We get a lot of rain here, and as a result, see a great many rainbows. This one showed up while we were jogging on the beach, and was especially good. I apologize for the optical deformity at the top; the lens on my phone isn’t wide angle enough to capture the whole thing… without a little Photoshop stitching. 🙂
Things are finally getting rolling at the farm. Today, Emily seeded up all the flats of onions for this year. Yeah, yeah, I know- we’re a few weeks behind. Things have been crazy! We have some tasty varieties we’re planting this year, including a return visit from Fukugawa green onions, Cortland storage onions, and my beloved Ailsa Craig onions (a sweet onion, like Walla Walla, but an heirloom from Scotland that is well adapted to our weather). We’re also trying a new red onion this year, Apache. I hope it does better than the ciprollinis last year- they were tasty, but didn’t grow very large. I think they were unhappy.
The work on the cabin continues apace. Adam really stuck it out, and when all was said and done, he put in over 30 hours of work with me last week. We got a huge milestone out of the way, too: the jacking of the house, and subsequent new subflooring, is complete. Here we see Adam in our moment of victory on the new, sturdy plywood floor. We celebrated on the last day by dragging the wood stove back to its original position, and provisionally hooking it up to the chimney once again. By the time Emily showed up with the celebratory pizza, we had a roaring fire going and… well… had the first pizza party of the new house. Yay!
But what I’m really excited to talk about today is the WaterMaster. His job, along with his four counterparts in Oregon, is to make sure everyone gets their fair share of our limited groundwater supply (1). He measures river flows, reservoir levels, and so forth, looks at recorded water rights, and tells users when they have to ration or are completely cut off during the dry season. He is also knowledgeable about the geology and hydrology of the state, and can make insightful recommendations about groundwater practices.
As part of getting a building permit, the county required me to get a letter from him stating that it was theoretically possible to get water on the site. After several weeks of trying to coordinate schedules (remember, there are only five watermasters in the whole state), he offered to meet me at the property. Needless to say, I was thrilled- a chance to get more quality advice from a knowledgeable person.
When he arrived, we walked around the property and looked at the options. Some things I already knew, or at least suspected: the creek is for all practical purposes useless to us. Users with much older water rights have priority, and during the months we’d need water for irrigation, the reduced summer flow of the creek wouldn’t even be enough to satisfy their demands, and we’d be legally prohibited from using it.
He also brought with him a list of wells on nearby properties (all wells must be recorded with his office). The news was bleak: most were between 150 and 210 feet deep, and produced little flow. One well didn’t produce anything. Our neighbor told me a few months ago that he had a 200-foot well that had water so iron-laden that it turned his wife’s hair orange. She got mad about that, and had him dig a “surface well.” It then produced copious amounts of sparkling, tasty water.
Now, I’d heard about this “surface well” before, from both the farmer across the street, as well as my excavator buddy that redid the driveway. It sounded a little sketchy, but very interesting, so I got excited when the watermaster started talking about it. “Your property is a great opportunity for a surface well,” he explained, starting in with a geology lesson. It seems that most of the soils of oregon are build up of a very deep clay-sandstone plate that was once ocean bottom. Tectonic activity pushed it up into the Cascadia range, after which it became covered with gravel as things broke down, and eventually organic matter formed. End result: groundwater flows like an underground river, above the clay plate, through the gravel.
That’s where the “surface well” comes in. If you dig through the plate, you get no water or bad water, as the good and plentiful stuff is held above the clay layer. But a much of the rainwater we get is constantly collecting underground in the shallow, gravelly layer above the clay plate. The surface well exploits this hydrology. It’s a ±5 foot diameter vertical concrete pipe, about 12 feet deep, with perforations along the lower half of it. It’s placed in a 12′ wide pit that’s filled with coarse gravel, that allows the subsurface water to percolate through and into the pipe. At the water table, the coarse gravel is capped with geotextile fabric and a layer of bentonite clay, then the rest of the pit is backfilled. Bentonite expands upon contact with water, forming a seal to keep potentially contaminated water from the ACTUAL surface out of the well.
Of course, there are some catches. The big one is that the surface well is only allowed if it’s constructed by the property owner. Weird. I guess it’s a holdback to frontier days and American notions of self-sufficiency, much like the same rules that make it OK for a property owner to do his own plumbing and electrical work without a plumber’s or electrician’s license. I’m not so hot on digging a 12′ by 12′ hole, but not to worry: I’m allowed to pay someone to do that, as long as I am the main contractor and direct the work, and the guy was on my property to do other work anyway. I also am required to get the construction bond, pay for the permits, and so forth.
This… is getting to be more of an adventure every day!
(1) Side rant: yes, even at 96″ of annual rainfall, we have a limited supply of water. In fact, everyone does. The potable water on this planet is limited, aquifers are being depleted by irresponsible irrigation, and more than half of drinkable water used in buildings is flushed down the toilet.
…is a funny AC/DC song that keeps going through my head this week. Because this week is Jack the Cottage week. We’re pulling the rotting bits out of our little house, and to do that, we basically have to jack the building off of the foundation. Check out the sketch: this house is built with platform framing, meaning that the walls sit upon the floor which sits upon the foundation. Very typical in houses made after the mid-20th century. In our case, moisture had entered the wall, and soaked through to the plywood, causing it to rot. The hard part about removing it is that it’s pinched between the wall and floor framing by the entire weight of the building.
Enter: 20-ton hydraulic jack. One of our farmer buddies had one on hand (no family should be without one) and we set to work attaching temporary beams to the walls. These are 2x12s that are screwed into every stud. Then, we pass needle beams through the walls, and block them up with 4x4s. Patiently, carefully, we go back and forth between each end of the beam, jacking it up a bit, inserting a longer 4×4 under the end, and letting it down a bit to remove the jack. The end result is a building lifted an inch or so in the air! Luckily, that is all you need to get in there with a sawsall, cut the nail, and pull out the rotting plywood. Easy!
Working our way around the building, eight feet at a time, is time consuming but not too hard now that we have a hang of the system. Once we have the wood out and surrounding framing clean, we insert a new sheet of stronger 3/4″ subfloor, lower the house, and beat it with a sledge a few times until it’s plumb. Some new plywood on the side will keep it from blowing away in the next windstorm.
This has been made easier with the aid of yet more friends. Adam is down for the week, helping me out in a work-trade program (I helped him build his new sound recording studio in his basement last month). And Sleep continues to lend a hand, which is really helpful. I get WAY more work done with extra people on site. Part of that is motivational, but it’s also a truism that two people get about three times as much work done as one, becuase of the efficiency of helping you carry things and hold them in place while you conncet them.
When I was little, my mom used to recite this poem every spring:
Spring has sprung
The grass is riz’
I wonder where the flowers is?
I think of that every spring when my favorite flower, the daffodil, appears. A fragile, short-lived flower, I like daffodils because they are pretty, and they sprout up unexpectedly in unforeseen places to announce the coming of spring. Also, their timing correlated with the last weeks before my birthday. With global warming, though, they now appear much earlier. I was out at the new property yesterday, and saw some at the edge of our new gravel driveway. A friend of ours pointed out that in many places, the presence of daffodils gives archaeological clues to former dwelling places used by the pioneers. They planted daffodils (as well as other flowers) around their homesteads, and the daffodils remain- in part, because they are in hiding eleven months out of the year, but also because the bulbs are poisonous (or at least not tasty) to animals that might otherwise eat them.
But other things are starting to “spring” back to life, as well. Our experimental winter wheat has little heads on it, which is very exciting. I still don’t know how much we’ll get, but it’ll be fun to see. Our garlic has resumed growth as well. As a result, today was the first day of real farming for the new year. Emily and Allison (another buddy of ours) went out to the original farm to weed and fertilize the garlic. While she was out there, she also sprayed fish emulsion (another fertilizer) on our fruit trees. They have buds, and are soon to explode with growth. Hmm, I guess it’s time for me to start pruning. I LOVE pruning.
As you know if you’ve been following along, we’re in the process of renovating a derelict cabin into the new home of Peace Crops. This last week, though, there really hasn’t been much swinging of hammers or scooping of shovels. Instead, it’s been more like pushing of pencils.
You’d think I’d have forseen this, since in my other life I’m an architect. But the reality is, I don’t actually do the physical building on many projects, and I’ve never before owned a home. Wow, there’s a lot of paperwork! Our property is especially “blessed” in this regards, as it was subject to an Administrative Review by the county zoning board for being a nonconforming parcel. In English: when we bought the place, we got a 118-page legal document of extra “stuff” we have to do if we want to live there. It includes things like
and a zillion other things… some easy, some complicated. My favorite right now is the deal with the septic system. The property actually came with one (a surprise, since there isn’t a water source on the property), but we have to have it pumped, even though it’s empty, and a “pump report” provided by the certified septic system pumper guy. THEN, we have to take that to the county septic board, along with some other forms I have to fill out, and a site plan, and so forth, and they then send an official Pooper Inspector (my title, not theirs) to look one more time and say “yep, they have a septic system”. Oh, and it costs $575 for him to come take a look.
While all of this is going on, I’m also working up the energy to draw my house… the county building department actually wants to see a plans of what I plan on remodeling. I wasn’t intending to do that, I was just going to fake it, but they are insistent that I provide them with something. The cobbler’s son goes unshod!
One of the things that has been giving us some trouble is the road into the property. Muddy, slippery… I had to use four wheel drive to get up to the cottage. But now, with the help of my buddy Dick (and a few thousand dollars worth of gravel!) we have a great driveway. Not only can Emily now get all the way up to the house in her cute orange car, but our other friends (read: laborers) can as well! It was quite a bit of work. Dick had to take out a few trees, and limb up many others, so he could get his giant dumptruck full of gravel down the road. Who knew that a dumptruck was 30 feet tall when the dumper was all the way up?
In other news, we have finally replaced all of the rotten floor joists. Now we can start looking onto replacing the rotten subfloor. See how you can see daylight out the wall below the windows? We have to remove some of the siding to attach temporary lifting beams to the wall, so we can jack the whole building a few inches off of the foundation to get at the rotten subfloor. If it sounds stressful, it is. Poco a poco (little by little) they say in Guatemala.
And, as expected, there is some rotting in the sill plate of the wall too. We saw this extremely deteriorated area when we pulled off the siding. We’ll have to replace all of that framing, and while we’re in there, we’ll be replacing the rotten insulation too. Moral of the story: install proper flashing when you stick a deck onto your house. Or, better yet, let the deck float clear entirely.
Sleep, one of our friends who was helping this weekend, pointed out that I’d need to get some more of the siding off to get at the bottom part of the west wall… meaning, even more of the deck had to be destroyed. Luckily, that is fun work that’s appropriate for a gaggle of friends hanging out on a sunday afternoon. Here we see destruction in progress.
In other news, this week is seed ordering. The process of picking what we want isn’t all that hard, but going through 6 different catalogs to find the best deals and varieties is laborious at best. If you have something you’d like to see us grow, let us know soon. We’re mostly sticking with what we did last year, due to the insanity with trying to get a new house built, but there is room for a little experimentation.
Good news! The EU has recently decided to restrict the use of neonicotinoids, a class of pesticide that has been linked to declining bee populations. Whether or not you like honey, you should care about this because bees also pollinate nearly a quarter of all food grown on this planet. We are in huge trouble without them.
Most of us beekeepers have been ranting about this for a while. Agrochemical manufacturing giants like Bayer Crop Science say that they’ve tested it and it doesn’t hurt bees, but the latest thinking is that the tests are flawed… they only look at live, adult bees. Bee larvae aren’t examined, and no one is studying the long term effect after several generations of exposure in a colony. It would be like saying thalidomide is OK as a sleeping pill… despite the fact that it caused tens of thousands of kids to be born without limbs in the 50s and 60s.
In other good bee news, work is being done at Purdue University (thanks for the article, dad!) to isolate a gene in bees that encourages anti-mite behavior. Mites are one of the other big problems in bee survival; these parasites sucky the bodily fluids of larval bees, and in large enough numbers, can destroy the entire colony. Some bees, however, will discard infected larvae or even attack the mites directly. The idea is that by figuring out which bees carry this gene, they can be selectively bred to enhance this trait- it’s like the selective breeding mankind has done with livestock for millennia, but with less trial-and-error. Note that this is different from “genetic modification,” or grafting a gene from one species of creature into another. That’a process I’m generally uncomfortable with, as it can have long-reaching effects that we as humans can’t foresee… and will be unable to control, once a genetically modified organism is out in the wild and reproducing rampantly. The aforementioned neonicotinoid pesticide is a good example: scientists have genetically engineered a type of sunflower that contains a gene from another plant, causing it to manufacture this pesticide in its own cell structures. Great for protecting against bugs eating your harvest, but what happens if this things spreads in the wild, and then we realize it kills bees too?
I’ve been thinking about bees today, because I just had a paperwork meeting with Terry, my Bee Mentor. I’m in the OSU Master Beekeeper program, and as a part of that, we have a paperwork/ skills checkoff system very similar to earning ranks in Boy Scouts. As a kid, I enjoyed that sort of thing, but as an adult, it feels kindof goofy. Terry feels similarly, but we both realize that it’s merely a necessary inconvenience in the overall system to encourage a structured learning progression for a rather complicated craft. It’s also a good excuse to get together and talk about those fuzzy, buzzy bees- something beekeepers really like to do too.
We’re back from the 2013 EcoFarm conference in sunny Monterey, California. I had such a good time last year that I figured I should take Emily with me this time. It’s an interesting conference- I attended sessions on growing blueberries, making cider, repurposing farm equipment, and so forth. Sometimes, though, we ran afoul of one of the drawbacks to the “conference” system: with concurrent sessions, you sometimes miss one good class because you are at another. For example, I missed the class on seed saving. But with Emily there, we got most of it covered using the “divide and conquer” system.
One of the highlights of the conference is the food that comes out of the dining hall. This is not normally the case at conferences, but this was a FOODIE conference! All the meals were organic, free range, non-GMO, gluten free, and any other fancy adjective you could think to stick on there, made mostly from food donated by organic farms in the area. It was scrumptious. Meals were served family style at large, 7 to 12 person tables with a lazy susan in the middle. We met many interesting folk this way. The last dinner of the conference was especially tasty, and came with locally produced organic wine and hard cider. For some reason, our tablemates were in a hurry to get on to other things, and left the two of us pretty early… along with two nearly full bottles of high-quality libation. Best not let that go to waste! We closed the shop that night, drinking and chatting and enjoying ourselves until late, finishing both bottles. We weren’t the only people with that idea… one other table stayed longer than us, and was much louder. Earlier in the evening, I’d seen one of them going from empty table to empty table, collecting all the remaining bottles of organic wine and adding them to their evening meal. Smart fellows!
Right. Now it’s time to get back to work on the cottage. We’re going to be scraping and re-graveling the driveway this week, and some other random tasks. We’ll keep you posted.
All this talk of the remodel on the cabin, and I just realized that I’ve not yet posted any images of what it’s going to LOOK like. In fact, I didn’t even work it out until sortof recently, and it’s likely that I won’t do much of a set of architectural drawings for the project. You know, “the cobbler’s son goes unshod” and all that. But I do have a SketchUp model done, so here are a few renderings for the curious.
Last week, yet another friend showed up to lend a hand with the demolition. I’ve known Brian since elementary school, and he occasionally posts on our blog as Chicken Brian. He lives in the Chicago area, but was out this way for business, and thought he’d drop by. “I’d love to help you work on the house,” he said. When people come visit, I like to take them hiking and to the beach… you know, fun tourist stuff. But he really wanted to be a part of what were doing, and we’re proud to have a little bit of his sweat in the house too. Here he is, after helping us take up the last of the subfloor. But don’t worry- we still had plenty of time left over for beaches and hiking, before he left again 36 hours later.
And with that, we’re nearing the end of the demolition phase. We’ve amassed quite a pile of debris outside the house, and that will have to be taken care of at some point. There is still a few days of demo left, and there will be occasional minor demolition when we get to the roof in a few months, but I can feel the excitement building for the start of… well… building!
The weather has been absolutely BALMY in the last two days: sunny, with temperatures in the 50s. But it wasn’t like that for most of the week, and I noticed the mercury on the wall thermometer inside the new house at a pleasant 33 degrees. I say “pleasant,” because I wear the full complement of Carhartts as I demolish, and it’s only a matter of minutes before I’m pretty comfortable. Working inside is kindof nice, watching the rain (and occasionally hail) fall outside, reminding me that warm is all relative… 33 can be pretty awful if you’re wet at the same time.
We’ve had a new discovery, too. Besides the rotten subfloor I mentioned in the last post, I’ve discovered that most of the floor joist have rotten ends from contact with the evil siding. They must come out, too. Ryan and I stewed upon the problem awhile, then he pointed out that it may cost a few hundred dollars and half a day’s work to replace them right now, but that’s WAY better than the time and expense to replace them in a few years when the house is all closed up. Good point. It gets me wondering when I’ll hit the point of diminishing returns and be better off burning the place down, but we’re still pretty far from that… the foundation is in excellent shape, and the roof/ walls appear sound too. We are nearly out of unknowns, which is reassuring.
Concerned about the soffit and roof structure, I pulled that off to discover that it’s in OK shape. The structure, I mean. The soffit is a total writeoff. Here’s a picture of the rats nests that were up there… ewww!
Wrecking stuff isn’t the only adventure in construction so far, either. I had the lumber yard deliver new joists, since they are 20 feet long and would not fit well in my 6′ pickup bed. The driveway is impassable without four wheel drive, so I had them unload at the edge of the property. Getting the plywood up to the house using my truck was fairly easy, but the joists required creative thinking. Carrying them by hand wasn’t an option; soaking wet and frozen from transit, they weighed about 80 pound apiece are were extremely awkward to handle. I ended up tying them in bundles of four with ratchet straps, tying a prusik around the end of them with a tow rope, and dragging them up the driveway with my truck. Worked great!
