September 8th, 2023 Summer Winding Down

 Summer is still with us for a few more weeks. Today it is a wonderful seventy-five degrees and clear skies. While this isn't very good for farming veggies, it is wonderful for working in. We have a lot to show for all the work this year. 

We got the Tiny Home Cabin(s) moved a few weeks ago. The project was planned years ago and there were some significant issues we needed to address to make things work out.  We needed to expand the electrical, water, and septic infrastructure to make the tiny home(s) usable once  we got them moved. 

On the left is the Tiny Home Cabin we moved to the Farm back in early Winter of 2018.
On the right is the same space (note the telephone pole in both pictures) as it is today.

Since we have a serious iron problem with our water we have built our water system with house water is very well filtered. This house water system had to be tapped into to provide good water the the Tiny Homes (now called the Guest House and Kennel). Then we had to expand the electrical system to provide power to the Guest House and Kennel as well.  While we did the electrical work we also included inlets, outlets, and switching to bring in generator power when it is needed. And finally we needed to put in piping to remove septic waste. Each of these projects was difficult to accomplish, even if not very expensive.  Once we got all the preliminary ground work done it was time to separate and move the two Tiny Homes to their permanent places behind the Farmhouse.

The new Farmhouse layout.

When we built the first trailer we did the work in the driveway of our home in North Plans and towed the thing out to the empty lot that would become the Farm (pictured above).  A few weeks later we built the second half, making ours a double wide Tiny Home Cabin. We lived in the Cabin for nearly four years as we cleared the land and built our new Home. Taking them apart was not the biggest part of our plans when we built them it took some work, as did moving the small garden and accumulated stuff added to the place after it was built.

Moving these two large trailers took an entire day using a large rented tractor. Towing them was a tricky proposition once they were separated. But once we got them moving it came down to jostling the two halves into their permanent places. This  proved to be the most difficult part of the job.

The Guest House eventually settled into a place where the front facing side ran parallel to the Farmhouse Porch. The Kennel side eventually came to rest immediately behind the Farmhouse on the back wall where there are no windows. Both buildings needed the eight foot pass through hole sealed up against the weather, so we are installing sliding glass doors to keep the rain out and the heat in. The piping and wiring were the easy parts and once we had the two trailers jacked up and level. Eventually, the end of the largest temporary part of our early plans for building our farm came yesterday, when we moved my brother's camp trailer to it's new place near the Utility Shed.

A Wooly Bear Caterpillar.
This one say it is going to
be a long, cold Winter.

So now the entire area in front of the Farmhouse is cleared out and cleaned up. We hadn't been able to see the front of the Farm from the Farmhouse until just yesterday. So this is a major change in how things look. Perhaps more importantly, the view of the Farmhouse from the Road is now much cleaner.  Now the place looks as it should. 

I remodeled the Guest House interior during the cold months last Winter. Putting the glass door on it allows me to finish the job and do some upgrades on the exterior, including a fresh coat of paint. Eventually I will put skirting on both buildings to keep animals from playing around underneath them and refinish the Kennel building to make it useful. We will also put in a fence to contain our tangle of hounds behind the Farmhouse and reduce noise a bit out front.  But for the present, the job is mostly done until Farming winds down and we settle into Winter month projects.

Farming this year has been quite good. We have been selling produce for many weeks and eating quite a lot of it ourselves. While we haven't  had the growth we wished for, we have done roughly ten times more planting than we did last year. No-till gardening is really a great way to grow things and our planting and pest control plans have all performed much as we expected they would. A few weeks ago we have our expected flea beetle infestation, but instead of them stressing our tomato and potato plants they attacked the Nasturtium plants we had planted as a pest attractor. We dusted the Nasturtiums and the problem was solved in a few days with little actual damage to our paying crops. And we got some really goods crops.

We planted three flights of potatoes this year, each a few weeks apart. The first flight came up easily and the spuds are absolutely wonderful to eat. Rich flavors, perfect flesh. Our cucumbers and tomatoes have thrived this year and we had put quite a lot more of them in the dirt. They are heavy with fruit  and sweet. Tomatoes are selling like hotcakes. The peppers haven't done as well as we expected, but our cool peppers are doing very well and selling out as quickly as we can pick them. The Corn crop has been disappointing. We put in so many and got so few ears out of it. The Corn cobs we did get is smallish, but the flavor is wonderful and we are enjoying eating it despite not being able to sell it.  Melons are doing very well and selling out for the most part. So the gardens are producing well even if we do need to make some changes next year. 

Lemonhead Lucy

We think Taffee is pregnant with our (planned for) Fall litter of pups, but we won't know for sure for a few weeks. This will be Taffee and ClarkeBar's last litter and they will be retired after this. We love having puppies around and are really looking forward to the work raising puppies brings.

Our newest addition to the kennel is Lemonhead Lucy, a wonderful little white and red female. She is well accepted to the Hound's social group and is quite well liked by everyone who she meets. Lucy is very chatty, with a great many expressive howls and barks that make her unique in our kennel.

We have had loads of visitors this Summer. Some coming for the produce, some just to visit. All are welcome. So if you find yourself on the Highway and looking for some place to stop by, think about stopping by and seeing all the changes at Creekside Farm. We are making constant improvements and it will be nice to have you see it all. We have plenty to keep us busy here as Summer begins to close down. We look forward to the change in seasons and are ready for whatever comes. 

In the middle of this image you will find the telephone pole seen in the upper images.
This is the place before we found it, taken from a real estate advertisement.
Taken from the Western edge of the property, where the Market Garden is today.

This is the same telephone pole.
This picture taken on the first day we came to the property, but from the back of the place.
This is approximately the angle seen from the Bathroom window of the Farmhouse.

This is the same telephone pole.
Just before we brought the first tiny home here.

August 6th, 2023 Deep Summer

 It has been nearly perfect weather since my last post, and a lot got grown and done since then. So much has been done I really haven't had much time to write.  Summer has caused an explosion in growth here.. No-till gardening has solved nearly all of our soil fertility problems and the produce we are getting is exceptional. In the next week or two, once our produce is ripe and ready, we will be opening our little produce stand in an attempt at making a dollar. 

The stuff we have planted is roughly five times what we planted last year. But our much larger plan is still not quite large enough. We might be able to grow twice the amount we have in the ground next year, but we will need to plan for a much bigger grow. We put in seventy melon hills this year, where there were only fifteen last year, and the plants are doing quite well, but I think we could grow five hundred just as easily so that's the plan going forward. We put in five times the cucumber plants too, and a trellis to hold them all up. Next year I think we will need to tripple the cucumber grow and we certainly have the space for it. Our squash and pumpkin grow is also quite a bit larger, perhaps double last year, and the results are extraordinary. But I'm pretty sure I could still do five times the amount with little trouble.  And our corn crop is easily eight times the number of stalks we grew before, might be more, but we have space for double this number right now. 

Since all of this year's plan involved converting to no-till gardening and drip irrigation, planting is much easier, harvesting is half the work, and watering is a snap. Also, the sort of weeds we usually have are tough to handle. Thistles and berries are difficult to pull out of hard pan clay. But in a no-till scenario these sorts of weeds don't do very well and pull out of the ground easily. This is not to say that there are no weeds, crabgrass has really done well this year, but crabgrass and the other worts growing in the garden are relatively easy to chop off and when we let them rot in the ros they make a mighty good mulch which blocks sprouting. But there's other reasons why weeding isn't really so much of a problem now.

The drip-tape irrigation system I put in only waters the top of the rows, not the spaces between. So weeds don't get all the water they have in previous years and grow slowly. With far less growth potential we can work the spaces between rows quickly using a stirrup hoe knowing the weeds will not grow back quickly. Most of the weeds we have don't have energy storage, so most won't grow back at all. This new way of growing is half the work, or less, so our days aren't as long and there's plenty of time for other projects.

Our new house plan.

We are on the cusp of moving the tiny homes to space behind the Farmhouse. I had always envisioned moving them to the edge of the Farm, near the back fence line, but actually looking at the project seriously made us change the plan. While we prepare for the move I have upgraded our electrical power plan to include two generators and enough wire to service the two new outbuildings behind the Farmhouse. Each will have water and power and the stuff is already buried in the ground ad waiting for the move. My Brother, visiting while planning his retirement moves, has a large camp trailer which currently is placed near the tiny homes. When we move the tiny homes he will also be moved to a new place where I recently put in power and water connections. The only thing left to do is septic hook ups, but these have to wait until we actually move the buildings. And there's so much more to do than just this.

Our Farm is exploding in growth. Fruit is ripening and will soon need sold. So there's much to do. 

Our Produce Stand is in fine shape and the area where it will be accessible to the public is currently parking for all of our cars and trucks. So we will spend a few days shifting things around and cleaning places up to get ready for opening day. This year's plan is to tow the Produce Stand to the end of the road five days a week and sell produce down there. But the Stand will be parked outside of the fence where it was last year when it is not at the end of the road so some allowance must be made. We should be opening in a week or so. 

 I thought of another new thing to try. Our government has added some burdens to the Organic Farm movement and I have recently run into it while talking to food buyers about taking on some of our produce. 

Pirate Organic Farming

In order to call ours an organic farm we must become Certified. This involves a lengthy application process and about a thousand dollars in cost borne over and above the cost of actually growing things. What this does, and my central argument against it, is that what is expected is a loosely governed branding process where a farmer pays a certain amount to be able to say they grow food without the use of chemical pesticides, herbicides,  fertilizers, and seeds. These factors of producing food are already in place and we do these things, but applying for the certification has some other hoops to jump through and costs to be borne, not the least of which is a thousand dollar fee.  We are allowed to sell our produce without these hurdles, but we would not be allowed to use the term "Organic" in any form. Not just this, but grocery store buyers require the certificate, as do farmer's market administrators.  If you have read this BLOG I stated early on that these were just the sort of regulatory things we would not wish to participate in.  So we will not. And for some very good reasons.  So we are now going pirate organic.

We will no longer worry over using the term "organic", instead we will fly a flag I designed (above) and trust that our buyers will get what it is we are doing.  It might be a good conversation starter.  A sort of rebellion against being regulated.  This is the only change to how we have been doing things. We will still produce our fruits and veggies without chemical inputs, we will still be using very sustainable farming practices, and our produce will still be of the highest quality we can grow at this scale of production. But we won't even try to call it "organic". 

In other news, we delivered all of our puppies to their new homes since the last journal entry and brought what may be our last puppy home. Lemonhead Lucy is a wonderful little "lemon" Basset female. She is full of life and has become central tour tangle of seven hounds. We have always planned to be out of the dog breeding business in under ten years to make room for the wedding business. So Lucy will likely be the last breeding female in our kennel.  This year we have had a bit of trouble with fleas where we have never had this sort of trouble before.  So we do spend a lot of time washing dogs and vacuuming them in between washes.  It will take a bit of time, but we will get the problem licked before Fall. 

Life here has been very good for a long time now. Our house is spacious and comfortable. Once the tiny home's are all moved the way the Farm looks will change drastically. Our dogs will soon be moved to a place where they don't have much access to the people coming to the Produce Stand too. So much has happened here since we started. And there's a lot more that will.

June 30th, 2023 Summer Opportunities

 Summer setting in at Creekside Farm mean opportunities abound, far too many to get them all done. So the priorities will be chosen based on time and money. 

Our Farming practices are mostly in place. The Gardens are planted, such as they are, and the watering system we planned for in the past few months is all in and working. The planting being done, all that is left is to grow and harvest produce, then sell it as quickly as we can. We have a good plan for this and our produce trailer is just as good as it was last year when we built it. We will fill the trailer as things come available and haul it down to the end of the road once we have sufficient produce to make the investment of time worth while. We had a very large gardening plan mapped out this year. Had we had a good handle on the scale we could have increased the plan by another half measure. When we laid down our first sets of rows we found that the first set was twelve rows larger than we planned for the space. So we hustled the plan a bit and moved quite a lot of the Kitchen Garden plan to the Market Garden. I am still working in the Kitchen Garden to lay down the new rows, but there's not much to put in the new dirt we've created there. The produce opportunities are in very good shape, hopefully we will pull a good sized profit out of our dirt. The goal for the year is $25k in Farm produce sales, we're ready, but we'll count it all up at the end. 

The Farmhouse still needs a concrete porch, and this is an important thing we must get done before late Fall, but there's a few things with a bit higher priority to do first.

We have to move the tiny home to the back of the Farm, behind the Farmhouse. This was always a part of the plan. The double wide tiny home is to be split into it's two halves and make a guest house and a dog kennel from the two halves. We spent a lot of time in Spring remodeling the Guest House section. It is now a two bedroom with a central shower room and water closet. The entry is re-oriented for installing a sliding glass door, though there's now a huge window at one end and a door at the other (neither of which will be used as an exit).  When we built the tiny home we used nothing but the least expensive materials to save money and weight. Now the place is completely sheathed in drywall and the electrical an plumbing has been upgraded to something less primitive.  Our son will live there for a time, once he's moved out we will rent it Air BnB style. 

The Kennel side will be an open and easier to clean proposition. We will have a grooming and whelping room for our puppy and boarding business. And we will have adequate electrical and water infrastructure to make it comfortable in there. Our Kennel will take on an appearance of a Living Room. A comfortable space for the dogs and for us to stay out there with them in the evenings. The area surrounding the Kennel will be fences in three foot chain link. I've already collected the fencing and we'll put it in after the Kennel is moved. There will be two yards around the Kennel. The main yard will be for the Hounds' daily use, the second much smaller yard will be for segregating the boys from the girls and for letting the new puppies out once they get to six weeks old. Past this there's nothing more planned.  In order to make all of this happen we need to put in electrical, water, and septic service to these new spaces. To that end I have been collecting parts and plans for quite a few months. While we do these things we will also make some changes to our basic plans. 

Since moving here in 2018 we have had a fairly stable electrical service, but this has changed in the last few years. PGE now turns the power off rather than take a chance that their electrical grid might start a fire. We bought an generator once we began planning to move here in 2017, but hadn't had much need for it until this past year. But the generator, as big as it is, isn't enough to power much of the Farm and the uses we have for power are no long just a tiny home. So we bought a second generator, a much bigger generator, and have a plan to put in transfer switches and stuff like it to power the essentials without having to run around with long extension cords. The plan is in place and I've been busy finding the parts for it all on CraigsList. The goal is to make all of these moves by the end of July.  So there's a lot going on. Luckily for us there's no puppies on the way and we have some help to get some of this done. 

My Brother came to visit in late Spring and has been living in his very spacious camp trailer parked next to the tiny home while he figures out his retirement move. The trailer will be moved near to the Utility Shed where I will put one of the generators and be able to power everything from there.  The Utility Shed is also the place where our clean water system is centrally located too, so all we need do it figure out  the septic hook-up and he'll  be set-up. Since our septic pipe between the tiny homes and the septic tank run close by the site for his trailer we'll be set-up in a jiffy.  Getting water and septic to behind the Farmhouse is a bit more of a job, but nothing we can't do easily and without a great deal of expense. 

So our plans are moving forward and all is going swimmingly. In other news there really isn't much more to talk about. We traded one of Abba Zabba's last litter with another breeder and Lemonhead Lucy has been with us for about  two weeks.  She is a fireball and fearless little white and red girl Basset. She's a joy and will have a good life here. Eventually we will be out of the puppy business and Farm and hospitality businesses take over, but there's years to go before all of the parts of our plans are in place. 

The heat of Summer came this week. Crops are growing quickly. Produce is just a few weeks away. Life is good. You might want to come and visit. The produce that we have will be in the picture bar at the top of this page. It will be the best you've had. We promise.

June 11th, 2023 Summer Weather

The end of May brought a string of 90+ degree days, then things went back to our normal near eighty for a few weeks. The heat didn't really change much in what we had to do, planting the assorted crops, but the results have been a bit better than we expected. The plants are doing very well and outgrowing the weeds by just a bit.

The plans we made in January are nearly all in place. Our row building plan is almost four fifths complete. Dozens of neatly made rows of varying lengths, each oriented exactly from North to South to grab maximum light no matter the season. These will all be permanent rows, after this year the tiller on our tractor won't have too much use and I might just dismount it. In our no-till scheme what happens is addition of organic matter (leaf compost) directly on top of each row as we take plants out and put new plants in. This, along with loosening the soil with our heavy Broadfork, should keep out plants healthy and growing more vigorously every year. But there were three bigger plans for the Gardens.

We specifically designed the rows to keep our pest problems down by putting the right plants in the right places. Some plants discourage pests from crossing between rows. It is hard to prove these are working because the effect is nothing, but we are guess things are going along just fine since there hasn't been much animal predation of our starts and seeds. We had always planned to put Nematodes into the Gardens to keep larvae down and we did this two days ago. So far no new is good news, but the Flea Beatle population doesn't seem to have been effected much. The main target for the Flea Beatles has been the tomatoes so far and a little bit on the potatoes. We walk along the row the rows  and squish the little black specks a few times a day figuring the dead ones can't breed. And we hope the nematodes do the job down in the soil. If the Beatles get out of hand we have a few more tricks we can use.  Our only other pests are the few mammals we have seen.

Radishes

There have been a few Moles working the rows. They are easy enough to track, but the previous years of gopher tunnels gives them a super highway to whatever part of the Gardens they think are nice. So we are flooding their holes, ruining their tunnels, and hoping they will either go away or attract an owl. Either will do the job. Moles eat Worms, of which we have a great many, so they don't do much damage to the crops except for messing up the rows a bit, an easy to fix.  The few field rats we had seem to have either been killed off or have fled. but not before eating quite a few watermelon and bean starts. We planned for this and over planted starts so that we might replace them as quickly as we can. This doesn't replace the growth, but we have a lot of growth and most of the plants are unhurt by rodents. Aside from these few things it seems out pest plans are doing okay. 

The third part of our plan is crop rotation and bed flipping. We haven't moved far enough into the season to start thinking about this seriously, but there is some movement. The used forty gallon plastic stock tanks we bought have all been carefully filled with the right soil components and planted in Radishes, Carrots, and Bunching Onions.  The seed have germinated and we're hopeful of getting these things to grow quickly. The plan is to plant two new rows of these three every few weeks so that there will be a steady supply for the Produce Stand.  Fingers crossed. The rest of our rotation thing can be discussed later. 

The month of May was so much more cooperative this year than last. And the presence of  Ann and I in the Gardens nearly every day means things are slightly cleaner and quite a bit better laid in.  We are watering a bit less this year due to the thick compost mulch cover put on every row. So too the weeds are greatly decreased and easy to remove, but it's an uphill fight. There are still quite a few trouble areas for weeds, but I am burning and cutting a few times a week trying to stay on top of the weed problem. And there's still much to do that is not  digging and planting.

Pickler Cucumbers

We have a new irrigation thing happening soon. I invested a bit in a drip tape plan to directly water the plants at the dirt level. This is a big job but the parts are all here and once I get a minute to start putting it all in things will go along swiftly.  

My Brother, visiting in his first few months of retirement and looking for a job and permanent housing here, has spent a few weeks siding the Utility Shed. This was something that needed done before next Fall and today it is nearly complete. We will caulk and paint it in the next few weeks. 

Very soon I will need build build the parking lot area that will allow us to begin opening the Produce Stand. This is more to give the four cars here every day a place to stay and allow people to use the driveway outside of the Farm as they access the Stand. We're shooting for mid-July opening and things are looking good. 

Other than this a great many smaller things still need doing. We need to set up a backup power generation plan to make this place habitable when PGE turns off power to avoid wild fires. We need to put in the infrastructure to make the tiny home move immediately ready to use. I'll be looking for the parts in the coming few weeks. 

Jalapeño

If it seems we are really busy, we are. At our age we have a good five or six hour work day available, and this about four days a week. But the lack of the forty hour week doesn't seem to be holding up our plans. We just have to keep moving.

May 4th, 2023 Spring Update

 Things are humming along at Creekside Farm. The weather turned warmer and a whole lot dryer this past few weeks, allowing us to move out into the gardens in earnest. Today it is raining quite a lot, but this isn't supposed to last for very long and we'll get back to work. 

Our farm grows weeds better than most. We never use chemicals unless something is very wrong so weeds can get ahead of us if we take a day off. I have spent the last week or two moving and tilling leaf compost into the gardens.  Tilling has the dual effect of killing weeds and allowing us to add compost to the soil, so the ground is looking pretty good in most places. We're heading into a no-till permanent gardening practice, so sooner or later I'll take the tiller off of our little tractor "Rosie". I won't go further into no-till than I have in previous articles. If you don't know what I mean there is an archive of articles to look through and you are welcome to look through it. We have a large garden plan based on our previous plans, the chief difference is that all of our rows will be completely new, all of them very heavily stocked with soil organic matter in the form of compost and mulch, and nearly every one of them will be aligned in a north-south direction to get maximum light.

One of three garden plans for this year.
This is the first one we have been planting.
It turned out that we had seven more rows than we had planned for.

We spent some time a cutting down, or limbing up, the sky depriving trees shading parts of our gardens. There was one seriously dangerous deciduous tree shading the east end of the Market Garden which we took down a few weeks ago.  Yesterday we went out to fall three large and healthy pines, but thought better of it once we took a good look. These are all along the front fence near power lines. We called a friend who cuts down trees for a living and will see what it might cost to take them all down next week. We did take all of the branches off up to about twenty four feet and there's plenty to do without the little new gardens removing these trees will produce. 

Ann has been spend a lot of time in the Greenhouse this year. We heated the place and added some fans to move air around and the plants really took off. Once I built some new rows and the weather turned nice she got out there and started putting plants in the ground. Strawberries, flowers, and the first flight of corn (there will be five this year) are all in. A multitude of crops are ready to go in or ready to plant. All is on schedule/ 

This garden sits to the south of the first one.
The areas for basil will have to move until we get the trees down.
This is a huge increase in garden spaces and we'll grow hot peppers here.

The Kitchen Garden area will hold our potato crops and cooled down peppers. Tis year we are adding a cool version of the Habanero Pepper. The hot version is one of the hottest peppers humans can use, but ours has not heat to it. The cooled Jalapeños and Habaneros have all of the great chili pepper flavors, none of the heat, so they will soon become a favorite on our produce stand. I tilled the Kitchen garden spaces in the last few days so we hope to begin planting there in a week or so. Peppers take a lot of heat to thrive and it just is not that warm out yet. Potatoes really don't care much when they are planted.  We will plants flowers and herbs wherever there is space and time.

The Kitchen Garden spaces are nearly ready for planting.

We are aiming to make the Farm profitable for produce this year and all is going pretty much according to plans. But there is certainly more work to do than we have time and energy. Things will happen in their own time. Our goal is to have the Produce Stand moved down to the end of Sell Road where the people are every day. So picking in the morning, selling in the afternoon. We shall see how it all works out. Farming is going along as we thought it might, but there's a lot going on here right now.

We had a litter of puppies about seven weeks ago. Most of them will leave us for new families in a bout a week's time. This is a big part of our lives and livelihood. We love to see them come into our little world. Love to see them grow and learn. The we love to see them go so that some semblance of cleanliness and order can be restored. Mostly we love it, but there are days . . .

We ran into a bit of trouble with our fresh water system in these past few months. I thought it might be overloading the water filters that was causing it so I went out to add more filtering capacity. As I was working through it I figured out that something was wrong in the pipe routing that brought water from the well to the filters, so we dug the problem out, swapped a few pipes, and this fixed the problem. Last Tuesday I replaced the filter media and things are cleaning up as we go along. Since I made the mistake a few years back, when we were building the water system, the rust and resin got thoroughly into everything so it might take a while to get it all out. This morning the water was clear and iron free. Hurray for us!

Jack and I have nearly finished remodeling half of the tiny home cabin, the part he will occupy once we have it moved behind the new Farmhouse. It looks great, but there's still a few things to do. As is always at Creekside Farm, so much to do.  The second half of the tiny home will also move to the back and become the new kennel and grooming area. We'll remodel it once it is moved. Hopefully we will get these things shifted around once all of the compost behind the Farmhouse is shifted into the gardens. 

As a last note, to those interested in our longer story, we talked to our lawyer yesterday. For those who don't know we ran into a problem with our ownership of the Farm last Summer while trying to finalize the sale of the property. Things got really tense and terse for a month or two and then we found a lawyer worth the money and stopped worrying so much. While things still are not entirely settled, it looks like they might we be in a few months. He has this thing well in hand. 

Time goes by quickly if you don't pay attention to it. We are lucky to have each day and none of them go by unnoticed. If anyone reading this would like the opportunity to get fingers into good dirt, come on ahead. Working in the sunshine is wonderful. Someone said you had to stop to smell roses. I say there's plenty of sweet thing to smell while moving around and working.