December 26th, 2023 Boxing Day and the Winter Plan

 Every year, about on this same day, and Christmas being done, our thoughts turn back to getting things done on our Farm.  There is a bigger plan in place which we are still working toward and we are not for sitting.  But there is a limit to our energy and daytime sunlight.

It rains nearly every day in Winter and four of seven years there was snow on December 26th. Not a whole lot of motivation for getting out there and getting things done. So we kid ourselves and begin planning for the coming year on this day, every year. Since we have little money, and less time every year, planning is usually a bit more aspirational than actual. A few years ago we might have looked at plans left un-finished as something of a loss.  But we've adopted a new philosophy. Good planning means making larger plans than will actually be done and then letting our actual time and money trim tthe list down. 

This iss the new layout for 2024
The newer areas are highlighted in white.
The rest of it is how we built it so far.

We need to do quite a bit of work on our Kennel spaces. This will happen in the first weeks of the year and be our first priority. We need to make the Doghouse walls tougher and put in some better flooring, and there's a few electrical and plumbing things to work through. The Doghouse had been our Bedroom and Laundry in its previous life, so making it a good Doghouse isn't too much work and more about parts than labor. The Kennel area needs a good fence and some ground cover to keep the mud down. All of this is a high priority since we need to grow our Kennel business.  We will eventually offer boarding and grooming, as well as the breeding and coat businesses we already do. Plenty of work to do.

We have been in our new home for a bit over two years. Some of the finishing work that we hadn't time or money for when we moved into the house is still not done. So we are making a "punch list" of stuff in the house, like moldings, and small  finish flaws, (stuff that can be done on rainy days) and prioritizing them for January and February. When we built the house we painted everything, but the paint was more of a primer color that we could get in recycled paint. So we will re-paint the Bedroom and Bath and this project includes some finish flaws in the drywall and texture. None of this is necessary, but would be nice to get it done. We also never got around to painting the door jambs, window sills, and didn't have the cash to do door and floor moldings, so these too will be a thing this Winter. Our Office has been a catch all for random stuff since we built the place. We have an office, but can barely walk into the room right now. So gathering furishings and putting up shelving will take a higher priority this Winter. We will concentrate most on the Bedroom end of the Farmhouse even though there are things needing done in the Great Room. If there's time we will attend to the Great Room stuff which includes paint and moldings, but these might not all get done.

It is our habit to make our gardening plans in January. These too are often quite large and there is never enough time or energy to get them all done. This year we are rebuilding our chicken coop since our initial build was for fifty hens and we gave up trying to supply the world with eggs last year. So we will scale down the coop and move the hens to a new place with less space and more out of the way. The space we open up moving the chickens will be used as farming space. We will move the Greenhouse once more, having moved it three years ago, to a place inside of the old chicken run. This will add quite a bit of planting space to the Market Garden. We will also add twelve more feet to the length of the Greenhouse to accomodate more planting tables. Adding the length won't cost much and the greenhouse plastic we have will cover the newer length. We will also change the orientation of the place to catch better light and use our heating system and grow lights better. Much of the remaining plans still need to be worked out, but we have experience and most of the equipment is already here. 

Our basic Garden Plan is going to be much the same as last year's planning, but a bit bigger, with less row building to do. Our pest control plan and half the irrigation system is ready to go, but we will need three times as much of everything and this will be our goal for 2024. At some point we neeed to make money of farming. Sprouting a few thousand plants and putting them into dirt is most of what Spring and Summer will look like. 

At some point we would like to get the permanent Farm Stand built. This larger trailer design will be settled inside the Farm's fenceline and we will have parking for customers. The new stand is going to have a large refrigerated walk-in and shelf spaces for canned and other farm made goods. The whole thing will need new fencing, water, and electrical power. We already have much of the stuff to do the work but this might become project for next year since we already have our Farm Stand trailer to work with.

There are a few dozen more items which will have to become part of our bigger list. But the number of items will be bigger than there will be time, money, and physical power necessary to do them. We have never shied away from lofty goals and always make grandiose plans. We'll have to count the successes up at the end of the year. But if the past tells us anything, we always get a lot of stuff done. 

December 09, 2023 Our Christmas Letter

December 1st, 2023 Pest Report

 

Last January I wrote a long(ish) article about our intended strategy for keeping bugs out of our gardens. (You can read about it here.)  And through the Spring and Summer we got the bulk of the tactical plans that came of these thoughts implemented. This article is merely a recap of what happened and can be skipped by most people as trivial.

Our Lettuce Row Covers
kept the rodents away.

Our rodent population this past year was small. Our main concern, after putting in rows of barrier plants and using those few idea we had laying around to keep them off the plants, became moles and voles. These didn't really do much damage to the crops, but appears in every row as a small hole near the end of each row and some few places where the wee beasties had to come up for air. Our no-till growing strategy meant there was deep enough soft ground that these two sorts of animals were able to keep their tunnels much deeper in the dirt. Moles eat worms, of which there were plenty of Compost Worms (Red Wrigglers) above the level of the soil, and Earth Worms (mostly black worms) under the compost layer in the soil. (I did see one fairly large furry little Moles in one of the Compost piles when I moved it with the tractor. Our tangle of Bassets caught it and there was some happy carnage for a little bit.) Voles eat vegetables, mostly root systems. We didn't have much plant predations, though there might have been a little, so Voles weren't really much of a problem. We didn't really see many Moles or Voles, but when we did find an open hole we dropped two or three Mole Bait Pellets into the open hole to keep the numbers down where we could without adding a lot of pesticides to the soil. I saw an open hole this morning, so they are still out there.

We had a bit of a Chipmunk problem in late Spring and I had to shoot them where I could with my 22lr rifle. I got good at it and the chipmunks were mostly under control through the Summer. We had few squirrels, but this Fall there were plenty coming onto the Farm to gather Walnuts and I let them be. The squirrels aren't living on the farm but they are put on notice. We also had a rabbit at the back of the Market Garden. He's a slippery little guy and avoids us. One day I was working in the garden and he walked out of the brambles to lay in the sun. I told him he ought not lay out where I could see him because I definetly would shoot him if I could, so he agreed to lay out somewhere else and we never really had any rabbit troubles this year. I carried my rifle around with me for two months in late Spring and this solved the problem of Chipmunks for the most part. 

We had no Japanese Beetles this year, which were a concern a few years ago, but toward the end of the Summer we did have a few common Cucumber Beetles in amongst the squash and bean plants. These were the only insects that our efforts did little about. We planted many barrier and attractive plants in long rows throughout the gardens and this seemed to do the trick. We had a few Flea Beetles in the Potatoes early on, but a fine kitchen sifter and some diatomaceous Earth took care of it. We applied nematodes to the rows in early Summer and I don't know what effect they might have had. Our only real problem was Flea Beetles. In the bottom half of Summer we had an explosion of Flea Beetle populations throughout the gardens. There were millions of these highly destructive bugs which might have done some real damage to the crop plants. But they were more attracted to the Nasturtiums than anything else and their millions were wiped out in one application of Diatomaceous Earth. Two days after they showed up and turned the Nasturtiums black, and ate nearly every leaf, the plants began to recover. By Summer's end the plants were looking robust and covered in flowers once more. 

There were few slugs in the gardens to worry about. We did find them around the house and in the wood piles. We also saw some Strawberry predation, though this might have been Field Rats or Chipmunks. There wasn't enough trouble to address, so we let it go. Our first year of the new Strawberries was great, next year we'll put in three times the number. 

Our little Farm Stand

Bottom line, the strategies we adopted last Winter worked pretty well. The only real trouble was the Flea Beetle explosion, which we saw immediately, got on top of, and solved easily since the combination of an attractive plant and an organic solution worked easily.  The rodent populations will continue to be a problems since clearing territory only gives outsiders an opportunity. I suppose that vigilance is the price of lettuce and hunting them out seems the only way to control the damage. We'll likely try adding barrier plants to the edges of the Farm next Spring. I'm thinking allium types will give us a crop plant that rodents don't seem to want to cross through might do the trick. 

Winter is setting in at Creekside Farm. Our Christmas lights are up and we can't wait to find a tree to dirty up the Farmhouse. Our Farm is looking pretty good and we're pretty sure of the future, so long as things continue as they are. Life here is good, if not easy.

I read a story a very long time ago about the Laziest Man on Earth. Born on a farm he thought it would be better for him to avoid all of that hard work by doing the easier work of thinking, so he went to school. That he became a mathematician isn't the moral of his story though. I learned from this that thinking things through, when you have the time to do it, was one very good way to avoid as much of the physical labor as one could while still being a farmer. Our pest controlling "dogmatic" thoughts of last Winter seemed to have not been a waste of time.