September 19, 2021 Rain and a Few Days Off

 It's been a while since we had rain at Creekside Farm, seems like five months since, but this weekend the wet stuff came back in force. I'm starting out with the rain because it is so important to us. Life happens where water is. Certainly, we have a good well and have been watering the crop plants and flowers all Summer long, but the rain is something more than just well water. This weekend promises nearly two inches of rain. On two acres this amount of rain just could never be sprayed through a garden hose. The rain stopped all work here this weekend and we needed the break. We were very busy before the rain stopped us.

My last post was one month ago. We had just put the paint on the interior walls of the new Farmhouse and were putting siding on the exterior. The plants were beginning to perform as they should, but we were not getting fruit yet. And the animals were spending their days panting in the sunshine. It seems more like a few months longer when I look backward. It amazes me all that took place since August 9th.

Our Greengage Plum tree gave us about ten pounds of wonderful medium sized plums in the recent three weeks. We have been eating every day since they ripened. The Greengage is a good little eating plum, but firm enough to cook with. We didn't get enough fruit in the first year to practice baking with them and we haven't the space to can them yet, but each plum is about eight small bites of wonderful. We'll finish the lot tomorrow some time.

The Peaches and Herbs Garden inside the Kitchen Garden needs a new name since we put the plum tree in thinking that the Peach Tree tag was accurate. 

The Market Garden started providing a huge amount of produce this past month. Peppers, corn, beans, squash, cucumbers, and quite a few little other things suddenly rushed into production.

We grow a wonderful Jalapeno pepper here that has zero heat to it and Ann began making a Pico de Gallo as soon as she could find ripe fruit. This Pico is so good you can practically improve oatmeal with its addition find a more wonderful thing to eat. We put this Pico on everything, adding a green crunch and balanced flavor to everything. 

Ann also created a new sort of Chili Relleno (picture above) using Anaheim Chillis from the garden. I'll eat it any time it is put down in front of me. 

The corn, though planted only for our own consumption, was sweet and tender. And our potato crop came in about eighty pounds, enough to take us through the Winter. In the next month, or so, Ann will begin taking up the pepper plants and potting them to Winter over in the Greenhouse. (As it turns out the peppers are perennials.) With any luck we'll get a jump on the pepper crop next Spring by putting the mature plants out instead of growing from seed.

We had a nice woman from the USDA out to survey our Farm. She gave us some good ideas as to how to improve things economically. Since she came we have changed the way we sprout seed and paid to have a soil test done. As it turns out our soils are pretty good and need few amendments. Ann took an invitation to spend a day learning about cover crops at a farm nearby. Aside from the practical knowledge, they gave her a wonderful book on soils and about ten pounds of Red Clover seed. The stuff we learned this past month have been leveraged into the roots of next year's Farm planning. We are headed toward a no-till, no watering system of growth and soil. If you have the desire, look for a YouTube video called Return to Eden and you'll see where we are heading in the next few years. 

I spread out my enormous compost pile over the area where we will put a new Strawberry patch next year and then seeded it heavily in Daikon Radish to break the clays under the six inches of compost. This sort of Radish puts down a twelve to eighteen inch root and dies in the mid-winter, leaving root space and bringing up some nutrients. The area is about fifty by sixty feet, so it will make a good Strawberry Field which we will plant all in one sort of berry in the early Spring.

All of the Flowering plants have finished. Ann put in a whole lot of sunflowers all over everywhere this year. They performed very well and so did all of the Cosmos, Marigolds, Coneflowers, Dahlias, and many others. Most of the flowers are getting leggy and out of hand so it is time to start tearing them out. Ann is making seed this year for all of the plants we usually buy seeds for. Next year we will begin buying only seed that makes plants that produce viable seed. At some point we will be able to stop spending money on planting.

The Farmhouse is still coming along. We finished the siding shortly after the last post and I began putting the finish roofing on. The roofing is a difficult thing to do. The pitch is very steep and the roofing is very heavy. Coupled with the heat and my aged knees, along with having to climb fourteen feet up the scaffolding carrying roofing, the process takes a lot of time and energy. I can get about three bundles of roofing nailed down most days. As of this writing I have the entire front of the house complete and am about a third of the way across the back. I should finish this by the end of the month. The it will be a race against the rain to paint the house and seal it against Winter. But things are looking very good.

The interior of the house is somewhat on hold while I spend my days on the roof, but some things are still moving ahead. We put in the flooring of the Water Closet and half of the Pantry, then put a working toilet in. We also rolled one of the Pantry shelf units out and began moving some of the pantry items out of the Tiny House. Soon enough we will move the chest freezer to the new Farmhouse, finish the Pantry flooring, and pick up some carpet for the three areas of the house that get carpet. We have the closet furnishings picked out, and the Kitchen Shelving hardware found but not purchased yet. And the door hardware is in hand. SO there's plenty going on.  About mid-October our new couch will arrive and we'd like to put it down on finished flooring. We want to spend Christmas in the new house, but there's a lot to do still.

We laid out the Kitchen cabinets. As it turns out we measured correctly and the used cabinets we bought, that will need to refinish, fit the space near perfectly. We will have a very large kitchen considering the size of the house. Plenty of cultured granite counter space to work on. The lighting scheme is also very good with plenty of natural light, sufficient general lighting, and great counter lighting to work under. The cabinets will be painted in a deep blue, the interiors and shelving in a deep brown. Its sounds dark, but will be striking to look at.

In other news, our Bit O'Honey gave us five wonderful little pups about ten days ago. People were a bit more reluctant to reserve a puppy this litter due to economic fears, but all of the pups are taken by families as of today. The pups are all very healthy but have yet to open their eyes. Bit O'Honey has recovered very well and is now spending some of her time away from the pups and hunting Chipmunks with the other dogs. The pups will go to their new homes in early November. We're still looking for a new home for the Cinnamon Bear. She was spayed a few weeks ago and has made a full recovery. We rehome our girls once they are no longer in our breeding program, the people who take them are happy to get a nice Basset Hound for free.

Our flock of Runner ducks increased by twelve nice little ducklings. Daphne Duck sat on the eggs and has been tirelessly guarding the new Ducklings since then.

One of the ducklings hatched after Daphne had led her brood off of the nest. Ann found it peeping away and brought the little thing inside for about a week. She raised it until it could join the flock. Today the ducklings are beginning to fledge out their adult feathers and they look ratty. Since all of them are mixed types of Runners, all having Sonjay as the sire, they are all a bit differently colored than the mothers. Some carry white plumage like our Malaysians, some black like our Balinese, and more than a few mixed browns from two types of Indian Runner. All of them are standing tall like Indian Runners do. They look like self propelled bowling pins.

We're selling off ten of the twelve for $5 a piece. They eat regular chicken food, slugs, snails, larvae in the soil, and house flies. And mostly they are fun to have around.

We continue to have luck finding things we need from Craig's List. We got an entire truckload of very usable lumber for free and it will do nicely in forming the concrete work of our wrap around porch next Spring.  And a few days back found a large load of garden carts, tools, and miscellaneous hardware. Love that free stuff!

It will likely dry out near immediately. We had a lot of rain and this will bring up a lot of weeds, so there's work ahead. 

Another Weird Anniversary: The Bucket Hen

We have some anniversaries we like to keep, even if they are not all too important. Today is the third anniversary of another weird event at Creekside Farm. I originally posted this text to Facebook. . . 

Yesterday I found a young Rhode Island Red hen had somehow squeezed herself up under a five gallon bucket, which was turned upside down on top of the chicken food container. I found her when I went out to put new food into the container. She was stuck for some period of time, I'm guessing days.

I immediately picked her up and took her to the automatically filled water dish and put a container of food next to her as she drank. She had her fill and walked out to the sun to dry herself out.

Poor thing looks a little bit bent, but she made it through the night and will likely be okay as time goes on. We hope that she makes a full recovery, but for now she looks a little bent and is being called the Bucket Hen.

Now - this was a  few years ago. The Bucket Hen didn't make it through one of our flock culls, when we gift the chickens to the Vietnamese, so she's no longer here. We often call our older hens Collete, but that's a different story entirely. "Bucket" was my favorite hen for a few years but I doubt she ever gave us an egg.

The Bucket Hen story is one that might never get a mention. 

August 22, 2021 New Satellite Picture

 

We simply love it when Google buys new images for Google Maps. These images really let us know what has happened since we came to this place and give us ideas about what to do next. I usually have Adobe's Photoshop on my computer so that I can enhance the image but the laptop I was using died and I can't find the install disk to put it on my new laptop, so we're posting the raw picture.

If you click on the picture it will set up something of a slide show.

 

The new image shows what we have done in the past year. So far we've cleared most of the ground but have yet to take down the big trees which are shading valuable sun from the Farm  We think this image was taken around February since there is  a layer of straw covering the slick mud of the tractor paths, the new Farmhouse is clearly visible, the ground has been tilled clean for Spring planting, and the new Greenhouse can be seen near the left side of the picture.  If you contrast these images with previous versions it gives you a good idea of how far we have come.

This is where we started in 2015

By the middle of 2015 we had cleared a lot of the brambles, structures, and some of the trash which was strewn everywhere under the brush.

This was how the place appeared in 2020.

There is a bit of difference between  2013 and 2021. Click on the pictures to  see them larger. 

This is the West end of the front fence in 2013

In 2021 things looked a bit differently.

This is the East end of the front fence in 2013

By 2021 we had the jungle cut back a bit.

This is the front gate area we found the very first time we saw the property that would become our Farm. I saw the real estate sign out of the corner of my eye from the Highway and circled back to see whatever it was that had caught my eye. It was raining, the sign had fallen down into the ditch by the time we found it, but somehow I saw the sign laying in the ditch (from 100 yards, while traveling sixty-five miles per hour, in the rain). Bing maps still has the pictures online from at least 2013.

In April of 2015, day one of the Farm project, we cut a hole in the jungle and got down to clearing the land.

The Front Gate in Winter 2021. This is not the best picture taken of the Farm, but it does make the point pretty well.

There is so much more we will do to this place before it takes its final form. We bought it for a reason, something you can find by reading the earlier articles in the Archive to the right of this article. Today we are nearing completion of the Farmhouse build and can't wait for Google to show everyone what comes next. With any luck, and a bit of hustle, the next picture will show the world something spectacular.

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.