June 24, 2019 The tree, the crash, and the aftermath (Part One)

A really good shot of the Greenhouse having been crushed.
There were two large trunks which fell.

Ann wrote a pretty good post about her experiences with the tree fall incident that happened back on the eighteenth. But, since I holed up in bed for a few more weeks I thought I might try to paint a better picture of what happened. Since we don't know the actual effects of the tree fall I'm figuring there will be a need for a follow-up or two.

Tuesday was a good day, right up until the tree fall ruined it for all of us.

Looks like a war zone.
Click on images to see them properly.

We had spent the morning doing what we do We got the Farm going near sun-up, got breakfast, and looked forward to the day. I found a woman willing to give up a whole lot of succulent plants (very useful in future garden plans) and we went out to scoop them up. We grabbed donuts on the way home (this will actually figure large in the story because it delayed lunch).

Returning to the Farm (always a favorite) Ann took the succulents out to the Flower Garden to let them begin to reproduce themselves while I went out the Strawberry patch to continue a mulching/weeding project I had started last week.

At about two I got to the end of a row and decided to check up where Ann was in her project. The donuts we ate earlier had made out usual one-thirty lunch break a moot point, but even donuts wear off and I was getting hungry and very thirsty. I finished up and headed out to find Ann.

She was in the Greenhouse as I walked to the Market Garden, looking like she was packing something into a pot. I called out to tell her we ought to stop for a while and get something to eat. There was a stiff breeze in the air, but otherwise the weather was perfect. As I came through the Market Garden gate nothing appeared wrong in the least way.

Just as I came to the Greenhouse door I heard a cracking noise coming from a tree, a sort of gunshot noise, very rapid fire. I knew which tree was going over, but otherwise had no time to think about the what's or the where's. I remember entering through the Greenhouse door, grabbing Ann's upper arm, pulling her through the door, and telling her to run. This was about all of the time I had to act, the rest was pretty much free form and I lost track of Ann shortly after that. I didn't have time to think about things and since I couldn't run through Ann, going to the right, I decided to make a run for the left side of the tree, but this meant going trough the Greenhouse. I got about a step and a half in before things  got loud and went black for a moment.

The little square near the middle is where I was.

When I opened my eyes I was down on the ground. My right foot had been pinned under my body and was pressed against my hip. I didn't know if I was hurt, but I did know I was alive and this was something of a surprise since I also knew that I had been hit in the head by a large falling tree. I began calling out for Ann (who came through it all). She began asking me where I was.

The was taken from the western side.
Still has plenty of usable space.
I faced out into this space as I looked out/

I was about six feet inside the eastern door and all I could see was the western end of the Greenhouse and a bunch of greenhouse wreckage. The wonderful tomato trellis I had made of re-purposed ladders, which had only just last week taken the first weight of the tomato plants, was twisted and the boards holding them together were splintered. The roof structure of the Greenhouse itself (just rebuilt after being collapsed by Winter snow) was torn apart and pressed down under the enormous weight of the tree. I didn't so much notice these things and recognize them in my memory as I tried to piece together what had happened.

Somehow I managed to get my foot out from underneath my hip. It hurt, but I'm tough. I was calling to Ann and she back to me. We established that we were okay, if not all right, and she began calling out the Jay (our neighbor who was working on his own tiny house project about two hundred feet away). She called out for quite a while, getting louder with every attempt. All I could do was stay put.

From outside of the Greenhouse it would
have been difficult to see where I had landed.

As it turned out I was pinned between the tree (and the wreckage) on the top and the left, the ground on the bottom, and a blue planter half-barrel on my immediate right. This planter barrel, which I had intended to move out of the Greenhouse a few week earlier, turned out to be the thing which saved me. Being full of dirt, it took the weight of the tree fall and stopped it, leaving just enough space for me to survive in the nearly two foot space it maintained under the falling tree.

Note: What more can I say? Laziness paid off. I will never again pass up the opportunity to not do something which doesn't need to be done right away. 

As I lay on the various slabs and tables of the Emergency Room at Tuality Hospital, I went through the day's events. One of the things I remember, prior to the tree falling, was working happily in the Strawberry patch. The sun was very sweaty warm, my hands were blistered by the work. The job I was doing was hard, but it looked like it would pay off large in the satisfaction of it. I remember thinking that, if I had to do this hard work for the rest of my life, I could do it easily. I fell in love with farming that Tuesday. The work of it and for the sake of it. I only left the job behind because my wife needed a break and wouldn't want to be the one to stop the day's work. I remember being proud of where we were and what we were doing. And then POW! It all could have ended there.

Th base of the tree which fell.

Note to self: Life isn't a set of tragic choices. A series of acts which navigate between the bad outcome possibilities present within the set of all things possible. Life is loving what you do, who you are with (even if alone). Life is full of good reasons to do things and good reasons to leave things be.

After all of this episode is finished, the last stitch pulled out of the newly minted surgical scars, we will be fine. The important stuff isn't the stuff which might be damaged. The important stuff is what might be lost. My wife made it out of the greenhouse where she was standing in the direct path of the tree which hit me. She was unhurt. I wasn't (but I'm tough).

The other side of the tree fall.

There were a thousand possible outcomes of the tree tipping over, nearly all of them very, very, bad. The best outcome would have been that the tree fell toward the north and missed us completely, but the range of possibilities included the tree falling with us safely in our bed, or us getting lunch on time. Barring these the possibilities which put both of us, the tree, and uncontrolled gravity, in the same space, were mostly bad. Somehow we found one of the possibilities which did not include someone living alone for a long time or spending the rest of our lives in pain or reconstruction. We both came away from this whole thing more grateful for the opportunities ahead.

Big Tree - 1, David - 0

Today's post is being written by Ann.

Yesterday was a tough day. It started out well enough. We went out to collect a whole bunch of free succulents  we found for free in Craig's List.  We got back to the farm and began our chores for the day.  David is roto-tilling new compost into the strawberry field and I planted to succulents and proceeded to the greenhouse to separate and replant flower starts.

He finished up and I was at a stopping point for lunch about 2 p.m. He got just a few feet into the greenhouse when he heard a tree starting to fall. He yelled for me to MOVE and I did. He tried for the back door of the greenhouse.

The tree won.

The one-hundred, fifty oak decided it was rotten enough to fall for no particular reason and down it came, through the fence. and the greenhouse, with all of its support beams. David, normally a healthy adult American man of 6'2" was, in the matter of about 2 seconds (probably less), squashed into a two foot high space. I got out unscathed.

I screamed for the neighbor and between the two of us we got him extricated. With a bit of assistance got him into the car and down to the Emergency Room. Seven hours, six CT scans, and three x-rays later we got the news: two broken back-ribs, four foot bones dislocated from the ankle (that will absolutely require surgery), and 5 spinal process snapped off in his lower spine. (The neurosurgeon will tell us if that one needs surgery.)

We got home and him into bed  at 11:30 p.m..

Jackson has been a huge help with coming out yesterday to secure the dogs, and is coming out today to cap the broken watering pipes and cut away enough of the tree to repair the garden fence so the dogs can again roam the Farm.   He'll be back to continue to help me with the clean up and repairs.

The good news of course is that we lived to tell the tale. Thins could have very easily turned out much much differently.  David has some tough days and weeks ahead of him, but he will make it. Farmers market plans have been terminated as we don't know surgical dates etc  as of yet.

But the farm lives on just like we do.  And we'll be okay, one day at a time.

June 14, 2019 The Heat Came and Left

The top row of plants, once we lowered the trough,
had a great many berries.
Each type had it's own flavor.

Summer came to the Farm this week, if only for a few days. We hit a few solid ninety degree days with a nice light breeze and things started showing signs of significant growth in the Market Garden. A good thing too because we were starting to worry. Looking back to last year it seems we didn't have much produce until mid July. I had always assumed that this was due to our late planting and inexperience. Now I'm thinking that it might be the way of things. Anyway, the crops are growing and lettuces are on the way.

The heat got the Strawberries growing rapidly, but it is still a bit early to expect much fruit. On Thursday we made some adjustments to our Strawberry Tower experiment, lowering the trough planters and changing the spacing. The previous configuration was a bit too tall to keep the topmost trough planter clean and too tall to see into easily for picking. However, the Tower is beginning to perform as expected. A month back I put a mist watering system into the Tower and the water got things moving pretty well. We still need to mulch the Tower with the same horse compost stuff we used on the Strawberry patch last week. We expect things will go much better in the Tower afterward and it looks good for expanding the Tower garden either later this year or very early in the next.

After lowering the troughs we have a bit of stooping,
but no reaching, when we clean and pick.

There are four varieties of  berries in the Patch. All are ever-bearing types, meaning that they will produce until the cold weather returns. Each of these has it's own fruit style and a distinct flavor profile. We chose these four types for an experimental trial but lost track of which  plant was of which type a long time ago. But it is pretty easy to tell which is which by the characteristics of the fruit that each plant gives. Some are brightly flavored,  some mild, and one has a sort of smokey mild flavor. Some are better for cold serving, some for canning. We had intended on choosing one type of the four and then scaling up the project using just the one. But the jury is still out as to which one to eventually prevail. It doesn't really matter right now, the berries we get right now are a bit small, the harvest is still very small, but the flavors are wonderful. We freeze those that don't sell out at the Produce Stand

We did quite a bit of cultivating in the Flower Garden, pulling the many hundreds of  bulbs out where we had put in only dozens last year. The Dahlias came into bloom and the Hostas are all doing well. Marigolds began flowering too, along with the first of the Nasturtiums. These will help deter the Japanese Beetles that eat little holes in the vegetable crops. We planted hundreds of large Marigold seeds outside of the back fence using seeds harvested last year. These are great habitat for bumble bees and help pollination. We also went into the woods this week to collect native Shamrocks and Ferns for the botanic gardens we have yet to plan. These new plants will be potted and propagated until they are needed for planting.

Our dirt cleaning project seemed to enter it's final stage this week as we began raking under the dirt in the last areas of obvious trash and debris found near the new home site. It's seems amazing to us that we are going to have to search for trash following this raking, but I am sure we'll find some if we look. There is still plenty to do. Right now the Farm is mostly weed free and soon will be trash free. The Farm looks pretty good nearly everywhere you look and once the trash is finished we will be able to begin laying out the botanical gardens and paths system to surround the food and flower production gardens, and the animal habitats.

The new ducklings moved out into their own little field this week, leaving behind the locked doors of our broody coop. The new duck habitat is adjacent to the old duck pond we set up in the Winter. The new field has a miniature coop for them to sleep in and get food, and we bought them their own kiddy pool to splash in.They seem to like it out there, but are really skittish and afraid of their own shadows. The ducklings are already getting big and ought to fledge out their adult feathers soon. Once they have their adult characteristics we will mix the two flocks into one. We decided to re-home one of the drakes because having two drakes is hard on adult hens, much more so on baby hens, but so far nobody has jumped at the opportunity to own a pet duck.

Jim the Duck is up for re-homing.

Egg production is a bit low this time of the year with only about one dozen coming out of the nearly fifty chickens and ducks. We found that a large Raven had been taking duck eggs in the early hours. A Duck egg is quite large but the raven still seemed to need two of the three we get every day so we are going out in the first light to collect the Duck eggs, chicken eggs are collected from the coop in the late evening. Otherwise, egg production is cyclical and we are just finding out what the cycle looks like. We'll have more eggs soon.

No good news on the house permit front. We got a letter requiring us to have a grading permit application, so I'll do this next week. The County seems to be adding things now just to see what they can get away with. The grading permit is completely un-necessary since we will do no grading at all and the County guidelines seem to say that we won't need it. But the show must go on so I'll fill out the grading permit form. I vowed that I would not cut my hair until the house is built. My hair is now well over my shoulders.

Our annual Summer Supper planning has begun. We did one last year and hoped to host a dinner at the Farm every year for neighbors and friends. This year we are planning the same date, but because of all the big changes made this year the event will be moved to a prettier location. Right now we're thing of putting where the Kitchen Garden will eventually be laid out. More to follow as we find more to say . . .

June 8, 2019 Manic Thoughts

The nature of this project, so far, has been somewhat manic. We find something that works, or a plan comes together, and you get very happy to have found it. The following day you hit a roadblock, or wall, and you suffer unhappiness until something better comes along or enough time goes by. That's been the simple path we have been walking for more than the four years we have actually be able to make a claim on this place. UP! Down. Up! Down. An emotional roller coaster which appears to be taking a toll on us since this is going on so long.

This week wasn't much of a down-turn, even though the end of last week was a very nice UP!

We started off the week with sunny, but cool weather. Farming sort of requires heat and we didn't get very much of that for the entire week. We had a bit of rain which came out of thick clouds that eventually delivered thunderstorms once they hit the Cascades on the other side of the city. The rain was heavy, but short lived. We thought about watering the gardens but because of the cooler weather didn't do it.

We harvested about ten pints of Strawberries all week due to the cooler weather. Five of them sold and five went into the freezer to wait for Winter's desserts. The end of the week was colder, but the forecast is for a lot of heat next week. Let's hope.

We have had many visitors this week. The normal amount of visitors is a solid zero so far, with the occasional someone dropping after being announced. This week people simply found the place,  some even stopped.

One fellow drove by in his pick-up truck and offered to sell us some horse manure compost he had cooking for a few years. We agreed to a price but he didn't get it delivered until Friday morning (un-announced). The compost was of a superior quality, so we used a bit of it to make a new patch of garden and another chunk to compost the strawberry field. We cleared most of the weeds from the strawberries and laid a nice line of mulch between the rows of berries. This is doing what we have read ought to work to supercharge the organic berry field and replenish the nutrients used up by the plants. Not that these particular berries have had much of a chance to use thing up. Hopefully we will see some rapid growth in the Strawberries this week, the mulch will keep the roots cool and hold water down where the roots can find it.

We started off the week with the intention of "caponizing" (castrating) the one young rooster we found in the last clutch of chicks we bought. This is a squeamish subject because birds carry their testes inside, under the rib cage. I won't go into details except to say that the tools we bought to do the job proved inadequate. So our young rooster spent the week healing up while we waited for another re-tractor to come in the mail. We'll probably try again next week. I'll discuss the benefits of "caponizing" then.

On Monday we got e-mail from the County telling us that we would need a grading permit, something which doesn't seem ought to be required of us. I wrote back telling them why we didn't need it. We haven't hear back yet whether we are going forward or not. Such is the nature of this project. One week we're UP! The next week we're down.

The trick to surviving all of this is to keep moving, and planning what to do when we get the opportunity.