June 30th, 2023 Summer Opportunities

 Summer setting in at Creekside Farm mean opportunities abound, far too many to get them all done. So the priorities will be chosen based on time and money. 

Our Farming practices are mostly in place. The Gardens are planted, such as they are, and the watering system we planned for in the past few months is all in and working. The planting being done, all that is left is to grow and harvest produce, then sell it as quickly as we can. We have a good plan for this and our produce trailer is just as good as it was last year when we built it. We will fill the trailer as things come available and haul it down to the end of the road once we have sufficient produce to make the investment of time worth while. We had a very large gardening plan mapped out this year. Had we had a good handle on the scale we could have increased the plan by another half measure. When we laid down our first sets of rows we found that the first set was twelve rows larger than we planned for the space. So we hustled the plan a bit and moved quite a lot of the Kitchen Garden plan to the Market Garden. I am still working in the Kitchen Garden to lay down the new rows, but there's not much to put in the new dirt we've created there. The produce opportunities are in very good shape, hopefully we will pull a good sized profit out of our dirt. The goal for the year is $25k in Farm produce sales, we're ready, but we'll count it all up at the end. 

The Farmhouse still needs a concrete porch, and this is an important thing we must get done before late Fall, but there's a few things with a bit higher priority to do first.

We have to move the tiny home to the back of the Farm, behind the Farmhouse. This was always a part of the plan. The double wide tiny home is to be split into it's two halves and make a guest house and a dog kennel from the two halves. We spent a lot of time in Spring remodeling the Guest House section. It is now a two bedroom with a central shower room and water closet. The entry is re-oriented for installing a sliding glass door, though there's now a huge window at one end and a door at the other (neither of which will be used as an exit).  When we built the tiny home we used nothing but the least expensive materials to save money and weight. Now the place is completely sheathed in drywall and the electrical an plumbing has been upgraded to something less primitive.  Our son will live there for a time, once he's moved out we will rent it Air BnB style. 

The Kennel side will be an open and easier to clean proposition. We will have a grooming and whelping room for our puppy and boarding business. And we will have adequate electrical and water infrastructure to make it comfortable in there. Our Kennel will take on an appearance of a Living Room. A comfortable space for the dogs and for us to stay out there with them in the evenings. The area surrounding the Kennel will be fences in three foot chain link. I've already collected the fencing and we'll put it in after the Kennel is moved. There will be two yards around the Kennel. The main yard will be for the Hounds' daily use, the second much smaller yard will be for segregating the boys from the girls and for letting the new puppies out once they get to six weeks old. Past this there's nothing more planned.  In order to make all of this happen we need to put in electrical, water, and septic service to these new spaces. To that end I have been collecting parts and plans for quite a few months. While we do these things we will also make some changes to our basic plans. 

Since moving here in 2018 we have had a fairly stable electrical service, but this has changed in the last few years. PGE now turns the power off rather than take a chance that their electrical grid might start a fire. We bought an generator once we began planning to move here in 2017, but hadn't had much need for it until this past year. But the generator, as big as it is, isn't enough to power much of the Farm and the uses we have for power are no long just a tiny home. So we bought a second generator, a much bigger generator, and have a plan to put in transfer switches and stuff like it to power the essentials without having to run around with long extension cords. The plan is in place and I've been busy finding the parts for it all on CraigsList. The goal is to make all of these moves by the end of July.  So there's a lot going on. Luckily for us there's no puppies on the way and we have some help to get some of this done. 

My Brother came to visit in late Spring and has been living in his very spacious camp trailer parked next to the tiny home while he figures out his retirement move. The trailer will be moved near to the Utility Shed where I will put one of the generators and be able to power everything from there.  The Utility Shed is also the place where our clean water system is centrally located too, so all we need do it figure out  the septic hook-up and he'll  be set-up. Since our septic pipe between the tiny homes and the septic tank run close by the site for his trailer we'll be set-up in a jiffy.  Getting water and septic to behind the Farmhouse is a bit more of a job, but nothing we can't do easily and without a great deal of expense. 

So our plans are moving forward and all is going swimmingly. In other news there really isn't much more to talk about. We traded one of Abba Zabba's last litter with another breeder and Lemonhead Lucy has been with us for about  two weeks.  She is a fireball and fearless little white and red girl Basset. She's a joy and will have a good life here. Eventually we will be out of the puppy business and Farm and hospitality businesses take over, but there's years to go before all of the parts of our plans are in place. 

The heat of Summer came this week. Crops are growing quickly. Produce is just a few weeks away. Life is good. You might want to come and visit. The produce that we have will be in the picture bar at the top of this page. It will be the best you've had. We promise.

June 11th, 2023 Summer Weather

The end of May brought a string of 90+ degree days, then things went back to our normal near eighty for a few weeks. The heat didn't really change much in what we had to do, planting the assorted crops, but the results have been a bit better than we expected. The plants are doing very well and outgrowing the weeds by just a bit.

The plans we made in January are nearly all in place. Our row building plan is almost four fifths complete. Dozens of neatly made rows of varying lengths, each oriented exactly from North to South to grab maximum light no matter the season. These will all be permanent rows, after this year the tiller on our tractor won't have too much use and I might just dismount it. In our no-till scheme what happens is addition of organic matter (leaf compost) directly on top of each row as we take plants out and put new plants in. This, along with loosening the soil with our heavy Broadfork, should keep out plants healthy and growing more vigorously every year. But there were three bigger plans for the Gardens.

We specifically designed the rows to keep our pest problems down by putting the right plants in the right places. Some plants discourage pests from crossing between rows. It is hard to prove these are working because the effect is nothing, but we are guess things are going along just fine since there hasn't been much animal predation of our starts and seeds. We had always planned to put Nematodes into the Gardens to keep larvae down and we did this two days ago. So far no new is good news, but the Flea Beatle population doesn't seem to have been effected much. The main target for the Flea Beatles has been the tomatoes so far and a little bit on the potatoes. We walk along the row the rows  and squish the little black specks a few times a day figuring the dead ones can't breed. And we hope the nematodes do the job down in the soil. If the Beatles get out of hand we have a few more tricks we can use.  Our only other pests are the few mammals we have seen.

Radishes

There have been a few Moles working the rows. They are easy enough to track, but the previous years of gopher tunnels gives them a super highway to whatever part of the Gardens they think are nice. So we are flooding their holes, ruining their tunnels, and hoping they will either go away or attract an owl. Either will do the job. Moles eat Worms, of which we have a great many, so they don't do much damage to the crops except for messing up the rows a bit, an easy to fix.  The few field rats we had seem to have either been killed off or have fled. but not before eating quite a few watermelon and bean starts. We planned for this and over planted starts so that we might replace them as quickly as we can. This doesn't replace the growth, but we have a lot of growth and most of the plants are unhurt by rodents. Aside from these few things it seems out pest plans are doing okay. 

The third part of our plan is crop rotation and bed flipping. We haven't moved far enough into the season to start thinking about this seriously, but there is some movement. The used forty gallon plastic stock tanks we bought have all been carefully filled with the right soil components and planted in Radishes, Carrots, and Bunching Onions.  The seed have germinated and we're hopeful of getting these things to grow quickly. The plan is to plant two new rows of these three every few weeks so that there will be a steady supply for the Produce Stand.  Fingers crossed. The rest of our rotation thing can be discussed later. 

The month of May was so much more cooperative this year than last. And the presence of  Ann and I in the Gardens nearly every day means things are slightly cleaner and quite a bit better laid in.  We are watering a bit less this year due to the thick compost mulch cover put on every row. So too the weeds are greatly decreased and easy to remove, but it's an uphill fight. There are still quite a few trouble areas for weeds, but I am burning and cutting a few times a week trying to stay on top of the weed problem. And there's still much to do that is not  digging and planting.

Pickler Cucumbers

We have a new irrigation thing happening soon. I invested a bit in a drip tape plan to directly water the plants at the dirt level. This is a big job but the parts are all here and once I get a minute to start putting it all in things will go along swiftly.  

My Brother, visiting in his first few months of retirement and looking for a job and permanent housing here, has spent a few weeks siding the Utility Shed. This was something that needed done before next Fall and today it is nearly complete. We will caulk and paint it in the next few weeks. 

Very soon I will need build build the parking lot area that will allow us to begin opening the Produce Stand. This is more to give the four cars here every day a place to stay and allow people to use the driveway outside of the Farm as they access the Stand. We're shooting for mid-July opening and things are looking good. 

Other than this a great many smaller things still need doing. We need to set up a backup power generation plan to make this place habitable when PGE turns off power to avoid wild fires. We need to put in the infrastructure to make the tiny home move immediately ready to use. I'll be looking for the parts in the coming few weeks. 

Jalapeño

If it seems we are really busy, we are. At our age we have a good five or six hour work day available, and this about four days a week. But the lack of the forty hour week doesn't seem to be holding up our plans. We just have to keep moving.