January 5, 2019 Preparing for Spring

It rains a lot here, but this doesn't mean we get to sit around much. Winter is a time for planning and preparing so we are staying moderately busy preparing the greenhouse for early Spring and late Winter crops, and working the ground to keep the weeds down.

One Winter project is working on our long termed goals of building a vertical u-pick strawberry garden.  A vertical garden would give an advantage to other u-picks because there would be no need for getting up and down from the dirty ground. 

The giant strawberry barrels didn't work.
They were heavy, hard to water,
and the soil temperature got awfully high.

We tried one vertical method using 55 gallon plastic drums a few years ago,  but it didn't seem to work for many reasons. Each planter held about 100 plants, but watering and heat considerations kept flowering artificially low, so there wasn't much fruiting. We'll re-purpose the barrels this year, but the goal remains unmet, so we're trying another idea.

Following on last Summer, where we let the 300 berry plants left over from the barrel failure run wild. Now we have about two thousand plants to put in the ground in March.

A major problem will be sorting the plants into rows because, in all of the moving, we lost track of which plant is what variety. They all will be planted none-the-less and we had prepared conventional planting space for them in the Strawberry area made last Summer. We had tilled the soil and planted a cover crop in the new field, but the new septic drain field was forced to go under the space so it had to be torn up; but before annihilating the ground, I pushed all of the good soil into a long berm to wait out construction and Winter. This soil will get put back into rows and we will plant most of our unsorted strawberries on the ground this year. We should get a fairly good crop starting in early Spring and lasting until nearly Winter this year and hopefully with enough yield to sell a bunch of berries. But our u-pick plans will take a bit more time.

Each planter will hold around 69 plants at first.
We'll allow them to double up and then hold them there.
Each tower might produce as much as 100 pints a season.

The new u-pick plan involves building elevated towers of trough planters, stacked one over another, hung between posts, in long rows. Each row will take about six of these eight foot towers and be spaced apart well enough to get two people to to walk through the rows comfortably. There may be as many as twelve rows in the first two years and the whole affair will be under greenhouse roof year around. In summer the roof will change from plastic to shade cloth to keep thing cool for the people who come to pick berries.

Even unsorted, we will have four to six different varieties of strawberry plants and this will make our picking season run from April through October. Each of the varieties has its own picking season, so not all berries will be available in every season. There are many factors in making a garden grow great stuff and we are only getting started. The strawberry gardens will mostly be planted on flat ground this year if all goes well, but so much more is happening around the Farm.

We fully tilled the greenhouse for late winter planting. The weather in the greenhouse isn't Spring-y, but it is close enough that many types of plants will do well in there. Lettuces, spinach, and some of the hardier stuff, like bulb vegetables, ought to do well. We built a series of planting tables to sprout things on. These long tables will be double covered in plastic with a heater for the coldest days ahead. We used re-purposed wood found on Craig's List in building these tables and it saved nearly one-hundred dollars.

I get a ton of stuff off of Craig's List. This week I was able to grab about 340 retaining wall blocks  (about $1000 worth) for free. They are individualized and will make nice planters and terraces. Craig's List is a big help.

We are just in the middle of finishing the new chicken coop and run. Quite a few of the chickens we bought in the Summer never did take to the old coop, so hopefully this will get everyone to go indoors at night. There are few things sadder than looking at wet chickens in near freezing weather, especially when there is a nice warm coop ten feet away.  The new coop is large and spacious, with nine nesting boxes, an automatic door, and pans for easy floor cleaning. The perches will hold fifty birds comfortably and half again as much before bickering sets in, so we are good for size.

Aside from this we are trying to stay motivated while wet with rain, get the house planning moving once more, and prepare for the coming season. 

December 29, 2018 It rains here a lot.

It rains in western Oregon, and it rains a lot. Our efforts to work the land have been rained out for two weeks. And even though there are interior spaces to consider and build, these are not sufficient to take up the time available in our lives. So we hobby around a bit.

Ann's hobby is cooking and baking. So she has been busy learning to make breads while testing recipes she searches for in books, magazines, and on the Internet. We eat well at Creekside Farm. The chickens and dogs eat everything we don't.

My hobby is writing long fiction. I write all of the time, but put things on pages only occasionally. This hobby began when I had more time on my hands than things to employ them. The stories simply appear out of nowhere in my visual mind, but then it takes months and years to appear on the page. None of this is easily explained, which is good because it makes the inside of my brain fun even though it complicates things. I have been working to squeeze a new book into paper for the past few weeks and things are going surprisingly well. This may be the one book that actually works out as intended, only time will tell.

This morning I woke up to find the resolution to a few problems I created for myself in the book, one was a reason for the suicidal death of one of the main characters. For some reason the death had to be a beautiful death, so I spent five minutes looking around the Internet for inspiration and found a piece of Ballet which led into finding a poem, which led to another poem and some analytics. I don't do poetry, but a few have happened to me in the past and I appreciate the stuff.  I opened a blank page in my word processor to start taking notes and a poem fell onto the page unexpectedly. I sent it out to a poetry web site, but had to publish it here for copyrighting purposes.

The Dying Swan – © 2018 David Paul Drake

We all fight death,

its relentless behavior.

But witness change,

to all, in nature.

Dying swans catch, without assent.

To rail, to rant, warble, lament.

To no avail. Death won't repent.

All lives end, despite intent.

We say “Cry out!”

And “Fight!” with zeal.

Yet all still fail in their appeal.

None escape that which is real.

Strive and strafe, care, and carry.

Waste the time, or never tarry.

Marry and parent, extend your lives.

Pointless or fruitful, death still arrives.

December 13, 2018 Our Christmas Letter

Click on this picture to see it better.

You can see this better if you click on it

We packed our address book, so it is in storage and we have no idea where to send cards this year. Please write your address information in the contact box on the right of this and we'll get your card in the mail. Otherwise the only people receiving a card from us will be those who send one.

November 22,2018 Re-imagining Creekside Farm

The New Farm Plan
The little images are hints of the nature of each place.
Click on the picture for a larger version.

Thanksgiving is an everyday occurrence here, we seldom take any of this for granted. Our good fortune in the past few years has been notable. Many would never believe the place where we started from, or what we did to get to this point. All I can say on this is that we did start from nothing and have come this far with God' good graces.  And for that we are truly grateful.

The Farm was a dream at its onset. Once we found the property I imagined what we might eventually build there, then as more information came to the forefront I spent time re-imagining the plan to fit the new circumstances and conditions. Today I put some finishing touches on the new Farm Plan, the changes forced by having to re-locate the house in order to get a permit to build it. This plan takes all of our previous ideas into account, but changes all of dimensions from previous plans. If you are interested in looking at the old plans click here.

This new plan is merely a vision of perfection, not likely to ever be completely built. There will be many more re-visioning images as we go forward with building because things change and reality gets in the way of good imagining. I make these pictures so that I can keep the entire thing in my visual mind as I do everyday work. This past week, for example, I began to think about the Creekside Path (which follows Dairy Creek outside of the fence at the back of the property). So as we cut and burned the brush I began visualizing the different aspects of the proposed new path, because these aspects will become the backdrop for the gardens to eventually be found inside of the fence.

And then there is the County approvals needed to build the thing, which may or may not come (easy or at all). We will need a Type Four land use approval in order to fully realize the Farm plan as a public space. There will be three other land use approvals decided before we get the thing built and in use.

All this being said, we didn't remove much from the original plans, and the new things incorporated in the new plan are:

A Cherry tree lined path which runs from near the proposed Barn Store to the Northeast gate at the back of the Farm. It should make a very nice picture and add a substantial length of walking path. In designing this space I am trying to add a colonnade sort of thing. Something like the Colonnade images taken at the White House to add a sense of time and removed contemplation to the images taken there.

I moved the Yin Yang Pond to a new location due to a lack of a proper surrounding in the northwest corner gate. In the old place the pond would not have had a good backdrop, or provide a good backdrop for pictures taken there. But the pond might have a chance of making a good picture with the Cherry Tree Lane and Chinese Gazebo in the background. And since this is a semi-reflective pond, mirror images might be more interesting.

We had been toying with allowing each guest to have their own fire pit near their cabin, but this is a bit dangerous and would take a load of maintenance. So instead we thought of putting a centrally located fire pit in the midst of a communal gazebo where all guests might come and be together as they wish. I have an idea about surrounding the space with a curtain water feature, something of a rainy day during the hotter months with water falling gently on the landscape surrounding the Gazebo. But this space is intended to allow a gathering of people around a fire in the evening, something which people have been doing for the entire history of people.

As we build, we find new things to build or things which ought not be built. But each change is a refinement of a vision which, at its heart, is intended to bring things to people and ourselves.

Today it is three years since the very beginning of the Creekside Farm Project and only two years from beginning this written BLOG chronicle, so much has been accomplished. In this three years we have reclaimed the land from trash and wildness, planted food and flower crops, raised a flock of chickens and dozens of dogs for a profit, and begun actual building of what we hope will be something special. It seems a lot longer, but it has only been eight months since we began living on the Farm (full time) in our tiny home cabin, which doubled in size while we also added hundreds of feet of covered space for animals and work. Is seems incredible that we are only five months from the point of achieving the money to begin making the bigger dream a reality. Time means nothing once you reach fifty or so years old, days tend to flitter by unnoticed. So taking the time to reflect is important or we might miss all of the fun we are having.

November 1, 2018 A Necessary Update.

Life goes on apace at Creekside Farm. So much is happening, most of it too small to write about, most of it is fairly meaningless in terms of the bigger picture. But I have been remiss in keeping our history up to date. So here's what has happened since the Summer Supper Party in late August.

The biggest thing is that we finally got all of the readily available trash removed from the place.  But so much has happened, is happening, will happen.

Jack helped me build it.

We got the new septic system installed. It was a big project which might have needed an article of its own, but didn't because it really wasn't very interesting. A lot of digging, a bunch of laying things into trenches, and then a lot of burying. It is enough to say that we got the thing in, saved a ton of money doing ourselves, got it approved by the County, and this past week hooked the tiny home cabin into it so that we are better off right now than we were.

As soon as we got approval to apply for the septic permit we hired Erik the Architect, along with Trena the Intern, to design our new farmhouse. Up to this point the only thing we knew for certain was that my dream of putting the house at the northwest corner of the property had to be changed so that we got a quick land use decision. Putting the house in the corner would have added at least six months to the project and we wanted to get building. I had already done a preliminary plan for the house (and thought myself pretty clever for nearly a year), then these two clever people got hold of it and changed most parts for the better.  We're quite happy about the new design and should get actual plans this month at some point. From there it goes to the engineer, then to the building permit people, then maybe we can build. Since we are doing most of the building ourselves we expect to move in by next November, but we've said this same thing before.

The early version of their design work.

I added in some details.
You can click on this for a bigger picture.

MacGreggor's Garden produced (2) pretty well this summer, but not enough to build the produce stand this year. Next year in Jerusalem, as they say. This morning we began pulling everything that won't Winter over out in the garden. It will look better to see rotting mud than to see rotting plants, and our compost pile looks quite happy.

The chickens (2) have been selling about twenty dozen eggs a month for the past two months. Not much of an income, but we got some business done this year and so we can claim victory even if it is something a bit more hollow than we had planned. Winter is coming and so we expect less of them as the weather turns colder.  They will process the compost pile all Winter for use in planting  in the Spring.  This morning I ordered cartons and labels for future egg sales. Not that I needed to, but it will feel more like a business effort.

Our hounds are doing very well, but we had to put Henri Hudson down in early September. He had taken a turn for the violent crazy and killed a few chickens . . . He's been planted behind the new home site along with our LizziBeth, who was his girl and who went into the ground before him  We did get a new girl puppy, named Grizelda Laffee Taffee, in September and she is both growing well and a double handful of fun. Since we are not going to do any breeding until the new kennel is up and running there is no puppy business. But we are probably looking for another female in the Spring so that she can start growing old enough to put to work.

I am working on a new design layout for the Farm and Gardens since the old one had the house in the wrong place, also since we have some experience which can be put into the plan, and since we already change the plan by putting some stuff into the ground to propagate more plants for the gardens.

The Party Tent, now workshop.

A few weeks back I converted the Summer Supper Party tent into workshop and covered it for the winter's rain. It will be a great place from which we can stage the house building, but the dogs love it to play in when it is rainy out and the chickens like to stay in there for keeping out of the rain too.

As for the rest of it . . . The rains started last week and the lack of old growth weeds makes the place really a big mud pit that one must keep out of, for the most part. We will do what we can through  the Winter and try to keep up the momentum we believe has finally begun to grow faster, but the Farm has its own plans, and its own schedule. There seems no way to rush anything. The Dream of Creekside Farm is still in place and working (for the most part), though changed by time and the needs of Creekside Farm and Washington County.