A More Detailed Farm Plan

Do remember: a plan is a basis for change.

Adam did a scale drawing of the farm using Google Maps as a base for the main structures and the boundaries. I thought you'd enjoy seeing what his plans are for the eventual plantings, the main plots. I hope perhaps you can read his writing.
The house is the oddly-shaped object in the middle of the driveway loop. The square at the top of the loop is the carport.

Above is the left side with the house and garage, orchard and barn. That big oval is the pine grove. It has only two big pine trees and a few others, but we call it the pine grove nonetheless.

And here's the right side, including the big field and the long-range plan.
Do you see the tool shed and W/C just above the winter garden? That's where our field water spigot is located.

The field spigot that will become a shower

Adam doesn't want to pay for town water to irrigate all those crops (even though there's town water there). That spigot will just serve a little outdoor shower there, and he hopes to put in a composting toilet. For the crops, he's planning a significant water collection system. See the 1000-gallon water tank? And there will be other large tanks on the back corners of the house and the garage, providing water for the house gardens and the orchard. The front of the property, with wild flowers and tall sunflowers, will welcome customers to our farm store. The living hedge, which will be significant, will give the best possible sound barrier between the house and the road.

A Garden Plan

Sunday evening: Adam is plotting out his scheme for the pasture this fall. He's marked off the rectangle (about 110 feet square, or about 1/4 acre) for his wheat field. He hopes to get it tilled in the next two weeks, and plant wheat there by the end of September.

He also hopes for a winter garden, a long strip 6 feet by about 30 feet. In it he'll plant lettuces, spinach, broccoli, bok choy, chard. We hope to have these winter crops to sell at the local farmers' market during months when there is little available that's fresh and local.

In the spring a much larger vegetable garden is planned. Adam is enthusiastic about eating primarily veggies and little meat. We've already been doing this for a year or two. We love a vegetable medley roasted on high heat -- potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, and sweet potato fries, with little tomatoes added at the last minute. Serve this with a dip of mayonnaise and peppery dijon mustard, like a brown Inglenook mustard.

It's one thing to have a plan for farming; it's quite another to accomplish it. But Adam is enthusiastic and motivated. He's been wanting, even longing, to do this for quite a few years.

He has five healthy bee hives now. We lost two small nuc boxes in the spring/summer that did not survive, and we lost the one Warre hive in the move. He's been feeding the bees honey-flavored sugar water for the past several days, and they are sucking it down! He wants to add a box on top of each hive for the ladies to stock with new comb and honey, before winter comes.

Monday morning: I went out to the pasture to take a pic or two of Adam scything the wheat field, but this is what I found:

Not my husband withe a scythe swinging through the air, slicing the grass down, but the rumbly, puttery noise of a lawn mower. :(
He tried the scythe, but the grass (which was rough cut last week with a bush hog) was too short for a scythe. A lawn mower was the other option. You can tell we haven't been farmers! We don't have all the machines in the shed, all the options.

This morning he had this strip of the wheat field done, which is about the same size as the winter garden will be (in another location) later.

The mower is sitting in the corner of this season's wheat field, and the field is a bit bigger than the width of this photo indicates. Next year, the vegetable garden will be much bigger and include this wheat field (and about as much more again), and the new wheat field will be past this field, further down to those tall pine trees on the right.

A Few Move-In Photos

A quite important piece of furniture is in place. It's been years since it had a front-and-center location in the home.

The cluttered table is not bolted down yet (top to legs), but it's been eaten on!

The red couches make life comfy in the evenings. Don't notice the crumbly drywall dust and mess that still muck up many surfaces in the rooms.

The kitchen's looking homey and is getting lots of use at last.

The house had an old stove and old refrigerator, but they both work fine enough for us. I don't believe in throwing big appliances into the dump if they still work.

Adam installed a new ceiling fan in our room Wednesday, and that makes for lovely sleeping!

This light fixture came from Julia's ceiling. She'll get a ceiling fan too, and this lovely piece will go into the kitchen. I LOVE this style -- simple like a pill-box hat.

When the contractor moved the A/C return vent into a kitchen cabinet, he left me a narrowish space perfect for my cookie sheets and pizza pans. Lovely!

It's now Friday morning. Adam came back in from raking and piling grass cuttings from the pasture, and putting it around his beehives to keep down weeds there. It's 8:30 AM. He's a morning bird, always has been. He's eager to get this property up and viable -- he views it as unemployment insurance :) Those of you who've done farming in the past may giggle at that. But a man must have a dream and a hope and a plan, and it's nice to watch. He loves his pastoral work very much, but someday we will need to retire, have a place to live, and have something we can to do make a little income in our later years.
I set about cleaning the back porch this morning, dragging the nasty rugs outside, sweeping it well, wiping off surfaces, and putting in a second bookshelf for more storage. You can never have enough storage.

 Those wonderful built-in bookshelves in the office have freed up many of my other bookshelves for other purposes.

Every surface needed scrubbing, but it looks great now.

Adam installed new closers on the back and front storm doors.

 And a new handle on the back door, since the old one was broken.

 Adam's other chore today was to install a clothes line for me. I don't think I've had a clothes line since we lived in Iowa, many years ago. Our goal is to cut costs and live simply and from our land (when possible). A clothes line will slash electricity costs. It drives me crazy to dry sheets and work clothes in a dryer -- what a waste when there's good sunshine and breezes outdoors!

(Now it's Saturday afternoon and I WILL click "publish" on this post before I find any other photos to post!)
So many people seem to be pursuing this rural, simple life ... and blogging about it. I've loved finding those kindred-spirited bloggers out there. Our children, nearly grown, seem to gravitate to the urban life, but we 50-somethings are drawn to the countryside like lemmings to the sea. Here's hoping that the fall into the waves is a pleasant one!!

First Day on the Farm

Yesterday we sat in the quiet, cool lawyer's office, signing our names a hundred times. In the late afternoon rain, after visiting the water department and calling the energy company, we pulled into the driveway of our new homestead for the first time.

1922 sharecropper farm house on 3.75 acres of land

We'd visited it before, but this time it was ours.
Above is the front of the little house. We're downsizing. The house is about 1100 square feet. It will house four adults and two dogs.
Today, husband Adam had some urgent pastoral work to do, so daughter Anna and I went to the new house to clean ... deep clean.

The tarp we so carefully put on the roof a few months ago is now in tatters and has mostly come off the roof. How much had the summer rains leaked into the living room? Was the ceiling there fallen to the floor?

Thankfully, no! It's exactly as it was in May. Phew! Now our contractor can begin repairing the roof, replacing the ceiling, and painting the interior, right? Except ...
Yesterday when we came in the pouring rain, we heard someone drive up to the house. It was the man from the water department, coming already to turn on the water! Yay! Cleaning cannot commence without water, right? He turned it on, and came to the front door. "Do you have water running in the house?" he asked.
"No," we replied.
"Then you've got a bad leak somewhere," he answered ominously.
Sure enough, we could hear water gushing under the house, beneath the bathroom.

So today our contractor could not begin with the roof. He began with the plumbing. As they say, Expect the Unexpected! Especially with an old house.
Let me show you a bit of the outside. In the next post, I'll give you a tour of the house.

The house sits rather close to the road, too close for my comfort. It's a two-lane state highway, not over-busy, but not quiet. I'm not a fan of roads. I hope we'll plant a row of privacy trees just to the left of that wooden fence you see above.

Since I don't want the main entrance of the house to come straight from the road, I'd like to change the front porch steps, having them come down this side, toward the driveway. I want to do everything I can to prevent people from thinking we want an approach straight from the highway to the front door.

This side yard is the sunniest spot. And since we want a homestead, not a lawn (ugh), Adam plans to remove the grass here, till the soil, and make this into a large herb garden. In the foreground to the left, you see the rosemary plant we put there already.

 
 

Look! A huge fig tree! The birds were chatttering there, fighting for fruit. I gathered a few. I love making fig preserves with lots of lemon. The tree needs pruning to get the fruit lower for good picking. You see how the birds have already taken some of the fruit.




The bulk of the property is in a pie-wedge-shaped field, nicely fenced already with water there. It's now overgrown, but we have a friend who's offered to come brush-hog it for us, to get it under control. Adam hopes to use a hand scythe to keep it mowed. He's watched all kinds of videos, and this is his preference. With the grass so tall, you can only barely see the barn back there:

 In addition to the cute red horse barn, there's a single garage with a shed on the back:

 And there's a square cement block outbuilding. Anna has claimed this for her own. We need to store some things out there, but she wants to clean it well and (hopefully) make it livable for her. She made a good start today with some elbow grease, after we conquered a massive zipper spider and egg sack at the doorway, and a very lively wasp nest as well.

Here's an aerial view of the farm, with labels to help you see where everything is:

1. house, with deck, covered carport, and garage immediately behind

2. cement outbuilding (the #2 is white and somewhat hard to see. It's to the right of the house.)

3. little red horse barn, complete with office, storage room, and two large stalls

4. main field. Adam will grow wheat here. He has many uses for the wheat, one of which is to help grow oyster mushrooms to sell.

5. orchard. This is a mysterious, overgrown part of the property, now tangled and full of poison ivy. Adam plans to clear it out in the winter when the ivy is less active. We hope for grape vines (the previous owner made wine, we think) and fruit trees.

6. overgrown area around outbuilding. It looks awful now, but has a couple of pretty, small fruit trees. I want to clear this area soon.

7. location of future cob house. We love cob house construction. We hope to build a cob home here, further away from the road. This might allow us later to rent/sell the original house, or have a family member live there.

That's it for the first day at the farm! Not much farming going on ... haha! ... but we're taking baby steps. More on the inside of the house in the next post.