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)



Finally some rain...

It finally rained on Fri, 5/25. Our farm rain gauge showed 2.7 inches.

The vetch is blooming a beautiful purple. We really like this cover. It kills easily by low mowing / cutting with the tractor or with hand trimmer. It kills into a thick mat helping to further suppress weeds and we envision it will be quite an addition to the tilth of our soils when we turn it in this fall.

The blue at the lower bottom is an irrigation header line

And it's scape time! We noticed them last week and now several varieties have produced scapes:

Tzan

Bavarian Purple

Russian Red

Spanish Roja

Siberian

Polish Hardneck

Music

Kazakhstan

We harvested some and grilled them for dinner last night. They are so delicious and have much more garlic flavor than the green garlic.

We were walking the farm to document if we had any rain/watershed areas of concern and while standing behind the shop looking at our low growing fields (not yet in production), I happened to glance to the side and only about 4' away from me was a sleeping fawn. I'm sure the mom was somewhere near watching us closely.