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.

May 23, 2020 Mid-Spring Progress

The Farm was cool and rainy for the entire week. We're hoping that we don't get a repeat of last year when things never really got growing because Summer heat never came. 

Beth and Wendy's Victory Garden

Weeding is always a big concern here. It takes only a few weeks for the weeds to get out of hand, usually about a month to get things cleaned up if that happens. So Ann spent a few days last week in the Strawberry Patch keeping on top of the weeding and this week she succeeded in finishing the work. Eventually we'll get the farm itself to control the weeds. Right now things simply want to grow and there's not much to stop it.

Considering the cool, cloudy, days the Strawberry Patch is doing re-markedly well . There were many large berries out there and we picked seven quarts of perfectly ripe berries just to keep them from rotting in the field. Most of these berries went into the first Strawberry pie of the year. It was wonderful.

The Potatoes look great.

On Tuesday a few of Ann's cohort of friends (people that kept the Farm working last year while I was on my back) came by to tend their Victory Garden. Finding that there wasn't much to do there, they spent the day weeding in the potato patch they helped plant a month earlier. I had flame weeded between the rows on Monday and they cleaned up all the rest in just a few hours. The patch looks super.

Between Monday and Wednesday I tilled much of the remaining open ground on the Farm (at least the places where we have tilled before) and Ann mowed what tall grass remained. The Farm looks as it should. Weeds are under control, for now, and it took just a few days. We hope to continue replacing weed patches with gardens. Keeping the weeds from going to seed is a big part of this.



The house build is coming along very well. We had put up most of the walls, but lacked the final two panels. So we worked the project and, by Friday afternoon- had completed all of the vertical walls of the new house. We still need to put in some blocking and sheath the whole thing, but the house had a distinctive  house-like shape. The lumber pile we once had is mostly gone, leaving the roof trusses and Strand Boards we will use to sheath the house. With any luck we'll be putting a roof on the place next week. And next week promises a bit warmer weather, so we are hopeful.

The new Farmhouse seems large, but it really is not.

The Banks-Vernonia State Trail opened up this week, so we have a lot more traffic passing in front of the Farm. We're looking forward to putting the Produce Stand up next weekend. Hopefully the Strawberry Patch will  produce enough berries to make some people happy.

May 16, 2020 Mid-Spring Rains

It rained most days this past week. But enough work was in it to tire ourselves out.

We started the week on Sunday, but not doing labor. I found a fellow in Camas who had some scaffolding frames for sale. They are pretty beat-up but not so much they needed repair and since we have been looking for a solution to putting up the house it made sense to invest in the right tools. We also acquired a few more important parts for the house build from Craigslist. We found the house wrap, some heavy duty wire, and a very nice weeding cart.

On Monday we added another raised bed to the Kitchen Garden and Ann moved the few remaining plants from the Flower Garden and planted them in the new bed. We have two fairly well matched planters full of great plants. These will become the public entrance to the Kitchen Gardens someday.

Monday morning our son Jack and I began using these frames to take down a one-hundred, twenty foot tree which sit about twenty feet from the back corner of the new Farmhouse. It was so big that the branches over-hung the walls of the Pantry, so it had to go before we could put a roof up. Part of our house building and farming plan has always been to remove most of the diseased trees from the home-site and there are places where full sun might be better than shade. Most of the large hardwoods on the Farm are in pretty poor shape and dangerous so they have to go. We cut and burned all of the branches we could cut safely and it took two days to not get the entire job done. Some of the central branches were just a bit too dangerous to take down whole, especially with the wind blowing from the wrong direction. The tree is small enough now to put the roof up now and when we rent the man-lift to put the roof on the Farmhouse we will also use it to shorten up the highest branches without putting other things in jeopardy. While Jack and I wore ourselves out cutting and burning the tree Ann spent her time in the Strawberry Patch of the Kitchen Garden weeding.

The Strawberry Patch is just about ready for early picking. We have four types of berry plants, all of which are of the ever-bearing type (meaning that they give fruit for months rather than one solid week). The Ozark Beauty berries is the first to bear fruit and these are going to be ready very soon. This is my favorite berry variety because they give very nice looking berries from May until October. Eventually we may replace all of our berries with this one sort, but for now we have three other varieties. All of them are good. The Shuksan and Fort Laramie berries aren't pretty, but perfect for canning. But for eating the Ozark berries are just a bit prettier. This week we ate berries straight out of the garden. All about an inch and a half large, red throughout, very low acid, and with enough sugar to be pleasing. We will be putting the Produce Stand up in a week or so.

Wednesday was spent clearing weeds with our tractor's roto-tiller. The area behind the home-site and

The attic floor goes above the Bedroom
section of the Farmhouse.

the Flower Garden area in MacGreggor's Market Garden needed cleaning up so the best tool for the job is the roto-tiller because it mulches the weeds into the soil.  Our goal is to never let a weed go to seed so we're doing more than one thing by tilling the weeds in because the weeds become mulch. Jack ran around burning the weeds growing under and around our fencing until our propane burner ran out of gas. The Farm is looking better every week and the soils around the Farm are noticeably better this year than last.

On Thursday we left the Farm for a couple of hours to buy some beneficial seeds to throw out on the newly cleared, but unused, ground so that weeds wouldn't simply grow back. The seed we bought is of the type which both flowers, self-seeds, and brings nutrients and organic matter to the soils when tilled in. The ground we have open will look good and be improved once these seeds come up, but we need a bit of dry weather so that we can put the seed out.

Beth and Wendy planting.

Jack came on Friday to help us put the flooring on the new house attic. Half of the house has an attic space above it and we designed the house to have as much storage space as we can, so the attic is a very large room in our plans. The attic floor is made from the same heavy wood as the floor of the house and it took all day to cut the panels and get them nailed down. We will be putting up the attic walls and finishing the outer walls early next week. Then we will be ready to put a roof on the house.

While were doing this Beth and Wendy, two of the girls involved in helping Ann during the period last year when I was injured, and who have been here a few time since (most recently having planted all of our potato crop) came to put in their Victory Garden plants. They have tomatoes, beans, peas, cucumbers, and lettuces out there. We will be putting a duck fence barrier up for them next week so things don't get snacked to death. We still have plenty of really great dirt to give if you want to grow some food for yourselves or others. Just get in touch and we'll find you a spot. All for free.

Aside from the great progress we made cleaning things up this week, we had a fairly good week with the chicken and duck eggs too. Unfortunately we lost one of our favorite hens but we found a few new ducks to pick up Saturday, so life goes on happily.

Next week the plan is to finish the framing on the house. The weather forecast is for dry conditions. Things are moving along very well.

May 10, 2020 Summer has come

This past week wasn't very eventful, but there certainly was enough to do around the Farm.

Click on this for a bigger view.
This is the radial end of the Peaches and Herbs Garden

We spent Monday doing farm work. Parts of the Farm are turning into a sort of low lying jungle right now. It takes four days a week to keep the weeds down and raise the plants up, but we only have two days open due to building the house.

This week we got the Peaches and Herbs parcel put together in the Kitchen Garden end of the Farm. The new garden layout looks very good but still needs some things to finish the work. Our neighbor Jay gave us four plastic Trex deck boards a few months back and we used them to make radially divided spaces in the new garden, then filled them with huge amounts of compost.

Strawberries are everywhere.

With the new herb garden, the idea is to plant our herbs in large quantities but keep them separated visually.  The Kitchen Garden concept combines permanent flowers with food, with seasonal flower and food, installed into permanent design. Most of the perennial plants we will eventually offer for sale are planted in garden pots. This will allow us to change plants without digging so that we can move perennials in and out as needed during the seasons. We don't expect much to come out of this new garden this year, but there is still a lot of food growing in the Kitchen Garden.

The large volume planting we did in the Kitchen Garden rows in past weeks is all going strong. Our Strawberry Patch is alive with green berries and we found six berries that weren't completely ripe, but delicious none-the-less. Our rows of potatoes are doing well and the Ruth Stout beds are showing good growth. The onion/garlic bed has grown quite a bit and we even have a few corn plants sprouts showing their baby heads out of the dirt. The end of the week was hot so we expect an explosion of corn growing progress in the next few weeks.

Tuesday through Thursday was spent working on the framing of the new Farmhouse. We had raise many of the wall panels the previous week so we spent Monday tying them together and squaring them up. Wednesday and Thursday were spent doing the heavy lifting required to put the attic floor on top of the West half of the house.

The Bedroom corner

The Bathroom corner

One of the requirements of building in Washington County is that we add at least two energy efficiency upgrades to the building. We chose to add under-floor heating and increase the insulation of both the floor and the ceiling. The increased insulation requires that we over-size the floor and ceiling lumber. So instead of eight and six inch wood we are using twelve inch lumber and this adds considerable weight to the job.

This huge chunk of wood is the eight foot high Bedroom section of the new Farmhouse.
The Kitchen end of the house is a full fourteen feet high at the ceiling.

Putting the floor framing in was tough, especially in Winter where wet sixteen foot lengths of two by twelve weigh about a hundred pounds each soaking wet. Putting each board into the frame was a job in itself and it took two weeks to put the floor down. The combination of heavy wood and uneven ground made the job very difficult. Using the same wood for the ceiling in half of the house was easier since we had a flat floor to work from, but lifting these same heavy boards eight feet over our heads added a bit to the work. Add to this the need for a great many more nails driven above our heads and, by two-thirty in the afternoon, my twenty ounce hammer would barely swing. By Thursday afternoon we had the attic floor framing  nailed together and looking good. Since we were out of strength, and also out of floor boards, we went back into the garden Friday.

One of the two raised beds.
(Made from reclaimed Craigslist wall stones.)

I built another raised bed in the Kitchen Garden to "book-end" the one you see in the image on the left. We filled this first bed with succulent starts from the Flower Garden. We'll fill the new bed in later. The two raised beds will eventually be the public entrance into Kitchen Garden area.

McGreggor's Market Garden has been a bit of a mess this year, mostly because we put so much energy into the Kitchen Garden, so we spent some time Friday cleaning things up. Ann has moved many of the plants we were growing in the Flower Garden into the new beds of the Kitchen Garden, but a few will stay on the West side this year.  We will begin serious attending to MacGreggor's Market Garden in the next week, putting in tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and a few others. But there are a few things going on too.

In a few days we will have our first off site gardeners begin planting their crops, so we will spend next Monday putting some time into making things as good as can be. There is still a lot of available space for those wishing to do some gardening of their own. Just get in touch with us and we'll find you a spot.

We also did a bit of catching up on the rest of the Farm. We went around collecting all of the big stones we have found around the place, putting them into one stack for later use. Then we picked up all of the sticks knocked down in Winter and burned all of it. We also spent some time re-organizing things so that the Farm looked a bit neater. Monday I will till over most of the encroaching jungle behind the house and in unused corners.

Next week we hope to finish the house framing and have all of the walls and flooring nailed down. Following this we need to do some large tree removal before putting a roof on the House. The goal is to have the roof on by the end of the month.