Home stretch

Ben and I are in our final week of classes, which means that I will be moving to the farm on Friday! I can't tell you how excited I am to be there full time! So, in preparation for that, Ben and I had quite a bit to get accomplished on Sunday!

We are building our hoop house tables out of lumber from the Howards in town in an attempt to keep things as local as possible. They are giving us locust boards which are fairly rot-resistant, high quality boards and they are very reasonably priced, which makes them the best choice for lumber in my book. They are currently finishing up their sugaring season (being the farming rockstars that they are) and should be able to get lumber to us by next week. So, in the meantime we have set up temporary tables in the hoop house out of saw horses, buckets, and scrap wood.

The other temporary station we had to construct was our potting area. The lumber for the rest of the floorboards that we need to finish the workspace floor in the barn is also coming from the Howards, so until that floor is laid we need to have another area in the barn to pot things up. 

We were lucky enough to find this old workbench in the barn. I hosed it down and disinfected it for good measure and set up a workstation right outside of our other horse stall. Our potting mix is from Vermont Compost Company, our trays are recycled from another farm, and that little metal do-hicky you see on the top left side of the bench is our soil-block maker. We are all set to start seeding next week!

Another project I started was to clean out an "office" space for myself in the barn. 

It's in the hay loft and overlooks the front field we'll be using this season... 

I think it will be my quiet space to plan and take a breath! We're thinking of putting in a couple of windows to brighten it up...

While I worked on all those projects, Ben put the chain saw certification classes he's been taking to good use. He ventured up into the woods and came back with the logs we needed to make our roll-up sides on the hoop house (this is why I call him the woodsman, among other things).

Those roll up sides were a huge project and took Ben a good chunk of the day and a large amount of creativity to construct, and while we both had our doubts about them, I think it's safe to say they are high quality. 

I am so happy to have those done! They look great! We could have gone with the commercially made ones, but these have more character!

And finally I just want to leave you with some pictures of what's happening around the farm. It seems like everywhere I turn there's something beautiful to be present to.