Down on the farm...

Terry keeps telling everyone we bought a farm. And telling people to look at my blog for photos of it. So I figured I'd better get some evidence posted that maybe we do have a farm.

If you have a tractor that makes it a farm, right? We bought the cutest little farm tractor. I had no idea that real farm tractors came in the mini size. Here is a friend of ours experimenting with disking up the soil in my future garden plot. Since our soil is so sandy, we figured we might be able to skip plowing (especially since we don't own a plow and would have to buy one if we wanted to plow up the soil.) Digging in this soil is literally like digging in a sandbox. I'm so used to heavy clay soil, where you dig down 6 inches and hit hardpan. In the garden in New York State and the garden I left behind here in MI when we moved, I added sand to the soil to make it lighter. Here I am wishing I had a bit of clay to add. It will be a learning experience to garden in sand. You dig down six inches past the grass roots and hit pure clean soft brown sand. Pretty amazing.

The disking experiment appears to be a success. Rick is going to disk it up again this coming weekend and I will mix in a whole bunch of compost and manure and plant my first crop in a few weeks... a row of garlic to be harvested next July. I am also going to prepare rows for raspberries and strawberries. I need to do some research to see if those are okay to plant in the fall, or if it better to wait until spring. Those are two things I want to get started as soon as I can.

If you are hauling hay, that makes it farm too, right? That hay wagon is really overloaded, isn't it? These bales of hay are for chicken bedding, then when mixed well with manure, will be used to mulch the garlic, raspberries and strawberries and fertilize the soil.

Oh, and all farms need a barn. We have a couple you can chose from.

This is a large metal building. The person who built it, used it to build airplanes in. We decided we are going to call it the garage. It is actually where Terry is going to spend most of his time, because his air compressor and all his important tools are out there. I believe we are going to be parking our cars in there in the winter, too. And keeping the tractor in there. And in case you are wondering, the guy who built this barn, also built an airstrip on the property. The electric wiring for the lights for the runway is all still intact, even though the airstrip is now partly lawn and partly overgrown. So if we decide that farming doesn't work for us, we can always go into the airport/airplane manufacturing business.

We are going to call this long green building the workshop. Rick, the guy on the tractor in the first photo, is going to make part of this building into a wood working workshop. (We are giving him space for a workshop in trade for him mowing our 5 acre or so of lawn on a regular basis. If it means less work for me, I'm all for it!) I will have a corner of the workshop to use as my potting shed and a little workshop for me to keep all my basket making materials and other messy projects in. It is all set up for a woodstove, so it will be warm in the winter. Half the building is open on one side, and right now we are using it for storage space, but eventually I would like to build a few horse stalls in there. That is not going to happen any time soon, but this morning I was impressing on Terry that we can't fill the whole thing up with stuff, because at some point, I need to have room for my horse!

I haven't taken any photos of it yet, but we also have a little barn for animals. It doesn't look like much on the outside, but on the inside, it is cozy and dry and has two stalls that would be perfect for my miniature milk cows (when I get them--which I don't think is going to be any time soon, so don't hold your breath waiting for photos!). It looks like in the rather distant past, goats were kept in this little barn, judging from the goat manure covering the floor. In fact that is what I am off to do right now, go clean out the stalls and spread the manure on the garden, and use the old decayed straw in there for to mulch the tomato plants I planted last weekend. And while I am waiting for the workshop/potting shed to be completed and organized, I am going to use this little barn for my gardening tools and my own personal space. It is the one place Terry hasn't filled up with his tools and stuff, so I have claimed it for myself!

So, you see, we do have a farm. We have a tractor, a haywagon, some barns, a farm cat--now our little farm just needs a name. If anyone has any suggestions we are open to ideas!