July 24th, 2021 Light at the End of the Tunnel

So much has happened that I had little time or energy to write it all down in the past month. At the last posting I was working on the drywall (image to the left) in the front room and had just finished the paint in the bedroom section. Since then I have finished the main room and it has been painted but needs another coat (image on the right). We used recycled paint and a airless painting gun that did a bit of an uneven coat, so I'm painting it all with a roller to even things out. Still and all it looks very good and the drywall doesn't show seams. With the interior being very close to finished I have begun working on the exterior siding and roofing.

As the rains were approaching in the Fall of 2020 we were racing to get the house "dried in". I figured we'd spend the late Fall, Winter, and early Spring working on the interior where it was a bit warmer and a whole lot drier. So as October approached I spent all of my time putting tar paper on the roof and securing it against the heavy winds of Winter. The roof did its job and even held out the heavy snow that came in January. Once down from the roof, and having had all of the framing and sheathing inspected, we wrapped the entirety of the vertical surfaces with Tyvek, a sort of plasticized paper product that provides a mostly waterproof layer of protection for the sheathing which underlies the siding. With the house secured against the Winter (mostly) we spent the time between then and now working on the interior. I wrote all of this up as it happened. If you want to know more just look in the archive to the left of this page.

The drywall was a heavy project, but we got through the main part of hanging these heavy panels around the beginning of April. Ann had to go to work on the Farm in April so I have spent nearly every day since then applying drywall "mud", smoothing it all out, and then applying texture and paint. The whole process took nearly eight months. Today we have nearly all the rooms finished and awaiting flooring. I have moved on to (once again) racing against time to put the final exterior siding and roofing on before the rains return in October. 

The get the siding done and put the final roofing on we needed a plan. There are many parts to the project. The siding itself, flashing to help direct water away from joints and seams, trim boards, and sealants around the windows and doors.   Our son Jackson spent the past few month of his free time putting the lowest course of siding on the house and this will save a great deal of time. The siding treatment we decided on is a simple Board and Batt treatment. To get the job done Ann and I put up three courses of scaffolding with a final platform at the top. If I stand on a six foot ladder on top of all the scaffolding I can reach the top of the gables. As I go along the wall I am nailing up the siding and applying the 1x2 cedar batts as well as sealing things up and installing lighting. There are eight small LED exterior lights under the porch roof to light the porch area and three high intensity LED security light fixtures high up under the gables which will light the entire farm from edge to edge. As I move the scaffolding along the wall I am finishing every job I can while on the scaffolding. These projects include the first course of roofing and the drip edge as well as the siding elements and lights.

It will take another three weeks or so to get all siding parts in place, then it is on to putting the finish roofing on. All of this needs to be done by the end of September and the heat of Summer is just now coming on. So I will spend my mornings on the scaffold, or the roof, and the afternoons working on the final interior projects.

We have much of what we need to finish the house and can see a day when we can actually move into the house. So for the past few weeks we have been thinking about furniture. We kept so little of the furniture from our house in North Plains, some key pieces are out in the Shipping Container, and we have been acquiring things along the way, but a new couch was a special thing we were going to need.

Back in 2015, once we had found the property which would become the Farm, we spent a lot of time dreaming up things we would want once the place was built. One of the things we decided we wanted was a chaise sofa we found at Macy's. This bright blue couch sat at the entrance to the Macy's Furniture Store at Clackamas Town Center, a small peacock blue sofa with a chaise at one end. The sofa was much smaller than most house would use but it was large enough for two people who like each other to spend some time on. We journeyed across town to visit our couch at least nine times as our plans were formed and put into place. And I designed the living room area around the eventual presence of this one particular couch. But in 2018 the company quit making our bright blue couch and we had no time to address the problem. We began building the house about the time the World went into lockdown for fifteen months. About a week ago we began looking for something that would fill the place of our long lost dream "chofa". We shopped the city and found a few things that might have worked, but nothing as good as our dreamy blue couch.

This morning we went out to shop for a replacement and had a plan for ten more stores. But on the first stop we  ran into a saleswoman that remembered admiring our couch. She also had the perfect replacement in mind. It was about the same size and came in the same color and fabric, so we bought it without hesitation. The sofa will come in October. Another important piece of a house project that is about to become our home.

Through all of this Ann has been keeping up on the Farm. We built a new greenhouse and she planted hundreds of plants in early Spring. Then, as late Spring came along, we worked hard to make new planting places for the new plants. Little happened to show progress through May, but things started to happen around the beginning of June. Today most of what we put in is growing by leaps and bounds. Most of Ann's flowers are in bloom and we have pumpkins and gourds beginning to show up.

We have some guest farmers using some of our extra spaces to plant food for themselves and they came in June to plant their seeds. The plants sprung right up. The plants we put in a month earlier did nothing until those planted directly began to grow. Today we have a respectable amount of growing happening. Not enough to make a profit, but enough to learn how a profit might someday be made.

Since this place is not just about food, much of what Ann is doing involves planting flowers and arranging plants and vegetables in a more interesting way. All of this takes time and learning how to put things together, but some of the new ideas are really beginning to come together.

The Market Garden is showing explosive growth.
We'll be harvesting potatoes this coming week.

Putting down the landscape fabric has give the peppers the heat they need.
We'll have a lot of peppers this year. We'll add compost to it next year.

The beans are all working very well.
We've even got some lettuces to show for all the work.

Stuff growing just about everywhere.

This is the only part of the squash and gourd row that is behaving so far.

Pumpkins all over the place.

Autumn Sunflowers. Behind these are some of the scrub Apricot plums still hanging around.

Though I am mostly employed building the new Farmhouse, I have been improving how I make soil for planting and have spent quite a few days working toward turning the sterile or weedy clays into something that will grow plants. 

About a month ago I spent a day building a new compost pile from the piles of stuff I had around the Farm. This new effort is something with some real size to it. The "wind ridge" pile in the picture to the right will eventually become the planting spaces for our new Strawberry patch next Spring. The current pile is perhaps eight times the size of my largest earlier pile and the soils it is creating appear to be great quality.  I will need to duplicate this pile eight more times to finish building the planting spaces of the Farm, but the effort will be rewarded for many years to come. 

Before I started learning to make dirt the problem with our soils was drainage. The heavy clay simply didn't drain water away and the roots rotted out. Then when the heat came the clays dried into hard pan which was horrible to dig through. My later attempts at soil making was are doing pretty well, but the soil didn't hold enough water and we have to add water frequently. With any luck the new dirt will do the job. 

To keep this posting a manageable read I'll let it go here. The only thing I had left to write about is that we have another litter of puppies on the way. Bit O'Honey and ClarkeBar got together about ten days ago so we expect a litter in September. But there's still plenty to do between then and now. Dogs were always the first business we needed to succeed in for this project to work. And so far the plan  seems to be working.

June 13, 2021 Passing for Progress

 The level of effort we have put into Creekside Farm has been tremendous over the past three years. We haven't done anything like a maximum effort because we are not really capable of sustaining that sort of effort for very long. But both of us have worked hard most of our lives, so our normal might seem like a lot of work to people less accustomed to manual labor. For all of this effort, it is a rare day when we can look at what is happening and see the work pay off. This was such a week.

The Farmhouse build finished another phase of work. With the Bedroom section walls and ceilings all painted we are ready for flooring to go in. We are in our fifteenth month of building the house and up until this week there was little we could call completed.

The bedroom section is a suite of rooms which include a large bedroom (we only have the one), a water closet room, a separate bathroom with a shower and large jacuzzi tub, and office, and a large walk-in closet. This section of the house has eight foot ceilings to keep things cozy. All of the electrical fixtures are in and working, but the plumbing parts still need finished and this should happen fairly soon.

  Above this section is the attic. The attic is a completely open floor plan with seven foot ceilings and heavy duty floor. Designed for storage, but also for the possibility of putting together some sort of future production space. 

There are no moldings in this house build. My intention in this was to save money using the 85% rule. This being the idea that eighty-five percent of what we desire can be bought for fifty percent of the resource money. We still have to pinch every penny (twice) if we hope to actually live in the house some day, moldings are an un-necessary expense. No moldings has turned out to be a very clean look around windows and doorways.

While I waited for the drywall textures to dry in the bedroom section, prior to paint, I began the finishing work on the Great Room space. This space is about twenty-five feet square and fourteen feet high. It is ringed above by sixteen two by two foot windows to give it an expansive feel. The idea is to bring the outside sky into the house. Our house will eventually have an eight foot porch on three sides, so even with the four foot windows in the lower spaces there will be little direct sunlight. Without moldings the trick is to finish each window and standing on a ten foot scaffold this is a whole lot of work.

The Great Room is our living room. It will contain the kitchen, a very large pantry, the laundry room, and some couch space. The couch space will be minimal. Where in most houses the couch space is rather large. Our focus is on food in this house. We will have a reasonably large kitchen, but more than this we will have an enormous pantry. The Pantry, at first, will be about sixteen feet of Costco chrome rolling shelf units, totaling about eighty feet of sixteen inch depth shelf.

 

We will be using this area to store value added produce from the Farm outside. Soups and preserved fruit initially. I was able to find a two foot wide entry bench on Craig's List for free. It will take up the last few feet of Pantry wall and give us a place to put shoes on before going outside and off before soiling the house.

I hope to have the walls of the Great Room finished by the end of June. Sometimes I hit my lofty goals. Mostly they land when they do.

Our Farm is looking more like a farm every day. June is the beginning of the growing season at the bottom of the Apple Valley. Walls of this narrow valley rise five to eight hundred feet on the North and South sides, so the sun needs to be pretty high in the sky to get heat down to the valley floor. We are committed to growing things here and selling enough to be able to stay, so we have been learning how to work with the land for three years.

We built a new Greenhouse this year, complete with growing benches, heat, water, and grow lights. Ann has been sprouting plants in there since April. (We hope to get things growing earlier next year.) Much of what she had planted in the Greenhouse is now outside in the dirt, but the Sun has only just started to come in hot enough, for long enough, to make things grow properly. 

A few years ago we built some chicken wire row covers to protect the plants rabbits and squirrels find most attractive. This year Ann stapled greenhouse film over the row covers and made little greenhouses for our pepper plants to grow in until the Summer heat arrives and it looks to be working. The Pepper plants are planted in newly made rows which we covered in landscape fabric. I found a good resource for landscape fabric on Craig's list and we hope to begin cutting down on the amount of weeding we need to do by covering the ground where we can.

We also planted Carrots in a bed I have been working on for two years. This bed is sixteen feet long, three wide,  and filled with two feet of extra-light growing medium poured into a ditch lined with chicken wire to keep the gophers and moles out. 

The corn we planted in the Kitchen garden did nothing at all. We planted six, seventy foot rows but not one seed came up. So we are trying a new place for the corn in the Market Garden. We covered the space with fabric and cut slits into it to plant seeds. Time will tell if we get corn this year, but corn is a sunshine plant.

At the back of the Market Garden Ann put in two enormous rows of potatoes in newly made beds designed especially for spuds. She really planted the potatoes close, much closer than we hear is recommended. But there's a madness in her method. As the potatoes grow below ground, the tops above, she will pull the sides of these wide beds up to cover half of the greenery, making room for more spuds and controlling weeds at the same time. Her plants are just about a foot high today, so she'll be covering them this week. Potatoes usually do well here, if given half a chance, and the varieties we grow are both unusual and delicious.

Strawberry production here has really done well this year. We pick twice a week and get about a bushel and a half every time we pick. So far we have taken over ten bushels out of the Strawberry Patch, every one of them a gem. These are all picked ripe so the shelf life is short but sweet. I am putting in a new Strawberry Patch next year and have it tilled and mulched the new space. In Spring I will buy five-hundred new plants to grow in the new patch, this time of all one type. Five years ago we bought four varieties of Strawberries to see what would do the best, now we know and our next field will be devoted to the winner.

Our Basset Hound kennel has done well for us this year. We birthed and sold one litter of puppies and the income from this is sufficient to keeping the Farm alive even if we never make a dime on farming. We hope to have another litter this year, perhaps Christmas puppies. 

We kept one male from Laffee Taffee's litter to replace our male in a few years. He is doing wonderfully. We have also been boarding a few dogs for pay as well. Not much money in it, but it proves the concept we stated at the onset of this project. Between pups and boarding we should be able to support farming until we figure it all out. All part of the plans we made eight years ago when this whole thing started.

So much more has been happening since I made my last BLOG post. Our son Jack has begun to put the exterior siding on the house for us. The chickens and ducks are doing okay, but not great. And the friends and neighbors of our Farm are coming and going daily. The Pandemic is beginning to become endemic, so life for everyone will now beginning to return to whatever normal it should become. 

Our world is busy. But really good busy.

May 29th, 2021 A Memorial Day worth remembering.

 This Memorial day weekend is especially memorable for us. It has been a little over four years since we began working toward a few of our early goals. Four years back I was building the frame of our first tiny home out in the driveway of our house and we had cleared enough area on the Farm to put the thing. We had not broken ground for anything like planting and it would be some more months before we moved the tiny home cabin out the Creekside Farm. Needless to say it, but I will anyway, the whole project was still very much an uncertainty. That was Memorial Day 2017.

 We started the project in April of 2015, but didn't start this journal BLOG until October of 2015. On Memorial Day of 2016 we were still learning to build a fire out of scrub trees and had just begun getting electricity to the pole that had so recently been buried under thirty feet of Blackberry brambles. We had started renting tractors and brush cutters, when there was money, to clear the land. Trash was everywhere and it was dangerous to walk the land because of all the broken glass, scrap metal, uneven Terrain, and Blackberry bits. This place wasn't a Farm at all. The Farm didn't even have any name at all until December of 2018.  At Christmas of 2018, once we had a cabin on it, we called this place Camp Creekside. We came out on weekends to clear and clean, earning from many sources, none of the cash  came from here. We couldn't call the place a Farm until we began harvesting food in late July of 2018. There were many goals and milestone reached for this light supper of lettuce, cucumber, and strawberries, eaten at the table of our cabin in 2018. At this point, the Farm was mostly still a gamble. We were putting all of our time and treasure into a place that seemed to fight our every step.

Our first Farm food was grown here less than three years ago. But we were living on the Farm full time then, and eating from it (if only just a little bit). We had taken the leap of faith. Rolled the dice. Gambled everything on the idea that we could live here and make our living here. 

 This Memorial Day weekend we crossed another major milestone on our way to making this place work. We finished the business of selling a litter of puppies which were born here, of dogs which have know little else but the Farm.  And our Farm, as much as it is, is cleared, planted, and growing in a way that looks to recoup much of our longer termed investments of time, labor, and cash. There is a good cash crop out in our fields today.  In past years the tax forms have claimed that we hade made enough money in the past few years to call this place profitable, but the little we got never paid any bills or bought anything significant. This first Farm litter gives us four months to come up with some more cash and pays for quite a bit of building and farming supplies as well. 

 It is not that big of a thing to earn the money we did this month, using the money we earned and spent over the past five or six years. But it does seem that this new income was very significant in a self-sufficiency sort of way. Being able to live on what we can produce means we might just be able to build the big dreams we outlined earlier in the history of this place. (All of which are buried in the archive of this BLOG.)  To us this is major. That's memorable. 

May 23, 2021 Time Flies

 It has been three week since my last entry, so I figured I'd better write something. But it's not like there is too much difference between the last entry and this. Just more of the same.

We still have fourteen Bassets, six adults and eight babies, living in the tiny home with us. The pups leave us this week for their new homes and Stanley, our visitor, leaves next week. Things are going to seem much quieter around here after that. We will be keeping one of the male puppies this time. His name is Rocketdog Rockford Rhoades, we call him Rocky. Our boy ClarkeBar will retire in a year or two so bringing up his replacement allows us to control the genetics a bit. And having a puppy around will be fun. With our puppies all being sold, and food sales about to rise in Summer, we ought to be able to show a good profit this year. We are hoping for one or two more litters of pups in the second half of the year, but dong things naturally means not knowing for certain. 

Ann has been very busy in the Greenhouse and the Gardens. We have hundreds of sprouts up and more than a few rows planted. There are hundreds of plants in the Greenhouse, mostly sprouted, but there will be thousands more as the Summer draws near. I found a large number of planting benches on Craig's List a few weeks ago. A guy in McMinnville had a Pot grow in his basement and gave up on it.

I got thirty or so nice plastic benches and quite a lot of wall mounted electrical fans to move air in the greenhouse. We've set up two long benches in the Greenhouse and a few of them outside to "harden" off plants making the transition outside. We will find uses for the rest of the benches as time goes on.

True to form, we are adjusting our farming plans to include new information and try to find things that work a bit better. One of the things I am trying is planting fewer rows by scraping the soil together into deeper rows with wider spaces between. This gives the rows better drainage and the plants a deeper bed to grow roots in. It also gives us more room to move around in. The soils here are beginning to develop into fairly good dirt, but the entire farm is still a few years from being where they need to be. We have mostly solved the trash problem. Most of the debris we find now is very small glass shards. The weeds will continue to be a problem for some years going forward, but we are making progress in certain areas. 

This year's potatoes are in two very long rows at the back of the Market Garden and all of them have emerged. This year we have planted the potatoes in a full ten inches of soil with wide margins of good soil on both sides. When the plants reach twelve inches tall we will pull soil up from the edges over the plants, deepening the soil column and allowing more potatoes room to develop. That's the theory anyway.

In the corn rows we are not mounding up the dirt at all, but we are mulching the beds following planting and we are adding a bit of lime, even though our soil tester says we don't really need it. We planted six one-hundred foot rows and will plant another six in a month, then another a month later. Let's see what happens, but it is supposed to get us a whole Summer of corn to sell. Onions, garlics, and herbs are all out in the gardens growing right now, peppers, tomatoes, beans, peas, and lettuces all ought to go in soon.

There is a new row at the front of the Kitchen Garden dedicated to squash, pumpkin, gourds, and watermelons. The thing is a bit over one hundred feet long and about ten feet wide. Again, we made a berm of good soils about twelve inches deep, right down the middle, with four foot wide margins for growth to spill into. It ought to be a riot of interesting stuff growing right where people can see it from the road.  Ann is adding some Sunflowers to the row for color too.

The Strawberry patch is doing super well this year. This is the third year for the rows and Ann finally has the weed problems and excessive growth under control. We mulched the plants about a month ago and right now each plant is covered in young fruit waiting to ripen. We'll pick them in the morning, sell them in the afternoon, hopefully through the month of June. 

The house build is going along just fine. We have ninety percent of the finishing done in the bedroom side of the Farmhouse. I'm hoping to finish in that end of the house either this week or next, leaving only the great space to do. Our son Jack has agreed to help with the exterior siding portion of the house to keep us on track for moving in this year. Following the interior finishing I will be working on the roof for a month, trying to get it done before the heat of Summer sets in. Plenty to do on the house still but we are working on it nearly every day.

We have found and collected enough cabinets and shelf materials to finish the Kitchen and Bathroom. One of our counter-tops is sitting on the floor in the Kitchen right now and I'll likely make the others myself. We're still needing more paint, but we have about half of the flooring already purchased and most of the rest is either bought or easy to get. Lumber prices are ridiculous right now so we may need to hold off on doing the wrap around porch until prices come down. It will be time to find carpet soon so I'll be looking for a deal.

May 1st, 2021 Busy, Busy, Busy

 Last week we took a couple of days off and the world wanted them back, so we did eight days this past week to make up for the malingering. 

Laffee Taffee's pups all came to life in a big way. Their little puppy personalities began to emerge when their ear canals opened up and they became aware of the world.

We started weening, putting warmed milk in a very large feeding dish a friend of the Farm gave us. We had a dish something like it but it was about a third the size. This one allows the pups to all get around it in one go. At times there's enough room to fit a few inside the dish while the others are eating.

On Monday we started giving them about a cup of milk, by Friday were adding a handful of puppy kibble to three cups of milk. They pups, if added together by weight, would out-weight their mother, so she isn't really able to fill them up anymore. The dish fills them up just fine. We have begun letting people visit the pups. 

The House build is still moving along well. I have been working on finishing the drywall in the low portion of the house. This week I was able to put the final touches on the seams and corners of the Closet and Bedroom, and am getting pretty close in the Hallway and the Water Closet. On Friday I put together the texture gun for the first time and sprayed the Bedroom and Closet, the last step before priming and paint. 

On Wednesday I found a commercial painter on Craig's List who had exactly the paint we need to do much of the interior finishing. He had bought a house-full but the job had fallen through due to Covid and he got tired of waiting for the work to come back. We bought about twenty gallons of primer and paint for under two-hundred dollars and the guy even delivered it to us. I will begin painting on Tuesday next week and we will have two rooms of seven completed (except flooring).

Craig's List is a real resource for the House build. I bought the air compressor, paint sprayer, and texture gun in past months for pennies on the dollar. This week we found a few other things we will need, including one of our Kitchen counter-tops. A lovely ten foot piece of quartz for Ann's Baking counter.

The Farm is beginning to show sure signs of Spring growth. The greenhouse is awash with baby plants of all sorts. We have peppers, tomatoes, squash, watermelons, lettuces, and many others growing out there and we will be putting these into the dirt soon enough. There are also many annual flowers growing too. 

The biggest flower planting we do is Marigolds. Marigolds add a great deal of color to the Farm, but they also provide a chemical barrier to many beetles. We plant rows of Marigolds around the parameters of each garden to protect the leaves of our vegetables but this year we plan to add a few rows just for color. Marigold really encourage pollinators. Bumble Bees love to sleep in the blooms.

We also got a wonderful planting table from a Lutheran Church where it had been a kids sandbox for over two decades. The thing is large enough to mix soil and gives us a great place to put seeds into pots.

Yesterday I found a garden cart on Craig's List  for Ann. She's wanted one for a few years and it finally showed up on the listings. You have to be quick to get the hard to find stuff and I saw this nineteen minutes after the seller put it up for sale. Last year, at Mother's Day, I found a nice little fat-tired planting stool for her, another real find, and she's been using it for weeding. This year she gets the wagon to help in moving  the hundreds of things now growing in the Greenhouse out to the gardens. 

Things are really beginning to move at the Farm this week. Puppies have been born and sold, the Strawberries (in their third year) are thick with young fruit, and our house is about four-fifths finished. Covid relief checks came too. So money, though important, isn't nearly so much of a concern. With any luck our plans will now begin to bear out the promise we already knew was there, but had so far been unable to find.

It is good we got a few days off. There will be few days off in the coming weeks.