August 24th, 2019 The New Normal

Last year on this date we were anticipating our very first Summer Supper. We had built a special place, bought way too much food, wine, and beer, and had invited everyone on Sell Road. Eventually about fifty-three people came for dinner and we served them as well as we could considering that the entire thing was cooked in our tiny home. That party was a success, the next one ought to be as good, or better, if all goes well. The 2019 Summer Supper will be on September 21st at about four o'clock in the afternoon. We'll be doing a fairly straight forward burgers and dogs meal with Camp Creekside Chili on the side, over the top, or left out altogether. We will also be serving enough vegetarian and vegetable stuff to keep the vegans satisfied and enough iced tea, pop, beer, wine, and ice as well.

RSVP using the form at the top of this page to let us know who is coming.

We are hoping for seventy-five this year so you coming is important to us.

As for the past week, things are pretty much back to a new normal. Ann's helpers have continued to come (and it is really appreciated). This week Ann spent the entire week working the Gardens. Produce is coming fairly regularly, and increasing weekly, but we still haven't come to the point that we can open the produce stand. Instead we are taking our excess produce down to St. Vincent DePaul's Food Bank. We are still delivering produce and eggs once a week to our longer standing friends too.  She also began the learning prcess for fermented pickles. This is a good thing. So farming is coming along. 

I have returned to working the Farm full time, even if a bit restricted as to what I can do somewhat. The first few days of the week I spent quite a bit of time working through some cleanup projects in anticipation of building the new Summer Supper shelter. We will put the new shelter at the back corner where it is a bit better shaded from the Sun. The shelter will become the place where we put building materials once the permits come through. (We made zero progress on the permits this week.) 

From Wednesday onward I sent my time cleaning up the shop space. The past few months had left it a shambles. Tools and hardware were wildly mixed up and left everywhere, the materials and tables were covered in dust, trash, what-have-you. SO the whole thing needed cleaned up and re-organized. This morning I got the final touches finished and began cleaning up around the outside of the shop. Eventually we may get the place cleared away, time will tell. 

This afternoon we took the e-bikes up the hill to Stub Stewart park on the Trail. The weather here has been unseasonably cool, but sunny and really nice. 

This new girl will be named Abba Zabba

We also finalized the purchase of two new puppies for our Rocketdog Kennel. No only if we could build the kennel . . . The new girls will come to us from Idaho in Mid-September and we're wondering how we will get through it. But plans still have to be kept if we're ever going to make a living on this place.

This little cutey will be named Bit-o-honey

Another thing worth noting is that: somehow, without showing any of the normal warning signs, Laffee Taffee may just be pregnant for the first time. She is too young to have to go through this, so we are hoping she doesn't have to. It may be that she is merely going through a false pregnancy, only an ultrasound will tell us. We have the appointment scheduled for the coming week. This is not entirely bad news, even if we didn't intend for this to happen. I'll keep you posted.

August 16th, 2019 Back to Work

The Summer Supper is happening!
Come one, come all!

After nearly nine weeks of laying around I returned to work. Not just this, I also returned to driving a car, wearing regular shoes, and thinking ahead toward a better future. Not everything is as it once was, but a bunch of stuff is.

On Tuesday I noticed that I could move my toes without much effort. This may not sound like much, but it signaled that the swelling in my foot was beginning to go away. On Wednesday morning I was able to bend my ankle enough to pull on a pair of jeans. The work of the farm doesn't really match wearing shorts, so work pants are better. By Wednesday night I could feel the tendon flexing along the inside of my arch. Thursday morning I could begin to make out an ankle bone, and that was about it. I strapped on my ski-boot styled foot support and went to work on Thursday morning and did nearly an entire day's work for the first time. Just after lunch I took the boot off and replaced it with a pair of matching runners. In normal shoes I can drive a car, but I still need to use a crutch on one side to keep some of the pressure off of the foot as insurance. All of this might give my foot doctor a headache, but I really needed to go back to work despite his anxieties.

The Farm is looking good, things are happening.

We are getting about a quart of large strawberries out of our patch every day. Most of these go straight into the freezer, some go on our plates. Lettuces, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, onions, and corn are all present in at least one of our meals every day. Soon the zucchini, melons, and beans will begin to show up on our plates too. There still isn't enough being picked to open the produce stand, but we are selling produce to Ann's circle of friends and we donated enough lettuce to St.Vincent food bank to make a bunch of people happy. Giving food away was always part of our plan, so at least something is going according to some plan. This  doesn't happen much.

Most of the damage from the tree fall in mid- June has been either cleaned up, or waiting the lifting of the burn ban. We will start putting up a replacement greenhouse soon enough and the irrigation stuff as well.

We will also need to build a shelter for the Summer Supper Party in September. Make sure to RSVP on the form above this article if you plan on coming. We will announce the menu soon, but the food will be good and the drinks cold. Last year we fed fifty or so people, this year we are hoping for another twenty-five more to come.

Click for a bigger picture

Our young hens began giving eggs this week. The eggs are good, but will be a bit small for a few more weeks. Orpington chickens are very large and their eggs are large as well, so the little eggs are sort of comical, but tasty. Ann delivers large eggs to our loyal customers, the little eggs stay here for personal use. Our duck eggs are selling well and our two new hens gave their first eggs this week. As it turned out only two of the five new Runner Ducks turned out to be hens so we are in the process of finding homes for the three young drakes we do not need. These drakes are very pretty so it shouldn't take long to find places to re-home them to.

The rodent problems have gone away for the time being. Hunting the squirrels and rabbits with a rifle has worked, but we are not at all happy to have shot those who were eating our crops. We haven't seen any more for a few days so maybe the new plan worked.

We got a message from the County that they needed a few engineering questions answered, so the permit is being worked and we might be able to build some day. I got our structural engineer on the job and we should have the questions answered pretty soon, but I'm ever more skeptical about the building phase of our project happening this year. Not building this year puts our whole project at risk since making money really depends on having a house and kennel. The timing is getting uncomfortably close but we are not panicky about it just yet.

All in all, this was a really good week. The weather has been great, nothing bad happened, and we are somehow beginning to look forward to a brighter future. All seem as it ought to be once more and we are very grateful for it.

August 10, 2019 Moving around now

The doctor took the cast off of my leg, put me into one of those boot things, and then told me not to use it. Funny thing this. . .  I have been walking around for a few weeks now, the thought of me giving all of that up is pretty small, but I appreciate the sentiment. The fact is that I really got hurt when the tree fell.  The broken bones and tree anxiety took a whole lot more out of me that I realized or was willing to admit. Moving around takes about four times the effort since there is no leverage in my legs and lifting anything more than about twenty pounds fairly stops me moving around. I can still move if my hands are pretty empty and I can stand up straight for a few hours at a time. But otherwise I am pretty useless for work.  It isn't that I can go running around, pulling heavy weights and roto-tilling new fields. But I can do some stuff.

We were having a real big problem with rodents. Mice, rats, rabbits, squirrels, moles, and gophers have all taken quite a toll on the gardens. Last year it was about moles and gophers. These didn't eat too much, but they tore the ground up a lot. During the Winter, after trying every bait, trap, and every bit of internet advice we could find, we finally heard about using road flares. So any new opening is now opened up immediately and a fifteen minute flare put into the tunnel. The gophers all moved, some of them not too far away so they stage come backs every once in a while. The moles have given up for the most part. The mice and rats are an ongoing puzzle, but the rabbits and squirrels have given  us a real problem.

The squirrels started off early in the Spring by invading the Greenhouse (before it was destroyed by the tree). The ate a great many of the seeds planting for sprouting, ate the heads off of a bunch of the sprouts, and when the plants started going into the ground the came soon after and destroyed the lot. They ate all of the early lettuces and all of the cantaloupe sprouts. They also started emtying the chicken feeder, an expensive thing to allow to continue.  We started making screen protectors and looking for other solutions.

The rabbits live next door and usually eat their new flowers, but occasionally they came by and weren't nearly the problem the squirrels have been. But since the Greenhouse has been torn down they have been coming over to take advantage of the many varieties of rabbit bait we have planted. They aren't nearly as big a problem as the squirrels, but they eat a lot more and take bigger bites.

We thought about snares and traps, but the farming forums online told us the only solution would be some sort of gun. Eventually we decided to do the dirty deed and bought a .22 caliber rifle with a scope. Since then we have been taking the critters out and hating it. The fact is that the little varmints just keep on coming. The rabbits are pretty hard to get, they are quick but not impossible. The squirrels are more numerous and a bit slower moving, so their numbers will eventually start falling.

The rows in the Market Garden is mostly filled with plants under some sort of wire protection, but so much that these furry critters stay out of it. We have three of four opportunities to take a squirrel out most days, the rabbits not nearly so much. Some days we don't see any.

The Gardens started producing food this past few weeks and things are looking pretty good. We now have onions, potatoes, tomatoes, strawberries, and lettuces to eat. Last night's supper was mostly grown here an it was delicious.  The plants are growing faster than the rodents can eat them and soon we will have produce worthy of selling.

Since I can't work much it falls to me to do the hunting, but gardening is out. I have spent some time driving the tractor and moving stuff around. I have also spent some time using the field burner to try and help out with weeds. And I can sit for a few hours and look for opportunities to do some stuff and it gives me something to do which isn't surfing YouTube or playing some game when I find something. But it will sure be nice to be able to get back to work.  We are planning our next moves, waiting for permits to come through, and thinking about our Second Annual Summer Supper. None of this is nothing, so I'll have to be content.

I've had quite a bit of time to think about things while laying around for nearly eight weeks. It took a few weeks to stop feeling useless, and few more to stop trying to force myself back to work. But since there isn't much anyone can do to knit bones it seems more right to think that there isn't much I can do about it either. So I spend about half my days laying around, the other half I get to do what little I can. The new boot will give me a bit more flexibility in doing some things, but time is the only thing that will fix what has been broken.  But things are going pretty well on the Farm and it looks good for the near future. Ann and her crew have done an amazing job of keep up on things too, so once I do get back to work we will be right back on top of it.