Christmas means....CANDY!

At least at the Lehrman house, that's what it means.  We've been making an assortment of candies for Christmas for several years now.  Today was the big day for getting that done (a week or two behind our normal schedule, but who's counting?).  Jeremy made him amazing fudge and candied nuts.  I made divinity and peanut brittle.  There will likely be another batch of divinity and another batch of fudge yet this year, but this gets the bulk of it done.

In other news, we've planned out where the garden will go for next year and we're hoping it will be close to the size we removed from our house in town.  The veggie mix will focus on things that don't need daily maintenance since we likely won't be living at the farm full time for the entire garden season.  Some things we're just going to grow for seed for the following year due to their harvest requirements (green beans fall in this category - we likely won't have the hours needed to pick, snap and can or freeze them this year, but we can grow out enough seed to plant a big crop in 2014).  We'll have our garden mainstays though - tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, lettuce, chard, onions, garlic, leeks, spinach, celery, sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, corn, black beans, cabbage, broccoli, green peas, melons and some other things.  It will be wonderful to have fresh vegetables again!

Along with the usual garden planning and seed selecting, we're having to devise a fencing strategy.  Not only are there plenty of deer and cayotes on the farm, but our neighbors have wonderful free range ducks and chickens that would also love our veggies.  Since we hope someday to have our own ranging poultry, I'm not complaining at all!  Just pointing out that we have to be realistic about where we're at.  ;-)   Many options are being discussed and weighed against each other, but we haven't landed on the exact right solution yet. 

There will be more details on this upcoming as we set up our seed starting stand again and go through the renewed annual rythm of the garden.  I can't wait! 

Resurecting the greenhouse

Since we'll be staying in our house until Spring, we decided to put our mass driven home greenhouse back into production.  This is a process since we had removed all of the "mass" from our greenhouse which rendered it much less temperature stable that we would like.  Here's how the process went:

First, we went to the farm to pick up the six 55 gallon plastic water barrels that go along the back wall of the greenhouse.  These provide the thermal mass to prevent the greenhouse from freezing.  They are painted black to absorb as much solar energy as possible on sunny days (thus heating the water) and they release that heat slowly through the night and on cloudy days.  The greenhouse itself is very insulated on 3 sides (north, east and west) to retain this heat.  While we were at the farm, we picked up the shelves that sit on top of the barrels and provide a convenient grow bench.

Second, we unloaded the barrels and lined them up in the spots in the greehouse.  This involved rearranging a few things, but was pretty quick.

Third, we started filling the barrels.  The water will start out around 55 degrees which should be warm enough to prevent a freeze anytime soon.  This step took forever since we had about 330 gallons of water to add.

Filling the first barrel

Lastly, we put the shelves on top of the barrels and moved the potted plants already in the greenhouse up onto the shelf.

Shelves lined up

First shelves on and plants moved in

Sometime in the next week or so, we'll start filling trays of soil and planting greens.  By past experience, we should be able to eat salad from the greenhouse all winter long, although it will take several weeks before what we plant is big enough to start eating.  We plan to plant some root crops (carrots and radishes most likely) in the front planting bed also.  I can't wait to have food growing again!

We are also trying to figure out what kind of garden we can handle for next year.  I would dearly love to have a garden the size of our former home garden, but we aren't sure if we'll have the time to tend a garden that size while building.  There are several things that will have to get settled in our lives before we make a final decision so for now I'm happy looking through the newly arrived seed catalogs and dreaming of what I could grow. 

More Cedar!

Its taken me a bit to get this posted, but the Tuesday after we got back from Arkansas with the first load of cedar trees, Jeremy and Scott went to pick up another load from a gentleman south of town.  He is clearing several acres of cedars from his property and we offered to buy the trunks from him for a reasonable price.  his aren't quite as long or as large as the ones we got from AR, but some of them are pretty nice.  Most will make great fence posts if nothing else.

Anyway, the upside is that these are much closer to us.  The down side is that there is no equipment to help load the logs.  It took everything Jeremy and Scott had to get all these loaded onto the trailer (as well as a come along and a litany of words I will not be re-typing here).  Thank goodness for awesome brothers!

The loaded trailer

One of the bigger logs - about 16" across

The unloading, of course, went much more smoothly.  The little ones were dropped off at the farm and the big ones were unloaded at Tim's with the excavator.  One of these days, we'll get to mill them into the appropriate timbers.