August 29th, 2020 The Dog Days of Summer

Despite the heat, Summer is beginning to come to its inevitable end. Harvest season is upon us, not that we grew so much or didn't harvest things all along. 

Not much has happened here in the past few weeks that didn't happen before. So I won't bore the world repeating the mundane. Instead I took some pictures . . .

We have three people who took up the challenge of coming here to grow some food. Their gardens are growing like crazy. The above image is of Beth's Monster Tomatoes. She planted five different types of tomatoes from starts and the combination of good soil and sunshine has turned them into a huge harvest. 

Below is C.B. and Ellen's pepper plants. They used their plot just to grow hot peppers and last week took home about half of a paper shopping bag full of Jalapenos, Serranos, and others. They brought starts from the store and the soils did the rest, but they hadn't done much up until a week or so back.. What was lacking was heat. We had plenty of heat and they now have plenty of peppers.

Beth also planted two squash plants and they have been producing well for about a month. The above picture is her yellow Summer Squash and below is her Zucchini. 

Christina took a different path in her garden plot. She planted nothing but seeds and the explosion of growth has us jealous (pictured both above and below). She planted an eclectic bunch of vegetables and flowers all mixed together. This is the aesthetic sense we admire most. . .  A green mess full of food and color.

Last year we had a tree fall. This year we got rid of the very last reminder of it. We have begun clearing the land behind the Farm and so far we have about an eight foot path back there. The huge tree stump that remained from the tree fall went into the creek. When we repair the fence we hope to move it to the edge of the creek's high bank. At places the bank is as much as thirty-five feet behind the fence so we will gain a lot of space by moving the fence back.

Below are Ann's Romaine Lettuces. She also grows Butter Crunch Lettuces too.  We keep the lettuce under row covers to keep the squirrels from eating it all. So much so that we have taken a lot of lettuces down to the food bank.

While we were waiting for a building inspection I took the day to clear part of the old gravel parking pad out of one of the few problem areas in the Kitchen Garden. I took out about twenty yards of gravel, leaving a really dusty area behind. We are watering this area down to settle the dust and eventually we'll have all of our mulch delivered to this spot. This morning I had a very decorative water sprinkler turned on and it attracted our Runner Ducks.

Below is a gourd that Christine planted in her garden plot.

Above is another image of Christine's garden plot. It is a riot of growing stuff.

When we built our compost heap last fall I put some rotting pumpkin carcasses in with the weeds and stalks. So, naturally, when we spread the mulch we distributed a bunch of seeds. And now we have twenty or so pumpkins ripening in the Kitchen Garden, all of them doing well, none of them planned.

So far our corn hasn't done very well. But the Runner Ducks love hanging out in the corn on the hot days. And the California Poppies are really happy.

Ann's Sunflowers are a favorite of the local Canaries and Finches. She planted five kinds of Sunflower and all are doing very well. So are the two raised beds of succulents and annual flowers we put in last Spring. Two of the remaining Apricot (Asian) Plum trees we kept are at the corners of these two raised beds gardens. They are also taking shape well and should fruit next Summer.

The Peaches and Herbs Garden is doing okay. Some plants are better than others, but this is the first year of perennial and self seeding herbs, so next year will be much better. Our well has a large volume of iron in it. We filter the iron from the water we drink, but don't filter the water we use to water plants. So the  white patio furniture in the gardens, and anything else we have out there, slowly take on a lovely golden red color. The color doesn't come off on clothing or hands so we sort of like the Creekside Gold color we get over time. 

The Farmhouse build is going very well. We are putting a double layer of roofing felt on before putting the final roof covering down. This is all very high and steep work, but were getting it done prior to the rains returning next month. After stapling a layer of paper down we overlay it with another and then nail it down using washer nails. We then add a row of 2x3 boards to ease climbing and working on such a steep roof. We hope to have the roof "dried in" in a week or so. 

August 15, 2020 A Month Later

 Time flies. I looked up and a month's time had gone by without an update for this journal. Not at all too disciplined, but things happen, and don't, that get in the way. The lack of  and update didn't mean that nothing got done.

The Farm is growing. Ann and our three tenant farmers have been very busy. The plots of MacGreggor's Market Garden we have allowed people to grow are doing very well. This is the third year of tilling for MacGreggor's Market Garden. It is small, but we have tilled in quite a bit of compost and so it holds water a bit better than the native soils. The weed seed bank has finally begun to burn itself out so weeds are not as big of a problem in this one particular patch of dirt. Building a vegetable farm from unimproved dirt takes time. We are tilling in tons of compost every year and planting quite a bit. The worms and fungus then have the stuff they need to do the work of permanently improve the dirt and make soil. We are trying to grow eighteen inches of soil depth but at present we're only about half way there. But the lack of depth allows some things to grow pretty well without a lot of watering and weeding.

• One couple who has adopted a plot of land to farm put in nothing but peppers grown from starts they had purchased. The peppers haven't really done well so far this year, but there is a lot of season left. 
• One of our perennial helpers, Beth, took a plot of land and her stuff is doing fantastically. Her Zucchini and tomatoes are huge and producing a huge crop. She has even got some sweet Ground Cherries ripening out there. 
• A local woman and her daughter took a plot and planted nothing but seeds. These have exploded in growth, she even has carrots up and growing. Her sunflowers haven't bloomed yet, but everything else looks very good.
• Our own plantings in this Garden had been pretty slow to grow, but we have been eating our own lettuces for about a month now and we'll be having beans and peppers pretty soon. We also put in quite a lot of peppers, grown from seed, and they are doing okay. But none of the peppers have produced much. 

In the Kitchen Garden we have begun harvesting potatoes and onions. So far there is about five bushels of various potatoes, not as much as expected. Since these rows are in very new dirt we are pretty happy for the harvest, but our plans to donate the excess to the food bank isn't going to be as large as we thought. We are realizing a large number of seed potatoes for next year's planting and the soil ought to be much better then. The Strawberries aren't as "ever-bearing" as we thought they would be. The Strawberry Patch is largely weed free now and the plants all doing pretty well, but there is only enough fruit coming for our own eating. The Peaches and Herbs Garden is doing wonderfully. Our Chives and Thyme is doing very well, enough so that our Runner Ducks are eating only enough to keep the beds tidy. Basil hasn't done real well but the soils are all new. Sapedeh (our Peach tree named for the person who gave it to us) is growing like a wild weed right now and I will have to prune it hard once the weather turns cold and restore its shape. And a few of the Asian plums we have allowed to continue are also doing very well, even though they were pruned to harshly to bear fruit this year. It takes a few years to grow a tree taller, or smaller, but we expect these tress to produce next year. Our corn, pumpkins, and sunflowers are all doing very well in the Kitchen Garden. We have many pumpkins ripening and the whole Garden is very colorful. 

From Sell Road the Farm looks like a Farm should. . . Tons of plants and animals everywhere. The Ducks are happy in their Garden of Ducky Delights. We re-homed the two Khaki Campbells because they turned out to be drakes. And we re-homed ten of our older hens as twenty of our new hens are now ready to join the flock. Ann is working very hard out there, but my time is spent building the new Farmhouse.

All of the Gable ends were 
finally built by last week. 

The big news on the Farmhouse is that the roof is nearly finished. This has been a long haul and our son Jack has been a huge help in putting the thousands of part together. Each of these parts is small when taken on its own, but all of them are considerably high off of the ground. We have safety equipment which is tied to the top of the roof, but this doesn't make the job of going up there any easier. This past week we built all of the interior structure and bracing in, making the roof very stiff, but there are some touch-up projects to do before we can have the thing inspected. 

In a week or so we will have our house framing and roof inspected and then we can begin to put on roof felt on to keep the rains out from above. We ordered the windows a few weeks ago, and already have the doors, siding, and vapor barriers needed to make the place waterproof on the sides. It looks like we will beat the rains and have the place ready to begin finishing the interior. This will all take time, but the house looks a lot like a house ought to.

All in all this post isn't very long despite all that is happening here. The heat has arrived, things are growing, and the house is at its full height and looking good. But there is so much more to do. So we'll just keep pecking away at it all in hopes that our dreams will finally be realized.

July 18th, 2020 Summer Might Have Arrived (at last)

Remembering last year (nearly being killed is hard to forget) I remember looking around the Internet to try and figure out why the Summer weather was so cool. A few sites looked at something by a "solar minimum", which is a phenomenon where the Sun has few sunspots so less solar energy makes it out. As good an explanation as any I suppose. At any rate -the cool Summer of 2019 led into a lack of crop performance. Adding to this the fact that our Farm is subject to the cooler temperatures of the Oregon Coast, and down in a narrow valley, the heat people are seeing elsewhere simply hadn't come to the Farm much. Since most of our sprouts were destroyed when the Greenhouse (and me) was hit by the tree and we had a very cool Summer, we had a fairly poor crop last year. We did have some growth though. Enough to show a profit for the year and qualify for a Farm property tax reduction.

Ann and her team of volunteers did somehow manage to get a few plants into the ground last Summer. Those few produced some food which we either ate or donated to the local food bank. There wasn't enough to sell, so we removed the Produce Stand' pop up canopy and contented ourselves with not being put out of business entirely. We did get enough potatoes and onions to eat through the Winter but wound up having to buy these in mid-Spring. Not entirely a loss, just not a good year.

Our plan since last Summer was to build our new Farmhouse.

Nothing else matters. We put the foundation in in the early Winter. Put up the walls in the late Winter and early Spring. Then put the roof trusses up in June, covering them with sheathing up until this past week (early Summer). Our son Jack has been here since helping with the building since the beginning of the year so we have progressed slowly. Now the Farmhouse has its basic shape. But since most of the building is a two man job Ann has been tending the Farm and getting things growing. And up until last week things have been growing very slowly. But in the past week or so this all changed.

I walked out to get chicken and duck eggs last evening a noticed quite a bit of new growth happening in the Market Garden side of the Farm. Our guest farmers, those who are tending gardens of their own on for free, are really starting to see some results. And out own food crops, the tomatoes, peppers, and beans, are really starting to take off. Even the peppers are starting to grow, though they haven't in the six weeks since they sprouted. With any luck we will eventually see some production, but this isn't our main focus, the house building, just some good news.

For those who wish to open a garden of their own at Creekside Farm, there is still space and time to get things done. Get in touch and we'll help put things together for you. Eat what you grow, sell it, or give it away. All for free. You bring the seeds and plants, and spend an hour a week here, we provide the rest.

In other farming news:

Egg production has been relatively depressed this year. Our flock of chickens is aging and older hens don't produce as well. We are still getting about a dozen a day, just enough to to sell so the chickens are still paying from their up-keep. Our Runner Ducks have continued to produce consistently, but the market for duck eggs isn't as strong. This year we bought twenty new chicks and we will re-home fifteen of our older hens in a few weeks when the chicks move into the Chicken Run. We also build the new Duck Garden and moved the four youngest hens into it a few weeks ago. But the four older ducks are still in with the chickens because out Crested Runners have built a large nest and are sitting on eggs. With any luck we will have some nicely mixed Runner Duck chicks to sell in a few weeks, we have no space to keep any of them. Once the chicks show up we will move all of the ducks into the Kitchen Garden and the new Duck Garden inside of it. Then we can move the new Chickens into the Chicken Run and wait for egg production to rise.

The Farm is looking good. Weeds are always a problem and we spend quite a bit of time chasing weeds down and killing them. We are expanding the Farm by removing the berries, bamboo, and tall grasses found outside the fence-line, but this is a long termed goal. One day I want to move the fence out to the edge of the Creek. This will add about ten percent more usable land to the Farm and allow up to keep better control on the Berries behind the place. We have the weeds under control for the most part, but it would take a few weeks of not tending the problem to let things grow out of control. As we remove the weeds we try to replace them with new plants. This is worked pretty well and we have a lot of new color out in the Gardens to show for it. Yesterday I was walking past a corner plot where Ann and through our some California Poppy seeds to find a burgeoning poppy patch filled with happy Mason Bees. We love this sort of thing.

Ann noticed another Strawberry harvest coming soon from our ever-bearing Strawberry patch. The Patch had produced heavily in late May and early June, but had stopped producing, so we figured things might just be over. But the heat and the bees have got thing going again and we had two quarts of beautiful large berries to eat this week.  Hopefully we will sell some more pretty soon. We have started to take potatoes out of the Kitchen Garden too. Hopefully we won't have to buy spuds any more. The main potato crop will be harvested in September, most of this will go to the food banks because there will be much more need this year due to all the troubles we are all experiencing.  Until then we will grow what we can, sell what we can, eat what we get, and be happy that our lives are not as effected as others without a farm of their own.

We will be trying to finish the roof structure on the new Farmhouse next week, then we will get the house inspected before beginning to put the roof coverings on. The project is taking more time than expected (we expected it would) so we are pushing our move in day to April of next year. Ann will continue tending the gardens and keeping a lid on the weed problem in the increasing heat of Summer while we build. So things are looking good here (if only here). Barring floods, disease, and civil unrest, we are hopeful for the remainder of this year and a return prosperity in the next. Hoping the same for all reading this.

July 4, 2020 A New Picture

Click on this for a bigger picture of our Creekside Farm.

• The light green blob of land is the high point of the Farm at 231 feet.
• The purple blobs in the creek are the creek bottom at 216 feet.
• The lowest point of the Farm is in blue.
• Each line shows a two foot change in elevation.

I created this picture using a combination of Google Maps, Google Earth, and Photoshop. At the top of the image there is a section in red which we call the Kitchen Garden. At the bottom is the Chicken Run. The brown area above this is MacGreggor's Market Garden.  Just above that is the House, tiny house, Kennels, and all of the shop space and storage. At the Right side is Sell Road. The left side is the West Fork of Dairy Creek. The yellow portion of the creek I marked to show a landslide we noticed which was a source of my concern. As it turned out the slide area doesn't appear to be severe or widening at this point. It took quite a lot of work to prepare an image which has enough information on it to know if the Creek is beginning to be a problem or not.

The base image (bottom, if you think of a stack of transparencies laid one on top of the other) is from Google Earth. I have been spending quite a bit of my limited free time learning the limits of the free version of Google Earth. In this base image I carefully laid out the topography of the Farm using colored lines and noting elevations, mostly to get a good idea of the slope of the West Fork of Dairy Creek. The Creek is hard to see from anywhere on the Farm and I really wanted to get to know it better since it was a source of concern for us. The Farm is generally located above a 228 foot elevation and rises to just above 231 feet (the light green blob). But at the Creek's edge it drops off quickly down to the water at about 218 feet.  In Winter the Creek rises to about 224 feet routinely and can get up to 225 feet at times. Knowing how the Creek works allows us to forego finding flooding solutions and planting bank stabilizing stuff.

The first over-layered image is from Google Maps. I took a satellite image from it and have used the same image to practice laying out the features of the Farm, including finding where to put the Gardens and siting the Farmhouse.

This is the Farm plan for 2020
used in the image above it.

I have made many such images over the five years we have been involved in the project, but none of these could be very accurate because we lacked a way to show the place in more than one dimension. The underlying Google Earth image allowed me to put the two dimensional image into a more proper context.

I hope to further improve these image to reflect the reality of the Farm and give us a better understanding of how the land looks. It is difficult to get a handle on the project when standing on the ground this image allows us to make better decisions regarding land uses.

July 1, 2020 The Faster You Go . . .

The weather has been wonderful at the Farm, for the most part. Mid-seventy degree sunshine nearly every day and just a few days of soaking rain kept things happening and then not happening. But we have been very busy this past week. So busy that it took two weeks to get to writing some of it down. It seems the faster we go, the more we get behind.

The Farmhouse build is still our highest priority. We got the walls up and covered with sheathing a bit more than two weeks ago and spent a week getting much of the roof lumber and supplies brought to the Farm.

We got the new farmhouse'
roof trusses lifted into place. 

Last week we rented a hydraulic lift and spent three days pulling the roof trusses up onto the roof and nailing them to the top of the walls. The lift made the job much easier, but it still took every hour of two and one-half days to carefully pull each individual truss up. The height from the ground, once the truss was lifted, was about twenty-eight feet or there about, so  standing a fet feet higher than this was a bit of adrenaline pumping fun. We had intended to raise the trusses from the ground into place, but we found that the lift couldn't do it because the platform at the end of the long arm couldn't turn to the left or the right. The arm the platform was attached to turned enough to work on the project if we moved the lift a few times so we eventually had to settle for pulling each truss up to the attic floor, moving the lift, and then picking each truss up and placing it. Each truss had to be carefully spaced, using blocks of 2x4, and nailed to the top of each supporting wall, then tying each end of the trusses down with hurricane straps so that the roof wouldn't blow off in a storm. We began work last Thursday morning and got the last truss set in place on Saturday afternoon.

An attic view. 

The whole thing wore us out, both physically and mentally. But it looks very good.

Jack and I are putting the roof sheathing boards onto the trusses this week. Another pretty tough job. We have the scaffolding we bought a month back to work from, but it is still very nerve wracking work because the walls are sixteen feet high off of the dirt and everything is either heavy or on a steep slope. The scaffolding is old, a bit wobbly, and the ground uneven, making things a bit more worrisome. But we are getting through it. Roofing is hard work. Once the sheathing is all up there we will still need to  put on the "through gable" (the gable on the front of the house). It faces the front and must be built on top of the roof we already have framing in. Then tar paper.  This is slow going work, probably second in difficulty only to the foundation work a few months back.

If you click on this picture it might
get large enough to glimpse the new chicks.

Ann gets out of the hard work by doing the Farm work, weeding and early Summer planting this week. She is happy to be on the ground. This week she has cleared and reclaimed quite a large area of dirt, and plants that had seeded themselves in the weeds. She's found dozens of corn plants, pumpkins, and tomatoes rising from last Summer's mulch pile. We tilled it in and plant came up.

We bought twenty more Orpington chicks this past Friday. Our flock is getting a bit old and we had planned to put ten new birds into our flock every year. Last years chicks were put off by the tree fall, so we doubled up this year.

Stanley is just visiting.
A handsome boy for sure.

Chickens produce eggs best early in life, so many of our hens are a bit too old to produce the eggs we need and must be replaced. Last year we had five chickens die off, and ten of them escaped through the tree sized hole on our fence, so new birds are a good idea. We don't make much money on eggs, but we do get free eggs.

In other news, as if there wasn't enough to do, one of the families which had taken a puppy from Laffee Taffee's litter is letting him vacation with his Mom and Dad.  He is a delight.
A big boy, considering his parents, but a really handsome boy with a great personality. He has played, run, and barked himself until his feet and voice are sore. His family will come get him on Friday. We're pretty sure he'll be happy about it, but our dogs might not seeing him go back to Sherwood.

June 13, 2020 A Wet Week

The past week was proposed as the week when we got all the things to put the roof up next week. Needles to say it, but we didn't quite get there. Farming and Rain took up most of the time between working on the new Farmhouse.

I did go out and haul in one whole unit of the siding we have chosen for the house. We also bought one whole unit of OSB boards to sheath the roof trusses as they go up. One of the trusses we had come in a few weeks ago was damaged in shipping, but a guy from the truss company came out and we fixed the truss inthe rain.

We ordered the metal hurricane straps from Amazon and they said it would be the end of next week before they would come, but they came today so we're back on schedule. I will go get the remaining roof stuff Monday and Tuesday, the roof ought to go up on Thursday and Friday.

Our hope was to pick Strawberries Monday and Friday, but the rains were very heavy, so we worked other projects instead. We did pick about three bushels on Wednesday, but a lot of the fruit was a bit moldy and much of it was a bit on the small side. We kept the good ones, but made the decision to begin thinning the plants out and keeping only those plants which produced marketable fruit. All of our plants are ever-bearing varieties, so we should improve our total yield while reducing the labor needed to get the job done. There certainly are some very good berries out in the Produce Stand for sale every day, so come get some.

The weather is very cool this week, loads or rain, but the next week promises to end in glorious sunshine and much higher temperatures. So it will soon be time to build and grow again.

April 6, 2020 A Funny World

The first week of the picking season gave us plenty.

The World is an odd place this week. Protests everywhere, COVID19 in full swing and nobody seems to take much notice. But not at Creekside Farm. Things at the bottom of the Apple Valley don't change very much. Even the weather stays fairly consistent.

This week the weather was wonderful. A bit breezy at night, never below fifty degrees and never above seventy-five. Warm enough to sprout seeds and ripen Strawberries, and that's what happened. We picked Strawberries three times this week, taking about three bushels of fully ripe berries and selling two at our Produce Stand. We moved the stand down to the end of the road and people came by bearing cash money. We still have a bushel to sell and hope people will come buy them soon. We'd hate to see them go to waste. We will deliver the excess to the local food bank on Monday so there will be no loss.

"Der Gortn fun Dukki Dileyts"

The gardens are all flourishing, making us wish we had more time to plant. The Garden of Ducky Delights was heavily planted in wildflowers and white clover, the seeds are mostly sprouted and will grow rapidly once the heat sets in. We have so many seeds in which haven't come out to play yet. Our Marigolds are doing well and we have a flat of beans sprouted, but no corn so far. We have pumpkins and sunflowers sprouted, but no peppers or tomatoes yet. All we need is heat.

The new Farmhouse actually looks something like a house now.

Our son Jack and I finished wrapping the house in sheathing, making it ready for a roof. We went out to buy siding, but still need some things for the roof. We're hoping to put the roof on soon, but have to bring all of the parts together first. We'll get the parts staged this week and put it together the week following after. We will then have the whole thing inspected. Once the roof is on the house will be ready for wiring, plumbing, insulation, and drywall.

The week went so quickly, so much got done. But there is a great deal more to do.

The Produce Stand is selling Strawberries, so come out and get some.