Many Happenings

Alas, we have neglected our blog!! This post is a pictoral tour of the last 4 visits to our property that we've made since the previous entry. We will be moving up there permanently very soon! Enjoy the photos.


August 31st-September 2nd

This was our first trip up to our new home once the sellers had moved out. Here we are brushing our teeth.



And unloading the metal pipes for our greenhouse





Kara wasted no time tearing up the old dusty carpet in the living room. After a brief but emphatic session of destruction, her dad finished the job on the next trip up. (Note the the classy object in the foreground, some people call that an "upside down bucket" but we call it "dining room chair.")




Sept 18th-20th

Mowing buckwheat on the south field, which will be planted to garlic later in the fall


We then raised beds in the same garden after the buckwheat was mowed and incorporated.


Kara, Malaika, and Jim working on setting up the greenhouse




The house feels so much nicer after Kara's parents deep cleaned it.


The living room, carpet free with upgraded dining room chairs.


Our sink is at the end of a dead-end hallway. Funny.


Upper field after it was mowed.


The tall grass in background is sudangrass. The foreground is an emerging cover crop of peas and oats.





Our greenhouse, partially set up!





October 2nd-4th

Our to-do list, with inspirational artwork, written on whiteboard.




David fixing our sink. Hooray!


Kara mowing down our sudangrass cover crop: it grew to over 5 feet high! We accidentally let it grow a little too long, so that it started to form seed pods, which could germinate in the soil as a weed in subsequent years. Since Sudangrass seeds will only germinate in warm weather, we may try to use this section for early spring crops or late fall crops to avoid weed pressure from sudangrass.



Field of oats and peas as covercrop


Closeup: oats and peas


Closeup: oats and vetch



We transplanted onions and leeks (along with David) that we will attempt to overwinter.







On this trip we picked up 200 bales of hay from our neighbors 1 1/2 miles up the road. We managed to fit 60 bales in the manure spreader: hooray! Here it is parked in the garage next to our soil preparation equipment



And the rest of the hay was stacked in the upper floor of the barn next to our tractor.


The next three images are intended to be a panoramic view of our vegetable fields (left to right), but I couldn't figure out how to stitch them together. The hill that you see in the first two photos is Hateful Hill, apparently so named because it blocks the setting sun.






Next Trip: October 16th-20th

Planting Garlic, yahoo! Many thanks to all the garlic helpers: Wes, Jo, Angela, Jean, Colleen, Lindsay, Tom, Michaela, and Parker. We planted 190 pounds of garlic (9 1/2 165 foot long beds) and mulched it with 180 bales of hay.


Gaea, queen of the haywagon






The finished beds on the left and right will be for our caterpillar tunnels, which we will set up soon and cover with greenhouse plastic. All four beds will be seeded to carrots in late February for an early carrot harvest.






This is the beastie that dug a trench to put in a waterline to our washstation and greenhouse. It also dug out an area where we would pour a concrete pad for our washstation.


We got a load of gravel dumped off where we were going to put our concrete pad. We leveled it off, installed a form for the concrete, and the concrete truck arrived that afternoon to pour our slab.














What a trip! Our upcoming projects are putting up our caterpillar tunnels, covering our onions and leeks with plastic for the winter, preparing a shed and fenced area for Kara's goat, finishing the construction of our greenhouse, putting a roof over the wash station, installing our wood stove into the house, and updating our blog more frequently. Thanks for checking it out!