November

I think Mike mostly explained the timeline and his perspective on things in his first post, but the story sounds different from my end, and I have some other ideas as well. I'm just going to tell all about the farm and what resources we are starting with and then talk about the plans we have and the point of the blog. Probably this will be the longest blog entry ever. So here we go from the tippy top:

After very many life events and big changes we purchased and moved to our little farm in July of this year. So, like 4 months, right? The property sits in a little nook in the coast range of the central Oregon coast. It is 32 acres and zoned as "Timber Conservation," so a good 18 or 20 acres is trees and all hilly, which still leaves a good amount of lovely flat pasture/garden area to work with. The pasture area is split into two sections by the lane that runs up to the house. We have two naturally occurring springs, one of which supplies our house with water and one that supplies irrigation for the garden (such as it is, at the moment) and greenhouse and also supplies water for the goats, the mule, and the barn. These are both gravity fed systems, which means we have water all the time, even when the power is out. We also have a sweet little creek down the hill, and about a billion miles of blackberries. So there is the landscape . . .

The human made stuff includes: a 4-bedroom farmhouse, which is completely livable, but also leaves a lot of room for improvement projects. There is too much to talk about here, so I will just address it as it happens. There is also a barn, which Mike talked about. When we got here, it was really truly a church. With carpet and insulation and drywall, which was a stupid idea because they didn't do anything to weather-proof it and it was all damp and mouldy and also stupid. There is also a huge greenhouse and a creepy old shack, which was likely the original house structure. Oh! There is also this sweet little area in the "back" of the property that we call "The Shire" The Shire is where all the best trails start including the trail that leads down to the creek. It is like a cute little, roughly circular, meadow with a little spring and surrounded with trees. There are four tiny cabins in the shire. They are all the same layout (basically 8x10 plus a loft and two windows), but in varying stages of completion. The "best" one has drywall and insulation and flooring and a little stove and an aunt to live in it. The worst one has mould and is used for storage.

So that is what we are working with. Now on to what we have done and our plans for the future. So far we have mostly been playing catch up with land management and trying to get "outside" things done before it really starts raining, since the average annual precipitation where we live is in the vicinity of 100 inches per year and almost all of that happens between November and May. Our primary goals for this Summer and Fall were to get the smaller of the two pastures ready for goats and a mule, to set aside an area for chickens, and to prepare the garden area and plant a fall cover-crop. And really we pretty much met all the goals. Also we got a new dog!

The church/barn has been ripped out and repurposed as a . . . barn, of all things. The carpet is out as well as all the gross, rotted dry-wall. Mike built the most lovely pen for the goats and is finishing up the milking area. The goat and mule areas are all fenced in, the garden area is tilled and planted with cover crop, and the greenhouse is partially cleaned out and planted with a few vegetables. We are pretty much set for winter and ready to regroup and begin planning for the new year.

The next big project is our goats. I am so excited about goats I can hardly contain myself. Because the whole point of this farm is to be as self-sustaining a possible and provide all of our food, securing a reliable source of dairy foods is a very big deal. We chose goats because they are smaller and therefore require less feed and less space than cows. Also they are crazy adorable and friendly and I love them. We are expecting to welcome our ladies to their new home in the next few weeks. We are getting three Nubian does, two of them will come to us already milking and bred (which is what we are waiting for), the third is younger and we plan to breed her later in the year so that we can have a more consistent milk supply. So that means milk, yogurt, ice cream, and cheese of many varieties. And babies! (and goat meat, shhhhh, don't tell the babies).

And that is about it for the moment. Our main goals for the winter are getting ready for chickens in the spring, garden planning, and getting used to the new goats and the mule. We will likely be working inside the house as well, but there is so much to do in there, I can't really tell what will happen. What I hope will happen is that we will rip out the utility room and turn it into a functional laundry/cheese/fermentation area/beer making/extended pantry space (and maybe a secret root cellar too?). I also wouldn't mind heat in the bathroom and insulation in the upstairs. And maybe I will also decide on some paint colors. But who can tell.

And looking out a bit further . . . we plan to have a few highland cows for beef and also for eating up the grass in the larger pasture. We pan to turn a corner of that pasture into a small orchard and berry area as well, which is also where the bees will live (Mike is very excited about bees). There is a vague possibility that there will be a small pond and some ducks in this general area as well. There are pigs in the future, too, because pork is delicious. We would like to have a small care-taker's or mother-in-law cottage back in the Shire. And somewhere way out on the horizon the house will be converted to solar and wind energy and we will start relying more and more on just us.

So that's the basic plan. It's really just about the food.