Early Xmas Present

We were gifted with a beautiful rainbow a couple days before Christmas.

Ice Storm

We got an ice storm Saturday night/Sunday morning. We got off light compared to the midwest but everything did get a thick glaze of ice.


Julia came out to help me tend the animals, and had a lot of fun knocking the ice off the fences and gates.




All the animals weathered the storm fine. Luckily the pigs and sheep respect the electric netting since the thick glaze of ice would have prevented it from shocking them.


A large branch from a neighbors evergreen came down due to the ice landing on our fence. After cutting it free with the chainsaw, the fence rebounded, although I may need to add a t-post at the spot to take out the slight bow that is left.


The asparagus stalks were finished off by the ice. They were ready to be cut down anyway, but they do make quite a tangled mess.

High Tunnel Construction Part 2

Snapped a few pictures of the finished hoop house when I got home from work last evening.
Danielle purchased the 6 mil plastic in a roll 100 ft long and 40 ft wide. The plastic is held in place along the sides by simply burying it in a shallow trench. We cut 24 ft of the plastic so that we had 2 ft on each side to bury in the ground.
The ends are framed out with 2 x 4s with a 4 ft wide door on one end and a window at the other.
We need the window so that we can get cross ventilation on warm days so that we don't bake the plants. You can see some of the seedlings in the picture above.

T-posts are driven into the ground and attached to the end frames to add support. It is not really clear but we also strung all the hoops together with rope to tie the entire structure together. Probably the most difficult part was figuring out how to attach the plastic at the ends. We ended up just stapling it in place, which was easy enough, but I had wanted to avoid it so that we could more easily remove and reuse the plastic. Well we see how it holds up and we may end up leaving this in place all year since we are expanding our market garden, thanks to all the rooting the pigs are doing -- but that is another post. As far as holding up to the weather the hoop house so far has proven up to the task. It was something of a trial by fire, since the day after we finished it we had a nasty wind storm with 50 mph wind gusts followed by 5-6 inches of snow. Besides having to knock the accumulated snow off the top of the tunnel all was well.

I need to put a remote thermometer in the hoop house to get an idea of how well it is doing at insulating the plants. As you can see in the pictures from inside the tunnel it has already started to create its own weather system thanks to water vapor condensation.

High Tunnel Construction

Here are some photos from our high tunnel construction project. I am sure Danielle, will explain the rationale and such on her blog later, but since I am known as Manuel on the farm I will just give you an idea of the construction. It is a simple design, 4 ft long rebar driven into the ground with 1 ½ inch pvc conduit slipped over it to form the hoops. The hoops themselves are 20 ft long and 14 ft across at the ground which makes the tunnel just under 6 ft high in the middle. The overall length of the house is 34 feet.

One of the great things about this type of building is that you can vary the dimensions to fit your space/needs. We wanted to get the most plantable area so we went with a slightly wider footprint, 14 ft for the 20 ft long hoops, most designs suggested a 12 ft span. Adding the extra 2 ft in width dropped the middle some, but since Danielle and the kids will be doing most of the work inside it makes little difference.

We were only able to get the conduit locally in 10 ft lengths, but they did come with bell ends so we were able to glue them together without a separate coupler. The kids helped me do the conduit gluing, and measuring out and pounding in of the rebar. Emily and I bent the hoops into position and slipped them over the rebar.








I will post pictures of the framed out ends, as well as the finished product when I get a chance.

First Snow

Well we are having our first snow of the season, and it reckons to be a real one. We have at least an inch already and it isn't even noon yet. Overall they are calling for up to four to six inches. Went out deer hunting this morning but nothing seems to be moving with the snow falling. Maybe I will get lucky this afternoon if it lets up.

The pigs now have access to part of the market garden and seem to
be enjoying cleaning up the leftover corn stalks and other vegetable matter.

The Navajo-Churro sheep don't mind the snow at all with their nice thick wool coats.

This will likely be the only snow many of these geese see, as we need to butcher them soon for Xmas.