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.