August 23rd, 2022 Our Homestead Farm is an Undeniable Fact.

Today we crossed the finish line of a race we have run, non-stop, for nine years. 

The race we finished today has been in progress since April of 2015, when we found the property which became our homestead farm. We have a longer termed goal set which is broken into three major parts. Our first goal was always to build a house (we finished this today and this is the main message of this post). Our second goal is to build a farming business and we've come a long way on this front. The third part of our bigger plan is the hospitality phase, we are looking toward starting working toward this goal beginning today. The path which took us to this place has been a long one and we have passed by quite a few milestones along the way. Some of these milestones were significant and were found wherever a major goal had to be achieved. These were usually make or break points in our current project and the days where we moved forward in a meaningful way.

Deciding to start our Farm project happened in 2013, but I didn't write about it until I began blogging in October, 2015. The timeline of this journaling project jumped around a bit at first. We found the property in April of 2015 and this BLOG didn't begin until October of 2015.  Here's where we started.

The Creekside Farm project was very LARGE at the onset, but seemed to grow as time passed. The post linked above this paragraph tells of how we decided to buy a farm, began to clear the place, and how we found a way to buy control of the property. The story of everything is contained in the archives of this blog, but since this post is entirely about finishing Phase One of our larger project, I'll try to tell this story as concisely as I can. Where you see red in the list below, you'll find a major goal achievement nested into the larger Phase One goal. This is the story of our Farmhouse. 

• We found the Farm property, by accident, in January 2015.
• We found a woman to buy the land from in April 2015.
• In late September of 2015 we bought the land in an extraordinary way. 
• By March 2017 we had built a tiny home and moved it to the property.
• We called the land Camp Creekside because it was had a cabin and we were producing no food. 
• Our temporary electricity permit came in April.
• This allowed us to have water in July.
• We moved the Tiny Home Cabin in October and tilled the first garden plot.
• In 2018 we began producing food on the now renamed Creekside Farm.
• 
  After selling our house in August we had more than enough cash to begin building and started the permit process.
• I built our new septic system around this point in time.
• We finished clearing the trash off of the place in October.
• 2019 was a tough year.
• The permit process dragged on nearly the whole year long.
• We finally got permits in September.
• We broke ground on the new Farmhouse in October.
• In November we had actually poured a foundation for the new Farmhouse.
  
• 2020 was a year of hard work and not many growing things.
  
  
• We began building on top of  the new foundation in January.
• Plumbing was roughed in in March.
• By October we had a roof on the house and were doing electrical rough in.
• In 2021 we worked every day to convert cash into house. 
• Prices began to rise immediately in 2021, most building materials doubled in cost.
• We moved into a very comfortable Farmhouse in December.
• The Last Nail was driven into the new Farmhouse in March of 2022
• It took until today to get all of our permits signed off.

All together, from the January 2015 until today, we spent our lives completely committed to building our Farm-house. We also spent considerable time building a Farm for the house to sit on. This has been a dream since August of 2013. So nine years of dedicated effort has finally come to fruition. 

Or new farmstead home is still in trouble in many ways. We changed our farming practices a few times, this year we found something that works. We are self sufficient, but there isn't enough cash to build the rest of our initial dream yet, but the dream has changed many times. We still have to find the money to pay off the Contract we entered into at the onset of this, and this has developed more than a few additional troubles since the beginning so we have work to do. While our project still is not certain to find the ending we began at the beginning, we sure have made it quite far.

We started the project with no cash and no real plan. We found ourselves on land unsuitable for farming and without any place to lay our heads. We were as surprised as anyone when we actually got control of the land. We learned how to build fires and grow food. And, after all this time and effort, we have arrived at the end of our first major goal: We built a house!

June 25th, 2022 Summer Arrives

 

Peppers, Tomatoes, Potatoes, and Beans
Click on the pictures to make them larger.

As I see things, the problem with starting Summer in mid-to-late June is that it does little to help with making the Farm a financial success. We need produce to sell in April, so having none of the plants putting produce on the table until sometime in July is something of a problem, if the problem is selling produce for a profit. 

Be that as it may, we are grateful for the plants we have growing today. Our seeds nearly jump into the sun once the Summer comes and there's little time for anything except planting and weeding.  Right now we have many hundreds of row feet planted in corn, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, watermelon, beans, peas, mini-cantaloupe, potatoes, onion, and herbs of all sorts. There are hundreds of flowering plants still to be planted, but these are on their way to the beds this coming week. It would be better if some of this planting success would happen in Spring, but it is hard to complain when looking out there today.  The Summer is a time for growing things, but there area few more things happening here right now worthy of taking some notice of.

Our Runner Ducks just love the hotter days.
This morning I cleaned their pond.

There are still some things to do on the new Farmhouse. I began painting the place this past week. It took a few weeks to get ready for painting and the weather was still a bit too wet and cold to start in. But the colder weather gave me time to get the house well prepared and my tools in good order. Once the heat showed up I primed and painted the back of the house in just a few days. All the climbing was a bit harder than it needed to be. Things make me tired where they didn't before. I'm thinking we'll get through the painting by the end of July, but it might happen earlier if the weather doesn't turn horribly hot. 

We decided to paint the house yellow about five years ago.  Like everything else we spent a lot of time thinking about the color prior to having to make a real decision about it. My first choice was barn red, because it is a farm house and it made some sense. But then we thought about putting a red barn on the Farm and figured it would be a bunch too much red, so we tried white (because farmhouse are often white). But white reflects light and we had decided to use the front yard as a public space, so white was out. Greens and blues are nice for trim work . . . So yellows came up naturally. We agonized about the shade of yellow and would point out yellow houses as we made our way off the Farm. There was a nice little house in Banks with what appeared to be the right color so eventually we went to the store and picked out some yellow paint cards. These cards laid around on the desk for a year or so before a decision had to be made. The color is Sunflower Seed, something of a misnomer since sunflowers are certainly yellow, the their seeds are definitely not. In any event, I got the first side of the house sprayed this past week and it is going to be the right color. The trim will be white, so too will be the batts of our board and bat siding plan. FarmyAF : Farm-y as f-heck.

Squash, Cucumbers, Corn, and Beans

In a few weeks we will have the last framing inspection before finalizing the Farmhouse permit and becoming legal. So we started in on finding the financing for the balloon payment due on the land contract we wrote in 2015. It's a large amount of money, but not as much as anyone would think it would be considering the size of the lot and its relative position in the world. Nearly two acres of good flat land is pretty hard to find these days, we got lucky. Since I wrote all of the contract, deeds, wills, and powers of attorneys myself I thought it a good idea to begin this next vital step by discussing everything with a lawyer. Good thing I did too, but I won't go into this here. Suffice it to say that we have things well in hand and have made significant steps toward finding our next significant step. There's two more years on the Contract, so we are getting started early and all should turn out well in the end.

The back of the Farmhouse is plain.
But the new Yellow makes a statement!

Our Farm is a special place, we hope anyone who might read this BLOG might feel free to come visit. But you might not so let me openly invite you to come out a visit. Expect dirt, insects, dogs, chickens, and ducks, so wear something that might get dirty. We'll try to sell you some of what we grow here every time you come, but the stuff we have is two weeks fresher and grown with better soil. It's the same dirt that has made our lives so very good. 

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.