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, but grouped according to year.
2025
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, but 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, for which and wrote up a sheep plan for the property. My husband, who is enthusiastic about 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 cycle 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 soil improvement.
2023 The Start
August to October 2023
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 (I came to learn), “dropped” by the minions of the guy who previously hayed our pasture and other neighborhood properties as it was being moved from our north neighbor’s property where he’d stashed a bunch of other machinery, to the south neighbor’s where several were lined up to sell; but when I asked him to come retrieve it, he stopped replying to my texts and we found that he’d conveniently moved to Tennessee some months previous.
There’s a long story that involves the swather’s flat tire, the squirrely north neighbors, the sheriff who added 14-ft wide swather illegally abandoned to his bucket list, the California Highway Patrol and the DMV, some old-time-tractor aficionados, a guy who knew a guy who knew the guy recommended by my swimming-mate, a failed engine fix with a beer can and baling wire and an inopportune rain that bypassed the shoddy fix and thwarted an attempt to jumpstart the machine by depositing water in the engine, and finally, in January 2024, just literally half an hour before a big rain hit that would’ve sunk this thing axle deep in mud, we achieved this, courtesy of some reticent local toughs and a girlfriend with a baby who tastefully narrates: