New Beginnings

Tonight may very well mark a very new beginning for our family.
Tonight, we accepted the counter offer to our initial offer for what will hopefully become our new home, all things willing...

It's an older home, much older, actually, than it looks but has been nicely updated outside. The inside will still need some updating, but I have full faith in my wife to take care of that. She works wonders in that department! I'll have to update you more on that when the time comes, but for now, suffice it to say it meets all of our needs but needs a bit of "lipstick".Out back the property is in good shape with a play house, a well pump house (Yep... well irrigation water comes with the property.) And a couple of mature fruit trees. One looks to be cherry I think. Anyway... off topic... It has a wonderful deep covered porch that looks out to an unobstructed view west. Great for sunsets I'll wagerAnd a little further out back... well, that's where my domain will begin. The property sits on 2.62 acres of Agriculturally zoned real estate. Undeveloped, underused and waiting to be brought into it's own.
In addition to the land, and the well irrigation rights, this property also carries 30 shares of pasture irrigation water. It's only ten minutes from downtown Ogden, where our kids go to school and where a great farmers market is every summer. Basically, it's everything we had hoped for.

There will be much more info to come, and planning... oh the planning. I hope you'll enjoy the journey with me.
More to come!
P~

Uggghhh... My back!

Another weekend of packing and lugging things around in the books. I'm ready to move already... even if it IS just to a crappy little apartment. Hmmm.... wait a minute, that crappy little apartment has a hot tub... thinking this may not be so bad after all.

I managed to get my "Lifetime" plastic shed taken apart (Linked but not affiliated at all. They are just a local company that manufactures good products and hires good local people!) and stowed ready to bring to a generous friends house that will be willing to store it for me until we have a new home. It was actually surprisingly easy. With the help of a few teenage boys that happen to owe me free labor thanks to a life's worth of free food and lodging, I lifted the roof off in one piece and was able to tear the rest down by myself... even with wind!After moving things around and packing all morning and afternoon, I was able to head over to a friends parents house to take some cuttings of some 50+ year old grape vine stock before they started budding for the spring. Right now, at least in my neck of the woods is the perfect time to do this.
These vines were grown for 30 some odd years in the nearby town on a Church owned farm. When that farm was being taken down some 25 years ago, the members of the church were offered the opportunity to take the vines if they wanted to. My friends parents did, and they have been doing well in their backyard ever since. My buddy made a point of making sure I knew these vines did so well because they had once been "Gods vines". Either way, I ate a bunch of the green seedless table grapes this fall, and canned cases of qt's of juice from them and they certainly taste phenomenal! We're hoping that where ever we end up in this move that we'll have space to set up a true vineyard. We've wanted one forever. These cuttings will go a long way to helping with that. I'll cover the cutting and planting of these dormant buds for you in a future post, but it's not really a hard thing.

Speaking of future homesteads.... Tomorrow is D-Day for us on a property that we're REALLY interested in. By D-Day I mean, of course, Decision Day. We have placed an offer on a home and Tomorrow we will know what they think of our offer. Wish us well!

Best to you all, and may I say... I'm really glad to be back... I missed ya!
P~

Moving day...

Monday became Moving day for our little ladies.
After planning to move them originally on Saturday, two days from now, and then learning that it is scheduled to rain, we bumped up the move. No better time than the present. I figured that since most of the girls had recently molted and had a flush of new feathers, I figured that this would be a good time to clip the wings on then, since they may be loosely penned and allowed more room to free range at their new home. So out they came, clipped and ready to go and were loaded into a metal pen that I keep around for "things like this", and then we had to drag out the chicken tractor and load it into the new owners truck. I got a bit lucky here because, while I had not measured it previously, the coop was 48 inches wide and coincidentally my gate opening was... 48 inches wide! phew... it fit. Only after taking the wheels off, but it fit none the less.The drive wasn't far, but it was pretty slow. didn't want to have any problems after all.
So, now our girls are at their new home. I haven't heard of any problems, so I'm guessing that things are going alright. I'll probably check in on them this weekend... wouldn't want to just hve them think I didn't care after all.
I was glad to see the new families little kids come running out excited as could be to get to see the "Chickens chickens!!!" I hope they enjoy them as much as we have.
Maybe later this year they'll come home to a new farm?
Till next time!
P~

Going to be a hard Season

I was packing today and had a thought... It's going to be a hard season for me this year. I won't have a home, and that means no garden. No garden means no fresh veggies everyday. But even more so, no chance to work in the garden.

I Guess this will be the year to really get to know our local farmers markets and maybe vounteer a few more "hands on" hours at the Extension Service huh?
Got to find the silver lining... that's what it's all about!
Namaste.
P~

As we've been going through our own process of making sure that we can move forward with our home sale, we've been slowly coming to the realization that this is really happening... we are moving.

It's a little hard on one hand, I mean we've really grown as a family and as individuals in this home, but in other ways we've grown beyond it. I know now that I don't have to have the "farm of my dreams" to be happy. I know what is possible on a small acreage. We've learned that a "perfect" looking neighborhood often means you have neighbors that are too concerned with their own definition of what "perfect" means. Unfortunately, one families definition of that may not be the same as anothers.

Well, we've completed our home inspection and our appraisal, both of which seem to have gone well and brought up no real issues, so it seems as though in just a few short weeks we are to be transient for the first time in 13 years. We're looking into apartments and storage options, locations and new homes, so many things to do to get ready. But it's not just us, there are other lives impacted by this move...

Yep... the chickens. Not a lot of apartments that take chickens (More like none!) so we need to find them a home. Oh sure, I could put them in the freezer and enjoy them this spring, but it seems like such a waste for a flock of mature, well producing layer hens to just jump to that conclusion. Well, with the help of Facebook and with the help of some great Friends, we've found a new home for the ladies! Yay!!

A family that we met while doing some volunteer work for our Master Gardener program last year and have been able to keep in touch with online saw our call for a new home and have been looking to dip their toes in the the hen keeping business so this is a match made in hennery heaven!

"So, yeah, I guess you could say things are getting pretty serious..." We're packing, we're looking and we're making plans for our charges. Here we go, let's do this!
P~

Catalyst

When I wrote my last post, to be quite honest, I was pretty down. It really just put a damper on everything I felt we were trying to do. Obviously I won't let anyone stop me from having a perfectly legal garden, and I had already worked to change the laws so that I could keep my chickens so they're not going anywhere. The thing is that our garden wasn't only so we could produce food for ourselves. We love the feeling we get when we're able to give a lot of it away. We try to make multiple donations to a local women's shelter and of course ”produce bomb” the neighbors (those we can stand). But it was more than that. I felt like I was trying to point out during conversations with people, and during the beginning gardening classes that I teach, that this is possible... Our society can begin to take back at least some part of our food security and we can do it in our own backyards. I guess I was just disheartened that what I was trying so hard to do not only fell on many deaf ears, it was actually seen in a negative way? I, whether I was well meaning or not, was considered that ”trashy” neighbor that no one wants to live by. My wife and I have talked a long time about leaving the area we currently live in and trying to find some place perhaps more “tuned in” to the same things as we are. Our kids go to school a few towns over and that's the area we've thought of going to. We just never really had the catalyst to get us moving on it. It's finally come...

Now before I start getting the emails saying that I should not back down to my stupid ass neighbors, let me reiterate... we've been thinking about moving for some time. To be honest, even after the whole stink with the sign in the yard, we were still not ready to take action; we’ve never been reactionary in any of our life altering decisions. In late November though, I was told that the contact I am currently working under looked like it will not be getting renewed. There was no problems with the work, and still plenty to do in fact, it's just one of those “we need to cut back somewhere” kind of deals. So there it was... the catalyst to get us going on a long deliberated decision. Our house was put on the Market on the first of February, it was time to move on.

I began to write this post a little over a week ago. I’ve been incredibly busy with kids school projects, work, showing our home and looking at what is available on the market so it’s taken me some time to complete it. We’ve had a wonderful reception to our home on the market with an average of one showing every three days. In fact, at the time I am completing this post, I can say that we’ve received a lot of news... Last week, I found out for sure that I’ve received a brief reprieve from the unemployment scare in that my contract has been renewed for one more year. In addition, just 24 hours after that, we received an offer on our home and have accepted it. Our home is currently under contract. It took exactly every day of February, from the 1st to the 29th, but we look to have sold it in one month exactly! Just a few more hurdles like inspections and appraisals to get over and it’s a done deal. Time to find a new “farm”. For some reason, I was telling A~ from the start that I just believed that it would all happen at one time, back to back, and it did. The power of positive thinking and belief cannot be underestimated!

In talking about what we wanted going forward, we’ve decided, for a number of reasons, that we are going to downsize. Not necessarily joining the “small house” masses quite yet, but still we are looking for a smaller home. One with space enough, but perhaps not empty space to fill. If there is one thing that we have found to be true in the last six years or so that we have been slowing becoming more in tune with our lifestyle it is that the value in where we live lies most in the people we share the space with and less with the space itself. We hope to relocate ourselves to a place where we may have a little more acceptance of our “Homescale Farming” ways, and maybe even a little more space to conduct it in. More than anything though, we want to be closer to our kids school and we want to reduce our debt as a hedge against future employment scares. Here’s to hoping. We’ve seen a number of good homes, and may know more soon. Either way, we both look forward to a new adventure.

If you’ve been a guest here for some time you know that of late I’ve been a bit out of the picture. I got to a point that I felt like I just wasn’t adding anything to the discussion and didn’t really know what to share that wasn’t just a rehash of things I’d written before. I look forward to the process of building a new homescale farm as a chance to get back into the swing of things, learn more and try some new techniques. A chance to breath a little new life into our garden and to learn new lessons along the way. If you’re new here, well, welcome and stay tuned. I’ve been planning some big changes for some time and just never managed to get around to them; I think this may just be my own catalyst.

Namaste, and thank you for hanging in there.

P~