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.
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