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.