It’s been a while since we’ve written, and perhaps the only reason it’s happening today is because it is raining.

My pickup truck has a shell on it, so it’s not good for hauling compost.  We have the tiny John Deere for cutting grass for compost and the 18 cubic foot trailer it tows for hauling manure.  While Dan picked out the last of the starthistle, I brought down load after load of manure (each to their talent) into the 2400 square foot veggie area.  Our neighbor has a collection of horses, steers, and llamas that kept us well supplied as long as we could move the stuff.  It would have been simple except for a particularly steep and canted section of the road that had me doing controlled slides on the later trips in the day.  Yeah.  Don’t tell my dad.

Lovely rain.  Weekend after weekend of 95+ degree heat was great for the cherry tomatoes, but bad for the larger heirlooms.  Now the cherries are backing off a bit and the heirlooms are coming out.  They’d better hurry because we’re going to cut down the vines in a week or two so we can compost that area too.  Along with 3-5 inches of compost went 350 pounds of gypsum to battle the clay.  Next year’s soil is going to be a huge change from this red hardpan!

We’ve learned the lesson about gopher cages.  Of the 16 trees we planted in our first year, 9 of them died from a long frost.  They would have been alright, but we planted them in an area where the cold air pooled and did not run off.  The other 6 that were planted on a slope did better.  However we did not use gopher baskets.  They did okay the first year, but half of them died this year.  All the trees we planted the second year went in with gopher baskets, and they are doing fine.  This winter we will be planting 40 new trees and each one will get a basket.  Cheap insurance.

The deer figured out my fishing line fence trick.  Next year it’s going to be electrical fence.  If that doesn’t work, I’ll be hiring lawyers.

Today I built a second solar panel.  The field shed is all set for the winter and all the basic facilities are in place.  Dave, our son, is planning to live on the farm next Fall as part of a university exchange program.  He will definitely be factored into the 2011/12 farm plan.

Obviously, summer means different things in different places.  In coastal Mendocino, it means it’s warm enough to plant basil (in a sunny sheltered spot or unheated greenhouse), and… fog!  Summer solstice was a lovely, sunny day, and for those of us still scraping off winter’s moss, it was a welcome sight.  Then through today… mostly fog, overcast, and a balmy 60 degrees.  Ahh, coastal summer.  We’ll still have nice, sunny days, but they are scarce enough that… Read the rest of this article »

The rain comes on Tuesdays as if I set the timer myself on one of the robots.  Then it warms up and dries out for the weekend.  It’s been like that for a month.  I can’t believe it. The last couple weeks we’ve been working on a number of things, both in infrastructure and planting.  Some of the work we’ve been doing over the winter has been making the off-grid operation able to sustain human life and even field a few off-farm job emails.  Most of the insulation is… Read the rest of this article »

Actually, I did.  I had been looking forward to our annual inspection and it was worth it.  Debbie was our inspector and she went through our operation.  I got to talk about our farm for an hour to someone who really likes this sort of thing.  She looked at our labels and my farm records.  Some days I can have trouble digging a hole, but by golly can I file records!  We had a great talk and Coyote House Farm got the thumbs up for another year. During our walk around… Read the rest of this article »

With the seeds in the ground and the timers set, the routine for the next few weeks has turned from planting to building, weeding, and checking on the infrastructure.   This is the sweet spot at our place where the rain has tapered off and the snake desiccating heat has not started. Our son Dave came with us this weekend.  He turned 18 a couple weeks ago and is getting ready to go off to the University of Alaska at Fairbanks in the fall.  We’re going to miss him around the house and on the… Read the rest of this article »

[slideshow id=27] Drew, Jim and I spent Saturday at the farm practicing division of labor.  My morning was spent taping up some of the tube connection points in our Freshman test field irrigation system.  Occasionally one of the inner-hose-inside-outer-hose connections, currently held together by friction alone, will pop and we’ll arrive at the field to see the evidence of an uneven timed irrigation etched as water lines in the clayey soil.  We decided to try duct tape and see how it holds. … Read the rest of this article »