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.
Things are happening on Creekside Farm. 
