Portage River Farm

In my opinion, barns are the steam engines of the architectural world. They fascinate me. I don't know exactly what the draw is, but I feel it everyday. They evoke a sense of nostalgia for sure, but it is much more than that.

I grew up in the country and around barns. My father had a sprawling one-story horse barn. My grandfather had an old barn for his cattle with a loft for loose hay. Our neighbors had a more modern steel barn loaded with hay bales that were perfect for making forts and secret hideouts.

On my drives to and from our farm, there are beautiful barns in every direction. I never tire of gazing at them and wishing I could take a closer look. I size them up, note their features, and dream of building the perfect barn of my own.

Unfortunately the farm we purchased last year did not come with a barn. I have enjoyed hours of reading and thinking about the perfect barn for our purposes but I know it will be a number of years before I can afford to build one.

One of the features of my barn plan will be a space to shelter our equipment from the weather. Our tractor and implements have been sitting outside for the six months that we have owned them. I know that many farmers leave them outside year round, but my engineer's sense is that they would stay in better condition if they could be dry and out of the sun most of the time.

The onset of snow and bitterly cold weather finally forced me to consider some temporary shelters. The day after Thanksgiving, the local farm supply store had a sale that included steep discounts on their "Garage-In-A-Box" shelters. They are heavy-duty tents with steel frames intended primarily as shelters for automobiles. They were perfect for my needs and the price was right. After verifying that my tractor would fit inside, I happily purchased two and loaded them into my van.

The primary project of the past two weeks has been constructing these shelters and moving our equipment inside. Aidan and I had a memorable day setting up the first one in the rain. The frame of the second one was assembled on a cold night beneath brilliant stars with the help of my new friend Andrea who is one of our CSA members. Yesterday, Sean and I completed the job by attaching the cover to the second shelter and filling it up with implements.

I'm not sure how long those tents will last, but it is reassuring to know that all of my equipment is protected and out of the weather. Our next task will be to transfer the contents of our shed out into these tents so we can begin converting the shed into a "sugar shack" for the quickly approaching maple season.

I have known about this flaw in myself for a long time and have mentioned it before, but I still can't seem to do anything about it. I guess it is a symptom of having too many projects on my plate from which to choose, but it is annoying just the same. The problem is simple to understand and probably common, but the solution evades me.

The problem is that I tend to leave projects uncompleted for long periods of time because I choose to shift my attention to something else. With few exceptions, the point at which I switch to something new is when I make a frustrating mistake or come up against a seemingly daunting obstacle. I generally do manage to get back to things and finish them up after a long period of time has passed, usually finding that the intimidating task wasn't so tough after all.

Running power to the chicken coop is a prime example. Way back in April, the project began with the task of cutting two trenches through the back yard to provide the coop with power and water. I spent much of the summer building the coop at the far end of the trenches, but the power and water were never connected due to obstacles at the near ends.

In the case of the electricity, the obstacle was a six foot wide concrete sidewalk. I needed to tunnel under it to be able to connect the underground cable to the wiring of our shed. I had never tunneled under anything like that before so that is where the project stopped. The wire lay there in the ditch, neglected for eight months while I found other things to do with my time.

I must have told myself hundreds of times that I just needed to get that task done as I walked past the wire on my way to work on the coop or garden. It wasn't until the bitterly cold weather of early December hit and I started worrying about the chickens keeping warm enough that the uncompleted wiring project finally rose to the top of my list.

In the end it was a very simple task. I stopped by the hardware store and picked up length of PVC pipe and an end cap. I placed the end cap on the leading end, stepped into the ditch and hammered the pipe through the soil beneath the walk until it emerged on the other side. I cut the end of the pipe off to remove the cap and fed the wire through without a hitch.

Aidan and I finished up the project by running the wire through the ground to the shed wall, up out of the ground through a protective conduit, through the wall and finally connected it up. We hooked up a heat lamp from the rafters of the coop to shine down on the roosting area. We turn it on when the weather falls well below freezing in the hopes that it will make the birds a little more comfortable and help prevent them from getting frostbite on their combs and wattles.



The water line? It's still waiting to be connected. The intimidating task at that end is the fact that I plan to splice into the main water supply line from our wellhead to our house. I have been mowing around the unsightly ditch and pipe all summer. At this point it is clear that we will be carrying water to the coop well into next spring before I will finally break down to finish it.

I do know of one solution to prevent these delays. I am far less likely to abandon a project when I am working together with someone else. The recent triumph of getting the siding put on the coop when a friend came to visit is a good illustration. I guess I may just have to schedule an annual volunteer work day for the CSA members to come push me to clean up all of my loose ends!

Somewhere back there in the distant past it was first explained to me. Some adult in my life took the time to patiently relate the mystery of the seasonal shortening and lengthening of daylight. I can imagine myself wide-eyed and innocent as my consciousness struggled to take in the complex astronomical concepts that caused my outdoor playtime to be cut short as a consequence of living on an orbiting, spinning and tilting world.

Eventually my turn came around to be the adult in this age-old exchange. I have struggled to find a clear way to help my children understand why they were made to go to bed in the summer when it was still light or go to school in the winter when it was still dark. Unfortunately for them, their father is one who has always preferred the long and complex answer to the simple one. Eventually I get down to the method that always works, the demonstration with the flashlight and the wobbling basketball.

As with all of us, I am well schooled and long experienced with the facts of the changing seasons. That is why it seems odd that it took half a lifetime to finally feel the full force of planetary happenstance. For most of my adult life, I have led an suburban existence where indoor living and artificial lighting have reduced the changes in daylight to a mere curiosity as I occasionally glanced toward a window. Now that my life has changed to a much more rural, much more outdoor existence, I find the shortening of the day has an oppressive impact on my productivity.

I am aware that these feelings are exacerbated by the fact that I am attempting a dual existence of holding down a full time job away from the farm during the weekday and struggling to squeeze my beloved farming into evenings and weekends. I'm sure that the full time farmer feels the impact of the shortened day as a limitation of how much he can accomplish. For me, this season means that I never see my farm by the light of day except during the weekend.

As such, I find myself struggling mightily to keep up the pace on my projects. I keep a headlamp in my coat pocket all of the time and most evenings will find me out in the darkness trying to work by its dim beam. I have even resorted to mowing my entire two-acre lawn in the dark by attaching a flashlight to the handlebars of my push mower!

As much as anything, I am looking forward to the coming holiday season because our wobbling basketball world will finally reach the point where the night will give way to increasing daylight once again. Until then, I guess I should be spending a little more of my time on those nagging indoor chores or perhaps even slowing down just a little. I would like to think that my life will progressively adjust to one more harmonious with the weather and seasons, but that just may have to wait until that happy day when I can retire and take up farming full time.

The morning of our Farm Open House found the children and I scurrying about preparing for visitors. Janet had gotten called in to work on short notice and my well-planned preparations took a tailspin as I found myself shorthanded. After a brief panic, I made a list, marshaled the children together and passed out tasks to be done.

The day was bright and relatively warm. That realization came as a relief because our little house would likely be swamped if a large crowd appeared and needed refuge from the cold. I made another round to check how the children were getting along with their tasks. Freya tidied the interior while Sean organized the construction materials from the never ending coop project into neat piles. To Aidan fell the unenviable task of checking the yard for any messes left behind by the dogs.

After a quick change of clothes, I fired up the tractor and drove it to the little rise overlooking the entrance to our driveway. A few days before, I had purchased a big "Welcome" flag which I now fastened so it would hang from the bucket of the front-end loader. I raised the bucket as high as it would go while the boys gave me approving thumbs-up signs from the driveway.

Our property is not well marked. OK, it really isn't marked at all! We had made a little poster board sign and were nailing it to a pole when the first car slowed and turned into our driveway. By the time I had completed the task and had walked back to the house, three more cars appeared and made their way to parking spots. The children and I strolled out to welcome our guests as yet more cars arrived.

It was an exciting time. Some of the people who emerged were old friends of ours while others were completely new. We hugged some, shook hands with many, made introductions again and again while trying hard to remember every one's names. Eventually Janet arrived and the rounds of hugs and greetings began again as we put out snacks and got everyone seated in the living room.

I had been preparing a little slide show and talking points for the past couple of weeks. Showing my stripes as a nerdy engineer-historian-activist-farmer, I launched into my talk that covered the history of agriculture from before World War II, through the Green Revolution, the founding of the CSA movement and an overview of Organic Farming practices. Finally I got around to our little farm and our plans for the CSA.

Everything seemed to be going very well. People made lots of comments and asked questions to elicit more details about us and our intentions. When things finally wound down, we moved everyone outside for a tour of the farm. Once we were outside, I was amazed at the number of people who were present. Many had not come inside at all because the house had been too full and were patiently waiting for a second round of the presentation.

I led everyone around as best I could and showed them the features of our little farm and where we planned to do various things. They lined up along the fencing to the chicken enclosure as I gave a little talk about our chickens, answered questions about the coop and held a hen out for them to pet. We toured the edge of the field that had been plowed for spring planting, showed them our beehive and the bonfire circle where we plan to hold parties.

I invited those who had not heard the talk to join me in the house as the rest of our guests made their way back to their cars. We had planned for the Open House to end at 4, but I found myself still answering questions to a fairly large crowd as the clock edged toward 6pm. Once the last of them had departed, we were tired but elated at how well the day had gone.

The real surprise came when we checked the sign-up sheets that were on the dining room table. Nearly everyone who had come signed up on the spot. Two families had even paid their memberships two months early! With few exceptions, the remaining people had left saying that they just needed to talk it over with their families and would call us back. That is exactly what they did. Before three more days had passed, we had sold all twenty shares that we planned to offer for 2010.

The group of people that have joined are amazing and I couldn't be happier. They come from many walks of life and bring a wide range of strengths and levels of experience to the effort. They have already begun to pull together behind the idea of forming a community around this farming adventure. More than half have signed up to be more actively involved in planning and working together with us on the farm. All of that involvement from such a great group of reliable friends and impressive new ones, has given us the confidence to increase the number of shares that we will plant for this first year. As of today we still have a couple of openings left.

I am excited and not at all intimidated by the year ahead of us. It feels very much like a group effort and everyone is charged up to build something great together. That enthusiasm fuels my drive to do my very best. It may sound corny, but it makes me feel like my life has taken an important turn for the better.