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.