December 15th, 2022 Our Christmas Letter

 

December 3rd, 2022 Winter Sets In

A bit of snow on Tuesday morning.

 Winter in northwestern Oregon is a weather grab bag. In the past few weeks we have had torrential rains, sunny days, ice, snow, hail, and everything in between. The one thing we don't get it plant growth. So, as in years past, we work projects and plan for the future. This year seems different because the potential for impending doom. But so far nothing has changed and our future, though not settled, may well turn out much as we had planned it. So we are working projects.

We began remodeling the tiny home a while back. It was fairly worn out from living too long in something that was only built to last a year or so. Our son Jack is living in it and helping out, so we are having to work around him just a bit as we re-do what was a difficult job in the first place. 

Part of our Thanksgiving decor.

I built half of our tiny home Cabin in the driveway of our home in town. When we built it there was plenty of time and the space was empty. We built the walls from 2x3 lumber, not the 2x4 or 2x6 one would expect, so we had to find work arounds to put in electricity and plumbing and this is still the case. When we built the thing we intended to build a second half of the Cabin as needed, but hoped not to find the need if we could get away with living in 220 square feet of house. We built the bathroom at one end, a living space at the other, and a kitchen in the middle. But the remodeled Cabin is not going to be used for the same purpose in the end. So the remodel moves the bathroom to the middle of the thing and puts two 8x8 rooms at either ends. We are also separating the bathroom into two separate rooms, one for showering, the other for the water closet. Eventually we will separate the two sides of the Cabin behind the Farmhouse and into one two bedroom, shared bath, side and a dog kennel. When Jack moves off the Farm we will use the two bedroom as a guest house or even put it up on AirBnB. The remodel is taking up much of my time, but we are doing quite a bit more.

Leaf mountains.

Part of next year's farm planning is to use the knowledge we found last year and go BIG on planting in the Spring. We found a great thing in a relatively new farm practice called No-till, and I have described this quite a bit in the last year. So we have been bringing in about a forty yards of mixed landscape debris in every few days.

We have to move the leaves physically to clear the driveway before more can come in. Right now we have about 240 yards of leaf piled behind the Farmhouse, most of it sorted to get woody debris out.  Some of the "sticky stuff", which has some small sticks and branches in it, is piled separately in a few smaller piles. The big clean piles will compost and be used to prepare new planting beds in early Spring. The "sticky" piles will will be left along until next Summer before we screen the results and use it to top dress the beds. We have another eighty yards in the driveway right now which will be spread very think on the raw ground we will till in late Winter, Composting this raw leaf in place will protect the soils and feed the worms. We will cover every foot of farming space we can before  they run out of leaves to bring us. 

Our Tin Tree

Christmas is coming. This year we'll have four people living on the Farm, so Christmas will be a bit bigger deal than before the Farmhouse was finished. We put up some of our house lights today. There's a bigger plan for holiday lighting, but this year there's no time or money for it. Ann has decorated the house and stuffed every available space with as many little Santas, reindeers, Christmas bears, and snow-folk she has saved up for the thirty plus years we have been married. Snow villages and nutcrackers are everywhere. We also have a special little tin tree which we bought the first Christmas on the Farm when we had no space for a real Christmas tree.  The tin tree has become something of a tradition. We light it the day after Thanksgiving and let the batteries run out. It takes until New Years to run the batteries out. 

We'll go out and find a real Christmas tree next weekend. Last year we were lucky to find one because we moved into the Farmhouse late. We took what we could find on Christmas Eve last year. This year will be different.

Farming experiment update: We put thirty-six pepper plants from last season under individual covers in later September to see if we can Winter-over them into next Spring. Pepper plants are supposed to be perennial, but above the forty-fifth parallel this is debatable. Some uproot their plants and bring them inside their homes or into heated greenhouses and then put them back into their gardens. We tried such a thing last Winter but that experiment failed for a few good reasons. We might have heated the space, it got pretty cold in the greenhouse when it snowed; we might have been a bit more regular in watering, in the cold of Winter getting out to the greenhouse seems a bit of a slog. These failings of ours prompted me to thinking about the thing and, as always, I spent entirely too much time on it. We decided to try over-Wintering the plants in the ground. The soils temperatures never go below fifty-two degrees, water is always available, the soils don't get disturbed, etcetera.  So I decided to steal an idea, something I read about in a book about French market gardens, so we cut the plants down to one leaf, we cut the bottom off of some two-liter plastic bottles, and we covered the plants with the bottles before burying the whole thing in a foot or so of compost. The upshot of this is that, as far into Winter as we have come, including the snows and freezing rains, we find the plants still seem to be alive, though dormant.  We found this out by accident. Never wanting to disturb the process in place we didn't plan to open anything up. But one of our hounds (Abba Zabba) decided the bottle looked like fun and pulled one of them off. But so far the plant we did see was in pretty good shape. We put the bottle back and hope for the best.

Legal stuff update: We're still waiting out the probate stuff and hoping for the best. We talked to their lawyer the other day and she was rude, combative, and generally horrible. So we're talking to lawyers again. We don't intend to do anything differently than we have been, but we do want to exercise a bit of care so we'll spend a few dollars against the possibility of an unforeseen circumstance.  This is our home after all.  Post script: We talked to a few other lawyers in the past few days. This morning we met with one very good lawyer, who we did not hire outright because he didn't need assurances. This was the right guy. So we will sleep better knowing he is there if needed. 

November 2, 2022 Farm Business

 

Our Mini-Barn Produce Stand.

We closed the Produce Stand last week. The Summer came late, the Spring was a long and wet one. We had little luck with sprouting in our Greenhouse too.  But we somehow got plants in the ground and the Summer heat came on strong, so things went very well in the gardens. So well in fact that we found ourselves building the Produce Stand in August. The Summer went on nice and hot so we put quite a bit of our produce into the Stand and by the end of the season had sold enough to cover all of the costs for building the Produce Stand. All in all we had a very good Summer season. We were able to put Tomatoes, Peppers, Corn, Cucumbers, Zucchini, Pumpkins, Acorn Squash, Gourds, Watermelons, Cantaloups, and even some flowers, in the Stand. Quite a good year considering it all started off a bit rocky at first.  

Our main goal, following the finishing of the Farmhouse (Phase One goal) was to begin to make money on the Farm as a business.  Phase Two is building the Farm business and this is well under way now that we have found a good means for growing things to sell. But there are many parts to the Farming business, some which still need figured out. 

The first way we make money is by raising Basset Hound puppies for sale. This is something we've done for many years now, but once the house was finished we were able to do the job much better than what we could do in the tiny home. Our Pantry converts into nursery quickly and I built some enclosures which go together quickly and are effective in keeping the little monsters penned up. 

In the years since we went into business the business itself has changed. True to economic form we were making good money, so a few others have jumped into the business and customers are a bit harder to come by. We've had another way to sell our fur babies since the beginning so there really isn't any hold up in moving them on to new families, just the profit margin is a bit tighter. Still and all, it is a fun business and we are delivering another litter next week. Another solid addition to an already good year.  

We also have boarding for some of our puppies throughout the year too. We don't put a price on it since we aren't really set up to do proper dog boarding, but the families which trust us with their dogs chip something in and it all adds up. 

Puppies are a happy business.

We delivered a litter earlier in the year too, giving us the money we needed to finish the Farmhouse and buy a few new tools. And about a month ago I found a red and white female to bring into our kennel. Four month old Rocketdog Dulche DeLeche (Lilly) comes from Oklahoma, by way of Blackfoot, Idaho. A friendly breeder there is leaving the business and didn't need her, so we were fortunate to be able to bring her here. She is very pretty and fits right in with our tangle of hounds. We still need one more female to keep things going because we are taking two of our females our of service this coming year and we need three to satisfy our goals. 

We also do a brisk business in eggs from the forty hens we have kept for many years.  Since we no long have to leave the Farm to deliver eggs, because people come visit, we no longer have the high expense of labeling and buying new cartons. This means we can make a small profit on eggs and still get out eggs for free. Not a big add to the bottom line, but no longer a loss either. 

My Dog Coat Design
is simple and robust.

Despite all of the above, most of it good news this year, we are always on the lookout for other opportunities to add to our bottom line.  One thing I did last year, which is looking pretty good, is making coats for our dogs. We spent quite a bit of money on coats for our hounds in past years, most of these things simply never worked out. Most had Velcro straps and materials too light to survive the pounding a Basset Hound gives a coat, so I designed one myself and last year figured out how to build them. Our Rocketdog coat is tough, washable, and looks great. It's not cheap to make, but the way it's made means they should last for years. Our dogs line up to get their coat on once the weather starts to turn cold. So far this year I have sold four, so it is well worth doing in the context of building a Farm business. 

Between eggs, dogs, produce, and coats, we're doing all right. Not going to spend much time spending money frivolously, but we're not spending savings either. All part of our plan to stay here for the rest of our lives, so we're happy with the results.

The Farmhouse is finished.

Phase Two of our plan is to build a Farm business. One where we have people come and visit. A business where people take our goods and produce and are happy about supporting us while receiving good stuff. I'd say we are well under way.  Still to come: a cafe, more produce, and value added stuff -like canning and baked goods. All in its time.

In  other news . . .
My younger brother came to stay with us as he figures out where he wants to be in his retirement. He has a very nice camp trailer which sits next to the tiny home (which we have rented out to our son). So we have quite a bit of family here now. We also have quite a few visitors too. Last week we had nineteen visitors come for one reason or another. We've always meant to have a lot of visitors here in the plans we made. It seems funny to have all of these people here now after being alone together for the most of the past five years. It takes some getting used to, but we like it even if it is complicating.  

October 12, 2022 Produce Stand Update by Ann

Come on down to the produce stand!  It is chock-a-block full of  tomatoes, Anaheim peppers, poblano peppers, jalapenos, Acorn squash, zucchini, cucumbers, decorative gourds, bell peppers and seed potatoes. Ask about picking volumes of tomatoes for canning. 

For those that don't know: Anaheim and poblano peppers are very mild. I use Anaheim's as a substitute for bell peppers in many recipes. Poblanos make the best chili rellenos. Acorn squash are simple to prepare by cutting in half, scooping out the seeds then packing it full of butter, brown sugar and cinnamon. pop it in a 350 oven for 45 minutes to an hour till tender.

The seed potatoes will come 20 per bag for $2. There are 3 varieties available: Kennebec, which are like the russets you buy in the market. German Butter Ball which are golden fleshed and brown skinned. Pontiacs which are red skinned and white fleshed. keep them in a cool dark place till spring then plant them for your own crop next year!

September 31st, 2022 The Perfect Second Act

 I took theater appreciation in College, not all that long ago. Going to live theater wasn't really a thing for me prior to that, though I had seen a bit through all the years of searching out Christmas Plays and Kenneth Branag films. The past few weeks have seemed dramatic, but likely not to anyone who wasn't following what we have been doing here. It occurs to me that those who don't know our story, the marquis reading “A Triumph of Completing the House”, might not understand what is happening now,  in what appears not to be a one act play.

In a one act play, the whole thing usually takes place in one corner of the universe. There's something that happens there which has some of the elements of other plays and the whole conflict and resolution are found by the time the curtain comes down. I love a good black box one act play. Minimalist, it is all about make believe and believing; and I took a class, so maybe I appreciate it a bit more than some. But it appears our triumphal house building and farm getting “play”, if it is such a thing, is a bit more complex than just the one act. Now that we have a cliffhanger at the end of the first act we've got to turn the page to see what happens. But lets appreciate the first act during a short intermission.

In the first act we had a dream of victory. We are celebratory and chose the new path. We found, instead of a bright road lined with flowers, a dark thing, something menacing lurked somewhere undefined. But we were committed, in true heroic form, and we stood against the tide, jumped all obstacles. About a month ago, we emerged from the deep dark forest of fear and into the sunshine of our victory. Mid month last our house was built, permits signed off, land cleared, and crops in harvest. Curtain down, bring up the house lights. . .

It was a good story. And it might have ended right there with everybody feeling like it was fun, but maybe two bucks too expensive for the time spent watching. But wait! In comes something unexpected, something shapeless that appears to feed on those things we grew; something that might just put another end over the happy ending . . . The curtain is down so let's stretch the legs and maybe buy another drink in the lobby. Fifteen minutes later we are deep into the Second Act. If the writer was any good at all.

So here we all are. Ann and I spent years clearing, cleaning, building, and spending cash money. We're the protagonists and the world into which we inserted ourselves, and appeared to prevail over in the first act. . . Didn't. It all would have finally paid off, except it didn't. But this isn't a one act play.

Production Note: I wrote an article claiming that our farm was an “undeniable fact” around the middle of August. It should have been a tip-off that something evil this way comes. Mis- direction is key to good writing.

In the opening of the Second Act of Part One, of a three part serial, we have a nameless, formless, potentially amoral monster, who had been lying dormant, under the surface, just waiting to be found at just the right moment. We found it in the last moments of Act One. So Ann and I, happy and faithful true in our ignorance, scratched at something innocent and boom: a disaster that proposed the possibility of defeat from what was obviously a victorious end. If my thesis is correct, this whole thing is a dramatic form, we already know how it ends even if we don't know how we will get there.

With only a little faith in my premises, the conclusion is that we will win. Our Farm will continue. Our lives will improve. We will bring people what they want and give them what they need. Our original Act One goals will work themselves into being despite the challenges ahead in the Second Act. Act Three will be about looking back and stomping the last fires out. Then we can start producing Act One of Part Two, if there ever will be such a thing.

Every day we get up and work towards some long termed thing we drempt up a decade ago. A lot of this work is as simple as picking a tomato or raking some dirt. All of everything we have done is along the road to somewhere else, perhaps something better. Maybe in the current troubles at the beginning of Act Two we have somehow lost sight of the good we are doing because we are caught up in the dramatic bullshit we mostly wrote for ourselves.

The way we did things here was risky at first. We thought that right would certainly prevail. And we thought we'd get away with it. Then we thought we had gotten away with it, and that didn't prove true at the end of Act One. But we all know where this is headed. You couldn't write it any different. From Cinderella to Diehard the story always takes on a form we seem to know instinctively. Even without taking the class.

Keeping all of the above in mind, for a moment, the questions we will ask as we leave the theater are: What part did I play in this? Was I audience? Sort of the point of the production was to find an audience. Was I a minor player? No lines, but I walked in from Stage Left on cue. Was my part that of a supporting actor? Can't get it done without some real help. And what of the antagonist? Are they evil, or merely supporting a system which in it has challenges? Remember, the bad guys don't see themselves as bad or your writing comic melodrama. We simply have no answers yet.

So we'll all sit in the dark and watch as the curtain rises for the Second Act. Even the actors behind the rising curtain don't know what will happen if they are good at it. But we all know how it will end, the form of the play is undeniable.

I'm thinking you should grab that second drink during this intermission and get back to your places. We will need you and you are a help even if helping is only watching this play out.

September 29th, 2022 Where We Stand Today

 Where things stand today.  If you would like to help with this in any way. Look to the bottom of this post for more information.

I spent the hours since my last posting working on the issues found in bumping into a Medicaid debt owed by woman who died on this place back in 2007. I have read most of the laws, quite a few of the common law cases, and talked to a whole lot of people. I even paid a lawyer to make a few phone calls and discuss finding some way forward. What I found was shocking.

Apparently, and you might want to know this some day: 

• When people die in hospitals, hospice care, and nursing homes, their insurance is supposed to pay for the expenses. 
• Once the insurance hits a cap of some sort the remaining expenses are supposed to be paid from savings of the person under care. 
• And once savings are depleted Medicaid steps in and pays the bills. At this point there is a practical limit to the bills Medicaid pays, so once the limit is hit the amount paid goes negative and a debt is accrued from that point forward. 

This debt will almost certainly be collected following the death of the beneficiary.  So what we have is a situation where a person, knowingly or not, accrues debt for which any remaining value of any thing the beneficiary owns can be used to pay off the debt incurred in the care of whoever went into care and died. 

But the person needn't have died right away.  They might have survived another ten years and died in a plane crash. Any Medicare debt which went uncollected up to the plane augered into the dirt is debt which can be collected from the estate of the deceased. Because of this simple fact there are no time limits on collections, reasonable or not.  


Now any reasonable person might think this is just, and right. People need Medicaid, and in order for Medicaid to continue these outstanding debts ought to be collected if it is possible. SO, this reasonable thing, the way we pay for health care in the United States generally, has some pretty extreme downsides to it which on the surface appear reasonable in the general sense, but in the specific can be very unreasonable.  Here's a short hypothetical:

In 2020 a man is found by his neighbor laying on the floor of his kitchen and unresponsive. The neighbor calls 911 and the ambulance takes the man to the closest hospital for care. The man has COVID virus and is given every opportunity to regain consciousness through heroic effort of the Emergency Room, Intensive Care, and everyone else that might offer some sort of aid. The man has a "do not resuscitate" notice pinned to his refrigerator, but the Emergency Medical Technicians didn't see it.  The man has family who might have given other instructions, but because of the restrictions inherent in COVID care at the time, they are never given an opportunity to make any decisions. In fact, they only learn of the death through a call from someone trying to figure out how to pay for twenty-three days of keeping a respirator tube down the throat of they guy in ICU bed twenty-seven who never did regain consciousness. He left behind half a million in unpaid medical bills, a house, a car, and his lifetime of stuff. He had savings, a retirement account, and life insurance. His Last Will left everything to his only child. 

The child lost his father, sad enough, like so many did in those long dark months. But he also lost the home his parents left to him because it was worth around two-hundred thousand dollars. The savings the child would receive were taken because $200K isn't nearly enough, so another fifty-thousand in cash is gone. As is his mother's jewelry, the retirement account, and the car. In fact, all told the estate of the man could only pay for $450K of the $500K of debt.  And by the time the child found out, while settling the estate of the father through probate, interest had accrued which kept every dime of the $550K estate. If there were any remaining debt, and the child not be hopelessly poor, the child would be held to account for any unpaid arrears. Nobody told anyone, anything, which would have changed any of this. These things are not common knowledge and by the time it all came to completion the damage was done. 

In the way I have just described the entire family fortune, all of the value that might have passed from one generation to the next, which might have lifted that family to a new social level and insured care, feeding, and education of following generations, is lost. 

A million people died of COVID in the first few years, perhaps five times that number were hospitalized and survived. So many families effected, so much cost, most of it uncontrolled by anyone as emergency measures were taken, most of which were completely ineffective. The open question remaining is: how many family fortunes were made due and payable upon demand?  How many family fortunes completely knocked out? And why do we pay for health care in this way?

I can't answer this last question, it is beyond my imagination. And since I receive publicly funded health care I really have no skin in the game. But the fact remains that somehow I am now being effected by this unjust, though perfectly reasonable, system. 

None of the facts in my hypothetical scenario above apply in our individual case. We had no family members whose legacies would be denied to us. We had nobody wresting control of our loved ones from us at our expense.  Except that  those individuals who left behind a debt to Medicaid were associated with the dirt our homestead farm was eventually built we have nothing at all to do with this. We are collateral damage. The injustice, in our case, is that Medicaid came after the value in my Farm only after I had bought it and began making improvements. Medicaid never informed me, or anyone else, of the fact that they had some claim against my land; never told me, or anyone else, that there was interest being accrued on the debt levied against my Farm. In fact: were it not for me attempting to finalize the sale of my Farm we would still be ignorant of the debt or the lien. They made no attempt to collect the debt prior to our buying it, never notified anyone at all of anything at all prior to us investing our entire amount of equity in the land we call home. All in the name of keeping the Medicaid fund restocked with the cash vital to doing the good work that they do. 

Medicaid has been given extraordinary power in this. There are no limitations as to time allowed to collect the debt. While every other area of Law, except perhaps murder,  has some means of saying that the law can no longer be applied because the offending action has lingered too long. Medicaid can sit back and make no efforts at all, then swoop in when a sale of the property be considered and stop the sale and demand payment from any proceeds. The effect of this is that people who would normally enter into probate proceedings to take over Father's or Mother's assets just walk away from their rightful inheritance because they haven't got the three hundred thousand dollars to pay, while the estate isn't worth that amount. In a world of houseless persons, thousand of houses are being left to rot because of this sort of debt.

In our case we bought the land from a woman who did not know anything at all about a Medicaid debt. Through our investment she redeemed her land from tax foreclosure and contracted a sale which relieved her from being homeless. And when she died a few months later she left the valuable Contract behind as her legacy to her own family, not knowing that she would also leave the debt of her own care to them as part of the bargain.

In our case the County Tax Office knew nothing of any lien for repayment of Medicaid debt. They were simply obeying the law by letting the Woman redeem the title to the land and then letting us clear away the sadness we found there before building our home.  The County was never told that there was a lien placed upon the title to our homestead land, nor could they notify us of these facts. All the while the interest was growing, the debt increasing. Nobody told anyone of any thing.  

So we have come, in just a few short weeks, to a place where we can now say that the legally entered into Land Sales Contract is perhaps a moot point. There are two probate issues that now must be worked through which otherwise were pretty straight forward prior to learning about these debts.  The equity in cash, labor, and blood, we put into the Farm and our home may be in serious jeopardy because the means Medicaid uses to collect on these debts. It is all a reasonable injustice. 

The best case scenario for us is that we will participate in the probate proceedings to clear up who owes the money, then pay whatever amount is decided for the land we bought seven years ago for a generous amount and for which we have paid all taxes, maintained as our home, and improved steadily since day one.  Best case, we pay what we said we would on the Land Sales Contract and that will be the entire amount, but we won't be paying to those who would have had their lives improved by the money, we will pay debts which have nothing what-so-ever with us and our lives. 

Since the day we learned of this outstanding and well hidden obligation we will eventually be held to account for. We informed those responsible for the debt and they made contact with DHS to try to work things through. DHS has not called out to us despite our involvement, but I did call them. DHS is continuing to work through the issues they must, but have never made any attempt at contacting us or including our concerns. And since I am the Personal Representative for one of the deceased people involved in this it seems that I ought to be included in all of these things. 

Any money that DHS claims as theirs to collect will eventually be paid by us. You'd think they would wish to talk to us first. 

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If you know us, or even if you don't; if you have been following our story, or even if you merely heard about it and want to help, we want you to get in touch. We don't know what we need, have few resources and fewer remaining ideas as to how to move forward. We think we are defensible by lack any way to know how or do anything about this.  So please let us know about you, even if it is only moral support you can offer. There's a contact form just to the left of this page. Please use it. 

We need an army. 
 
Most helpful notes:

• I have received ask why our title insurance won't be of some help to us. We have no title insurance because of how we became involved in this property. We had no money for it at the time, but there would have been no lien to find at the time either. The first lien DHS levied did not occur until well after we entered into the Contract for purchase and months after the woman who sold me the land died of cancer. Title insurance, had we done a conventional sale, would have not been issued. 
• Other helpful notes usually ask why we weren't informed by the lawyer helping in the purchase. Again, there was no money for lawyers, and there were no levies. We were faced with helping a homeless woman to get off the streets, we had very little money but what we did have went directly into helping her to help us. Any lawyer worth a dime would have just told us to run away. But we could never have run away from a duty to this poor helpless woman as her land was taken from her to pay County property taxes. We worked for six months, six days a week, twelve hours a day, to get the money needed to redeem the land from property tax foreclosure and to get Colette Kramer out of her car and into a house. If I lose everything, getting her off the streets, so that she would not die alone in a car in Winter, is the best thing I ever did and it will have been worth it. 

September 16, 2022 Big Trouble

 

We've faced some pretty steep challenges since beginning the Creekside Project.  We've had to pay off a huge tax bill that wasn't ours, clear away eight hundred yards of debris we didn't make, learn how to build everything that exists here, and surmount all of the obstacles anyone could put in our way. We've bled real blood, shed real tears and sweated enough to fill a swimming pool. And there's been times when the Farm has actually tried to kill us dead, but it couldn't. All of this was done on a shoestring,. We didn't get much help, but took as much as was offered gratefully. 

But we've run into something that might be bigger than we can handle. Something which could kill the dream.

If you've read much of this blog, you know how we did all of this. If you haven't, the story is right there on the right side of this page. So let me dispense with the preliminary story and just get to it.

The land had belonged the woman who died in a house fire, but when she died she left behind a debt to Medicaid which was still outstanding. So when we filed a Small Estates Affidavit for the daughter who had taken control of the property, and without any knowledge of it, the Department of Human Services (DHS) had placed a lien on the Title to the land to collect this debt.

The lien was for around thirty-two thousand dollars for a debt made in 2007. It had been accruing interest since March of 2016 but it was August of 2022 when we found out about it. The new truth here is that the Title had not transferred to the woman we bought our farm from, despite Tax and Probate laws saying it would, because the transfer was held up by a lien we had no way of knowing about. The lien was placed three months after the prospective owner of the land had passed on, so her address was no longer valid and DHS had made no attempt at finding someone new to send the bill to. In fact, they didn't know she was gone.

Picture a taxi sitting a block away with its meter running for fifteen years. 

The potential debt arising in March or 2016 has since ballooned up to nearly four hundred thousand dollars because not only does the family holding the Contract on our farm owe a debt for health services paid for their mother, the woman we bought the Farm from also has a large debt stemming from her care as she slipped away. The amount of money owed far exceeds the value of the Farm, with the house, which we put every dime we had into, which was tied to the land, which we did not own.

But this would be a rotten place to end this story. A bad outcome which nobody would want to read because it would be too sad. We need to find help, though it may already be too late. The laws on paper protect heirs under certain conditions and we don't meet the criteria. 

September 6, 2022 The Dream Ammended

This is the 2022 plan.

This production layout is four times what we are growing today.

Click on any of these pictures and see them larger.

The second plan was done in April 2015
we had found the edges of the place by then.

We had intended to plant peach trees at first
but there isn't enough heat here.

In November 2015 we decided to add themed 
gardens and tiny home cabins.
The cabins might not work here.

It was in January 2020 that I did the last design of the Master Planning image. Prior to that I did one about every year, usually in the dead of Winter when time is easy to find. A whole lot has happened here since the last time I sat down to think things through. It seemed appropriate to do it now, following so close behind the final inspection on the new house. Last year I didn't even think about this. The two years  since the last one of these was pretty full of house building projects.

The most important thing I had to incorporate in this new plan was the idea of a no-till farm. The beds we will lay down in the coming year will be very permanent and never again worked by machines. The gardens will be set up once and then fenced without access for the tractor. From that point it will all be hand work.  We took some trees down last year. This year we will get the remaining few down and begin laying out the final farm. With no house to build, there will be time to grow.

In May 2016 we had a good idea of 
what the land might support.
So we added long walking paths.

In laying out the gardens we are using a very specific repeating chord pattern in all of the gardens. Each 24 inch row can easily be used as two twelve inch rows with just enough room for one shoe comfortably in the middle. Every 24 inch row is separated by a one foot open space for walking traffic that doesn't compact the soils. Every two row set is separated by a two foot space for carts to carry stuff. This pattern uses  the land very intensively while making the rows easy to work by hand. As we harvest each row we recharge the soil with fresh compost, organic fertilizers, and a new mulch cover. No till gardening makes for light work,  few weeds, and much less watering, all while increasing food quality.  But you have to keep moving. And you have to plan ahead. Our new plan is four times the sixe of this year's production.

Second to this, and perhaps still a few years away, is the first wedding venue. We started our planning with the idea that we would eventually create a farm themed venue but a few things had to happen before we could begin. The first was a house, which is now nearly complete. The second was a real working farm,. This is the image we will build toward making this place a real farm. The first wedding venue will look much the same as a croquet pitch. Just a big flat grassy space at the front of the Farmhouse, level with the deck of the front porch, with shade cloth sails for a light cover. We will put in permanent electrical stuff and anchors for large tent rentals. We have a good design worked up for this whole thing, but first we need to get a few more things done. 

In September of 2017 we refined the image
a bit. But siting the house became an issue.

We have learned quite a bit since beginning the Farm Project in 2015. Today we have a house, water, septic, electric, water treatment and distribution. We have learned how to build a greenhouse so that it doesn't need yearly rebuilding. And we finally found a way to grow things in the soil we have. Almost all of our first level questions have answers and our farm produces much more than we need. Our dreams have changed, the goals did not.

We are well on the way. 

Once we had a home site identified in 2018, but before we figure out that trees wouldn't work here.
The Barn and Greenhouse would need more permit than we could get at the time. 

In 2019 we found the first layout that we could do.
We began building a Market Garden and a separated Kitchen Garden.

Our farm is economically self-sufficient today. Our Basset Hound breeding and boarding kennel is producing a healthy income on an ongoing basis too. We still need to put the final Kennels in, so we have some work to do still.

The 2020 layout was bit rough, but most of what we planned is working today.
We have changed little in this plan since 2020, we just had to fix the soil and
build a house. 

August 23rd, 2022 Our Homestead Farm is an Undeniable Fact.

Today we crossed the finish line of a race we have run, non-stop, for nine years. 

The race we finished today has been in progress since April of 2015, when we found the property which became our homestead farm. We have a longer termed goal set which is broken into three major parts. Our first goal was always to build a house (we finished this today and this is the main message of this post). Our second goal is to build a farming business and we've come a long way on this front. The third part of our bigger plan is the hospitality phase, we are looking toward starting working toward this goal beginning today. The path which took us to this place has been a long one and we have passed by quite a few milestones along the way. Some of these milestones were significant and were found wherever a major goal had to be achieved. These were usually make or break points in our current project and the days where we moved forward in a meaningful way.

Deciding to start our Farm project happened in 2013, but I didn't write about it until I began blogging in October, 2015. The timeline of this journaling project jumped around a bit at first. We found the property in April of 2015 and this BLOG didn't begin until October of 2015.  Here's where we started.

The Creekside Farm project was very LARGE at the onset, but seemed to grow as time passed. The post linked above this paragraph tells of how we decided to buy a farm, began to clear the place, and how we found a way to buy control of the property. The story of everything is contained in the archives of this blog, but since this post is entirely about finishing Phase One of our larger project, I'll try to tell this story as concisely as I can. Where you see red in the list below, you'll find a major goal achievement nested into the larger Phase One goal. This is the story of our Farmhouse. 

• We found the Farm property, by accident, in January 2015.
• We found a woman to buy the land from in April 2015.
• In late September of 2015 we bought the land in an extraordinary way. 
• By March 2017 we had built a tiny home and moved it to the property.
• We called the land Camp Creekside because it was had a cabin and we were producing no food. 
• Our temporary electricity permit came in April.
• This allowed us to have water in July.
• We moved the Tiny Home Cabin in October and tilled the first garden plot.
• In 2018 we began producing food on the now renamed Creekside Farm.
• 
  After selling our house in August we had more than enough cash to begin building and started the permit process.
• I built our new septic system around this point in time.
• We finished clearing the trash off of the place in October.
• 2019 was a tough year.
• The permit process dragged on nearly the whole year long.
• We finally got permits in September.
• We broke ground on the new Farmhouse in October.
• In November we had actually poured a foundation for the new Farmhouse.
  
• 2020 was a year of hard work and not many growing things.
  
  
• We began building on top of  the new foundation in January.
• Plumbing was roughed in in March.
• By October we had a roof on the house and were doing electrical rough in.
• In 2021 we worked every day to convert cash into house. 
• Prices began to rise immediately in 2021, most building materials doubled in cost.
• We moved into a very comfortable Farmhouse in December.
• The Last Nail was driven into the new Farmhouse in March of 2022
• It took until today to get all of our permits signed off.

All together, from the January 2015 until today, we spent our lives completely committed to building our Farm-house. We also spent considerable time building a Farm for the house to sit on. This has been a dream since August of 2013. So nine years of dedicated effort has finally come to fruition. 

Or new farmstead home is still in trouble in many ways. We changed our farming practices a few times, this year we found something that works. We are self sufficient, but there isn't enough cash to build the rest of our initial dream yet, but the dream has changed many times. We still have to find the money to pay off the Contract we entered into at the onset of this, and this has developed more than a few additional troubles since the beginning so we have work to do. While our project still is not certain to find the ending we began at the beginning, we sure have made it quite far.

We started the project with no cash and no real plan. We found ourselves on land unsuitable for farming and without any place to lay our heads. We were as surprised as anyone when we actually got control of the land. We learned how to build fires and grow food. And, after all this time and effort, we have arrived at the end of our first major goal: We built a house!

June 25th, 2022 Summer Arrives

 

Peppers, Tomatoes, Potatoes, and Beans
Click on the pictures to make them larger.

As I see things, the problem with starting Summer in mid-to-late June is that it does little to help with making the Farm a financial success. We need produce to sell in April, so having none of the plants putting produce on the table until sometime in July is something of a problem, if the problem is selling produce for a profit. 

Be that as it may, we are grateful for the plants we have growing today. Our seeds nearly jump into the sun once the Summer comes and there's little time for anything except planting and weeding.  Right now we have many hundreds of row feet planted in corn, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, watermelon, beans, peas, mini-cantaloupe, potatoes, onion, and herbs of all sorts. There are hundreds of flowering plants still to be planted, but these are on their way to the beds this coming week. It would be better if some of this planting success would happen in Spring, but it is hard to complain when looking out there today.  The Summer is a time for growing things, but there area few more things happening here right now worthy of taking some notice of.

Our Runner Ducks just love the hotter days.
This morning I cleaned their pond.

There are still some things to do on the new Farmhouse. I began painting the place this past week. It took a few weeks to get ready for painting and the weather was still a bit too wet and cold to start in. But the colder weather gave me time to get the house well prepared and my tools in good order. Once the heat showed up I primed and painted the back of the house in just a few days. All the climbing was a bit harder than it needed to be. Things make me tired where they didn't before. I'm thinking we'll get through the painting by the end of July, but it might happen earlier if the weather doesn't turn horribly hot. 

We decided to paint the house yellow about five years ago.  Like everything else we spent a lot of time thinking about the color prior to having to make a real decision about it. My first choice was barn red, because it is a farm house and it made some sense. But then we thought about putting a red barn on the Farm and figured it would be a bunch too much red, so we tried white (because farmhouse are often white). But white reflects light and we had decided to use the front yard as a public space, so white was out. Greens and blues are nice for trim work . . . So yellows came up naturally. We agonized about the shade of yellow and would point out yellow houses as we made our way off the Farm. There was a nice little house in Banks with what appeared to be the right color so eventually we went to the store and picked out some yellow paint cards. These cards laid around on the desk for a year or so before a decision had to be made. The color is Sunflower Seed, something of a misnomer since sunflowers are certainly yellow, the their seeds are definitely not. In any event, I got the first side of the house sprayed this past week and it is going to be the right color. The trim will be white, so too will be the batts of our board and bat siding plan. FarmyAF : Farm-y as f-heck.

Squash, Cucumbers, Corn, and Beans

In a few weeks we will have the last framing inspection before finalizing the Farmhouse permit and becoming legal. So we started in on finding the financing for the balloon payment due on the land contract we wrote in 2015. It's a large amount of money, but not as much as anyone would think it would be considering the size of the lot and its relative position in the world. Nearly two acres of good flat land is pretty hard to find these days, we got lucky. Since I wrote all of the contract, deeds, wills, and powers of attorneys myself I thought it a good idea to begin this next vital step by discussing everything with a lawyer. Good thing I did too, but I won't go into this here. Suffice it to say that we have things well in hand and have made significant steps toward finding our next significant step. There's two more years on the Contract, so we are getting started early and all should turn out well in the end.

The back of the Farmhouse is plain.
But the new Yellow makes a statement!

Our Farm is a special place, we hope anyone who might read this BLOG might feel free to come visit. But you might not so let me openly invite you to come out a visit. Expect dirt, insects, dogs, chickens, and ducks, so wear something that might get dirty. We'll try to sell you some of what we grow here every time you come, but the stuff we have is two weeks fresher and grown with better soil. It's the same dirt that has made our lives so very good. 

May 28th, 2022 Spring Finally Arrives

 About two weeks ago the rains of Winter finally stopped, ending one of longest wet spells the Pacific Northwest has seen in many years. Our last truly dry day was in September of last year. Prior to that day, the days of endless rains began, we had the hottest Summer on record. The Summer included about four days of one-hundred-fifteen degrees. Another new record. While the Winter rains ended, the Spring rains arrived a few days later.  The difference between Winter and Spring rains is easy to tell if you know what to look for. Winter rains are cold and sharp when they hit your skin. Spring rains come through warm air and is usually a smaller drop which is softer on the skin. You get wet either way, but Spring rains are wonderful. The difference in the rain gave us good reason to begin preparing the farm for planting. The Spring rains are usually spaced apart too, giving us a few days of sunshine in between rainy days and allowing the ground to dry out a bit. Dry ground is what we need to begin planting. 

This is the new Strawberry
and Potato beds.

In the past few years we began preparing the Farm for planting in mid-April, so we're getting started pretty late in the year. Previous year's preparation were about physically breaking up the rain damaged soil on the surface of our planting beds and bringing in loads of horse manure. The horse manure is usually composted and ready by late April so we add it to the beds and till it in while dragging a row making tool behind our tractor. The result has been an increasing amount of good soil. But building up good soils has been a one step forward, one step back sort of thing and we decided to try another method. I wrote a long article about how we planned to change our Farm practices last October. You can read it by clicking here if you'd like. But here are the highlights.

No till gardening uses massive amounts of garden debris laid out in a thick layer over the native soils and left to rot. Worms come up and eat the debris, converting it into worm tailings which garden microbes digest leaving nearly pure nutrient rich soil for plants to grown in. Besides this great soil the leaves break down, leaving the veins and twigs behind to form a "matrix" which breaks down more slowly, leaving water channels which carry water deep into the dirt. 

A finished no till bed.
This is cucumber and squash.

Last fall we had about four hundred yards of leaf debris brought in by gardening companies to get us started. We also began tearing into our gigantic compost piles and sorting this out too. The whole process takes a lot of time and effort, but we really needed to get going on the new plan. 

We decided to help Nature along a bit by tilling in the well broken down debris on the beds, laying out the final rows where they would be for the coming years, and then covering the new rows with another thick layer of leaf compost. 

The whole system works to contain weed seeds and allow any weeds that do sprout to be pulled from the soft soils without much effort. The vermiculture eats the leaf debris which feeds the fungus, but other animals enter to the soil to eat the worms and these also eat the larvae of harmful insects too. All in all it sounds like a good deal. Time will tell if this works, but we are committed to it at this point.  So far we have about a third of our planting done. But there's much more happening here.

This is one of Bit O'Honey's
pups with her new bigger brother.

We birthed three litters of puppies in late March and have been delivering them to their new families for the past few weeks. Right now we have only one puppy left and she will go to Washington next weekend. This will allow us to put the Pantry back together and finish one or two more Farmhouse projects that have been on hold for space, time, and money. The puppies provide the cash, their leaving provides the space and time. 

The Farmhouse build is still moving, albeit slowly. We have been working on smaller projects as time permits. A few weeks ago I finished the closet shelving. The pandemic caused supply disruptions, especially in building materials, so buying the twelve foot long cheap shelf boards became impossible and I had to get creative. We found some forty inch long pine shelving on Craig's List and stitched it together into lengths long and strong enough. This is the sort of little project that we have been doing since finishing the Porch roof framing a few weeks ago. Last week I wrapped the water heater and earthquake strapped it to the wall . . . we have a long list of little stuff. The only major thing to do is painting the exterior of the house and we've been waiting for weather for months. I'll begin painting this coming week.  We are also approaching the point where we can begin the porch floor concrete and parameter drain. It's all about time and money. 

One of our tree and debris projects is a
mushroom patch. This is a permaculture
project involving tree trunks and leaf compost.
The trees will rot under the compost and give us
some good ground for mushrooms in the future.

Aside from these things we have begun taking down the large and dangerous trees that were always slated for removal. The fruit trees along the front fence have to be  removed, but these are small and relatively easy to take down. We cut them up and burn the debris, but the bigger trees are a problem to solve. Some of the pines, though healthy, are eighty to one-hundred feet tall and either near the power lines, the fence, or some other thing we don't need to drop a tree on. We have four more pine trees to cut down but it might be we have to wait until next Spring for these. The bigger tree cutting project is two  hardwood trees nearby the Farmhouse. These are diseased and rooting out so simply sawing through them does not guarantee they will fall in the right direction. We'll have to take these bad trees down in stages; the top and side branches first until all that is left is the main trunk. Then we can cut the trunk down without worrying that it will damage the house. This is going to take some time, but we've been wanting to get these things done for five years.

I have been a bit slow in writing all of this stuff down. So much is going on and it all seems pretty small. But when it finally does hit the page it seems much more is being done than there is time to write. Certainly more than there is time to read. 

May 14th, 2022 Spring is Late

 It has been cold and wet nearly every day since the start of Winter, maybe earlier. What this usually means is that we are in a La Nina year, cold and wet right up until the start of Summer, then hot, but a bit cooler than the Summer's have given us lately. 

The Summer will be good for growing things, the Spring . . . not so much.  But we have much to keep us busy.  So much so that I haven't had time to write about things, so here's what we have been up to.

We had three litters of puppies in March. None of these were well planned and all together there were thirteen pups. We had a lot of fun, but didn't get much sleep from late February until just about a week ago. We found places for everyone to go and still have two of them here with us. They will go to their new homes at the end of May. The money these pups brought in will allow our projects to go forward and bills to be paid through the Summer. We also have some boarding and egg money coming in so things are farily comfortable right now. Hopefully we'll get a crop to sell this year to carry us further. 

Having puppies in the house put a hold on some of our short termed projects and took time away from others. But the rains were the main reason why our planting schedule is behind by six weeks. We began planting seeds in the Greenhouse, but the sun just hasn't been there for us. To keep from getting further behind we bought a hundred large plant pre-started to put into the ground around the first of June. Tomatoes, Peppers, and Cucumbers are keeping warm in the Greenhouse until it is time to plant them. We will continue to plant seeds in pots, but have already planted Strawberries, Potatoes, and Onions since they can take the inclimate weather. This is the first year for our new "no till" gardening  plan.

No Till, for us, is something of a hybrid system. We took in a few hundred yards of hardwood leaf debris in Fall last year and this stuff mostly was piled up to make compost. We put about one hundred yards out directly onto the ground to sit through Winter and protect the soils we already had, and this debris was largely taken down into the soil by worms so it really improved the soil composition. We are laying about six inches of newly made composted leaves on top of the soils and then tilling it in a bit to distribute the materials better. Following planting we will put another two inches on top of all this to protect the soils and keep water loss down.  Once we build the new rows and plant them we will no long be able to walk on our rows, but we also won't need to till the soils to get ready to plant every year. So we're being very careful in laying out our rows this year and hope to no long make changes to the gardens going forward.  Other than this, we also have been working on fences, paths, and made our driveway large enough to park cars inside of the fence. At some point in Summer I will build our permanent produce stand. The rains have made working outside a hit and miss thing, but we are getting things done. 

Living in our new Farmhouse is delightful. We've been doing small and large projects a few days a week while preparing the Farm for planting when weather allowed it. I had to re-charge our water softener, the resin medium that clears the iron from the water had finally broken down so it wasn't doing enough. We have sediment filters wherever drinking water enters house plumbing so we were able to get by for a while until I could replace the  resin. Since this was the first time I had ever done this I was a bit nervous about it, but in the end the job was pretty easy. It's nice to have fully softened water back in the pipes.

In early Summer I will begin painting the Farmhouse, weather permitting. Once we paint I can begin putting the final roofing on the Porch, but this is not something that needs done prior to the final inspection so it will wait a bit longer. There are still a few large projects remaining before getting our final inspection scheduled in August. I began backfilling the area under cover of the newly built porch roof. Once this dirt is settled we can begin pouring the concrete rim of the porch and build the perimeter drain around the outside of the Porch to carry away excess water, the last big project needed to get our final inspection done.

All in all it must be said that things are going along pretty well despite the rains. We're looking forward to the Summer and hoping for the best while wishing people less fortunate than we are the same.

April 7th, 2022 The Last Nail

Our first homesite plan.
It mostly failed.

There's a saying I like to use. Happiness comes of pride, pride comes of achievement.  Today I feel like we achieved something great and, filled with pride, I am a very happy man. 

Our newly built home.

We put the last nail into the structure of our Farmhouse today, completing its intended shape and function.  The details I will write about today are the broad strokes of out home's design and construction, what we were trying to build when we had nothing but empty dirt. 

This building project started in 2015 when I  Photoshop-ped a Google map image while playing around with possible farm layout. (The picture is at the top.)  The site planning went through ten, or so, reconsiderations before we ran into reality and had to site the house in a different place. 

This is the actual home
site plan we used.

In the early site plans, our intention was to make the Farmhouse look as small as we could. We wanted to hide the house by siting it in a back corner. In the end we were not allowed to build where we desired, so the home site was move to where it would be agreeable. This brought a complete change in how we saw the house project because once we had a home site we hired a nice architect named Eric to give us signed drawings.  Eric was worth most of the money we paid. He put fresh eyes on our  design ideas and made our plans work better within the space we had. Some of my early ideas were used, but the idea to re-orient the house along it's long axis presented the house as large and the central object central of the Farm.  

We loved the design Eric came up with and secured an engineer to provide structural details. Neither of these sets of drawings gave any guidance as to building the house, so we made some minor changes to the plans as we built it. Most of  our changes, or interpretations, were about being efficient with money. We used many used parts in furnishing the house. The bath tub, bath sink, cabinets, and doors  were all re-used from other houses. Where we couldn't re-use parts, we made decisions on a cost/benefit basis. All of our plumbing and electrical installations were done to minimize energy and water use and  also be well lit and heated.  Shopping for things we would find useful became a habit. 

This is my original design.
Eric made it work.

The house plan was fairly simple. Since our intention was to open our Farm up to the public, later on, we designed the house to look like a farmhouse might. The main design element in making this appearance was a wrap-around porch where we placed the last nail today. The porch we finished added 750 square feet to the footprint of the house, but also cuts cooling costs and decreases road noise. As we made the many thousands of decisions we added a seven foot ceiling and solid floor in the attic space adding a full 425 of highly usable storage space.  The entire useable floor space of our 1000 square foot house, is 1925 feet. 

This is what we built.
We adjusted it a bit.

Having never built an entire house, but having a great deal of experience in the building trades, we spent a time avoiding, and making up for, mistakes. The County's building inspectors chipped in quite a bit and gave us enough guidance to piece the whole thing together successfully. We had to come up with some idea of how the structure would go together, designed and built an entire water and waste system, then learned how to make a safe and effective electrical system.  Buying materials, learning how to pour a concrete foundation, and piecing a million things together only brought us to a point where we could decide how to finish the house inside and out. A million decisions, all well considered, mostly correct, brought us to today. 

Though we still have a long list of things we need to do before the County signs off on our permit, the broad strokes are done.  

Our last nail is figurative and not literal. But the shape of our home, and the pride of place feeling it gives us seems complete.