December 25th, 2021 Doing the Impossible: Christmas in the Impossible New Farmhouse

  

I'll try to be brief . . .

This post is a retrospective on Creekside Farm since its beginnings. The sort of thing I like to do when we hit a major milestone. Finding the property was one such posting and I included all that had gone before it in that post.  Another such opportunity to read an abridged version of that story was in Redefining the Plan. Plans changed when the former plans stopped making sense.  When we Moved from the City and into the tiny home cabin I wrote the story again. There may have been a few more moment when reflection seemed a good idea, but the point stands that occasionally the story needs retold and refined. 

This post is another brief restating of our experiences here since we began. I cannot possibly write the whole story in a simple post so I'll keep the details simple. You can read this entire story using the links of our blog's Histories section (to the right of this). 

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In the beginning . . .

Ann and I went to Las Vegas to have a second wedding. 

Our slate of life goals had been achieved and we needed a plan for the second half of our lives. So we took long driving trip to decide what and where we wanted to be when we retired. It took four days to decide on a direction, landing on the idea that owning a wedding venue would be a happy business (and one that we might be able to do). Soon after we decided that a farm themed venue sounded the most achievable so we began making what would some day be called The Plan. 

We were actually planning to do the impossible. We needed a two million dollar farm themed wedding venue to grow from a dead standing start and nearly no cash to begin the project. 

To fund our initial efforts we decided to leverage our experience in dog breeding. The idea at this point was to use small chunks of available cash (to buy dogs) to make medium sized chunks of cash (from raising puppies), then use the medium chunks of cash to buy a Farm (with a house and barn). We bought some dogs and got started right away. But things didn't go as planned -a continuing theme for the bigger project . . . 

Early on in our search for a farm it became apparent that any property suitable for our early plans was going to be financially out of reach. Any farm with ten acres, a house, and a barn, was going to be too expensive to move forward in anything but a fully fledged farming business and we didn't have that sort of experience. So we began looking for a "stepping stone" farm. 

It took some wildly optimistic searching but eventually we found a derelict piece of abandoned land, with dubious ownership, under tax foreclosure, without a house, and having no barn, that might become a "stepping stone" toward buying a bigger place. 

The idea of a "stepping stone" farm seemed one possible way to get to where we wished to go, while learning how to farm while we built up enough money to buy what we needed. Though seemingly impossible to do, we found a place and bought it on owner contract. For our next impossible trick we somehow found a way to pay off the tax lien. The project could then begin in earnest and we began to clear away the trash. Simply finding land suitable for homesteading was just one of the impossible hurdles we would need to jump over. It took a year to clear the trash. We still needed to develop the empty lot into a farm, build a house, and the project was just getting started. 

We had decided early on in The Plan to buy some land and leverage a combination of the land value and the equity our house (in town) to get a building loan and develop the Farm quickly. But following the Real Estate Crash of 2007-8 the banks had decided only to fund larger development projects and small building loans were not being made to single family developments. So we changed the plan once more. 

Deciding the best way to move forward we built a tiny home to live in while we built a Farmhouse. It took almost a year to build our temporary tiny home and the entire story of that period can be found in the Histories section of the BLOG. We moved the tiny home to the farm under cover of darkness, no knowing if it would survive the trip to the Farm (which at that point was simply a piece of cleared land). And once we were settled in we began remodeling our house in town so that we could get top dollar for it. We sold the house quickly and began our Farm building efforts in earnest. But things took a lot longer that we thought they should.

It took two years to get the required architectural and engineering drawings and secure the necessary permits so that we could go ahead with building the Farmhouse.  We made many mis-steps and a few minor changes, but we actually achieved the impossible this year and moved into the new Farmhouse three days ago. Our Plan contained many points where failure might become an issue and stop us from doing as we wished.  But the Plan also had many points where failure could become a success. The Farmhouse completion was one such point in the plan.

Step one of the larger Plan was always to build a house because if we completed a house the Farm would become a  residence and not a simple plot of somewhat valuable land to home buyers who are looking for a two acre plot with a house. In the larger scheme, building a house creates a safe stopping point. So, our moving into the Farmhouse three days ago is a significant step forward that allows us to move the project forward much more readily. If we never make the next part of the plan a reality, our investment is fairly safe and the return significant enough to think things through into a change in our Plan.

Bearing in mind that Creekside Farm was, at first, intended only to be a stepping stone farm; something that we would build up and sell, so that we might buy a property more suited to our ultimate goals. We have been planning since we found the land to continue with our initial plan here on this Farm, but most things have their own dynamic. It may or may not be possible to do what we wish to do. It may be actually impossible to complete our bigger plans here. In the case of our Farm, the future of the Farm may be two (or more) things at once. We may become a farm which makes enough money to continue; The Farm might become another family's residence (if we decide to move our plans where they might come to fruition); The Farm might continue to grow into the complicated plan containing hospitality and wedding venues we dreamed up eight years ago. The end is still not certain.

But building our House (with our own hands), buying our Farm, both from a dead stand-still, with no cash on hand, both of these were mere possibilities most people would simply not begin with. Both would had seemed impractical or impossible, depending on your personal optimism. We once said we were rolling the dice with all of our future on the line.

Only time will tell how things will work out. But if you've been following our progress so far, you will know that we have done the impossible more often than not. 

December 18th, 2021 Our Christmas Letter

 

November 26th, 2021 Thanksgiving

 Thanksgiving at Creekside Farm is a simple thing. We sit for dinner, as most do, and contemplate our good fortunes. This post will be a retrospective on our year and not a recounting of the month as is usual. Occasionally I like to recount an entire history of the Farm and this is a possibility as I begin to write, but I will try to be brief and keep things relatively on point. To this end I must say the generally this year has been very good to us, but not without a some spill over of drama from outside, both good and bad. We began the year with our world in a pandemic lockdown, a newly elected President, a horrific  revolt against the government.

Our world seemed in turmoil and I wondered how far Trump, the traitorous ex-president, would take it. I wondered how much war I make at my age. But things never went that far. Political things have slackened off, but not without qualifications, which I will not go into since it really is not Farm related. 

The year has been a financial success even though Farm production was not really involved. We had two litters of Basset pups, both litters sold within days of birth and all of the new parents are ecstatic with their new fur babies. The financial gains from these two litters allowed bills to be paid, but there was other income as well. We decided to take our Social Security retirement at sixty-two because the numbers were right and full retirement had been raised to sixty-seven. And there were a number of large chunks of cash, doled out by the government, intended to stimulate the economy and assuage the negatives of the pandemic. We had a barrel of cash when moving to the Farm three years ago, but our long ranged planning included income to keep things level. The year brought us good fortune and we became self sufficient this year. But our long ranged planning requires farm production income to succeed and we made some large moves in that direction this year.

Since we are not yet settled on the sort of farming we will do in order to be successful farmers, but not knowing what this means in action, we continued to experiment with the sorts of plans and practices that might make our farm work successfully. As this past year began we continued to work withing the bounds conventional organic farm practices. Tilling the soil,  making compost, bringing compost in, and pushing the dirt into rows before planting seeds and starts, all seemed the right way to do things. And we had some success, but it was our crop of peppers that proved the only worthwhile thing we did. Once more we didn't reach the point where we could open a roadside produce stand or take things to a Farmer's Market, so we took what we did grow to local food banks.  In July we decided to get some outside advice to move things forward.

A nice woman from the USDA came out to survey our farm and discuss USDA subsidies to build infrastructure. She gave us some wonderful advice and described how we might go about things, but none of this advice seemed right for the level of development we have. One of the things that came of this visit was an invitation for Ann to go to a class on cover cropping in the off season. I had been spending some time learning how to make good compost, but reading a book Ann received at this class opened some new possibilities to explore. In the end we decided to begin building a "no-till" farm and this led into procuring hundreds of yards of hardwood leaves to make into leaf compost, leaf mulch, and leaf mold. The Farm looks a bit of a mess today because hauling the leaves around is a messy and muddy affair. And I won't go into how these things work together to make soil until it works, or does not, but the system sounds about right and we look forward to our attempt at farming in the coming year. Farming is the second business we had planned, the first being our dog breeding business as described above. So, while we are able to stay on the Farm even without farm income, production of sellable farm produce is our chief concern, second only to finishing the farmhouse in immediate importance.

We have nearly finished the Farmhouse we began to build two years ago. At the beginning of the year we had raised the frame, put a temporary roof and siding on, and wrapped the whole place in a weather resistant layer. During the year we wired, insulated, and finished the interior walls. We also put the exterior siding and finished the roof. There is still the exterior porch to build and the exterior of the house still needs painted, but plans are in place and we hope to get all but the painting done in Winter. We will move from our tiny home to the new Farmhouse in the next few weeks and celebrate Christmas in warmth there. One thing we are very thankful for is a long hot shower, but there was much more that happened, and did not happen, this past year. Things are generally going forward fairly well. Objects will come up to block our plans, but as in the past we will find a way around whatever we find. The Farm has a schedule which our careful plans fit into, but only in a general way. 

In the coming year we will attempt once more to make a profit on farm produce, finish the house, birth two more litters, move our new kennel into place, and begin producing things to sell in service of our long termed goals. All of these plans will be guided by the weather and the world's need for what we can make of the gifts we have and we look forward to finding out how we did when Thanksgiving comes around once more. But this past year showed us much and gave us much more than we expected, even if less than we hoped for. The thanks we give is for the help we received in making our plans work and not to plans that failed. We have had, now have, and will have, much to be thankful for as time marched forward.

October 31, 2021 Fall is in Full Effect

Fall came in with rain and it has continued up right up until yesterday with nearly daily deluges. There never was drought at Creekside Farm this year. Nearly as I can tell there has been no water shortages here ever. But the world at large has been complaining of drought and the rains this Fall have brought a lot of that to a halt. The rains have made the grounds here horribly wet and when we drive the tractor around the muddy ruts can get pretty horrible. Normally we buy ten, or so, bales of straw from a farmer nearby and put the stuff out on the tractor paths, but this year we are doing something completely different. Sometimes the simple things we are doing take a lot of explaining. This past few weeks was a simple idea, but really very large and complex in the doing of it. 

Following on Ann attending a group class on cover cropping at a neighboring farm, one of the things she took away was a book on soil building and maintenance. This book sat on the dining table and I read it at meals, or while waiting for meals, and got through quite a lot of it in rapid fashion. The information became immediately useful, but the whole affair has led us in a different direction.

We have committed to a new path to soils health based upon a film called "Back to Eden" (see it on YouTube). In this a the author noticed that Nature, as such, is generally very messy and not well controlled and tidy like most farms. The forest floor, being for him nature in its basic form, is usually very deeply covered in debris which is decaying over time. He noticed that this debris slowly feeds the soil while protecting the soils from damage. Each year's layer of Fall debris adds new materials that nature slowly breaks down into the nutrients the trees use to make new growth, while sheltering the microbes and other crawly things from rain, snow, and sun damage. A perfect system.

This man brought this insight out of the forest and onto his farm. He began importing large amounts of leaf debris (usually waste) and spreading it out in thick layers on his planting beds. After a few years and false starts he found that he no longer needed to weed his beds because the sun could not reach the weed seeds; he no longer needed to till the soils because the soils never compacted; and he no longer needed to water the garden because all that organic material held the water down where the plants could get it (even in the heat of Summer).  As an example of this in action: the man has an apple orchard which has so much debris laid down that the apples are always perfect, He has no insect damage to deal with using pesticides because the microbes and things in the leafy debris eat pests, the trees need no fertilizers of treatments, and as time goes by the ground rises to meet the tree growth in equal proportions (so no ladder work as time goes on). He never needs to replace old trees which have grown out of a useful size at all. But he still has to prune to keep things even. 

Once the biology (of the many sorts of creatures which feed on leaf debris) does it's thing, the nutrients locked up in the debris itself is converted into the stuff which garden plants use to grow plants. So no fertilizing needed unless a soils test tells of some nutrient deficiency. 

This "no-till" farming practice has caught on in the Organic farming community in many forms. If you have a lot of straw, you use straw, have access to yard debris, it works even better. So we have begun bringing in hundreds of yards of leaf debris, grass clippings, and the like. But there have been a few false starts of our own to deal with.

One is that the company we sought free debris deliveries from gave us a first batch of stuff which contained what we wanted, but also a whole lot of tree trimmings and larger branches that made everything more difficult. We had to sort the whole load out and it took nearly a week. Eventually we found there was a large pile of roots and branches we could not use and it took two days to burn it down to nothing. The first five or six truck loads of debris are better suited to composting into loom (stuff put down onto new beds to give plants the lighter stuff they need to put roots down. As we go forward through the Fall we will be receiving much "cleaner" loads of mostly hardwood leaf (the stuff put on top of the beds to protect the soils and slowly be converted into plant food). I put the first truck loads into long composting piles to begin breaking it down into a usable form.  The piles were so large I am having to move them to bigger places to cook down. Since we have a hundred foot driveway, and two loads of debris is sixty feet long, it takes a while to move it all into their appropriate places before more can arrive. 

Part of our Farming philosophy is to re-use and re-cycle. If we had to pay for the compost we are creating right now  the hundreds of yards  of compost would cost many thousands of dollars we do not have. But processing of yard waste will give us a great many healthy new planting beds in the Spring with very little cash outlay except diesel for the tractor. I will continue to make compost for at least a few more truck loads, but as the debris becomes more of the cleaner and lighter Fall leaves I will begin covering the existing beds with leaf and then pile it up for later use. We are also covering all of our tractor path s with the pure leaf debris as well, saving of the cost of straw and the need to pick it all back up in late Spring for composting.

Another part of this new soil building plan is returning the unused portions of garden plants directly to the soil. So this Fall, as we break down the gardens, we are mulching the tops of the plants, and leaving the roots in the ground, to rot where they are. In past years we have been composting all of the plants and roots in a pile and this has been the stuff we used to make the good soils we have today. But composting removes some of the nutrients which could have been useful for growing things and that are lost in the heat of composting. Cutting the plants off at the ground and leaving them to break down where they fall will return the leafy nutrients. And the root systems will rot where they are to return nutrients and provide water channels for next Spring's plantings to use. We will move the tops of the plants to new beds so that they don't infect the soils with longer termed problems, but the whole thing becomes a circular system;  a system which increased soils vitality, while decreasing costs, and greatly reduces the labor of weeding, fertilizing, tilling, and watering. 

The best potential outcome of all this of this is the weeding. Composting creates a heat which destroys plant diseases and weed seeds. So the compost we will make for use at the bottom of the plants will no longer have so many weeds to deal with in Spring. Another benefits is that, since we are covering the native soils entirely, the hundreds of years of thistle and grass seed already in the ground will be denied sunshine to sprout themselves in Spring.  Perhaps the best part of this best part is that the newly made soils will no longer be so easily compacted after tilling lightens it up, allowing any weeds that do develop to be taken out with far less effort. The only weeding problem remaining will be the longer termed problems of deep thistle and blackberry roots. These bigger roots will have to be individually dug out, but the lack of pulling new weeds ought to show us where to dig and the new beds will soften the native clay and allow us deeper digging with less effort. 

That's pretty much the tale of the past two weeks in action. Our new soils plan is now being implemented and might give us the Farm we need.

There are still many other things going on. We moved the shop as planned, making it taller and narrower to try to keep the snows of Winter from breaking it once more. And we still have the five of Bit O'Honey's pups, which are mostly slated to go to their new homes beginning Thursday. The Farmhouse build hasn't seen much action in the past two weeks, but I have been doing the finish work in the Bath room and we have many projects ready to go now that we have the leaf debris sorted out.

Things are going forward every day. But the days themselves are becoming much shorter too and  many things have to be done to get us ready for the Winter freezing that will eventually come to our little Creekside Farm.

October 2nd, 2021 Things that Happened

 Things are happening on Creekside Farm. 

Fall arrived and the change on seasons was immediate. In my mid-September post the rains had started. We've had rain every few days since then. This is great for the cover crop seeds we had put in and the new plants jumped from the ground soon after planting. But the rains also brought up the weeds too. At least there was some progress.

I finished putting the finish roofing on the new Farmhouse. There is still the need for adding ridge tiles and putting in some zinc strips to keep the moss from growing in the coming years. But one hard day and the roof is ready for Winter.

We took the last week off from roofing to get a few more things for the Farmhouse. We found a really nice carpet remnant in Vancouver and began cutting it to fit. We're only using carpet in the living room area, hallway, the Office, and the Closet. These are small rooms so we are laying the carpet ourselves. 

Ann painted two accent walls in the main room. We have a fairly bright terra cotta on the t-wall that separates the Kitchen from the Pantry. And there's a nice subdued olive paint on the large wall of the living room area. As I go on I am beginning to dislike the dolphin grey paint in the Bedroom section of the house. Re-painting will commence later on. We want to live in the place and paint choices are of lesser importance.

We will begin painting the exterior of the Farmhouse this week, hopefully we'll have a good coat of paint on before the Winter rains settle in. We still have to build the wrap-around porch so we extended our building permit six months to allow for the extra time COVID 19 added to the project. There is time to finish the house and we will spend Christmas night living there.

We harvested our pepper crop, with a great deal of satisfaction in the result. We had planted two thirty foot rows in the Spring, all of the plants sprouted from seed in the new Greenhouse. We decided to put the plants down under a ground cover of landscape fabric this year to help keep weeding down, but also to retain heat and water in the soils. (Peppers like warm soil.) We planted four types of peppers: Poblano, Anaheim, mild Jalapeño, and a wonderful new pepper called a "Fooled You" Jalapeño. We only put  in a few of the traditional peppers, about a third of the space. The bulk of our plants were of the new Cool Jalapeño type. 

This new pepper is a bit larger, a bunch more flavorful, and has absolutely no heat to it. It is a wonderful thing to eat and to cook with. 

All in all we took about eight bushel baskets of peppers from the Market Garden. Half a bushel of Poblano, Anaheim, and traditional hot Jalapeño, and six bushels of the new Fooled You variety. We harvested the plants by pruning off all of the branches and then stripping out the fruit. Pepper plants are perennials, so this year we will be pulling the mature plant stumps and potting them to over-Winter in the greenhouse. We hope this will give us a jump on the growing season next year. 

We made contact with a small Portland green grocer chain who seems interested in putting our Fooled You pepper crop in their stores, but as of today we haven't got a deal yet. 

Ann has decided that she would be perfectly happy if we only grew peppers, since it was relatively easy to grow and very effective as a cash crop. But I'm pretty sure she'll be happier with the other crops once we figure out how to do them as well as we have done the peppers. We will be adding more rows and varieties of peppers in coming seasons, they seem to like growing here. Half the fight in farming is finding out what the ground wants to grow.

We have decided to begin using another farming strategy going forward which involved layering copious amounts of un-composted materials onto our rows of crops. I read the Soils book Ann received as a door prize at the Cover Crop class she took early last month and this led me to find a very interesting no-till method for vegetable farming. Ann went to a local garden materials center (one we used for twenty years while in the landscaping business) and she was able to convince them to drop their yard debris into a large pile on our Farm. This saves them a bunch of dumping fees and provides us with enough materials, for free, to cover all of our gardens for free. Since we had already made a large amount of really good planting dirt, the addition of four inches of leaf and grass debris will add a super slow release of nutrients into the soil, decrease water loss due to heat, and protect the soil and from rain and sun damage and erosion. It will also give the biome of good little garden creatures a wonderful source of food which they will slowly turn into plant food.

Our flock of Runner Ducks had grown to a whopping sixteen birds by hatching eggs. We re-homed ten of them, keeping the best two females to add to our egg producers. We will not miss having so many ducks here. A large flock is smelly, noisy, and expensive to feed. 

Bit O'Honey's pups are now three weeks old. They have begun walking, playing, and having a good time. People have begun coming to visit, as. the decide which one to take home in five more weeks. Today's visitors was a family which had taken one of Cinnamon Bear's litter a few years ago and it was nice seeing one of our puppies again. It always is.

The mornings have taken on a bit of a chill around here. The days are getting shorter and the nights much longer too. But the change in seasons is awfully nice to see and feel. And the work a bit less sweaty, if also a bit wetter.  Things are going very well