Portage River Farm

Two days ago, I got a call from Janet's brother Tom. He has been caring for our chickens at a nearby farm for the past month. He called to tell me that one of the chickens had died of unknown causes.

I drove out to the farm to check on them. Since they were still a bit young to withstand the cold night temperatures, we had housed them in the back room of his butcher shop. We put litter on the floor and provided them with heat lamps, food and water. Tom has been very attentive to their needs and visiting them twice per day.

The chickens seemed fine. I hadn't seen them in weeks and they have really grown. I picked some of them up and looked them over without noticing anything unusual (not that I have that much experience). They seemed lively and healthy as far as I could tell.

Last evening my cell phone rang again and I could see that it was Tom. Expecting more bad news, I answered. Tom conveyed that he had found a second one dead at noon yesterday and a third one this evening. That makes three in two days!

We were both puzzled over what could be causing them to die. They didn't have any peck marks on them and no obvious signs of disease. We concluded that we should move them back to our farm as soon as possible where they can have access to the outdoors and have more room.

The trouble is that our coop is no where near ready to shelter young chickens! Right now it is basically a wooden stage standing at the edge of a grassy field. We have a number of friends coming over this afternoon for our "coop raising" party but even if we make amazing progress, it will be far from done. We also don't have any fencing set up to contain them or keep predators away.

The obvious lesson in all of this is that I should not have purchased the chickens before having adequate quarters set up for them. I vastly underestimated the amount of work it would take and how limited my time would be. I'm planning to spend the morning working on getting fencing set up. This is a pretty difficult task because the first 1 1/2 feet need to placed in a trench in the ground to prevent digging predators from finding a way in.

If nothing else, this episode makes it less likely that I will hatch any plans to purchase calves before we have fencing and some kind of shelter in place for them. So much for my idea of covering the living room floor with straw and turning it into a temporary barn ...(just kidding)!

This is a sketch of the coop project as it stands today. The step of adding the plywood flooring was pretty easy and really gave us a feeling of making substantial progress. The coop now looks like somebody has built a stage in our backyard in preparation for an outdoor concert.

We have it under tarps to protect it from the rains that are forecast for the next few days. We have invited friends over this coming Saturday for a ol' fashioned "coop raising". I'm looking forward to having the help and the company. It should be alot of fun!

In the mean time, I have been running around picking up building supplies in my "farm pickup truck" (a Ford Winstar minivan with the back seats removed). I visited the Habitat for Humanity Store in Brighton and was able to pick up 6 used windows and 2 used interior doors. They were donated by people who had removed them from their houses when they remodeled and they are perfect for our purposes. Best of all, the whole lot was only $135!

I've also been hauling loads of 2x4s home each evening in anticipation of the next exciting phase: the framing in of the walls. I'm trying my best to make sure we have all that we will need this weekend to make substantial progress. I'm looking forward to getting started!

The coop project has been slowly moving forward. After the concrete piers were dry we mounted short lengths of 4"x4" post to each pier and began building up the framing for the floor from there. Hopefully from the photo (made with Janet's cell phone) you can make out the method we used.

After we nailed all of the joists in place we added a second 2x6 to the two long outside edges for strength. We also finished up the connection for the water and electrical lines and filled in the ditch.

The drawing is my attempt to show how we are building the coop in the absence of a decent camera. The lines that are shown surrounding the coop are my reference points for the fencing that I plan to install to segregate the enclosure around the coop into separate yards. That way I can control access to the different portions and rotate the chickens to different pieces of ground to give the vegetation time to recover (more on this later).

One of the first things I noticed upon returning from my recent trip to Mexico was that the vegetable seedlings that we have growing in our basement didn't look so good. They had been doing so well prior to my departure but now they were yellowed and appeared to be dying. Of course, my initial reaction was to assume that Janet had let them get too dry between waterings. That assumption turned out to be incorrect.

Right away, I began my attempts to nurse them back to health. As I watered them and fussed over them they continued to wither and look terrible. I asked about the problem in my organic gardening class and the consensus was that they were lacking nutrients. It seemed odd to me that the organic seed starter mix could be so devoid of nutrients that I would have this problem but I dutifully purchased organic fertilizer and applied it in hopes that it would work. Alas, the yellowing and dying only continued.

I noticed that the tiny pumpkin and spinach seedlings were forming flowers in a desperate attempt to reproduce before their impending demise. I wondered if they could be too cold in our basement. The temperature usually hovers somewhere in the upper-60s. After considering that for a while I started thinking that the flowering could be bolting behavior. Cold weather crops will "bolt" and begin to flower when the heat of mid-summer becomes too much for them. Could they be too hot?

It was just about then that a memory of something that I barely heard in my gardening class filtered to the fore in my puzzled brain. It had been one of those moments when my attention had wandered and I only caught the end of what the instructor was saying in response to a question. She said, "...four to six inches from the top of the seedlings".

"That must be it!", I thought. Perhaps it hadn't been lack of water or nutrients at all! While I was away in Mexico they must have grown too close to the overhanging lights and baked themselves! I raised all of the lights to about six inches from the poor little plants and began an anxious watch over them to see if it would help.

Sure enough, a few days later they began to green up again and put out new leaves. They seem much happier now and I feel that I have yet again learned an important lesson. The pumpkins and spinach may not pull out of it since they shifted over to flower production way too early. Everything else is looking better every day and are probably going to pull through. I guess this was a case of too much of a good thing!

Weekday evenings can be frustratingly short. Lately I have been working at my company's headquarters which is a 50 minute drive away from our farm. I turn into the driveway each evening with so much anticipation for my projects that I'm surprised that I don't jump from the car while it is still rolling. This can be a bit of a problem in a number of ways including the fact that Janet is often anticipating my arrival so I can help with things around the house such as dinner, the dogs, kids' homework, home repair issues, etc. I do my best to keep things in perspective and remember that my part-time farming needs to be balanced against my full-time roles of husband, father and engineer.

As soon as I can, I head out to the yard to begin my daily losing race with the sun. Most evenings will find me up as late as I can stand trying to make good use of the time. More than a few nights this has resulted in me being reprimanded for making noise while others are trying to sleep. I creep around as quietly as I can, often doing work outside by moonlight or with a headlamp strapped to my head. As long as I make some progress each day, I mostly manage to keep my frustration at bay.

After three days of messing around with dirt, rocks and cement, I'm pleased to report that the coop construction project can finally move on to the building phase. I'm sure I'll regret it soon, but I've really been looking forward to grabbing a handful of nails and beginning to swing my hammer. As you can hopefully see from the photo, I now have ten little cement piers with anchor bolts prepared to support the building. The children added the final touch by writing their initials into the last pier before the cement hardened.

Last night I picked up a box of nails, forty 2"x6" boards for framing in the floor and carriage bolts to attach it to the foundation. I added them to the big pile of 2"x4"s that a family friend donated and called it quits for the night. As always, I was sorely tempted to keep going, but I know my family and neighbors would not have been willing to endure my hammering and sawing into the night.

My top priority is to get the chicken coop done. You may recall that the chickens were set up in temporary quarters in the back room of a butcher shop on a nearby farm. They are under the care of my brother-in-law, Tom. Since returning from my business trip, I have been trying to find the time to make major progress on the coop so as to not impose on Tom's hospitality for too long. Regrettably, spare time has not been very abundant and progress has been slow.

I managed to get water and electricity run to the site previously. Thus far this week I have laid out and pounded in the poles for the perimeter fencing and placed stakes marking the locations for the ten piers that will form the foundation of the coop. My next step, if it ever stops raining, will be to use the auger on my tractor to bore the holes for the piers.

I debated with myself for a long time before settling on a design for the foundation of the coop. The possibilities were constrained by two issues: 1) the organic farming requirements don't want treated wood in contact with the ground and 2) the high water table will prevent concrete pilings from curing properly. The first issue meant that I couldn't use the usual solution of putting a treated 4x4 post in a hole with a little concrete at the bottom. According to my advisers at Lowes, the second issue would cause a solid concrete piling to slowly crumble and fail. I imagine that there must be some other solution to this since they use concrete to build bridge pilings but who am I to argue.

In the end, I decided that the cheapest solution was to bore ten holes 4 feet into the sodden ground. I plan to fill those holes with brick bats and large rocks and then pour dry cement mix into the holes on top of them. I plan to top each piling with a concrete block above ground level and then build up from there. This solution will give me a relatively solid foundation that should be resistant to frost heave. It will also be cheap and help me get rid of some of the rocks and bricks that the previous owner left around in piles.

The possibility of finishing this project up any time soon seems remote. I'll just have to keep plodding along and hope that the weekend will find me pleasantly surprised at how well the coop is coming along. I doubt it but we'll see.

Last week's trip to Mexico was my first venture into that country. I must admit that I had a bit of trepidation in the final days before leaving. The news reports were full of stories about the thousands who have died in the recent wave of drug violence and the problems with kidnappings of foreigners for ransom. Little did I know that one week later everyone would be talking about death in Mexico but nobody would be mentioning violence at all.

I believe it was last Thursday while I was working in Queretaro that the flu epidemic in nearby Mexico City entered my consciousness via a news story on Google. The brief article talked about people becoming sick and was accompanied by images of mask-wearing pedestrians on the city streets. It was all too familiar.

A couple of years ago I was working in China during the avian flu crisis. I was stunned to realize that I had been in some of the same open air markets and been surrounded by the same freshly butchered chickens that had begun killing people. A year or two prior to that, I had been in China when word of SARS had finally leaked out past a government reluctant to admit that it had a problem that it could not control.

The thing that sticks in my mind about these incidents is the journey home. I remember worrying about whether we would be restricted from leaving China and become trapped far from home in a plagued land. I remember the strange sensation of walking past hastily set-up thermal cameras in the airports while the operators carefully scrutinizing each person's image to pick out the feverish. The fear in the crowd was palpable as each person cringed and hoped that they wouldn't be selected from the lineup.

I remember trying to figure out if we could find facemasks anywhere and speculating that perhaps they had little effect on health other than preventing panic. I remember feeling uneasy and vulnerable packed into a cramped and stuffy airplane breathing the same stale air and rubbing elbows with hundreds of other potentially infectious refugees.

This time, the fears of pandemic reached a crescendo after I had returned home. My departure from Mexico occurred so soon after the discovery of the disease that most people did not become seriously worried until a few days later. As I have watched the news and the global panic unfold, I have been monitoring my health and mostly keeping my distance from others until I am in the clear.

Part of the problem has been mixed messages as to the incubation period of the disease. I was initially reassured to read on the CDC website that it was only 24-48 hours. That amount of time had already passed. Then I saw a CDC official on CNN saying that the period was 2 to 7 days! My concerns were further complicated by the fact that my children were already sick with a respiratory infection when I got home. That led to me developing a bit of congestion myself and taking my temperature twice per day to make sure the worst wasn't happening.

Today is day #5 since I got off of the plane and I seem to be fine. It seems increasingly likely that we will all be exposed to it from other sources anyway but at least I won't have brought it directly into our home myself.

I'm finally home and the rain that was predicted for the weekend managed to finish up on Saturday night. Sunday morning, the sun rose in a windy sky while I stood in our dining room hoping that it would dry the grass and ground out quickly. I had been anticipating this day for the entire week in Mexico and had built up way too many expectations for myself of all of the things I would accomplish.

Speaking of grass, I'll digress for a moment to mention that it has begun to grow with vigor. I believe it is foretelling problems to come as its rate of growth will outstrip my ability to find time to push our little lawn mower all over this huge yard. We haven't managed to find the time nor the cash to purchase a riding mower and I fear that it may turn into a green version of my snow-shoveling torments of last winter before we do.

Today turned out to be beautiful, if a bit windy. As the sun did its work on the damp ground, we celebrated our daughter Freya's victory at yesterday's Michigan History Day competition by having a big breakfast with pancakes and bacon. We even cracked open our first bottle of homemade maple syrup! Freya's winning of the state competition means that she will now go on to compete in the National competition to be held in Washington, D.C. in June and her project will be put on display in the Smithsonian. We are very proud of her!

I decided that my first priority would be the prepping of the garden soil for planting. As you may have seen from the picture on the website, the garden area is overgrown with weeds and small trees. As well, the previous owner of our farm had dumped piles of bricks, dirt and trash in one area that would have to be cleaned and leveled before plowing could begin.

The first job that I wanted to perform was the removal of the trees. I reasoned that it would be better to pull them out of the ground instead of simply cutting them off with a chainsaw and leaving the stumps and roots in place. The tree removal seemed a good first task for the tractor so I searched on the Internet for the best way to do it. Right away I found all sorts of accounts of people killing themselves doing the very task I had in mind!

It seems that it is very dangerous to attach something very heavy or stationary to the back of a tractor. If the load is sufficiently large and the traction under the back tires is good enough, the tractor can rear up and flip over backwards in less than a second. The articles claimed that this can occur far too quickly for the operator to drop the power, disengage the clutch or jump clear of the tons of iron rearing back to crush them. The websites drove home the point with scary photos of inverted tractors atop dead farmers.

After reading all of the safety precautions, I learned that it was safest to hitch the load to the swinging drawbar. It is positioned well below the axle to minimize the risk of rollover. With an appropriate level of caution and a sturdy chain, I was able to complete the job in a couple of hours. Two of the trees proved to be too large. They have a date with my chainsaw as soon as I get it back from the repair shop. I suppose we'll have to work around the stumps for several years until they soften enough for me to dare dragging the plow over them.

Once the trees were out of the way, I attacked the dirt piles with the front-end loader. I had imagined that I would simply scoop them up and dump the dirt somewhere else. That proved to be difficult for this novice driver so I simply tipped the bucket vertical and dragged the piles down flat. After we removed the last of the trash and hauled a bucket-load of bricks away, it began to look much more likely that we would be able to grow our vegetables there.

As the shadows of late afternoon slid across the field, I backed the tractor up to the brush hog. Locking the brakes, I jumped down and wrestled with the three-point hitch and attached the mower shaft to the power takeoff. This was my first attempt to hitch anything to the tractor and I hopped on and off of the tractor again and again before I had it lined up just right.

Once I was convinced that I had hooked it all up correctly, I raised the mower, put the tractor in gear and started for the field. After driving only a few yards my attention was drawn to my spectators as Janet and Aidan tried to alert me to the fact that the brush-hog had dropped back down and was dragging two deep furrows across the lawn! I raised it back up again and finally made it into the field to begin cutting the brush.

I would love to report that it went smoothly and that I knew just what I was doing. Nothing would be further from the truth. Luckily my audience became bored of watching me struggle to get the mower at the correct height and left me to continue the fight unobserved. The tractor seems to be bogged down as if the mower were dug into the ground and preventing forward progress. A couple of times I found myself digging a hole with one of the back tires and I wondered how the brush hog could change the way that the tractor drove so much that I could no longer produce enough power to move over the slightest bump!

I jumped off of the tractor twice and scratched my head at the puzzle. There was absolutely nothing that should be impeding forward motion, yet there I was digging a big hole on one side as if I were attached to an anchor. Finally, I noticed the cause of the whole struggle. I had failed to disengage the brakes! I had been practically dragging the left rear wheel the entire time! What a dope!

I disengaged the brake as I shook my head and chuckled. As if a great weight had been lifted, the tractor sprang forward and began mowing with ease. Shortly thereafter I learned to stop fiddling with the height of the mower as the tractor's hydraulics miraculously began adjusting the height to match the terrain. In my defence, I should mention that the operator's manual that I ordered has not arrived yet! After those revelations, the job became a snap to complete. I parked the tractor and headed in to tuck Aidan into bed but not before I had coaxed everyone to the window to see that I had finally managed to figure out what I was doing as evidenced by a nicely mown field.

Through my engineering career, I have traveled and worked in a number of countries around the globe. This week, I am staying and working in Queretaro, in central Mexico. In the mean time, all of my farm projects are on hold awaiting my return.

This is my first trip to Mexico and it has been eye-opening and very pleasant. I have found my hosts to be very friendly, capable and hard-working. I have learned a great deal on the trip and have established new working relationships with the staff here that will help me in my work in the future.

Janet is doing her best to keep up with everything at home single-handedly. She is managing the children and watching after our garden seedlings. A few days before leaving, I made arrangements to have my brother-in-law take care of our young chickens after we set them up in temporary quarters at a nearby farm.

I am excited to head home at the end of the week. I miss my family and look forward to getting started again on the garden and chicken coop. Additionally, the tractor and implements that we bought have been delivered and are now parked in our side yard. I am excited to give them a try!

As soon as we had approval from the authorities to build our coop, I was ready to roll up my sleeves and get started. I was itching to start on the building itself, but I knew that I needed to run water and power out to the building site first. I called up a local equipment rental place and reserved a Ditch Witch for Saturday.

As Saturday approached, I was struggling to figure out just where to tap into the house water lines. The original owner and builder of our house must have had a connection to a cement company because the area around the house has an over-abundance of concrete. Every side of the house is surrounded by wide sidewalks and stairs that would make the task of running a pipe into the basement very difficult.

I spent several days polling the opinions of my family experts (my father and father-in-law) and the guys in the plumbing aisles of Lowes and The Home Depot for the best solution to the problem. The resulting consensus was that I should avoid the concrete altogether by tapping into the water line between the wellhead and the house. After confirming that the well water line was plastic and thus easy to splice into and that the water pressure check valve was located at the bottom of the well thus insuring that the line was pressurized at all times, I decided that we were going for the well connection plan.

If I was going to go through all of this trouble, I wanted the water to be available at the coop year-round. I called up the local building code department and found out that the average depth of frost required water lines to be buried at least 42" deep. Since the trencher had a 48" cutting blade this didn't seem to be a problem. Since the coop was not going to be heated I planned to bring the water up into the building using a yard hydrant that would shut off the supply four feet below ground level to prevent bursting pipes in the winter.

I borrowed a truck with a trailer hitch and brought the trencher to the farm. The boys and I excitedly fired it up and I positioned it at the coop site to begin the first trench. Within minutes, the first signs of trouble showed up as the water-soaked soil came up out of the trench with the consistency of pudding and the machine dug itself to the axles in mud. With some creative maneuvering, the application of some bricks and boards for traction and a liberal sprinkling of curses, I managed to complete the trench at the coop site.

The trenching in the yard went much more smoothly as the soil as much drier. I was becoming increasingly aware that my rental turn-in time of 5pm was creeping up on me so I increased the pace of operation to insure we could return the machine and avoid paying for an extra day. Everything was going smoothly except for the fact that we kept running into bread-loaf sized rocks that had to be extracted from the trench-bottom by hand before we could resume.

As I was nearing completion of the job, Fred, a family friend, stopped by on his bike to check on our progress. Fred is a tree-trimmer, chimney sweep and beekeeper who is knowledgeable about a great many things. Upon surveying our trench at the coop site he pointed to a fatal flaw in my great scheme. The groundwater had filled the trench to a depth just 18 inches from the surface which meant that my yard hydrant would never drain and would burst in the first hard winter freeze.

Fred's observation raised a very serious concern for me. Since I was tapping into the line at the wellhead, there was no way to turn the water off in case of a burst pipe at the coop other than cutting off the power to the well and completely losing all water for the house! Fred and I tossed around a few ideas to deal with the high water table including burying a 55 gallon barrel full of gravel to create a drainage area for the hydrant and a sump pump to remove the water.

Having finally completed the trenching, we hosed off the machine, loaded it up and headed back to Howell to return it. We managed to get there just at 5pm but not without incident. Just as we were approaching the last curve going into town, I was paying a little too much attention to my conversation with Aidan and Sean and not enough on my driving. I took that last curve a little fast and the three of us experienced a white-knuckle slow-motion moment of terror as the trencher and trailer bounced, tipped and careened back and forth in the rear-view mirror.

I was fully convinced that the machine was either going to fall off or the trailer was going to come unhitched from the truck and swerve into oncoming traffic. In the end my application of the brakes was enough to settle it back into line and I breathed a huge, shaky sigh of relief. I was so happy to unhook that thing from the truck and hear the guy at the rental place say that everything looked fine with the machine.

After several more days of agonizing over a solution to my ground water problem, a practical solution came to light. My brother-in-law Tom, Sean and I were placing the water line in the trench and we discovered that my haste to complete the trenching job had caused the trench to be shallow from backfill to a depth of three feet instead of four. The prospect of having to dig that bottom foot back out by hand would have added a couple of days of difficult digging to the task and we were suffering repeated cave-ins due to the wet soil.

Tom made the wise suggestion that it would greatly simplify things to back away from the goal of using the water line in winter, bury it more shallowly and plan to blow it out each fall. Sean made the wise suggestion that I move the hydrant to the well end of the pipe to provide a safety cutoff below ground to prevent a potential disaster of losing all of our access to the well. That plan also required much less expensive hardware. All of that finally settled, we are now ready to begin building the coop!

A portion of the last two days has been spent filling out paperwork and setting things up so that our farm can officially be declared a business. As of today, Portage River Farm is registered with the State of Michigan and the IRS as a member directed Limited Liability Corporation. Janet and I are now owners and officers of that corporation and she generously allowed me to be the President! Gee, I feel so important!

My first official act from my high seat of power was to open up a business checking account for the farm and get a credit card for purchasing our materials and supplies. This will greatly simplify our bookkeeping since up to now it has all been mixed in with our personal finances and I've had to separate it out onto a ledger each month.

On behalf of the farm, I also applied for a business loan for the tractor and implements we are interested in buying. We should have the answer tomorrow. I'm not very confident that we will get approved because the business itself hasn't established any credit with the bank but the banker seemed to think it would be ok. It was a little odd to answer questions on the application such as filling in the farm's projected net profit for the year of $0.00! I'm sure that will get the underwriters excited...not!

You might recall that during a recent beekeeping conference I decided to sign up for a beekeeping class to bring myself up to date with the latest techniques. That class is being taught by Ed, an elderly gentleman who has about 50 hives in his suburban backyard. We had our first get together in late March and it was an interesting experience.

I arrived to find his driveway choked with cars and the class gathered in a cluttered little classroom that he has built onto his detached garage. There were about eight students including myself. As with the beekeeping conference, I was again surprised to see that roughly half of the class were women. Somehow I had always thought of this as a nerdy male hobby and I'm glad to see that isn't the case anymore.

My snow shoveling misery of last winter made the purchase of a tractor one of our major goals for this summer. Now that the weather is warming and things need to be planted in our garden, that need is rising even higher on the list of priorities. Not knowing much of anything about tractors, I set myself to the task of studying up on them and doing an exhaustive search for the perfect machine for our uses and budget.

The first step in the process was to think about the particular uses that we had for a tractor. The three things that came to mind instantly were plowing, mowing and snow removal. Secondary things that would be useful if we could afford them are shoveling loose material such as dirt, gravel and manure, post hole digging and road grading. We also have a fairly tight budget target for the whole project which helps to keep things in perspective.

Tractors come in a wide range of sizes in terms of horsepower (hp). There are two different important horsepower ratings depending upon what uses you have in mind. The first power rating is "drawbar horsepower". That is an expression of the tractors ability to pull something behind it. Our greatest demand for drawbar power is for plowing the fields which with my preferred three-bottom (three cutting blades) plow in our loamy sand soil will require at least 45 hp at the drawbar.

The second power rating is "power take-off" or PTO horsepower. The tractors have a spinning shaft at the back end that can be used to power implements called the "PTO". Our greatest demand for PTO torque would be for a brush hog mower. A six foot wide brush hog will require at least 50 hp to operate well without overtaxing the engine.

The final requirement that eventually moved from the "would like to have" to the "must have" column was a front-end load bucket. This implement will allow us to scoop and move dirt and gravel around as needed. The hydraulic lift on the arms that hold the bucket can even be used to pull brush and small stumps out of the ground.

Given all of those requirements, I began an Internet search throughout Michigan and Northern Ohio for the perfect tractor. Right away it was obvious that an older model tractor would fit the bill and still be reasonably priced. There are many large tractors from the 60's, 70's and 80's that still have many years of useful life in them and are far more affordable than newer models. However, not so many of them come equipped with front-end loaders which helped greatly to narrow the field of possibilities.

In the end I located a couple of strong possibilities at a used tractor dealer in Fenton, Michigan. I have visited them twice this week and am starting to get very seriously interested in the 1976 Massey Ferguson 255 that is shown in the pictures. After talking to the dealer about adding in a wide assortment of implements, I am now armed with a final price tag and just have to figure out how to pay for it!

I keep telling myself that this is a year for building and that it won't always be this crazy. I suppose it doesn't help that my enthusiasm is driving me to do absolutely everything that I can this year rather than taking things on at a more gradual and reasonable pace. For that reason I am finding myself perpetually behind. It's a good thing that I'm having such a great time!

The vegetable garden project is an excellent example. My ambitious plans led me to order a very large selection of vegetable seeds (see what I picked here). Each day the mailbox has been stuffed with little packages from seed companies who are more than happy to take my order and indulge my lunacy. The seed packets are now stacked up around me and impatiently waiting for me to get them started.

If there is a meticulous way to go about something, that is what I favor. The problem of figuring out of when to do what for the garden led me to the idea of making a calendar (see it here). I bought a gardening book for Michigan and combined that with information from the Internet to pull the plan together and get it organized.

Of course, as soon as the task was done I could see that I was massively behind in getting my seeds started indoors. For some things such as onions it was obvious that the boat had sailed so long ago that I will have to give up on those for this year. I decided to tackle all of the seed starting for March in the last few days of the month and hope for the best.

The pictures show the contraption that I built to encourage the seeds to do their thing. I bought four fluorescent two-tube light fixtures and rigged them from the basement ceiling so that I can adjust the height as the plants grow. I also bought seed starting trays and organic seed starting soil mix and rolled up my sleeves.

The lights must be working because it has only been three days and all of the trays now have little seedlings in them. Now that they are on the way I need to do something about the varieties that are listed in the calendar that are supposed to be in the ground outside already such as peas, shallots and turnips. Since I have nothing to prepare the soil for planting other than a hoe and a shovel, I am now turning my attention to getting some better tools!

When we were in the process of buying our farm I had the opportunity to meet the former owners and get a little tour. I recall that they mentioned that the frogs in the pond next to the house could be very loud. They told me that we would have to keep the windows closed if we wanted to get any sleep. I remember thinking to myself, "Yeah right, you obviously aren't nature lovers like we are!"

Now that we are living here I may have to recant. The weather hasn't gotten quite warm enough yet to tempt us to leave the windows open at night, but I have to admit that the peepers are extremely loud! It is so noisy out there that you can tell when anybody opens a door from anywhere in the house.

I made a little video here to demonstrate. Take note of the sound level in the house before I open the door.