May 28th, 2022 Spring Finally Arrives

 About two weeks ago the rains of Winter finally stopped, ending one of longest wet spells the Pacific Northwest has seen in many years. Our last truly dry day was in September of last year. Prior to that day, the days of endless rains began, we had the hottest Summer on record. The Summer included about four days of one-hundred-fifteen degrees. Another new record. While the Winter rains ended, the Spring rains arrived a few days later.  The difference between Winter and Spring rains is easy to tell if you know what to look for. Winter rains are cold and sharp when they hit your skin. Spring rains come through warm air and is usually a smaller drop which is softer on the skin. You get wet either way, but Spring rains are wonderful. The difference in the rain gave us good reason to begin preparing the farm for planting. The Spring rains are usually spaced apart too, giving us a few days of sunshine in between rainy days and allowing the ground to dry out a bit. Dry ground is what we need to begin planting. 

This is the new Strawberry
and Potato beds.

In the past few years we began preparing the Farm for planting in mid-April, so we're getting started pretty late in the year. Previous year's preparation were about physically breaking up the rain damaged soil on the surface of our planting beds and bringing in loads of horse manure. The horse manure is usually composted and ready by late April so we add it to the beds and till it in while dragging a row making tool behind our tractor. The result has been an increasing amount of good soil. But building up good soils has been a one step forward, one step back sort of thing and we decided to try another method. I wrote a long article about how we planned to change our Farm practices last October. You can read it by clicking here if you'd like. But here are the highlights.

No till gardening uses massive amounts of garden debris laid out in a thick layer over the native soils and left to rot. Worms come up and eat the debris, converting it into worm tailings which garden microbes digest leaving nearly pure nutrient rich soil for plants to grown in. Besides this great soil the leaves break down, leaving the veins and twigs behind to form a "matrix" which breaks down more slowly, leaving water channels which carry water deep into the dirt. 

A finished no till bed.
This is cucumber and squash.

Last fall we had about four hundred yards of leaf debris brought in by gardening companies to get us started. We also began tearing into our gigantic compost piles and sorting this out too. The whole process takes a lot of time and effort, but we really needed to get going on the new plan. 

We decided to help Nature along a bit by tilling in the well broken down debris on the beds, laying out the final rows where they would be for the coming years, and then covering the new rows with another thick layer of leaf compost. 

The whole system works to contain weed seeds and allow any weeds that do sprout to be pulled from the soft soils without much effort. The vermiculture eats the leaf debris which feeds the fungus, but other animals enter to the soil to eat the worms and these also eat the larvae of harmful insects too. All in all it sounds like a good deal. Time will tell if this works, but we are committed to it at this point.  So far we have about a third of our planting done. But there's much more happening here.

This is one of Bit O'Honey's
pups with her new bigger brother.

We birthed three litters of puppies in late March and have been delivering them to their new families for the past few weeks. Right now we have only one puppy left and she will go to Washington next weekend. This will allow us to put the Pantry back together and finish one or two more Farmhouse projects that have been on hold for space, time, and money. The puppies provide the cash, their leaving provides the space and time. 

The Farmhouse build is still moving, albeit slowly. We have been working on smaller projects as time permits. A few weeks ago I finished the closet shelving. The pandemic caused supply disruptions, especially in building materials, so buying the twelve foot long cheap shelf boards became impossible and I had to get creative. We found some forty inch long pine shelving on Craig's List and stitched it together into lengths long and strong enough. This is the sort of little project that we have been doing since finishing the Porch roof framing a few weeks ago. Last week I wrapped the water heater and earthquake strapped it to the wall . . . we have a long list of little stuff. The only major thing to do is painting the exterior of the house and we've been waiting for weather for months. I'll begin painting this coming week.  We are also approaching the point where we can begin the porch floor concrete and parameter drain. It's all about time and money. 

One of our tree and debris projects is a
mushroom patch. This is a permaculture
project involving tree trunks and leaf compost.
The trees will rot under the compost and give us
some good ground for mushrooms in the future.

Aside from these things we have begun taking down the large and dangerous trees that were always slated for removal. The fruit trees along the front fence have to be  removed, but these are small and relatively easy to take down. We cut them up and burn the debris, but the bigger trees are a problem to solve. Some of the pines, though healthy, are eighty to one-hundred feet tall and either near the power lines, the fence, or some other thing we don't need to drop a tree on. We have four more pine trees to cut down but it might be we have to wait until next Spring for these. The bigger tree cutting project is two  hardwood trees nearby the Farmhouse. These are diseased and rooting out so simply sawing through them does not guarantee they will fall in the right direction. We'll have to take these bad trees down in stages; the top and side branches first until all that is left is the main trunk. Then we can cut the trunk down without worrying that it will damage the house. This is going to take some time, but we've been wanting to get these things done for five years.

I have been a bit slow in writing all of this stuff down. So much is going on and it all seems pretty small. But when it finally does hit the page it seems much more is being done than there is time to write. Certainly more than there is time to read. 

May 14th, 2022 Spring is Late

 It has been cold and wet nearly every day since the start of Winter, maybe earlier. What this usually means is that we are in a La Nina year, cold and wet right up until the start of Summer, then hot, but a bit cooler than the Summer's have given us lately. 

The Summer will be good for growing things, the Spring . . . not so much.  But we have much to keep us busy.  So much so that I haven't had time to write about things, so here's what we have been up to.

We had three litters of puppies in March. None of these were well planned and all together there were thirteen pups. We had a lot of fun, but didn't get much sleep from late February until just about a week ago. We found places for everyone to go and still have two of them here with us. They will go to their new homes at the end of May. The money these pups brought in will allow our projects to go forward and bills to be paid through the Summer. We also have some boarding and egg money coming in so things are farily comfortable right now. Hopefully we'll get a crop to sell this year to carry us further. 

Having puppies in the house put a hold on some of our short termed projects and took time away from others. But the rains were the main reason why our planting schedule is behind by six weeks. We began planting seeds in the Greenhouse, but the sun just hasn't been there for us. To keep from getting further behind we bought a hundred large plant pre-started to put into the ground around the first of June. Tomatoes, Peppers, and Cucumbers are keeping warm in the Greenhouse until it is time to plant them. We will continue to plant seeds in pots, but have already planted Strawberries, Potatoes, and Onions since they can take the inclimate weather. This is the first year for our new "no till" gardening  plan.

No Till, for us, is something of a hybrid system. We took in a few hundred yards of hardwood leaf debris in Fall last year and this stuff mostly was piled up to make compost. We put about one hundred yards out directly onto the ground to sit through Winter and protect the soils we already had, and this debris was largely taken down into the soil by worms so it really improved the soil composition. We are laying about six inches of newly made composted leaves on top of the soils and then tilling it in a bit to distribute the materials better. Following planting we will put another two inches on top of all this to protect the soils and keep water loss down.  Once we build the new rows and plant them we will no long be able to walk on our rows, but we also won't need to till the soils to get ready to plant every year. So we're being very careful in laying out our rows this year and hope to no long make changes to the gardens going forward.  Other than this, we also have been working on fences, paths, and made our driveway large enough to park cars inside of the fence. At some point in Summer I will build our permanent produce stand. The rains have made working outside a hit and miss thing, but we are getting things done. 

Living in our new Farmhouse is delightful. We've been doing small and large projects a few days a week while preparing the Farm for planting when weather allowed it. I had to re-charge our water softener, the resin medium that clears the iron from the water had finally broken down so it wasn't doing enough. We have sediment filters wherever drinking water enters house plumbing so we were able to get by for a while until I could replace the  resin. Since this was the first time I had ever done this I was a bit nervous about it, but in the end the job was pretty easy. It's nice to have fully softened water back in the pipes.

In early Summer I will begin painting the Farmhouse, weather permitting. Once we paint I can begin putting the final roofing on the Porch, but this is not something that needs done prior to the final inspection so it will wait a bit longer. There are still a few large projects remaining before getting our final inspection scheduled in August. I began backfilling the area under cover of the newly built porch roof. Once this dirt is settled we can begin pouring the concrete rim of the porch and build the perimeter drain around the outside of the Porch to carry away excess water, the last big project needed to get our final inspection done.

All in all it must be said that things are going along pretty well despite the rains. We're looking forward to the Summer and hoping for the best while wishing people less fortunate than we are the same.

April 7th, 2022 The Last Nail

Our first homesite plan.
It mostly failed.

There's a saying I like to use. Happiness comes of pride, pride comes of achievement.  Today I feel like we achieved something great and, filled with pride, I am a very happy man. 

Our newly built home.

We put the last nail into the structure of our Farmhouse today, completing its intended shape and function.  The details I will write about today are the broad strokes of out home's design and construction, what we were trying to build when we had nothing but empty dirt. 

This building project started in 2015 when I  Photoshop-ped a Google map image while playing around with possible farm layout. (The picture is at the top.)  The site planning went through ten, or so, reconsiderations before we ran into reality and had to site the house in a different place. 

This is the actual home
site plan we used.

In the early site plans, our intention was to make the Farmhouse look as small as we could. We wanted to hide the house by siting it in a back corner. In the end we were not allowed to build where we desired, so the home site was move to where it would be agreeable. This brought a complete change in how we saw the house project because once we had a home site we hired a nice architect named Eric to give us signed drawings.  Eric was worth most of the money we paid. He put fresh eyes on our  design ideas and made our plans work better within the space we had. Some of my early ideas were used, but the idea to re-orient the house along it's long axis presented the house as large and the central object central of the Farm.  

We loved the design Eric came up with and secured an engineer to provide structural details. Neither of these sets of drawings gave any guidance as to building the house, so we made some minor changes to the plans as we built it. Most of  our changes, or interpretations, were about being efficient with money. We used many used parts in furnishing the house. The bath tub, bath sink, cabinets, and doors  were all re-used from other houses. Where we couldn't re-use parts, we made decisions on a cost/benefit basis. All of our plumbing and electrical installations were done to minimize energy and water use and  also be well lit and heated.  Shopping for things we would find useful became a habit. 

This is my original design.
Eric made it work.

The house plan was fairly simple. Since our intention was to open our Farm up to the public, later on, we designed the house to look like a farmhouse might. The main design element in making this appearance was a wrap-around porch where we placed the last nail today. The porch we finished added 750 square feet to the footprint of the house, but also cuts cooling costs and decreases road noise. As we made the many thousands of decisions we added a seven foot ceiling and solid floor in the attic space adding a full 425 of highly usable storage space.  The entire useable floor space of our 1000 square foot house, is 1925 feet. 

This is what we built.
We adjusted it a bit.

Having never built an entire house, but having a great deal of experience in the building trades, we spent a time avoiding, and making up for, mistakes. The County's building inspectors chipped in quite a bit and gave us enough guidance to piece the whole thing together successfully. We had to come up with some idea of how the structure would go together, designed and built an entire water and waste system, then learned how to make a safe and effective electrical system.  Buying materials, learning how to pour a concrete foundation, and piecing a million things together only brought us to a point where we could decide how to finish the house inside and out. A million decisions, all well considered, mostly correct, brought us to today. 

Though we still have a long list of things we need to do before the County signs off on our permit, the broad strokes are done.  

Our last nail is figurative and not literal. But the shape of our home, and the pride of place feeling it gives us seems complete.

February 6th, 2022 A Quick Update

 Though quite a bit has happened since my Christmas post there hasn't been so much that I felt the need to post an update. But time flies. So here are the few good things that have happened since Christmas. 

In my last post we had moved into the new Farmhouse and Jackson moved into the tiny home.  Since then we have finished the kitchen cabinets and counter-tops. The cabinets all needed to be painted but we had primed them in white prior to moving them into place. Once they were all put together I painted them all and put knobs on all of the drawers and doors. The knobs we used had been sitting in a bag of knobs I had collected throughout the thirty years I worked in home renovations. I don't know why I toted that bag through four house moves, but the fact they are now in the new Farmhouse makes it seem worth it. Ann simply loves her new kitchen and has not spent much time out of it since we got it finished.

The new bathroom seemed so luxurious when compared with the tiny home. The water heater is ten times the size and we really appreciated the long showers it gave, but waiting for hot water to reach the bathroom, from the pantry, was about eight minutes. We had planned for this with the intention of putting a secondary tankless electric water heater in the linen closet in the bathroom, so when the time was available I put one in. Now the hot water is quick on the draw and when the hot water does reach the bathroom from the pantry the new tankless heater shuts down to save money. 

Ann got our exterior lights installed a few weeks ago. They compliment the electric candles in the upper windows and will eventually light the space under the wrap around porch we'll build in the next few weeks. The outside of the house is very well lit, but the picture my phone takes of it makes the house seem overly bright. It isn't. The house looks spectacular from Sell Road and Highway 26, looking so much bigger than it really is. This was all to plan, we did everything we could to make this little farmhouse look very large. People often think this is a two story house of about two0thousand feet. It is only one thousand feet and only one floor.

Every house has some things that show up only after beginning to use the space. One place needing attention is the big room heating. The bedroom section of the house is very well heated, but the big room stays a bit cool most of the time. Our really huge ceiling fan wasn't working when I installed it and I found a bad wire nut at the wall switch. This solved the problem with the fan working but showed us another -We didn't put in a furnace to heat the house, using underfloor heating instead. We did it this way to save energy. The plan was for the ceiling fan to moderate the heat and bring warmth back down from the high ceiling. But in the cold of Winter the heat wasn't sufficient and the fan only cooled things down a bit too much. We had a plan in place to put an auxiliary electric heater, but haven't got it done yet. The weather has warmed a bit and the heating system we have is sufficient so long as we don't turn the fan on. We'll figure it out before next Winter.

Other than a few things: painting the laundry room and putting in some Craig's List cabinets; hanging the many dozens of pictures we had packed away in the shipping container; putting up closet rods and bringing our clothing in from storage; etc; . . . All of these have combined to make us walk around enjoying the new house more every day. There are still a few things needing done, but things are in motion.

I ordered part of the wood for the new wrap-around porch last Friday. Our permit extension is likely to time-out before it is built so we are likely going to apply for another extension to give us some time. We still have a lot of little stuff to do before the final inspection so a bit more time will ease things a bit. We are coming into the busy season.

One of our girl dogs, Laffee Taffee, is having a litter in March. Since we couldn't put the new kennel in place before then we are building temporary accommodations in the Pantry of the new house. She will be comfortable there and we will work hard to keep the new house from becoming dog worn. 

I have begun making dog coats for sale and have a good pattern which I came up with after a few less than perfect attempts. The new coats fit Basset Hounds very well, can be washed in the machine over and over, and so far haven't had much go wrong, so I'm confident enough to let them go out to people needing them. It's not certain that our coats will be a success on the market, but our dogs love them.

We bought ten new Orpington chicks to replenish our flock. We have done this every year because we lose them to cold or other causes and occasionally have given older hens which have decreased egging. This time we bought Lavender Orpington chick, which are slightly purple, to set them off from the buff colored hens we have been raising for four years. The idea is, and always was, to cull our own hens and put the meat in the freezer, but we've never been able to tell how old they are with certainty so buying a different color every year will tell us when the cross into the third year and are ready for the soup pot.

The Farm is nearing Spring, so soon we will begin tilling to prepare the soil for planting. We brought in many yards of hardwood leaves to begin turning the Farm into a no-tilling concept  and these pile will be mulched enough to till into the soils we have. This ought to be a pretty good year and we have begun buying seed for April planting. 

Much more to do. So much has been done. 

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). 

---

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.