Portage River Farm

Over the past few days, I have been using the tractor to get a few more tasks completed. The driveway has been plagued with potholes since before we bought the farm. With the warm spring rains those potholes became huge and filled with water. I felt embarrassed any time somebody came to visit as they slowly bounced and jostled their way up to the house.

When things were particularly desperate, the children and I spent a couple of afternoons loading the wheelbarrow with small rocks and attempting to fill the holes. Our efforts resulted in small improvements but most of the rocks we deposited ended up getting shifted to the sides as our car tires worked their way back down into the muddy mess.

This problem was on our mind when we went tractor shopping. We wanted to be sure to purchase something to help us restore and maintain the driveway. In the end we bought a 6' box blade (fourth photo down).

The box blade has six adjustable teeth that loosen up the gravel as it is pulled along. The loosened gravel accumulates in the box and is graded smooth by the blade on the lower back edge of the box. I made about a half-dozen passes up and down the drive with this implement and it left the drive smooth and the previously packed-down gravel loose and soft.

The second task for the tractor was getting the garden soil ready for planting. I had already plowed it up a few days ago but unfortunately left a few grassy patches. I decided that I would have to turn it a second time to be sure that we wouldn't be attempting to plant portions of the garden in sod and then spending all summer searching through tall grass to find our crops.

The surface of the garden was still very rough from the large furrows the plow had left. Before plowing a second time, I decided to use the disc harrow to cut up the large chunks and smooth it back out. After backing the tractor up to the disc, I found that it was equipped with the wrong size of draw pins to mate up with the lower arms of the three-point hitch. I ran out to Tractor Supply and bought smaller pins, removed the old rusty ones with a grinder and installed shiny new pins.

The disc harrow (two pictures below the box blade) made quick work of reducing the clods. Then I hooked up the plow set again and turned the entire garden once more. The second try at plowing was so much easier. By the end I really felt that I had gotten the hang of it and the resulting garden was uniformly turned.

I finished up the task by passing the disc set back over the whole area and then dragging the spring-tooth harrow (pictured below the disc harrow) across the soil to smooth the final high spots down. The soil is now fully broken up and very soft. I will have to do a bit of raking to remove small clumps of broken up sod that are still on the surface but otherwise it is ready for seeding.

Nevermind the fact that this task should have been done long ago, I'm still having fun and have decided that we are just going to do the best that we can for this first year. As long as each year brings some improvement over the last, I'll consider myself successful. As things are going, I'm ensuring myself many years of satisfaction by leaving lots of room for improvement!

Sunday morning dawned cool and beautiful. Sean and I talked about the possibilities for the day over breakfast trying to decide which of the many projects that we have going would be the best use of our time. Sean asked if he could feed the chickens before we started so we headed out to the coop to check on them.

The chickens always come running from all directions when they see us approaching. They crowd the fence like adoring fans and welcome us with excited peeps and whistles. I remarked to Sean that the flock seemed a little smaller than usual as we passed through the gate and began the slow walk to the coop as the milling chickens did their best to position themselves directly in the path of each footfall.

As Sean fed the hungry birds we attempted the difficult task of counting them. It is difficult because they are continuously moving about and jockeying for a choice bit of ground at which to peck. After coming up with a number of different results we finally concluded that the correct number was twenty-one, a sum that was two birds less than it should have been!

We begun looking around the chicken yard, searching for the missing birds. We were sure that they would not have been able to resist coming back to the coop for breakfast. I walked along the fence trying to spot anywhere that a predator could have entered but found none.

In the far corner, I came upon the remains of one of the birds. It had been killed and half eaten by something that was strong enough to crunch right through the bones. What was left was the lower half of the chicken with the spine and ribcage cleanly chewed through. A while later we located a single leg from the other poor bird. Clearly something big and hungry had been dining in the coop during the night.

Since there was no sign of digging, the perpetrator had either climbed or jumped over the fence. My bet was that it had been a raccoon. My neighbors opined that a coyote could clear the 4 1/2 foot fence as well. Whatever it was, it was obvious to Sean and I that our day would now be spent improving the security of the coop to prevent further losses to the toothsome visitor from out of the dark.

The chickens had been housed on the previous night in the unfinished coop surrounded by a second run of chicken wire. Since this type of fencing was not doing the trick, we resolved to completely wall in one half of the coop so we could close them safely inside. We joked that we were on a mission to fortify "Fort Fowl" in preparation for the attack from the enemy that would surely come again as soon as the sun went down.

We headed off to purchase twenty sheets of plywood and then spent the rest of the day walling in the northern half of the coop. It was exciting the see the room coming together. We completed it by installing one of the doors that I picked up from a reuse center. At sunset we placed our feathered charges in their new home and closed them in.

It was a school night so Sean had to turn in. I continued until midnight tacking up chicken wire across the large window openings. I was unsure if the predator could climb all of the way up to those windows but I was in no mood to take any chances.

On my way out to work this morning, I stopped by the coop and let the birds out for the day. They were all present and accounted for and none the worse for wear. As long as our bold chicken stealer doesn't get so hungry as to risk an attack by daylight we should be able to prevent further casualties.

The coop project has moved along to the point that I needed to start thinking about the roof. My design hadn't moved beyond laying out the walls and they had recently been framed in. For a little while I entertained the idea of putting off the roof and just continuing to finish the walls but a few days of rain convinced me that all of our work was going to get ruined if I didn't do something about getting it covered.

My first question in designing the roof was what sort of pitch should be used. I searched around the web for recommended pitches to handle the significant weight of snow that can build up during our Michigan winters. Unfortunately, I was not able to find the information that I wanted so I simply settled on a 6/12 pitch.

I drew up the trusses on the computer and bought all of the supplies. We had some friends over last weekend who were willing to lend a hand so we pulled out the mitre saw and the mending plates and gave it a whirl. Joe and I measured the angles on the drawing, adjusted the saw and made the cuts in the hope that it would turn out as planned. To our surprise, the pieces of the puzzle fit together very well and we began turning out truss after truss.


I now have half trusses mounted on the coop and securely covered with a tarp. I am still shopping around for reasonably priced sheet metal to cover it. In the mean time, it is very satisfying to stand in that half of the coop during a rain storm and watch the rain pour off either side leaving the coop high and dry beneath.

The weather had been dry, rain was in the forecast and the planting was way behind schedule. The day had finally come when I had to take my courage in both hands and give plowing a try. When I purchased the tractor and plow, the dealer gave me a long-winded explanation of how to set up and adjust the plow. At the time plowing seemed a far-off prospect and the information went completely over my head.

In the past month I have attempted to gain some understanding of what is involved. I read websites on plowing but only picked up tidbits of knowledge. I talked to my father and father-in-law. Everyone seems to be saying that I just needed to hook it up, give it a try and learn as I go.

What understanding I had managed to gain was this: 1) the angle of the plow should be adjusted so that all three shares dug into the ground at the same depth; 2) the side-to-side tilt of the plow should be adjusted so that the resulting cut was level in the ground; 3) the coulters (the black wheels in second picture) should be adjusted to cut the sod in front of each share; 4) the sod should turn off of the mold board so that it lands grass-side down and 5) I should not break anything or run into anything while accomplishing all of this.

Mounting the plow to the tractor proved to be tricky. It is very heavy so the tractor has be to positioned exactly to allow everything to link up. This involves a lot of jumping on and off of the tractor to make tiny adjustments and to raise or lower the hitch. After a good ten-minute struggle, I was able to raise the plow and drive toward the field.

As I had read, I paced off the field at each end and placed stakes to show where the first cut should be positioned in order to divide the area in half. I lined up the tractor on these stakes, lowered the plow to the ground, gunned the engine and kicked her in gear. Just as if I knew what I was doing, the plow dove into the soil and began expertly turning three big furrows. I gave Janet a smiling shrug and continued down the field quite pleased with the results.

I probably plowed up a little over 1/2 acre that day. It went pretty smoothly and nothing broke. The forces that plows withstand while doing their work is amazing. It is no wonder they are built so heavily.

I also learned a number of refinements as the job went on. Early on I noticed that the hind-most share was cutting much more deeply than the front. I turned the top-link of the three point hitch to adjust the angle of attack and that problem was solved. I also had some issues with the fact that the ground was so uneven. Now and then the plows would come completely out of the ground and leave a grassy patch as the tractor bumped along. Some of these I backed up to fix, the rest I left for next time.

Once completed, I stood at the edge of the field and felt good about my accomplishment. I would leave the soil as it was for at least a week (two weeks is recommended but I am late as it is!) to let the grass die underneath. Then I will disc it and perhaps plow it a second time to get those grassy patches that I missed.

Even with all of my trepidation, the job got done and not too badly for a first try. Oh yeah, there was one comical collision with a spruce tree that borders the garden area. I hadn't removed the front-end loader and the bucket is pretty hard to see around and makes the tractor much longer. At one point I rounded the corner while looking backwards to check on the plows. Suddenly I realized that the bucket had rammed into the spruce which waved wildly back and forth making a big display of my error. I backed up and continued plowing. The tree only lost some bark and will recover. Later, while admiring my handiwork I made a sideways comment about having run into the spruce hoping that it hadn't been noticed. Janet grinned at me and said, "Yeah...I saw that."

Here are the chickens as they settled into their partially built home on that first night back on the farm.

Saturday dawned cool and rainy. Sean and I spent the morning getting things ready for our "coop raising" while the rest of the family attended a local fundraiser for the Humane Society. Our helpers were scheduled to arrive after lunch and the weather progressively improved as the time to begin our work approached.

When the appointed time arrived, we dove right into the work with one crew laying out the top and bottom plates for the walls while another cut all of the boards to length. We laid the boards in place and nailed it all together. Before long we were raising upright and bracing it in place.

Our progress slowed a bit as we began work on the front wall. It was admittedly more complicated due to the inclusion of two more windows and the front doorway. When we were about halfway through, the call came from the house that dinner was on the table.

Janet and Freya prepared a delicious dinner of fried chicken which seemed fitting with the theme of the day. We were all a little tired but pleased with the progress we had made. With the meal and dessert behind us, we headed back out to finish up the front wall.

As the sun lowered into the trees, the fields were bathed in a dimming rosy glow. With the front wall standing, we had been enjoying a nice dessert and socializing with our friends when it was time for them to head home.

Sean and I looked at the two finely built but precarious walls and decided that we should add the two end walls to stabilize the structure. Somewhat doubting our ability to accomplish the task in the failing light, we grabbed hammers and boards to see how far we could get. The job went quicker than we had anticipated. In a gloom so dim that we could barely see what the other was doing, I drove the final few nails home tying the walls together at the top.

We headed back to the house very satisfied with the day. The work had been so much more enjoyable when mixed with socializing, even if it meant that we took lots of breaks. Topping all of that off with Janet's good cooking and a pretty sunset made me wish that every day could be like this.

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.