December 26th, 2020 The last week of 2020

 For the World, if not for us, 2020 was a horrible year. Fire, Flood, Protest, Pandemic, and a political system being stretched to the limits. But we made it through with little trouble. Our only New Years resolution for 2020 was to build a house and this actually happened. 

We began 2020 with the wooden forms for the concrete foundations in place. In January we poured concrete, stripped to forms off, and bolted down the "mud plate". By May we had the first floor nailed down and the underfloor plumbing installed. By September the walls and roof were all framed in and sometime in October we had the sheathing and roof paper installed. October and November were spent roughing in the plumbing and electrical, including building the new utility shed to house the water and electrical services. In December we got the house "dried in" by adding windows, doors, and Tyvek sheeting to the outside. The final framing, electrical, and plumbing rough in inspections done in late December and so begins the comparatively easier process of finishing the house in 2021.

The finishing projects are much easier simply because we have done all of it before at a professional level. In our last business we spent quite a bit of time doing insulation and drywall, put in copious electrical components and lighting as well. We also did weeks and weeks of painting, so this isn't a problem. Finishing the house should go pretty fast when compared to the hard job of putting the basic house up from the dirt to  ridge. We began buying and installing electrical components right away, once we got the inspections done, but finding the necessary parts might prove a slight problem. 

Wood prices have gone up significantly in the past few months, owing to the pandemic, unnecessary trade wars, and increased local building activity. Insulation products are also getting hard to find and prices are rising there as well. I ordered insulation from one source who said he couldn't find much of my list but the next guy I talked to sounded a bit more optimistic. We haven't received the stuff yet but we are hopeful to start insulating next week.  

Our main power wire installation is running a bit behind too. We were supposed to have PGE power to the new house on the 23rd of December. Now we are looking at mid-January, before they come, providing there isn't any major storm to deal with.

But the house is up, dry, and the wind doesn't run through it anymore, so we're pretty sure we'll have a house to live in in 2021.

We decided to restart our Basset breeding program in the Spring of 2021. This is a good idea as our bank account has begun to become a minor worry and we want to get ahead of it. We have  much to do and not a whole lot of money laying around to get it done, so we are considering whelping pups in our new bedroom while we do the finishing. Whelping takes about twelve weeks from start to finish and we will do much of the finishing in the bedroom before we get pups. Eventually we will move into the house and repurpose half of our tiny house into kennel space, but this won't happen soon enough  so we'll use the new house temporarily since it will be safe, warm, and dry. We have two females available for breeding this coming Spring, and four girls of breeding age by late Fall, so there's a good chance we'll do at least two litters in 2021. We're also hoping for some COVID relief bucks to come in sometime in late Winter, but every dollar not spent or dollars coming in will help insure we get where we are going in 2021. 

Our land is pretty well prepared for farming in the coming year. We spent quite a bit of time clearing and tilling, fertilizing and tending, and we have some good experience in planting and sowing seed in the past few years, so we are looking forward to a good year for growing and selling crops. Our chicken flock is producing very well and we will add some hens to the mix in late Spring. Most of our farming practices are all well known to us now, and we have sold enough of it to know how to do this too. We have our produce stand ready for when the crops show up and 2021 looks to be a great strawberry year this Spring and we are well prepared and ready for.

All things considered we did pretty well last year. And as the New Year arrives we have vaccines on the way. The World is looking forward to shaking off the virus and the strange politics of the last few years. So we are hoping for a substantial bounce in the worldwide happiness quotient in the coming year and hope everyone reading this is as hopeful and ready to smile as we are. The past year has been one big nasty surprise after another, few of them we would wish to see again, so let's not. 

December 19th, 2020 Our Christmas Letter

 This is the third Christmas Letter here at Creekside Farm. Life is good. 

But there is always room for improvement.  You can click on the image below for a better view.

December 12th, 2020 The Week Started of a Bit Rough, but Ended Well

I'm just going to say it: This was a fairly tough week, and it started on Monday. . .

We had a coupon from Home Depot for ten percent off anything, so we decided to buy our roof shingles now, even if there isn't much time to put the roofing on, and saving a few hundred dollars. I have said this all before -If you do something unnecessary, you are inviting disaster. In this case the disaster was manageable and short lived. 

On Monday I took our big trailer down to the Tigard Home Depot to pick up the ninety bundles of roofing we ordered. This was the closest store that had enough of the roofing to allow us to get it all in one place so this is where the whole story started. The crew loaded two palettes on the trailer and it was all going very well. . .  I tied the load down with truck straps and began the trip back to Creekside Farm. . . I got the thing onto the highway and began accelerating to highway speed . . . And at about forty miles an hour one of the straps broke and the whole thing got really interesting for a few seconds. 

The forward-most palette shifted to the right, at the front of the trailer, sending the trailer to the right and fish-tailing the truck because the truck itself is perhaps quite a bit too light for this much load. As I corrected the steering to the left the load shifted once more and the trailer began pushing the truck around.

I tried to steer toward the shoulder but the whole thing was out of whack, so the trailer pushed the the truck hit the guard rail. The entire load became airborne and nearly every bundle of roofing jumped over the guard rail. The trailer broke free and kept going down the highway, eventually stopping fifty feet ahead of where I had finally stopped, but the trailer crossed the highway and landed against the concrete barrier in the middle. 

Needless to say it, but the whole thing shook me up a little. But my luck held out. Nobody got hurt, no other cars became entangled in my follies, the trailer landed right side up, and the truck was still running when I stopped. 

I called 911 and they sent a Tigard cop out. He stopped traffic and I re-attached the trailer and pulled it across the highway and onto the shoulder. I called Ann and she arranged the rental of the big truck and trailer we had used to haul horse compost a few weeks back. Our son Jack jumped out of bed and drove the big truck to where I was sitting and the hard work of loading all of the roofing, much of which was now loose, into the new trailer. While we worked the project a few caring people pulled off the highway and helped out. All of them are appreciated, the Hispanic guy name Christian is especially worthy of praise because he really did a whole lot of work helping us pick all of the stuff up. Jack drove back to the Farm and I stayed behind, solving the problem of getting our trailer hooked to the truck. Eventually I got the truck back home and all of us allowed ourselves to decompress. It was a tough day.

We held off unloading the big trailer until the next morning. The load weighed about six thousand pounds, so moving the load from the highway embankment, over the guard rail, and into the big trailer was quite a lot of work. Moving it again the next morning was quicker work, but the weight was still significant. Eventually we got the load sorted out and back onto our flatbed trailer. We lost about six bundles of roofing in this, but saved enough of it to roof the house.

All in all it wasn't an especially expensive episode. The trailer wasn't hurt, the Truck wasn't hurt. All we lost was a day and a half and about a two hundred dollars in roofing and rentals.  This is the end of the story, but the week didn't start off very well. 

However, the week wasn't a complete washout. We finished closing up the stubborn leaks in our waste water system in the new Farmhouse, called for inspections of water, waste, and electrical rough ins. Got through the inspections with very little trouble and even less necessary changes, and began closing up all of the trenches we had crisscrossing the front of the house. So the week ended pretty well, all things considered. Though all of this was very stress filled, we find ourselves little worse for the wear on Saturday.

In other Farm news we decided to re-open the Rocketdog Wait List. Our new house will soon be livable (soon being a fairly malleable term) so we will once more commence our breeding business and trying to show a profit. We already have three people singed up for the List but expect we will have puppies again in the Spring of next year. Our Chickens have begun providing a dozen eggs a day, which is about right for the size of our flock in Winter. The eggs are beginning to increase in size as the hens get better at making them. We are selling eggs once more. The ducks are happily disturbing our newly planted Tulip and Narcissus bulb bed, but not giving eggs. And the dogs are having a very good time. The Farm looks Christmas-messy, more messy in the daylight, more Christmassy in the dark. All in all we are making good progress on the place.

The weather has been very cold and rainy, so pushing mud back onto the trenches is a bit of a hassle. It is hard to smooth out the mud and the tractor makes ruts more and more as you drive over the bare dirt. But PGE needed the trenches near the Utility Shed filled in so that they can hook power up to our newly approved electrical system in the new house. It will be nice to have water and power out there, but it will still be a little while before we can move into the place. There is still insulation, drywall, a few windows, and a long list of other things needed to make the place our home, so for now we live in the tiny home and look forward to the coming of Spring. But first . . . Winter@CreeksideFarmOregon.

December 3, 2020 Lighting things up a little

 

We put up some of the few Christmas lights we have done since moving into our tiny home cabin. We have lit one of our smaller pine trees every year and this year we added this nice silhouette, The piece is hung on the new utility shed we put up near the driveway. We found the silhouette in the free ads on Craigslist. It is about four feet by four feet and came new in the box. We modified it a little, added back-lighting, and hung it up. Very cool. 

November 28th, 2020 Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a daily thing here at Creekside Farm. Some days we are a bit more thankful than others, but generally we love the life we live here. Tiny home living means a scaled down version of holidays. A whole turkey might fit in the new refrigerator out in the new house, but eating a whole turkey seems like a bigger job than we'd like to take on. This year we did Game Hens and traditional Thanksgiving Dinner trimmings. Ann made her wonderful cranberry sauce garnish and we had stuffed sweet potatoes on the plate along with the usual stuff, but not stuffing.

The house build is continuing. We finally got the entire house wrapped in Tyvek and got nearly all of the windows in. The place looks pretty good and the wind no longer blows through the house. This has to make our son Jack happy since he's living in the office out there. He has made a nice little nest of the office by wrapping the room in plastic sheeting and heating it electrically. It seems pretty nice in his place, a bit warm for working, but nice.

There are still a couple of tiny leaks in our waste water system confounding our hopes of one day having everything inspected and approved. The electrical system is all done and the water supply system is leak free, but there are three persistent leaks in the waste system venting still need chased out. We'll get them done next week.

We took Thanksgiving day off and then spent today and Friday working on the Farm instead of working on the house. There is not much you can do in the cold wet weather of late Fall, but those things needing done simply won't wait.

Ann and I planted  a bed of Tulips and Narcissus bulbs, sixty feet long and five feet wide, in the Kitchen Garden. The space was where we had onions and garlics planted last year. The new flower bed is entirely in the public view, so early Spring will be very colorful with about a thousand bulbs blooming.  Right now it just looks like a stripe of brown mulch because we buried the whole thing in six inches of composted horse manure mulch to keep things cozy in Winter. We also divided and transplanted our Peonies into the same row with the bulbs. Early Summer will have twenty-one pink Peony plants blooming to carry us through until Summer and early Fall blooms are well in full color. We started this project with one reclaimed Peony plant and three hundred bulbs three years ago. We'll leave all of this in the ground through next year and will likely have four thousand bulbs and sixty Peonies when we replant next time. 

We are moving Potatoes and Onions back to the Market Garden this year. There is plenty of froom there, plenty of Sunshine too. But there is quite a bit of work to do out there this Winter before planting season arrives in late March. We still  need to cut down some trees, a project which I am somehow reluctant to do, but we need to open up the sky this year to let the Sun shine and heat in the vegetable beds to get things growing. The soils in the Market Garden are very good and we will improve it only slightly this year. Making new bed space isn't on the agenda this year since we already have quite a lot of space ready to plant. 

We only planted the Peaches and Herbs garden last Spring, but it is already well established. We planted our baby Garlics there this year. Garlic takes quite a bit of time to mature, and nothing else really likes being around it, so putting it in with the Chives and other herbs seemed the best place for them. We found about three-hundred baby garlics in the bed where garlics we put last year. All of the new garlics were self planted from seed so we're hopeful to have a continuing supply of Garlic, and other related stuff, for the foreseeable future. 

We are moving one of our greenhouses out to MacGregor's Market Garden and have greenhouse heat and lighting ready to get things growing early in the new year. We also have quite a bit of Coco Coir planting mix, home made potting soil, and  many other growing supplies found on Craig's List. A Marijuana growing facility that was changing over from growing in dirt, to hydroponic growing, so we got quite a few nice pots along with the expensive lighting and very expensive bagged growing media, for free. We also found a nice propane heater on Craig's List. It looks like a wood stove but needs no chimney since burning propane only exhausts heat and water vapor. We already have growing tables from the old Greenhouse, so we have all that we need for planting seeds.

Our new hens are producing eggs nicely now, but the old hens and Runner Ducks have stopped laying for the Winter. The new hen's eggs are really small when compared to what we normally get, but they are very tasty and will get larger as time goes on. 

Life at Creekside Farm is composed of hard work, sore joints, and little else. But we love it. 

November 15, 2020 Winter sets in

The weather outside has been frightful since my last post. Rains nearly every day. Cold and windy in between rain storms and throughout each week. All of the leaves have fallen and the ground in most places is covered three leaves deep. This is sort of a mixed blessing because the leaves cover the mud, and there's been plenty of mud around. Not much outdoors work has been done, but there's  plenty to do.

The Framing Inspection we scheduled for Monday before last didn't happen. When the guy came he told us the plumbing and electrical parts of the larger framing inspection had to be done first. The inspectors in Washington County are pretty good people so we received some good guidance on what to do. We scheduled the electrical inspection the next day. 

The electrical inspector came and told us to do some stuff before the inspection could take place. Some wiring changes for the most part. Quite a bit of work. But we spent a few days clearing all of this up and so we'll be ready in a day or so. Once they inspect and pass this we can get PGE out to put in the main power wire and have power in the house shortly thereafter.

The plumbing inspection is getting close to ready too. I had to change some stuff slightly and finish putting things together, but with the exception of completely filling the septic and vent system to the very top we are pretty close to ready. The waste system is pretty large and there are quite a few parts glued together, so the way they check for it all being good the ask you to plug all of the openings and fill the system up until it runs out of the roof vents. It is going to weigh a ton once it is al filled up and we're hopeful it will all hold up. The water system must be checked too, but we'll probably sail through it. 

Wednesday last we had a dry period and so we started wrapping the house in waterproof paper and putting windows in. The inspector gave us some guidance and so a few of the windows had to be re-ordered in tempered glass. We were able to get most of the lower windows in, but the second level will take towing the scaffold around the whole house to put the paper on and hang the windows. It will take a hard day to do and hopefully our son Jack will help out. We'll still have to paper the gables too, so another day of climbing in our future.

Not much farming to do in the mud, but we did find a really cool planting table on CraigsList for free. It was a standing sand box in a Sunday school and now we're going to r-purpose it into a a planting table. The thing is about two feet high so the first order of business is putting some taller legs on. 

Chickens, Ducks, and Dogs are all doing well. The eggs are selling once more, but on a wildly scaled down basis. Not much else happening as we pray for drier weather and passed inspections. 

October 31, 2020 Happy Halloween!

The weeks go by pretty fast around here. The days have become very short and the nights cold, all in the short time since my last post. The Farm is awash in Fall colors and the large trees surrounding us are all turning their reds and golds. 

The Farm is mostly going into hibernations where we have annuals planted. Some of the herbs and lettuces are going to continue to grow until Winter sets in hard. All of the perennials were killed off last Monday when we got our first frost. 

It's amazing how some of the very large plants, the pumpkins, squashes and gourds for the most part, nearly disappeared on one cold morning. One of the gourds had been covering about thirty square feet of dirt and the entire thing simply melted away. Cleaning up the remnants was simple enough. This year we decided to put the remains of these squash plants  into a separated compost heap so that we can dump seed loaded compost on strategic locations next Spring. Last year we accidentally seeded pumpkins and tomatoes willy-nilly around the Kitchen Garden. Next year will be planned a bit better. Ann took all of our volunteer pumpkins and gourds out front and sold them off to passers by.

The new hens we bought  in the Summer have finally begun producing eggs. Normally hens stop producing when the weather gets colder but we hung two heat lamps in the hen house and so the chickens might continue to produce a bit longer. We are back to selling eggs, but not quite up to full capacity yet. Our Runner Ducks are producing about one egg a day so we have enough for home cooking and little else.

The Farmhouse project is still going forward. We have been getting ready for our framing inspection for a few weeks now. The rough in wiring and plumbing were all done a few weeks ago. But the rough in wiring and pipes which bring water and power to the Farmhouse all had to be put in before the inspection. 

Ann met a new neighbor at the front gate a few weeks ago. As it turned out the new friends husband has a lot of equipment which he is willing to rent, so I rented a very large Ditch-Witch digger from him to cut out all of the trenches we would need to bury all of the water and power pipes. The machine was quite a bit larger than I would have rented and cost much less, making a three day job into one inexpensive and relatively easy day. We cut enough trench to put in a lot of garden watering capacity and this should reduce the long lengths of water hose normally found laying on the ground everywhere. We have nearly finished putting all of the infrastructure stuff in, so maybe we'll have the inspection next week.

We found the tile for the new shower floor on Craig's List last weekend and saved a bunch on it. We also got a few of the other things we will need to finish the project. Prices of building materials have been skyrocketing as of late, so every penny pinched is more appreciated. This morning we found a nice $2400 refrigerator for $400 and brought it home. Craig's List is a real resource.  

Time marches on. It doesn't stop or even slow down. And so we go along for the ride, keeping busy, trying to get stuff done. 

October 12, 2020 Slowly Moving Forward

The past few weeks haven't seemed very busy here on Creekside Farm. We've begun taking down the Market Garden plants, moving mulch around, making new mulch for next years planting. Otherwise it is has seemed a bit slow around here. The Farmhouse build is still going forward. We are getting the new house ready for its framing inspection and this is a complicated thing.

The Farmhouse project will eventually take a few hundred-thousand individual parts, each taking some amount of time to put in the right place.  We started digging out for the foundation in October of last year, poured the concrete in early Winter, and got the first wood laid in January 2020. The wooden frame of the house took ten months to complete. The wooden frame and roof are finished, for the most part. These still need their final coverings and finishes, but the house is dry on the inside and solid as a rock. But the Farmhouse framing isn't the only part included in the final County framing inspection. 

The County also wants the rough plumbing and electrical work done prior to signing off on the framing. This is so that they can check how we routed the utilities through the walls and also so they can see we didn't weaken the frame with all of our hole drilling. So the past few weeks have been spent running wiring through and over the walls, and putting in water supply lines for the sinks and laundry. Our electrical plan will appear fairly simple once we cover everything in drywall, but wiring a house is a complicated thing to do.

Figuring out where things would go took a bit of thinking. We have been talking about this and modifying the picture at the top of the page for about four months. Each room gets the parts required by the building codes, but we added things to make the place more usable. Some of our outlet points are doubled up, having four places to plug things in. The modern house has quite a lot of small appliances and computers, so more outlets are a good idea if you don't want a bunch of cords draped all over the place. Then there is figuring out lighting and electrical heating, water heating, air conditioning, and the rest.

We had started the Farmhouse project with the idea of having a propane tankless water heater in the Pantry (to supply the kitchen) and a little tank water heater in the Bathroom (to save power and have hot water quickly available). It was a sound idea, but once we found that raising the water temperature from its native fifty-five degrees, to a solid one hundred - twenty degrees, would take a lot of heater and a whole lot of propane we switched things around. Now we will have a conventional electrical water heater in the pantry and a smaller electric tankless heater in the bathroom. The two person bathtub we are buying takes about seven hundred gallons to fill, that is a lot of hot water. The tub also has a water heater of its own but seven hundred gallons of hot water is not easy to make. The switching of water heaters will save about four hundred dollars initially and won't add much to the utility bills once the solar panels are installed.

Figuring out which types of wire would make the basic plan work took some time and research. Some circuits are smaller than others. Some carry more power (like clothing dryers and water heaters), a few will only carry a little power (like L.E.D. porch lights). We made this big plan with the intention of changing it to fit the reality of the house as we put the stuff in. The drawing at the top is complicated, but it was merely to give us a general sense of how things ought to look when completed. How high up on the walls switches and outlets would go took some thought. How many outlets in each room took some thought too. Then we had to decide how to move the wires into each room, then how to move wires between outlets or through light switches to the lights. In some places we needed four wires in a casing, some only three, some heavier wire, some the minimum.

There is also the problem of putting enough power to the proper uses. A refrigerator is a bigger thing than a light bulb, so we had to add up the power needed to make the plan and try to decide if we needed a bigger wire in some places. The Kitchen circuits above the counter are heavier than the circuits below the counter because a microwave and coffee maker draw a lot of power and we didn't want things to bog down so we used a heavier wire and a bigger circuit breaker to carry the load. Some places have more outlets, but all needed thinking about carefully. Then there is the problem of circuit breakers.

Any house built in the last half century has a switched circuit breaker panel and this hasn't changed. But the modern house must have both "Arc Fault" and "Ground Fault" circuit protection. These new types of breakers cost about ten times as much, but the Code is the Code. So  to save money we had to plan around all of this and reduce the number of circuits as we put the wiring in the walls. There are few circuits that don't require these hugely expensive circuit breakers. Our interior ceiling lights and in-floor heating are the few which take the five dollar breakers. For some circuits we need very expensive outlets, some take the cheapest kind. All of this had to be thought through, then re-considered as we built the system. Then there is the problem of placing things where we think we will need them.

Initially we intended to put a single circuit in to carry six outlets outside the house. This "Ground Fault" circuit would supply power as needed for landscape lighting and electric bar-b-ques . . . But as we built the electrical system it seemed an extra expense we might want, but didn't need. Now we have three outlets which extend from existing Ground Fault circuits, or can take a Ground Fault outlet. The move saves two hundred feet of wire and a hundred dollars in boxes, outlets, and the like. We added three high power security lights, and two Christmas light outlets to the final plan too.

Once we got the wiring in, we had to route it all into a circuit breaker panel. All in all there are twenty-four circuits in our little house, few of which are exactly as we planned in the four months preceding the building. And all of this had to meet code and be hidden inside of the walls. Somehow we got it all done though.  The plumbing parts were much easier.

We had planned and installed the basic water and waste systems when we built the floor of the house. This plan hasn't changed except to reorder the water heaters. Adding in the supply line "stubs" takes some time, but is relatively easy to do. We are doing the whole system in PEX plastic pipe. Since we put in the basic system we have been collecting bits and pieces of PEX pipe from people on CraigsList. We have collected enough free PEX pipe, in enough sizes and lengths, to finish the interior piping and supply water from our well to the house. The main supply pipe must carry the well water to our new Utility Shed before treatment before  sending it on to the house. This adds a hundred feet to the piping, but the freed pipe will cover it nicely. So far we've saved about five hundred dollars in PEX costs in building the Farmhouse and added quite a lot of water supply line out to the landscape of the Farm too.

Last week we also got the septic venting pipes and  roof venting in. The rains were coming and I didn't want to work on a wet roof. All of the stuff which protrudes from the roof is hidden at the back of the house.  We also poured the four by eight foot concrete slab for the new Utility shed. 

All this stuff spelled out together, it seems we have been busy.  It didn't seem like it, but there was still some time to move a few other things forward. 

We also picked up a new Apple tree and placed it in the Peaches and Herbs Garden. The new tree is a Polka "Columnar" Apple which we found half priced at Farmington Gardens. I have wanted this tree for a few years but was holding off because the tree is about $130 dollars. The fruit is really very good though, worth the price. Finding the last one they had for $60 made the decision to go forward pretty easy.

The Farm is doing well. The herbs in the Peaches and Herbs Garden we planted in late Spring has settled in well and will re-seed itself  for next year and some plants will 

For such a slow couple of weeks, this seems a long post. So maybe we've been much busier than it seemed. Much to do, but it is all getting done.

September 27, 2020 Fall Arrives

Though the upcoming week is going to be very warm, Fall came to the Farm about two weeks ago due to the forest fires and settled in nicely this past week. The mornings have all been cool (not quite cold), afternoons are mostly warm(ish), and Sunset seemed to be noticeably earlier every day. We have had quite a bit of rain, but not the cold rains of an early Winter. And the trees are starting to turn color and leaves are dropping. Fall has arrived and we are really quite happy about it.

Last Monday we pulled the corn plants and shallow tilled  all of the garden beds we had harvested in the past month. This made huge chunks of the Farm look clean and tidy. And I ran Rosie the Tractor around and scrapped the tractor paths everywhere before Ann laid out fresh straw to keep thing from being muddy. The plants around the Farm are still growing (slowly) and those that are not we are pulling for next year's composting. Those plants still growing are mostly very colorful flowers or pumpkins and gourds so we have bright colors all over the place.  All in all the Farm looks wonderful in the rain and spectacular in sunshine. Despite the flaws we look neat as a pin.

Our guest farmers have begun taking down there gardens. Their Summer growing experiments were mostly a success. Beth and Wendy came this week and pulled most of their plants, the harvest of which went to the food bank. They still have a few tomato plants out there, covered in ripening fruit. The coming week ought to finish these hold outs. CB and Hellen have taken out all but three pepper plants, some nice Thai peppers are still ripening, some are a dangerously red color. Christine's patch is still alive with color and growth, but she pulled a great many spent plants this week too. She has quite a bit more to do. A whole lot of gourds to be picked. 

The Farmhouse build is going along pretty well. In the past few weeks we have had quite a lot of rain, but the new roof held out the water very well. It may seem normal for the roof to hold out the rain, but anything that goes according to plan here must be acknowledged, things don't always happen the way we plan it. We are "planning" to get the final roof cover up prior to Winter.

We spent the late days of the past week pulling wire through the Farmhouse electrical system. Our house is relatively small, around 1000 square feet, but the electrical system is relatively large and we have never done anything like it before. Figuring it all out has been interesting. Routing the wires through the walls efficiently takes a bit of planning since I had only drawn locations for the switches and outlets. We had to work each circuit out individually as we pulled it together. There will be about thirty circuit breakers in the final system and we are about half way through the process. 

Jack (our son) started laying out the new utility shed this week. The site for this is located on the driveway, about half the way between the Farmhouse and the Road. Our permanent electric meter box is to be mounted on the outside wall of the new shed, so the shed must be built prior to our putting the power on. The new shed will also hold the water filtration and softening equipment, which has been temporarily sheltered near the well head, so we will also need a trench for the new water pipes to bring water to the shed and then to the new Farmhouse. We will get the final framing inspection after the trenches are dug, we expect to be ready a month or so out.

We have been working very hard these past few months. Our bodies get tired out, so we find fewer days where recreation seems desirable. This weekend we pulled the e-bikes out and spent a bit of time rolling around on the Banks-Vernonia Trail. The weather is perfect for riding: cool, dry, and with a light breeze. The leaves are beginning to fall and trees drop fruit everywhere. The cooler weather has also slowed the numbers of people using the trail too. Conditions are perfect on the Trail and, with a heavier shirt, the ride is fine. 

Fall came down like a hammer this year. But the Farm looks better than it ever has (nearly tamed), the Fall colors are beginning to pop, and the Farmhouse project is coming along well. If only the rest of the country were doing so well as we are.

September 17, 2020 A Resting Point

Time seems to flit by (flit?). Just a few weeks ago we were in a nice late Summer season. The roof was up but we hadn't "dried" it in by putting roof paper up there. Ann and the other gardeners were getting some food out of the ground. And then it all fell down.

Everyone reading this knows Oregon had some massive fires in the foothills of the Cascades. A million acres or so went up in flames. We have friends that needed to evacuate the area and so they brought their horses and a sheep here late one night and spent a few days on the bare floor of the new house.

Smoke socked in tight over every valley, so thick it blocked out the Sun and brought a cold start to Fall down onto Creekside Farm. The forecast for later on this evening is for heavy rains and thunderstorms. Hopefully it will douse the fires and wash the smoke out of the air. A whole lot of people lost their stuff in the fires this year, two weeks of bad air is what happened here. Our guests went back home, but we worry about them.

The world is a crazy place in so many ways right now. But it can't last forever.

The Farm went into a sort of deep holding pattern due to the unseasonable cold days, peppers and tomatoes are still ripening, squash and gourds are doing very well, and there's even some corn out for sale today. Not out of the normal range of expected harvest fare, but it came a few weeks early and got us thinking about the Fall.

My primary occupation for the past few weeks has been putting roofing paper on the new Farmhouse. We got the job done a few days ago, two layers of felt paper, nailed carefully to the sheathing with special nails designed to handle high winds. We put lumber down at regular intervals to ease climbing all over the steep pitch of the roof as well. Eventually the roofing parts people will deliver bundles of roofing to the steps we put up to make the next part of the roofing project. We made the job of putting the paper down as easy as we could, but it still took ten days to call the job completed. Enough to stop for a few days. Just in time for the rains to start. 

Since Monday we have been taking it a bit easy. The roof took all of my strength and the air was too thick to breath the last couple of days to do much farm work. But there isn't as much farming to do everything stopped growing for a few days. So we have spent the last few days preparing the Farm for Winter and getting ready to start the next phase of building.

We have a lot of plastic film covered structures here, all of it temporary, each to serve a particular need. The pump house, the dog kennel, dog house, and back porch all have temporary roofs which need an annual re-covering because the plastic gets brittle in the sunlight. So we took some time to do the simple work. We also put the Winter lights up in the Hen House. They hens lay eggs the whole year around if there is enough light and heat. So this year we put two heat lamps in the Hen House. We also turned on the automatic Hen House door and will begin training the hens to stay inside at night. 

The chickens and ducks are doing very well. Our newly acquired hens are getting large quickly and we hope to see egg production come back up very soon. There has been very few eggs the past month or so, since we gave about half of our flock away, but today we have on dozen for sale, the first in a while.

In the few weeks between today and the start of the rains in late October we hope to get the roofing delivered and nailed down, and the house wrapped in waterproofing, windows, and doors, then begin clearing out the Farm. SO there is plenty to do. We also hope to begin building the small utility shed we need to have built before they electricity can be turn on in the new Farm house before November. The Winter will be used primarily to wiring, plumbing, insulation, drywall, and flooring inside the new Farmhouse. Hopefully we'll be able to move in by late April, but the Farm has its own ideas about schedule.

August 29th, 2020 The Dog Days of Summer

Despite the heat, Summer is beginning to come to its inevitable end. Harvest season is upon us, not that we grew so much or didn't harvest things all along. 

Not much has happened here in the past few weeks that didn't happen before. So I won't bore the world repeating the mundane. Instead I took some pictures . . .

We have three people who took up the challenge of coming here to grow some food. Their gardens are growing like crazy. The above image is of Beth's Monster Tomatoes. She planted five different types of tomatoes from starts and the combination of good soil and sunshine has turned them into a huge harvest. 

Below is C.B. and Ellen's pepper plants. They used their plot just to grow hot peppers and last week took home about half of a paper shopping bag full of Jalapenos, Serranos, and others. They brought starts from the store and the soils did the rest, but they hadn't done much up until a week or so back.. What was lacking was heat. We had plenty of heat and they now have plenty of peppers.

Beth also planted two squash plants and they have been producing well for about a month. The above picture is her yellow Summer Squash and below is her Zucchini. 

Christina took a different path in her garden plot. She planted nothing but seeds and the explosion of growth has us jealous (pictured both above and below). She planted an eclectic bunch of vegetables and flowers all mixed together. This is the aesthetic sense we admire most. . .  A green mess full of food and color.

Last year we had a tree fall. This year we got rid of the very last reminder of it. We have begun clearing the land behind the Farm and so far we have about an eight foot path back there. The huge tree stump that remained from the tree fall went into the creek. When we repair the fence we hope to move it to the edge of the creek's high bank. At places the bank is as much as thirty-five feet behind the fence so we will gain a lot of space by moving the fence back.

Below are Ann's Romaine Lettuces. She also grows Butter Crunch Lettuces too.  We keep the lettuce under row covers to keep the squirrels from eating it all. So much so that we have taken a lot of lettuces down to the food bank.

While we were waiting for a building inspection I took the day to clear part of the old gravel parking pad out of one of the few problem areas in the Kitchen Garden. I took out about twenty yards of gravel, leaving a really dusty area behind. We are watering this area down to settle the dust and eventually we'll have all of our mulch delivered to this spot. This morning I had a very decorative water sprinkler turned on and it attracted our Runner Ducks.

Below is a gourd that Christine planted in her garden plot.

Above is another image of Christine's garden plot. It is a riot of growing stuff.

When we built our compost heap last fall I put some rotting pumpkin carcasses in with the weeds and stalks. So, naturally, when we spread the mulch we distributed a bunch of seeds. And now we have twenty or so pumpkins ripening in the Kitchen Garden, all of them doing well, none of them planned.

So far our corn hasn't done very well. But the Runner Ducks love hanging out in the corn on the hot days. And the California Poppies are really happy.

Ann's Sunflowers are a favorite of the local Canaries and Finches. She planted five kinds of Sunflower and all are doing very well. So are the two raised beds of succulents and annual flowers we put in last Spring. Two of the remaining Apricot (Asian) Plum trees we kept are at the corners of these two raised beds gardens. They are also taking shape well and should fruit next Summer.

The Peaches and Herbs Garden is doing okay. Some plants are better than others, but this is the first year of perennial and self seeding herbs, so next year will be much better. Our well has a large volume of iron in it. We filter the iron from the water we drink, but don't filter the water we use to water plants. So the  white patio furniture in the gardens, and anything else we have out there, slowly take on a lovely golden red color. The color doesn't come off on clothing or hands so we sort of like the Creekside Gold color we get over time. 

The Farmhouse build is going very well. We are putting a double layer of roofing felt on before putting the final roof covering down. This is all very high and steep work, but were getting it done prior to the rains returning next month. After stapling a layer of paper down we overlay it with another and then nail it down using washer nails. We then add a row of 2x3 boards to ease climbing and working on such a steep roof. We hope to have the roof "dried in" in a week or so. 

August 15, 2020 A Month Later

 Time flies. I looked up and a month's time had gone by without an update for this journal. Not at all too disciplined, but things happen, and don't, that get in the way. The lack of  and update didn't mean that nothing got done.

The Farm is growing. Ann and our three tenant farmers have been very busy. The plots of MacGreggor's Market Garden we have allowed people to grow are doing very well. This is the third year of tilling for MacGreggor's Market Garden. It is small, but we have tilled in quite a bit of compost and so it holds water a bit better than the native soils. The weed seed bank has finally begun to burn itself out so weeds are not as big of a problem in this one particular patch of dirt. Building a vegetable farm from unimproved dirt takes time. We are tilling in tons of compost every year and planting quite a bit. The worms and fungus then have the stuff they need to do the work of permanently improve the dirt and make soil. We are trying to grow eighteen inches of soil depth but at present we're only about half way there. But the lack of depth allows some things to grow pretty well without a lot of watering and weeding.

• One couple who has adopted a plot of land to farm put in nothing but peppers grown from starts they had purchased. The peppers haven't really done well so far this year, but there is a lot of season left. 
• One of our perennial helpers, Beth, took a plot of land and her stuff is doing fantastically. Her Zucchini and tomatoes are huge and producing a huge crop. She has even got some sweet Ground Cherries ripening out there. 
• A local woman and her daughter took a plot and planted nothing but seeds. These have exploded in growth, she even has carrots up and growing. Her sunflowers haven't bloomed yet, but everything else looks very good.
• Our own plantings in this Garden had been pretty slow to grow, but we have been eating our own lettuces for about a month now and we'll be having beans and peppers pretty soon. We also put in quite a lot of peppers, grown from seed, and they are doing okay. But none of the peppers have produced much. 

In the Kitchen Garden we have begun harvesting potatoes and onions. So far there is about five bushels of various potatoes, not as much as expected. Since these rows are in very new dirt we are pretty happy for the harvest, but our plans to donate the excess to the food bank isn't going to be as large as we thought. We are realizing a large number of seed potatoes for next year's planting and the soil ought to be much better then. The Strawberries aren't as "ever-bearing" as we thought they would be. The Strawberry Patch is largely weed free now and the plants all doing pretty well, but there is only enough fruit coming for our own eating. The Peaches and Herbs Garden is doing wonderfully. Our Chives and Thyme is doing very well, enough so that our Runner Ducks are eating only enough to keep the beds tidy. Basil hasn't done real well but the soils are all new. Sapedeh (our Peach tree named for the person who gave it to us) is growing like a wild weed right now and I will have to prune it hard once the weather turns cold and restore its shape. And a few of the Asian plums we have allowed to continue are also doing very well, even though they were pruned to harshly to bear fruit this year. It takes a few years to grow a tree taller, or smaller, but we expect these tress to produce next year. Our corn, pumpkins, and sunflowers are all doing very well in the Kitchen Garden. We have many pumpkins ripening and the whole Garden is very colorful. 

From Sell Road the Farm looks like a Farm should. . . Tons of plants and animals everywhere. The Ducks are happy in their Garden of Ducky Delights. We re-homed the two Khaki Campbells because they turned out to be drakes. And we re-homed ten of our older hens as twenty of our new hens are now ready to join the flock. Ann is working very hard out there, but my time is spent building the new Farmhouse.

All of the Gable ends were 
finally built by last week. 

The big news on the Farmhouse is that the roof is nearly finished. This has been a long haul and our son Jack has been a huge help in putting the thousands of part together. Each of these parts is small when taken on its own, but all of them are considerably high off of the ground. We have safety equipment which is tied to the top of the roof, but this doesn't make the job of going up there any easier. This past week we built all of the interior structure and bracing in, making the roof very stiff, but there are some touch-up projects to do before we can have the thing inspected. 

In a week or so we will have our house framing and roof inspected and then we can begin to put on roof felt on to keep the rains out from above. We ordered the windows a few weeks ago, and already have the doors, siding, and vapor barriers needed to make the place waterproof on the sides. It looks like we will beat the rains and have the place ready to begin finishing the interior. This will all take time, but the house looks a lot like a house ought to.

All in all this post isn't very long despite all that is happening here. The heat has arrived, things are growing, and the house is at its full height and looking good. But there is so much more to do. So we'll just keep pecking away at it all in hopes that our dreams will finally be realized.

July 18th, 2020 Summer Might Have Arrived (at last)

Remembering last year (nearly being killed is hard to forget) I remember looking around the Internet to try and figure out why the Summer weather was so cool. A few sites looked at something by a "solar minimum", which is a phenomenon where the Sun has few sunspots so less solar energy makes it out. As good an explanation as any I suppose. At any rate -the cool Summer of 2019 led into a lack of crop performance. Adding to this the fact that our Farm is subject to the cooler temperatures of the Oregon Coast, and down in a narrow valley, the heat people are seeing elsewhere simply hadn't come to the Farm much. Since most of our sprouts were destroyed when the Greenhouse (and me) was hit by the tree and we had a very cool Summer, we had a fairly poor crop last year. We did have some growth though. Enough to show a profit for the year and qualify for a Farm property tax reduction.

Ann and her team of volunteers did somehow manage to get a few plants into the ground last Summer. Those few produced some food which we either ate or donated to the local food bank. There wasn't enough to sell, so we removed the Produce Stand' pop up canopy and contented ourselves with not being put out of business entirely. We did get enough potatoes and onions to eat through the Winter but wound up having to buy these in mid-Spring. Not entirely a loss, just not a good year.

Our plan since last Summer was to build our new Farmhouse.

Nothing else matters. We put the foundation in in the early Winter. Put up the walls in the late Winter and early Spring. Then put the roof trusses up in June, covering them with sheathing up until this past week (early Summer). Our son Jack has been here since helping with the building since the beginning of the year so we have progressed slowly. Now the Farmhouse has its basic shape. But since most of the building is a two man job Ann has been tending the Farm and getting things growing. And up until last week things have been growing very slowly. But in the past week or so this all changed.

I walked out to get chicken and duck eggs last evening a noticed quite a bit of new growth happening in the Market Garden side of the Farm. Our guest farmers, those who are tending gardens of their own on for free, are really starting to see some results. And out own food crops, the tomatoes, peppers, and beans, are really starting to take off. Even the peppers are starting to grow, though they haven't in the six weeks since they sprouted. With any luck we will eventually see some production, but this isn't our main focus, the house building, just some good news.

For those who wish to open a garden of their own at Creekside Farm, there is still space and time to get things done. Get in touch and we'll help put things together for you. Eat what you grow, sell it, or give it away. All for free. You bring the seeds and plants, and spend an hour a week here, we provide the rest.

In other farming news:

Egg production has been relatively depressed this year. Our flock of chickens is aging and older hens don't produce as well. We are still getting about a dozen a day, just enough to to sell so the chickens are still paying from their up-keep. Our Runner Ducks have continued to produce consistently, but the market for duck eggs isn't as strong. This year we bought twenty new chicks and we will re-home fifteen of our older hens in a few weeks when the chicks move into the Chicken Run. We also build the new Duck Garden and moved the four youngest hens into it a few weeks ago. But the four older ducks are still in with the chickens because out Crested Runners have built a large nest and are sitting on eggs. With any luck we will have some nicely mixed Runner Duck chicks to sell in a few weeks, we have no space to keep any of them. Once the chicks show up we will move all of the ducks into the Kitchen Garden and the new Duck Garden inside of it. Then we can move the new Chickens into the Chicken Run and wait for egg production to rise.

The Farm is looking good. Weeds are always a problem and we spend quite a bit of time chasing weeds down and killing them. We are expanding the Farm by removing the berries, bamboo, and tall grasses found outside the fence-line, but this is a long termed goal. One day I want to move the fence out to the edge of the Creek. This will add about ten percent more usable land to the Farm and allow up to keep better control on the Berries behind the place. We have the weeds under control for the most part, but it would take a few weeks of not tending the problem to let things grow out of control. As we remove the weeds we try to replace them with new plants. This is worked pretty well and we have a lot of new color out in the Gardens to show for it. Yesterday I was walking past a corner plot where Ann and through our some California Poppy seeds to find a burgeoning poppy patch filled with happy Mason Bees. We love this sort of thing.

Ann noticed another Strawberry harvest coming soon from our ever-bearing Strawberry patch. The Patch had produced heavily in late May and early June, but had stopped producing, so we figured things might just be over. But the heat and the bees have got thing going again and we had two quarts of beautiful large berries to eat this week.  Hopefully we will sell some more pretty soon. We have started to take potatoes out of the Kitchen Garden too. Hopefully we won't have to buy spuds any more. The main potato crop will be harvested in September, most of this will go to the food banks because there will be much more need this year due to all the troubles we are all experiencing.  Until then we will grow what we can, sell what we can, eat what we get, and be happy that our lives are not as effected as others without a farm of their own.

We will be trying to finish the roof structure on the new Farmhouse next week, then we will get the house inspected before beginning to put the roof coverings on. The project is taking more time than expected (we expected it would) so we are pushing our move in day to April of next year. Ann will continue tending the gardens and keeping a lid on the weed problem in the increasing heat of Summer while we build. So things are looking good here (if only here). Barring floods, disease, and civil unrest, we are hopeful for the remainder of this year and a return prosperity in the next. Hoping the same for all reading this.

July 4, 2020 A New Picture

Click on this for a bigger picture of our Creekside Farm.

• The light green blob of land is the high point of the Farm at 231 feet.
• The purple blobs in the creek are the creek bottom at 216 feet.
• The lowest point of the Farm is in blue.
• Each line shows a two foot change in elevation.

I created this picture using a combination of Google Maps, Google Earth, and Photoshop. At the top of the image there is a section in red which we call the Kitchen Garden. At the bottom is the Chicken Run. The brown area above this is MacGreggor's Market Garden.  Just above that is the House, tiny house, Kennels, and all of the shop space and storage. At the Right side is Sell Road. The left side is the West Fork of Dairy Creek. The yellow portion of the creek I marked to show a landslide we noticed which was a source of my concern. As it turned out the slide area doesn't appear to be severe or widening at this point. It took quite a lot of work to prepare an image which has enough information on it to know if the Creek is beginning to be a problem or not.

The base image (bottom, if you think of a stack of transparencies laid one on top of the other) is from Google Earth. I have been spending quite a bit of my limited free time learning the limits of the free version of Google Earth. In this base image I carefully laid out the topography of the Farm using colored lines and noting elevations, mostly to get a good idea of the slope of the West Fork of Dairy Creek. The Creek is hard to see from anywhere on the Farm and I really wanted to get to know it better since it was a source of concern for us. The Farm is generally located above a 228 foot elevation and rises to just above 231 feet (the light green blob). But at the Creek's edge it drops off quickly down to the water at about 218 feet.  In Winter the Creek rises to about 224 feet routinely and can get up to 225 feet at times. Knowing how the Creek works allows us to forego finding flooding solutions and planting bank stabilizing stuff.

The first over-layered image is from Google Maps. I took a satellite image from it and have used the same image to practice laying out the features of the Farm, including finding where to put the Gardens and siting the Farmhouse.

This is the Farm plan for 2020
used in the image above it.

I have made many such images over the five years we have been involved in the project, but none of these could be very accurate because we lacked a way to show the place in more than one dimension. The underlying Google Earth image allowed me to put the two dimensional image into a more proper context.

I hope to further improve these image to reflect the reality of the Farm and give us a better understanding of how the land looks. It is difficult to get a handle on the project when standing on the ground this image allows us to make better decisions regarding land uses.

July 1, 2020 The Faster You Go . . .

The weather has been wonderful at the Farm, for the most part. Mid-seventy degree sunshine nearly every day and just a few days of soaking rain kept things happening and then not happening. But we have been very busy this past week. So busy that it took two weeks to get to writing some of it down. It seems the faster we go, the more we get behind.

The Farmhouse build is still our highest priority. We got the walls up and covered with sheathing a bit more than two weeks ago and spent a week getting much of the roof lumber and supplies brought to the Farm.

We got the new farmhouse'
roof trusses lifted into place. 

Last week we rented a hydraulic lift and spent three days pulling the roof trusses up onto the roof and nailing them to the top of the walls. The lift made the job much easier, but it still took every hour of two and one-half days to carefully pull each individual truss up. The height from the ground, once the truss was lifted, was about twenty-eight feet or there about, so  standing a fet feet higher than this was a bit of adrenaline pumping fun. We had intended to raise the trusses from the ground into place, but we found that the lift couldn't do it because the platform at the end of the long arm couldn't turn to the left or the right. The arm the platform was attached to turned enough to work on the project if we moved the lift a few times so we eventually had to settle for pulling each truss up to the attic floor, moving the lift, and then picking each truss up and placing it. Each truss had to be carefully spaced, using blocks of 2x4, and nailed to the top of each supporting wall, then tying each end of the trusses down with hurricane straps so that the roof wouldn't blow off in a storm. We began work last Thursday morning and got the last truss set in place on Saturday afternoon.

An attic view. 

The whole thing wore us out, both physically and mentally. But it looks very good.

Jack and I are putting the roof sheathing boards onto the trusses this week. Another pretty tough job. We have the scaffolding we bought a month back to work from, but it is still very nerve wracking work because the walls are sixteen feet high off of the dirt and everything is either heavy or on a steep slope. The scaffolding is old, a bit wobbly, and the ground uneven, making things a bit more worrisome. But we are getting through it. Roofing is hard work. Once the sheathing is all up there we will still need to  put on the "through gable" (the gable on the front of the house). It faces the front and must be built on top of the roof we already have framing in. Then tar paper.  This is slow going work, probably second in difficulty only to the foundation work a few months back.

If you click on this picture it might
get large enough to glimpse the new chicks.

Ann gets out of the hard work by doing the Farm work, weeding and early Summer planting this week. She is happy to be on the ground. This week she has cleared and reclaimed quite a large area of dirt, and plants that had seeded themselves in the weeds. She's found dozens of corn plants, pumpkins, and tomatoes rising from last Summer's mulch pile. We tilled it in and plant came up.

We bought twenty more Orpington chicks this past Friday. Our flock is getting a bit old and we had planned to put ten new birds into our flock every year. Last years chicks were put off by the tree fall, so we doubled up this year.

Stanley is just visiting.
A handsome boy for sure.

Chickens produce eggs best early in life, so many of our hens are a bit too old to produce the eggs we need and must be replaced. Last year we had five chickens die off, and ten of them escaped through the tree sized hole on our fence, so new birds are a good idea. We don't make much money on eggs, but we do get free eggs.

In other news, as if there wasn't enough to do, one of the families which had taken a puppy from Laffee Taffee's litter is letting him vacation with his Mom and Dad.  He is a delight.
A big boy, considering his parents, but a really handsome boy with a great personality. He has played, run, and barked himself until his feet and voice are sore. His family will come get him on Friday. We're pretty sure he'll be happy about it, but our dogs might not seeing him go back to Sherwood.

June 13, 2020 A Wet Week

The past week was proposed as the week when we got all the things to put the roof up next week. Needles to say it, but we didn't quite get there. Farming and Rain took up most of the time between working on the new Farmhouse.

I did go out and haul in one whole unit of the siding we have chosen for the house. We also bought one whole unit of OSB boards to sheath the roof trusses as they go up. One of the trusses we had come in a few weeks ago was damaged in shipping, but a guy from the truss company came out and we fixed the truss inthe rain.

We ordered the metal hurricane straps from Amazon and they said it would be the end of next week before they would come, but they came today so we're back on schedule. I will go get the remaining roof stuff Monday and Tuesday, the roof ought to go up on Thursday and Friday.

Our hope was to pick Strawberries Monday and Friday, but the rains were very heavy, so we worked other projects instead. We did pick about three bushels on Wednesday, but a lot of the fruit was a bit moldy and much of it was a bit on the small side. We kept the good ones, but made the decision to begin thinning the plants out and keeping only those plants which produced marketable fruit. All of our plants are ever-bearing varieties, so we should improve our total yield while reducing the labor needed to get the job done. There certainly are some very good berries out in the Produce Stand for sale every day, so come get some.

The weather is very cool this week, loads or rain, but the next week promises to end in glorious sunshine and much higher temperatures. So it will soon be time to build and grow again.

April 6, 2020 A Funny World

The first week of the picking season gave us plenty.

The World is an odd place this week. Protests everywhere, COVID19 in full swing and nobody seems to take much notice. But not at Creekside Farm. Things at the bottom of the Apple Valley don't change very much. Even the weather stays fairly consistent.

This week the weather was wonderful. A bit breezy at night, never below fifty degrees and never above seventy-five. Warm enough to sprout seeds and ripen Strawberries, and that's what happened. We picked Strawberries three times this week, taking about three bushels of fully ripe berries and selling two at our Produce Stand. We moved the stand down to the end of the road and people came by bearing cash money. We still have a bushel to sell and hope people will come buy them soon. We'd hate to see them go to waste. We will deliver the excess to the local food bank on Monday so there will be no loss.

"Der Gortn fun Dukki Dileyts"

The gardens are all flourishing, making us wish we had more time to plant. The Garden of Ducky Delights was heavily planted in wildflowers and white clover, the seeds are mostly sprouted and will grow rapidly once the heat sets in. We have so many seeds in which haven't come out to play yet. Our Marigolds are doing well and we have a flat of beans sprouted, but no corn so far. We have pumpkins and sunflowers sprouted, but no peppers or tomatoes yet. All we need is heat.

The new Farmhouse actually looks something like a house now.

Our son Jack and I finished wrapping the house in sheathing, making it ready for a roof. We went out to buy siding, but still need some things for the roof. We're hoping to put the roof on soon, but have to bring all of the parts together first. We'll get the parts staged this week and put it together the week following after. We will then have the whole thing inspected. Once the roof is on the house will be ready for wiring, plumbing, insulation, and drywall.

The week went so quickly, so much got done. But there is a great deal more to do.

The Produce Stand is selling Strawberries, so come out and get some.

May 29, 2020 The Heat is Coming

Weeks tick by quickly when you stay busy. And we have been very busy.

The Farm is exploding with growth. This week the early Summer heat came, following a few nice days of late Spring rain, and the seeds Ann put in last week fairly jumped out of the dirt. The Strawberry Patch started producing just as we thought it should. We harvested twenty quarts of early Strawberries, leaving only a few behind, then either sold or gave away quite a lot of it. The berries are wonderfully red through and sweet. The early strawberries we have in the Patch are nearly finished, but since these are ever bearing varieties we expect they will continue to produce through October. The remaining berry plants are filled with fruit, but won't be ready until mid-June. There will be a great many more Berries once these other varieties begin to ripen and these later berries are also ever-bearing varieties, so we ought to be getting fruit for the remainder of the growing season.

The Strawberry Tower experiment seems to have failed, so it will be removed and we will try another idea for a you-pick berry patch next year.

Our chicken and duck egg production has fallen off in the past few weeks, and some of the chickens have taken up eating eggs, so we haven't sold many lately. We figured out that when we turned off the heat lamp in the coop it might have thrown things out of kilter a bit, so we turned the light back on and this has helped. We also are beginning to believe that our flock is probably getting a bit old, this tend to lower egg production. So we ordered twenty new chicks that will come in a few weeks.

We  added two new ducks for our flock. These new guys are Khaki Campbell ducks, a favorite of English farms.  A family up in Washington had chicks that needed a new home and advertised this on Craigslist, so they came to us for free. The new ducks are named Roscoe and Boscoe and they will join the flock in a week or so, opening up the broody hutch for the new chickens.

All of our other crops are doing well, except the corn we planted a month or so back. Ann planted another nine rows of corn in MacGreggors Market Garden to begin making up for the short-fall, and we will be re-tilling and re-planting the two-thousand seeds that failed in the Kitchen Garden. Ann also planted ninety bush beans and a myriad of other vegetable and flower seeds directly in the soil. We didn't spend time sprouting seeds in a greenhouse this year. The past two years proved that early planting really isn't worth the trouble. We may revisit the greenhouse thing later on, but for now the time is going into house building.

The new Farmhouse is going up nicely, but taking a bit more time than we had hoped. Our son Jack has been a big help, allowing Ann to spend time in the Gardens. He and I worked all week on putting the sheathing onto the wall framing we finished last week. The house is now beginning to look like a big brown box, with windows. We expected to finish the sheathing project this week but it simply is too much work. So the plan is to finish it next week and use the remainder of the week to stage the parts for putting a roof on the place.

The Farm changes every day now. Big things are happening, big things are getting done. Late Spring is is nearly over, Summer is on the way. So we hope to have the Produce Stand up and working in a few weeks, once there is enough produce to put out. Until then we will be building, weeding, and looking forward to moving into our new home.