Settled in to the new farm, looking ahead for next season

Well, it's been a few months since I posted and as life always gives you the unexpected, we've had a wild ride this summer into fall. Typically my family will "reboot itself" every September in some fashion and this year has been no exception, but with the addition of being extremely intense!

We gambled our harvest in order to gain a 7 acre farm of our own and the gamble paid off! This means of course that we ended up moving at the beginning of July and then again at the end of September. We've purchased a 7 acre farm in Warburg AB that will be perfect for growing our veggies. No more traveling between different cities to grow things! With the house-hunt this summer combined with the driving distances between Alberta Beach (Mission Creek Estates) where we were renting to Mundare & Camrose, our final harvest amounts were nowhere what I had initially hoped for since we just weren't able to be everywhere nearly enough to tend things. It became a case of resources spread far too thin and not enough hours in the day when working full time in Edmonton. We did get plenty of tomatoes, potatoes and carrots, though the cucumbers failed this year along with the pumpkins and much everything else except peas.

My parents stayed with us for the month of September so our son would be able to start school right in Warburg at the beginning of the school year. It was a grueling haul as everyone left the house and drove in different directions at least 80km each way. My parents spent about $50/day on gas and my gas usage that month came out to about $1200!! I'm very glad we don't have to do that again!

As part of the reboot, I rather unexpectedly found myself back on the job market. After a brief 5 days of looking around I signed on with Able Automation in Leduc AB. This works well as the daily commute 1-way is about 35 minutes on dry roads without snow. We'll see how long it takes me when roads are snowy, I really hope the county maintains our highway well since it is fairly busy all the time. I am really glad I bought a 4x4 truck now that we are out in the country full time, since it will certainly be a help in many ways around the farm as well as driving each day to work - especially since I do a lot of service calls into Edmonton and area now.

Looking ahead to next season, we have much work to do to plan how we are going to utilise our land & buildings and what to implement first vs. $$$ available for each project. I think it could easily take 5-8 years for us to fully develop the place. We have an approximately 7,000 square foot, 3 floor shop (read old aircraft hangar/quansit) to work in which is fabulous! There is enough space not only to park our vehicles in one bay, but enough space to start all my plants indoors under lights year round, a room to do wood/metal working, a place where my husband can fix/build computers, a big room for multimedia workshops (as well as playing guitar hero on a big screen), and tons of other space.

This week I need to get out in the field and measure up next year's veggie plot layout. At the very least I'd like to do either raised beds, or build polytunnels or both. We'll see how much it costs and how much time I have to build things. The first hurdle to get by with the field is all the grass that is about 3 feet tall and mostly laying down on its side. That needs to get cut and moved off the area so I can get at the ground. But all in good time.

I am finding all my studies into Six Sigma methodology is really helping with the enormity of the farm project and the multitudes of details. Right now we are picking off all the activities that give us the most progress for the least/easier effort. Winterising the house is well underway, with applying polyfilm to the windows, caulking cracks and seams where needed, wrapping pipes with insulation etc. I am making a new door for the master bedroom to replace the folding door that the dogs keep pushing open and running through too. I'm putting all the plans into a MS Project 2007 file to manage it all, though I've started it as a spreadsheet in Excel just to get things fleshed out so I can see it first.

We've been learning which things are the most important to tackle and what sort of things we should have on hand. Last month while it was still warm, there was a really bad windstorm, and although stuff stayed intact around the farm, the wellhead froze! We woke up on a sunday morning to no water pressure, and we thought fantastic the pump broke or something. Going out to the well house turned up that we hadn't yet plugged in the heater in there (it was still warm enough everyday). We messed around with it and couldn't get it going, but it was freezing in the pumphouse so we got the heater setup and let it run for a few hours just to see if that would help since we thought the pump had died. Lo and behold, once the well head warmed up the water began to flow again. (We had pointed the heater right at the wellhead since we'd noticed some ice near where condensation normally would drip.) From this experience we realised that we should have on hand a duplicate pump/set of equipment for various things around the farm like the septic pump, the well pump, a new hot water tank, potentially a new furnace. Certainly a generator would be a good thing to have too. I'm glad we have the space to store all this extra equipment, which we still need to buy!

Once I get our list of things really fleshed out, I'll post a copy so people can get an idea of the hugeness of the project we've taken on. It's going to be fun (I hope), and a ton of work. But the result will end up being an energy-self-sustaining farm, well productive in food and other goods. Our first podcast will hopefully be recorded and published just before Christmas!

New additions to the family since we've started all this moving are 2 new dogs Hera, a 1.5 year old white shepherd husky cross, and Zipper a now 5 month old Border Collie-something-er-other cross. Lexie our first dog really likes having buddies, although Zipper is teething so Lexie tries to avoid her for now, not wanting to get chewed on. They have learned their jobs as farm dogs, which is to guard the farm of course and they love to run around the 7 acres as much as they can. We'll be getting a rabbit shortly for Davin's 4H project once we find out where to buy mesh for the cage/hutch, so we'll have to teach the dogs to leave the rabbit cage alone. They certainly don't leave our garbage bags alone, causing us to have to lockup the bags before dump day each week! Here's some pics of the dogs and other stuff going on right now.