Returning to normal (a little)

The last month has been spent making progress in the main bay downstairs.  To finish up from the last post, Jeremy go the stairs pegged and the pipe clamps off, so we have real stairs now! 

Pegged stairs

I also finished the end wall of the laundry room and Scott got the electrical taken care of so that we could finally get a washing machine.  No more laundrymat!!!! 

New washer and built in shelves

And along with those finishing details, we got the laundry/utility lights wired and installed and got the light at the top of the stairs wired and installed.  With a little more electrical tie up, we were able to have actual operating lights everywhere except the kitchen and dining room. 

The stairs were the last holdup for getting the rest of the downstairs floor tiled.  Because the tile pattern is centered on the front door (right in front of the stairs) and there is already a section of tile there under the wood stove, we had to begin the new tile on that side.  With the stair feet locked down, we could finally put down the rest of the cement board. 

Dining room and living room prepped for tile

Ultimately, we did tile in 4 phases to account for having to move stuff around on the first floor.  First, we did the north 3/4 of the living room.  Why 3/4 you ask?  Because we still had to be able to get from upstairs to the bathroom and the kitchen while the tile set up, so we left a path without tile on the south side of the room and at the base of the stairs.  This stage didn't get grouted immediately because we thought we would finish the dining room and then tile all of that side at one time.


Once that set up, we shuffled stuff around and did the tile in the dining room.  Here is where our former plan kinda crapped out.  We had to move stuff onto the living room tile to be able to clear out where the dining room tile had to go.  Sigh.  So we got the dining room done, grouted and sealed, then did the stuff shuffle again. 

Jacob was my mortar mixer and gopher while Jeremy cut tiles

 The finished dining room floor

We decided to try a blitzkrieg day on Saturday the 3rd - finish all the tile in the main bay was the goal.  That included putting cement board down in the kitchen, tiling the entry and south 1/4 of the living room and doing all the tile in the kitchen.  Despite our best efforts and a very long day, we still had half the kitchen left when we had to call it a day.  We still considered it a success though and we got to have Matt Jolley out to help again which is always fun.  I grouted all the new tile and part of the old living room tile (that wasn't covered by stuff) on Sunday and sealed it up on Monday.  Woo hoo for finished floor!

 Half the kitchen done

Entryway tile

South 1/4 under the stairs

Catherine is our expert grout washer!

Weather was a constant concern through this process.  The tile saw has to be set up outside which means that the weather has to be above freezing and not super windy.  That limited the days that we could lay tile pretty significantly.  Because of that, I took a day of vacation on a Thursday to finish laying tile in the kitchen rather than wait for another nice day on the weekend.  Doing the other half the kitchen required installing the floor outlets first though, so Scott and Jeremy worked Wednesday night and got those installed.  They were even able to place them so that the landed inside of the grey diamonds in the tile pattern!  The result looked really nice when it was all grouted and sealed.  With a solid day of work, Jeremy and I got the rest of the kitchen tile down.  I couldn't do the grout the rest of the living room and the kitchen until Saturday, but I got it done just before bedtime on Saturday evening.  Unfortunately, that meant cleaning up the grout lines in the living room without great lighting and while tired.  When we looked Sunday morning there were several spots that needed patched so I did that on Sunday.  The tile was finally sealed up and ready to have things put on it by Tuesday. 

This is where we started - you can see the 2 floor outlets.

Finished tile

 Floor outlets inscribed in the diamond

And with that, the downstairs suddenly got to be organized!  The couch went to its final home in the living room, the buffet to its home, the piano and dining room table to their homes.  The refrigerator is still waiting for the last electrical in the kitchen to get tied up, but finally being able to spread things out has made a huge difference. 

We still have to wrap up the tile in the storage/utility area that was left from Christmas, but we're almost done with the floors downstairs.  Hopefully that will happen in the next few days.  Jeremy has already started cutting trim to finish out the spaces and I am eagerly looking forward to finishing up some other small projects that have been on the back burner while we focused on tile.

These milestones really bring home the length of the journey we've been on.  Most of the time, we just put our heads down and keep plugging away at whatever is next on the list.  It often seems like an endless list - a never ending treadmill of work on the house - then we get a moment where something goes back to being normal again that has been off for a long time.  When we finally set up the couch again and sat down we realized it has been 6 months since we've had a couch to sit on.  When we used a light switch to light up the living room instead of a lamp or headlamp, when we did the first load of laundry at home in so long, something started changing.  The house felt more like home, more like "normal".  We started to feel like our old life was coming back after a long hiatus.  It feels good.

There's still plenty to do before the house is actually finished, but these little steps feel pretty huge to us.  We've even started talking through the garden for this year!  The light at the end of this very long tunnel of house building is getting brighter.  Finally. 

Another sign of the normal annual cycle of farm life arrived in the middle of January - kids!  We had 6 does kid in the span of a week in January in the coldest weather we have ever kidded in.  As a result, we lost our first kids - a really nice set of twins from Rosie.  They were already frozen when we went to check on the goats.  It is so hard to lose any of them.  The other kiddings went well and all the mamas and babies are doing well.  We had 8 kids from the other 5 does (3 sets of twins and 2 singles) and the cuteness has been irresistible ever since.  We will have 2 or 3 more does kidding in another month or so, but for now we're enjoying this round.

New year begins on the farm

I don't care what the calendar says, the year doesn't start on the farm until the first seeds go in the ground.  That started last weekend with the first round of onion seed getting planted in flats for (eventual) transplanting into garden beds.  The first of them are just now starting to poke their heads up.

Onions sprouting!

Currently, I have 5 flats of onions planted and 2 flats of various herbs (thyme, lavender, stevia, yarrow and parsley).  As soon as the seed arrives, I'll have another flat of herbs to plant (oregano, wormwood and a couple of other things).  Here in another couple of weeks I'll start the coles (cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower).  It is wonderful to have veggies growing already!  There's a little bit of spring in our living room now.  :D

Seed stand and lights

On the goat front, we traded bucks with some country neighbors who also have la mancha dairy goats.  The loaner buck, Bucky, has successfully accomplished his mission despite a less than auspicious beginning. 

Upon meeting their new boyfriend, the girls unanimously ask, "Who is this guy?!?!" 

The girls spent most of the first week or so running away from him.  Luckily he was predictably persistent and they eventually decided he wasn't so bad after all.  LOL.  We are expecting baby goats sometime in April or early May.

I don't have pictures of it, but we have been busy recently cutting firewood and getting practice splitting wood.  It has been nice to have some not-quite-frigid days to be out in the winter sunshine.  We hope to do a little lumber milling in the next couple of weeks also.  There's a nice downed oak tree in our woods that looks straight enough to make nice timbers, so we're going to give it a shot. 

In preparation for winter, we assembled a section of our second hoop house over the house slab.  It makes a nice, mostly wind free, space that stays a bit warmer than outside.  It should let us work when it isn't completely frigid out this winter and it will let us leave the work out once we get started.  That will save a ton of time spent uncovering and re-covering the timbers. 

Hoop house over the slab

I have yet to do the final tally of garden produce, but I think ended up close to 1000 lbs.  The bio-char trial definitely proved that the char made for healthier plants and higher yields in our tomato trials.  It didn't seem to make a difference for the dry beans we grew or the cabbage and broccoli.  It also didn't hurt either of those crops, so over all it seems to be a beneficial treatment.  We plant to use the remainder of the char we bought last year on our tomato beds for this year and we will likely purchase more to add to our remaining garden beds.

On tap for this Spring's projects (other than the house, of course) are some re-working of our catchment swales by the garden, creating a mini-chinampas bed for watermelon, finishing the grape swales and planting the grapes and (finally!) getting the front hedge row planted.  It will be another busy year for us, but at this point we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves if it wasn't! 

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!

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! 

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!

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. 

Unloading logs and goat update

We made it back to Kansas safely after an uneventful 12 hour drive with logs in tow.  We drove straight to the sawmiller to unload the logs.  We were very fortunate that he has an excavator to help move the logs around - it makes handling 500-800 lb logs much easier!

This is the load as we pulled out of Colorado

The excavator rolls it, Jeremy and I hold it...

5 logs waiting to be milled

We hope to mill these sometime this week.  Stay tuned!

Before he left last Friday, Aaron managed to dig mini-swales for our fruit trees and a first swale for the grape vines.  He also finished the retaining wall in front of the greenhouse and planted the first 4 fruit trees.  We cannot express our gratitude for all his help enough.  With a little luck, Jeremy and the kids will get the other fruit trees in the ground tomorrow and we'll work on the grapes later in the week.  Once the plants are in the ground, we'll be ready to look at doing the dirt work to start the garden shed.  Oh, and we have to move a bunch of rocks and a bunch more logs.  Its safe to say that we'll be busy!

In other news, the goats are gone.  No, they have not met an untimely end.  We decided that until we are living at the farm full time, we don't want to have daily chores.  There is simply too much for us to balance right now.  So, Rollins (the little black one) has found a home with a family that plans to spoil him rotten and Hercules (the buck) is being bought back by our neighbors.  Both will have wonderful homes where they will be well taken care of.  Sometime in the future when we are living on the farm, we will consider getting goats again.  Until then, we will go back to just taking care of plants on the farm.