December 19th, 2020 Our Christmas Letter

 This is the third Christmas Letter here at Creekside Farm. Life is good. 

But there is always room for improvement.  You can click on the image below for a better view.

December 12th, 2020 The Week Started of a Bit Rough, but Ended Well

I'm just going to say it: This was a fairly tough week, and it started on Monday. . .

We had a coupon from Home Depot for ten percent off anything, so we decided to buy our roof shingles now, even if there isn't much time to put the roofing on, and saving a few hundred dollars. I have said this all before -If you do something unnecessary, you are inviting disaster. In this case the disaster was manageable and short lived. 

On Monday I took our big trailer down to the Tigard Home Depot to pick up the ninety bundles of roofing we ordered. This was the closest store that had enough of the roofing to allow us to get it all in one place so this is where the whole story started. The crew loaded two palettes on the trailer and it was all going very well. . .  I tied the load down with truck straps and began the trip back to Creekside Farm. . . I got the thing onto the highway and began accelerating to highway speed . . . And at about forty miles an hour one of the straps broke and the whole thing got really interesting for a few seconds. 

The forward-most palette shifted to the right, at the front of the trailer, sending the trailer to the right and fish-tailing the truck because the truck itself is perhaps quite a bit too light for this much load. As I corrected the steering to the left the load shifted once more and the trailer began pushing the truck around.

I tried to steer toward the shoulder but the whole thing was out of whack, so the trailer pushed the the truck hit the guard rail. The entire load became airborne and nearly every bundle of roofing jumped over the guard rail. The trailer broke free and kept going down the highway, eventually stopping fifty feet ahead of where I had finally stopped, but the trailer crossed the highway and landed against the concrete barrier in the middle. 

Needless to say it, but the whole thing shook me up a little. But my luck held out. Nobody got hurt, no other cars became entangled in my follies, the trailer landed right side up, and the truck was still running when I stopped. 

I called 911 and they sent a Tigard cop out. He stopped traffic and I re-attached the trailer and pulled it across the highway and onto the shoulder. I called Ann and she arranged the rental of the big truck and trailer we had used to haul horse compost a few weeks back. Our son Jack jumped out of bed and drove the big truck to where I was sitting and the hard work of loading all of the roofing, much of which was now loose, into the new trailer. While we worked the project a few caring people pulled off the highway and helped out. All of them are appreciated, the Hispanic guy name Christian is especially worthy of praise because he really did a whole lot of work helping us pick all of the stuff up. Jack drove back to the Farm and I stayed behind, solving the problem of getting our trailer hooked to the truck. Eventually I got the truck back home and all of us allowed ourselves to decompress. It was a tough day.

We held off unloading the big trailer until the next morning. The load weighed about six thousand pounds, so moving the load from the highway embankment, over the guard rail, and into the big trailer was quite a lot of work. Moving it again the next morning was quicker work, but the weight was still significant. Eventually we got the load sorted out and back onto our flatbed trailer. We lost about six bundles of roofing in this, but saved enough of it to roof the house.

All in all it wasn't an especially expensive episode. The trailer wasn't hurt, the Truck wasn't hurt. All we lost was a day and a half and about a two hundred dollars in roofing and rentals.  This is the end of the story, but the week didn't start off very well. 

However, the week wasn't a complete washout. We finished closing up the stubborn leaks in our waste water system in the new Farmhouse, called for inspections of water, waste, and electrical rough ins. Got through the inspections with very little trouble and even less necessary changes, and began closing up all of the trenches we had crisscrossing the front of the house. So the week ended pretty well, all things considered. Though all of this was very stress filled, we find ourselves little worse for the wear on Saturday.

In other Farm news we decided to re-open the Rocketdog Wait List. Our new house will soon be livable (soon being a fairly malleable term) so we will once more commence our breeding business and trying to show a profit. We already have three people singed up for the List but expect we will have puppies again in the Spring of next year. Our Chickens have begun providing a dozen eggs a day, which is about right for the size of our flock in Winter. The eggs are beginning to increase in size as the hens get better at making them. We are selling eggs once more. The ducks are happily disturbing our newly planted Tulip and Narcissus bulb bed, but not giving eggs. And the dogs are having a very good time. The Farm looks Christmas-messy, more messy in the daylight, more Christmassy in the dark. All in all we are making good progress on the place.

The weather has been very cold and rainy, so pushing mud back onto the trenches is a bit of a hassle. It is hard to smooth out the mud and the tractor makes ruts more and more as you drive over the bare dirt. But PGE needed the trenches near the Utility Shed filled in so that they can hook power up to our newly approved electrical system in the new house. It will be nice to have water and power out there, but it will still be a little while before we can move into the place. There is still insulation, drywall, a few windows, and a long list of other things needed to make the place our home, so for now we live in the tiny home and look forward to the coming of Spring. But first . . . Winter@CreeksideFarmOregon.

December 3, 2020 Lighting things up a little

 

We put up some of the few Christmas lights we have done since moving into our tiny home cabin. We have lit one of our smaller pine trees every year and this year we added this nice silhouette, The piece is hung on the new utility shed we put up near the driveway. We found the silhouette in the free ads on Craigslist. It is about four feet by four feet and came new in the box. We modified it a little, added back-lighting, and hung it up. Very cool. 

November 28th, 2020 Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a daily thing here at Creekside Farm. Some days we are a bit more thankful than others, but generally we love the life we live here. Tiny home living means a scaled down version of holidays. A whole turkey might fit in the new refrigerator out in the new house, but eating a whole turkey seems like a bigger job than we'd like to take on. This year we did Game Hens and traditional Thanksgiving Dinner trimmings. Ann made her wonderful cranberry sauce garnish and we had stuffed sweet potatoes on the plate along with the usual stuff, but not stuffing.

The house build is continuing. We finally got the entire house wrapped in Tyvek and got nearly all of the windows in. The place looks pretty good and the wind no longer blows through the house. This has to make our son Jack happy since he's living in the office out there. He has made a nice little nest of the office by wrapping the room in plastic sheeting and heating it electrically. It seems pretty nice in his place, a bit warm for working, but nice.

There are still a couple of tiny leaks in our waste water system confounding our hopes of one day having everything inspected and approved. The electrical system is all done and the water supply system is leak free, but there are three persistent leaks in the waste system venting still need chased out. We'll get them done next week.

We took Thanksgiving day off and then spent today and Friday working on the Farm instead of working on the house. There is not much you can do in the cold wet weather of late Fall, but those things needing done simply won't wait.

Ann and I planted  a bed of Tulips and Narcissus bulbs, sixty feet long and five feet wide, in the Kitchen Garden. The space was where we had onions and garlics planted last year. The new flower bed is entirely in the public view, so early Spring will be very colorful with about a thousand bulbs blooming.  Right now it just looks like a stripe of brown mulch because we buried the whole thing in six inches of composted horse manure mulch to keep things cozy in Winter. We also divided and transplanted our Peonies into the same row with the bulbs. Early Summer will have twenty-one pink Peony plants blooming to carry us through until Summer and early Fall blooms are well in full color. We started this project with one reclaimed Peony plant and three hundred bulbs three years ago. We'll leave all of this in the ground through next year and will likely have four thousand bulbs and sixty Peonies when we replant next time. 

We are moving Potatoes and Onions back to the Market Garden this year. There is plenty of froom there, plenty of Sunshine too. But there is quite a bit of work to do out there this Winter before planting season arrives in late March. We still  need to cut down some trees, a project which I am somehow reluctant to do, but we need to open up the sky this year to let the Sun shine and heat in the vegetable beds to get things growing. The soils in the Market Garden are very good and we will improve it only slightly this year. Making new bed space isn't on the agenda this year since we already have quite a lot of space ready to plant. 

We only planted the Peaches and Herbs garden last Spring, but it is already well established. We planted our baby Garlics there this year. Garlic takes quite a bit of time to mature, and nothing else really likes being around it, so putting it in with the Chives and other herbs seemed the best place for them. We found about three-hundred baby garlics in the bed where garlics we put last year. All of the new garlics were self planted from seed so we're hopeful to have a continuing supply of Garlic, and other related stuff, for the foreseeable future. 

We are moving one of our greenhouses out to MacGregor's Market Garden and have greenhouse heat and lighting ready to get things growing early in the new year. We also have quite a bit of Coco Coir planting mix, home made potting soil, and  many other growing supplies found on Craig's List. A Marijuana growing facility that was changing over from growing in dirt, to hydroponic growing, so we got quite a few nice pots along with the expensive lighting and very expensive bagged growing media, for free. We also found a nice propane heater on Craig's List. It looks like a wood stove but needs no chimney since burning propane only exhausts heat and water vapor. We already have growing tables from the old Greenhouse, so we have all that we need for planting seeds.

Our new hens are producing eggs nicely now, but the old hens and Runner Ducks have stopped laying for the Winter. The new hen's eggs are really small when compared to what we normally get, but they are very tasty and will get larger as time goes on. 

Life at Creekside Farm is composed of hard work, sore joints, and little else. But we love it. 

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.