I get by with a little help from my friends

Now that we’ve “bought the farm,” it’s time to see what we’ve signed up for. There is a pretty big list of fixit items, including things like thinning downed timber and re-gravelling the driveway. That’s actually a bigger deal than you might think, as the driveway is just over a thousand feet long. But it must be done; the upper half of it is impassable without four wheel drive, and last week Josh got stuck in the lower half and I had to pull him out with my trusty truck and tow rope.

The big item, though, is the cabin. I’ve finally had a chance to tear into it and see what I’m dealing with, and it’s about as bad as I suspected after my preliminary survey. The siding is rotten and will have to be replaced, and as you can see here, it’s straight through the wall in some places. This is unfortunate, because on the south side where the weather hits it, the siding was impropoerly installed and a LOT of water penetrated. On the inside, I removed the existing fake wood flooring, and discovered that it was bubbled up because the water from the wall leak had made its way through to the subfloor, which was crappy particleboard. It had turned into a wet, moldy dishrag, sagging between the joists. End result: total tear-out of the floor, down to joists. Luckily, only a few of the joists have any water damage, and replacing them before I install the new subfloor will not be too hard.

Did I mention that the rotten existing subfloor is between the wall and the foundation? That means I will have to bolt a header onto the existing wall, knock holes in the wall (that will be easy, as rotten as it is) to pass needle beams through, and temporarily jack the entire building up an inch or two so I can remove the old and install the new. Thank goodness the building is only 640 square feet.

The deck is very cool with a great view, but it also has to go away. Besides the fact that it’s rotting from neglect, whoever installed it chose to hang it from a ledger on the building, without flashing it. This is one of the #1 bad details perpetrated by unknowing remodelers, and virtually guarantees that you will get water (and subsequent rot) in your home.  But don’t worry, the deck will reappear anew before it’s all over, and it will be even better than before. I promise.

Now you notice I used the word “I” in most of those previous paragraphs. That’s oversimplifying; the reality is that all of our friends here are both excited about our new property and willing and able to pitch in and help. This makes us really happy, not just for the free labor, but for the camaraderie and community aspect of the project. Since the beginning of the Peace Crops farm, we’ve wanted it to be a way to build community. It’s a way to make your friends a permanent part of your home, without creepy things like burying them in the foundation.

It’s probably not a coincidence that many of the first friends to help us are former Peace Corps volunteers (notice the spelling!). Here’s Dan, a great friend who worked in a site very near ours in Guatemala; and Josh, who served in Bolivia, removing the kitchen counters. In the background is Ryan, who I’ve been friends with for much of my life and whose family owns the land we farmed on the last two years. He’s been very helpful with both advice and labor, and I will rely on him quite a bit in the coming months. In fact, one of the biggest challenges on this job will not be getting the manpower, but being able to manage it in a way that people are kept busy so they don’t get bored,  yet get enough rest so they have fun and still want to come over for dinner after it’s all done.

If this all sounds like a lot of work and makes me seem like a macho building guy, please know that it’s not the case and that I’m in “fix the problem” mode, purposefully not thinking too hard about the monumentality of the entire task so as to not freak myself out. My brother is a PhD engineer working as a spook for the government, a very smart guy, and I remember a good piece of wisdom he once shared with me: there is no engineering problem so complex that you can’t solve it by breaking it down into smaller, manageable parts. Poco a poco, hombre. Poco a poco.

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Wassail!

Twelfth night has come and gone- you know, that post Christmas revel that celebrates the Epiphany? Well, there is a great ancient tradition that goes along with that, called “wassailing.” The idea is that you prepare a tasty beverage of spices, fruit juices, and (heaven forbid) some degree of alcohol, and toast to the health of your friends and family. Then, you go out into your orchard and do it again, toasting the trees and giving them a little drink too. In return, the forest spirits will be more inclined to show a good harvest in the coming year.

Since we have an orchard, this seemed like the thing to do. We raided the cellar and brought out a quart of our apple cider from this fall, as well as two pints of the hard cider I brewed up the season before. The sweet cider is rich, earthy, and tastes like summertime. The hard cider is naturally effervescent and awfully dry, and Emily discovered some time ago that if you mix the two, it’s delicious.

We called a few friends and met them at the orchard. Dark comes early this time of year, so we found ourselves standing outside in the misty darkness amongst two score of nearly naked trees, stepping carefully over the squishy hillocks and watching not to topple beehives scattered across the orchard. “Wassail!” someone would toast, taking a drink then pouring a bit on a tree. “Be thou hale!” another would exclaim, following suit with the next. We proceeded that way across the field, tending our orchard as the ancients did.

I present to you a portion of the lyrics to “Here We Come A- Wassailing,” a Christmas carol about this very thing:

Here we come a-wassailing
Among the leaves so green;
Here we come a-wand’ring
So fair to be seen.

And that pretty much sums up the evening.

 

 

 

There is even a Christmas carol about the idea

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Property!

Well, I’ll open with an apology. It’s been a zillion years since we’ve posted, and I’m sorry. Now the excuse.

I didn’t want to mention it earlier, but for the past few months we’ve been working on buying property. There are a lot of reasons for this:

  • We would have more flexibility to do what we want on the farm, especially in regards to permanent infrastructure improvements like barns and irrigation
  • We’d be building equity with all our work
  • We’d embrace our role as legitimate, upstanding pillars of the community

OK, that last one is a little heavy-handed, but the general idea holds true. When we started looking, we knew it would be a long search, as our requirements were pretty specific: 5-10 acres, farmable, good sun exposure, within our price range, and in a very specific region of the county where we have made a lot of friends and like the scenery. But amazingly, we found not one but TWO candidates almost immediately. One turned out to be a dud for  several reasons, but the other really was about perfect. “Gravel Creek,” as we started to call it, met the criteria in most areas. In addition, it had a creek running through it (hence the name), more acres than we need (32), and a derelict cabin.

But the big bonus was the price, which was close to our price range. After making no income for nearly 4 years, with Peace Corps and the subsequent recession, we had a very low payment threshold. But as it turns out, this property was “distressed” and not very appealing to most buyers: No electricity, no well or water supply, not legal for a residence under current zoning, and required a 4×4 to get down the driveway… which has an inadequate bridge over the creek that must be replaced before the fire department would serve the place. But for us, this is OK… even with all that, it was WAY nicer than where we lived in Guatemala. And we just happened to have all the skills, resources, and personal connections to overcome all these obstacles. Here’s Emily with one of our Guatemalan machetes, on our hike to find the far corner of the property. It took three hours of hacking through rainforest to get to the edge and back; on the way, she found a pair of dropped elk antlers that were over three feet long each.


To make a very long story short, months of negotiations followed, which culminated in us finally signing the deal on December 21st, the longest night  of the year and the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar. This strikes us as very auspicious; a start of a new era for us, beginning a climb out of a great darkness, and maybe even the Mayan gods thanking us for two years spent serving their people.

So, here we are. Peace Crops now has a permanent new home. What next?

I am starting this week on a months-long process of renovating the cabin into a livable dwelling. There’s a lot to do- we have to install a well, electricity, replace the exterior siding (leaking), repair water damage inside, install plumbing and wiring, replace windows, install cabinets, make a kitchen and bathroom. Wow. Luckily, a lot of friends have offered to help, and I’m going to call in decades worth of favors I’ve saved up. This is a happy thing, too- our home will have a piece of every one we know in it, built with a few drops of everyone’s sweat, a real community effort. That sounds a little shamanistic I guess, but that’s how we roll.

As for the farm, Ryan and Farmer Ned are allowing us to keep growing vegetables on our current plot for another season. There is no way we could possibly get our new ground ready for planting AND remodel the cabin by spring, so we’re not even going to try. Emily is going to manage the farm (with occasional labor help from me) and I’m going to manage the remodel (with some labor help from her). All in our spare time. We won’t get to relax until fall, looks like.

There will be ongoing posts about the remodel in the coming weeks, and we will resume the farm related posts as well, now that we’re over the hump of winter. Wish us luck! (By the way, the pretty picture on the blog header is very close to where the new property is located; we’re just off the frame to the right.)

 

 

 

 

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2012 harvest statistics

I’ve finally had a chance to compile this year’s harvest statistics. It gives an interesting, quantitative perspective on what we did in 2012. I won’t bore you with all the details, I’ll just give you the highlights, much like the Harper’s Index of Peace Crops agriculture.

  • We produced just over 1200 pounds of food on 3,700 square feet of beds for a gross theoretical market value of $3,923 (that figure doesn’t figure things like loss, which can be significant, and haggling increases)
  • Our average income in vegetables per square foot: $1.06. That’s up from $0.82 last year.
  • In revenue per square foot, garlic was the clear winner, at $5.76.
  • Potatoes, onions, and root crops made up most of the above-average performers.
  • Easter egg radishes made a strong showing at $2.64/sf and drew a LOT of people to our stand.
  • Broccoli was the only green vegetable that performed better than the average.
  • All of the legumes were below average in revenue per square foot, except for sugar snap peas at $2.48.
  • Our dried beans, if we sold them instead of making awesome chili with them, would be the loss leader at around $0.05 per pound.
  • Pumpkins did poorly this year, in contrast to their excellent showing last year, where they produced four times as much.
  • Tomatoes continue to produce poorly, though we got some the last few weeks.
  • Corn was abysmal this year, and will probably be discontinued for a while.
  • Cucumbers fell from the pole position last year at $3.43/sf to the middle of the pack at $1.04.
  • Surprisingly, bush beans outperformed pole beans by 73%. I feel like the poles were too far apart, and if I doubled the density, I could bring their production up to the same as the bush beans.

There were a lot more data that came out of the study, boring details that I will use to plan next years’ crop.  Our goal next year is to increase production without adding any square footage, by intensifying our growing practices and smarter planning.  We’ll see how that goes…

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Google Earth rules

While I was working on my other job, I was looking up a client’s property on Google Earth, and noticed that it showed some VERY recent changes he’d made with a bulldozer. Excited, I zoomed over to the farm to see if we’d been updated too. We have! You can now see our farm from the air, where previously there was only an abandoned piece of land visible. The imagery is dated from July 7, 2012, and very clearly shows our beds, the toolshed, and row covers mostly pulled away for the newly-arrived warmth. You can even see the beehives, if you look for the three white squares amongst the orchard trees in the upper left.

Just thought I’d share the excitement with you.

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Blueberry Pancakes

Blueberry Pancakes

  • 2c flour
  • 4tsp baking powder
  • 1tsp salt
  • 1/2tsp cinnamon
  • 1/4tsp ground nutmeg
  • 1-1/2c milk
  • 2 eggs
  • 4TB melted butter
  • 2TB honey
  • 1 or 2 c blueberries

Mix the wet and dry ingredients separately, then fold the dry ingredients into the wet. If it’s a little thick, add a bit of extra milk. Set the stove to medium heat, and when the pan is hot enough that drops of water crackle, it’s ready. Pour the pancakes, and add the blueberries directly onto the wet pancakes. When the edges are golden, flip and cook until done throughout. Yum! Serve with berry syrup or real maple syrup… none of that high fructose corn syrup stuff.


The first version of this recipe came in a little cookbook they gave us in the Peace Corps; sort of a “here’s how to cook a few simple things so you don’t starve to death” deal. This in itself is insightful, because in developing countries, prepared food is uncommon. No mac-and-cheese, canned soups, and so forth: just raw ingredients. Prepared food is an expensive luxury item. As Americans, though, many of us grew up with Betty Crocker and didn’t know how to bake a cake from scratch.

We modified the pancake recipe over the two years we lived in the village, and what you see here is the final result. When I made it this morning, though, I looked at all my ingredients on the counter and was pleasantly surprised to see that most of them were grown or collected by us or people we know, within a few miles of here. The eggs (and the yummy pork sausage we ate as a side dish!) were from Shelly, the milk was from a farmer buddy who lives about 5 miles up the valley, the butter was Tillamook, the blueberries were from Sturm (the other tenant who farms on our property), and the honey was from my own hives. Even the salt was local; there is a guy here who harvests seawater for local salt production. We know that all of those ingredients are safe, healthy, and helping the local economy.

Now I just have to successfully grow some wheat…

 

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Recipes?

One of this things I had imagined to do with this blog when I originally started it was to post recipes. Yeah, yeah, I know- there are a million recipes on the internet, and I’m not even that much into cooking. But I had a few reasons for wanting to do this. First, I thought it would be a good opportunity to showcase some of the food-related issues Emily and I are spending a lot of time discussing, both in person and online.

The second reason was to build up a database of ideas that people could use to prepare food they buy from our farm. In this modern age, cooking (heck, just preparing food) has gone out of vogue. On top of eating out several times a week, most Americans don’t even “cook” at home. They just reheat; the food has already been prepared in a factory somewhere far away and packaged to store indefinitely on a shelf in the store. I’m not griping about this because I’m a romantic nostalgic; it’s because I see a lot of worrisome things around me, and I feel like I should speak up and do something about it. Most of the kids I see around town are fat, and like so many American adults now, will likely be undergoing treatment for Type II diabetes one day. That bugs me. I also see how as a society, we are giving up our food sovereignty to corporations, and don’t keep enough food on hand to handle even the shallowest “bump” in the distribution system that brings the food across the country to stock the shelves of the local supermarket. And what about peak oil? As gas gets more expensive,  prepared food will become increasingly costly.

Anyway, I’ve been reading a great book about these things and more, and I was thinking about it as I was making breakfast this morning. I looked at the food I’d set out to cook, and thought, “wow, that’s what I’m talking about.” Almost all of it was scratch ingredients, locally grown and acquired, and healthy. Now, I don’t want you leave the impression I always eat like this; our quest for food sovereignty and health is still a big learning process, and we eat out sometimes too. But with an example like this, maybe it’s time for me to start the recipe project. I will try to post one every week or so, with the ingredients, the directions, and then maybe even a little bit of commentary. I hope you find them enjoyable and informative. For the first one, read on…

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What’s next?

Now that the winter has come and the rains have finally set in, it’s time to do two things:

A: Chill out and take a wee break

B: Perform statistical analysis of past income and production performance.

The chill out happened last week- we went on a road trip to the high desert in eastern Oregon, backpacking and camping our way across a landscape very similar to the one Clint Eastwood spent a lot of time riding in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. There’s a good 360 panorama here. We also stopped at a few hot springs along the way for some soaking (oregon has several dozen, most of which are unimproved and open to the public) and slept in a dry lakebed much like the ones they use in Nevada to test Air Force experiemntal vehicles and UFOs. I took a panorama of that too. I’d show you some flat pictures, but I really want you to click the panoramas, because a flat picture does NOT do the terrain justice.

And statistical data? We’re just starting with that, but I have looked at the breakdown of income streams for this year. Most small acreage growers like us sell in a lot of different forms: farmers’ markets, CSA shares, restaurant accounts, grocery retailers. There are other options, but those are the main ones. We don’t sell to groceries yet (though I just talked to a friend who is the produce manager at one of the groceries in town, and we may be taking them pumpkins next week). We have one restaurant we sell to weekly, one we sell to sporadically, and one we are just forming a relationship with. Most of our business, as you can see from the graph, comes from the farmers’ markets. This is typical for nascent ag businesses, but after they get established, the market becomes secondary, more like an ongoing advertisement for the farm’s main sales channels. The big selling opportunity for most of us is CSA shares.

What is that? CSA = Community Supported Agriculture. There are a lot of ways to organize this, but the idea is that a group of people commits to partnering with a farmer, to support her financially in turn for receiving the best product that can be had by Americans in this day and age. By knowing your farmer, you know you’re getting produce free of chemicals, genetic modification, and substandard growing practices (which affect nutritional value as well as flavor) … and also contributing to the stability and reliability of your local food structure. In return, the farmer gets a stabilized income and living wage.

In practice, this is usually done by the farmer selling “shares” for a fixed price per week, paid in advance (so she can buy seed, inputs, equipment, etc.). Then, for the course of the season, the participants receive a weekly CSA box filled with awesome vegetable goodness. The contents vary, but they may look something like this. If the farmer has a good (or even mediocre) year, there will be an abundance of food. If there is a bad year, then there might be less, and the entire community participates in diluting the disaster… as mankind has done since the beginning of time, until the postwar era.

For us, CSA share income is really low right now, but we are going to expand next year. We currently only do one share (the ideal size for a farm like us would be 60 – 80 shares), and that share started as a favor to a friend. But it soon became apparent that this was the way to go- selling just eight shares would equal our average weekly market take, for  example. Our challenge now is to grow in a sustainable way that doesn’t cause us to self explode- overexpansion is the #1 killer of new businesses. To sell shares, then not deliver a good box, would be a long-term black eye from which it would be hard to recover. So, our plan is to go up to about a half dozen or so next year. We’re not even going to advertise (much); we’ve already had nearly enough people come up to us and ask about CSA shares, that we can just serve them and still meet the 2013 expansion quota.

That’s about it for today. Hopefully next week I will have some interesting production statistics to share with you.

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Emily’s last stand

The end of the farming season has arrived. Or, more precisely, the end of the farmers’ market season. Here’s a picture of Emily at our stand in Tillamook. At both the Manzanita and Tillamook farmers’ markets, we had somewhat slow final weeks… most of the tourists are gone, and the locals can’t entirely make up the difference. One thing that helped keep revenues up was the honey; nearly a third of gross sales has been honey in the last three weeks. It makes me even more excited about beekeeping than before, if that were possible, and we’re planning on expanding to 6 or 7 hives next spring.

Even though the market season is over, “farming” really isn’t. We still deliver to the restaurant accounts (things like pumpkins, potatoes, and spinach), and we have some overwinter crops that still need occasional tending: broccoli, carrots, chard, beets. The cold here is far less severe than most places in the US due to the moderating influence of the ocean, so it doesn’t freeze more than a few weeks per year and we rarely see temperatures below 20°F. This means that all the root crops store just fine in the ground!

For all the other beds, though, we pulled up the dry remains of the summer’s growth. Some of our friends came out for a work-cation last week and helped us quite a bit with clearing, broadforking the soil, and planting the cover crop. This year, we’re trying Crimson Clover as our cover crop; it comes highly recommended. It’s happy in moist climates, adds nitrogen, and it also has a root system that is easy to turn under in the spring but will hold soil during the winter rains.

I was also able to get a few patches of winter wheat planted, which I’m pretty excited about. I have no idea if it will be successful or even practical, but that’s what experimenting is all about. One of my big tests this season was dry beans. Legumes are really good for the soil, as they fix nitrogen, and a significant portion of your acreage should be planted in them if you want a sustainable system. The bad news is that they are not a high-value crop, at least not the way we are farming, so we were unsure of how it would all work out: were they labor intensive to harvest? Would they produce much per bed? As it turns out, harvesting is easy: wait until the plants dry up, pick them all and throw them in a bin, and stomp them like crazy. The beans thresh out easily, and can be winnowed form the chaff by pouring back and forth between buckets in a stiff breeze. Result? About 6 pound of dry beans per bed. Here’s a few different varieties we grew, a portion of the 20 pounds of beans from this year. That sounds like a lot, but we can do better: production by skilled biointensive growers on high-quality soils can reach up to 25lb per bed. And we can definitely eat more beans: if you eat the USRDA of beans, it works out to 60 pounds per year! Magical fruit indeed. Selling the beans would be completely pointless as a business proposition, but eating them is quite satisfying.

One of the things I look forward to this winter is the chance to analyze all the sales and production data we’ve collected. I will post some of the results in the next few weeks as I get around to compiling them. Last years’ results were really useful for planning this year, and I am sure that with two years’ worth of data, we can be that much more efficient in our planning for 2013.

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Honey again

The big surprise of the week is the bees. A few weeks ago, they were looking a little sparse and lackluster, but now we’re buried in honey. It’s all due to the japanese knotweed, an invasive plant that has all the environmentalists up in arms. You see, it clogs stream banks, driving out native plants and harming salmon populations. It also is as hard as a cockroach to kill: it spreads by rhizomes, seeds, or even tiny cuttings; if you chop it down or burn it, it hides underground in a fat root to spring back a few weeks later when you are not looking. Word has it, it even drinks gasoline… generally, an apocalyptic plant. But the good news? It makes awesome honey.

So that is why my bees are ON. By dumb luck, my hives are a half mile from the largest patch in the county, and it blooms like crazy in early September- right when everything else is done for the year. The result? Lots of last minute honey, the dark and floral kind you can only get from knotweed. I took 52 pounds of honey off the hives last week, and another 40 or so yesterday. Zowie. We’re now selling it at the market stand, which ended up tripling our earnings last week. We’re pretty excited about honey.

Here’s Terry, my beekeeping mentor in the Oregon State Master Beekeeping Program, showing me how to work his extractor.

And with all that, the hives still look REALLY strong for winter. I have four that are so heavy with stores that I can’t lift them (a good sign) and even the weakest is stronger than my strongest one last year. We remain optimistic for their ability to overwinter, hopefully not to repeat last winter’s debacle.

And to close, here’s a picture of the solar wax melter I made, to melt down the cappings I got when I extracted all that honey. It’s extremely low-tech. I got the stuff from $6 in parts laying around at the junk store, and some scrap wood I had. Totally worth the massive investment.  I made  the box to match the pane of window glass I found ($1). I drilled a few holes in the edge of a pan ($3), and it is suspended at a slight angle on some wooden braces that span across the box. A catch pan ($2) sits at the bottom to get the drippings, which separate out nicely in the heat. When it cools down tin the evening, I have gunk (dead bugs, twigs, whatever) in the upper pan,  pure wax in the lower, and a little gunk honey under the wax.  A bit of soap and water, and I’ve got a pretty wax block!

Incidentally, I was out of paint, so the black paint was added after I used it… it works fine with bare wood, but should go faster with the black.

And I will leave you with a blessing (of sorts).  Emily’s birthday was two weeks ago, and we had a gathering of friends at the farm to celebrate. It was a pleasant evening, and a chance to reflect on all the hard work we’ve done and create a little community. Following the ancient tradition of her family (and ours), she’s using our Blessing Cup to share the goodwill and brotherhood with all who were able to attend.

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