November 15, 2020 Winter sets in

The weather outside has been frightful since my last post. Rains nearly every day. Cold and windy in between rain storms and throughout each week. All of the leaves have fallen and the ground in most places is covered three leaves deep. This is sort of a mixed blessing because the leaves cover the mud, and there's been plenty of mud around. Not much outdoors work has been done, but there's  plenty to do.

The Framing Inspection we scheduled for Monday before last didn't happen. When the guy came he told us the plumbing and electrical parts of the larger framing inspection had to be done first. The inspectors in Washington County are pretty good people so we received some good guidance on what to do. We scheduled the electrical inspection the next day. 

The electrical inspector came and told us to do some stuff before the inspection could take place. Some wiring changes for the most part. Quite a bit of work. But we spent a few days clearing all of this up and so we'll be ready in a day or so. Once they inspect and pass this we can get PGE out to put in the main power wire and have power in the house shortly thereafter.

The plumbing inspection is getting close to ready too. I had to change some stuff slightly and finish putting things together, but with the exception of completely filling the septic and vent system to the very top we are pretty close to ready. The waste system is pretty large and there are quite a few parts glued together, so the way they check for it all being good the ask you to plug all of the openings and fill the system up until it runs out of the roof vents. It is going to weigh a ton once it is al filled up and we're hopeful it will all hold up. The water system must be checked too, but we'll probably sail through it. 

Wednesday last we had a dry period and so we started wrapping the house in waterproof paper and putting windows in. The inspector gave us some guidance and so a few of the windows had to be re-ordered in tempered glass. We were able to get most of the lower windows in, but the second level will take towing the scaffold around the whole house to put the paper on and hang the windows. It will take a hard day to do and hopefully our son Jack will help out. We'll still have to paper the gables too, so another day of climbing in our future.

Not much farming to do in the mud, but we did find a really cool planting table on CraigsList for free. It was a standing sand box in a Sunday school and now we're going to r-purpose it into a a planting table. The thing is about two feet high so the first order of business is putting some taller legs on. 

Chickens, Ducks, and Dogs are all doing well. The eggs are selling once more, but on a wildly scaled down basis. Not much else happening as we pray for drier weather and passed inspections. 

October 31, 2020 Happy Halloween!

The weeks go by pretty fast around here. The days have become very short and the nights cold, all in the short time since my last post. The Farm is awash in Fall colors and the large trees surrounding us are all turning their reds and golds. 

The Farm is mostly going into hibernations where we have annuals planted. Some of the herbs and lettuces are going to continue to grow until Winter sets in hard. All of the perennials were killed off last Monday when we got our first frost. 

It's amazing how some of the very large plants, the pumpkins, squashes and gourds for the most part, nearly disappeared on one cold morning. One of the gourds had been covering about thirty square feet of dirt and the entire thing simply melted away. Cleaning up the remnants was simple enough. This year we decided to put the remains of these squash plants  into a separated compost heap so that we can dump seed loaded compost on strategic locations next Spring. Last year we accidentally seeded pumpkins and tomatoes willy-nilly around the Kitchen Garden. Next year will be planned a bit better. Ann took all of our volunteer pumpkins and gourds out front and sold them off to passers by.

The new hens we bought  in the Summer have finally begun producing eggs. Normally hens stop producing when the weather gets colder but we hung two heat lamps in the hen house and so the chickens might continue to produce a bit longer. We are back to selling eggs, but not quite up to full capacity yet. Our Runner Ducks are producing about one egg a day so we have enough for home cooking and little else.

The Farmhouse project is still going forward. We have been getting ready for our framing inspection for a few weeks now. The rough in wiring and plumbing were all done a few weeks ago. But the rough in wiring and pipes which bring water and power to the Farmhouse all had to be put in before the inspection. 

Ann met a new neighbor at the front gate a few weeks ago. As it turned out the new friends husband has a lot of equipment which he is willing to rent, so I rented a very large Ditch-Witch digger from him to cut out all of the trenches we would need to bury all of the water and power pipes. The machine was quite a bit larger than I would have rented and cost much less, making a three day job into one inexpensive and relatively easy day. We cut enough trench to put in a lot of garden watering capacity and this should reduce the long lengths of water hose normally found laying on the ground everywhere. We have nearly finished putting all of the infrastructure stuff in, so maybe we'll have the inspection next week.

We found the tile for the new shower floor on Craig's List last weekend and saved a bunch on it. We also got a few of the other things we will need to finish the project. Prices of building materials have been skyrocketing as of late, so every penny pinched is more appreciated. This morning we found a nice $2400 refrigerator for $400 and brought it home. Craig's List is a real resource.  

Time marches on. It doesn't stop or even slow down. And so we go along for the ride, keeping busy, trying to get stuff done. 

October 12, 2020 Slowly Moving Forward

The past few weeks haven't seemed very busy here on Creekside Farm. We've begun taking down the Market Garden plants, moving mulch around, making new mulch for next years planting. Otherwise it is has seemed a bit slow around here. The Farmhouse build is still going forward. We are getting the new house ready for its framing inspection and this is a complicated thing.

The Farmhouse project will eventually take a few hundred-thousand individual parts, each taking some amount of time to put in the right place.  We started digging out for the foundation in October of last year, poured the concrete in early Winter, and got the first wood laid in January 2020. The wooden frame of the house took ten months to complete. The wooden frame and roof are finished, for the most part. These still need their final coverings and finishes, but the house is dry on the inside and solid as a rock. But the Farmhouse framing isn't the only part included in the final County framing inspection. 

The County also wants the rough plumbing and electrical work done prior to signing off on the framing. This is so that they can check how we routed the utilities through the walls and also so they can see we didn't weaken the frame with all of our hole drilling. So the past few weeks have been spent running wiring through and over the walls, and putting in water supply lines for the sinks and laundry. Our electrical plan will appear fairly simple once we cover everything in drywall, but wiring a house is a complicated thing to do.

Figuring out where things would go took a bit of thinking. We have been talking about this and modifying the picture at the top of the page for about four months. Each room gets the parts required by the building codes, but we added things to make the place more usable. Some of our outlet points are doubled up, having four places to plug things in. The modern house has quite a lot of small appliances and computers, so more outlets are a good idea if you don't want a bunch of cords draped all over the place. Then there is figuring out lighting and electrical heating, water heating, air conditioning, and the rest.

We had started the Farmhouse project with the idea of having a propane tankless water heater in the Pantry (to supply the kitchen) and a little tank water heater in the Bathroom (to save power and have hot water quickly available). It was a sound idea, but once we found that raising the water temperature from its native fifty-five degrees, to a solid one hundred - twenty degrees, would take a lot of heater and a whole lot of propane we switched things around. Now we will have a conventional electrical water heater in the pantry and a smaller electric tankless heater in the bathroom. The two person bathtub we are buying takes about seven hundred gallons to fill, that is a lot of hot water. The tub also has a water heater of its own but seven hundred gallons of hot water is not easy to make. The switching of water heaters will save about four hundred dollars initially and won't add much to the utility bills once the solar panels are installed.

Figuring out which types of wire would make the basic plan work took some time and research. Some circuits are smaller than others. Some carry more power (like clothing dryers and water heaters), a few will only carry a little power (like L.E.D. porch lights). We made this big plan with the intention of changing it to fit the reality of the house as we put the stuff in. The drawing at the top is complicated, but it was merely to give us a general sense of how things ought to look when completed. How high up on the walls switches and outlets would go took some thought. How many outlets in each room took some thought too. Then we had to decide how to move the wires into each room, then how to move wires between outlets or through light switches to the lights. In some places we needed four wires in a casing, some only three, some heavier wire, some the minimum.

There is also the problem of putting enough power to the proper uses. A refrigerator is a bigger thing than a light bulb, so we had to add up the power needed to make the plan and try to decide if we needed a bigger wire in some places. The Kitchen circuits above the counter are heavier than the circuits below the counter because a microwave and coffee maker draw a lot of power and we didn't want things to bog down so we used a heavier wire and a bigger circuit breaker to carry the load. Some places have more outlets, but all needed thinking about carefully. Then there is the problem of circuit breakers.

Any house built in the last half century has a switched circuit breaker panel and this hasn't changed. But the modern house must have both "Arc Fault" and "Ground Fault" circuit protection. These new types of breakers cost about ten times as much, but the Code is the Code. So  to save money we had to plan around all of this and reduce the number of circuits as we put the wiring in the walls. There are few circuits that don't require these hugely expensive circuit breakers. Our interior ceiling lights and in-floor heating are the few which take the five dollar breakers. For some circuits we need very expensive outlets, some take the cheapest kind. All of this had to be thought through, then re-considered as we built the system. Then there is the problem of placing things where we think we will need them.

Initially we intended to put a single circuit in to carry six outlets outside the house. This "Ground Fault" circuit would supply power as needed for landscape lighting and electric bar-b-ques . . . But as we built the electrical system it seemed an extra expense we might want, but didn't need. Now we have three outlets which extend from existing Ground Fault circuits, or can take a Ground Fault outlet. The move saves two hundred feet of wire and a hundred dollars in boxes, outlets, and the like. We added three high power security lights, and two Christmas light outlets to the final plan too.

Once we got the wiring in, we had to route it all into a circuit breaker panel. All in all there are twenty-four circuits in our little house, few of which are exactly as we planned in the four months preceding the building. And all of this had to meet code and be hidden inside of the walls. Somehow we got it all done though.  The plumbing parts were much easier.

We had planned and installed the basic water and waste systems when we built the floor of the house. This plan hasn't changed except to reorder the water heaters. Adding in the supply line "stubs" takes some time, but is relatively easy to do. We are doing the whole system in PEX plastic pipe. Since we put in the basic system we have been collecting bits and pieces of PEX pipe from people on CraigsList. We have collected enough free PEX pipe, in enough sizes and lengths, to finish the interior piping and supply water from our well to the house. The main supply pipe must carry the well water to our new Utility Shed before treatment before  sending it on to the house. This adds a hundred feet to the piping, but the freed pipe will cover it nicely. So far we've saved about five hundred dollars in PEX costs in building the Farmhouse and added quite a lot of water supply line out to the landscape of the Farm too.

Last week we also got the septic venting pipes and  roof venting in. The rains were coming and I didn't want to work on a wet roof. All of the stuff which protrudes from the roof is hidden at the back of the house.  We also poured the four by eight foot concrete slab for the new Utility shed. 

All this stuff spelled out together, it seems we have been busy.  It didn't seem like it, but there was still some time to move a few other things forward. 

We also picked up a new Apple tree and placed it in the Peaches and Herbs Garden. The new tree is a Polka "Columnar" Apple which we found half priced at Farmington Gardens. I have wanted this tree for a few years but was holding off because the tree is about $130 dollars. The fruit is really very good though, worth the price. Finding the last one they had for $60 made the decision to go forward pretty easy.

The Farm is doing well. The herbs in the Peaches and Herbs Garden we planted in late Spring has settled in well and will re-seed itself  for next year and some plants will 

For such a slow couple of weeks, this seems a long post. So maybe we've been much busier than it seemed. Much to do, but it is all getting done.

September 27, 2020 Fall Arrives

Though the upcoming week is going to be very warm, Fall came to the Farm about two weeks ago due to the forest fires and settled in nicely this past week. The mornings have all been cool (not quite cold), afternoons are mostly warm(ish), and Sunset seemed to be noticeably earlier every day. We have had quite a bit of rain, but not the cold rains of an early Winter. And the trees are starting to turn color and leaves are dropping. Fall has arrived and we are really quite happy about it.

Last Monday we pulled the corn plants and shallow tilled  all of the garden beds we had harvested in the past month. This made huge chunks of the Farm look clean and tidy. And I ran Rosie the Tractor around and scrapped the tractor paths everywhere before Ann laid out fresh straw to keep thing from being muddy. The plants around the Farm are still growing (slowly) and those that are not we are pulling for next year's composting. Those plants still growing are mostly very colorful flowers or pumpkins and gourds so we have bright colors all over the place.  All in all the Farm looks wonderful in the rain and spectacular in sunshine. Despite the flaws we look neat as a pin.

Our guest farmers have begun taking down there gardens. Their Summer growing experiments were mostly a success. Beth and Wendy came this week and pulled most of their plants, the harvest of which went to the food bank. They still have a few tomato plants out there, covered in ripening fruit. The coming week ought to finish these hold outs. CB and Hellen have taken out all but three pepper plants, some nice Thai peppers are still ripening, some are a dangerously red color. Christine's patch is still alive with color and growth, but she pulled a great many spent plants this week too. She has quite a bit more to do. A whole lot of gourds to be picked. 

The Farmhouse build is going along pretty well. In the past few weeks we have had quite a lot of rain, but the new roof held out the water very well. It may seem normal for the roof to hold out the rain, but anything that goes according to plan here must be acknowledged, things don't always happen the way we plan it. We are "planning" to get the final roof cover up prior to Winter.

We spent the late days of the past week pulling wire through the Farmhouse electrical system. Our house is relatively small, around 1000 square feet, but the electrical system is relatively large and we have never done anything like it before. Figuring it all out has been interesting. Routing the wires through the walls efficiently takes a bit of planning since I had only drawn locations for the switches and outlets. We had to work each circuit out individually as we pulled it together. There will be about thirty circuit breakers in the final system and we are about half way through the process. 

Jack (our son) started laying out the new utility shed this week. The site for this is located on the driveway, about half the way between the Farmhouse and the Road. Our permanent electric meter box is to be mounted on the outside wall of the new shed, so the shed must be built prior to our putting the power on. The new shed will also hold the water filtration and softening equipment, which has been temporarily sheltered near the well head, so we will also need a trench for the new water pipes to bring water to the shed and then to the new Farmhouse. We will get the final framing inspection after the trenches are dug, we expect to be ready a month or so out.

We have been working very hard these past few months. Our bodies get tired out, so we find fewer days where recreation seems desirable. This weekend we pulled the e-bikes out and spent a bit of time rolling around on the Banks-Vernonia Trail. The weather is perfect for riding: cool, dry, and with a light breeze. The leaves are beginning to fall and trees drop fruit everywhere. The cooler weather has also slowed the numbers of people using the trail too. Conditions are perfect on the Trail and, with a heavier shirt, the ride is fine. 

Fall came down like a hammer this year. But the Farm looks better than it ever has (nearly tamed), the Fall colors are beginning to pop, and the Farmhouse project is coming along well. If only the rest of the country were doing so well as we are.

September 17, 2020 A Resting Point

Time seems to flit by (flit?). Just a few weeks ago we were in a nice late Summer season. The roof was up but we hadn't "dried" it in by putting roof paper up there. Ann and the other gardeners were getting some food out of the ground. And then it all fell down.

Everyone reading this knows Oregon had some massive fires in the foothills of the Cascades. A million acres or so went up in flames. We have friends that needed to evacuate the area and so they brought their horses and a sheep here late one night and spent a few days on the bare floor of the new house.

Smoke socked in tight over every valley, so thick it blocked out the Sun and brought a cold start to Fall down onto Creekside Farm. The forecast for later on this evening is for heavy rains and thunderstorms. Hopefully it will douse the fires and wash the smoke out of the air. A whole lot of people lost their stuff in the fires this year, two weeks of bad air is what happened here. Our guests went back home, but we worry about them.

The world is a crazy place in so many ways right now. But it can't last forever.

The Farm went into a sort of deep holding pattern due to the unseasonable cold days, peppers and tomatoes are still ripening, squash and gourds are doing very well, and there's even some corn out for sale today. Not out of the normal range of expected harvest fare, but it came a few weeks early and got us thinking about the Fall.

My primary occupation for the past few weeks has been putting roofing paper on the new Farmhouse. We got the job done a few days ago, two layers of felt paper, nailed carefully to the sheathing with special nails designed to handle high winds. We put lumber down at regular intervals to ease climbing all over the steep pitch of the roof as well. Eventually the roofing parts people will deliver bundles of roofing to the steps we put up to make the next part of the roofing project. We made the job of putting the paper down as easy as we could, but it still took ten days to call the job completed. Enough to stop for a few days. Just in time for the rains to start. 

Since Monday we have been taking it a bit easy. The roof took all of my strength and the air was too thick to breath the last couple of days to do much farm work. But there isn't as much farming to do everything stopped growing for a few days. So we have spent the last few days preparing the Farm for Winter and getting ready to start the next phase of building.

We have a lot of plastic film covered structures here, all of it temporary, each to serve a particular need. The pump house, the dog kennel, dog house, and back porch all have temporary roofs which need an annual re-covering because the plastic gets brittle in the sunlight. So we took some time to do the simple work. We also put the Winter lights up in the Hen House. They hens lay eggs the whole year around if there is enough light and heat. So this year we put two heat lamps in the Hen House. We also turned on the automatic Hen House door and will begin training the hens to stay inside at night. 

The chickens and ducks are doing very well. Our newly acquired hens are getting large quickly and we hope to see egg production come back up very soon. There has been very few eggs the past month or so, since we gave about half of our flock away, but today we have on dozen for sale, the first in a while.

In the few weeks between today and the start of the rains in late October we hope to get the roofing delivered and nailed down, and the house wrapped in waterproofing, windows, and doors, then begin clearing out the Farm. SO there is plenty to do. We also hope to begin building the small utility shed we need to have built before they electricity can be turn on in the new Farm house before November. The Winter will be used primarily to wiring, plumbing, insulation, drywall, and flooring inside the new Farmhouse. Hopefully we'll be able to move in by late April, but the Farm has its own ideas about schedule.