August 24th, 2019 The New Normal

Last year on this date we were anticipating our very first Summer Supper. We had built a special place, bought way too much food, wine, and beer, and had invited everyone on Sell Road. Eventually about fifty-three people came for dinner and we served them as well as we could considering that the entire thing was cooked in our tiny home. That party was a success, the next one ought to be as good, or better, if all goes well. The 2019 Summer Supper will be on September 21st at about four o'clock in the afternoon. We'll be doing a fairly straight forward burgers and dogs meal with Camp Creekside Chili on the side, over the top, or left out altogether. We will also be serving enough vegetarian and vegetable stuff to keep the vegans satisfied and enough iced tea, pop, beer, wine, and ice as well.

RSVP using the form at the top of this page to let us know who is coming.

We are hoping for seventy-five this year so you coming is important to us.

As for the past week, things are pretty much back to a new normal. Ann's helpers have continued to come (and it is really appreciated). This week Ann spent the entire week working the Gardens. Produce is coming fairly regularly, and increasing weekly, but we still haven't come to the point that we can open the produce stand. Instead we are taking our excess produce down to St. Vincent DePaul's Food Bank. We are still delivering produce and eggs once a week to our longer standing friends too.  She also began the learning prcess for fermented pickles. This is a good thing. So farming is coming along. 

I have returned to working the Farm full time, even if a bit restricted as to what I can do somewhat. The first few days of the week I spent quite a bit of time working through some cleanup projects in anticipation of building the new Summer Supper shelter. We will put the new shelter at the back corner where it is a bit better shaded from the Sun. The shelter will become the place where we put building materials once the permits come through. (We made zero progress on the permits this week.) 

From Wednesday onward I sent my time cleaning up the shop space. The past few months had left it a shambles. Tools and hardware were wildly mixed up and left everywhere, the materials and tables were covered in dust, trash, what-have-you. SO the whole thing needed cleaned up and re-organized. This morning I got the final touches finished and began cleaning up around the outside of the shop. Eventually we may get the place cleared away, time will tell. 

This afternoon we took the e-bikes up the hill to Stub Stewart park on the Trail. The weather here has been unseasonably cool, but sunny and really nice. 

This new girl will be named Abba Zabba

We also finalized the purchase of two new puppies for our Rocketdog Kennel. No only if we could build the kennel . . . The new girls will come to us from Idaho in Mid-September and we're wondering how we will get through it. But plans still have to be kept if we're ever going to make a living on this place.

This little cutey will be named Bit-o-honey

Another thing worth noting is that: somehow, without showing any of the normal warning signs, Laffee Taffee may just be pregnant for the first time. She is too young to have to go through this, so we are hoping she doesn't have to. It may be that she is merely going through a false pregnancy, only an ultrasound will tell us. We have the appointment scheduled for the coming week. This is not entirely bad news, even if we didn't intend for this to happen. I'll keep you posted.

August 16th, 2019 Back to Work

The Summer Supper is happening!
Come one, come all!

After nearly nine weeks of laying around I returned to work. Not just this, I also returned to driving a car, wearing regular shoes, and thinking ahead toward a better future. Not everything is as it once was, but a bunch of stuff is.

On Tuesday I noticed that I could move my toes without much effort. This may not sound like much, but it signaled that the swelling in my foot was beginning to go away. On Wednesday morning I was able to bend my ankle enough to pull on a pair of jeans. The work of the farm doesn't really match wearing shorts, so work pants are better. By Wednesday night I could feel the tendon flexing along the inside of my arch. Thursday morning I could begin to make out an ankle bone, and that was about it. I strapped on my ski-boot styled foot support and went to work on Thursday morning and did nearly an entire day's work for the first time. Just after lunch I took the boot off and replaced it with a pair of matching runners. In normal shoes I can drive a car, but I still need to use a crutch on one side to keep some of the pressure off of the foot as insurance. All of this might give my foot doctor a headache, but I really needed to go back to work despite his anxieties.

The Farm is looking good, things are happening.

We are getting about a quart of large strawberries out of our patch every day. Most of these go straight into the freezer, some go on our plates. Lettuces, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, onions, and corn are all present in at least one of our meals every day. Soon the zucchini, melons, and beans will begin to show up on our plates too. There still isn't enough being picked to open the produce stand, but we are selling produce to Ann's circle of friends and we donated enough lettuce to St.Vincent food bank to make a bunch of people happy. Giving food away was always part of our plan, so at least something is going according to some plan. This  doesn't happen much.

Most of the damage from the tree fall in mid- June has been either cleaned up, or waiting the lifting of the burn ban. We will start putting up a replacement greenhouse soon enough and the irrigation stuff as well.

We will also need to build a shelter for the Summer Supper Party in September. Make sure to RSVP on the form above this article if you plan on coming. We will announce the menu soon, but the food will be good and the drinks cold. Last year we fed fifty or so people, this year we are hoping for another twenty-five more to come.

Click for a bigger picture

Our young hens began giving eggs this week. The eggs are good, but will be a bit small for a few more weeks. Orpington chickens are very large and their eggs are large as well, so the little eggs are sort of comical, but tasty. Ann delivers large eggs to our loyal customers, the little eggs stay here for personal use. Our duck eggs are selling well and our two new hens gave their first eggs this week. As it turned out only two of the five new Runner Ducks turned out to be hens so we are in the process of finding homes for the three young drakes we do not need. These drakes are very pretty so it shouldn't take long to find places to re-home them to.

The rodent problems have gone away for the time being. Hunting the squirrels and rabbits with a rifle has worked, but we are not at all happy to have shot those who were eating our crops. We haven't seen any more for a few days so maybe the new plan worked.

We got a message from the County that they needed a few engineering questions answered, so the permit is being worked and we might be able to build some day. I got our structural engineer on the job and we should have the questions answered pretty soon, but I'm ever more skeptical about the building phase of our project happening this year. Not building this year puts our whole project at risk since making money really depends on having a house and kennel. The timing is getting uncomfortably close but we are not panicky about it just yet.

All in all, this was a really good week. The weather has been great, nothing bad happened, and we are somehow beginning to look forward to a brighter future. All seem as it ought to be once more and we are very grateful for it.

August 10, 2019 Moving around now

The doctor took the cast off of my leg, put me into one of those boot things, and then told me not to use it. Funny thing this. . .  I have been walking around for a few weeks now, the thought of me giving all of that up is pretty small, but I appreciate the sentiment. The fact is that I really got hurt when the tree fell.  The broken bones and tree anxiety took a whole lot more out of me that I realized or was willing to admit. Moving around takes about four times the effort since there is no leverage in my legs and lifting anything more than about twenty pounds fairly stops me moving around. I can still move if my hands are pretty empty and I can stand up straight for a few hours at a time. But otherwise I am pretty useless for work.  It isn't that I can go running around, pulling heavy weights and roto-tilling new fields. But I can do some stuff.

We were having a real big problem with rodents. Mice, rats, rabbits, squirrels, moles, and gophers have all taken quite a toll on the gardens. Last year it was about moles and gophers. These didn't eat too much, but they tore the ground up a lot. During the Winter, after trying every bait, trap, and every bit of internet advice we could find, we finally heard about using road flares. So any new opening is now opened up immediately and a fifteen minute flare put into the tunnel. The gophers all moved, some of them not too far away so they stage come backs every once in a while. The moles have given up for the most part. The mice and rats are an ongoing puzzle, but the rabbits and squirrels have given  us a real problem.

The squirrels started off early in the Spring by invading the Greenhouse (before it was destroyed by the tree). The ate a great many of the seeds planting for sprouting, ate the heads off of a bunch of the sprouts, and when the plants started going into the ground the came soon after and destroyed the lot. They ate all of the early lettuces and all of the cantaloupe sprouts. They also started emtying the chicken feeder, an expensive thing to allow to continue.  We started making screen protectors and looking for other solutions.

The rabbits live next door and usually eat their new flowers, but occasionally they came by and weren't nearly the problem the squirrels have been. But since the Greenhouse has been torn down they have been coming over to take advantage of the many varieties of rabbit bait we have planted. They aren't nearly as big a problem as the squirrels, but they eat a lot more and take bigger bites.

We thought about snares and traps, but the farming forums online told us the only solution would be some sort of gun. Eventually we decided to do the dirty deed and bought a .22 caliber rifle with a scope. Since then we have been taking the critters out and hating it. The fact is that the little varmints just keep on coming. The rabbits are pretty hard to get, they are quick but not impossible. The squirrels are more numerous and a bit slower moving, so their numbers will eventually start falling.

The rows in the Market Garden is mostly filled with plants under some sort of wire protection, but so much that these furry critters stay out of it. We have three of four opportunities to take a squirrel out most days, the rabbits not nearly so much. Some days we don't see any.

The Gardens started producing food this past few weeks and things are looking pretty good. We now have onions, potatoes, tomatoes, strawberries, and lettuces to eat. Last night's supper was mostly grown here an it was delicious.  The plants are growing faster than the rodents can eat them and soon we will have produce worthy of selling.

Since I can't work much it falls to me to do the hunting, but gardening is out. I have spent some time driving the tractor and moving stuff around. I have also spent some time using the field burner to try and help out with weeds. And I can sit for a few hours and look for opportunities to do some stuff and it gives me something to do which isn't surfing YouTube or playing some game when I find something. But it will sure be nice to be able to get back to work.  We are planning our next moves, waiting for permits to come through, and thinking about our Second Annual Summer Supper. None of this is nothing, so I'll have to be content.

I've had quite a bit of time to think about things while laying around for nearly eight weeks. It took a few weeks to stop feeling useless, and few more to stop trying to force myself back to work. But since there isn't much anyone can do to knit bones it seems more right to think that there isn't much I can do about it either. So I spend about half my days laying around, the other half I get to do what little I can. The new boot will give me a bit more flexibility in doing some things, but time is the only thing that will fix what has been broken.  But things are going pretty well on the Farm and it looks good for the near future. Ann and her crew have done an amazing job of keep up on things too, so once I do get back to work we will be right back on top of it.

July 26th, 2019 Days Dragging Along

These past two weeks have been relatively good ones. Ann and the people who are helping her have done a fine job of putting the gardens back together and we have been getting some produce out of it.  Salads here are really good, but the tomatoes haven't caught up to us yet. We are getting a pint of Strawberries out of the Strawberry patch every day this week, most of these are eaten fresh, some will be frozen. There isn't enough produce to put out in the produce stand, but things are beginning to look better out there. Ann has been delivering eggs and lettuce for a few weeks.

The weeds almost got on top of us again, but Ann and her people have stayed at it and we're looking pretty good. We also had a resurgent problem with squirrels, rabbits, and rats. The wire row covers we had weren't quite enough to keep them at bay so we lost quite a few plant starts to grazing. We went to Bi-mart and bought the only rodent deterrent that we hadn't tried, a twenty-two caliber rifle with a scope. It took a few days to get the thing sighted in so that it was fairly accurate, but we haven't seen a whole lot of rodents around since then.

There was a minor tree incident last week. The big Walnut behind the tiny home had been looking a bit "lean-y" all year, but Ann was pretty sure it was moving towards falling. I am especially paranoid about falling trees these days, so Ann and Jack rented a bucket lift and cut about half of the tree away to balance the load on the roots. Had the tree fallen it would have landed on the tiny house, not an outcome we were willing to suffer. The tree debris is now a large pile awaiting a lifting of the seasonal burn ban. We were also able got get a problematic branch taken out of another tree. We used to call the branch the "widow maker". Not anymore.

This was the bucket lift they used to cut down the Walnut.

I have been touring around the Farm this past week, using crutches to keep the recently rebuilt foot off of the ground. The broken ribs and spinal fractures are nothing to be concerned about now and my strength is coming back. The day before yesterday I did two laps of the Farm and we finished the day doing a fifteen mile ride on our electric bikes. The bikes don't need pedaling, but I was able to pedal for quite a bit of the trip. It was freeing.

Yesterday I spent the entire morning sorting through the Greenhouse wreckage to salvage what metal I could. I cut the very badly bent parts off and kept the straight pieces for other projects.  It felt really good doing something worthwhile but just after lunch the exertion caught up to me and I slept a bit of the afternoon away. Today I was worn out and didn't move around very much. It will be good to get the cast off in a few weeks so that I can go back to work.

This afternoon we put a deposit on a female Basset House puppy for the kennel. The new girl will come from Idaho in mid-September and we can't wait. The plan was to buy two new females this Summer, but we might need to hold off until the new house is built and we have the new kennel set up.

The house permit was supposed to be finished today, but we haven't heard back from the County yet. It wouldn't make much difference since I'm laid up and can't build, but it would be nice to know where we stand.

July 13, 2019 The Healing Time

Probably the thing I am most impressed by.
Ann built these cucumber trellises
without vthe least amount of help.

To those of you who have helped. Thank you.
Your place in Heaven ought to be secure.
Ann still needs you for a little while longer.

Since June 18th we have been in a crisis brought on by the tree fall on that day. The Market Garden had been about forty percent destroyed, the Greenhouse was a total loss except for about half of the plants, I had five spinal fractures, two ribs, and a foot which had to be reconstructed; all of which has kept me on my back and off of work for nearly a month. Many people, if not most, might have taken the rest of the year off, but somehow we haven't.

Ann (Heidi Hay) has been working hard, under her own power, since the accident. A change happened on the day neither one of us was killed by a giant tree falling on top of both of us.

Since the beginning of our time together, I have been the motivating force in our family. Most ideas came from me and if there was heavy lifting it was my back doing the work. Not to say, of course, that I did all of the work. To say this would be a huge exercise of ego. We worked as a team, I was the coach and captain of the team is all. Ann had no desire to lead or create, or if she had them the desire was kept tightly wrapped. We have always been a very good team, she was always as tough, but not as strong, and so she generally kept herself to lists I dictated. Checking off the lists was her forte and nothing would have got done if she wasn't so good at checking things off.

But following the accident, something within Ann stiffened up. She was tough, but something within her grew immediately strong. It may have always been there, but since that fateful day Ann has taken control of the Farm and orchestrated the entire recovery in such a way that, as of today, the only thing left undone is the rebuilding of the greenhouse and returning me to sufficient health so that I can go back to work. And this is happening soon.

She has had a great deal of help in doing all of this, a great many people have simply showed up here and pitched in some labor, our Son Jackson has come here many times and used the skills I taught him to repair much of the damage. Friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family have given Ann the extra hands she needed to re-build and re-plant nearly all of what was lost. But all of this had to be her doing. She's created lists of goal every day and when people showed up, she had a plan to use them to their full effect.  But this isn't all that she has done in the past month.

She has supervised my recovery, kept the house, and even joined in on getting our permit application forced through. (They haven't actually issued the permit, but it seems actively moving forward now. Ann went down there and crabbed out loud until the County people got interested in cooperating.)

All of this combined amounts to an amazement, and she deserves great respect for her efforts and achievements. I cannot explain in words how much I admire what she has done. It was nothing short of heroic. Here are some images to tell the story better.

Ann put the Market Garden back together after the tree was removed.
The amount of replanting  and fixing rows was huge.
We still have a weeding issue to work on, but this is as it has been.

The tree which fell has been almost entirely cut up and burned.
We still have a bit more wood to get rid of, but the tree is mostly gone.

This is all that remains of the greenhouse.
Now the site is cleared of the tree and the torn apart greenhouse.
The plants are all growing well and we expect a good season..

I cannot say enough about how Ann has pulled both of us out of the dangerous place the tree put us. She might have simply folded up and reasoned that the best course of action would be to lay low and get me back on my feet. But this is not what happened. She has carried the Farm, and me, on her back since then. Providing nothing else happens, we will make a full recovery.

If there were is award, she ought to get one.