March 7, 2021 Spring Might Have Arrived

It's still Winter here at Creekside Farm, but signs of Spring are everywhere. Our two large bulb beds are all colored in green shoots and there are a few flowers emerging. Daffodil flowers are usually opening right now but the Farm is at the bottom of Apple Valley so things grow more slowly here. Some of the English Daisies we put in the Peaches and Herbs Garden have begun to flower for the first time. We pruned all of our fruit trees a few weeks ago and they are budding out nicely. So, despite the recent snows and ice storms, Spring is looking good here.

We took most of the week away from the house building project to work on the collapsed shop hoop house and move the new greenhouse out to the Market Garden. The new Greenhouse moved easily. It was the last hoop house we built and it looks like our latest design changes are sufficient to last through the harshest parts of Winter here. The new design was also built using all that we had learned from constructing these things, so all of it came apart, moved, and then went back together in less than five hours. One of the Farm's friends, a guy named C.B., came to help out putting the thing up. He seemed interested in learning how i had built it and has a similar project of his own to do. The greenhouse is up, but we still have to put the end walls together and install the doors and heat vents for when the summer heat arrives. There is a new water hydrant to the greenhouse and we have enough heavy power cords to power the fixtures we will eventually have in it.

The new Greenhouse will be stocked with newly built planting tables, a recently acquired potting table, quite a few high intensity grow lighting fixtures, a three hundred gallon water tank, and a propane fireplace heater, and ventilation fans to keep the air moving. All of this stuff has been collected from CraigsList postings and most of it for free. We also have quite a lot of planting soils laying around which came from CraigsList also. So we are prepared for planting and are ordering seeds this week. The Farm itself will need quite a bit of preparation for the planting season, but is still much too wet to do much tilling. Our water system still needs to be installed, but we have the pipes in the ground and a plan in place.

The new Farmhouse project didn't get a lot of attention this past week but it has been our primary focus all Winter. Since our last post we got all of the doors in and the ceiling drywall installed. There is still two rooms to put drywall walls up. The Bathroom used three types of drywall boards which we still need to bring in. The large front room is about a fifth of the way done and we have the sheets to finish it.

Most of the electrical work is in, but there are still a few things to get working. We have lights and heat in the Farmhouse and it is beginning to look like a home in there at times. We have much of the flooring already on the Farm but it will have to wait for finishing the walls and ceilings.

In other Farm news our hens are putting out about  eighteen eggs a day and all of these seem to be selling out pretty quick. Our Runner Ducks are happily clearing the Kitchen Garden of pests as we get ready for Strawberry Season, but we have no duck eggs yet. And one of our Basset Hounds, Laffee Taffee, has figured out how to get preneant again. So we'll need to prepare for puppies coming at the beginning of April.

We have been preparing for puppies since November. I began by joining quite a few Hound oriented Facebook Groups a long time ago and participating in them. And in November I started putting a Wait List for future litters online. We have about twenty people waiting to hear good news about coming puppies and the Wait List will get notified this weekend. 

There are a lot of projects happening here this year. All of them will take time and effort, most will take money. So we are planning on a large planting project this year, two or more litters of puppies, and quite a bit of luck and hot weather to keep the main projects moving forward. But things are looking real good today.