November 2018

November!   Well, at least everything being brown like it was for much of the summer, seems normal now with the cold weather.  During summer, it was because it almost never rained.  What a strange year.  Despite our fields looking brown and lifeless, our goats continued to go out to graze in the paddocks each day, which surprised us because we've had other years when the grass looked green and they wouldn't eat it.  There's so much we don't understand about farming - it's a continual learning curve and source of inspiration.

 Last month, Linc spent some time making a car workshop.  Cleared some land behind the cabin, leveled it with the backhoe, bought a used 20'x10' hoophouse frame from a friend for $75, put it up and anchored it, added some used hoophouse plastic from our hoophouse renovation project this year, and "Voila!", a $100 workshop!  Solar heated, even!  Later, for cloudy days, he added a wood stove.  Here, we've got the Prius in there, gradually making all of the trouble lights on the dashboard go away.  So nice to finally have a dry place warm place to work in the colder months.  Linc likes the combination so much that for our final, larger workshop, he's thinking of doing the exact same thing on a larger scale and with a cement or adobe floor, and shade cloth for summer.

In the hoophouse, beneath the secondary protection of row cover on PVC hoops, and with the addition of beneficial nematodes and fungal insecticides, we are finally starting to have success at growing winter greens again (our winter crops were decimated by root aphids the last few years, so this is a nice change).

Linc realized that Amber would need a wood box for storing wood for her tiny house on wheels woodstove, and came up with this structure from scrap materials.  The boards in the front are removable so that wood can be added and removed easily, and the shade cloth that's flopped over the roof drops down to protect the wood from windblown rain and snow.  This was one of those projects that kind of evolved into something better than the original vision.