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.