Summer has been very, very busy. I write something in my head, and before I have a chance to sit and write it out, something else happens that is Even Better, and causes the previous thing to be uninteresting. Right now, chickens are The Thing, but we’re hoping to get the cows moved in before the end of the month, and maybe ducks next week. Goats need to be here before the end of the month. And everything takes longer than we expect, and requires at least twice as much talking as we anticipate, but the things we do are so much better together than they would be if we were making decisions individually. Here’s a few pictures of what’s happened over the summer:
Roger Hodgkins cutting the hay – our first crop!D.A. Smithson and Sons Well DrillingJasmine creates beauty (and dust) using heavy machineryOuthouse, half done, and shade plants (thanks, Nanette!)Handwashing station that will wash your feet if you’re not careful.Jasmine makes amazing roadsKids have a play area. Thanks for equipment, Grandma Gail!Food Digester, used a great deal before we had CHICKENS (and before the bear knocked it over).Our first livestock! Thanks, Ellen and Adrian. They got out three times, one overnighter, but we’ve still got both.Cistern. Now if we could get electricity, we’d have water!The Transition House, knocked together inside the ‘barn’ to house chickens until we have something better. I used your fancy tool belt, Uncle Rod, but still managed to drop a hammer on Tony’s head.CHICKENS!!! They have already earned their purchase/feeding in eggs, took less than a week.An Actual Haystack, hay scythed by Sweaty People because it ended up being faster/quieter/more-fun than weedwacking.
And now, I think you’re mostly caught up. We are having Such A Good Time.
We’ve had the marvelous and adept Jasmine at our farm, for the past little while, and she drives Big Machinery.
She made us a road!
Jasmine has scraped away the two inches of soil on top of the driest and least living part of our farm, so we can use the space for materials storage and parking. She built an earth berm, filled with brush and old wood, so we have a bit of privacy and delineation (dogwalkers like to know where to go, and we made a nice path) in the short term and a decent place to grow things (hugelkultur!) after a wet winter. We had our containers delivered, on to cement blocks on top of carefully leveled (by Jasmine) gravel. Of course, the containers weigh an average of 15,000 lbs apiece, and so they crushed the cement blocks immediately and settled comfortably on the gravel. Due to Jasmine’s expert leveling job, we didn’t need to do any adjustments to the ad-hoc, not quite-as-planned delivery.
Containers, from the outside, snuggled into gravel behind the berm.And from the front!
We’re planning to make a roof between them, for a workshop space and materials storage. Solar panels on the roof, though that plan is still developing and may change.
Having some heavy machinery on site definitely makes things go faster. We’ve discovered that the bottom-most field, where there isn’t much growing but trailing blackberries, patchy grass, and alders, was used as a dump site for excess rocks and gravel. “Lots of road-base!”, declared Jasmine happily.
We’ve got a second berm underway, and a proto-goat-yard. We’ve planned two minimalist access roads (though no road is minimalist with Jasmine around – she has to make sure it’s level, and won’t get potholey or mucky, and probably has to dig down a meter or so and add some of our newly uncovered road base to make sure it will continue to be a road. “I’m just returning the land to what it was, before those developers messed around with it!”, says Jasmine, “And don’t you want it to look nice? How about a nice road, here, and clearing out all that brush?”. She’s an artist with a backhoe, and it’s awfully nice to have her, even if I have to keep convincing her that some of the plants are fine just where they are.
