I am 'beet' from all the winter vegie planting.

Outhouse - Outside is completed

We even add a little deck to the outhouse. 


This past weekend (Oct 30-31) was a nice Fall weekend though it did sneak up to 80 degrees on Sunday for a bit.  Because of the rain we received last week, we were able to plant all our winter vegies....kale, mustard, collards, beets, turnips, rutabagas, etc.  Our tomatoes are still growing, though they are green and not as big as they should be.  We have been canning pickled green tomatoes.... when life hands you lemons...you make lemonade...or in this case, pickled green tomatoes!  We were hoping for a bumper crop of tomatoes for can tomato sauce this year but there's always next year.

We were able to finish up the outside of the outhouse which included painting the outside walls, trim, adding the roof and the little awning over the door.  We also added a gutter in the back to collect rain water for the toilet. I painted the walls and floor on the inside. We have not dug the hole yet for the septic tank so we aren't going to buy the toilet and sink until then. 

Now that the winter vegies are planted, we are going to turn our attention to finishing up the outhouse, adding on to the barn (another 12x24 stall), and purchasing and installing the hoophouse.  Once we get the hoophouse installed, the Dept. of Ag. will come out, inspect it and then reimburse us about 80% of the cost of materials.  I think it's going to be about 30x100 feet and Cris and I will be installing it ourselves. 

The first of the year we will start on the cabin.  In between all these projects we are also clearing out trees around the pond and bushhogging some trails through the woods.  We have found some pretty steep ditches in our inspection of the wooded areas so we plan to fence these areas off to keep Alex and friends from coming upon them unexpectedly.  I'd hate for someone to fall in them and get hurt......especially me!

Our mushroom logs are FINALLY starting to show some promise.  I did a test and dropped one of the logs a few weeks ago to simulate a tree falling.  According to the mushroom people, if you drop a log onto the ground, it makes the mushroom spores think the tree has fallen to the ground and is in the process of dieing.  This makes the spores grow more quickly.....which is what happened on the log that I dropped.  It now has little mushrooms growing, whereas the other's do not yet.  So, next week we plan to drop all the logs onto the ground, then stand them up vertically and see what happens. I think the fact that it finally started to rain around here helped too.

We plan to visit family in Maryland for Thanksgiving. This will be the first weekend that one of us has not be at the farm since purchasing the property.  I took a weekend away to go to Maryland (but Cris stayed behind and worked on the farm) in the summer but other than that, we have been at the farm every weekend.... maybe not the entire weekend but we have spent at least one day of the weekend there since about March or April.  I so look forward to the day we have moved out there permanently. It will be easier to get things accomplished then and the peace and quiet out there is so refreshing.