House Update

The house construction is moving along.  The basement and crawl space walls have been repaired, tuck pointed and/or re-poured and all have been sprayed with structural foam.  The basement floor has also been repoured - after Bill and some helpers dug down an additional 10" in the basement and hauled it up and out.  Tomorrow brings a crew of carpenters to help Bill pull off the old roof, reframe and prepare for the new roof.  This week also brings the excavator to dig the foundation for the addition (a/k/a the new house where we will live) - we hope the foundation will be poured early next week.

 The gray is the exterior foam which is structural.  The yellow are interior foundation walls which only need insulating

Interior shot.  The space where the ladder is going down will be the commercial kitchen (at grade) and a basement underneath

Labor Day found us seeding cover crops.  Bill cultivated with the tractor on Fields 1, 2, 4, 9 and 11.  I followed behind with the hand seeder.  1 and 2 got white clover while 4, 9, and 11 got a mixture of peas, oats, vetch, winter rye, and crimson clover; which will be tilled in next spring.  Fields 1 and 2 will be replanted with garlic in - yikes - 6 weeks.

The drought has claimed a fair number of our orchard trees, planted this spring.  We anticipate a 50% survival rate.

The barn cats are settling in nicely. 

All 4 sleeping

(Left to right:  Sylvia, Mr. White, Oscar, Thomas)



Garlic planting begins!

We are in Wisconsin. I've spent the past two days popping cloves (breaking open the bulbs into individual cloves). I clocked in 11 hours while Bill was tilling the fields, picking up the tractor and fixing fences since the neighbor's cattle have been discovering that the grass is indeed greener on our side of the fence.

Music - a Porcelain variety

Spanish Roja - a Rocambole

Simonetti - an Artichoke

Bai Pi Suan - an Marbled Purple Stripe

look at that beautiful toffee marbling!

Various varieties in netting

And then today, Thurs, 10/6/11, after 6 years of planning and 5 years of farm ownership, we finally planted a crop! (I'm not counting the farm garden which was for personal use.)

Field #1 - before planting

Varieties all organized by type

tools include clipboard, tapemeasure, scale

7 hole dibbler - homemade by Bill out of Black Locust

(even our lumber is local!)

Dibbler in Action!

3 rows / bed. 39" wide bed. 12" between rows. 8" between plants.

Planting on the grid - it makes life easier!

We each have carpenter's aprons to carry the cloves down the rows

Me putting garlic to bed

After Day #1. We have more garlic than will fit Field #1;

looks as if we'll be tilling up part or most of Field #2.

As we were leaving the farm, my cellphone rang and now we have an appointment with our organic certifier for Saturday!

Field #1

The buckwheat cover crop in Field #1 was mown down on Mon, 9/19. We left it to decompose and will till it in on Tues, 10/4 before we begin planting that week.

Buckwheat stubble - it did a great job of smothering the seed bank

This gives a good idea of the bed size.

We will plant between the tractor tire marks.

We will plant in alternating beds within the field and in the fallow beds will plant clover which will suppress the weed seeds and allow a nice path for access to the plants.

Sparky the tractor went into our Mennonite farmer neighbors for a tune-up (they run a tractor repair and a roadside farm stand). They are nice folks and we enjoyed meeting them. They run tractors on steel wheels instead of rubber. Here is a photo of a Mennonite doing some haying - note the wheels.

Disc'ing and celebrating the 4th

Our disc finally arrived - it was about 3 weeks later than it should have been. Bill was in Wisc and got the call that it had arrived on Fri, 6/24 in the morning. He was supposed to come home that day but opted to stay all day and disc our fields that badly needed it.

With the wise advice of our farm mentor, the plan is now to rake (i.e. with our cultivator) several times to pull the quack grass out. So we did that yesterday.

Bill did one pass and as I was standing at the field edge admiring the soil, I noticed it moving. Like something was burrowing underneath. Groundhogs. If I had a shovel with me, I could have done away with it.

We are having a real infestation of groundhogs at our farm and it is becoming quite a problem. The burrows are everywhere and we often even see them poking their heads out of the burrows. Preferring to not use poison/bait, we've opted for the old-fashioned route. Bill dug out his rifle from his childhood, dusted it off and has been target practicing.

(Yes, our High Life cans from the day before. Our 'end-of-day-good-day-of-work' celebratory beer We typically like microbrews, but on a hot summer day, there is nothing like plunging your hand in an icy cooler and coming up with a can of beer.)

As he was sighting the scope, Bill urged me to give it a try. (It just seems like the 4th of July is the appropriate time to shot a gun, right?) I've never shot a gun before and I was scared. This is an easy to handle rifle and after Bill's gun safety course (he made me repeat outloud the rules, work the safety, load it, unload it, and put it on single shot, etc.) I did it! I didn't hit the target but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I don't think I'll be target practicing on a regular basis, (I'd rather weed the garden). But it was good to try and I might do it again (especially if my friend Mimi comes up to do some target shooting too! :) )


This picture is for my sister-in-law. Pickles enjoying the double full screendoors at our church-house.