Down with the Floors, Up with the Greenhouse

 Adam finished the dining room floor a couple of days ago, and it looks marvelous. I'm quite proud of him. It was not altogether easy because there are so many openings from this room, and the videos he watched didn't tell him everything he needed to know. But he's a problem-solver, and he got it done! And he didn't stop until he found a way to make it look great.
Now, however, he is thoroughly unhappy with the old wooden floors in the rest of the house. Sigh.

 The contrast is rather stark :)
LLBean was having a massive sale. I had free coupons for merchandise from them, plus another coupon, plus the 25% off sale, so I went ahead and ordered the rug for the new floor. I was going to wait ... but ...

Adam says this is shockingly colorful for me, and he's right. I'd usually go for a nice, safe, boring brown. But I want this room to be a cool, summer blue, and the rug is the first step in that direction. It has shades of blue, green, and white in it.
At last, today Adam can get outside and do the work he's been longing to do: build the new greenhouse!
First metal hoop:

 A piece of rebar keeps it in the ground.

 Adam built this jig/frame/don't know what you call it. This is for bending the metal poles into rounded hoops.

 He lays part of the metal pole into that opening against the rounded piece of wood. Then he gently begins to press against it, forcing it to bend and round.  Two poles joined together make one hoop.

 Here's the nice screen door for the greenhouse!!! He didn't make this; he bought it. But he's making the frame for it, and the rest of the building.

 Beginning to stand things up for a dry fit. He'll finish everything here near the barn where he has electricity. Then he'll move it all to the garden and put it together permanently.

Yesterday he did me a huge favor and improved my chickens' lives. He made an opening in their fence so they could get into the orchard, and he closed off the opening that allowed Ned to get into the orchard. Now ... at last!! ... my chickens can peck and eat greenery and bugs and worms to their hearts' content! I'm so happy :)

From inside the orchard, here's a view of the new fence blocking Ned out (on the right) and the new opening where the chickens are coming through.

 They mostly stay on the far end down there near their coop where the vegetation is overgrown and they have lots of cover from predators. Plus, Bernie the Roo keeps his eagle eye on them and is always watching for their safety.

 See how they blend in?

 Other good news: my daffodil bulbs are coming up everywhere. Then, I dug around in my tiger lily bed and found new green coming up!! yay!!

 I should add that Adam returned the truck to its owner who needed it back. It was a generous loan for over a year and quite useful. In its stead he bought a wheelbarrow at the hardware store.

We wanted to buy him one for his last birthday but they were all over $200! A bit steep! But yesterday they had this one for only $49, so we're glad we waited.

That's all from the farm. Hopefully in the next post I'll be showing you the greenhouse in its new home.

Improvements in January

 Did I tell you that one of us stepped right through a thin spot in the dining room floor over Christmas? Yep! Kinda scary, and I'm thankful nobody was hurt. Adam quickly did a patch job.

 But we realized then that the patching work he'd done on the various weak spots on that floor would simply not be adequate; the floor was too thin, too weak.

 We would have to put something on top of it, and we must do it before somebody else puts a heel through it and makes a bigger hole! So we picked out a flooring. Today Adam is starting to lay the pad and the new flooring on top of the old.

Okay, that was two days ago. This has been a challenging project. Adam used the trial-and-error method, putting it down and pulling it up. But he's got the hang of it today:

 Meanwhile, our house generally looks like this:

 That photo is just in case some of you have a false impression of the wonder of farm life.
Guess what? I have cilantro germinating!!

I was so excited, I planted some more cilantro seeds. I want LOTS of cilantro!
Elsewhere on the farm, Adam's compost continues to do its quiet, magical work. BIG compost. He constantly turns it with a pitchfork to keep it moist, and it steams and gets hot as it breaks down into dirt.

 He has a small separate pile of chicken poop/compost especially for the asparagus bed. However, the puppies are always sticking their noses in there. This is why I do not kiss dogs on the face.

 Our five beehives are fine. See those funny stands? Adam used them in a telescope-making class he taught. The poles are in concrete, which is in 5-gallon buckets. He'll bury the buckets out there and build a new, taller bee table on the stands.

 He's marked out the perimeter of the new greenhouse, twice as long as last year's greenhouse. That front black PVC won't be there; it's just marking the front two corners.

 And he bought metal pipes that he'll bend into curves for the dome of the greenhouse. They will be sturdier than the white PVC he used last year. This will be a permanent greenhouse.

Soon Adam will expand my chickens' yard. See the barren landscape in which they must live? Not a green thing. I pick greens and grass and toss it over the fence to them. 

 He will expand the yard to include that overgrown area next to it (the back of the orchard). That will make them happy. He'll simply extend the fence below straight across to the property line fence.

Today is 70 degrees. I put my basil plants on the front steps to drink in the sunshine. What crazy weather we have in the South! Its primary characteristic is unpredictability. I'm sure we'll have some more chilly temps, but I'm betting we have had our one harsh cold snap last weekend. Now we will drift happily into spring. Yes?

All these photos are to encourage you that the wonder of spring and warmth and growing things is just around the corner!

November on the Farm

 Only a few leaves remain on the grapevines in the orchard. That golden one caught my eye.

 Only the weeds are in bloom now. Our roses are about spent. The camellia buds are full and near bursting. We will see them ruby red in January.

 Most mornings are frosty now on the farm.

Adam has very nearly finished the red metal roof on the little building. He has a bit of caulking to do, that's all. He put some new fencing around my chickens ... again. Escape artists that those hens are! He's growing his compost pile, of course, gathering the cut grasses from the big field. In the photo above, you can see the scythed part of the field, and then in the distance the beige color of the taller grass, not cut yet.
This month he also ripped out and rebuilt the pantry cupboard in the kitchen. We're discussing the continuing project of the house floors -- what to fill the weak parts with, and how to finish them. Simply, I hope. I like simple wood floors.
The pecans that fell after Hurricane Matthew may be the only ones we get this year. I gathered two mesh bags full.
Adam plans to plant little slips of Christmas trees on the property, hoping to cut and sell them down the road. It's cheapest to buy them 1000 at a time. We barely missed the deadline to order them this fall, so it will wait until next fall. They will go in the damper area of the field that isn't suited to farm crops. Pine trees grow here like weeds, and I do not joke!
We are busy, busy with work and the Christmas season, and the farm is quiet. The chickens are producing. The worms are doing very well. The bees are quiet. Ned the guard dog is barking and chasing squirrels, doing his job. And in my mind I'm thinking of the quiet hours I love, fiddling in the spring greenhouse, mere months away.

A Wood Floor

I've already told Adam that I know I'm ridiculous, but I just love my "new" wood floor. This house was built in 1922, so this thin pine floor is nearly 100 years old. It was never intended to last this long. This is a sharecropper house, not a big farmhouse or a plantation home. There are dozens of these narrow homes around the county, many fallen into disrepair.

Several boards are damaged, weak, and will need to be repaired. I moved a long rug to cover one hole so we don't put a heel though it.

Adam will sand it all, and then it will get a good protective coat of polyurethane. We'll continue with the other floors in the house. The only thing on them that needs to come off are paint splatters. Then we'll look at the kitchen floor too. Two layers of linoleum cover the kitchen floor. Someday I hope we'll have a house of glowing wood floors. But as it is right now, rough, gouged, striped and splotchy, I love it already.