At this point, I don’t have a dedicated website for the farm project, and I don’t want to comingle this with the Mimeograph Revival blog, so this is going to end up becoming a somewhat unwieldy string of “posts” all on one page. It’ll proceed in “semi-blog style” with oldest information at the bottom, newest added to the top, according to year.
2025
Second-half of the year updates yet to come…
At the start of the year, we documented what our land does with its winter water. Short story: it holds it, barely percolates it, some of it flows down the ditch at the roadside, and maybe what’s left evaporates.
The water pretty much behaves according to elevation. The lowest area (dark and bright green) gets the seasonal “pond.” The pale green moving toward yellow&green are definitely mushy. Orange and yellow are wet and soft but not sink-to-your-ankles mucky. Brown is the highest and driest point (pardon the glitch of copy/paste that shows the brown and purple twice).
Between rains, and once the soil at the western and northern edges could handle our presence, we planted out the trees that had been waiting in our backyard, adding more new purchases as time permitted. My husband is passionate about fruit and enthusiastic, if not driven, to get things rolling sooner rather than later.
So, although I’m more circumspect and want to have some semblance of a plan before proceeding too far, I support his experiments as well. He’s coordinated and done the majority of the work to put in three rows of fruit (about 65 trees at this point, but 10 more just arrived today and he’s off planting them right now). These include citrus (cara cara navels, pomelo, lime, kumquat), peaches, a pluot, apples (mostly fuji, if I recall correctly, but also one red delicious [for some reason]), figs (a tiger, a Violeta de Bordeaux, some Brown Turkey, and Celeste), a couple volunteer pecans that we relocated, and some jujubes. In addition we put in a privacy screen of both incense cedar and Western red cedar , and then there’s a hodgepodge of mostly conifers, including redwood, dawn redwood, ponderosa pine, maybe a douglas fir that’s limping along, and some sort of cypress that volunteered at the roadside and got relocated. Additional relocated volunteers include a few Valley oaks, and there are also three cork oaks.
We’re nothing if not optimists who are willing to see what succeeds by throwing a whole mix of things out there!
In the meantime, I’ve been building out the irrigation system – above-ground HDPE with spigots inserted only when/where we want them, saving about $12,000 by doing this rather than hiring a guy to put it in a trench. My main goal is to get the water from the well on the east side, out to my husband’s orchard out on the west side, and this gives us flexibility to meet the inevitably heavy modification of our plans as we go along.
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2024
When the rain started for real in February and March, the grass started to grow faster. As we were only in the earliest of planning phases – and since we didn’t have to spend all our time trying to get a swather out of the way – and knowing that we didn’t (and still don’t) want to buy heavy machinery, we decided we should try scything.
So, we bought one scythe, took turns with it, loved it, and then ordered a couple more.
Meanwhile, we had the perimeter fenced (so no more stray swathers could trespass) and we kept scything, finally finishing six or seven months later .
There was a lot going on concurrently, including a wedding – and in the summer, just two of us would go out some mornings to work for an hour before the heat kicked in- so we progressed slowly. The upside was that we became very familiar with every inch of ground.
From 2023 to 2024, we continued to develop our ideas about how we want to build and manage the farm, honing in quickly on regenerative principles (that mesh with my basic permaculture background), and becoming particularly aware that ruminant animals would be an ideal way to work with our climatic and soil conditions in a way that could improve the latter and become resilient in the face of the former.
I took a few online and in-person classes on regenerative agriculture, as well as a sheep & goat production class at the local community college. I wrote up a sheep and silvopasture plan for the property. My husband, who is enthusiastic about fruit trees, started ordering seedlings of different varieties early on, potted them up to over-summer in our home garden, and, by the end of the year, began planting things on the “back forty” out at the far end of the farm where they wouldn’t be in the way of future (hoped-for, potential) small-house construction.
Given the expense of everything in California, we cycled from small strawbale house to stick built to modular/manufactured, and back to strawbale in an effort to find an ideal mix of the famous three: affordable, quality, soon(ish).
As you can see in the series of photos above, we alternate between wet/cold and dry/hot seasons. Coupled with our heavy clay soil, we get cracks you could lose a small child (or at least an arm or leg) in:
The main order of business will be encouraging biologically-driven soil improvement to remedy this.
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2023 The Start
August to October 2023
We now have a little more than five acres of previously and repeatedly hayed, nearly-level, land – composed of heavy clay soil – in an inland Mediterranean climate in California. On the ground, it looks about like you’d expect for October.
Existing infrastructure includes a well and electricity.
November 2024
We arrived to our grassy rectangle on Thanksgiving day to find this:
This is a New Holland swather, as I came to learn, “dropped” here by the minions of the guy who had previously hayed our pasture and other neighborhood properties, as it was being moved from our north neighbor’s place, where he’d stashed a bunch of other machinery, to the south neighbor’s across the street, where several such things were lined up to sell. I got his phone number off the for-sale sign. I texted, asking if he was selling said machinery, got an enthusiastic “yes!” and then I asked him to come retrieve it, he stopped replying. We later found that he’d conveniently moved to Tennessee some months previously and was transacting this business remotely. Troubling, too, was that the swather had an obvious flat tire.
Trying to get this thing removed involved the slightly cagey north neighbors – from whose land the swather had emerged after it had been abandoned there first (though the first conversation yielded “oh, maybe we’ve seen machines like that before.” Yeah, sure you have)…
…and it involved the sheriff who added to his list of “things I never thought I’d see” a14-ft wide swather illegally abandoned mid-field, the California Highway Patrol and the DMV and inquiries into how to dispose of such a “vehicle” when it’s wider than a traffic lane and doesn’t really belong to you, some tow-truck drivers who tried to be helpful, an old-time-tractor aficionado named Ralph (and his dog, Buck) who was willing to attempt a jump-start before discovering a failed exhaust-pipe-fix starring a beer can and baling wire…
…and, of course, there had been an inopportune rain that bypassed the shoddy fix and deposited water in the engine the night before the attempted jump-start. There was also a guy who knew a guy (and they both independently asked, “was it left behind by Howard Correa?” And in fact, it was! – his reputation ranged far and wide, it seemed, and included machinery that he’d obtained by questionable means)… anyway, the second guy, Nick, said he might be able to haul it and scrap it…
(Finally, maybe the end was in sight!)
But then, before that could happen, in January 2024, literally half an hour before a big rain hit that would’ve sunk this thing axle deep in mud, we achieved liftoff, courtesy of some reticent local toughs who, I found out the next day, were friends of Nick’s son, and one of whom was the father of a baby with a girl who turned out to be Howard’s daughter.
Does everybody know everybody around here?
Anyway, young Miss Correa tastefully narrates the video Nick sent to me the next day (he came clean about the fact that he had contacted Howard’s crew first. He hadn’t wanted to run afoul of Howard’s creative means, as it were, had he hauled and scrapped Howard’s swather).
Fun times. We’re just happy “it’s gone!”:
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