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.