a long termed goal. One of two major goals reached on Friday. The second was the opening of our roadside produce stand. More on these two a bit later. As is my custom, whenever we make significant progress on the Farm I like to reminisce a bit. Usually I go back to the beginning and try to write a synopsis of our journey so far.

A long time ago . . . Late Summer of 2013, Ann and I took a long driving trip to Las Vegas to get re-married. I won't go into the particulars, but if you want to know what happened look to the right of this and you'll see the two of us getting married by Elvis. Ann and I have always been goal oriented, this trip was to celebrate all of the goals we had finished, but also to find some new ones. Our kids were all grown. We had been married twenty years. It was a good time to try and come up with some new directions we wanted to try together.

Long story very short, we decided to open a wedding venue. Then we decided how to get this done by breaking the big idea in half, and then these halves into halves, etc; . . . We talked for four days, trying to come up with some plausible plan to get a two million dollar wedding venue built in ten years. This was a lofty goal because we were literally starting off with zero cash.  We decided that the best sort of wedding venue would be a farm and so we set goals and plans to buy and build a farm themed wedding venue in ten years time. As of today we are nearing six years since we set the goal.

But the road has been long and rough at times. We did college, cancer, and ended two careers during this time, along with finding the property, clearing it, building a dog breeding business, and so much more.

We found a piece of highly distressed property and had to find some way to buy it.  The entire story of this is the content of this BLOG so I won't get more into this. Suffice it to say, we got the property in April 2015 and have worked very hard to make something of it. We still need to build a house, but we have the money and the land so it looks good that we shall have our house sometime in the next year. The wedding goal is still a ways off, but once the house is built the path to the weddings seems fairly clear. We are definitely headed in the direction we chose so many years ago. Whether we make it to the same end, or on time, is impossible to tell. But today we made definite progress.

Day one of our produce stand was today.

• Today we opened the Farm Stand, the first iteration of the bigger "Farm Store" goal which is half of the first half of the ten year goal. This isn't to say that we are one-quarter of the way there, but things are looking good.  We opened with about twelve pints of strawberries, fifteen hanging pots, dozens of strawberry starts, and a few potted Hostas. As of five in the afternoon we haven't sold a thing, but the goal includes the possibility that things might start off a bit slowly. Our philosophy in this is to build something worth seeing and then wait for people to see it. So we are prepared to wait it out.
• Today the County, which so far had been difficult to figure out, accepted our home site and so our building permit is passed the biggest hurdle. We already have the water and septic figured out.  The planning is all but done. What's left is buying the wood and hammering it together. With any luck we'll be building in Summer

I'll leave this all for now and go happily wandering on my Farm in the early Summer sunshine. We ended the day riding our e-bikes on one of the prettiest bike trials in Oregon (and this is saying something bigger than it sounds).  And it seems (for now) that our crops are growing, the chickens and ducks are happily productive, and the dogs are ready to so back into breeding just as soon as the house is built. The past few years have been difficult, but this was a good week.

May 25, 2019 Dragging things out.

This week was spent waiting for things to start moving again. The momentum of a few weeks back is all but gone. Cool weather and something of an ill wind might be the best way to put things.

It's a month since I made the development permit application and, though we have heard back a few times, the basic okay from the flood plain people has held up our approval. The problem seems to be that the person making the decision has criteria for approval which he is not sharing. I have re-engaged our flood plain engineer, but his attempts a finding a way through this have seemed to hit a stone wall of uncommunicative bureaucrats. My attempts a finding the way forward have also gone unanswered. So we wait. Certain that we will eventually get where we are headed. Unable to say when. Frustrated.

The Farm is looking pretty good. We weeded out the strawberry and potato patches thoroughly. The potatoes are doing very well and there are hundreds of berries ripening. The growth and development is slowed by a the cooler weather and lack of consistent sunshine, but strawberries are early Spring growers and don't need much sun. Many of the plants are thriving, most are not, but all are producing, so we are grateful for it. We have a Blue Jay nest in the nearby trees and she has eaten a few of the berries, so we ordered thirty-six Mylar pinwheels to put out in the rows and scare her off (if that is possible).

We planted the rest of the corn crop. One row was planted about a month ago using seed sprouted in the greenhouse. One row was seeded directly about two weeks ago using our nifty new seeding machine and it has emerged already. The balance of the corn went into four tidy rows this week and we are hopeful. "Knee high by the fourth of July" is the rule, and it looks like we will make it.

The baby Runner Ducks moved out into the chicken nursery coop and they love it out there. We love it too, since it removes the messy little critters out of the Laundry room of our tiny home cabin. We added a pond outside of one of the coop doors for the ducklings to play in. At night they have a heat lamp to snuggle by, so they are quite happy.

Our young hens, and one young rooster moved out of the nursery and into the main coop last week. They fit right into the flock, but don't browse the entire Farm just yet. Last week we had separated the bird areas from the rest of the Farm, leaving openings for the birds to leave their area, but keeping the dogs out of the bird area. The flock is looking good, but egg production is down just a bit. We have ordered a "Caponizing" surgical kit from Amazon and will soon be "altering" our one young rooster.This was always our intention, to make Capons of the rooster chicks we grow. The surgery itself is pretty straight forward and simple. But things might still go wrong so . . . Wish us luck.

As this week ends we still need to direct seed more crops, finish the preparations for the opening of the produce stand, and hope like hell that our first strawberries ripen by next weekend so that we can open the stand properly. We have live plants to sell, some of which have berries on them. We also have hanging baskets of strawberry plants. But it would be nice to have fruit to sell on opening day. We have the stand and the signage all worked out, now all we need is a crop to sell and a box to put the money into.

May 16,2019 Very Minor Reversals

This week started off, and continued, in exact opposition to the last. It rained every day. It was cold most of the time.  But nothing was lost. We had such high hopes for the week.

Last Saturday we added five baby Runner Ducks to the Farm's flock of five, making ten all together. The babies live comfortably in a crate on top of the clothes dryer. They'll be moved out to the Duck pond in a few weeks, but before we can trust them around water their feathers need to come in and waterproofing oil glands start working. The Babies need a pretty rigorous hygiene program. They get a bath every day and the crate they live in gets completely washed out. Our baby Runners are cute, but noisy, messy, and smelly. And we are quite happy they are here.

In spite of the rain there were a few things that got done. . .

The local Ban on Burning went into effect last week due to hot weather and no rain. The Burn Ban was lifted by the rain and the reprieve allowed us to take the extra time to built a nice warm fire out of winter debris collected up from all over the Farm. The place not only looks better, it will be much easier to keep clean of wild plants since the ground can be kept cleared using machinery.

The unexpected rain brought on a wave of rapid growth in the weeds found in the Strawberry fields. I'm reluctant to make too much of a fuss, even though weeding rows of strawberries is a back breaking sort of labor. We spent quite a few hours pulling weeds and ought to have it all fixed up by Saturday. The weeds grew everywhere the land hasn't been improved. I used the rotot-tiller on our tractor, set to a very shallow level, to run around the Farm and tear a large portion of the new growth  apart and the Farm is looking pretty good. With minimal effort for the first time.

We got the last of the watering system adjustments made. Not that this did us much good, since it began raining, and I had to turn the system off. The new irrigation system inside of the Greenhouse is doing a bang-up job of growing things and sprouting seeds. I designed and built a water fogging rail to water the front bed in the Greenhouse and the lettuces in that bed are exploding with growth. I did the same with the sprouting tables and the seeds are sprouting a bit quicker than before. The tomatoes are on drip hose, so the plants will be more resistant to blight.

The rabbits, gophers, rats, moles, and mice, seem pretty well under control this week. But it just might be that they aren't interested in working in the cool weather. Throwing lit road flares down gopher holes seems to discourage them from using their extensive tunnel network. The Chickens are always looking out for mice and moles, so these keep to dark corners. The dogs, especially Laffee Taffee spend a lot of their time harassing the rats and mice. As for rabbits, we put in some more chicken wire fencing to add one more laying of protection for the gardens. Between all of our efforts, and a few old fashioned traps, we seem to be getting ahead of the rodents at this time. But it is a long growing season.

All in all, the week didn't give much opportunity for growing things, but other important things did get done. Now if only the County would finalize our building permits . . .

May 9, 2019 Summer Heat has Come

Our Hostas are thriving

 Planting season has finally come. The hundreds of baby plants sprouted in the Greenhouse over the past few months are almost entirely in the dirt where they can grow into production. And the Gardens are full of life. All thanks to the heat climbing over eighty degrees all week long and never going below fifty at night. Together we got most of the job done and still had time to do some extra-curriculars. By Thursday night the corn planted on Tuesday had already grown three inches, the cantaloupe and watermelons were also showing signs of settling in for the Summer.

Ann put plants into the rows, while I tried to stay in front of her by putting the final touches on the dirt by flame weeding and finish tilling.

The Runner Ducks
enjoying the sunshine.

We have nearly perfect growing conditions in nearly perfect soil. All of this is so much better than last year (the first year). The Strawberry fields are already a sea of flowers and many plants have half-inch green fruit. We're really hoping that the berries will be available for sale at our produce stand by the end of the month. The same for the first flight of lettuces, finally growing and ought to be ready to eat by June first.

We had a free three month tune-up for out e-bikes scheduled this week and somehow found the time to get them into Portland. It so happened that a farmer in Molalla had about a hundred feet of free wiggle wire channel listed on Craig's List, so we took the time to go get it (another piece of our Strawberry Tower puzzle showing up for free). We already had the Wiggle Wire and the chain, now we need about thirty ten foot corrugated steel panels for free and we'll be set to build the towers. After we got back we took the bikes into Banks to get some errands done.  A perfectly used day which ended in an early to bed scenario.

The Tulips are giving us
many new bulbs.

But just before bed-time I found five baby Runner Ducks Wednesday, again on Craig's List, and the decision to buy was an easy one. We have had so much fun with the five we already had and the eggs they give us are marvelous, so we decided to expand the duck flock just a little bit more. The babies will come to us on Saturday. About the perfect timing as the broody chick coop will open up next week. This weekend our ten new Orpington chicks will finally come out of our broody hutch and join the hens in the main coop. This is just right on time too, some of our older hens are beginning to die off. As we planned the chicken business we had thought we would eventually take older hens for food, but the hens we have are laying until the bitter end and so it seems that their lives will continue until they fall over. A few have fallen over in the past few weeks but we are pretty sure they had good lives, at least for the time they were living on our Farm.

Ten baby Orpingtons
Graduated into the
Big Coop this week.

It appears that our permit is being actively worked on. A County driveway permit guy came by today, to do his bit of our permit process. He tells me that we're going to have to replace the culvert along the road and this is not exactly unexpected, just un-welcomed, news. I also got our civil engineer to re-draw the site plan, another piece of the puzzle completed. Nobody can tell us how long the process will take, but it appears that each step will add something to the building budget. Needless to say, it is all part of the game. Building the house is winning the game so we're will to do whatever it takes.

As the week comes to a close we appear to be right on track, right on time, and moving forward every day. The list of things to do seems to finally be shrinking, or at least not growing, and with the permit coming we will soon be building our new home. All seems well on Creekside Farm.

May 3, 2019 Moving things along

Our Farmer's Market Banner

This week didn't seem especially eventful.It was more like a few events happened. But we got a whole lot done. None of it seemed much of a strain.

The first thing we did was to acquire a two person hot tub. This had been a goal for many years and we found an appropriate two person triangular tub on Craig's List in excellent condition at a very reasonable price. It now sits behind the tiny home cabin and is used at sundown every day to relieve the strains of the day. The size of the tub might lend itself to being moved into the new bathroom in the new house should building a new house ever take place.

The second thing we acquired was an ancient ten foot satellite dish, again from Craig's List, for free, from a nearby farm. We have been looking for these for three years. We will use this one for the roof of the Kitchen Garden Gazebo once the Kitchen Garden is laid out. We will be looking for more of these as the years go by.

The building permit applications were all made this week. This is the latest installment in the building permit saga. Most have ended in some new County request for more information. I've made many trips to the Planning Department in hopes that they would let me write a check. This week we got the permits applied for and a check written. Such is the nature of building in Washington County. We are not holding out for an approval this time, but miracles do happen.

We made more progress toward our goal of putting up a produce stand to sell our farm products. We bought a large pop-up tent from Amazon, along with some larger than standard leg weights. This will eventually become the produce stand this year and also be used for the Tuality Farmer's Market. I designed an eight foot by two foot banner and had it printed by Vistaprint. They do a good job, are very reliable, and the prices are very low. The banner arrived the same day as the tent so we set it all up yesterday.

Along with the banner came some postcards I designed as handouts for the Farmer's Market. Graphics design has been a long time hobby for me and has occasionally made us a dollar, this time we need it to make us a bit more. Only time will tell.

These post cards have one typo on the front. All a part of the comedy we often experience here. I saw the typo a few moments after I sent the thing for printing, so now we sell "houds" instead of hounds. No big deal.

The back of the card tells a bit of our story and offers a map to finding us. I tried to make the thing look a bit like postcards from the fifties and sixties, much the same era as we wish the Farm to look like when finished.

Other than this we also: cleared and burned the area outside of the fence at the back of the Farm, scraped the whole length of fence outside the front of the Farm, burnt a whole lot of weeds inside the fence as well, and put together the irrigation system for the Market Garden. Thee newly cleared areas and weed burning are part of the massive cleanup we started four years ago, there are many hundreds of feet of fence-line left to clear. The watering system installation allows us to move nearly all of our gardening out of the Greenhouse and into the dirt.

The Greenhouse itself started showing signs of excessive heat buildup, so we put the shade cloth on the roof to keep things cool in there. Once the flats of plants are put into the dirt outside the Greenhouse tomatoes will go into their places inside.

We're really quite busy these days. The coming house building and gardening season will only add to the work. But we're looking forward to it all.