Long time away...

So sorry for the radio silence.  Those of you who connect with us on facebook have gotten regular updates on some of the happenings on the farm, but for those who don't we'll do a quick wrap up!

We're now living with our farm neighbors which is working out great!  Hopefully our next move will be into the house. 

The garden is exploding.  We've harvested close to 350 lbs so far and its still going strong.  It feels wonderful to be canning and dehydrating and fermenting again.  We've put up sauerkraut, naturally fermented pickles, regular pickles, salsa, spaghetti sauce, canned tomatoes, tomato juice, green beans and tons of jelly (blackberry, peach, mulberry and gooseberry). 

Blackberry and peach jelly and peaches

 

Mid summer garden

 

The preliminary results of the biochar trial show a significant increase in yield and plant health in the biochar beds vs. the normal beds.  We'll tally up final results once everything is harvested in the fall.

We hayed our top field and are working steadily to clean out the sumac patches.  The field is also infested with lespedeza which is a noxious week in Kansas.  It is also pretty good goat food!  Which brings us to...

 

Hay in windrows before baling in the top field  

We brought the 3 doelings and the buck (Jack) to the farm at the end of May and all are doing well.  The does are growing well and helping us clear out sumac with relish.  They are truly adorable and Catherine in particular has fallen in love with them.

Our girls (from L to R) - Beldandy, Erd and Skuld

The chickens are also doing well and laying 3-4 eggs a day most days.  They are clearing our north field for us bit by bit in their chicken tractor.  Jeremy built an addition to the tractor that can link up through the gate or not, so they can have double the forage room.  They seem to enjoy it a lot. 

Chicken tractor before wire and paint.  The gentleman in the flannel shirt did most of the building (can't thank him enough!).

 

We are making some progress on the house, although we've found that the busy of the growing season has not left us as much time as we'd like to work on that project (not to mention the two kids, work, sleep thing). 

Jeremy working on joinery

We've been making compost piles with food scraps from Jeremy's job and some of the hay and weeds from the farm.  Its looking promising for having enough finished compost by next spring to put a healthy layer on all the growing beds.  You can never have enough compost!

In the coming weeks we'll be putting in full crops of broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage; second plantings of lettuce and radishes; annual planting of garlic and potato onions and a host of other things.  If I have time, I'll update here.  If not, look for an update when it gets cold in the fall!

Quick update

Its been busy lately, but I have been horrible about remembering to take pictures!  Here are some highlights though:

• planted 62 tomato plants earlier this week. 
• Spread a truck load and a half of compost on other garden beds
• Making compost like mad with scraps from Jeremy's work
• Everything is growing at the farm!

Our list of things for the next 2 weeks includes:

• mulch tomatoes
• install rabbit wire around the garden (we have visitors)
• plant green beans, corn, squash, cucumbers...
• paint chicken tractor
• build goat shelter
• fence goat area

We are also getting ready to move again, so there's no end of busy in sight!  Hope you are all enjoying the spring weather!

Biochar trial update #1 - Cabbage and Broccoli

We are participating in a trial to see what effect biochar has on annual vegetable growth.  I wrote about this a bit before, so here's the first update.

This week on Wednesday I inoculated the biochar for the first 4 test beds.  I first measured out 3 five gallon buckets of finely ground char.  Then I mixed the char 1:2 with compost (one bucket char to 2 buckets of compost) and mixed all that up in a big bin.

Next, I watered the mix down so that the microbes from the compost would multiply and inoculate the char.  Then it sat for 3 days.

Put char into the container

Add compost

Mix thoroughly

Water it in

 

On Saturday, it was time to put in the first transplants for the trial.  The first 4 trial beds will be tomatoes, cabbage and broccoli.  When the cabbage and broccoli come out in July, we'll put in a planting of black beans.  This way we'll get to test fruits (tomatoes), leaves (cabbage/broccoli) and a legume.  The steps for doing this are:

Spread compost on all 4 test beds.  Add biochar to 2 of the test beds and spread it out.  The kids were champs and did a big chunk of this.  Then they took down the tomato tunnels we had set up from last year.  This is a big job and I wondered if they would be able to handle it by themselves, but they did great!  In case you're wondering why they were working on their own, I was working on the chicken tractor in the last post.

Next, we re-assembled the tomato tunnels in the new beds.  The tunnels are made of 16' cattle panels pinned between 2 fence posts, so the first step is to pound the T posts in to the beds at the right spacing for the cattle panels.  We put them about 1 foot into the bed so that there is a foot for the tomatoes to be planted on the inside of the tunnel and 3 feet outside the tunnel for the other vegetables.

Assembling tomato tunnels

Then we have to bend the cattle panels between the T-posts to make the arches.  This is a 2 adult job because the panels are heavy and they can spring back and catch you with some fairly sharp edges.  We clip the panels to each other to keep the whole tunnel a bit more stable once their in place.
 
Now we're ready to plant!  We put the same mix of varieties and vegetables in each of the 4 beds.  We planted a total of 72 cabbage and broccoli plants on the outsides of the tunnels.

Then we watered the transplants in and put leaf mulch around them to retain the moisture and discourage weeds.

Watering in the transplants

spreading mulch

Last, we covered them with insect barrier so that the cabbage moths don't eat our crop instead of us! 

Cabbages covered and ready for a good spring rain.

Ta da!  Finished garden beds!

Chicken tractor!

Its been a busy couple of weeks, so here's the first of a couple of posts to get caught up. 

Our friend, Jeff, has helped us make major progress on the chicken tractor.  Last weekend, we went from the frame in the last post to an enclosed top coop space as seen below:

You may notice that the coop part has a skylight.  We thought it would help the chickens be more in tune with natural light cycles since their laying is determined by how long the days are.  We also built nest boxes for the inside.  Both end walls are doors - one that we will use to get to the next boxes and one that we will use to clean out the coop.

Our guest chickens in the coop! 

 

This is where we left last week.

 

This weekend we added the top cap to shed water from the peak and vent air through the coop.  Then we put a perch on the inside and added a handle to help move it around.  Lastly, we installed a door frame on the bottom so that we can get into the lower run segment. 

Now we need to paint the frame, install the back wheels and put the chicken wire around the bottom.  Then we'll have a chicken house for our soon to be chickens!

The coop now.  :D

 

 

How do you know if you're on the right track?

“How do you know if you’re on the right track?  When resources start to gather around you.”

We came across this quote by Toby Hemenway this week and it perfectly sums up how this weekend went for us. 

First, I have to revisit something from my last post.  The picture of the beetle (large timber framing hammer) Jeremy made last week just didn't do it justice.  This one gives a much more accurate representation of his handiwork!

Jeremy and the Beetle

It was a three day weekend for us (I took Friday off) so the work started as soon as we dropped the kids off at school on Friday morning.  As mentioned before, the greenhouse plastic was in desperate need of replacing, so that was the big job for this weekend.  Friday and Saturday were predicted to be very calm with major wind kicking up Sunday and Monday.  We started by removing all 3 layers of the old plastic and dragging it far enough away from the hoop house to not be in the way.  Then we had to remove all the old hold down channel for the plastic and add some more tape/padding to a couple of edges that had rubbed on the old plastic.  Then we unrolled the new plastic next to the greenhouse.  All of this took until 3:30 or so.  This is where the first resource gathered around us. 

Pulling off the first 2 layers of plastic.

So here we are looking at 128 lbs of plastic (a 40'x105' piece) and a 12' tall hoop house, getting ready to do battle.  Having already done this before by ourselves, we have some idea of the ordeal this is going to be and we have some doubts about whether we will be able to do this by ourselves.  Last time we were able to pull it over an existing layer of plastic which helped immensely.  We had no such bonus this time.

One thing we've learned from all of the things we've done is that sometimes you just have to make yourself do it even when you don't think you can.  So we were mustering our courage, taking a deep breath, getting our last drinks of water and generally preparing for a major ordeal.  Then my brother drove up unannounced!  Hallelujah, the cavalry had arrived!  It is impossible to express how much help it was to have an extra set of hands in this process.  It took about an hour and half, but we got the plastic pulled over the hoop house and locked into the ends on Friday.
 
Saturday morning we were at the farm at 7:30 (yes, AM) to lock down the sides of the plastic before the wind started blowing.  It was a bit chilly with frost on the ground and running the cordless drills made all our fingers get a bit numb, but we got it done.  The plastic looked wonderful - perfect tension and everything.  There were a couple of holes to patch from where it snagged on some loose staples, but they were quickly taken care of.  Excellent!  We got to cross this project off our list!

Then more resources showed up!  Scott came by again around 9:00 and brought presents.  He had some shelves and pegboard he had torn out of a house he's remodeling that he was going to throw on our brush pile.  Instead, we will be repurposing most of it into our soon to be work shop space!  Can't beat that!

At 10:00, our friend Jeff showed up again (we knew this one was coming, but his help is still such a gift).  Saturday he helped us fold up the old plastic to be used on some future project and then he helped start building our new chicken tractor.  The plastic was quite a chore to fold - 3 pieces at 128 lbs each makes for a lot of muscle moving! 

Folding old greenhouse plastic

The chicken tractor, on the other hand, was a bit more technical.  We first had to disassemble some large pallets to get the framing lumber.  We tried the first one with hammers before quickly moving to the sawzall.  The people assembling these things must have been paid by the nail!  It was absurd how many nails were in every piece.  Once we had enough framing pieces, we started cutting and assembling.  Jeff is a carpenter by trade and he made short work of getting the pieces ready and making sure that everything went together correctly.  It was a privilege to work with him and learn some of the tricks to really getting it right.  We managed to get the whole frame together on Saturday before he had to leave. 

Jeff and I and a chicken tractor in process

By the time we got everything picked up and wrapped up, it was 5:30 and we were pooped.  A 10 hour day at the farm is not for the faint of heart.  This was also when we realized we had made a tactical error when pulling the greenhouse plastic.  We did it when it was too cold.  In the 70 degree air on Saturday, the plastic expanded to the point that it was very definitely too loose.  We were too tired to pull off all the side boards and re-tension it on Saturday though.   It was definitely time for showers and some rest!

Sunday was a light day.  We intended to go tension the plastic, but the wind was too strong.  While it has been moving a lot on the frame, it doesn't appear to be any worse for the wear at this point.  We will have to wait for a day that is both warm (60-70 degrees) and still(er) before we will be able to take care of the problem.  Instead we kinda putzed around a little bit and then went to go see our friends Doug and Bayliss for a bit.  ;-)

Later Sunday afternoon, we got to go visit the baby goats!  They are truly adorable little doelings - full of spunk and very lovable.  They are going to be a great addition to our farm in another couple of months.

Kids and kids...

Lastly, on Monday morning we put the finishing touches on the re-organization of the shed!  Jacob put in the lion's share of the work on Saturday while the adults worked on other things, so we just had a few things to finish up.  Check out the before and after!

Before...

After!  :D

Some projects coming up for this week include: 

• continuing to move dirt in the garden and finally finish getting all the beds ready (that project has only been on the list for a year now...). 
• Pull out the cedar limbs from the garden fence behind the blackberries and thread the blackberry canes through the wires.  This should keep them from taking over the aisle again.
• Mulch the raspberries
• Get the next set of beams laid out for the house so that joinery can commence
• finish the chicken tractor

There are some other planting/transplanting things to do too, but they may wait a bit.  This is enough for now! 

A post about mulch!

Mulch is a favorite topic of mine.  It does so many things for a garden - it really is a cure all for most of what ails us!  Here is a short list of the benefits of mulch in a garden:

• Reduces weeding by smothering weed seedlings
• Reduces watering by shading the soil to reduce evaporation
• Keeps soil cooler in spring and warmer in fall
• Adds organic matter to the soil as it breaks down
• Increases soil life by providing a perfect environment for microbes and beneficial insects
• Prevents rain splash on leaves which dramatically reduces leaf molds and diseases
• Looks nice in the garden
• Reduces erosion from heavy rains by dispersing the force of rain drops

So what kind of mulch should you use?  Generally, you want something that is pretty fine and that will break down in the garden within a year.  An exception to this would be mulching perennial herb beds.  A longer lasting (wood chip) mulch on those beds will work just fine. 

A word about wood chip mulch:
A wood mulch in your annual vegetable garden can also work if you are careful to pull it back at planting time.  If the wood gets mixed with the soil then it can reduce the nitrogen available to your plants and it's chunky nature can make it difficult to plant seeds.  Some sources will say that you should never put wood mulch on an annual vegetable garden because it will tie up all the nitrogen in the soil.  What research has shown is that the very top inch or so of the soil will have its nitrogen taken up by the wood as part of its decomposition.  However, deeper in the soil (where most of the plants' roots are) will not be affected.  Wood chips provide a more lasting mulch and as they decompose they provide a much wider and more balanced organic matter to the soil than the other mulch materials often used (grass clippings, hay, straw).  So, the moral of the story is that you shouldn't discount wood chips but you do have to take special care if you use them.

Ok, back to other mulches!  Most of us will end up using an easy and inexpensive mulch like grass clippings or straw.  Old hay can work well, but make sure its partially decomposed or you'll be planting a hay field in your garden.  This can happen with straw too if it wasn't harvested well.  Then you end up weeding wheat out of your garden (been there).  You want whatever it is to be reasonably finely chopped.  Grass clippings will come this way.  You can chop straw or hay by putting it in a bucket or barrel and running a string trimmer in it.  Be careful because this will make a lot of dust and little bits of stuff may come flying out!  Safety glasses are a must!

There are 2 basic categories of things that you will mulch in your garden.  The first includes the big plants - anything that you space a foot apart or more when planting qualifies.  For example: peppers, tomatoes, corn, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, tomatillos, cucumbers, squash and potatoes (sweet and regular).  For transplants, you'll mulch as soon as you put them in the ground.  If you're starting from seeds (i.e. corn, cucumbers, squash), you'll want to wait until the plants are several inches tall to avoid smothering them as they start.  Potatoes are an exception - they have enough energy that you can mulch them from the get go and they'll still come right on up.

The second category is the small stuff.  These are almost all started from seeds and usually have a much closer spacing.  Many of these will be planted close enough together that they will create their own mulch once they are a few weeks old.  Beans, peas, carrots and block planted lettuce all fall in this category.  If you're planting them in traditional rows, then you can mulch the sides of the rows and the aisles as soon as the plants are a few inches tall. 

The next question is how much mulch to use?  The answer is LOTS!  A light covering of mulch does almost nothing.  In order to really suppress weeds, it needs to be 6" thick or so.  Even at that, you'll have to top it off halfway through the season to maintain the moisture retaining and weed suppressing benefits.  As you can tell, this means you need a LOT of mulch material!  For some scale, in our garden in town we mulched aisles and beds with a combination of old hay/straw and grass clippings.  We went through 3 round bales of straw/hay each year (roughly 3000 lbs) plus at least a truck load of grass clippings picked up from the neighborhood.  That is for a garden with about 8,000 sq. ft. of annual vegetable growing space including aisles.  I would have used more too if I had it.

Ok, that's the skinny on mulch in your garden.  Happy gardening and keep that soil covered!

Timber Framing and spring gardening!

As the weather has warmed up, we've definitely gotten more active!  We've been hard at work on the cabin of late.  First, we moved all the timbers up from the hoop house to the building site.  This lets us use the nice flat, level pad as a work space and gets everything close to where it will end up.  We were very fortunate to have a friend, Jeff Bloss, come help!

Jeremy and Jeff on one of the completed timber stacks

Then we started doing the lay ups.  A lay up is where you precisely position every part of a plane of the building and then very precisely scribe all the joints where they belong.  This ensures that everything will (theoretically) fit together just right when we go to assemble it.  So far, we've gotten one of the East-West planes done and one of the North-South planes.  That leaves 8 more planes to complete.  Fortunately, only one of those needs to be done before we can get back to joinery for a while. 

One plane set and time to begin scribing

Other than requiring lots of unique steps, timber framing also requires some unique tools!  Jeremy has been hard at work making 2 custom hammers - one smaller one for chiseling and one large one (called a beetle) for "persuading" timbers into the right place.  This one is BIG!  The square in the picture is 12" on a side for some scale.

The BIG one...otherwise known as a Beetle

But wait!  That isn't all we've been doing!  We also planted about 400 onions and 3 beds of potatoes.  Our tomatoes, peppers, herbs and okra are growing nicely and getting almost ready for transplant into their own pots.  The cabbage and broccoli are doing well in their pots on the balcony despite the cold snap and we have a host of sweet potato slips growing.  It's feeling like garden season around here!

Onion starts along the fence

Tomatoes and peppers growing happily

Sweet potatoes and cabbage

Jeremy has been adding soil from the topsoil pile to some of the beds that didn't get enough last year so that they'll be ready to plant.  We've also signed up for a pilot study of biochar in garden soil.  We will have 3 different test crops (tomatoes, potatoes and cabbage) that we are planning to divide into the following test groups:  control (no additions), compost & minerals (we will add compost and a sea solids solution), biochar with compost and minerals, and a half dose of the mineral and biochar.  With these we hope to demonstrate what effect each component has on the overall growth and productivity of the plants in the beds.  We plan to post updates on here as things grow, so keep your fingers crossed that we manage to keep track of this while building a house this summer!

We have some joyous and some sad news to share.  First the good news!  Our future goat, Peaches, gave birth to 3 beautiful daughters about a week ago.  The girls are healthy and active and positively adorable!  The bad news is that Peaches did not survive the process.  Triplets are really hard on a goat (twins are the norm), especially a yearling, and these 3 were all tied up on the way out.  She survived long enough to provide colostrum for the babies and then passed.  She was a very sweet animal and we will think of her every time we look at her wonderful daughters.

Peaches' three daughters curled up for a nap

The last thing going on right now is that we will have to recover our hoop house in the very near future.  For those of you that don't know, we had 2 large rips in the white plastic cover show up last October requiring a midnight recover of the hoop house with the old plastic we took off of it at its old home.  Luckily we kept the plastic or everything in the hoop house would have been ruined.  Sadly, the old plastic is...well...old, and isn't going to last much longer.  We have been trying to nurse it along until warmer weather, but its about done.  After repairing with duck tape, gaffers tape, epoxy and super glue, we have resorted to this contraption to hold it in place for a few more days.

Epoxy and strapping...not a long term solution!

This means that one of the days this weekend will be spent covering the greenhouse again.  Luckily, we have new plastic on hand so hopefully it will all go much more smoothly than last time!  If nothing else, we've had some practice.

Ok, I think that catches us up!  Hope you're enjoying your spring!

Garden beginnings 2014

Planting season has begun for us, albeit a little late this year.  Normally, I would have planted onions in January, coles (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower) in February and tomatoes and peppers in March.  I missed January and February, but the tomatoes, peppers and a selection of herbs are now germinating away (we hope).

Herbs and Rhubarb

 

Tomatoes and peppers

We weren't willing to give up our cabbage and broccoli, so I stopped by my favorite garden center, Pines, and picked up a flat of them.  The kids and I then potted them up into 3" pots so that they can continue to grow until we put them into the garden.  Although this week is supposed to be wonderful, I don't trust winter to be over just yet!

24 broccoli and 48 cabbage growing happily on the deck

We'll be working on the chicken tractor and getting the garden ready for planting over the next week or two.  Pics and updates will be forthcoming as time allows!

Pallets, pallets everywhere

Well, what can we say?  Opportunity knocked again.  Now that we are adopting livestock, we need housing for them.  Housing generally involves wood of some sort which usually involves money.  We're short on that due to the whole house thing, so when my work decided to unload a large number of very large pallets, we said we'd take them.  Each pallet has 3 long 2x4's and some amount of 1x lumber, so its a substantial amount of free framing lumber.  After 4 trips with the trailer and some stacking, we now have 68 twelve foot or longer pallets at the farm.  If you're wondering what that looks like, here are some pictures:

Half the pallets

This is how the travelled from work to the farm

 

The other half the pallets

 

Sometime soon we'll start building the chicken tractor for the 8 laying hens and rooster.  It is based on the plan shown here:  http://www.backyardchickens.com/a/a-classy-a-frame-tractor  although we're making some modifications.  With a little luck (and some warmer weather) we'll start disassembling pallets to get the framing lumber for it in the next week or so.  Then we'll get to start on the buck's house.  The sheep, fortunately, is small enough to live in a dog house we picked up last year for the other goats, so no construction required there.

In other news, we're starting seeds again!  We hadn't planned to have much of a garden this year, but we changed our mind (nothing like a severe winter to make you dream of a garden).  I started sorting through our seeds tonight to figure out what we already have.  Tomatoes, peppers and herbs will be getting planted soon.  Does this not just look like a winter gardener's paradise?

Seeds everywhere!

Unfortunately, the bucket of soil to start the seeds in is still frozen, so seeds won't actually get started until tomorrow.  :(   That's ok - it was enough fun to sort through all the seeds tonight!  There's one happy gardener in this house tonight.

Doing the first lay up

What's a lay up, you ask (other than an easy basketball shot)?  It is where you take all the timbers in one plane of a timber frame structure and you stack them all precisely the way they will be in the finished building.  The joints are then scribed precisely from one timber to the other so that everything (in theory) fits together just right.  We are being forced to use this much more exacting method by the fact that our timbers have not dried completely true - they have twisted and bowed enough that we can't "persuade" them back to true.  On the upside, we're learning a lot more about the craft of timber framing!

We're using the slab for the work since it is conveniently level and snow/mud free.  This weekend we managed to get the timbers stacked to this point:

First bent mostly stacked

That may not seem like much of an accomplishment, but it takes a lot to get these large pieces of wood precisely placed!  We have to level each timber, make sure it is precisely where it needs to be in relation to the rest of the frame (square to within 1/16") and then transfer all the dimensions at all the joints.  It is a very slow process involving a lot of measuring, slight movements and more measuring until everything is just right.

This morning we got the rafters placed more precisely (in the above picture the one rafter was only very roughly placed).  We also finished scribing some of the joints that we didn't get to on Sunday.  In the morning, we hope to final place the rafters and finish the scribing on this bent.  Then we will either move on to the next bent and eventually scribe the whole frame, or we will stop and do the joinery in this bent to make sure we've done the scribing correctly.  :D  Either way, it feels really good to finally be working on the house again!

Stay tuned because we now have to get a goat shed (or two) built before the end of May.  We needed another project, right?  We have some fun ideas for that structure that should help it go up faster and also make it pretty inexpensive.  Have to see if it works out that way though!

Critters are coming!

Well, we had another opportunity fall in our laps with all the future challenges that will surely entail.  Some friends of ours are wanting to move to town from the country and needed to find a new home for their animals.  They asked if we would want them, so we went to see them a couple of weeks ago.  Here is what we saw:

A very pregnant la mancha (goat) doe

A tiny Shetland sheep

A full blood la mancha (goat) buck

10 chickens

 

The doe will have her babies any day now and we've agreed to take them also.  Our friends are going to keep them until May when we move back to the farm.  At that point, we will have somewhere between 2 and 4 goats, one of which should produce a gallon-ish of milk a day, a sheep and 10 chickens.  The farm is going to get a lot more farm like it appears.

The upside of this arrangement is clear - these are all very healthy animals that will provide us with meat, milk, pasture mowing and eggs for many years to come.  The downside is equally clear.  They require daily care (which I'm looking forward to) and we now have to build a place for them to stay.  We have some ideas for the future goat and chicken house(s), so stay tuned to see how that works out.

Another chapter in our crazy lives. 

Winter fun at the farm

For those who live close by, you know that we had a 10ish inch snow fall this week.  That means only one thing to this family - time to sled!  Thursday, Jeremy and the kids went to the farm and prepared the sled track and today several friends came over to test it out.  Great fun was had by all!

Caravan sledding down the hill

Meanwhile, I was representing the Lawrence Food Garden Tour at the Kaw Valley Seed Fair.  The seed fair is a wonderful event and I've been lucky enough to be part of it for the last several years.  The turnout was awesome, despite the snow, and I ran into lots of people I haven't seen in a while.  All in all, a very fun way to spend a Saturday!

LFGT table

Wood is moved, at last

Jeremy spent most of last week moving the wood up the hill and to the waiting, leveled pallets.  It took all week, but he got everything except the large beams moved, stacked, and stickered.  On Sunday, we went out to stack the last of the beams.

The beams stacked and stickered

Once we had them all ready to go, we used some of the old greenhouse plastic to wrap them up to dry out.  The wood is beautiful and we can't wait to get back to joinery!

Wrapping up the wrapping up!

The last of the wood, we hope...

This is how our lives work...opportunity knocks on the door and says "this is going to be great!".  We go for it and then opportunity adds all the conditions and problems.  This iteration of opportunity knocking went something like this:

Our sawmiller in Colorado, Joel, wanted a semi load of insulated garage door sections from where I work.  Conveniently enough, he also had all of the logs milled that we had dropped off when we went to Colorado last.  Hmmm....opportunity said, "You could load the lumber on the trailer and just pay for the back haul and save all that time driving to Colorado!"  Given that there were at least 3 trips worth of lumber waiting for us, this sounded like a great deal, so we made the necessary arrangements.

The semi was originally scheduled to arrive Friday afternoon and we prepared accordingly.  Then we got word on Thursday that the unload and reload in Colorado had taken longer than planned by quite a bit (I have no details about that end of the story, but given what happened on our end I think I can piece it together).  The delivery was moved to Saturday morning between 8:00-9:00AM.  Perfect.  We got an extra day to plan, the weather was predicted to be better and more people were able to come help out.  We start thinking that this is all working out pretty well!

On Thursday afternoon, Jeremy and I scavenged some long pallets from work to stack the wood on.  Friday afternoon, Jeremy and some friends set them up and leveled them behind our shed.

Saturday, we're at the farm about 7:30AM cutting stickers to be able to stack the wood up as we unload it by the house site so that we don't have to touch it again until we're ready to build with it.  We also utilized our volunteers (aka Amazing friends that we wouldn't know what to do without) to move a piece of the old greenhouse plastic up to the top of the hill so that we could cover up the stacks of lumber for the winter.  We were ready to go at 9:00 when the truck arrived.

Semi making its way up the drive

 

Everything is ready to go at the top of the hill

All is well with the world as the truck makes its way slowly up the driveway.  Then it gets to the bend, the icy bend, and the trailer slips off the road and the tires start spinning.  Crap. 

Semi is off the driveway

The driver explains how he doesn't think chains would be helpful and that he thinks he can back it back down the drive for another try.  He starts up, gets going and slides farther off the road.  He also managed to back the back of the trailer into the ditch on the passenger side.  At this point, he can't go anywhere because the trailer foot is high centered on our (frozen) driveway.  Double crap.

Semi is farther off the drive.  Note the location of the back trailer wheels, the high point under the trailer foot and the general air of "oh crap" felt by all. 

After much debate and some miscellaneous efforts to get traction for the semi, we start unloading the wood.  The theory is that with the trailer being lighter, it will be easier to unstick the trailer foot.  We moved 3 pallets down from the top of the hill that we hadn't used and set them up on the high side of the ditch.  About this time, the sun had come out and started melting the remaining snow and ice.  This made our ditch a mud pit that was wicked slippery.  First, we unloaded a stack of 1.75" thick boards into our trailer.  This wasn't as bad since our truck and trailer were on the drive and we could pull boards from the driveway side of the semi.

Jeremy, Daniel, Doug and I carry boards from the big trailer to our trailer.  The kids and Robyn hand boards out to us from inside the trailer.

Then we unloaded a BUNCH of 1" boards onto the first pallet on the uphill side of the ditch (in case the semi needed the grassy downhill side to get out).  Then came the first round of timbers.  Getting these out of the trailer was the amazing work of our friend Daniel.  He drug them to the back of the trailer and pushed them out as Jeremy, Robyn, I and Doug positioned ourselves under it so that it would rest on our shoulders to be carried to the waiting pallet.  Here is where another friend (Doug) saved the day.  He brought a pile of pit fines (which is a very find gravel mixed with limestone powder).  After the first timber, Jeremy slipped and fell in the mud.  No good.  So we shoveled some steps in the ditch bank and spread the pit fines on it.  Woot!  Traction!  The rest of the timbers were unloaded with nothing more eventful that exhausted people.

2 stacks of wood unloaded by the side of our ditch.  Note the white pit fines next to the pile for traction.

Unfortunately, this left us with 2 stacks of wood in the trailer and a still stuck semi.  Thinking that the lighter trailer might be more amenable to moving, we made another attempt to pull the trailer out of the ditch with the semi.  No dice.  Time to call for help!  We paid a visit to our amazing neighbors, the Jameson's, who happen to own a very large tractor.  I pleaded our case and they very graciously came to our rescue.  With their tractor chained to the semi in front, we were able to pull the trailer out of the ditch.  Then it was just a matter of pulling the whole rig down the drive until the semi wheels were also on gravel (instead of the newly created mud pit that was our north field). 

Jeremy holding the chains for the tractor.

With that accomplished, the driver was able to back the trailer all the way down to the bottom of the drive where we unloaded the last of the wood.  Our neighbor's son, Landon was incredible - he not only brought the tractor and expertly operated it, he helped with the unload!  We'd have been sunk without him.  We can't say enough good things about our neighbors! 

The other 2 stacks.  Note the deep ruts - that was the mostly unloaded trailer.  It was lovely to slog around it.

Now for the moment of truth - could the semi pull out through the mud and back onto the road?

Jeremy, Chris (the semi driver) and Landon (our neighbor) in front of the semi after it successfully pulled out onto the road (note the tractor waiting to assist if needed).

Victory!  Kinda.  Now we come back to the moral of the opportunity story.  We did manage to get all the lumber to Kansas for about the same as what we would have paid in gas (even including the extra time we have to pay for because the semi was at our place an extra 4 hours).  However, we now have several tons of wood scattered around the property and none of it is a)where its supposed to be nor b)stickered appropriately to be able to stay where it is.  We will be moving all of this wood again and stacking it correctly over the next week or two.  Why move something once when 3 times will do? 

On the upside, this should be enough to complete the house and a potential future addition (or another outbuilding).  In the course of moving every board, I can also say with certainty that there is beautiful lumber here.  We shouldn't need to haul any more for a very long time.  At least until opportunity knocks again...