Arrival, Landing, Transition, and More Clean-up(!)

To encapsulate a long, difficult and sad part of the story of the first month of this new farm endeavor briefly:

Tim and Regina moved to the farm after 3 years of relationship with lots of rapidly acquired animals to pursue what had become Tim’s vision.  Then Regina left. She is supporting from afar with good feelings between us.This blog is then the account of one man attempting to launch a community farm.

While the insanely busy first two months of development were very hard on the humans, the animals have been happy as clams in a beach in Baja.  Thanks to the late spring rains and the fertile valley bottom land of the farm there has been lush forage for the goats, turkeys, chickens, ducks and pigs.  They have been so busy eating that they have not even noticed the humans struggling and toiling.  I have been bearing the hot days together with the animals, doing more water carrying than a smart person with plumbing parts in the barn should stand for, but the systems get more established every day.

The above mentioned lush forage quality also meant that in June we walked onto an abandoned 25-acre farm of head high grass.  There were many hours of tractor mowing, weed whacking, fence removal and continuous discovery (and subsequent disposal) of more debris and trash and metal wire and so on and so on.  So my earlier declaration of the slaying of the trash pile was an underestimation of the clean-up process of at least a hundred hours of labor and 10 more cubic yards of landfill and almost that much scrap metal.  Besides getting help from Regina, I received many incredible volunteer work blessings from friends and neighbors.

The lush summer pasture yielded 800 bales of hay of varying quality from high to low in early June and then re-grew to 2-6 inches of grasses, clovers, vetch, and plantain.  The focus of the farm work has been largely around the structures, fencing, and infrastructure needed to raise and pasture the animals.  Tomorrow on the second to last day of July I will be putting my first vegetable garden in the ground.  The sad starts have spent an extra month in their 4” containers because having my own tomatoes or cucumbers wasn’t the highest priority (maybe it should have been).  The plan is to do a fall garden planting in late August aiming at doing some marketing in October along with the eggs that will be coming in, in order to get out and solicit members for our CSA launch the next year.   

More chicks will be hatched this fall to have the ideal size laying flock and turkeys and ducks will be bred over winter, all with careful projection for the farm season next year.  The 5 female goats will be bred also this fall to our soon to be arriving buck, Elvis.  This should of course result in goat babies and lots of milk!   

Okay, back to work… I mean off to bed.

Construction (and De-construction) Begins

Finally.  We didn't have to spent our whirlwind weekend picking up dirty diapers, used motor oil, rotting wood, rusty metal, beer bottles and cans and PLASTIC (so much!)...  So we got busy building and demolishing.  Some of this had begun a week earlier with Tim and a new local friend Ben.

Fortunately for us, our friends stepped up and we had 15 friends come and help us over the course of our 2-day work party.  The beauty of working with people we really know and trust is that we could explain jobs to them and then walk away.   Regina and I were able to focus on some really dirty projects and logistics, and before we knew it... BAM.  Serious progress.  Unfortunately we don't have a working camera, but we will soon take some pictures so we can show some before and after shots.

It is SO exciting to us to see this quiet, and pretty much wrecked farm space come alive and start to transform into the visions, plans, and drawings that Regina and I have been working on remotely for so many months as we have prepared to begin this project.  After one more weekend of Tim finishing up some projects ahead we will have a farm that is at least ready for our 6 goats, 2 pigs, 10 laying hens, and dozens of baby chicks and turkeys.  We will be camping on the land for the first few weeks while we finish preparing the place to be suitable for us.

We hope you will come and visit soon!

Slaying the trash pile

When we first saw the farm (and everyone we took to see it in the early times) we couldn't really find words to describe the mess it was left in.  A good friend came to help me but then just walked around, mouth open, too stunned to do anything.  Fortunately we have big imaginations and Tim has a lot of stubborn energy and a few amazing friends and family really stepped up in a big way to help us slay the beastly pile.  Thank you Rachel, Justin, Matt, Alex, Nick, Ryan, Cobb, Susan, Ben and others!



So, 200 hours of labor later, how much trash was there?

Not everyone is enough of a spatial thinker to easily conceptualize what 1 cubic yard of trash looks like.  So to help you visualize this, it is about one small pick-up load.  Hopefully that will help you to understand the amount of work required to remove:

• 60 cu. yards of landfill trash
• 3 cu. yards of beer bottles and cans
• 50+ cu. yards of scrap metal
• 50+ cu. yards of scrap wood
• 8 cu. yards of recyclable black irrigation tubing

You can also probably imagine our excitement that we have finally managed to remove all of this material from this piece of earth so that we can best grow healthy clean food, and maintain an organized farm!  We can't wait to bring people to see the beautiful farm-scape to be.

We also want to take from this experience strong lessons about how we choose to use materials and resources in the future.  It's not that we don't value saving useful things (we definitely salvaged some useful materials from the chaos)... we just want to close loop on farm inputs wherever possible.  Stay tuned to see how we do at accomplishing that (HUGE) goal.