Greenhouse Maintenance, Production Note, Vacation Cabin Rental, WP Migration
On the long road to farm vacations
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With the weather warming it seems that everything on the farm is moving much too quickly for me with the exception of seed starting. Perhaps it is my age or maybe because I am a little apprehensive about farm vacations.
The ground finally thawed and Alvin and his brother Joe began working on the road that will be used for hauling trees out of the forest and for providing access to the vacation cabin site. He is doing a fabulous job — leaving as many trees as possible and preserving the scenery — so we are thankful that he is grading these roads.
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We are also fortunate that these roads already existed on the farm because much of the work has already been done saving us some of our hard earned money. Don’t get me wrong, Alvin and Joe are still doing a lot of work, but he would be doing a lot more work if it wasn’t for these roads. These past couple weeks Carl, Lee and I have cleared almost have all of our logging roads making them accessible by our tractor so that we can begin learning how to pull trees out of the forest with as little damage as possible. Again, I just can’t tell you enough how blessed we are that our forefathers already built roads throughout the farm for harvesting trees, because it is emotionally difficult to see the road graded and the damage it causes to the surroundings. (I am glad I didn’t see the original bulldozer grade these mountains or I would have been heartbroken but am glad they are here for our use.) Over the years since we have been caretakers of this farm we have let trees grow in and along the roads, folks in the area call us “Tree Huggers”, I can understand why because we just couldn’t bring ourselves to cutting many trees down. I would still call us “Tree Huggers” but we are felling trees along the roads that are necessary for gaining access to harvest timber, and we will need to harvest enough timber to build the cabin, and also enough hardwoods for firewood. We will continue caring for the forest and leaving as much as possible for those who farm this land after us. I must say it is kind of exciting to choose a fell line then downing a tree along the chosen fell line!
THANKS to Ed, Suria, Frank, Forest, Justin, Townes, Jack, Julie and Carl we were able to pull plastic on our propagation house (G2) so can now begin seeding for our 2011 season. It is awesome to have neighbors help out on projects that take quite a few hands. Someday I want to snap a few photographs of us covering our greenhouse because it is a major job, and unfortunately we were all busy making sure our plastic didn’t end up in the trees, so no photographs this go around. We did almost loose our first layer of plastic with a small gust of wind, mostly because it while it was calm we became complacent and didn’t feel the need to hold the plastic, but after just one gust of wind that nearly blew away our plastic we took the job seriously and not one person let go of the plastic until the plastic was fully secured to the greenhouse. THANKS AGAIN EVERYONE . (NOTE TO SELF: We replaced the wood baseboards with plastic wood as the wood rotted just after 5 years. We don’t use pressure treated wood because we want to grow HEALTHY food and the chemicals of pressure treated wood can contaminate the food.)
