All Quiet on the Farm

I've not posted anything here for months. It was a difficult year on the farm. We suffered under severe drought conditions during the late spring and well into August. Weather like that will kill off a garden quickly, and we could not afford to water the entire garden. However, we continue to learn about both ourselves and our little farm. Here are a few take-aways from this year:

1. The vegetable garden must be redone to allow Adam to mow it with the riding mower. Weeds take over when paths between the raised beds only allow a push mower. Adam will remove one or two of our long raised beds in the spring.

2. We have too many raised beds in the garden, and we continue to attempt vegetables that don't grow well here. We'll focus on crops that thrive here: okra, sweet potatoes, peas, asparagus, strawberries (we hope).

3. I'm moving all my tomato plants out of the veggie garden next summer. They'll be in large pots in the house lot. I'll only plant Matt's Wild Cherry tomato plants. My tomatoes in the garden got progressively more diseased year to year, and they take up so much space.

4. I will never, ever try lavender again. I gave it my absolute best try, and it all died ... again.

5. Elderberry bushes, however, do quite well! I want more of them.

6. My gourds did well. My herb beds continue to flourish. The willow saplings are doing well too.

Now for some photos of what's been going on.

Henny Penny hatched four chicks in late summer. They're now ten weeks old. I think I have two hens and two roos.

I continue to weave occasionally.

 Adam installed a new water filter in the kitchen.

 I continue to paint many watercolor cards and sell them. Here's a roo.

 Adam vastly improved the chicken run with a supporting pole for the netting and new mulch underfoot.

 He built himself a desk in the house too, for all his writing/editing/podcast/youtube work.

 We had enough figs to make my mother a few jars of preserves in August.

 We had wonderful okra! I planted it late, so it produced after the drought had mostly passed. It did well when nothing else did.

 I continued to knit for autumn.

 Adam and I sold my wares at the farmer's market each week.

 We survived Hurricane Dorian. The north side of our house was splattered with shredded leaves.

 I painted the walls and floor of the guest room.

 Adam pulled out the entire termite-eaten floor in the little building.

 And he put in a new floor after treating/killing all the termites.

 And I painted it.

 Our trees and shrubs are so very confused after two hurricanes in two years. The crabapple tree is now used to blooming in October.

 Molting season has arrived in the chicken coop. Poor Sheena looks awful!

 I picked a few herbs before frost, hoping to make sachets with them.

This is the extent of our sweet potato harvest! So very sad. Adam worked hard, and dug out a very long bed. That's what a drought will do to you.

 I'm saving dried okra pods for next years planting.

 Drying herb leaves in jars. Tarragon flowers also.

 And one last woven scarf.

We are keeping busy, but farming/gardening has been a disappointment this year. We're hoping for better rains in 2020, and healthier crops. It's raining right now! Praise the Lord!

At Last! A Storage Building!

I can't tell you how very proud I am of my hard-working husband. He has single-handedly taken a derelict, vine-clad, termite-damaged building, and made it into a livable, usable space. He finished the roof, the floor, and (almost) the ceiling. Anna scrubbed and painted the walls.

You can't see the color, but it's called Pineapple Upside Down Cake -- a pale yummy yellow.

Back inside the main house, our contractor has been working on that little hallway to the office. Today he put sheetrock on it, after framing it in yesterday.

And here's the door that will go in that opening. It will open into the hall, against the right wall.

Now we won't need to use this door from the bath into the office. I'll put a dresser there for bathroom storage. I like having a spare dresser in a bathroom.

The bathroom floor is in bad shape. You can feel it give and sag as you walk there. Our contractor also put down plastic vapor barrier under the house today.
What does that little L-shaped hallway look like, from the other side? It's kind of odd. It took out most of the closet in the middle bedroom, leaving only a slice of closet, about enough space to hang 8 dresses.

It'll look a bit better when he's done, but it is what it is. At least it gives good access to the corner office, which was necessary.
All this happened on Wednesday. I have a backlog of posts, so I end up posting them a few days after the fact. Now it's Friday night, and we've begun moving lots of stuff up to the property. More to come, folks!

On the Right Side of the House

(To view an aerial shot of the farm, or to see a rough blueprint of the house layout, click on the 'plans' page above.)
Now I'll briefly take you through the bedrooms. They run, 1-2-3, along the right side of the house from front to back. The largest (ha!) is immediately off the living room.

The carpet in four rooms was this blue-green, quite old and stained. I do not like old dirty carpet; I like hard wood with rugs. So we pulled up all the carpet and hauled it outside.

Here's what the floor looks like:

They need sanding and cleaning, but they will be cleaner than old carpet!
I noticed a dark hold in the carpet in the front bedroom where the old man slept. At first I thought it was a utility line of some sort. While pulling up the carpet I discovered it was a burnt spot. I suppose he dropped a cigarette on the carpet one night while lounging in bed. Yikes! It burned through into the floor.

Here's a close-up of the living room floor (bottom) and the dining room floor (top). Not too good. The wood needs stripping and sanding and finishing, and the ancient gray linoleum squares in the dining room are so ugly. Still, I prefer them to green carpeting. We owned an 1870s Victorian home in Mississippi years ago, and we attempted to pull up this kind of flooring in a bathroom. Horrible!

 The sellers also left us two oil heaters! I love these things. I'm wondering if they're telling us, "Just wait till you feel how cold this house is in January!" haha :)

 Closet space is sparse! This is the "master" closet, tucked into a corner with two outrageously inaccessible cabinets above. I pulled out the carpet and liner today.

 On to the middle bedroom -- it opens directly off the dining room. Please note the hideous wallpaper and accent strip that will most certainly be gone. Each person has his own taste!

From the corner of the dining room (which you see in the above photo, on the left side), you enter the bathroom. And from there, you access the 3rd bedroom in the back of the house.
Here's the view looking from the dining room, through the corner of the bathroom, into the back bedroom:

And here's the view from the back bedroom, looking through the bathroom, into the dining room:

This arrangement must change for the sake of our daughter who will be using the back bedroom. The contractor will make a new passageway, cutting through the middle bedroom, bypassing the bath, to give her a private entrance. I'll close off the door that joins the bath and bedroom, which will give me space in the bathroom to put a dresser for more storage.

Last but not least, the bathroom. Not a fabulous bath, but serviceable. I do wish it had a window; I love a bathroom to have a window. The first thing I did here was remove the paper towel rack mounted just behind the toilet. Such a man thing to do!

And this light fixture -- it's interesting, unique, kind of '70s retro, but not really my farmhouse style. Kind of a flying-saucer, celebrate the space race, fixture. I think it will go away too. 

Oh -- one more fun thing. Get a load of this embroidered panel in the dining room. It had a wooden frame around it, like a picture. Can you get what it is?

It conceals the fuse box! Wow, just wow. We will find another solution for fuse-box-concealment, and the dead sunflowers will find a home elsewhere!

That's it for the house.  See you later!