August 6th, 2023 Deep Summer

 It has been nearly perfect weather since my last post, and a lot got grown and done since then. So much has been done I really haven't had much time to write.  Summer has caused an explosion in growth here.. No-till gardening has solved nearly all of our soil fertility problems and the produce we are getting is exceptional. In the next week or two, once our produce is ripe and ready, we will be opening our little produce stand in an attempt at making a dollar. 

The stuff we have planted is roughly five times what we planted last year. But our much larger plan is still not quite large enough. We might be able to grow twice the amount we have in the ground next year, but we will need to plan for a much bigger grow. We put in seventy melon hills this year, where there were only fifteen last year, and the plants are doing quite well, but I think we could grow five hundred just as easily so that's the plan going forward. We put in five times the cucumber plants too, and a trellis to hold them all up. Next year I think we will need to tripple the cucumber grow and we certainly have the space for it. Our squash and pumpkin grow is also quite a bit larger, perhaps double last year, and the results are extraordinary. But I'm pretty sure I could still do five times the amount with little trouble.  And our corn crop is easily eight times the number of stalks we grew before, might be more, but we have space for double this number right now. 

Since all of this year's plan involved converting to no-till gardening and drip irrigation, planting is much easier, harvesting is half the work, and watering is a snap. Also, the sort of weeds we usually have are tough to handle. Thistles and berries are difficult to pull out of hard pan clay. But in a no-till scenario these sorts of weeds don't do very well and pull out of the ground easily. This is not to say that there are no weeds, crabgrass has really done well this year, but crabgrass and the other worts growing in the garden are relatively easy to chop off and when we let them rot in the ros they make a mighty good mulch which blocks sprouting. But there's other reasons why weeding isn't really so much of a problem now.

The drip-tape irrigation system I put in only waters the top of the rows, not the spaces between. So weeds don't get all the water they have in previous years and grow slowly. With far less growth potential we can work the spaces between rows quickly using a stirrup hoe knowing the weeds will not grow back quickly. Most of the weeds we have don't have energy storage, so most won't grow back at all. This new way of growing is half the work, or less, so our days aren't as long and there's plenty of time for other projects.

Our new house plan.

We are on the cusp of moving the tiny homes to space behind the Farmhouse. I had always envisioned moving them to the edge of the Farm, near the back fence line, but actually looking at the project seriously made us change the plan. While we prepare for the move I have upgraded our electrical power plan to include two generators and enough wire to service the two new outbuildings behind the Farmhouse. Each will have water and power and the stuff is already buried in the ground ad waiting for the move. My Brother, visiting while planning his retirement moves, has a large camp trailer which currently is placed near the tiny homes. When we move the tiny homes he will also be moved to a new place where I recently put in power and water connections. The only thing left to do is septic hook ups, but these have to wait until we actually move the buildings. And there's so much more to do than just this.

Our Farm is exploding in growth. Fruit is ripening and will soon need sold. So there's much to do. 

Our Produce Stand is in fine shape and the area where it will be accessible to the public is currently parking for all of our cars and trucks. So we will spend a few days shifting things around and cleaning places up to get ready for opening day. This year's plan is to tow the Produce Stand to the end of the road five days a week and sell produce down there. But the Stand will be parked outside of the fence where it was last year when it is not at the end of the road so some allowance must be made. We should be opening in a week or so. 

 I thought of another new thing to try. Our government has added some burdens to the Organic Farm movement and I have recently run into it while talking to food buyers about taking on some of our produce. 

Pirate Organic Farming

In order to call ours an organic farm we must become Certified. This involves a lengthy application process and about a thousand dollars in cost borne over and above the cost of actually growing things. What this does, and my central argument against it, is that what is expected is a loosely governed branding process where a farmer pays a certain amount to be able to say they grow food without the use of chemical pesticides, herbicides,  fertilizers, and seeds. These factors of producing food are already in place and we do these things, but applying for the certification has some other hoops to jump through and costs to be borne, not the least of which is a thousand dollar fee.  We are allowed to sell our produce without these hurdles, but we would not be allowed to use the term "Organic" in any form. Not just this, but grocery store buyers require the certificate, as do farmer's market administrators.  If you have read this BLOG I stated early on that these were just the sort of regulatory things we would not wish to participate in.  So we will not. And for some very good reasons.  So we are now going pirate organic.

We will no longer worry over using the term "organic", instead we will fly a flag I designed (above) and trust that our buyers will get what it is we are doing.  It might be a good conversation starter.  A sort of rebellion against being regulated.  This is the only change to how we have been doing things. We will still produce our fruits and veggies without chemical inputs, we will still be using very sustainable farming practices, and our produce will still be of the highest quality we can grow at this scale of production. But we won't even try to call it "organic". 

In other news, we delivered all of our puppies to their new homes since the last journal entry and brought what may be our last puppy home. Lemonhead Lucy is a wonderful little "lemon" Basset female. She is full of life and has become central tour tangle of seven hounds. We have always planned to be out of the dog breeding business in under ten years to make room for the wedding business. So Lucy will likely be the last breeding female in our kennel.  This year we have had a bit of trouble with fleas where we have never had this sort of trouble before.  So we do spend a lot of time washing dogs and vacuuming them in between washes.  It will take a bit of time, but we will get the problem licked before Fall. 

Life here has been very good for a long time now. Our house is spacious and comfortable. Once the tiny home's are all moved the way the Farm looks will change drastically. Our dogs will soon be moved to a place where they don't have much access to the people coming to the Produce Stand too. So much has happened here since we started. And there's a lot more that will.

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.

September 6, 2022 The Dream Ammended

This is the 2022 plan.

This production layout is four times what we are growing today.

Click on any of these pictures and see them larger.

The second plan was done in April 2015
we had found the edges of the place by then.

We had intended to plant peach trees at first
but there isn't enough heat here.

In November 2015 we decided to add themed 
gardens and tiny home cabins.
The cabins might not work here.

It was in January 2020 that I did the last design of the Master Planning image. Prior to that I did one about every year, usually in the dead of Winter when time is easy to find. A whole lot has happened here since the last time I sat down to think things through. It seemed appropriate to do it now, following so close behind the final inspection on the new house. Last year I didn't even think about this. The two years  since the last one of these was pretty full of house building projects.

The most important thing I had to incorporate in this new plan was the idea of a no-till farm. The beds we will lay down in the coming year will be very permanent and never again worked by machines. The gardens will be set up once and then fenced without access for the tractor. From that point it will all be hand work.  We took some trees down last year. This year we will get the remaining few down and begin laying out the final farm. With no house to build, there will be time to grow.

In May 2016 we had a good idea of 
what the land might support.
So we added long walking paths.

In laying out the gardens we are using a very specific repeating chord pattern in all of the gardens. Each 24 inch row can easily be used as two twelve inch rows with just enough room for one shoe comfortably in the middle. Every 24 inch row is separated by a one foot open space for walking traffic that doesn't compact the soils. Every two row set is separated by a two foot space for carts to carry stuff. This pattern uses  the land very intensively while making the rows easy to work by hand. As we harvest each row we recharge the soil with fresh compost, organic fertilizers, and a new mulch cover. No till gardening makes for light work,  few weeds, and much less watering, all while increasing food quality.  But you have to keep moving. And you have to plan ahead. Our new plan is four times the sixe of this year's production.

Second to this, and perhaps still a few years away, is the first wedding venue. We started our planning with the idea that we would eventually create a farm themed venue but a few things had to happen before we could begin. The first was a house, which is now nearly complete. The second was a real working farm,. This is the image we will build toward making this place a real farm. The first wedding venue will look much the same as a croquet pitch. Just a big flat grassy space at the front of the Farmhouse, level with the deck of the front porch, with shade cloth sails for a light cover. We will put in permanent electrical stuff and anchors for large tent rentals. We have a good design worked up for this whole thing, but first we need to get a few more things done. 

In September of 2017 we refined the image
a bit. But siting the house became an issue.

We have learned quite a bit since beginning the Farm Project in 2015. Today we have a house, water, septic, electric, water treatment and distribution. We have learned how to build a greenhouse so that it doesn't need yearly rebuilding. And we finally found a way to grow things in the soil we have. Almost all of our first level questions have answers and our farm produces much more than we need. Our dreams have changed, the goals did not.

We are well on the way. 

Once we had a home site identified in 2018, but before we figure out that trees wouldn't work here.
The Barn and Greenhouse would need more permit than we could get at the time. 

In 2019 we found the first layout that we could do.
We began building a Market Garden and a separated Kitchen Garden.

Our farm is economically self-sufficient today. Our Basset Hound breeding and boarding kennel is producing a healthy income on an ongoing basis too. We still need to put the final Kennels in, so we have some work to do still.

The 2020 layout was bit rough, but most of what we planned is working today.
We have changed little in this plan since 2020, we just had to fix the soil and
build a house. 

August 23rd, 2022 Our Homestead Farm is an Undeniable Fact.

Today we crossed the finish line of a race we have run, non-stop, for nine years. 

The race we finished today has been in progress since April of 2015, when we found the property which became our homestead farm. We have a longer termed goal set which is broken into three major parts. Our first goal was always to build a house (we finished this today and this is the main message of this post). Our second goal is to build a farming business and we've come a long way on this front. The third part of our bigger plan is the hospitality phase, we are looking toward starting working toward this goal beginning today. The path which took us to this place has been a long one and we have passed by quite a few milestones along the way. Some of these milestones were significant and were found wherever a major goal had to be achieved. These were usually make or break points in our current project and the days where we moved forward in a meaningful way.

Deciding to start our Farm project happened in 2013, but I didn't write about it until I began blogging in October, 2015. The timeline of this journaling project jumped around a bit at first. We found the property in April of 2015 and this BLOG didn't begin until October of 2015.  Here's where we started.

The Creekside Farm project was very LARGE at the onset, but seemed to grow as time passed. The post linked above this paragraph tells of how we decided to buy a farm, began to clear the place, and how we found a way to buy control of the property. The story of everything is contained in the archives of this blog, but since this post is entirely about finishing Phase One of our larger project, I'll try to tell this story as concisely as I can. Where you see red in the list below, you'll find a major goal achievement nested into the larger Phase One goal. This is the story of our Farmhouse. 

• We found the Farm property, by accident, in January 2015.
• We found a woman to buy the land from in April 2015.
• In late September of 2015 we bought the land in an extraordinary way. 
• By March 2017 we had built a tiny home and moved it to the property.
• We called the land Camp Creekside because it was had a cabin and we were producing no food. 
• Our temporary electricity permit came in April.
• This allowed us to have water in July.
• We moved the Tiny Home Cabin in October and tilled the first garden plot.
• In 2018 we began producing food on the now renamed Creekside Farm.
• 
  After selling our house in August we had more than enough cash to begin building and started the permit process.
• I built our new septic system around this point in time.
• We finished clearing the trash off of the place in October.
• 2019 was a tough year.
• The permit process dragged on nearly the whole year long.
• We finally got permits in September.
• We broke ground on the new Farmhouse in October.
• In November we had actually poured a foundation for the new Farmhouse.
  
• 2020 was a year of hard work and not many growing things.
  
  
• We began building on top of  the new foundation in January.
• Plumbing was roughed in in March.
• By October we had a roof on the house and were doing electrical rough in.
• In 2021 we worked every day to convert cash into house. 
• Prices began to rise immediately in 2021, most building materials doubled in cost.
• We moved into a very comfortable Farmhouse in December.
• The Last Nail was driven into the new Farmhouse in March of 2022
• It took until today to get all of our permits signed off.

All together, from the January 2015 until today, we spent our lives completely committed to building our Farm-house. We also spent considerable time building a Farm for the house to sit on. This has been a dream since August of 2013. So nine years of dedicated effort has finally come to fruition. 

Or new farmstead home is still in trouble in many ways. We changed our farming practices a few times, this year we found something that works. We are self sufficient, but there isn't enough cash to build the rest of our initial dream yet, but the dream has changed many times. We still have to find the money to pay off the Contract we entered into at the onset of this, and this has developed more than a few additional troubles since the beginning so we have work to do. While our project still is not certain to find the ending we began at the beginning, we sure have made it quite far.

We started the project with no cash and no real plan. We found ourselves on land unsuitable for farming and without any place to lay our heads. We were as surprised as anyone when we actually got control of the land. We learned how to build fires and grow food. And, after all this time and effort, we have arrived at the end of our first major goal: We built a house!

June 25th, 2022 Summer Arrives

 

Peppers, Tomatoes, Potatoes, and Beans
Click on the pictures to make them larger.

As I see things, the problem with starting Summer in mid-to-late June is that it does little to help with making the Farm a financial success. We need produce to sell in April, so having none of the plants putting produce on the table until sometime in July is something of a problem, if the problem is selling produce for a profit. 

Be that as it may, we are grateful for the plants we have growing today. Our seeds nearly jump into the sun once the Summer comes and there's little time for anything except planting and weeding.  Right now we have many hundreds of row feet planted in corn, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, watermelon, beans, peas, mini-cantaloupe, potatoes, onion, and herbs of all sorts. There are hundreds of flowering plants still to be planted, but these are on their way to the beds this coming week. It would be better if some of this planting success would happen in Spring, but it is hard to complain when looking out there today.  The Summer is a time for growing things, but there area few more things happening here right now worthy of taking some notice of.

Our Runner Ducks just love the hotter days.
This morning I cleaned their pond.

There are still some things to do on the new Farmhouse. I began painting the place this past week. It took a few weeks to get ready for painting and the weather was still a bit too wet and cold to start in. But the colder weather gave me time to get the house well prepared and my tools in good order. Once the heat showed up I primed and painted the back of the house in just a few days. All the climbing was a bit harder than it needed to be. Things make me tired where they didn't before. I'm thinking we'll get through the painting by the end of July, but it might happen earlier if the weather doesn't turn horribly hot. 

We decided to paint the house yellow about five years ago.  Like everything else we spent a lot of time thinking about the color prior to having to make a real decision about it. My first choice was barn red, because it is a farm house and it made some sense. But then we thought about putting a red barn on the Farm and figured it would be a bunch too much red, so we tried white (because farmhouse are often white). But white reflects light and we had decided to use the front yard as a public space, so white was out. Greens and blues are nice for trim work . . . So yellows came up naturally. We agonized about the shade of yellow and would point out yellow houses as we made our way off the Farm. There was a nice little house in Banks with what appeared to be the right color so eventually we went to the store and picked out some yellow paint cards. These cards laid around on the desk for a year or so before a decision had to be made. The color is Sunflower Seed, something of a misnomer since sunflowers are certainly yellow, the their seeds are definitely not. In any event, I got the first side of the house sprayed this past week and it is going to be the right color. The trim will be white, so too will be the batts of our board and bat siding plan. FarmyAF : Farm-y as f-heck.

Squash, Cucumbers, Corn, and Beans

In a few weeks we will have the last framing inspection before finalizing the Farmhouse permit and becoming legal. So we started in on finding the financing for the balloon payment due on the land contract we wrote in 2015. It's a large amount of money, but not as much as anyone would think it would be considering the size of the lot and its relative position in the world. Nearly two acres of good flat land is pretty hard to find these days, we got lucky. Since I wrote all of the contract, deeds, wills, and powers of attorneys myself I thought it a good idea to begin this next vital step by discussing everything with a lawyer. Good thing I did too, but I won't go into this here. Suffice it to say that we have things well in hand and have made significant steps toward finding our next significant step. There's two more years on the Contract, so we are getting started early and all should turn out well in the end.

The back of the Farmhouse is plain.
But the new Yellow makes a statement!

Our Farm is a special place, we hope anyone who might read this BLOG might feel free to come visit. But you might not so let me openly invite you to come out a visit. Expect dirt, insects, dogs, chickens, and ducks, so wear something that might get dirty. We'll try to sell you some of what we grow here every time you come, but the stuff we have is two weeks fresher and grown with better soil. It's the same dirt that has made our lives so very good. 

October 2nd, 2021 Things that Happened

 Things are happening on Creekside Farm. 

Fall arrived and the change on seasons was immediate. In my mid-September post the rains had started. We've had rain every few days since then. This is great for the cover crop seeds we had put in and the new plants jumped from the ground soon after planting. But the rains also brought up the weeds too. At least there was some progress.

I finished putting the finish roofing on the new Farmhouse. There is still the need for adding ridge tiles and putting in some zinc strips to keep the moss from growing in the coming years. But one hard day and the roof is ready for Winter.

We took the last week off from roofing to get a few more things for the Farmhouse. We found a really nice carpet remnant in Vancouver and began cutting it to fit. We're only using carpet in the living room area, hallway, the Office, and the Closet. These are small rooms so we are laying the carpet ourselves. 

Ann painted two accent walls in the main room. We have a fairly bright terra cotta on the t-wall that separates the Kitchen from the Pantry. And there's a nice subdued olive paint on the large wall of the living room area. As I go on I am beginning to dislike the dolphin grey paint in the Bedroom section of the house. Re-painting will commence later on. We want to live in the place and paint choices are of lesser importance.

We will begin painting the exterior of the Farmhouse this week, hopefully we'll have a good coat of paint on before the Winter rains settle in. We still have to build the wrap-around porch so we extended our building permit six months to allow for the extra time COVID 19 added to the project. There is time to finish the house and we will spend Christmas night living there.

We harvested our pepper crop, with a great deal of satisfaction in the result. We had planted two thirty foot rows in the Spring, all of the plants sprouted from seed in the new Greenhouse. We decided to put the plants down under a ground cover of landscape fabric this year to help keep weeding down, but also to retain heat and water in the soils. (Peppers like warm soil.) We planted four types of peppers: Poblano, Anaheim, mild Jalapeño, and a wonderful new pepper called a "Fooled You" Jalapeño. We only put  in a few of the traditional peppers, about a third of the space. The bulk of our plants were of the new Cool Jalapeño type. 

This new pepper is a bit larger, a bunch more flavorful, and has absolutely no heat to it. It is a wonderful thing to eat and to cook with. 

All in all we took about eight bushel baskets of peppers from the Market Garden. Half a bushel of Poblano, Anaheim, and traditional hot Jalapeño, and six bushels of the new Fooled You variety. We harvested the plants by pruning off all of the branches and then stripping out the fruit. Pepper plants are perennials, so this year we will be pulling the mature plant stumps and potting them to over-Winter in the greenhouse. We hope this will give us a jump on the growing season next year. 

We made contact with a small Portland green grocer chain who seems interested in putting our Fooled You pepper crop in their stores, but as of today we haven't got a deal yet. 

Ann has decided that she would be perfectly happy if we only grew peppers, since it was relatively easy to grow and very effective as a cash crop. But I'm pretty sure she'll be happier with the other crops once we figure out how to do them as well as we have done the peppers. We will be adding more rows and varieties of peppers in coming seasons, they seem to like growing here. Half the fight in farming is finding out what the ground wants to grow.

We have decided to begin using another farming strategy going forward which involved layering copious amounts of un-composted materials onto our rows of crops. I read the Soils book Ann received as a door prize at the Cover Crop class she took early last month and this led me to find a very interesting no-till method for vegetable farming. Ann went to a local garden materials center (one we used for twenty years while in the landscaping business) and she was able to convince them to drop their yard debris into a large pile on our Farm. This saves them a bunch of dumping fees and provides us with enough materials, for free, to cover all of our gardens for free. Since we had already made a large amount of really good planting dirt, the addition of four inches of leaf and grass debris will add a super slow release of nutrients into the soil, decrease water loss due to heat, and protect the soil and from rain and sun damage and erosion. It will also give the biome of good little garden creatures a wonderful source of food which they will slowly turn into plant food.

Our flock of Runner Ducks had grown to a whopping sixteen birds by hatching eggs. We re-homed ten of them, keeping the best two females to add to our egg producers. We will not miss having so many ducks here. A large flock is smelly, noisy, and expensive to feed. 

Bit O'Honey's pups are now three weeks old. They have begun walking, playing, and having a good time. People have begun coming to visit, as. the decide which one to take home in five more weeks. Today's visitors was a family which had taken one of Cinnamon Bear's litter a few years ago and it was nice seeing one of our puppies again. It always is.

The mornings have taken on a bit of a chill around here. The days are getting shorter and the nights much longer too. But the change in seasons is awfully nice to see and feel. And the work a bit less sweaty, if also a bit wetter.  Things are going very well

September 19, 2021 Rain and a Few Days Off

 It's been a while since we had rain at Creekside Farm, seems like five months since, but this weekend the wet stuff came back in force. I'm starting out with the rain because it is so important to us. Life happens where water is. Certainly, we have a good well and have been watering the crop plants and flowers all Summer long, but the rain is something more than just well water. This weekend promises nearly two inches of rain. On two acres this amount of rain just could never be sprayed through a garden hose. The rain stopped all work here this weekend and we needed the break. We were very busy before the rain stopped us.

My last post was one month ago. We had just put the paint on the interior walls of the new Farmhouse and were putting siding on the exterior. The plants were beginning to perform as they should, but we were not getting fruit yet. And the animals were spending their days panting in the sunshine. It seems more like a few months longer when I look backward. It amazes me all that took place since August 9th.

Our Greengage Plum tree gave us about ten pounds of wonderful medium sized plums in the recent three weeks. We have been eating every day since they ripened. The Greengage is a good little eating plum, but firm enough to cook with. We didn't get enough fruit in the first year to practice baking with them and we haven't the space to can them yet, but each plum is about eight small bites of wonderful. We'll finish the lot tomorrow some time.

The Peaches and Herbs Garden inside the Kitchen Garden needs a new name since we put the plum tree in thinking that the Peach Tree tag was accurate. 

The Market Garden started providing a huge amount of produce this past month. Peppers, corn, beans, squash, cucumbers, and quite a few little other things suddenly rushed into production.

We grow a wonderful Jalapeno pepper here that has zero heat to it and Ann began making a Pico de Gallo as soon as she could find ripe fruit. This Pico is so good you can practically improve oatmeal with its addition find a more wonderful thing to eat. We put this Pico on everything, adding a green crunch and balanced flavor to everything. 

Ann also created a new sort of Chili Relleno (picture above) using Anaheim Chillis from the garden. I'll eat it any time it is put down in front of me. 

The corn, though planted only for our own consumption, was sweet and tender. And our potato crop came in about eighty pounds, enough to take us through the Winter. In the next month, or so, Ann will begin taking up the pepper plants and potting them to Winter over in the Greenhouse. (As it turns out the peppers are perennials.) With any luck we'll get a jump on the pepper crop next Spring by putting the mature plants out instead of growing from seed.

We had a nice woman from the USDA out to survey our Farm. She gave us some good ideas as to how to improve things economically. Since she came we have changed the way we sprout seed and paid to have a soil test done. As it turns out our soils are pretty good and need few amendments. Ann took an invitation to spend a day learning about cover crops at a farm nearby. Aside from the practical knowledge, they gave her a wonderful book on soils and about ten pounds of Red Clover seed. The stuff we learned this past month have been leveraged into the roots of next year's Farm planning. We are headed toward a no-till, no watering system of growth and soil. If you have the desire, look for a YouTube video called Return to Eden and you'll see where we are heading in the next few years. 

I spread out my enormous compost pile over the area where we will put a new Strawberry patch next year and then seeded it heavily in Daikon Radish to break the clays under the six inches of compost. This sort of Radish puts down a twelve to eighteen inch root and dies in the mid-winter, leaving root space and bringing up some nutrients. The area is about fifty by sixty feet, so it will make a good Strawberry Field which we will plant all in one sort of berry in the early Spring.

All of the Flowering plants have finished. Ann put in a whole lot of sunflowers all over everywhere this year. They performed very well and so did all of the Cosmos, Marigolds, Coneflowers, Dahlias, and many others. Most of the flowers are getting leggy and out of hand so it is time to start tearing them out. Ann is making seed this year for all of the plants we usually buy seeds for. Next year we will begin buying only seed that makes plants that produce viable seed. At some point we will be able to stop spending money on planting.

The Farmhouse is still coming along. We finished the siding shortly after the last post and I began putting the finish roofing on. The roofing is a difficult thing to do. The pitch is very steep and the roofing is very heavy. Coupled with the heat and my aged knees, along with having to climb fourteen feet up the scaffolding carrying roofing, the process takes a lot of time and energy. I can get about three bundles of roofing nailed down most days. As of this writing I have the entire front of the house complete and am about a third of the way across the back. I should finish this by the end of the month. The it will be a race against the rain to paint the house and seal it against Winter. But things are looking very good.

The interior of the house is somewhat on hold while I spend my days on the roof, but some things are still moving ahead. We put in the flooring of the Water Closet and half of the Pantry, then put a working toilet in. We also rolled one of the Pantry shelf units out and began moving some of the pantry items out of the Tiny House. Soon enough we will move the chest freezer to the new Farmhouse, finish the Pantry flooring, and pick up some carpet for the three areas of the house that get carpet. We have the closet furnishings picked out, and the Kitchen Shelving hardware found but not purchased yet. And the door hardware is in hand. SO there's plenty going on.  About mid-October our new couch will arrive and we'd like to put it down on finished flooring. We want to spend Christmas in the new house, but there's a lot to do still.

We laid out the Kitchen cabinets. As it turns out we measured correctly and the used cabinets we bought, that will need to refinish, fit the space near perfectly. We will have a very large kitchen considering the size of the house. Plenty of cultured granite counter space to work on. The lighting scheme is also very good with plenty of natural light, sufficient general lighting, and great counter lighting to work under. The cabinets will be painted in a deep blue, the interiors and shelving in a deep brown. Its sounds dark, but will be striking to look at.

In other news, our Bit O'Honey gave us five wonderful little pups about ten days ago. People were a bit more reluctant to reserve a puppy this litter due to economic fears, but all of the pups are taken by families as of today. The pups are all very healthy but have yet to open their eyes. Bit O'Honey has recovered very well and is now spending some of her time away from the pups and hunting Chipmunks with the other dogs. The pups will go to their new homes in early November. We're still looking for a new home for the Cinnamon Bear. She was spayed a few weeks ago and has made a full recovery. We rehome our girls once they are no longer in our breeding program, the people who take them are happy to get a nice Basset Hound for free.

Our flock of Runner ducks increased by twelve nice little ducklings. Daphne Duck sat on the eggs and has been tirelessly guarding the new Ducklings since then.

One of the ducklings hatched after Daphne had led her brood off of the nest. Ann found it peeping away and brought the little thing inside for about a week. She raised it until it could join the flock. Today the ducklings are beginning to fledge out their adult feathers and they look ratty. Since all of them are mixed types of Runners, all having Sonjay as the sire, they are all a bit differently colored than the mothers. Some carry white plumage like our Malaysians, some black like our Balinese, and more than a few mixed browns from two types of Indian Runner. All of them are standing tall like Indian Runners do. They look like self propelled bowling pins.

We're selling off ten of the twelve for $5 a piece. They eat regular chicken food, slugs, snails, larvae in the soil, and house flies. And mostly they are fun to have around.

We continue to have luck finding things we need from Craig's List. We got an entire truckload of very usable lumber for free and it will do nicely in forming the concrete work of our wrap around porch next Spring.  And a few days back found a large load of garden carts, tools, and miscellaneous hardware. Love that free stuff!

It will likely dry out near immediately. We had a lot of rain and this will bring up a lot of weeds, so there's work ahead. 

July 24th, 2021 Light at the End of the Tunnel

So much has happened that I had little time or energy to write it all down in the past month. At the last posting I was working on the drywall (image to the left) in the front room and had just finished the paint in the bedroom section. Since then I have finished the main room and it has been painted but needs another coat (image on the right). We used recycled paint and a airless painting gun that did a bit of an uneven coat, so I'm painting it all with a roller to even things out. Still and all it looks very good and the drywall doesn't show seams. With the interior being very close to finished I have begun working on the exterior siding and roofing.

As the rains were approaching in the Fall of 2020 we were racing to get the house "dried in". I figured we'd spend the late Fall, Winter, and early Spring working on the interior where it was a bit warmer and a whole lot drier. So as October approached I spent all of my time putting tar paper on the roof and securing it against the heavy winds of Winter. The roof did its job and even held out the heavy snow that came in January. Once down from the roof, and having had all of the framing and sheathing inspected, we wrapped the entirety of the vertical surfaces with Tyvek, a sort of plasticized paper product that provides a mostly waterproof layer of protection for the sheathing which underlies the siding. With the house secured against the Winter (mostly) we spent the time between then and now working on the interior. I wrote all of this up as it happened. If you want to know more just look in the archive to the left of this page.

The drywall was a heavy project, but we got through the main part of hanging these heavy panels around the beginning of April. Ann had to go to work on the Farm in April so I have spent nearly every day since then applying drywall "mud", smoothing it all out, and then applying texture and paint. The whole process took nearly eight months. Today we have nearly all the rooms finished and awaiting flooring. I have moved on to (once again) racing against time to put the final exterior siding and roofing on before the rains return in October. 

The get the siding done and put the final roofing on we needed a plan. There are many parts to the project. The siding itself, flashing to help direct water away from joints and seams, trim boards, and sealants around the windows and doors.   Our son Jackson spent the past few month of his free time putting the lowest course of siding on the house and this will save a great deal of time. The siding treatment we decided on is a simple Board and Batt treatment. To get the job done Ann and I put up three courses of scaffolding with a final platform at the top. If I stand on a six foot ladder on top of all the scaffolding I can reach the top of the gables. As I go along the wall I am nailing up the siding and applying the 1x2 cedar batts as well as sealing things up and installing lighting. There are eight small LED exterior lights under the porch roof to light the porch area and three high intensity LED security light fixtures high up under the gables which will light the entire farm from edge to edge. As I move the scaffolding along the wall I am finishing every job I can while on the scaffolding. These projects include the first course of roofing and the drip edge as well as the siding elements and lights.

It will take another three weeks or so to get all siding parts in place, then it is on to putting the finish roofing on. All of this needs to be done by the end of September and the heat of Summer is just now coming on. So I will spend my mornings on the scaffold, or the roof, and the afternoons working on the final interior projects.

We have much of what we need to finish the house and can see a day when we can actually move into the house. So for the past few weeks we have been thinking about furniture. We kept so little of the furniture from our house in North Plains, some key pieces are out in the Shipping Container, and we have been acquiring things along the way, but a new couch was a special thing we were going to need.

Back in 2015, once we had found the property which would become the Farm, we spent a lot of time dreaming up things we would want once the place was built. One of the things we decided we wanted was a chaise sofa we found at Macy's. This bright blue couch sat at the entrance to the Macy's Furniture Store at Clackamas Town Center, a small peacock blue sofa with a chaise at one end. The sofa was much smaller than most house would use but it was large enough for two people who like each other to spend some time on. We journeyed across town to visit our couch at least nine times as our plans were formed and put into place. And I designed the living room area around the eventual presence of this one particular couch. But in 2018 the company quit making our bright blue couch and we had no time to address the problem. We began building the house about the time the World went into lockdown for fifteen months. About a week ago we began looking for something that would fill the place of our long lost dream "chofa". We shopped the city and found a few things that might have worked, but nothing as good as our dreamy blue couch.

This morning we went out to shop for a replacement and had a plan for ten more stores. But on the first stop we  ran into a saleswoman that remembered admiring our couch. She also had the perfect replacement in mind. It was about the same size and came in the same color and fabric, so we bought it without hesitation. The sofa will come in October. Another important piece of a house project that is about to become our home.

Through all of this Ann has been keeping up on the Farm. We built a new greenhouse and she planted hundreds of plants in early Spring. Then, as late Spring came along, we worked hard to make new planting places for the new plants. Little happened to show progress through May, but things started to happen around the beginning of June. Today most of what we put in is growing by leaps and bounds. Most of Ann's flowers are in bloom and we have pumpkins and gourds beginning to show up.

We have some guest farmers using some of our extra spaces to plant food for themselves and they came in June to plant their seeds. The plants sprung right up. The plants we put in a month earlier did nothing until those planted directly began to grow. Today we have a respectable amount of growing happening. Not enough to make a profit, but enough to learn how a profit might someday be made.

Since this place is not just about food, much of what Ann is doing involves planting flowers and arranging plants and vegetables in a more interesting way. All of this takes time and learning how to put things together, but some of the new ideas are really beginning to come together.

The Market Garden is showing explosive growth.
We'll be harvesting potatoes this coming week.

Putting down the landscape fabric has give the peppers the heat they need.
We'll have a lot of peppers this year. We'll add compost to it next year.

The beans are all working very well.
We've even got some lettuces to show for all the work.

Stuff growing just about everywhere.

This is the only part of the squash and gourd row that is behaving so far.

Pumpkins all over the place.

Autumn Sunflowers. Behind these are some of the scrub Apricot plums still hanging around.

Though I am mostly employed building the new Farmhouse, I have been improving how I make soil for planting and have spent quite a few days working toward turning the sterile or weedy clays into something that will grow plants. 

About a month ago I spent a day building a new compost pile from the piles of stuff I had around the Farm. This new effort is something with some real size to it. The "wind ridge" pile in the picture to the right will eventually become the planting spaces for our new Strawberry patch next Spring. The current pile is perhaps eight times the size of my largest earlier pile and the soils it is creating appear to be great quality.  I will need to duplicate this pile eight more times to finish building the planting spaces of the Farm, but the effort will be rewarded for many years to come. 

Before I started learning to make dirt the problem with our soils was drainage. The heavy clay simply didn't drain water away and the roots rotted out. Then when the heat came the clays dried into hard pan which was horrible to dig through. My later attempts at soil making was are doing pretty well, but the soil didn't hold enough water and we have to add water frequently. With any luck the new dirt will do the job. 

To keep this posting a manageable read I'll let it go here. The only thing I had left to write about is that we have another litter of puppies on the way. Bit O'Honey and ClarkeBar got together about ten days ago so we expect a litter in September. But there's still plenty to do between then and now. Dogs were always the first business we needed to succeed in for this project to work. And so far the plan  seems to be working.