June 13, 2021 Passing for Progress

 The level of effort we have put into Creekside Farm has been tremendous over the past three years. We haven't done anything like a maximum effort because we are not really capable of sustaining that sort of effort for very long. But both of us have worked hard most of our lives, so our normal might seem like a lot of work to people less accustomed to manual labor. For all of this effort, it is a rare day when we can look at what is happening and see the work pay off. This was such a week.

The Farmhouse build finished another phase of work. With the Bedroom section walls and ceilings all painted we are ready for flooring to go in. We are in our fifteenth month of building the house and up until this week there was little we could call completed.

The bedroom section is a suite of rooms which include a large bedroom (we only have the one), a water closet room, a separate bathroom with a shower and large jacuzzi tub, and office, and a large walk-in closet. This section of the house has eight foot ceilings to keep things cozy. All of the electrical fixtures are in and working, but the plumbing parts still need finished and this should happen fairly soon.

  Above this section is the attic. The attic is a completely open floor plan with seven foot ceilings and heavy duty floor. Designed for storage, but also for the possibility of putting together some sort of future production space. 

There are no moldings in this house build. My intention in this was to save money using the 85% rule. This being the idea that eighty-five percent of what we desire can be bought for fifty percent of the resource money. We still have to pinch every penny (twice) if we hope to actually live in the house some day, moldings are an un-necessary expense. No moldings has turned out to be a very clean look around windows and doorways.

While I waited for the drywall textures to dry in the bedroom section, prior to paint, I began the finishing work on the Great Room space. This space is about twenty-five feet square and fourteen feet high. It is ringed above by sixteen two by two foot windows to give it an expansive feel. The idea is to bring the outside sky into the house. Our house will eventually have an eight foot porch on three sides, so even with the four foot windows in the lower spaces there will be little direct sunlight. Without moldings the trick is to finish each window and standing on a ten foot scaffold this is a whole lot of work.

The Great Room is our living room. It will contain the kitchen, a very large pantry, the laundry room, and some couch space. The couch space will be minimal. Where in most houses the couch space is rather large. Our focus is on food in this house. We will have a reasonably large kitchen, but more than this we will have an enormous pantry. The Pantry, at first, will be about sixteen feet of Costco chrome rolling shelf units, totaling about eighty feet of sixteen inch depth shelf.

 

We will be using this area to store value added produce from the Farm outside. Soups and preserved fruit initially. I was able to find a two foot wide entry bench on Craig's List for free. It will take up the last few feet of Pantry wall and give us a place to put shoes on before going outside and off before soiling the house.

I hope to have the walls of the Great Room finished by the end of June. Sometimes I hit my lofty goals. Mostly they land when they do.

Our Farm is looking more like a farm every day. June is the beginning of the growing season at the bottom of the Apple Valley. Walls of this narrow valley rise five to eight hundred feet on the North and South sides, so the sun needs to be pretty high in the sky to get heat down to the valley floor. We are committed to growing things here and selling enough to be able to stay, so we have been learning how to work with the land for three years.

We built a new Greenhouse this year, complete with growing benches, heat, water, and grow lights. Ann has been sprouting plants in there since April. (We hope to get things growing earlier next year.) Much of what she had planted in the Greenhouse is now outside in the dirt, but the Sun has only just started to come in hot enough, for long enough, to make things grow properly. 

A few years ago we built some chicken wire row covers to protect the plants rabbits and squirrels find most attractive. This year Ann stapled greenhouse film over the row covers and made little greenhouses for our pepper plants to grow in until the Summer heat arrives and it looks to be working. The Pepper plants are planted in newly made rows which we covered in landscape fabric. I found a good resource for landscape fabric on Craig's list and we hope to begin cutting down on the amount of weeding we need to do by covering the ground where we can.

We also planted Carrots in a bed I have been working on for two years. This bed is sixteen feet long, three wide,  and filled with two feet of extra-light growing medium poured into a ditch lined with chicken wire to keep the gophers and moles out. 

The corn we planted in the Kitchen garden did nothing at all. We planted six, seventy foot rows but not one seed came up. So we are trying a new place for the corn in the Market Garden. We covered the space with fabric and cut slits into it to plant seeds. Time will tell if we get corn this year, but corn is a sunshine plant.

At the back of the Market Garden Ann put in two enormous rows of potatoes in newly made beds designed especially for spuds. She really planted the potatoes close, much closer than we hear is recommended. But there's a madness in her method. As the potatoes grow below ground, the tops above, she will pull the sides of these wide beds up to cover half of the greenery, making room for more spuds and controlling weeds at the same time. Her plants are just about a foot high today, so she'll be covering them this week. Potatoes usually do well here, if given half a chance, and the varieties we grow are both unusual and delicious.

Strawberry production here has really done well this year. We pick twice a week and get about a bushel and a half every time we pick. So far we have taken over ten bushels out of the Strawberry Patch, every one of them a gem. These are all picked ripe so the shelf life is short but sweet. I am putting in a new Strawberry Patch next year and have it tilled and mulched the new space. In Spring I will buy five-hundred new plants to grow in the new patch, this time of all one type. Five years ago we bought four varieties of Strawberries to see what would do the best, now we know and our next field will be devoted to the winner.

Our Basset Hound kennel has done well for us this year. We birthed and sold one litter of puppies and the income from this is sufficient to keeping the Farm alive even if we never make a dime on farming. We hope to have another litter this year, perhaps Christmas puppies. 

We kept one male from Laffee Taffee's litter to replace our male in a few years. He is doing wonderfully. We have also been boarding a few dogs for pay as well. Not much money in it, but it proves the concept we stated at the onset of this project. Between pups and boarding we should be able to support farming until we figure it all out. All part of the plans we made eight years ago when this whole thing started.

So much more has been happening since I made my last BLOG post. Our son Jack has begun to put the exterior siding on the house for us. The chickens and ducks are doing okay, but not great. And the friends and neighbors of our Farm are coming and going daily. The Pandemic is beginning to become endemic, so life for everyone will now beginning to return to whatever normal it should become. 

Our world is busy. But really good busy.