Building the shed - Part 1

Given that we are scheduled to move to the farm in about 4 weeks, it's high time we got a structure built to start moving stuff into!  To that end, we began construction on a 12x16' shed this weekend.  We started on Friday evening by setting blocks and leveling them.  Then we built the floor structure.  We were also able on Friday to construct the first wall. 

First wall being sheathed on the platform Friday evening

On Saturday morning after home depot delivered three 16' long 4x6's, we installed the pressure treated 4x6's underneath the platform.  Then we installed the decking on the floor so that we could work on an actual surface.  While Jeremy and Scott started on the other walls, I cut the roof rafters.

Putting the runners under the platform

Then the sky got really dark.  Then it rained.  Not a sprinkle, but a full on downpour.  We had enough warning to move all the tools under the 10'x10' canopy and tarp over the rest of the wood, but Jeremy, Jacob and I got to spend a very intense few minutes watching buckets of rain come down (Catherine was visiting the neighbors and Scott had gone home to feed his dogs).  Thankfully, the rain cleared up about the same time that Scott got back and we were blessed with no sun and cooler temperatures!  Well worth sitting out in some rain for.

Rain clouds to the south

 

Then came the rain!

That afternoon, we finished building the remaining 3 walls and then finished cutting the roof trusses.

At this point, we called it a day (it was 8:30PM and we'd been working since 7:00AM).  In the morning, Jeremy and Scott put up the first 3 walls and braced them securely.  I cut gussets for the roof rafters and started assembling the roof trusses. Once the rafter's were gusseted together, we moved them into the shed through the wide open hole for the 4th wall.  Then up went the fourth wall!

 

 

 

I would just like to mention here that lifting these walls into place was no small task.  We pre-sheated them, so each wall was 8' tall, 12 or 16 feet long and had plywood on one side.  The two short walls had to be lifted 1-3 feet off the ground and set on the platform.  It was an impressive feat of manliness on the part of Jeremy and Scott to get it done.  Thank goodness we didn't start this adventure any later in our lives!

At this point, we decided to go ahead and build the 2 lofts (one on each end) so that we could use them as a platform to do some of the roof rafters.  That took a good part of the morning between cutting and mounting the structures and cutting the decking, but man was it nice to be able to stand up there!

Now we were ready for the roof!  We stood up the rafter's one by one making sure to keep them the right distance apart and straight.  We cross braced them from below with 1x2's to hold them together until the decking goes on.

Then we put the first piece of roof decking on.  Now we saw a problem.  While we braced the rafters with the 1x2's, the bracing didn't go high enough so the rafters were not all the same distance apart at the peak of the roof.  Bummer.  They have to be lined up or the metal roofing won't be able to go in correctly.  Double bummer. 

The shed at end of day Sunday

 

At this point, we decided to punt for the day.  We'd worked from 6:30AM until 1:30PM and it's Father's Day.  'Nuff said.  Tomorrow, Jeremy and the kids will install a 2x4 down the line of the roof on each side of the peak to hold the tops the correct distance apart.  Then we'll be ready to deck the roof and put on the metal roofing. 

Mowing and mulching

We are definitely behind at keeping the ground covered in the garden this year with everything going on.  We also haven't knocked back the 4 foot high grass and weeds along the fence or the front of the property.  Guess what that means?  That's right!  Get out the mower, cut down grass/weeds and mulch.

It took 7 hours of mowing and 5 hours of mulching and weeding on Saturday, but we got it done.  Well, actually, we didn't quite get everything mulched.  We got all the tomatoes and potatoes, but the peppers are only partially done. 

As a bonus, we can now see our front planting bed that we made last summer again!  It had become overrun with grass and weeds. 

deeply mulched tomatoes

Jeremy halfway through mowing the front of the farm

The finished product - 5 hours later.

Our strawberries are also ripe at the farm.  Unfortunately, most of them are going to waste this year because we don't have time to pick and process them.  We did have a couple of pounds of them for lunch Saturday though.  Yum!

We will also be building a shed this coming weekend (well, we'll get most of it done over the weekend we hope).  When that is done, we'll start the process of moving to the farm.  Our goal is to be living at the farm by the middle of July.  There's lots to do between here and there though.  If you feel like doing some normal stick-frame building this weekend, come on out!

Grape planting and then some

The grape planting went well today.  We managed to plant and stake 21 grapes in the first grape swale.  That required extending the swale by about 30 feet - a wonderful problem to have (too many grapes).  Here is our budding vineyard as of Monday afternoon:

21 grapes are in the first vineyard row!

While we were there (and we had help - thanks Matt!), we got the garden shed settled into its permanent home.  That took some significant lifting, shifting and shimmying but it was accomplished without major incident.  We even had time to move all of our garden tools and most of the garden supplies from the hoop house to the shed.  It will be very nice to have all the tools in the garden now.

Our new shed, complete with front step.

With the grapes and shed done, Jeremy and Matt started rearranging the hoop house and I started planting peppers and eggplant. I planted about 40 pepper plants and the kids planted about 20 eggplant.  The garden is starting to fill in!

2 beds of peppers in a row.  The cages aren't on all of them yet.

The hoop house needed to be rearranged for 2 reasons.  First, my brother was coming with the load of wood Jeremy brought back from Colorado last week and it needed a place to be unloaded.  Second, we need a place to start working on the timber frame joinery.  Fortunately, by the time Scott got there, they had made ample space for the new lumber. 

Because of all the rain we've gotten, it took several tries to get the trailer anywhere near the hoop house.  There are now tracks all over our bottom field and we are thoroughly convinced that we need to get a driveway done pronto.  On the upside, we were finally able (and by we I mean my brother) to get the trailer reasonably close.  Then we all started moving lumber.  In total, there was somewhere around 5000 lbs of wood on the trailer as near as we can estimate it.  This will finish out the vast majority of the wood we need to build the cabin and it gets us well on our way to starting the joinery.

Carrying the timbers into the greenhouse.  This was a 12' long 7x10.

 

Here is the growing pile of lumber in the hoop house.

In other news not otherwise reported here, we spent last weekend helping my brother convert our mother's carport into a finished room.  We managed to get everything framed in and the exterior sheathing and siding done.  It was a busy weekend!

This is shortly after we started framing. 

 

We hung the door after this, but its close to where we left it after 2 days and about 80 labor hours of work.

Ok, I think we're caught up now.  Stay tuned - it will be a busy summer!

Tomatoes are in and grape planting party!

We're a little late posting this, but we planted our 120 tomatoes out of the greenhouse about a week ago.  We have several varieties -

Arkansas Traveler (excellent heat tolerance),
Ilini Star (testing for heat tolerance, is an early bearing variety),
Red Cherry Tomato (garden snack),
Amish Paste (salsa and sauce, have tried this one before without luck but thought I'd give it another go)
Brandywine (best tasting tomato! not super prolific though)
Mortgage lifter (trying it, has a good reputation)
Ozark Pink (testing for heat tolerance)

First tomato tunnel

 

second tomato tunnel

 

Another 60 planted along the fence

 

I still have 65 pepper plants in the greenhouse to put out, but they aren't as root bound as the tomatoes were.  In other garden news, many of Catherine's flowers are coming up, so the north side of the garden should bloom beautifully this year.  Our cabbages are looking fabulous!  I thought we'd lost them all right after we transplanted them, but the long cool and wet spring has really brought them around.  I'm hoping they keep going so that we can make some kraut this year.  The onions and potatoes are super healthy and the vast majority of our transplanted asparagus is coming up wonderfully. 

This week we had a garden shed delivered.  We bought it from a local craftsman who is, unfortunately, moving away.  It is very well built and will work perfectly to hold all our garden tools out of the weather.  It also provides a roof to collect some rain water.  It is sitting on the hill above the greenhouse right now.  We'll be moving it (somehow) down into the garden tomorrow if we're lucky.

6'x8' handmade shed

 

Next Friday afternoon (May 31st), we will be planting the first row of grapes in the swales behind the hoop house.  Anyone who wants to learn about planting and growing grapes is welcome to come and participate.  We will start at our house at 12:30 and will hopefully be at the farm by 3:00.  We will be digging up the 4 large, established grapes at our house, loading them up along with another dozen or so cuttings I rooted last year, then taking them to the farm and planting them.  It will be a fun day and hopefully the weather will cooperate. 

Lastly, we've started getting bids to do the foundation for the cabin at the farm.  We are really hoping to get to break ground soon, but there are several things left to nail down.  The pressure is on since we have to be out of our house by mid July (no, we won't have it built by then).  Keep watching to see how it goes!

Fence, flowers, mulch and scythes

Its been a busy and good couple of weeks for us.  Last weekend, the kids and I transplanted several perennials from in town - 65 raspberry canes, 3 clematises and an assortment of herbs.  We also moved the arbor from in town.  And, if that wasn't enough, I couldn't help but stop by a garden center (or two) and pick up a few other plants.  :D  This little corner of the garden is starting to fill in...

The kids planting raspberries

Arbor from the south west gate

Arbor (and Jacob) from inside the garden

Catherine planting flowers

During the week last week, Jeremy managed to get all the wire strung for the fence.  That's no small feat when you consier that there's about half a mile of wire required to do 3 pairs of strands!  Then, this past weekend we started weaving withey's into the fence to make a more significant barrier to the various critters (namely deer) that would like to eat our garden.  As of the end of the day Sunday, here's where we were:

Cedar withes woven into the fence

While we've been working on these projects, Catherine has taken it to heart to plant a flower garden.  She has now planted some hundreds of seeds, plants and bulbs along the north fence line of the garden as well as helped plant nasturtiums where our squash will be this year.  It's been a huge help.

Catherine planting flowers

On Saturday we also stumbled across someone selling 2 scythes!  They are in good condition - one needs a significant re-peening to be in good cutting shape and the other is like new - and even came with a snath that's about Jeremy's size.  Now we can both cut grass or brush and we have a back up snath for someone who wants to help (and is over 6' tall).  Sweet!

New scythe blades!

Lastly, Jeremy lucked out and had his boss from work get us in touch with a tree service.  They need somewhere to dump many dump truck loads of chipped mulch and logs and we happen to need a TON (actually several tons) of mulch for the garden and various other projects around the farm.  SCORE!!  No pictures of this yet, but they've already brought by 2 dump truck loads of wood for us with the promise of many more.  Now we just have to get all that spread...

Building the garden - the fast way!

This weekend we rented a skid steer to finally get all the dirt for the garden beds moved.  It took about 4 hours of running the machine to move the 40ish cubic yards of dirt that make up the rest of the garden beds, but we did it!  While I ran the skid steer, Jeremy and the kids raked and shoveled the piles of dirt I dropped into reasonable beds.  Unfortunately, there's just no way they could keep up with the machine, so only about half the garden is in its final form.  Here are some pics to show you where it sits for now.

The end that got raked into beds along with the beds we already made

The end that hasn't been raked yet - there's some more work to do here.

 

Sunday, we went to Baldwin to help Scott move some stuff and to dig up his asparagus bed (he didn't want the plants).  I dug asparagus while Jeremy helped him move.  We ended up with about a dozen plants for our efforts, some of which were very nice sized.

Digging asparagus in Baldwin

Later Sunday, we had 2 friends who are photographers come out to take family pictures outside at the farm with Scott and Elexys.  We enjoyed a couple of hours walking around and getting cool, informal pictures all over.  It was a nice reminder that the farm has some very beautiful and relaxing places...we should take more walks. 

Lisa Marie and Christian with Jeremy

 

After pictures, we planted the asparagus crowns and then went out for a fun dinner together.  It was a nice end to a busy day.

Planting asparagus in our picture clothes - who else does this stuff?

Keep it covered!

We weren't fast enough and we broke the rule.  The one cardinal rule of organic growing (other than don't use chemicals) is Keep the Soil Covered!  We had all the dirt work done last fall and the soil has been bare since.  We planted grass seed, but not in time to prevent some significant erosion from the recent rains.  This means that the swales we carefully built a few weeks ago are now full of topsoil.  They also ran over in several places creating washes down the hillside. 

The good news is that the swales did their job and kept most of the soil on the hillside.  The straw we spread around the garden also helped - the erosion was much less severe on those slopes.

You can now guess how the kids and I spent Saturday!  Yep, we moved a lot of straw.  The kids spread straw all along the hillside to cover the bare ground while I moved bales to create temporary retaining walls to prevent further runoff with the next rain.  I also fixed the places where our swales had been overrun.  The hillside now looks like this:

New bale swales and mulch on the hillside.

There's still more work to do to move the topsoil that washed down back up where it belongs, but this will hopefully hold it while the grass grows in.  There is a fair amount of green coming up under the straw and in some of the bare places, so we're crossing our fingers that it will  hurry up and grow!

Green grass sprouting..hurry up and grow!

On Sunday, Jeremy and I pruned the grapes at our house in town, started some more clippings, and removed the last parts of our old garden fence.  This puts us one step closer to having all the plants moved to the farm.  We still need to move the raspberries, grapes, more asparagus and a host of herbs before the spring gets much farther along.  Never a dull moment here!


Since we were making a trip to the farm to take the fence poles anyway, we also picked up some bagged leaves from our neighbor's to mulch the blackberries.  They now have a nice, thick layer of leaf mulch to help keep the moisture in the soil. 

mulched blackberries