Saturday on the Farm

We had a pretty good family day on the farm today. We dug a pretty big hugelkulture bed in the fenced garden area a few weeks ago and came back again today to start another one. Nicole and I got the bed dug out and a bit of wood into the bottom before we had to break for the kids lunch/nap cycle. You can see the kids helping there on the right. :)

 The first hugelkultur bed that we dug is in the background but somewhat obscured by all the earth we removed for the second bed today. The soil is amazing! So easily worked and full of big fat earthworms. I almost felt bad turning it all up but once we get the wood and other brush materials buried under the bed it will be a great place to grow veggies over the next few years.

Jula, queen of the last grass island!

Tenzin brought his construction trucks to the farm today for added digging capacity. :)

 Finally all dug out and getting it's first layer of wood. After we pile 3-4 more layers of wood we'll add other loose brush and leaves before replacing the soil on top.

Today we had two new beehives added to the farm. The owner of the first three hives told their friends that we had room for more. Meeting Debbie and Hugh today was really nice, they're good folks and really love their bees.

 Here's Martha's 3 hives. I think we'll end up with a few more in the next few months. The two little white wires are electrified fencing designed to keep out the bears that occasionally roam on to our land.

 And yay, it's solar powered! Believe it or not it only takes two wires and about 400 volts to keep the bears out. This little unit will push a pulse 25 miles!

 BLACKBERRY!

 I'm not sure what kind of tree this is yet but it was clearly coppiced some time ago and has some wonderfully straight and tall branchs now. Good building materials!

Here you can see some of the shade scorch up in the forest. The tall cedars are shading out all the other trees and causing some to just die off and turn black. I think we'll have to thin out that forest some in the coming years.

This is a view of the backside of the house from the road that goes up into the forest. :-)

Suddenly this puppy appeared...

Welcome Anubis the latest member of our unexpectantly growing family!

Permaculture Zone Map

This is our very first stab at laying out some Permaculture zones for our farm. Some of this is subject to change over the next year. Most of the work that we'll be doing in the near future is in Zones 1, 2, and 3 so I intend to make another map very soon that focuses just on those areas.

Zone 1: includes Zone 0 (the House), our annual gardens, herb gardens, the chicken coop

Zone 2: Multi-layered food forest initially based around the old orchard (mostly pear trees) but we'll plant a lot more fruit and nut trees there

Zone 3: This area is already flat and open, we'll leave this for livestock grazing maybe planting some grains or something else out there too.

Zones 1, 2 and 3 cover the entire flat area of our land.

Zone 4: This area (as well as Zone 5) are slope up sharply to the north. This area actually provides a bit too much winter shade for Zones 1-3. We're thinking that we might be able to thin out the forest in this area and plant chestnuts and oaks to create a harvest forest for nuts and wood that won't grow as tall as the cedars that are there right now.

Zone 5: We'll just leave all this alone as a natural buffer between the farm and the large meadows that are just off to the east of us. It's really beautiful up there too, lots of really big cedars and oaks and mostly so sloped and wooded that it would be a major shift to turn it into anything else.

To-Do!

This property came with a lot of things that need repair or remediation. We're just starting to attend to the most important and obvious things but are making big to-do lists of all the little stuff too. We're starting to dream as well, finally envisioning all the things we've wanted to be doing but now with a real piece of land as the framework.

Off the top of my head, things that need attending soon:

• The Springhouse pumping rig needs to be converted to solar and have it's piping re-run such that the spring water no longer mixes with the nearby creek water. This weekend I'm going to a solar water pumping workshop at Sierra Solar. Hopefully I'll find  the info I need to really flesh out a plan to take care of this.

• Overhead power line from house to workshop has several old trees that are thinking about falling over on to it. These should be cleared before winter sets in too heavily. I put in a request for a quote from a tree guy that I saw at the Food and Farm Convention last weekend. 

• The Forest needs thinning. Unless I'm totally wrong, for both forest ecology and wildfire safety reasons we need to thin out the dead trees in the Forest area. The large cedars are so big that all the small trees that do sprout in the understory die off after a few years. These would make great fire-ladders for a brush fire to climb up into the canopy.  I think the tree guy will be able to help with this.

• The Workshop (cinderblock, some wood siding and tin roof) has several things that need attention before they deteriorate further.  In particular a few pieces of the tin roof have come unnailed and will probably blow off during the winter if I don't nail them back down. The workshop is a big project in general and we'd like to get it fixed up and remodeled to make it much more useful than it's rusty, leaky state right now. This season is about not letting it get worse than it is.

The House! We have some very lovely tenants staying on in the House until the end of March. After that we'll have a whole new set of  to-do items before we can get ourselves moved in. We're hoping to move in by Fall 2012.

• The septic system is over 100 years old and is too close to the creek to meet code right now. There's what seems to be a great place to dig a new septic system in the Backyard. Haven't explored this any yet but have plenty of contacts to be able to more or less do this ourselves.

• The house's electric heater is in an unknown state. The tenants have been using the wood fireplace for heat. Given that the old heater is under the house we want to replace it before moving in. 

• There is a solar water heater unit on the roof that's currently disconnected and due for some sort of maintenance. This needs lots more exploration. It's not a must-have before moving in but it would be a lot easier to work on if we weren't depending on the hot water system at the time.

Really, this year will be all about getting the obvious stuff fixed up. We're following the permaculture principle of observing the land for a full year before setting any concrete plans into motion.  Eventually we'll build up a food forest around the old pear orchard, have grazing areas for goats, have a good size chicken flock and coop, expand the beekeeping operation already in place.


In the past few weeks as the realities of all this work has started to set in we've begun talking about this whole homestead as a life-long project, one we're intensely excited about :-)

Start at the begining

At the beginning of January 2012 we closed escrow on a property that took us a year to find.   After searching high and low we found a hidden gem in Grass Valley, California: a 10-acre farm, small farmhouse, old orchard and really close to town.

This blog will chronicle the planning and progress we make on our way to rehabilitating the structures and land base, transforming it into a permaculture homestead!