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.