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!

The Work of Our Hands

First I must report the sad news that Adam's roof repairs did not eliminate of our ceiling leak. This is very discouraging. He did such a thorough job on the eaves that he's now wondering if somehow (inexplicably) the leak is coming from elsewhere in the attic.

I finished the red bird. It's a cardinal, obviously, but this is Red Robin Farm. He looks pretty cute up on his post!

Adam was gifted, amazingly, with a gorgeous, nearly-new lawn tractor (riding mower). We are so grateful and excited, and overwhelmed to have this new machine! He's now building a little trailer to pull behind it. He ordered wheels first.

Philip and Kara are here for Thanksgiving and the weather's been grand.

Adam planned to use pallets for the side walls, but all our old pallets are termite-eaten. For now, it only has a bottom.

I mentioned on my other blog that I scored some lovely alpaca fleece in a swap. I'm now looking for inexpensive ways to process it. I tried some fine-tooth nit combs for combing it.

 


I had fun combing away with them, but in the end their tines are too close together. I need a larger comb. So I went to WalMart and found the comb (above) for 98 cents.
I also need a hackle. It looks like this google image:
 
Hackles, like all devices connected with spinning, are expensive. However, it's possible to make your own. I bought a handful of 3.5" finish nails at the hardware store.

 We'll drill holes into a long board and embed the nails in them, and seal them with epoxy. This should work fine.
I also need a diz -- a small hand-held device for pulling the fiber through, forming it into a long piece of roving. I enjoyed strolling through the hardware store, searching for something that might suffice. I found this pipe clamp. The holes are 3/16", which is just about right.

I'll get Adam to pound it flat for me.

In the end, I'll get there -- the spinning process. Oh, I forgot to show you what else Adam made me today -- a spindle!

 I wanted a bottom whorl drop spindle. The disc is the "whorl." He did a fine job shaping and sanding that whorl from a block of wood.

Spindles are fun for spinning a small amount of fiber, but in the end it's good to have a spinning wheel. A friend in Massachusetts has offered me her antique spinning wheel ... if we can find a way to get it from there to here. Someday I'll have all the things I need to turn alpaca fleece into yarn. (Sigh) It looks like so much fun on youtube!

That's it from the farm -- roof leaks, hand-built trailer, and spinning wishes.

Good-night, Farm

It always feels to me as if the farm goes to sleep in winter. We tidy the garden beds, bring the potted plants inside, and say good-night until spring. The pecan leaves cover the grass. The geese this morning flew right over my head, honking south. I brought three volunteer tomato plants in from the garden in pots, plus a pepper plant, several mints, a basil that I hope will survive, and a lemon and a lime tree that we just bought at the nearby garden center. All are snug on the front porch, now wrapped in heavy plastic.

Adam wants to make concrete leaves year-round. Since the elephant ear leaves and hosta leaves are nearly dead for winter, he's making plaster "positives" -- a plaster cast from which he will make a clay mold. Then he will use the mold to make many leaves this winter. Here are some of the plaster positives he made yesterday:

 

Aren't they delicate? The veiling is very fine. I'm eager to see how the actual concrete leaves turn out from these impressions. Here is a much larger elephant ear plaster he made:

 A lovely, large mushroom popped up just outside the chicken coop:

I finished writing my little children's book, "Punkin and the Littlest Mouse" into one of Adam's handmade books. I left room for lots of little illustrations. Now I'm beginning to sketch them in. Here are a few examples:

It's a simple book, and I'm no illustrator, but I do think books for small children should have lots of pictures. I'm not up to complicated images, but I will add as much as I can. Punkin is my crazy Ameracauna hen. She's not nearly so sweet in real life as she is in this story, haha!

Adam continues to attempt repairs on our roof (really the eave) and after that, the ceiling. It's rough going. He succeeded in stopping the leaking along the very edge of the ceiling, but not entirely in stopping the leak in the middle. So up he went again on the tall ladder to rip off the repair he'd done, and pull down the gutter (gulp - yes), and go at it again. He's out there now. 

I went out to check on him. He showed me the roof's edge -- the metal is rusted and crumbling off. It's quite discouraging. A new roof is not something we can afford, so he will try to use metal pieces slipped underneath to reinforce the edge. It's something that must be attempted and done if at all possible. In my mind, this damage to the living room ceiling is the only thing that might still make the house not viable, and not able to be sold, if we ever wanted to sell it. Plus -- of course -- I don't really want even the smallest of drips from my living room ceiling. He is wonderful to keep after all the many projects that call on him, on this farm, small as it is. It's cold and windy out there today, but he's willing. We're both getting to an age when outdoor work in the cold and damp is hard on our bodies.

Well! On a happier note, Thanksgiving is coming, with a beautiful community service and three of our kids coming home! Philip, Kara, and Julia will be here next week. I'm so excited! They get to meet Trixie!

Trixie says, "Happy Thanksgiving!" She is learning how to be a good dog just as fast as she can.

A Three-Kleenex Kind of Day

Poor Bo-Beau. He's had a rough couple of days. His routine has been disrupted and his couch-sleeping has been robbed from him.
Since sometime before Christmas, we've had some black mold growing in our living along the line of the wall and ceiling.

The mold. Adam popped a hole in the wall to find out what size thickness of drywall he needed.

We hemmed and hawed about what to do. We'd had so much work done and redone on the ceiling and roof already. We certainly did NOT want our old contractor to return. But how to find somebody else we could trust? And would someone come to do such a small job? Finally, Adam said he could probably do the work himself as long as I wasn't too picky about the end result.

Picky? Me ... picky? I'm not that kind of picky. I live with three dogs in a house with paint-splattered, scarred floors and walls with wallpaper half-ripped off of them. I'd be happy to have the black mold cut out. Anything after that is just gravy.
So we draped up the living room:

And removed the curtains. He cut out the moldy drywall and fitted in a new piece.

He gave it a first taping and mudding.

At this point, not wanting to be a pesky wife, I quietly went to the back room to weave. After a while, I hear a strange sound. Drip. Drip. Drip. Apparently, there's a leak.

And this is how life generally goes for us:  a bit of good accompanied with a bit of bad. A freak hole appeared in the ceiling (new ceiling, no less!) and began to drip. This after a day of gully-washing rains and 40 mph winds from the south. I do believe this area of living room ceiling will be a bane to our existence as long as we're in this house.

Anna was not dissuaded by the sheets on the furniture. But as I said, Beau was quite disturbed. He came and hid in the back room when I was weaving.
When stressed, Beau tends to daintily remove dirty kleenex from my bedroom waste paper basket, chew them gently, and leave them on the floor. He was very stressed. It was a three-kleenex kind of day.

Adam is now finished with the taping and mudding, and tomorrow he'll sand and paint the spot. The leaky hole in the ceiling remains for the time being. It probably won't leak again until another 40 mph south wind comes along. Meanwhile, you know you live in a construction zone when your kitchen dish-drying rack looks like this:

Beau is hoping life returns to normal tomorrow.