May 12th, 2024 Hurrying Up So That We Can Wait.

 

Our two rows from
last year as of today.

We've been pretty busy here on the Farm. Working the planting plan, sprouting seeds, and putting what plants we can into the ground. But the Springtime weather is a bit too wet and a lot to cool to make a while lot of headway in growing things. Still and all we are getting some things going while we wait for the Summer.

Our two rows when
we started this year.

Right now there are many hundreds of plants either in the Greenhouse or on benches nearby. Every type of seed. We have quite a few varieties of Peppers, tomatoes, corn, beans, peas, and most other garden veggies that come in seed packets. There were enough plants this year that we had to come up with some way of keeping track of them. Managing what we have, what we will need, and where they are in the growing cycle takes a lot of time. In the past years we tried jotting things down on paper, but this got confusing and really didn't tell us too much unless we spent hours compiling the numbers for analysis. Then we started journaling things using Google's Calendar, and this was a bit better because the numbers would show up on a wider variety of computer screens and fit in our pockets. The calendar almost made it work, but again we had to pull the information off of the computer and put it into a spreadsheet to make sense of it. Last year we moved everything over to a Farm BLOG, something like what you are reading right now, but without all the great writing. But in the end we raand into the same problem, pulling out data and then trying to analyze it.  All of these things had one central theme, journal what you did today. 

So this year we are trying to do something simpler. We came up with a string of numbers for each type of seed and are journaling each type on a separate page. The form is simple and handles one thing well: planting seeds in dirt. This is the form:

z-x/y-1:2-3:4 ______________________

• z is the seed name. Usually we are planting more than one type of seed of the same kind. Like two varieties of watermelon or three varieties of lettuce. So we give each a separate letter for each variety at the top of each page. 
• x/y is the date of the entry. The x is the month, y the day. 
• 1:2 are greenhouse numbers where 1 is the number of seeds we have showing leaves and 2 is the number of seeds we have planted in the Greenhouse. (So if we have planted eighty seeds in trays or otherwise and eighteen of them have shown up bearing leaves the thing looks like this 18:80.) 
• 3:4 are the plants in the dirt out in the garden where 3 is the number of plants growing in the garden, 4 is the number of plants we need growing in the garden. (So 5:24 mans we need 24 but have 5)

Since we get around to looking at trays of seeds as we need to, the new numbering system keeps track of what we have, what we need, and where we are in the process. This cuts way down on  journaling what is actually going on.  There's room at the end for notes. Like fertilizing, or if we run into something out of the ordinary.  A typical record changed to look like this for watermelons:

 Sb- sugar baby - 48

W - watermelon - 48

W-4/11-0:44-0;48 greenhouse

Sb-4/11:0:36-0:48

W-4/23-37:44-0:48 sprouting 11

Sb-4/23-25:36-0:48 sprouting 50

W-4/26-39:52-0:48

Sb-4/26-24:24-0:48

Sb-4/29-21:66-0:48

W-4/29-57:74-0:48

Sb-5/1-31:96-0:48 

W-5/1-44:52-0:4

So we can tell just from looking that we have ten sugar baby watermelon sprouts out of thirty we have planted in pots, there aren't any out in the garden yet, but we plan for forty-eight eventually. If there's something that doesn't make sense we can find out what just by counting the plants and looking at the trays.  Eventually we might develop something that tracks the harvest, but we decided to keep it simple for the time being. In the current format we can see how long it took to sprout the seeds, then how long it too to get them planted in the ground. And since we track plants separately we've got nothing to sort out later. we're hopeful this will work, but journaling is a big part of getting things going in the right direction.  

Other than this I am spending a lot of time preparing rows for planting. Each row must be weeded out because we don't weed them in Winter. We don't weed them because in our no-till system the roots of weeds is part of the natural cycles which add soil organic matter below the surface. Weeds can help protect the soil from ice and rain damage too. After clearing things off the surface, I use out broadforking tool to make sure the soil isn't compacted. Since we don't till the dirt and don't walk around on it either there's little chance the soil is going to be compacted, but we check anyway. Then I sift out a load of leaf mold compost and spread it onto the beds. This compost will feed the soil, the worms, and the microbes that make nutrients available to the plants. In the end we have a nice light and well drained soil that holds water and plants well. Planting is a cinch and the plants have plenty of room to grow. 

Eventually, once we have plants in the dirt, I will put the irrigation system together and make sure things get water in Summer. For now the water in the ground that comes to the surface from below is plenty enough, and it rains all the time anyway, but once the plants start fruiting we need to keep the leaves dry as best we can. 

As it turns out, farming is hard work. But it gets a bit easier every year as we learn how to do things better. Right now we're doing the hurry up and waiting thing. We go out each morning and get all that we can do done until we tire out. Eventually we will be forced to wait until stuff starts ripening and then we'll have to market everything the best we can. 

It takes a marketing plan to sell produce, this is certain, but until the crops become reliable putting anythiing more scientific to the plan makes little sense. But we will get there.

May 4th, 2023 Spring Update

 Things are humming along at Creekside Farm. The weather turned warmer and a whole lot dryer this past few weeks, allowing us to move out into the gardens in earnest. Today it is raining quite a lot, but this isn't supposed to last for very long and we'll get back to work. 

Our farm grows weeds better than most. We never use chemicals unless something is very wrong so weeds can get ahead of us if we take a day off. I have spent the last week or two moving and tilling leaf compost into the gardens.  Tilling has the dual effect of killing weeds and allowing us to add compost to the soil, so the ground is looking pretty good in most places. We're heading into a no-till permanent gardening practice, so sooner or later I'll take the tiller off of our little tractor "Rosie". I won't go further into no-till than I have in previous articles. If you don't know what I mean there is an archive of articles to look through and you are welcome to look through it. We have a large garden plan based on our previous plans, the chief difference is that all of our rows will be completely new, all of them very heavily stocked with soil organic matter in the form of compost and mulch, and nearly every one of them will be aligned in a north-south direction to get maximum light.

One of three garden plans for this year.
This is the first one we have been planting.
It turned out that we had seven more rows than we had planned for.

We spent some time a cutting down, or limbing up, the sky depriving trees shading parts of our gardens. There was one seriously dangerous deciduous tree shading the east end of the Market Garden which we took down a few weeks ago.  Yesterday we went out to fall three large and healthy pines, but thought better of it once we took a good look. These are all along the front fence near power lines. We called a friend who cuts down trees for a living and will see what it might cost to take them all down next week. We did take all of the branches off up to about twenty four feet and there's plenty to do without the little new gardens removing these trees will produce. 

Ann has been spend a lot of time in the Greenhouse this year. We heated the place and added some fans to move air around and the plants really took off. Once I built some new rows and the weather turned nice she got out there and started putting plants in the ground. Strawberries, flowers, and the first flight of corn (there will be five this year) are all in. A multitude of crops are ready to go in or ready to plant. All is on schedule/ 

This garden sits to the south of the first one.
The areas for basil will have to move until we get the trees down.
This is a huge increase in garden spaces and we'll grow hot peppers here.

The Kitchen Garden area will hold our potato crops and cooled down peppers. Tis year we are adding a cool version of the Habanero Pepper. The hot version is one of the hottest peppers humans can use, but ours has not heat to it. The cooled Jalapeños and Habaneros have all of the great chili pepper flavors, none of the heat, so they will soon become a favorite on our produce stand. I tilled the Kitchen garden spaces in the last few days so we hope to begin planting there in a week or so. Peppers take a lot of heat to thrive and it just is not that warm out yet. Potatoes really don't care much when they are planted.  We will plants flowers and herbs wherever there is space and time.

The Kitchen Garden spaces are nearly ready for planting.

We are aiming to make the Farm profitable for produce this year and all is going pretty much according to plans. But there is certainly more work to do than we have time and energy. Things will happen in their own time. Our goal is to have the Produce Stand moved down to the end of Sell Road where the people are every day. So picking in the morning, selling in the afternoon. We shall see how it all works out. Farming is going along as we thought it might, but there's a lot going on here right now.

We had a litter of puppies about seven weeks ago. Most of them will leave us for new families in a bout a week's time. This is a big part of our lives and livelihood. We love to see them come into our little world. Love to see them grow and learn. The we love to see them go so that some semblance of cleanliness and order can be restored. Mostly we love it, but there are days . . .

We ran into a bit of trouble with our fresh water system in these past few months. I thought it might be overloading the water filters that was causing it so I went out to add more filtering capacity. As I was working through it I figured out that something was wrong in the pipe routing that brought water from the well to the filters, so we dug the problem out, swapped a few pipes, and this fixed the problem. Last Tuesday I replaced the filter media and things are cleaning up as we go along. Since I made the mistake a few years back, when we were building the water system, the rust and resin got thoroughly into everything so it might take a while to get it all out. This morning the water was clear and iron free. Hurray for us!

Jack and I have nearly finished remodeling half of the tiny home cabin, the part he will occupy once we have it moved behind the new Farmhouse. It looks great, but there's still a few things to do. As is always at Creekside Farm, so much to do.  The second half of the tiny home will also move to the back and become the new kennel and grooming area. We'll remodel it once it is moved. Hopefully we will get these things shifted around once all of the compost behind the Farmhouse is shifted into the gardens. 

As a last note, to those interested in our longer story, we talked to our lawyer yesterday. For those who don't know we ran into a problem with our ownership of the Farm last Summer while trying to finalize the sale of the property. Things got really tense and terse for a month or two and then we found a lawyer worth the money and stopped worrying so much. While things still are not entirely settled, it looks like they might we be in a few months. He has this thing well in hand. 

Time goes by quickly if you don't pay attention to it. We are lucky to have each day and none of them go by unnoticed. If anyone reading this would like the opportunity to get fingers into good dirt, come on ahead. Working in the sunshine is wonderful. Someone said you had to stop to smell roses. I say there's plenty of sweet thing to smell while moving around and working. 

April 1st, 2023 On the Cusp of Spring

 These past few years have had wet and cold Spring seasons. Growth doesn't really happen until soil temps come up to an average of sixty degrees. This is also the temperature soil microbes begin breathing and the smell of soil is in the air. I expect by the second weekend of April we will begin smelling Spring. It will certainly be very nice.

It is a bit too wet out on the fields to till or begin making ready for planting. There are some sizable projects that need done while we wait.  We finally had the time and courage needed to take down one of the larger danger trees. This tree also deprived a large portion of the Market Garden of morning light and had rotted out at least five times.  It was difficult to tell which way things might fall when cut off. But we got it down safely burned the carcass almost to ashes.  The project meant taking down the hand tool rack and East fence of the Market Garden.  In the end the fence project compacted the wet soils we never got planted last year; they will take a bit of fixing. These repaired rows will be the first planted. We have a few new strawberry plants to go in. Moving the fence allows us to move the greenhouse to its permanent placing  near the house in late Fall. In late Summer we will move the tiny home and kennel to its permanent placing behind the house. Next year will be a bit more open. 

Our gardening plan is large this year. Lots of beds to create and restore. Our Greenhouse is full of plants. Everything is being held in ten by twenty inch flats. Each flat hold between 20 and 92 plants, depending on the pot. We have a great many plants ready to go and as soon as they are planted the flats will be replanted with more. We will direct sow when the average daytime temps reach seventy degrees. This will be toward the end of May. Until then we have plenty to do. 

We had a litter of Basset Hound puppies in March. Nine beautiful little hounds. They are finding new families very well and Ann is doing much of the marketing. It is a happy business, not unlike the Christmas Lighting business I once did. The pups come, stay until they are the best sort of fun, but dirty. And then they go to happy families and we can get some sleep. And it helps support the Farm plan in a significant way. We need all the help we can get. 

I will complete the tiny home remodel this month. The plumbing and electrical are all in and working, the walls are all covered and the flooring is bought and ready to put down. What is needed is drywall finishing and paint, the rest isn't easy, but there's not a lot to do yet. Finish work. Then, once we move the halves to the back, I will begin remodeling the Kennel and fencing off the dog yard. 

There's so much happening here right now, but the days don't seem hectic or overly full. The weather keeps us indoors quite a bit. But stuff is getting done every day.

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.

May 29th, 2021 A Memorial Day worth remembering.

 This Memorial day weekend is especially memorable for us. It has been a little over four years since we began working toward a few of our early goals. Four years back I was building the frame of our first tiny home out in the driveway of our house and we had cleared enough area on the Farm to put the thing. We had not broken ground for anything like planting and it would be some more months before we moved the tiny home cabin out the Creekside Farm. Needless to say it, but I will anyway, the whole project was still very much an uncertainty. That was Memorial Day 2017.

 We started the project in April of 2015, but didn't start this journal BLOG until October of 2015. On Memorial Day of 2016 we were still learning to build a fire out of scrub trees and had just begun getting electricity to the pole that had so recently been buried under thirty feet of Blackberry brambles. We had started renting tractors and brush cutters, when there was money, to clear the land. Trash was everywhere and it was dangerous to walk the land because of all the broken glass, scrap metal, uneven Terrain, and Blackberry bits. This place wasn't a Farm at all. The Farm didn't even have any name at all until December of 2018.  At Christmas of 2018, once we had a cabin on it, we called this place Camp Creekside. We came out on weekends to clear and clean, earning from many sources, none of the cash  came from here. We couldn't call the place a Farm until we began harvesting food in late July of 2018. There were many goals and milestone reached for this light supper of lettuce, cucumber, and strawberries, eaten at the table of our cabin in 2018. At this point, the Farm was mostly still a gamble. We were putting all of our time and treasure into a place that seemed to fight our every step.

Our first Farm food was grown here less than three years ago. But we were living on the Farm full time then, and eating from it (if only just a little bit). We had taken the leap of faith. Rolled the dice. Gambled everything on the idea that we could live here and make our living here. 

 This Memorial Day weekend we crossed another major milestone on our way to making this place work. We finished the business of selling a litter of puppies which were born here, of dogs which have know little else but the Farm.  And our Farm, as much as it is, is cleared, planted, and growing in a way that looks to recoup much of our longer termed investments of time, labor, and cash. There is a good cash crop out in our fields today.  In past years the tax forms have claimed that we hade made enough money in the past few years to call this place profitable, but the little we got never paid any bills or bought anything significant. This first Farm litter gives us four months to come up with some more cash and pays for quite a bit of building and farming supplies as well. 

 It is not that big of a thing to earn the money we did this month, using the money we earned and spent over the past five or six years. But it does seem that this new income was very significant in a self-sufficiency sort of way. Being able to live on what we can produce means we might just be able to build the big dreams we outlined earlier in the history of this place. (All of which are buried in the archive of this BLOG.)  To us this is major. That's memorable. 

May 23, 2021 Time Flies

 It has been three week since my last entry, so I figured I'd better write something. But it's not like there is too much difference between the last entry and this. Just more of the same.

We still have fourteen Bassets, six adults and eight babies, living in the tiny home with us. The pups leave us this week for their new homes and Stanley, our visitor, leaves next week. Things are going to seem much quieter around here after that. We will be keeping one of the male puppies this time. His name is Rocketdog Rockford Rhoades, we call him Rocky. Our boy ClarkeBar will retire in a year or two so bringing up his replacement allows us to control the genetics a bit. And having a puppy around will be fun. With our puppies all being sold, and food sales about to rise in Summer, we ought to be able to show a good profit this year. We are hoping for one or two more litters of pups in the second half of the year, but dong things naturally means not knowing for certain. 

Ann has been very busy in the Greenhouse and the Gardens. We have hundreds of sprouts up and more than a few rows planted. There are hundreds of plants in the Greenhouse, mostly sprouted, but there will be thousands more as the Summer draws near. I found a large number of planting benches on Craig's List a few weeks ago. A guy in McMinnville had a Pot grow in his basement and gave up on it.

I got thirty or so nice plastic benches and quite a lot of wall mounted electrical fans to move air in the greenhouse. We've set up two long benches in the Greenhouse and a few of them outside to "harden" off plants making the transition outside. We will find uses for the rest of the benches as time goes on.

True to form, we are adjusting our farming plans to include new information and try to find things that work a bit better. One of the things I am trying is planting fewer rows by scraping the soil together into deeper rows with wider spaces between. This gives the rows better drainage and the plants a deeper bed to grow roots in. It also gives us more room to move around in. The soils here are beginning to develop into fairly good dirt, but the entire farm is still a few years from being where they need to be. We have mostly solved the trash problem. Most of the debris we find now is very small glass shards. The weeds will continue to be a problem for some years going forward, but we are making progress in certain areas. 

This year's potatoes are in two very long rows at the back of the Market Garden and all of them have emerged. This year we have planted the potatoes in a full ten inches of soil with wide margins of good soil on both sides. When the plants reach twelve inches tall we will pull soil up from the edges over the plants, deepening the soil column and allowing more potatoes room to develop. That's the theory anyway.

In the corn rows we are not mounding up the dirt at all, but we are mulching the beds following planting and we are adding a bit of lime, even though our soil tester says we don't really need it. We planted six one-hundred foot rows and will plant another six in a month, then another a month later. Let's see what happens, but it is supposed to get us a whole Summer of corn to sell. Onions, garlics, and herbs are all out in the gardens growing right now, peppers, tomatoes, beans, peas, and lettuces all ought to go in soon.

There is a new row at the front of the Kitchen Garden dedicated to squash, pumpkin, gourds, and watermelons. The thing is a bit over one hundred feet long and about ten feet wide. Again, we made a berm of good soils about twelve inches deep, right down the middle, with four foot wide margins for growth to spill into. It ought to be a riot of interesting stuff growing right where people can see it from the road.  Ann is adding some Sunflowers to the row for color too.

The Strawberry patch is doing super well this year. This is the third year for the rows and Ann finally has the weed problems and excessive growth under control. We mulched the plants about a month ago and right now each plant is covered in young fruit waiting to ripen. We'll pick them in the morning, sell them in the afternoon, hopefully through the month of June. 

The house build is going along just fine. We have ninety percent of the finishing done in the bedroom side of the Farmhouse. I'm hoping to finish in that end of the house either this week or next, leaving only the great space to do. Our son Jack has agreed to help with the exterior siding portion of the house to keep us on track for moving in this year. Following the interior finishing I will be working on the roof for a month, trying to get it done before the heat of Summer sets in. Plenty to do on the house still but we are working on it nearly every day.

We have found and collected enough cabinets and shelf materials to finish the Kitchen and Bathroom. One of our counter-tops is sitting on the floor in the Kitchen right now and I'll likely make the others myself. We're still needing more paint, but we have about half of the flooring already purchased and most of the rest is either bought or easy to get. Lumber prices are ridiculous right now so we may need to hold off on doing the wrap around porch until prices come down. It will be time to find carpet soon so I'll be looking for a deal.

May 1st, 2021 Busy, Busy, Busy

 Last week we took a couple of days off and the world wanted them back, so we did eight days this past week to make up for the malingering. 

Laffee Taffee's pups all came to life in a big way. Their little puppy personalities began to emerge when their ear canals opened up and they became aware of the world.

We started weening, putting warmed milk in a very large feeding dish a friend of the Farm gave us. We had a dish something like it but it was about a third the size. This one allows the pups to all get around it in one go. At times there's enough room to fit a few inside the dish while the others are eating.

On Monday we started giving them about a cup of milk, by Friday were adding a handful of puppy kibble to three cups of milk. They pups, if added together by weight, would out-weight their mother, so she isn't really able to fill them up anymore. The dish fills them up just fine. We have begun letting people visit the pups. 

The House build is still moving along well. I have been working on finishing the drywall in the low portion of the house. This week I was able to put the final touches on the seams and corners of the Closet and Bedroom, and am getting pretty close in the Hallway and the Water Closet. On Friday I put together the texture gun for the first time and sprayed the Bedroom and Closet, the last step before priming and paint. 

On Wednesday I found a commercial painter on Craig's List who had exactly the paint we need to do much of the interior finishing. He had bought a house-full but the job had fallen through due to Covid and he got tired of waiting for the work to come back. We bought about twenty gallons of primer and paint for under two-hundred dollars and the guy even delivered it to us. I will begin painting on Tuesday next week and we will have two rooms of seven completed (except flooring).

Craig's List is a real resource for the House build. I bought the air compressor, paint sprayer, and texture gun in past months for pennies on the dollar. This week we found a few other things we will need, including one of our Kitchen counter-tops. A lovely ten foot piece of quartz for Ann's Baking counter.

The Farm is beginning to show sure signs of Spring growth. The greenhouse is awash with baby plants of all sorts. We have peppers, tomatoes, squash, watermelons, lettuces, and many others growing out there and we will be putting these into the dirt soon enough. There are also many annual flowers growing too. 

The biggest flower planting we do is Marigolds. Marigolds add a great deal of color to the Farm, but they also provide a chemical barrier to many beetles. We plant rows of Marigolds around the parameters of each garden to protect the leaves of our vegetables but this year we plan to add a few rows just for color. Marigold really encourage pollinators. Bumble Bees love to sleep in the blooms.

We also got a wonderful planting table from a Lutheran Church where it had been a kids sandbox for over two decades. The thing is large enough to mix soil and gives us a great place to put seeds into pots.

Yesterday I found a garden cart on Craig's List  for Ann. She's wanted one for a few years and it finally showed up on the listings. You have to be quick to get the hard to find stuff and I saw this nineteen minutes after the seller put it up for sale. Last year, at Mother's Day, I found a nice little fat-tired planting stool for her, another real find, and she's been using it for weeding. This year she gets the wagon to help in moving  the hundreds of things now growing in the Greenhouse out to the gardens. 

Things are really beginning to move at the Farm this week. Puppies have been born and sold, the Strawberries (in their third year) are thick with young fruit, and our house is about four-fifths finished. Covid relief checks came too. So money, though important, isn't nearly so much of a concern. With any luck our plans will now begin to bear out the promise we already knew was there, but had so far been unable to find.

It is good we got a few days off. There will be few days off in the coming weeks.

April 25, 2021 Time Off

 We haven't taken a day off since Laffee Taffee began having false labor in the second week of March, so we took the weekend to loaf a bit.

Saturday we simply hung around. It was a  rainy day so I went out and watered the Strawberries. This might not sound right, but the rain didn't have enough water in it and we had mulched the Strawberry Field on Friday. Ann had spent a few days cleaning up the Strawberry rows and I had cleaned up the spaces in between. This is the third year for the field, so things are getting a whole lot easier to take care of. Ann pulled about two hundred plants out to make room for the ones we wanted to keep. There are about three thousand plants in the field now and all of them are covered in flowers. This is going to be a really good year for Strawberries. 

There has been a lot of work done in the Kitchen Garden this Spring. We have all the trees well pruned, though there still isn't enough growth to give us much fruit yet.  The Peaches and Herbs Garden is doing very well. The Parsley, Thyme, and a few others have grown rapidly and many of the annual herbs had re-seeded themselves and these are beginning to poke their little heads up.

Soon enough we will be planting a few rows of corn in the Kitchen Garden every few weeks. Hopefully the weather will return to normal and the heat will bring things up as they should have the past few cold years.

The thirty-four Peonies we planted in the big bulb flower bed are all up and happily showing buds. We will have a ton of flowers pretty soon and it's a good thing too, since the bulbs are all spent now and the only color we have is green.

Ann got quite a few Dahlias to plant this month. We decided to put in a few new raised beds to accommodate them. The drainage in the Kitchen Garden isn't the best, so raised beds gives us a bit more flexibility. I decided to put them at an intersection of tractor paths near the front of the Garden and since we had enough new space we also planted one of the Mimosa Trees we have grown from seed in one of the new beds.

Our plan is for five Mimosa Trees. They put out a lot of color all Summer long and also provide some strategic dappled shade. Since we are taking out most of the large trees replacing them is important. 

We have been very busy this Spring. The House build is coming along very well and I now have three rooms nearly finished and the Hallway started off right. There is still a ton of finishing work to do, but we are already planning the installation of cabinets and plumbing fixtures. I collected some Laundry Room cabinets from a Craig's List post and we are looking around for some better ones to do the Kitchen. 

Our Shower stall ought to come this week and soon we will be able to finish the bathroom. It won't be long before we're moving in.

Laffee Taffee's pups are nearly four weeks old now. We have decided to keep the pup we had named Bismarck. He will become our new male when ClarkeBar is retire in a few years. His new registered name will be Rocketdog Rockford Rhodes, Grizwold, but we'll call him Rocky. Life at Creekside Farm is good and getting better every day.

I took a bunch of pictures this evening on out evening Farm walk. I'm just going to paste them below this. We have developed enough walking path to take a walk every evening with the dogs. The path leads through every garden and past the new Greenhouse where we check on things and turn on the grow lights. The dogs really like taking the walk and we get the chance to look over all we have done and plan to do more.

This is our Peach tree

This is our new Columnar Apple

This is a side of the House I haven't show yet.

This angel is the Bedroom corner.
The Bathroom is the widows to the far right.

The Attic windows are above all.

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.