House Build Week 7-9

The last few weeks, the building project has been “on break”.  Our basement has just been sitting there, waiting for the next step.  Which was getting the floor trusses ordered.  They should be delivered sometime next week (the second week of June which will be week 10 of our house build).  Our builder plans to start framing out the basement at the beginning of that week in anticipation of the floor trusses arriving right when they need to install them.  In the meantime, we brought the manlift over and went up in it to get a good view of everything.  Here’s a panorama of our “front yard”.  (The image is a bit distorted since I took it on my iPhone: in real life our lane is nearly straight, not curved as it appears below.)

At the end of the lane, there is a little path through the trees that empties out into the corner of the next field over. I commandeered a section of the field here and planted a garden.  I kept thinking I was done but then going ahead and throwing in a couple more seeds here and there, but I really think I’m done now for this year.  I have three types of tomatoes, two types of peppers, zucchini, summer squash, spaghetti squash, four types of pumpkins (all mini varieties), cucumbers, cantaloupe, and watermelon.  Plus, zinnias and two types of sunflowers.

Watering everything has been a bit easier than I expected since we don’t actually have any water set up at the farm yet.  The wells are dug (if you look closely, you can see them in the picture above, just on the other side of the lane where the ground looks very dark) but the pumps have not been install, nor will they be until the house is under roof.  It’s been an obligingly wet spring so far, with the rain spaced out nicely to accommodate most of my watering needs.  On the really hot, dry spells, I’ve been carting water over to the farm by filling up our 45-liter cooler.  It’s a bit of a hassle, but not too bad considering we only live five minutes from the new house and it only takes one trip to water everything.

There’s still so much more I want to grow on the farm eventually, but I’ll have to pace myself and add things slowly so I don’t get overwhelmed.  We are hoping, when all the plants are done in the fall, to till up my whole garden area, landscape it, and fence it in.  Since it’s really just part of the farmer’s field that I took over, it’s VERY overrun with weeds right now, but I’m not letting myself worry overly much about it since it would take way too much time to try to maintain it the way it’s currently set up.

The farmers (we have two farmers who rent different sections of our fields) both came in and planted their crops.  It’s really interesting to watch them work because they both have very different methods of farming: one uses huge, high-tech machinery (he farms a lot of land in the area so needs larger equipment); the other uses a simple older tractor and disc plow (pictured below).

Spring is in full-swing now and it has been so much fun to see all the new wildflowers popping up. There has been a TON of new growth in general all around the farm.  We had to go through and re-carve out quite a few paths.  Everything is extremely green and grown up, and for the most part we like it that way, though maybe not in my garden and along the paths that we like to walk.  Evie is a huge fan of exploring the farm and we always have a blast taking little trips down to the creek (featured picture at top of page).  She’s leading the way in the picture below.

I got poison ivy before the plants really came up super aggressively, but now they are out in full force and we’ve been spraying the edges of the fields and garden that we navigate the most to prevent me bursting into itchy blisters everytime I come within ten feet of them.  The patch that is worst is right between our house lot and garden, so that’s been a real problem that we’re still working on.

I made a swing (which I want to share more about soon!) and Chad helped me hang it in my garden.  Unfortunately, the poison is too bad in this area to really use the swing yet, and we also need to clean up some small/dead trees that are a bit in the way.  I was still really excited about this, though, because I’ve wanted a tree swing FOREVER.

We’ve seen some of the prettiest flowers this Spring and I have been having so much fun learning to identify all the different wild plants. I’ve even been using some of them medicinally to help with the poison ivy I was dealing with and I have plans to gather and use many others in the future.  We’ve also seen some of the most interesting wildlife on the farm this spring!  Tons animals including deer, foxes, opossums, raccoons, rabbits, snapping turtles, frogs, snakes, many many species of birds including bald eagles, and most recently (and most excitingly) a porcupine!  No one in my family has ever seen one in the wild and they aren’t super common in our area so it was really special to find one on our property.  Spring has been a blast and I can’t wait until we’re actually living on the farm.  I’m sure we’ll see so much more when we’re spending our entire days there. (Blurry picture of the porcupine because we didn’t want to get too close to it!)

I could share even more of our adventures, but this is already been a really long post, so I’ll call it quits for now.  Thanks for reading through my ramblings! Check back again soon to find out the latest on our house building project and farm life updates!