It was raining this morning which wasn’t in the forecast. I don’t mind at all. I’m so sick and tired of looking at all the brown from this hot dry summer we’ve had. (It was enough rain to make the cows want to take shelter under an ash tree even.)
But it’s August 27th and this rain is a reminder that the clock is ticking. There’s a lot of stuff that has to get done while the ground is dry, from pasture maintenance to getting hay delivered to getting the hog fuel delivered…. This is all stuff that requires dry ground for heavy trucks to drive on, and so yeah the clock is ticking.
It’s all part of what I call the Anxiety of August.
Last year was the first time we turned our attention to our pastures, and wow, it turns out 22 acres is a lot to take care of! You might think, like I did, that’s it’s just grass so hay it or graze it. How hard could it be?
That’s how we thought about it for the first 12 years, but…we were wrong.
For one thing, we have the parts of our land going back to wetland, which we didn’t anticipate, and for another we started learning about the importance of native trees and plants meaning the need for hedgerows and allowing trees to take root. We’ve also learned about the need for soil, not dirt, and the importance of grazing.
And we are much more aware now of the invasive weeds that are a huge and constant threat to our farm, from the tansy ragwort that’s toxic to cows and horses, to the Scotch broom that sprung up when the logging company thinned behind our place…Scotch broom that is making a slow but steady march down the hill towards our place.
Other weeds we battle are Canada thistle which, it turns out, was declared an invasive weed in Washington state in 1850, and bull thistle, as well as the ever present (and destructive) Himalayan blackberry.
Still other invasive weeds have shown up in our garden (from bringing in gravel for our greenhouse) and cow paddock (from bringing in sand for our schooling arena).
So…what does all this look like as far as pasture management is concerned?
It looks like a lot more work than we realized.
It’s pulling tansy and spraying Roundup and brush hogging (aka mowing). It’s figuring out how to do rotational grazing with cows who want to constantly test—and then ignore—your electric fence.
It’s learning you let your horses over graze their pasture, making it an inviting place for weed seeds to take root.
It’s realizing that at some point you are going to have to talk to your neighbor about the weeds they don’t manage that spread seeds on your own land, and accepting that maintaining the weeds on the logging road is going to fall to you because the logging company doesn’t care.
The good news is, we are learning—always learning. And what have we learned?
We realize we need to divide the hayfield with permanent fence to help keep the cows where they should be. (Bonus: That gives us more possibilities for planting hedgerows!)
We are ready to buy our own haying equipment, because relying on others has been a royal PITA. We haven’t done it before due to inflexible work schedules that didn’t allow us to do hay when we needed to, but that will soon change. (YES!!) How does haying help? It keeps the grass cut which encourages more growth.
We’ve learned the weeds are simply going to be an ongoing battle and it will be years before we are the winning side. Simply put, we have to tackle the weeds the best we can knowing this. Last year we spent 95 hours battling tansy ragwort and we took several tons of garbage bags of it to the dump. This year we still had tansy, but probably a third of the amount.
We’ve learned we need to start pasture management in the spring, not after the grass is getting tall.
For now, in 2025, the pastures are kicking our ass-tures because we are so very behind. And this summer’s drought and heat definitely gave the weeds the advantage.
But we will keep learning and striving to do better year after year, because we are farming for a future, and we are in it for the long haul.
And in the evening, you don’t see the sparse grass or the weeds…only the beautiful sky.
In my work world, where I make online classes to teach people business writing skills, I constantly preach slowing down.
Why do I preach slowing down? Because a lot of sloppy business writing happens when people are just going too fast. We have this cult of busy-ness in our society that says we have to always be doing and so we’re dashing off emails willy nilly and hurrying through writing blog posts and hurrying through all kinds of writing at work. And then we don’t communicate clearly and we only make more work for ourselves.
So I’m constantly recommending to people that they slow down. I even wrote a blog post on ways to slow down your life so you can slow down your writing your work.
For me, I’ve long prided myself on adhering to not being sucked into that cult of busy-ness. Back when clients wanted me to use instant messenger, I quickly learned that no, that was just too distracting. And then later it was Slack and I said no to that too. I ignored work emails during evening and weekends.
But then with some health issues I’ve been going through, I figured out that I never applied that principle to my life on the farm. As prideful as I was about not being caught up in corporate craziness in my work world, I just took that cult of busy-ness and I made it how I approach the farm instead, with the cows and the horses and the garden and the dogs and the chickens and everything else that we are trying to get going here starting a small farm.
And then I had my awakening.
I’ve been suffering from chronic nausea for years—literally since we bought this place—and so I finally met with a naturopath to see what help I could get. She listened to me talk for about 20 minutes. Then she looked at me and told me she could tell just by listening to me that I spend all my time in fight or flight and no time in rest and digest.
Does your stomach ever knot up when you hear a big truth being spoken and you know in your core that it’s true? Yeah. That’s what happened.
Her recommendation was so simple. She suggested that I sit down to eat (something I don’t do unless my husband is home) and then I stay sitting for 20 minutes. That is my rest and digest.
Oh my gosh. That one change means I haven’t had nausea since the day of my appointment with her. And I have an appetite again for the first time in years.
This is a huge change in my life. Except it’s not the only change. It’s bigger than that.
Why? Because now this turns into self-examination. I have to look at why do I have to be so busy, why do I have to be so productive, and it gets into this lack of self-worth and the fact that I have to be doing things all the time to prove that I have value.
I said above that I avoided this in my work world, but that wasn’t always true. There was a time when I was part of the cult of busy-ness, carrying around my Blackberry (remember those?) and keeping it next to the bed so I was answering emails at 6:00 a.m. I was a self-employed single mom and people called me the Energizer Bunny because I was always busy doing things, like being the Cub Scout den leader and running and cooking from scratch. And my sense of self-worth came from being that busy. (I likely did some damage to my kids too because of all that, but that’s another story.)
As the kids got older, I managed to step away from that, to recognize I didn’t want to be part of the corporate craziness. But all I did was step into applying the same principles of long to-do lists and days that are far too full to our farm life instead.
So it’s a bigger journey than learning how to slow down and rest and digest because it’s a journey that involves learning to love myself. (Oh my gosh, it’s even hard to type those words.) I have to learn to believe myself worthy, learn to believe myself lovable, even if I’m not getting a bunch of stuff done.
This drive to prove my worth through productivity and long to-do lists has been my experience my whole life. And maybe one of the biggest lessons I’m going to learn from being on the farm is to finally get to a point of acceptance with myself that I’m OK as I am even if I only get three things done in a day instead of 33.
It’s only when slowing down that you see a spider catch and eat a fly!
Lucky for me, this new awareness I have of my surroundings will help me slow down. Whether it’s learning about the bird sounds around me with my bird app, noticing a salamander on the trail, or hanging out with a newborn calf, this life offers countless opportunities to slow down and savor (and even to spot a spider catching a fly on the underside of a daisy!).
So, yes, I have reasons and opportunities to slow down, but still, I will struggle with justifying it.
Now, why am I telling you all of this? Because whoever you are and wherever you are in your life, I want you to also know that you have value and worth, even if you go against the cultural norm and you slow down your life. Maybe you aren’t trying to start a small farm, but you’re doing something else, and you are okay if you go at a reasonable pace. You are okay if you quit social media and always being busy. You are okay to slow down.
Because—like me—you too are lovable and worthy, despite your to-do list.
If Christmas left you exhausted and broke, this post is for you. Why? Because we have a new way of doing the holidays that you might like.
OK, actually it’s an old way. But we’ve made it new again and we want to share it with you.
First, let’s be clear that I am writing from a place of faith, but you don’t need to celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday to benefit from our approach.
This approach can help anyone to slow down and get more out of the holiday season, whether you celebrate in a faith-based or secular way.
So, let’s get to the point, shall we? Here’s how we slow down the holidays in 6 steps…
Step 1: Make Christmas Day the beginning, not the end
So many people treat December 25th like some kind of race to the finish line. And on the 26th, it’s like they have a massive holiday hangover. They can’t wait to put the decorations away and be done with the whole thing. Stop doing that!!
December 25th isn’t the end date. It’s the beginning. Christmas is a season. In the old days, it was 12 days long (hence the song The 12 Days of Christmas). Christmas ended with Epiphany on January 6th.
Today the Church celebrates it as an octave, meaning it ends on whatever Sunday is closest to January 6th. But at home, keep the party going!
“What?” you’re thinking. “I’m so sick of Christmas by then that I just want to be done.”
Right. Because you left out the most important part: Advent.
Step 2: Celebrate Advent
For Christians, Advent is the time of preparing for Christ’s coming into the world. It used to be a lot like Lent, in fact, complete with fasting.
It’s not like that anymore, but it is still a time to prepare. And what does that mean in a secular world? Even if you’re not preparing your heart in a spiritual way, you can prepare your home slowly.
To everyone who puts up a Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving, just stop! The tree goes up for Christmas, not Advent. In the old days, the tree went up on Christmas Eve. Even in Bob’s family, his parents set up the tree on Christmas Eve after the kids went to bed.
Why? Because it is a CHRISTMAS tree. You put it up at Christmas and leave it up until the end of the Christmas season.
At our house, with constantly changing work schedules, we can’t count on both being home Christmas Eve, so we set it up a few days before, on whatever day works. And it stays up until January 7th.
Step 3: Decorate over time
This really helped me to take the pressure off when I started doing this. Rather than throw up all the decorations all at once, spread it out. As long as you have all the decorations up by Christmas Eve, you’re good! At our house, the nativity goes up the first Sunday of Advent (empty: see below). I put out my Santa collection on Dec. 6th, the feast of St. Nicholas. We put lights up around mid-month, again depending on work schedules. (We currently have cats that mean we don’t decorate as much as we used to.)
Then we put the decorations away slowly. We leave the nativity, tree and lights up until January 6th or 7th, but everything else gets put away a little at a time, in reverse order.
Step 4: Save the sweets
We don’t eat Christmas cookies until Christmas. We bake them ahead of time and they stay in the freezer. This makes Christmas seem more like Christmas because it’s the waiting and the prize.
Before I started doing this, I’d bake cookies and we’d eat them all before Christmas. There was one Christmas Eve when my kids were little that I was baking cookies that night because we didn’t have anything left to put out for Santa! Crazy!!
Now we have the anticipation of knowing we will break out our delicious cookies on the special day.
Step 5: Spread out the gift giving
If you’ve ever seen kids do the crash and burn after a frenzied Christmas morning opening gifts, you’ve wondered if there is a better way. And there is: Spread the gifts out over the 12 days of Christmas.
These aren’t big gifts. At our house, they’ve taken the place of stockings. We give our big gifts on Christmas, then little ones, one per day, until January 6th. But you could spread out the big gifts too!
Once you’ve spread out the gift giving and there’s one every day, you will never go back to the crazy way.
Step 6: Celebrate the end of Christmas
We had our first 12th Night party in 2022 and wondered why we had never done it before. It was so much fun to celebrate the end of the Christmas season with a party!
You don’t have to have a party, but marking the end of the Christmas season in some way will help you to not feel the burnout of treating Christmas like a one-day event.
Bonus Step 7: If you’re religious…
If you are celebrating Advent and Christmas as Christians, rethink your Nativity set. I used to be like everyone else and set up the whole thing at once. Now, the Nativity is set up on the first Sunday of Advent with only the animals in it and the shepherd to the side watching his sheep.
On December 17, we start the O Antiphons and we set Mary, Joseph and the donkey out to start making their way toward the manger. Every day we move them a little closer.
On Christmas Eve, we add the Christ child and the angel, we bring the shepherd closer, and we start the three Magi on their journey toward the manger. Every day, the magi move a little closer.
Just making this one change when my kids were young really helped us to refocus on Advent and slow down the whole process of “rushing Christmas.”
Congrats! Now you’re counter cultural!
I hope you follow at least some of this advice so you can slow down and enjoy the holiday season. And if you do, guess what? You’ll get to be counter cultural too! Why? Because you won’t be part of the rat race dashing towards the imaginary finish line of December 25th. You’ll slow down and savor the season. You’ll probably spend less money and eat healthier too. That’s what we’ve experienced once we took the “rush” out of it.
We evolved to be seasonal beings. We have a need to be in tune with the light and the dark, but also with feasting and fasting. When we can celebrate the Christmas season slowly, with the anticipation ahead of time and the closure at the end of it, we can truly treat it as a special time. Then we return to ordinary time refreshed and renewed, not worn out and broke.
Doesn’t that sound better?? It is, I promise.
P.S. That photo? That’s the centerpiece we made this year for Christmas dinner. We have time to spend on it because we aren’t busy rushing around. It’s fun. 🙂
We had a lot of rain and the pond that is the cornerstone of the wetland restoration project filled up…and overflowed. But I guess that’s the nature of a wetland! (You can see a video of the pond full of water here.)
To be honest, it is shocking to see how much water is in that pond, yet still overflowing. And the swale leading into it is full too. Yet, we still have standing water. Just think how much waterlogged ground we’d have if so much of it wasn’t captured in the pond!
Part of the swale. The swale goes over a gravel road that was installed for access to the project in order to haul out all the dirt. It’s called an armored crossing in wetland speak.
Full of water, it looks like it has always been there, even though the 500 native trees and shrubs have yet to grow. It has definitely become a happy place for us. We love to visit it each day, and we are anticipating migrating waterfowl will also be visiting it soon. (You can see it without the water here.)
This is where the swale goes into the pond. You can see all the standing water around the pond.
Personally, as much as I love birds, I’m also looking forward to seeing salamanders since they are one of my favorite creatures. We have them all over the farm and the garden, and we see them when we hike and ride the logging road. But I hope to see several of them moving in to the wetland area.
So for now, we sit back and enjoy, and wait for trees to grow and wildlife to show up!
We have a huge project happening on our 22 acres: a wetland restoration project. And not just any wetland restoration, but the first for our conservation district. So it’s a big deal for them too.
This has been a year in the making, although all we’ve had to do is sit around and wait…and open and close gates for the many visitors who have been out to survey, discuss, measure, dig, etc.
Now it’s October, 2024, and the final stage is taking place as 500 native trees and shrubs get planted as I type this.
What is this wetland restoration project?
Our 22 acres sits in a river valley. It was tiled and drained at some point in its 134-year history, but we don’t know when. All we know is the tiles have been breaking down over the past 12 years that we’ve been here, returning parts of our property to the wetland it used to be.
We had two choices: spend a lot of money to redo the drain tiles, or learn to live with the wetlands.
Since our goal is to farm for a future–meaning creating a place where farming and nature coexist in a way that benefits the planet–learning to live with the wetlands made the most sense. We are part of a voluntary stewardship program, learning to run our small farm in the most responsible way. That made it easy to talk to our local conservation district about the standing water issues and what we might do other than fence the livestock off. They offered to find the funds to restore a wetland on our property. That would help with some of our standing water issues, and provide critical habitat too. Of course we said yes!
From wetland mess to wetland restored
The half acre area that is being restored is technically wetland on geographical maps. For us as the property owners, it was simply a weedy overgrown mess that we couldn’t even walk through due to a neighbor getting his huge tractor stuck there—twice–and needing an even bigger tractor to pull his out. The tractor tires left huge ruts in the ground, making it uneven to the point of dangerous. So that part of our land sat and Oregon ash trees and Pacific crabapples sprouted and we thought we’d just let it be since we couldn’t use it.
I guess you could say it was kind of, sort of a wetland, but far from ideal.
But now…now it’s something! After months of meetings and budget approvals and paperwork and discussions and tours, the plan was finalized and the project began.
While the ground was still dry in September, the contractor dug out a pond and swales and hauled away 60 yards of dirt. He placed felled trees and brush piles in strategic places for habitat. Native grasses were planted in and around the pond and swales, and the area was fenced to keep livestock out but let wildlife in.
As the rain has started to fall, the pond has started to fill. And now 500 native shrubs and trees are being planted as the final step.
From weedy mess to wetland reality
What used to look like a weedy mess is starting to look like the wetland it used to be. We walk out there every day now to see the grass seed sprout and the water collect in the pond. It’s amazing to have this project happening right here, right now on our property.
To see what it looks like today, check out this video. (In the future, I plan to have a longer video showing every stage…and of course we will be tracking progress in the years to come.)
Using our cows for rotational grazing is one crucial step toward farming for a future. Planting cover crop is another. But…planting a cover crop was a bigger undertaking than you might think.
And we did it! Yes, the newbies got a fall cover crop planted in part of the old hayfield!
It took the help of another neighbor to borrow a big enough tractor, the generosity of our local conservation district to have a seed drill to rent for cheap, and a seed mix shipped across the country (to get what we wanted)…plus cooperative weather.
And it all came together. The week we had the seed drill reserved was perfect weather wise, and it hadn’t rained so the ground was dry. (That meant we didn’t have to worry about tearing up the field with the big tractor.)
Our neighbor Bob shows our Bob the controls on the borrowed tractor.
The fall cover crop seed mix is wheat, barley, sorghum sudangrass, radish, winterpea and forage turnip. It’s designed to help build soil but also feed our cows.
This mix will put nitrogen into the ground, help to break up the hard clay, and provide our cows with healthy forage next year…if it makes it through the winter.
Bob puts the seed mix into the bay of the seed drill.
That’s the big unknown. Our weather can be unpredictable in our valley because we get either warmer or colder than the surrounding area. This seed mix is meant to overwinter. Fingers crossed it will.
Seed drill in action! The grooves are where the seed drill has carved out a groove plus dropped seed.
We did make one mistake: We cranked up the density too high. We didn’t see enough signs of seed in/on the ground, and it didn’t seem like we were using as much seed as we wanted to.
Turns out we were wrong about that, because once the seeds sprouted, we could see just how close together they were planted. Oops! Here’s hoping they don’t crowd each other out as they grow.
That also meant we didn’t cover as much ground as we could have, but we planted about three acres of the 10-acre field, and we were happy with that. It was our first time, after all, and three acres was our plan.
Seedlings!
After our luck held with getting the seeds in the ground, we were blessed again a few days later with just enough rain to cause the seeds to sprout. In the picture above, you can see a radish and grass-like seedlings growing. YES!
Now that we’ve done it once, we plan on doing this every year, even if it means we have to buy a bigger tractor rather than count on borrowing one. Our goal is to be planting cover crops on every field in a rotation, because some pastures will need to be grazed, meaning we can’t plant the whole farm at the same time.
OK, so you might be wondering, “Why didn’t you simply plow up the field and replant it?” Well, that gets into the whole no till approach, which will have to wait for another post.
We were like kids on Christmas morning on this September day. This is a huge step forward for us and our goal to be farming for a future. It was something we had learned about and longed to do, and what a treat to make it happen!
There’s a saying about planting a trees that sums up everything I’m about to say:
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
Back in 2020 when lockdown started, several things happened at same time that all of a sudden made me realize importance of trees to our farm and the future.
I was reading those books plus watching small farm documentaries during the evenings because lockdown here started in March and it was dark and I wasn’t going anywhere.
All of this stuff just combined in my head like an explosion one evening and I had this epiphany. “Oh my gosh. We need trees!” For food, for shade, for habitat, for all that’s good and wonderful!
But I started out that journey in the wrong way because I didn’t realize they needed to be native trees—not the food trees like apple, but all the others. So we started planting trees but not necessarily the right trees.
Plus I had to learn to recognize trees. We bought several Oregon Ash trees not realizing we already had a hundred volunteer seedlings that had popped up on our property in our wetland area. So that was a waste of time and money. Now I can spot an Oregon Ash from a mile away.
Then we also learned how hard it is to get trees to get established. We’ve probably planted 300 trees since winter 2020 and have had a failure rate of 50%.
Then we get back to the saying about planting trees under whose shade you will never sit.
We know we are doing this for the future, not for us.
The thing is, you plant these trees and it’s going to be decades before they are big. We’ve only planted two Oregon White Oak so far and we have four more little seedlings and we will buy more because it’s a very important tree, it’s a keystone plant according to Nature’s Best Hope.
But they grow very slowly and won’t make acorns for 30 years and there’s a good chance I won’t be here in 30 years. Not that I’m holding my breath for the acorns, because we aren’t planting oaks as a food source, but for habitat and ecosystem. But still, that’s slow growth.
And then there are the apple trees. Our apple trees are huge, but over a hundred years old and dying off. So we are planting new ones. And we’re not going to get apples right away. We have to wait and nurture.
Plus we have more learning to do. In four years, we’ve had little growth and a lot of deer damage. Turns out, we should have done something about the grass around the trees because that has impeded their growth. So we are figuring that out. We did some research about landscape fabric and as much as I don’t want to use plastics, it looks like that is what we will try. (The deer are another challenge altogether.)
We also have started on our cider orchard with six out of the 30 trees we will need planted. I need the other 24 trees bought and planted this year if I’m going to make cider in my lifetime! Not sure how I will make that happen…
And then there were my unrealistic expectations. When we planted Black Cottonwoods, some of the first native trees we planted in 2020, I had read they grow 45 feet in seven years. In my mind, that meant we’d have 45-foot-tall trees by 2027. Woohoo!!
Uh, no. Trees spend the first year focused on building roots, for one thing. There’s a saying: The first year they sleep, the next they creep, the third year they leap. OK, full disclosure, we’re not seeing any leaping. But they have started growing now and maybe seven years from now they will be 50 feet tall?
And some trees are hard to get established! We planted 10 red alders by the chicken coop because they are a fast-growing tree and we need both shade and predator protection there. I’ve heard alders called weed trees because they spring up in disturbed areas, so I thought they’d be easy to grow. Nope. Only one of the trees survived. (In another area we planted two and both are flourishing despite the cows reaching over the fence to take bites.)
Trees are not like something made in a factory. I can’t just order up a tree and someone makes it and it shows up on my doorstep. It has to grow from a seed, and that will take years and sometimes decades. I might have visions of going online and buying a 20-year-old tree for instant height. But that’s only a fantasy. The trees we buy we buy small.
You think, “Go plant a tree, save the world!” Nope, not at all. There’s a lot more to it than that. And it takes a lot of patience…a lot.
But then I guess as slow growing as they are and as old as they are by the time they get to their majestic height, trees are just all about the patience.
And the photo with this post? That’s a fence line planted with trees. There’s one big native crabapple that we are lucky to have, but everything else is either a planted native or a volunteer, all under 2 feet tall. You can’t see them unless you look hard, but they are there. And someday they will tower over someone’s head…but it won’t be mine.
We’ve started migrating our gardening approach to no till, which we find a little challenging to figure out with raised beds. But that plus a bit of neglect led to this bed of overwintering kale flowering in late April which–it turns out–is a huge blessing because it is currently all that is flowering in our garden for the bees.
Last year we went to a gardening conference and learned several tips to help all pollinators, not just bees. Among the tips we learned were:
Have three different “somethings” flowering from last frost to first frost.
Don’t clean up the garden at the end of the growing season because many pollinators overwinter in brush piles and hollow stems.
The second piece of advice is easy to follow because I don’t like doing cleanup in the wet, cold weather of late fall. The first piece of advice will take a learning curve to figure out what we can have in the garden from last frost to first frost–as well as what can withstand a frost since our frost date has been later and later each year (May 1st this year!).
Accidentally discovering that overwintered kale will be there for the bees was good news for us! And a lesson as usually I harvest the buds before they flower and cook them up with garlic, but February and March were too crazy busy and I didn’t get to it. Now I guess kale buds won’t make it on the menu in the future either, which is okay with me: I’d rather help the bees!
Plus I am slowly figuring out how to save seed and this year it looks like I will be experimenting with kale seed.
And the added bonus? These are pretty plants!! Pretty plants full of buzz and activity.
I’ll apologize in advance because I am going to whine. Ready?
Why is this so hard?? All we want is to start a small farm, that’s it. We’re not trying to change the world or anything like that.
We have the best of intentions, we really do!
This time, it was to have a cow barn built—well, the shell of it anyway—before the end of October when we had a calf due. We succeeded with that goal. The barn (shell) was done October 25th and Pumpkin arrived on the 28th.
It did rain before the roof was installed, so the barn was full of mud, but we had some crappy hay and I was putting that down as bedding to keep the cows off the mud, assuming the barn would dry out.
The gutters were installed a month after the building was complete.
And then it rained. And rained. And rained.
And we had several inches of standing water inside the building…inside and out to be accurate.
At first I thought it was because the downspouts on the new gutters emptied onto the ground. When we had our garage built—and that has more roof surface than the barn—we had the downspouts installed that way and we’ve never had a problem. The water is absorbed into the ground without even puddling.
But—I reasoned—the ground had been compacted by the equipment during building so that must be the reason the water from the downspouts wasn’t draining. We installed PVC pipe to carry the rainwater away thinking that would help to decrease the standing water from future rains, as a temporary fix.
Nope. We are getting just as much water simply from the rainfall.
So. Our two cows, one heifer and one calf are all trying to crowd into the milking shed for shelter, which is also flooding now.
To be honest, I am stumped. We’ve had the milking shed since we bought our first cow in 2020. Yes, we’ve had far too much standing water and mud because it has been the only shelter, but nothing like this! And now it’s flooding behind the milking shed too, where we’ve never had standing water before.
I understand the ground probably was compacted by the equipment? Maybe?
When summer gets here and the ground dries out, we will have a contractor come in and do something to drain the water away from the buildings. We will put in plenty of gravel to build a base inside the barn. We will add a lean-to to the front to keep weather out and get the doors installed. We will, we will, we will make this right.
But for now and the long winter months ahead of us, the cow barn is flooded.
Since Bob is gone so much for work and so tired when he is home, I rely on his two-week vacation every August for tackling the big stuff. Nope. His vacations are not spent traveling to some exotic locale, sipping on IPAs by the side of a pool. They are spent here moving the farm dream forward, poor guy.
This summer’s must-do was more progress on the horse barn which is still also a hay barn. (Yes, I know how dangerous that is, but we do things as we can afford to around here.) The south wall was already decrepit when we got this place as you can see in the picture below from 2012 (with a then quite-young Emma on the swing). And the huge doors were already inoperable:
The horse barn slash hay barn back in 2012…the rotting has started.
Over the years and with all the weather that hits that south side of the barn, it only got worse. And since that’s where we store our hay (and it’s a lot of hay: we got 25 tons off the field this year), having a south wall that lets in wind and rain means hay that rots (or catches on fire).
We wanted to tackle the project but there’s always something that’s a higher priority around here. Our to-do list is an ever-changing one as we adapt to whatever the current emergency is. Cows got out? Fix the fence. Greenhouse blew apart? Rebuild the greenhouse. Time to put cows out on new pasture? Install new fence. And so on and so on.
So back to my story: August 2022 would be the vacation of the south wall and Bob’s best friend Dilsy was scheduled to visit for two days during that time so perfect! We bought all the materials and rented scaffolding and started on the demo before Dilsy arrived.
This was the state of the south side of the barn when we started
You can see in the picture above how much the door had deteriorated in 10 years and all of our sorry efforts to try and protect the hay. Ugh, it’s embarrassing to look at!
Working on the demo, trying to salvage some of the framing
Redoing the door and wall meant we could resize the doors. This won’t always double as a hay barn. Our plan is to have two more horse stalls on this side so we can board two horses in the future. The old doors were monstrous. Our new door is manageable. It’s just big enough to back the truck in should we need to.
Working around the demo to build the frame for the new door.
Thankfully we got some good input from our neighbor Jerry who suggested putting in cement footers for the wall and door. That also helped with framing the new door because we had to install a post for it. And it was a new experience: We hadn’t built footers and put in concrete before. We are always learning around here!
As the demo progressed, we still had to protect the hay.
At the end of each work day, we’d hang Tyvek to protect the hay inside. We were lucky to have a huge roll of it from an earlier project (probably our HOUSE) so it didn’t cost us anything and it worked well.
Most of the demo is done and the metal is going up.
We have been piecemeal working on the barn and when we redid the horse stalls in 2020, we went with a pretty board and batten. But that was not practical at all for this massive area so we went with metal. That was also a new experience, but with a team of three, we went pretty quickly, between measuring, cutting and installing.
We are making progress! And you can see the smaller size of the new door area.It got a little tricky working around the wiring…yikes!Hardworking Bob and Dilsy with lots of progress to smile about!And the metal is up! All that’s left is the door.Bob posting in our new door.
Now, doesn’t that look better! But figuring out how to build and hang the door was a challenge: Again, more learning. Thank goodness for YouTube, sheesh. Later our neighbor Jerry hung a light outside and we added a handle as well as a stopper (catch?) so the door won’t swing with all of our wind.
And when the rain returned, it was WONDERFUL not to have to worry about the hay! (Well, I worry a little. We have roof tiles to fix so we do have leaks.)
What’s next? To Bob’s left is the area that we are going to build out as the tack room. We redid that part of the wall a few years ago, but the wood did not hold up to the weather. So we will make a door in it and add on for the tack room (and I will finally have DRY leather in the winter and not have to clean mold off my tack!). We will add a lean-to over this new door area because the weather is still brutal and we want even more protection. Then we will wrap around to the west side of the barn and start rebuilding that. We are hoping Dilsy will be here for another visit to help, and I am hoping that we are ready to build that west wall with stall doors opening out to runs. As Bob says, “When is enough enough??” Well, with my farm dreaming, probably never. 🙂
