ridiculous weather

So, it's totes snowing, which I find outrageous. It's weird being at the intersection of all these valleys ... crazyass weather comes and goes at all times. This morning it was cold but not too bad, so Devin starting seeding parsnips. Halfway through the first row it started snowing, so we had to go on to something else. We started marking out more beds in the new field (some in the greens section for the lettuce transplants when they're ready, some in the roots section for seeding beets), and halfway through that it was sunny and getting warm again. You end up looking around at all the green grass and flowers and stuff growing, then if you look up just a bit, there are these very close epic mountains with fresh snow all over them. It makes for a bit of a schizophrenic landscape, but it's really beautiful.

The chicks are still sort of struggling, but I think they're starting to get a bit better. They got chilled in transit, so although we've been keeping them uber warm and giving them everything their tiny hearts could desire (chicken gatorade, both food and gravel to eat ... all the amenities, y'know), there have been a lot more deaths than is usual. I feel bad for the poor little guys, but they seem to be rallying now, and they're growing really quickly. You can see from the photo above of a few of the huddled masses that they're looking a little patchy and messy still, but I think that the attention is starting to make a difference. Judi tells us they're usually a lot more adorable and a lot less covered in gunk, but I think they're pretty okay as is.

I've been getting the shop all set up the last couple of days, which is really exciting. I have my work benches done, my new dovetail jig is here (!!!!!), and I've been changing the blades on the planer, organizing all my crap, and generally getting ready to start making rad shit. The next day or so will probably be spent working in the field and getting some hoop houses ready for the more delicate plants, but after that I'm ready to go on the side tables.

It seems crazy to me that we only got here just over three weeks ago. It feels like ages, maybe because we've been working a lot every day and the weekends and days of the month have become sort of meaningless, or maybe because we spend the majority of our time on the farm and the outside world tends to recede back. Whatever the reason, it's a bit of a dislocating feeling, but not in a bad way. I'm really really happy here, and even all the gardening stuff is really starting to come together and make sense to me, which is cool, as at first people would bust out all this gardening lingo and I would stare at them in incomprehension and start zoning immediately. I've obviously got a ridiculous amount still to learn, but it's starting to make sense and click into place, which is rad.

it begins ...

All of a sudden, it feels like things are really starting to get rolling pretty damn fast. A couple of days ago we started staking off the market garden in the new field, and got some seed potatoes in (as you can see from the pictures). In the last two days we finished stringing the wire for the fence extension (the field had been used as pasture in previous years, so the fence wasn't high enough to keep deer out) and getting it all tightened. The irrigation line is in place in bare bones form, so we'll just need to add more connections coming off it as we get plants in the ground. The spinach is going in today to keep the taters company, and Devin has a crop rotation plan pretty much totally mapped out now, so the rest of will gradually get dropped into various slots. Yesterday was the first twelve hour day, and I think that's pretty much how it's gonna be from now to the foreseeable future. I am stoked! I feel really lucky that we get to be a part of a solid, established farm, but that we are getting to be a part of putting in a new garden and adding new animals (pigs! coming soon!), because it's a good chance to learn every step of the process without it being too crazy intimidating. So, yeah, stuff is pretty totally rad. I will take more pictures of the garden as we get it staked off and planted in and as it starts to look a bit more like something besides a giant rectangle of dirt. other than the directly farming related projects, I am about to start building a matched set of side tables for Alex and Judi (which will be both lucrative and fun, and which has given me an excuse to buy a dovetail jig, which i am max excited about), and it looks like I'll be finishing framing out the windows in the workshop, shingling our house, and putting in a set of french doors (Devin will prolly work with me on the latter three endeavors, depending on how crazy busy he is).

the new field

The picture above is the freshly tilled new field ... lookin' damn fine. Yesterday was a pretty busy day ... we had guys out here tilling and liming the fields. I spent part of the day picking rocks behind the tractor, part of the day working on fencing, and most of the day toting around 40 kg sacks of lime. These had to be tossed into the scoop of the tractor, cut open with a shovel, and dumped out, and we did damn near 200 of them. The fields look great, and I feel like a tough guy, which is a good combo. The guy running the big tractor told me at the end of the day that he had to hand it to me, because he'd never seen anyone work like that, which is a pretty amazing compliment to get. The new field is now pretty much ready to go ... we're just finishing reinforcing the deer fencing to make it 6' plus. Right now we're doing a quick and dirty job where we use baling twine to attach a taller post to each short post, which we hope will get shored up to be even sturdier when we stretch the wire across it. It should be good enough to keep out the deer for now, anyway.

On a more nurturing note, we now have 200 tiny baby chickens (mostly meat birds, but a few layers)! They came in late Thursday night and I got to help introduce them to their new home and teach them to drink water (dip beak in water, repeat). For now, they're in a tiny enclosure under heat lamps so we can try to keep their temperature at around 90 degrees. As they get bigger and able to keep themselves warm and take care of themselves, we'll gradually enlarge the enclosure. I'll try to get a picture of them soon, but right now Judi is just going into the garage where they're kept quickly every 12 hours to make sure the heat stays in. Even their food and water needs to be warmed before it goes in.

It's a really beautiful morning here. The sun is already burning the fog off, and I can hear geese flying over (as well as Gretchen snoring). Devin gets home from Victoria today, so that will be good also. I look forward to once again having access to a motorcar, which I am gonna use to go get smokes and a beer. And a library card. Not necessarily in order of priority.

the dogs

Bean and Gretchen are pretty ridiculously happy here. They have shed their collars and officially become farm dogs (and have discovered all kinds of gross stuff to roll in to seal the deal). They spend pretty much all day outside (although Gretchen will occasionally sneak back in and fall asleep on our bed, generally after rolling around in the horse manure on the new field, if possible), so by nighttime they are totes beat and spend the whole time sleeping and being cuddly. This photo is definitely representative of their energy levels by the end of the day.

the workshop!

Here are a couple of shots of the workshop. You can see the utility shelves that I built or fixed up, painted, and installed for tool storage, and a bunch of crazy old cabinets (some from the dump, some from the newspaper office where they were used to store type back in the day) that I fixed up and made a new countertop for. We're still in the process of getting organized, but I am almost done a new workbench that will be really flexible in terms of how I can use it and put it away and store it, and that will also serve as an outfeed table for the table saw. The next project will either be a big worktable with a solid top for Alex to use, or some side tables for Alex and Judi that we still need to talk about and design. Once those are done with, I need to build a bunch of bookcases for our house and a table for the record player to live on. The field is what you see when you walk out the front door of the workshop, and it's the new field that will be used as Devin's market garden. This weekend we got four truck and trailer loads of horse manure and spread them all out on the field. A guy is coming in to till it all up later this week, then we'll be good to go. We'll run a chicken tractor around the perimeter, and maybe do something similar with the pigs.

the house

For the benefit of family type folks who want to see our house, here are a couple of pictures of it. It is pretty much the schmanciest and most grown up type place either of us have ever lived, which is kinda crazy. There are two lofts, one of which is Devin's private space, one of which is mine. We tried a bold new policy of sleeping in a loft and without the dogs, but that lasted all of two nights, one of which involved Gretchen being carried up a ladder midway through the night. So now we just sleep in a bedroom with dogs, which is pretty okay.

random scenes

This is what I see when I wake up in the morning. Stoked! It's only three weeks since the last photos, but the snow is pretty much totally gone. You can see fresh snow on the mountaintops in the last photo, but down here in the valley it's uber warm and protected. During the days, it's already way warmer than Victoria summers, and I've already been working in sleeveless shirts and guzzling tons of water and wishing that woodworking in shorts or miniskirts was not such a stupid idea. The first picture is part of the old shed right by our house. Part of it is storage for everyone's building supplies, but the part in the picture is a couple of rooms Devin has been cleaning out (hence all the junk on the ground). Half of it is his tool shed, and the part in behind will house our piglets in a few weeks.

first trip up this year

Here are some pictures from when we dropped off our first load of stuff in mid March. It was still pretty crazy snowy, but pretty rad nonetheless. The dog in the pictures is Tula, the farm dog who is giant and old and snorty and all in all pretty awesome.