Babies.

Because you can't be a momma without babies, here are some of the babies at the grandkids' farm today.

Gram had a big day too, we went to Wally's, then ate Taco Bell, then came home and built fence.

Happy day to all you Moms out there!

Gardens!

After babbling on about "living on the edge without money" I haven't been able to write much lately because I've stumbled on more design work than I've had in 6 years!  It's all good tho! (mind yer speakers)

Anyway I want to talk a little about the garden.

Hickchic, one of my faithful readers (I always wanted to say that) and family are starting their little farm from scratch, what a pleasure that must be! We bought an old farm, the house is almost 100 years old and I'd bet the kitchen garden has essentially been in the same spot all those years - it's been there for at least 40 years anyway.

Our soil is a silty loam, 24-30" of topsoil over a limestone chert/silt-clay fragipan. On top it's only slightly acid but as you dig deeper it gets more acid. The former owners were Amish and I was surprised the garden was so devoid of organic matter when we arrived. This type soil is very tight and poorly drained without organic matter and the less it drains the more acid it gets and the less it drains. I'm no chemist but somehow the tiny grains of silt don't clump together as well when pH is low and this makes for very small air spaces, when the particles clump together it makes passage of air and water easier. Anyway, without much of anything organic, the soil took forever to dry and compacted like cement when it did.

Our first garden here beat us, plain and simple. We came from the Central Valley of California, where sandy soil and sparse rain means there really isn't much of a weed problem except where you water. Not so, here. In fact the first two years we were effectively run out of the garden by spiny amaranth which is really hard to eradicate unless you get it extremely young.

So one of my main criteria for locating the farm - over 35" of rain, was my first hurdle.

Since I'm not much of a cultivator and I don't like to use more chemicals than I need to, I decided to build some raised beds. I simply used the scraper blade on the little tractor to scrape 6-8in of topsoil from between the beds-to-be up onto the new beds. Here are a list of raised bed benefits:

1. Drainage raises pH
2. quicker warming in the spring
3. less compaction
4. easier to mulch a wide area than a narrow one

Raised beds do quite a few things, first in the way of pH, by scraping the path topsoil onto the bed topsoil they gave me a deeper layer of sweet soil (less acidic) instantly and because they promote drainage, the soil stays sweeter.

We've added lots of carbon as mulch - wood chips, straw, spoiled hay and also lots of well rotted manure and stirred it thoroughly each spring to get oxygen to the breakdown bugs. I'm very happy with the improved tilth and will probably not till most beds after this year - tilling is good for incorporating organics but every time you add carbon (the woody part of plants) and stir, the soil the bacteria that breaks down the plant material uses nitrogen to get started and will take it from the soil if you don't add enough. In fact, tilling can actually burn up more organic matter than you are adding by giving the aerobic bacteria a shot of oxygen, causing them to break down all your hard won compost really fast - just like in your compost pile.

Report to the Grandkids, MMX

Since this is the grandkids farm, it only seems appropriate to give a periodic report on the state of the farm, so here goes part I.

We still own the farm, no liens or encumbrances - Ye Haw!

Soil fertility balance sheet:

1. (-) We sold a small amount of alfalfa hay last year and about 2 dozen calves
2. (-) Traded about 25 bales of grass hay for putting up the other 25
3. (+) We didn't hay all fields - mowed some and let it drop as usual. 
4. (+) We continue purchasing/bartering for feed concentrate imports
5. (+) We brought in a good wagon load of straw (with help buckin' from your pregnant Auntie/Mom!). 
6. (+) Most of our firewood last year was from off farm.

I need to get a couple soil samples to take to the Extension but I'm going to say that we probably are still down some fertility on balance due to putting up hay on shares.

Water
Still my biggest concern long term is water, both quality and availability. We are downhill from two dairies. One uses a lagoon to capture and spread from a freestall barn, the other is more traditional with lots of runoff. I don't mind receiving some of the "tea" that runs off but worry about the groundwater quality as well as level as dairies really use the water.

Good news is there isn't any new (or old) industrial development nearby or uphill, no big CAFO ag barns/lots and no new urban refugee barns either!

Stay tuned for an upcoming post on water.


Improvements:
Capital Improvements [cash costs in brackets]

1. Greenhouse Project: increased solar gain, new poly roof covering, new (recycled) south glass, hydronic heated benches, propagation cabinet [mostly recycled, $100 plumbing, $75 poly, misc hardware]
2. New hen house. [a few 2x4s]
3.  New back steps [recycled lumber, new composition railing]
4. Still working on Gram's kitchen...

Equipment, facilities:

1. 9 new calf hutches [2x4s]
2. New 8x12 calf shed [2x4s]

Cash income/expenses:
Last year was pretty tough cash-wise: Pops got sick, graphics work was virtually non-existent, calf market was in the toilet. But, work has been picking up since the first of the year, calves are bringing better, Uncle Sam is happy for a while, we're working the hospital bill and meds/supplies aren't nearly as bad as we thought.

I was kind of slow this time last year and Gram did lots of the gardening. This year I've been doing more graphics work so she is doing most of the gardening. We had thought this would be the year went much more into market farming as a necessity but we pulled back at the last minute as graphics jobs started coming back. We did wholesale some starts to the feed store, and depending on his success selling them we may put up a small hoophouse this fall.

We ate lots of homemade beef and pork and potatoes and onions and beans last year! We went shopping a couple times at Sam's and used the pantry a lot. We've worked on our few utility bills; the phone is a bare bones plan, the Great Thunder Bottom Internet Antenna is at the lowest level of service available, we have plug strip switches on the Evil Standby Red Eye phantom loads if we can remember to use them and of course we have had curly lamps everywhere since whenever.
We haven't had cable or satellite TV for years but I recently splurged and signed up for Netflix - $8.95/mo - good time are here again! I finally watched Crude Awakening!

All in all, the last couple of years were a good experience. Our income mix is is much improved. Although graphics still comes exclusively from CA, 2 new clients are more diversified than I've had in a long time - health care and small business advertising. We have even more experience with sick calves, one day we hope to be able to keep most alive.

We remembered too that pantries (and Rule #4) are there for a reason.

How Big is Too Big?

The average US home has grown in size from 1,000 square feet in the 1950's to somewhere in the 2,400sf area in the late aughts. At the same time, the number of people per home has dropped from 3.5 or so to 2.5 or about 1000sf per person. 

http://all-classic-ads.com

Is it any wonder the amount Americans owe on mortgages has increased from about 20% of the size of GDP to 70% of the size of GDP? Over 2/3 of the value of everything this country makes in a year. That just floors me.

www.calculatedriskblog.com

I didn't talk about housing in my 5 Rules mainly because there are so many ways to gain shelter and I obviously have a bias toward small towns and small farms. But if I were to add a sixth rule I think it would be KISS - Keep It Small, Stupid. Granted, we now live in the largest house we've ever owned, but that's the key, we own it.

Several bloggers I read were talking about housing and households this week - Calculated Risk (a great economics site if like me, you understand charts better than equations), John Michael Greer, Sharon Astyk and some others. They talk a lot about declining resources and that dovetails right into the whole idea of a less-is-more lifestyle.

When we decided to abandon CA to the real estate flippers 6 years ago, we had a few criteria; somewhere in the center of the country, east of the treeline and south of the 200-day growing line (think somewhere south and east of central Kansas) - away from cities, 20+ acres of tillable land, 35"+ rain - those we my criteria, plus - - -

 an old 2-story house...












So yea, we have over 1,000sf per person in our house but we don't owe anything to the bank and that makes all the difference. But as far as being the wisest decision, an old house (ours is just under 100 years old) isn't the best. This old place is framed with oak - yep, oak, so it's gonna stand up for a while longer and the foundation and framing are about as straight as they get so I have no qualms about putting in time and money bringing the insulation and mechanicals up to snuff. But it is a long process and if you or yours don't have the experience of living in a work zone for a really long time you need to think long and hard about a fixer.

Much better (if you all the parties can agree) would be building a new, frugal home from scratch. I love this old house and I'm trying to get all the holes plugged and some solar gain but it's tough, starting new with solid plans would get you to frugal fast. I'd build a small, bermed, passive solar house using plastered ICF walls (basically a Styrofoam/concrete sandwich) and galvalume or tile roof. I'd spend all I had on the envelope and finish the interior as I could get the goodies.

There used to be a formula, back in the pre ETF/bundled securities days, it was called a qualifying ratio and when we bought our first house we needed the housing cost to be less than 24% of our gross income and all our loan payments plus mortgage to be less than 28% - oh, and 20% down too.

Dropout Economy

A Time magazine article a few weeks ago really struck a nerve. The premise put forward was kind of a new underground economy populated by dropouts.

As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that won't exist, we're on the cusp of a dropout revolution...

As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.

So I looked up the author - Reihan Salam, like I usually do and was surprised to find he is a conservative. Not that that's a bad thing, just that this little ball-gazing effort was quite liberal - in the strict sense of the adjective:

Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; 

The dropouts he pointed to were of the young version but the underground economy he imagined could be one I'd fit right into. Today there are a large number of people who've been out of work for a long time, many are indeed blue collar and a large portion are also 50+ undergraduates. Salam thinks unemployment is so cushy and attractive nowadays many freeloaders would rather draw unemployment than find a job. I'd have thought perhaps his vision is more of a conservative's nightmare of the return of long-haired hippy types until this:

The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials.

Wow. What a mouthful from anyone even sort-of aligned with any political party.

Anyway, it's a great idea starter for anyone thinking about slipping out of the fast lane...