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"Sweet fields arrayed in living green, and rivers of delight"

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Thursday, October 30th

Tractor tilling



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Well, I finally gave in and bought a tractor. The picture above shows it as I first saw it on the lot at the tractor broker outside of Bend, OR; it's a Ford model 1920, lightly used. The story on it is that it was owned by a Seattle millionaire for 18 years before he traded it in on another piece of equipment. All I know is that he didn't put many hours on it; less than 10 hours per year!

The rest of this posting is an account of how my first day out with the tractor went.
Kurt on 10.30.08 @ 08:17 AM PST [more...]

Wednesday, October 29th

Harvest 2008



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The photo above shows one of the most reliable apple trees on the property; I stripped it bare of apples on a twilight evening in mid-September, and carted the apples home. I probably got a hundred pounds of apples off this one tree! All in all, I harvested a pickup load of apples, which I stashed in the garage for a couple of weeks to soften them up; then, as luck would have it, Joe G. from church invited us to his cider pressing party in early October, and I took them all over there to press.
Kurt on 10.29.08 @ 01:18 PM PST [more...]

Tuesday, October 28th

Catching Up On Projects



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After the camp-out I still found time to make it down to the farm to catch up on some long-neglected projects. One of my long-term goals has been to replace the fragile water delivery piping. There are hose bibs scattered around the property, but until recently none of them were frost-proof! This, of course, has led to some problems on frosty mornings; I once got a cell phone message from Ed the neighbor saying, "Ummm, it looks like you've got a fountain going there in the side yard." With Nate's help in digging the hole, I was able to replace this hose bib with a frost-proof hydrant. I had to go through some gyrations of piping to try and get the hydrant set as low in the ground as possible - normally a hydrant like this should be 2 feet below grade! But when the pipe itself is only a foot below ground there isn't much you can do.
Kurt on 10.28.08 @ 01:12 PM PST [more...]

Monday, October 20th

Summer Camp-out 2008



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Well, I've been way behind on posting any farm news here, so I will try to catch up a bit this week, starting with a recap of our summer camp-out. We broadened it out this year to include people other than just the children's liturgy families, and I think we had a nice event. We had some friends down for just the day, though most people stayed for the campfire and the overnight camping. As you can see above, there were a number of kids in attendance, some of whom wanted to know what happened to the pig (and they got various answers, depending on the age of the person inquiring).
Kurt on 10.20.08 @ 03:19 PM PST [more...]