March 27, 2021 The End is Near

In a world which promises lots of great apocalypses, our lives have a whole lot of things coming together at one time. Winter was a tough one, we got through it. Covid19 nearly wiped us out, but not the us living at Creekside Farm. The house is too much work, we have got so much done. Civil War, nope, that didn't happen either. We even had a rocket blow up and fall from the sky right over the house, while we watched from the comfort of our hot tub. The Daffodils and Tulips are up and some are even flowering. Despite all of the negative possibilities our lives are pretty positive and we hope yours is too. 

One of our female Bassets, Grizelda Laffee Taffee, looked to be coming into labor about a week ago, so we went into full whelping vigilant mode. Not a whole lot of sleep, splitting the nights into two shifts and napping in the afternoons has left us both a bit foggy in the head. But so far she hasn't really been too serious and so we have no choice but to continue waiting her out. The litter is likely all sold out prior to the pups arriving since we have more than twenty people on the wait list for puppies. 

The house build is going a bit slowly since someone has to stay with Taffee for the time being. But we did get much of the remaining drywall put up since my last post and all of the insulation is done. So the new Farmhouse is very comfortable (just in time for the outside temperatures to rise). All in all the Drywall project is looking very good.

We have about eight more panels to put up in the big front room and I have begun taping up the joints and corners. This is not new work for us, we did quite a lot of drywall work in our business and have the tools too. I have begun the laborious work of making everything smooth during those times when Ann has to stay with Taffee or has other farm work to do. There is about six weeks of taping joints and corners before I can start spraying textures and painting walls. We bought a nice little texture gun and airless paint sprayer from Craig's List in past weeks, so we are certainly ready to go once the walls are flat.

I have begun working on getting water to the house in the past few days. Since we have a well and also a temporary pump house we have to move everything but the pump and switches to the new Utility shed, about a hundred feet away, and then hook it all up. We have had a basic plan in place since we started building, and have a hose connection bringing water to the house today (where the Landry room is now located and working), but actually moving everything over is a bit tricky since we are using the water every day. I did bury nearly all of the new transport pipe a few months ago, as well as the long wire from the new Utility Shed to the old pump house, so quite a bit of the hardest work is already done. Moving the water treatment and pressure tank to the utility shed will have to go in two stages though.

The first part is to change the well pump power supply over from the temporary electrical pole and panel the the permanent electrical panel on the utility shed. This part is sort of an easy one. The second part is to hook up the existing old pump house, with the tanks and treatment stuff, up to the new water pipes so that we have treated and softened water all over the Farm and to the new house. We will also have treated water to the tiny home until we move to the new house. These two things will allow me to take a break from this water project and still use the water system while we get the house ready for all the water projects in the new house to be completed. Once we're done with the interior work on the house we'll move on to moving everything else water related into the new Utility Shed to live forever.

We moved a greenhouse out to the Market Garden a few weeks ago. Since then we have been trying to get out there to finish it and begin sprouting the thousands of plants we will need in the late Spring.  We have everything but time, but it will all need to get done in spite of the time we'll have to spend raising puppies and finishing farmhouses. Once the next step in the watering system is complete we will have water and power directly to the new greenhouse. We put in a fabric floor in the greenhouse and positioned one of the long growing tables, a large water tank we will use for a heat sink, and a propane fireplace to bring heat if it begins to get too cold. We need to get this done pretty soon, so the house build will need to take a back seat for farm-working.

Aside from these few things we are beginning to till the ground around the Farm and to make things ready for late Spring planting. Since we have mostly finished trash removal and have been tilling for three years now the process of preparing the soils for planting will be pretty quickly done this year. We already have the soil amendments and seeds ready to go and good weather is getting easier to come by. So farm life will be pretty good this year.

March 7, 2021 Spring Might Have Arrived

It's still Winter here at Creekside Farm, but signs of Spring are everywhere. Our two large bulb beds are all colored in green shoots and there are a few flowers emerging. Daffodil flowers are usually opening right now but the Farm is at the bottom of Apple Valley so things grow more slowly here. Some of the English Daisies we put in the Peaches and Herbs Garden have begun to flower for the first time. We pruned all of our fruit trees a few weeks ago and they are budding out nicely. So, despite the recent snows and ice storms, Spring is looking good here.

We took most of the week away from the house building project to work on the collapsed shop hoop house and move the new greenhouse out to the Market Garden. The new Greenhouse moved easily. It was the last hoop house we built and it looks like our latest design changes are sufficient to last through the harshest parts of Winter here. The new design was also built using all that we had learned from constructing these things, so all of it came apart, moved, and then went back together in less than five hours. One of the Farm's friends, a guy named C.B., came to help out putting the thing up. He seemed interested in learning how i had built it and has a similar project of his own to do. The greenhouse is up, but we still have to put the end walls together and install the doors and heat vents for when the summer heat arrives. There is a new water hydrant to the greenhouse and we have enough heavy power cords to power the fixtures we will eventually have in it.

The new Greenhouse will be stocked with newly built planting tables, a recently acquired potting table, quite a few high intensity grow lighting fixtures, a three hundred gallon water tank, and a propane fireplace heater, and ventilation fans to keep the air moving. All of this stuff has been collected from CraigsList postings and most of it for free. We also have quite a lot of planting soils laying around which came from CraigsList also. So we are prepared for planting and are ordering seeds this week. The Farm itself will need quite a bit of preparation for the planting season, but is still much too wet to do much tilling. Our water system still needs to be installed, but we have the pipes in the ground and a plan in place.

The new Farmhouse project didn't get a lot of attention this past week but it has been our primary focus all Winter. Since our last post we got all of the doors in and the ceiling drywall installed. There is still two rooms to put drywall walls up. The Bathroom used three types of drywall boards which we still need to bring in. The large front room is about a fifth of the way done and we have the sheets to finish it.

Most of the electrical work is in, but there are still a few things to get working. We have lights and heat in the Farmhouse and it is beginning to look like a home in there at times. We have much of the flooring already on the Farm but it will have to wait for finishing the walls and ceilings.

In other Farm news our hens are putting out about  eighteen eggs a day and all of these seem to be selling out pretty quick. Our Runner Ducks are happily clearing the Kitchen Garden of pests as we get ready for Strawberry Season, but we have no duck eggs yet. And one of our Basset Hounds, Laffee Taffee, has figured out how to get preneant again. So we'll need to prepare for puppies coming at the beginning of April.

We have been preparing for puppies since November. I began by joining quite a few Hound oriented Facebook Groups a long time ago and participating in them. And in November I started putting a Wait List for future litters online. We have about twenty people waiting to hear good news about coming puppies and the Wait List will get notified this weekend. 

There are a lot of projects happening here this year. All of them will take time and effort, most will take money. So we are planning on a large planting project this year, two or more litters of puppies, and quite a bit of luck and hot weather to keep the main projects moving forward. But things are looking real good today.

February 21, 2021 Lightening up

 The snows of the past few weeks have come and gone. The damage wasn't too bad and not a lot of time was wasted by the weather. We got a bit over ten inches of snow in the second storm. Nothing bad happened, but we did need to spent a day removing snow from the low pitched roof of the tiny home cabin. We never built the cabin for snow, so it really isn't built to hold the enormous weight of ten inches of snow. The first  four inch snow storm took out the Shop hoop house and there wasn't enough time to rebuild before the second storm rolled in and dumped ten more inches. So we'll still need to rebuild the Shop pretty soon. We had planned on moving our Greenhouse out into the Market Garden a few weeks back. So this will happen before the end of the month.

The house project has come far despite that we are both getting a bit worn down by the weight of it all. We have a little over half of the interior drywall hung. The bedroom suite is only eight feet tall so the ceilings are all in. The walls the office, bathroom, water closet, and bedroom, are all in except where the doors have to be installed. So we started hanging doors on Friday. 

There are only five interior doors. Two are sliding "pocket" doors, three of them swinging. We bought these really beautiful glass doors months ago from a bluff house remodel in Pacific City. We had found them on Craigslist and the builder delivered them to our shipping container. They have sat for nearly a year now.

The picture to the left is the Laundry room pocket door we have installed. We put the lighting inside the Landry room so that it backlights the glass door super well. The door frames are clear hemlock and the glass panel is beautifully etched with a wheat motif that is as farm-y as we could have hoped for. Eventually we will be painting all of the woodwork in the house but we haven't decided on a color yet. I never put in a pocket door and it turned out to be much easier than it looked because they sell a kit down at the Home Depot. We put the two pocket doors in on Friday and I began mortising out the hinges on the door jambs. It is an exacting project, much more difficult than putting in pocket doors.

We'll need to make a run into town to purchase another large load of drywall this coming week. The most we can put on our little truck is thirty-fours sheets. Buying this amount lowers the price of each sheet by about two dollars, so it is well worth moving this much at a single time, but the weight is serious enough to drive the truck slower. 

It doesn't take long to put the drywall up, but fitting around doors, windows, outlets, and switches takes some careful measuring. So far it has all gone very well. We have all of the lights and bathroom fans in and working now. We also have one of the small electric heaters in so the entire space is heated as well as lit.

The ceiling of the main room is fourteen feet from the floor and, since we have to use a much heavier sheet of drywall, we have to hoist ieach of the eighty pound sheets up on a lift to get it secured. I have to do much of the climbing, so things are going more slowly in the big room. We hope to have the main room ceiling up this next week so that we can begin insulating the main room. Right now the room is open to the roof and any heat goes straight up and out the roof vents. Once we have the ceiling and upper walls of the big room in the house ought to be easily heated. We designed the place to be heated using under floor heating, so it should be comfortable throughout using the one heater we already have installed.

The Farm itself has been pretty busy. Dairy Creek was at flood stage two weeks back and this brought one of the large Creek trees down. The tree fell toward the new house but wound up coming to rest just before it would have damaged the house. Ann and I made quick work of chopping it all up and burning to branches. We had to repair the fence where the tree hit it but we had already collected the parts so it only took two partial days to put everything right again. Between the weeks of heavy rains and snow this past Winter has been challenging. We were very lucky over all. 

Much of Northwestern Oregon had is far worse. We only lost electricity for a few minutes, some people nearby have lost power for weeks. We had more snow than ice while, just to the south of us, ice became one inch thick and tore the place up. We have a generator to power everything but haven't had to use it yet.

We spent a bit of time putting down some straw to cover the mud on our walking paths. Our chickens simply love hunting the grain out of it. We also pruned all of the fruit trees around the Farm on the one day between storms. I think the Winter is mostly over. There will still be more rain, but the worst is probably over. 

Our chickens and ducks are doing very well and the dogs are all vying to see who can get pregnant first. Our male hound, ClarkBar, is a nervous wreck  trying to find one of our girls receptive. He keeps trying, we stay hopeful. Our plan is to breed in April. Until then we have to feed ClarkeBar a bit more heavily since he won't eat his normal diet during times like these. 

All in all, despite the weather and a few minor set-backs, things are still moving forward pretty well here.

February 6, 2021 New Areal Map

 Every now and again the Google map gets updated satellite imagery. It's always a big deal because we get to see things as they really are and not as we have them in our imagination.  Today we found a new picture and it is a good time to take stock of what our progress looks like. 

This new image must have been taken in early June because the new Farmhouse has the roof sheathing and front gable is on, but the tar paper cover is not. Also, the Produce pop-up tent is out front, but the potato plants haven't really taken off yet. So this is somewhere about five months ago. A lot has happened since then, but this post is about a longer time frame. At the time this picture was taken, our house looked like the image to the left of this. Since then we have added windows, doors, roof felt paper, and a moisture barrier to keep the rains out.

At the beginning of last year we laid out a new design for the Farm, and the new satellite picture shows that we actually did it. Because of the house building there wasn't much farming going on.  But we did move the fences, partitioning the Farm into three parcels: the right section is the Kitchen Garden where food and flowers grow under the watchful eye of our Runner Ducks; the center section is the House and Kennel where our tiny home cabin is now in its third year; the left section is MacGreggor's Market Garden and the Chickens. When I made this plan last January, the house wasn't even a hole in the ground, but we were headed toward it.

The image on the right is where we began in 2015. Though you can't really see it, the place was covered in things that needed to be cut down, burned, cleared, or dumped in the landfill. It took nearly two years to find the fence on every side, three years to get the trash cleared up.  The image next to this one doesn't really do proper justice to the scope of the work we had ahead of us.

We still find trash every once in a while, but the place is cleared edge to edge and side to side. What little trash we do find fits into our weekly trash container. Our Basset Hounds are the ones who bring this stuff to us every once in a while. 

We still need to remove quite a few trees. This just may be the year we get to it. But from the look of this new image we are getting there.

In the coming year we hope to finish the house, plant a proper crop and sell it, and begin the hard work of laying out the Farm as it should become.

But today it is a Winter mud pit. Walking around the place, anywhere that isn't somehow raised above the mud, is a real problem. Driving the tractor only makes things worse. What we need is a dry month to begin cleaning it all up.  

Things are going real well at Creekside Farm. Lots getting done, more needing done. The Creek did rise but it isn't a real worry. 

January 24, 2021 Lights!!

Not much has happened since my last post, but we did get all the framing, electrical and plumbing rough-in inspections, and two-third of the insulation inspection all approved. So we began installing the interior drywall.  

I had found a drywall lift jack on Craig's List a few weeks back for $100 and I had put it up on a single level of scaffolding with the intention of doing the main room ceiling last week. But we took the thing down and decided to learn how to use it in the Bedroom section of the house. The process is laborious and hard on the lower back since the screws have to be done over-head. The drywall jack takes a whole lot of the work out of the job. 

We started off in the Office since this is where our Son Jack has been camped out. He had to take his place down entirely whenever the Inspectors come visit, because living in the house is technically out of bounds, so the room was empty for the day. We got as far as getting the ceiling, and two of the interior walls, covered before it began to get dark. 

As we put the ceiling up I installed the two L.E.D. lighting fixtures for that room. Cutting through the wires leading to the room from the electrical panel, where the circuit breaker was definitely off, brought the revelation that there must be a wire crossed somewhere, so I'll need to find the wire and buy some new wire cutters. The crossed wire also needs to be found the get the lights working. 

Jack came home from work at Supper time and put up the Window wall in the Office to allow him to move back into the room. Now the space is easy to heat and what little light there is bounces around, so it isn't so much like camping as it had been for the past few months. 

Tuesday, we did the wall which separates the Main room from the Bedroom section to make heating the Bedroom section easier. Now the entire Bedroom section is insulated and walled off. Until the Main room ceiling is up and insulated, that end of the house is impossible to heat and the difference between the two halves of the house is easily felt. The walls are much easier to do, but the whole thing weighs a ton.  The next day brought muscle and joint pain, so we  took the day off to rest up. 

On Friday we put up the Bedroom ceiling. This is a bigger room so the drywall jack does the job much easier. Even though the walls aren't covered it feels like a space we will be very comfortable in. I put the lights in the ceiling, as I had in the Office, but we still needed to put a few outlets in before putting power to the room. Saturday we had errands to run so all I got done was putting in the last two electrical outlets in the Bedroom. The lights came on with the flick of the switch. Real electric lights too, like the kind people in town have! Very satisfying. 

In non-Farmhouse news . . . The weather at the Farm was dry all week. Can't say it was ever warm, but not windy and wet passes for a nice day in the north-western Oregon Winter.  The mud subsided  a bit. The ducks dried out a the Chickens started producing eggs in a big way. Saturday we got thirty-one eggs, a new record. 

We are rapidly approaching breeding season for our hounds and we will soon re-enter the breeding business. I have been accumulating a Waiting List of people wanting a puppy, so most of the first litter is likely already taken even though we have nothing to take. We will do at least two litters this year, a good thing since were beginning to see the bottom of the money bucket. We will have to do the first litter in the Farmhouse since we are still living in what will become the new kennel once the house is done. A necessary sacrifice, but the pups will have a safe dry space with a floor, walls, heat, and lights. 

Lastly, the County was doing some tree trimming work on the electrical wires on Sell Road and our neighbor, Jay, had talked the crew into dropping all of the ground up trimmings onto his place. But he hadn't many places to put the stuff so on Saturday morning I warmed up Rosie the tractor and brought all that woody stuff in to make a six inch thick path from the Driveway to the Back door of the new house. The trimmings are not neat and tidy, but the mud will never get through it. Projects everywhere getting done, progress abounding at Creekside Farm.