February 10th, 2024 Farm Planning

2024 Farm Planting Plan
(Click for a larger image)

 January is a time for planning; the weather is horrid. It is cold, and mud is the normal condition of our soils, the days are short, and it is hard to get out of bed before eight in the morning. By the time we're ready to work it is ten A.M. and daylight ends at three-thirty. Not much gets done once you sneek an afternoon nap in.  The world doesn't lend itself to doing things, so we don't. If we were Daoist, this would be a Wu Wei thing. To bring about action without acting; an effect without a cause, without any reaction. 

Wu Wei means a great deal more.  Most people simple say "Wu" to mean the natural way, or in accordance with nature's mandate. Our farm uses completely natural processes to bring produce into the world wherever it can. No-till gardening, despite having large inputs of labor in the beginning phases, uses the least amount of labor over time so as to minimalize the negative effects of labor on the land. If we were to try working the land in the depths of Winter, we'd only make things worse. Mud would get deeper and soils more compact.

Despite all of this philosophy stuff, when there's a break in the weather we wind up doing something to clean up the apparent mess on the Farm, even if it is going in the wrong direction. We move carefully and try not to over-do.  We leave most of the plants in the dirt in late Fall as part of our organic no-till plan. We also leave whatever weeds springing up to grow as much root material as we can in the dirt. Things get to looking pretty bad by the end of January. It's hard to sit back and wait for Spring to come. It has rained nearly every day since early December. So a lot of naps . . .

Last year's Farm planning was the fourth year of planning to make a dollar on farming, but the first year of our no-till plan in action. We spent the Spring building new rows and laying things out. Our greenhouse plan, buying seeds and making planting soil, was not going to change much from the previous year. Our Greenhouse was already in place and the stuff we needed to do early planting already bought.  This year we will add ten feet to the Greenhouse and move it to better ground once we shrink the chicken run and move it to better ground.  We knew how to make soil and plant seeds going into last Spring and we got great responce, so all we need to do is scale it up a bit.  

Last year we made a map of our planting plan using what we knew from experience. But as we went along in building rows we found that our building plan was quite a bit more in size and diversity than we could maintain. The plants did well, but the produce wasn't as successful than in the previous year. We expected the change in method might take a bit to settle in, but we didn't get the results we expected and the weeding was awful. In 2024 we will concentrate on fewer varieties of plants.  The new image (above) shows more melons, less corn. and a change from bush beans to pole beans.  We're adding Russet potatoes to the spud line-up. We eat more potatoes than we sell and, despite  our wonderfully flavorful potato crop, standard bakers are a good thing. 

2023 Strawberries

The pest control plan we used last year worked very well and will largely stay in place. I am adding onions to our barrier plant plan. Though we don't really want to get into frowing onions we can use them and we're told that onions might keep the rabbits and squirrels away. Our crop rotation schedule will change only in locations used. Crop rotation is part of the pest control plan since no-till replaces soil nutrient faster than it can be used.

Last year we added some trellising when it became necessary and the one effective style we found last year will be used everywhere we need trellising this year.  We are removing a few of the rows to allow better access to some of the plants that need more constant care, more sunlight, or that need picking more often. There will be many more flowers in our rows this year, fewer varieties. We sold a lot of flowers last year and this was suprizing.

Getting ready to inprove our Produce Stand operations is part of the planning this Winter. I have a good trailer to build a new Produce Stand on and a place where it can go. The new stand won't be mobile, will have refridgeration, and a roof. There will be a parking area off road and a gate that can close, but this will take some time to put together. There's no rush, but we will try to get this stuff done by next Fall.  

649 baby berries

We've had a few days of partial sunshine this past week so some of our rows have been cleaned up. Our two fifty-six foot strawberry rows are cleaned up and the six hundred baby plants we took out are planted in flats in the Greenhouse will allow us to increase out strawberry planting by five rows. Eventually we might have enough to operate a Upick patch for five months of the year.  The Farm will be much easier to plant and pick this year. Soil, pest, and planting, plans are mostly made. All that is left to do is the doing. 

In other news:
Our chickens are producing enough eggs now. We did not heat their coop this year, opting to let them rest their egg makers a bit. We only had to buy eggs once this Winter, they were organic, from Costco, and fairly dissappointing. We're getting a half dozen a day now. 

Our kennel plans are made and we have quite a bit of it done. The Dog House still has a ways to go. . .  We're planning two or three litters in 2024 and have females in season today. Lilly is first up to breed. Then it will be Abba Zabba's turn. We are letting Taffee do her own thing and hope for one more litter from her which is not as well planned except that it will be Clarke's last turn as well. Breeding is a big part of our income, but boarding is becoming a helpful part of our farm business too. Dog coats are done for the year, but our dog coat plan is in place and did fairly well last year so we're hoping for better next Fall. 

All in all things are going along as they should. There are still a few issues needing resolved, but all things happen in their own time here at Creekside Farm. 

December 26th, 2023 Boxing Day and the Winter Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 09, 2023 Our Christmas Letter

December 1st, 2023 Pest Report

 

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

Our Lettuce Row Covers
kept the rodents away.

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

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

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

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

Our little Farm Stand

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

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

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

November 28th, 2023, Our Rocketdog Winter Coats are for sale

This is Rocketdog Rockford Rhoades in last year's coat. 

About four years ago we got tired of buying dog coats at the feed stores. Their coats were okay, but they never really worked easily and usually broke down in a year. So we started messing around with making our own. It took a while. . . .

The first attempt used reclaimed parts from all of the older coats and a used cheapo Singer sewing machine bought on Craig's List. We had received a nice "picnic" blanket from a client some years earlier and this had a nice flannel side and water resistant coating on the other. The results of that first effort were good at first. But we hadn't counted on the totally destructive nature of Basset Hounds at play.  They shredded their new coats in just a few days. The best part was that as they tore the black waterproof layer the red flannel layer showed through. Our Hounds look like the victims of an axe murderer.  But the basic design of the coat was good. Re-using strapping to hold the thing together got us into the warmer months despite the horror show. We resolved to solving the problem before the next Winter came.

We found a nice Buffalo Print at the fabric store and I bought new straps and buckles and laid out a pattern based roughly on the previous year's effort. The result was a good coat, though a bit smaller than we liked. And though we have changed the pattern a few times, and changed the way our coats were made, those early attempts are still working fairly well. We use them for our guests or use parts from them to make new coats for our dogs. But the process got easier and the coats came out better nearly every time we made one. 

Two  years ago we decided to sell our Winter Coats to those people we knew who had  adopted our puppies. So we began letting them know we had coats available and sold a few. Then last year we let a few more people know about what we were doing and  we sold a respectable number of our coats around Christmas. It seemed we had a good thing going after that.

Don't click here

This year we sold as many on our first week as we had in the previous year once we let people know about it. But this presented some new problems. Shipping them cheaply had to be figured out. A box to send them out it had to be found. We had the coats pretty well settled, but the details needed worked out. And we did it. But while we worked out the plan we found that one of the steps, the part where we put the parts into the box the coat would eventually be shipped in, offered another possibility. So we began thinking about selling the box full of parts to those interested in sewing their own coats.

We had to come up with instructions. And then we had to find a way to handle the increased traffic. But eventually we got it all working. Today I put out the first advertising for our expanded Coat project.  We're selling four sizes of Ready to Wear coats and Do It Yourself Coat kits, along with an option to make Coats and Kits for other sized dogs on an ad hoc basis.  We have a good way to handle the transactions securely and now all we need is for about fifty customers to show up and participate. 

Creekside Farm has always been pretty wide open as to what we would eventually become as a business. Coats may or may not work out. But the journey is the thing. We have out first really good product and it is being sold to the public. There's really no telling where this may go. But we're looking forward to getting there. 

If you need a coat. Head on over our Rocketdog Bassets Blog.

February 21, 2023 Quick Chess

Quick Chess

 I made a new game out of a very old one. In our first tries we found the game easy to learn, very quick to play and, relative to the Classic Chess Game, very fun to play. But this new game has not been explored sufficiently to know the problems or gauge response. So follow this link and let me know what you think.

February 11, 2023 Five Years Seems a Long Time.

Today we celebrate another anniversary. Five full years of our living on Creekside Farm. But it seems like we've been here much longer.

We built our home here.

Five years ago today I built the frame for the first Greenhouse. This first attempt worked well that Summer, collapsed the next Winter, and then rebuilt twice. Eventually the Greenhouse was crushed by a tree-fall which nearly killed us both, but didn't, and there have been six such greenhouse structures built here since. Two are standing today.

Five years ago today we built our heated dog house in the temporary enclosure attached to the side of our still unfinished Tiny Home Cabin. Our indoor-sy dogs were destined to become outdoor-sy dogs so I built them a dog house and put a little electric heater in it. Our hounds decided it was pretty nice in there and soon quit complaining about sleeping outside.

Our Tiny Home Cabin on Day One 

Everything we were doing five years ago was supposed to last only a year as the Farmhouse was built and new Kennel completed. It turned out those things were a bit more difficult than expected. Our Farmhouse took just under four years start to finish and there's still a concrete porch floor to pour.
The Greenhouse is now heated, water supplied, air ventilated, and grow lights lit. Our Farm Plan was finished on time and early seed went into pots last week. The bigger open questions are about organic pest controls and the first shots in our War on Pestilence were fired last week. We got control of the weeds last year. This year will be controlling insects and small animals. If weather permits we will have produce in our Produce Stand in June.

The Tiny Home Cabin we moved into five years ago is now two-thirds remodeled. Our little Cabin was worn out by living in it for so long and we had planned a remodel after we moved out to make it ready for Air BnB rentals. It seems like we are on track. Our tiny home Cabin is producing a small rental income today and hopefully more as time goes on.

We've Come a Long Way

Our initial 2013 "ten year dream" (made ten years ago) and "five year goal" (begun five years ago) was to have a Farmhouse built and a Farm producing a profit. We did this, if only just slightly over the line.
Our ten year anniversary goal will come in February of 2028. The Farm ought to be fully open to the public by then, tiny homes and camper spaces booked, a Farm Store selling produce and products every day, and Café serving food to people coming here to wander through a peaceful retreat from city life or be married in a purpose built Chapel space. . . We're still "swinging for the stands".

Our Produce Stand

Let's see what happens.

January 31st, 2023 Collette Kramer's Rememberence Day

 We celebrate two Collette Kramer anniversaries here on the Farm. The annual Birthday notice, and this secondary day of remembering her after-life. I write about her a few times a year in remembrance, this is a seven year anniversary so perhaps more important to me than others.

I wrote this public obituary on Facebook seven years ago, prior to this I had kept her name out of my postings for the most part:

Collette Kramer passed on this weekend after fighting for a month or so against a stomach tumor which came out of nowhere. She was sixty-four (near as I could tell) and the person who I bought the Farm property from. She lost everything more than once during her life, never had anything worthy of any notice, collected everything she found in hopes of someday having something she could call a life achievement. I found her living on the street in her broken down Toyota and all life is precious, all is temporary, all is suffering. She lived like a tiny boat on a big sea that didn't seem to owe her anything. She fought against almost everything and everyone in a effort to keep her dignity. In the end the pseudo-dignity she got from having a fingernail hold on a peice of property was really all she had to pin her hopes to. She sold me that property in some pie in the sky scheme to eventually find herself a permanent home. Her life didn't amount to all that much in the end. A short story with a bunch of sad chapters. Tragic only because it was so short. The shortness becoming something of a mercy.

As for us and the Creekside Farm Project, nothing is ever easy. We haven't done much that was over-funded or straight forward except being married to one another. Our successes have all been hard fought. We have the plan and it might work whether we build it in Manning or some other place. She left us with a bunch of legal hurdles to jump before we can call the place ours by virtue of a deed with our name on it. Only time will tell.

I think Collette would be proud of what we have built here, had she made it. There's still a bunch of legal hurdles to jump over before we finally get the place to ourselves, but things look okay going forward, at this point. 

She lives on in our memories.  

January 4th, 2023 Dogmatic Pest Control Theories

 

My one and only New Year's Resolution for 2023 is Step Two of the Grand Plan: to make the Farm profitable through production of food.

We made the Farm self-sustaining a little over one year ago and this meant no longer augmenting our income with savings. But this year is about making the future of the Farm more profitable so that we can begin the massive improvements we have been working toward for nearly eight years. Step One of the Grand Plan was to build the Farmhouse and we did that last year. Step Two is to build a Farm Business. Step Three is all about hospitality and creating a wedding venue in the future.

Our first year Step Two goal is to earn $25,000 in cash sales. Since we assume we will earn about a dollar a pound on produce then we will need to sell 25,000 pounds. But this level of efficiency is not likely to happen right away. Instead, we are assuming that we will need to grow nearly double this amount in order to find the highest quality goods, then preserve or donate the rest. The problems are many in reaching this level of growing things and many more in finding a way to sell it all when we succeed.

Of the things we have learned in our Farming practice so far I think getting rid of pests is perhaps the most important. In our second year of planting we found Squirrels, Gophers, Rabbits, Rats, and Mice all were very happy to come in and eat anything we had growing. We lost our entire crop that year as we learned to deter rodents and shoot straight. Last year all we had on the Farm were Chipmunks and a few field rats, so the problem wasn't too large to handle and we were able to sell a bunch of our production. But, even as we succeeded in getting the mammals under control, we found that insects began taking their place.

Cucumber Beetles

There are a great many insects that can harm crops. Last year we had Cucumber Beetles, Japanese Beetles, Flea Beetles, and a few grubs, but there were doubtless many more we didn't look for.  There are Ants, but they didn't come into the garden much. You might see the scope of the problem we will face as we expand our gardens this year.  

Of particular concern are the Beetles since they nest and over-Winter in plant debris. Since we are importing hundreds of yards of plant debris as part of building a no-till farm, we are likely going to give a home to huge numbers of beetles.  

Japanese Beetles

Adult Beetles have few natural predators and many have chemical defenses so birds usually stay away from them. Almost all have significant jumping and flying abilities too, so they are hard to catch. As we plan for the Spring we are spending quite a bit of time on the problem of Beetle eradication and prevention. As is turns out there are quite a few ways to get the job done in an organic garden. We will likely use them all. The first thing we can do is to put the right plants in the right places. 

If you put all of a Beetle's favorite food in one row the numbers will increase and soon the wee beasties will finish off the crop and need to find substitute food. One way to plant right is to use barrier plants, things that stop the beetles from moving from row to row and finding new food to eat. We will plant our rows with the following in mind.

• Marigold is a plant we have been using since beginning to grow stuff. It gives off an odor which most mammals, and quite a few bugs, tend to avoid. Marigold also gives Bumbler Bees a great place to sleep at night, so pollinator populations tend to increase in number. Marigolds are cheap, fast growing, and long flowering plants which look great in rows which border the larger gardens. We usually put in around a hundred Marigolds, this year we will put in around one-thousand as we expand our growing spaces. 
• Nasturtium is a plant I put in during year one of planting, but haven't used in any year since.  Nasturtium is a different sort of barrier plant, the bug attractive sort which tend to bring insect to one spot. In the first year I thought Nasturtiums didn't do well here so we gave up on growing it.  But after reading up on the subject we found that bugs loved them. They ate them down to nothing ahead of the plants growing out and before moving on to other sorts of plants.   There are other plants that attract bugs too. Radishes and Kale haven't done well here, for the same reason as the Nasturtiums didn't.  We are planning to plant at least one large row of Nasturtium in each larger garden bed, then treat the one row with Diatomaceous Earth once a week to kill off those bugs that have been drawn to it.  
• Diatomaceous Earth is a natural pesticide, it gets into the joints of bugs' exoskeletons and they simply stop moving around until they die off.  But care must be taken even in using this relatively innocent dust because Diatomaceous Earth also kills off beneficial bugs. We will restrict its use to these Nasturtium beds and then dust other plants only if we find a problem.
• Onions, Chives, and Garlic, all form a barrier to certain insects. We always grow these but now they will become border plants to hold back pests. These will be grown as "companion" plants along side of potatoes, beans, and tomatoes. Some plants simply do better near some other plants. I have a few charts describing these relationships and so we will plan accordingly. 
• Many herbs also deter insects. Oregano, Cilantro, Dill, Rosemary, and Basil all can deter insects, some have insecticidal properties.  Dill and Thyme can prevent some insects from laying eggs.

Cutworms

So it seems safe to say that planning to put the right plants in the right places might make things go along a bit easier. But there is a second way to keep buggy populations down: bringing in some good bugs to eat the bad ones. 

• Nematodes are non-segmented microscopic worms that hunt down many pesky bugs while the pesky things are in their larval stage. Nematodes invade their evil larval guts and eat them from the inside out. Some larvae, of some bugs, infesting root systems and killing the plants from below. Some adult Pests eat leaves and stunt growth from above. Putting a few billion Nematodes on the garden in Spring will help to kill off the larvae and prevent the adults from laying eggs in the soil.  
• A large number of different varieties of Nematodes are available, cheap, and easy to find, and these things come in very large quantities. You put them out using a garden sprayer and they breed and persist in the soil so long as the bad bugs are around to eat.
• Ladybugs and lace wing flies eat aphids, so they can be bought to release into the gardens, or encouraged to come in from the wild. We usually have a lot of ladybugs in Summer and we don't seem to have much of an aphid problem so far, so we are not likely to buy these predator insects this year. 
• Our Ducks and Chickens all like a good snack and many bad bugs, like houseflies, slugs, and snails make good duck food.

Aphids

The third way is to use insecticidal soap sprayed directly on the bugs. This is mostly a few tablespoons of detergent soap mixed in water and put into a garden sprayer. This stuff works by covering the little breathing holes on buggy bodies and suffocating them. There are no chemicals in Insecticidal Soap, but it can't be sprayed without care since it kills beneficial insects too. 

Finally there are physical barriers like cloth row covers. These keep the pests away from plants in an attempt to give the plant a running start. But row covers are time consuming, light depriving, and expensive to buy, so it's not likely we will invest in them this year. 

Since our problem is mostly beetles, we will rely heavily on the first and second means of keep their numbers down. We will carefully plan our gardens to include elements which deter bugs from sticking around or attract the bad bugs to their death. We will put down Nematodes to try and get them out of the soil. 

Flea Beetles

We have no hope of getting rid of all the bad bugs, but we can encourage the good ones that eat them if we are mindful of the problem.  The bug problem is a large and growing concern as we open more planting spaces and put out much more composted materials and leaf debris. The bug problem is much on our minds right now as we plan on making the Farm a planting success.

December 15th, 2022 Our Christmas Letter

 

December 3rd, 2022 Winter Sets In

A bit of snow on Tuesday morning.

 Winter in northwestern Oregon is a weather grab bag. In the past few weeks we have had torrential rains, sunny days, ice, snow, hail, and everything in between. The one thing we don't get it plant growth. So, as in years past, we work projects and plan for the future. This year seems different because the potential for impending doom. But so far nothing has changed and our future, though not settled, may well turn out much as we had planned it. So we are working projects.

We began remodeling the tiny home a while back. It was fairly worn out from living too long in something that was only built to last a year or so. Our son Jack is living in it and helping out, so we are having to work around him just a bit as we re-do what was a difficult job in the first place. 

Part of our Thanksgiving decor.

I built half of our tiny home Cabin in the driveway of our home in town. When we built it there was plenty of time and the space was empty. We built the walls from 2x3 lumber, not the 2x4 or 2x6 one would expect, so we had to find work arounds to put in electricity and plumbing and this is still the case. When we built the thing we intended to build a second half of the Cabin as needed, but hoped not to find the need if we could get away with living in 220 square feet of house. We built the bathroom at one end, a living space at the other, and a kitchen in the middle. But the remodeled Cabin is not going to be used for the same purpose in the end. So the remodel moves the bathroom to the middle of the thing and puts two 8x8 rooms at either ends. We are also separating the bathroom into two separate rooms, one for showering, the other for the water closet. Eventually we will separate the two sides of the Cabin behind the Farmhouse and into one two bedroom, shared bath, side and a dog kennel. When Jack moves off the Farm we will use the two bedroom as a guest house or even put it up on AirBnB. The remodel is taking up much of my time, but we are doing quite a bit more.

Leaf mountains.

Part of next year's farm planning is to use the knowledge we found last year and go BIG on planting in the Spring. We found a great thing in a relatively new farm practice called No-till, and I have described this quite a bit in the last year. So we have been bringing in about a forty yards of mixed landscape debris in every few days.

We have to move the leaves physically to clear the driveway before more can come in. Right now we have about 240 yards of leaf piled behind the Farmhouse, most of it sorted to get woody debris out.  Some of the "sticky stuff", which has some small sticks and branches in it, is piled separately in a few smaller piles. The big clean piles will compost and be used to prepare new planting beds in early Spring. The "sticky" piles will will be left along until next Summer before we screen the results and use it to top dress the beds. We have another eighty yards in the driveway right now which will be spread very think on the raw ground we will till in late Winter, Composting this raw leaf in place will protect the soils and feed the worms. We will cover every foot of farming space we can before  they run out of leaves to bring us. 

Our Tin Tree

Christmas is coming. This year we'll have four people living on the Farm, so Christmas will be a bit bigger deal than before the Farmhouse was finished. We put up some of our house lights today. There's a bigger plan for holiday lighting, but this year there's no time or money for it. Ann has decorated the house and stuffed every available space with as many little Santas, reindeers, Christmas bears, and snow-folk she has saved up for the thirty plus years we have been married. Snow villages and nutcrackers are everywhere. We also have a special little tin tree which we bought the first Christmas on the Farm when we had no space for a real Christmas tree.  The tin tree has become something of a tradition. We light it the day after Thanksgiving and let the batteries run out. It takes until New Years to run the batteries out. 

We'll go out and find a real Christmas tree next weekend. Last year we were lucky to find one because we moved into the Farmhouse late. We took what we could find on Christmas Eve last year. This year will be different.

Farming experiment update: We put thirty-six pepper plants from last season under individual covers in later September to see if we can Winter-over them into next Spring. Pepper plants are supposed to be perennial, but above the forty-fifth parallel this is debatable. Some uproot their plants and bring them inside their homes or into heated greenhouses and then put them back into their gardens. We tried such a thing last Winter but that experiment failed for a few good reasons. We might have heated the space, it got pretty cold in the greenhouse when it snowed; we might have been a bit more regular in watering, in the cold of Winter getting out to the greenhouse seems a bit of a slog. These failings of ours prompted me to thinking about the thing and, as always, I spent entirely too much time on it. We decided to try over-Wintering the plants in the ground. The soils temperatures never go below fifty-two degrees, water is always available, the soils don't get disturbed, etcetera.  So I decided to steal an idea, something I read about in a book about French market gardens, so we cut the plants down to one leaf, we cut the bottom off of some two-liter plastic bottles, and we covered the plants with the bottles before burying the whole thing in a foot or so of compost. The upshot of this is that, as far into Winter as we have come, including the snows and freezing rains, we find the plants still seem to be alive, though dormant.  We found this out by accident. Never wanting to disturb the process in place we didn't plan to open anything up. But one of our hounds (Abba Zabba) decided the bottle looked like fun and pulled one of them off. But so far the plant we did see was in pretty good shape. We put the bottle back and hope for the best.

Legal stuff update: We're still waiting out the probate stuff and hoping for the best. We talked to their lawyer the other day and she was rude, combative, and generally horrible. So we're talking to lawyers again. We don't intend to do anything differently than we have been, but we do want to exercise a bit of care so we'll spend a few dollars against the possibility of an unforeseen circumstance.  This is our home after all.  Post script: We talked to a few other lawyers in the past few days. This morning we met with one very good lawyer, who we did not hire outright because he didn't need assurances. This was the right guy. So we will sleep better knowing he is there if needed. 

February 6th, 2022 A Quick Update

 Though quite a bit has happened since my Christmas post there hasn't been so much that I felt the need to post an update. But time flies. So here are the few good things that have happened since Christmas. 

In my last post we had moved into the new Farmhouse and Jackson moved into the tiny home.  Since then we have finished the kitchen cabinets and counter-tops. The cabinets all needed to be painted but we had primed them in white prior to moving them into place. Once they were all put together I painted them all and put knobs on all of the drawers and doors. The knobs we used had been sitting in a bag of knobs I had collected throughout the thirty years I worked in home renovations. I don't know why I toted that bag through four house moves, but the fact they are now in the new Farmhouse makes it seem worth it. Ann simply loves her new kitchen and has not spent much time out of it since we got it finished.

The new bathroom seemed so luxurious when compared with the tiny home. The water heater is ten times the size and we really appreciated the long showers it gave, but waiting for hot water to reach the bathroom, from the pantry, was about eight minutes. We had planned for this with the intention of putting a secondary tankless electric water heater in the linen closet in the bathroom, so when the time was available I put one in. Now the hot water is quick on the draw and when the hot water does reach the bathroom from the pantry the new tankless heater shuts down to save money. 

Ann got our exterior lights installed a few weeks ago. They compliment the electric candles in the upper windows and will eventually light the space under the wrap around porch we'll build in the next few weeks. The outside of the house is very well lit, but the picture my phone takes of it makes the house seem overly bright. It isn't. The house looks spectacular from Sell Road and Highway 26, looking so much bigger than it really is. This was all to plan, we did everything we could to make this little farmhouse look very large. People often think this is a two story house of about two0thousand feet. It is only one thousand feet and only one floor.

Every house has some things that show up only after beginning to use the space. One place needing attention is the big room heating. The bedroom section of the house is very well heated, but the big room stays a bit cool most of the time. Our really huge ceiling fan wasn't working when I installed it and I found a bad wire nut at the wall switch. This solved the problem with the fan working but showed us another -We didn't put in a furnace to heat the house, using underfloor heating instead. We did it this way to save energy. The plan was for the ceiling fan to moderate the heat and bring warmth back down from the high ceiling. But in the cold of Winter the heat wasn't sufficient and the fan only cooled things down a bit too much. We had a plan in place to put an auxiliary electric heater, but haven't got it done yet. The weather has warmed a bit and the heating system we have is sufficient so long as we don't turn the fan on. We'll figure it out before next Winter.

Other than a few things: painting the laundry room and putting in some Craig's List cabinets; hanging the many dozens of pictures we had packed away in the shipping container; putting up closet rods and bringing our clothing in from storage; etc; . . . All of these have combined to make us walk around enjoying the new house more every day. There are still a few things needing done, but things are in motion.

I ordered part of the wood for the new wrap-around porch last Friday. Our permit extension is likely to time-out before it is built so we are likely going to apply for another extension to give us some time. We still have a lot of little stuff to do before the final inspection so a bit more time will ease things a bit. We are coming into the busy season.

One of our girl dogs, Laffee Taffee, is having a litter in March. Since we couldn't put the new kennel in place before then we are building temporary accommodations in the Pantry of the new house. She will be comfortable there and we will work hard to keep the new house from becoming dog worn. 

I have begun making dog coats for sale and have a good pattern which I came up with after a few less than perfect attempts. The new coats fit Basset Hounds very well, can be washed in the machine over and over, and so far haven't had much go wrong, so I'm confident enough to let them go out to people needing them. It's not certain that our coats will be a success on the market, but our dogs love them.

We bought ten new Orpington chicks to replenish our flock. We have done this every year because we lose them to cold or other causes and occasionally have given older hens which have decreased egging. This time we bought Lavender Orpington chick, which are slightly purple, to set them off from the buff colored hens we have been raising for four years. The idea is, and always was, to cull our own hens and put the meat in the freezer, but we've never been able to tell how old they are with certainty so buying a different color every year will tell us when the cross into the third year and are ready for the soup pot.

The Farm is nearing Spring, so soon we will begin tilling to prepare the soil for planting. We brought in many yards of hardwood leaves to begin turning the Farm into a no-tilling concept  and these pile will be mulched enough to till into the soils we have. This ought to be a pretty good year and we have begun buying seed for April planting. 

Much more to do. So much has been done. 

December 25th, 2021 Doing the Impossible: Christmas in the Impossible New Farmhouse

  

I'll try to be brief . . .

This post is a retrospective on Creekside Farm since its beginnings. The sort of thing I like to do when we hit a major milestone. Finding the property was one such posting and I included all that had gone before it in that post.  Another such opportunity to read an abridged version of that story was in Redefining the Plan. Plans changed when the former plans stopped making sense.  When we Moved from the City and into the tiny home cabin I wrote the story again. There may have been a few more moment when reflection seemed a good idea, but the point stands that occasionally the story needs retold and refined. 

This post is another brief restating of our experiences here since we began. I cannot possibly write the whole story in a simple post so I'll keep the details simple. You can read this entire story using the links of our blog's Histories section (to the right of this). 

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In the beginning . . .

Ann and I went to Las Vegas to have a second wedding. 

Our slate of life goals had been achieved and we needed a plan for the second half of our lives. So we took long driving trip to decide what and where we wanted to be when we retired. It took four days to decide on a direction, landing on the idea that owning a wedding venue would be a happy business (and one that we might be able to do). Soon after we decided that a farm themed venue sounded the most achievable so we began making what would some day be called The Plan. 

We were actually planning to do the impossible. We needed a two million dollar farm themed wedding venue to grow from a dead standing start and nearly no cash to begin the project. 

To fund our initial efforts we decided to leverage our experience in dog breeding. The idea at this point was to use small chunks of available cash (to buy dogs) to make medium sized chunks of cash (from raising puppies), then use the medium chunks of cash to buy a Farm (with a house and barn). We bought some dogs and got started right away. But things didn't go as planned -a continuing theme for the bigger project . . . 

Early on in our search for a farm it became apparent that any property suitable for our early plans was going to be financially out of reach. Any farm with ten acres, a house, and a barn, was going to be too expensive to move forward in anything but a fully fledged farming business and we didn't have that sort of experience. So we began looking for a "stepping stone" farm. 

It took some wildly optimistic searching but eventually we found a derelict piece of abandoned land, with dubious ownership, under tax foreclosure, without a house, and having no barn, that might become a "stepping stone" toward buying a bigger place. 

The idea of a "stepping stone" farm seemed one possible way to get to where we wished to go, while learning how to farm while we built up enough money to buy what we needed. Though seemingly impossible to do, we found a place and bought it on owner contract. For our next impossible trick we somehow found a way to pay off the tax lien. The project could then begin in earnest and we began to clear away the trash. Simply finding land suitable for homesteading was just one of the impossible hurdles we would need to jump over. It took a year to clear the trash. We still needed to develop the empty lot into a farm, build a house, and the project was just getting started. 

We had decided early on in The Plan to buy some land and leverage a combination of the land value and the equity our house (in town) to get a building loan and develop the Farm quickly. But following the Real Estate Crash of 2007-8 the banks had decided only to fund larger development projects and small building loans were not being made to single family developments. So we changed the plan once more. 

Deciding the best way to move forward we built a tiny home to live in while we built a Farmhouse. It took almost a year to build our temporary tiny home and the entire story of that period can be found in the Histories section of the BLOG. We moved the tiny home to the farm under cover of darkness, no knowing if it would survive the trip to the Farm (which at that point was simply a piece of cleared land). And once we were settled in we began remodeling our house in town so that we could get top dollar for it. We sold the house quickly and began our Farm building efforts in earnest. But things took a lot longer that we thought they should.

It took two years to get the required architectural and engineering drawings and secure the necessary permits so that we could go ahead with building the Farmhouse.  We made many mis-steps and a few minor changes, but we actually achieved the impossible this year and moved into the new Farmhouse three days ago. Our Plan contained many points where failure might become an issue and stop us from doing as we wished.  But the Plan also had many points where failure could become a success. The Farmhouse completion was one such point in the plan.

Step one of the larger Plan was always to build a house because if we completed a house the Farm would become a  residence and not a simple plot of somewhat valuable land to home buyers who are looking for a two acre plot with a house. In the larger scheme, building a house creates a safe stopping point. So, our moving into the Farmhouse three days ago is a significant step forward that allows us to move the project forward much more readily. If we never make the next part of the plan a reality, our investment is fairly safe and the return significant enough to think things through into a change in our Plan.

Bearing in mind that Creekside Farm was, at first, intended only to be a stepping stone farm; something that we would build up and sell, so that we might buy a property more suited to our ultimate goals. We have been planning since we found the land to continue with our initial plan here on this Farm, but most things have their own dynamic. It may or may not be possible to do what we wish to do. It may be actually impossible to complete our bigger plans here. In the case of our Farm, the future of the Farm may be two (or more) things at once. We may become a farm which makes enough money to continue; The Farm might become another family's residence (if we decide to move our plans where they might come to fruition); The Farm might continue to grow into the complicated plan containing hospitality and wedding venues we dreamed up eight years ago. The end is still not certain.

But building our House (with our own hands), buying our Farm, both from a dead stand-still, with no cash on hand, both of these were mere possibilities most people would simply not begin with. Both would had seemed impractical or impossible, depending on your personal optimism. We once said we were rolling the dice with all of our future on the line.

Only time will tell how things will work out. But if you've been following our progress so far, you will know that we have done the impossible more often than not. 

December 18th, 2021 Our Christmas Letter

 

November 26th, 2021 Thanksgiving

 Thanksgiving at Creekside Farm is a simple thing. We sit for dinner, as most do, and contemplate our good fortunes. This post will be a retrospective on our year and not a recounting of the month as is usual. Occasionally I like to recount an entire history of the Farm and this is a possibility as I begin to write, but I will try to be brief and keep things relatively on point. To this end I must say the generally this year has been very good to us, but not without a some spill over of drama from outside, both good and bad. We began the year with our world in a pandemic lockdown, a newly elected President, a horrific  revolt against the government.

Our world seemed in turmoil and I wondered how far Trump, the traitorous ex-president, would take it. I wondered how much war I make at my age. But things never went that far. Political things have slackened off, but not without qualifications, which I will not go into since it really is not Farm related. 

The year has been a financial success even though Farm production was not really involved. We had two litters of Basset pups, both litters sold within days of birth and all of the new parents are ecstatic with their new fur babies. The financial gains from these two litters allowed bills to be paid, but there was other income as well. We decided to take our Social Security retirement at sixty-two because the numbers were right and full retirement had been raised to sixty-seven. And there were a number of large chunks of cash, doled out by the government, intended to stimulate the economy and assuage the negatives of the pandemic. We had a barrel of cash when moving to the Farm three years ago, but our long ranged planning included income to keep things level. The year brought us good fortune and we became self sufficient this year. But our long ranged planning requires farm production income to succeed and we made some large moves in that direction this year.

Since we are not yet settled on the sort of farming we will do in order to be successful farmers, but not knowing what this means in action, we continued to experiment with the sorts of plans and practices that might make our farm work successfully. As this past year began we continued to work withing the bounds conventional organic farm practices. Tilling the soil,  making compost, bringing compost in, and pushing the dirt into rows before planting seeds and starts, all seemed the right way to do things. And we had some success, but it was our crop of peppers that proved the only worthwhile thing we did. Once more we didn't reach the point where we could open a roadside produce stand or take things to a Farmer's Market, so we took what we did grow to local food banks.  In July we decided to get some outside advice to move things forward.

A nice woman from the USDA came out to survey our farm and discuss USDA subsidies to build infrastructure. She gave us some wonderful advice and described how we might go about things, but none of this advice seemed right for the level of development we have. One of the things that came of this visit was an invitation for Ann to go to a class on cover cropping in the off season. I had been spending some time learning how to make good compost, but reading a book Ann received at this class opened some new possibilities to explore. In the end we decided to begin building a "no-till" farm and this led into procuring hundreds of yards of hardwood leaves to make into leaf compost, leaf mulch, and leaf mold. The Farm looks a bit of a mess today because hauling the leaves around is a messy and muddy affair. And I won't go into how these things work together to make soil until it works, or does not, but the system sounds about right and we look forward to our attempt at farming in the coming year. Farming is the second business we had planned, the first being our dog breeding business as described above. So, while we are able to stay on the Farm even without farm income, production of sellable farm produce is our chief concern, second only to finishing the farmhouse in immediate importance.

We have nearly finished the Farmhouse we began to build two years ago. At the beginning of the year we had raised the frame, put a temporary roof and siding on, and wrapped the whole place in a weather resistant layer. During the year we wired, insulated, and finished the interior walls. We also put the exterior siding and finished the roof. There is still the exterior porch to build and the exterior of the house still needs painted, but plans are in place and we hope to get all but the painting done in Winter. We will move from our tiny home to the new Farmhouse in the next few weeks and celebrate Christmas in warmth there. One thing we are very thankful for is a long hot shower, but there was much more that happened, and did not happen, this past year. Things are generally going forward fairly well. Objects will come up to block our plans, but as in the past we will find a way around whatever we find. The Farm has a schedule which our careful plans fit into, but only in a general way. 

In the coming year we will attempt once more to make a profit on farm produce, finish the house, birth two more litters, move our new kennel into place, and begin producing things to sell in service of our long termed goals. All of these plans will be guided by the weather and the world's need for what we can make of the gifts we have and we look forward to finding out how we did when Thanksgiving comes around once more. But this past year showed us much and gave us much more than we expected, even if less than we hoped for. The thanks we give is for the help we received in making our plans work and not to plans that failed. We have had, now have, and will have, much to be thankful for as time marched forward.