Starting our Farmstead Pt.2: Making it all Happen

First I want to thank everyone who took the time to read, comment, and watch our video from Part 1 of this article. I feel truly humbled and your support means a lot. With that said, let's get down to it!

Embarking Upon a Blank Canvas

So last article I discussed a little bit about who we are, how we came upon our current piece of land, and all the hard work it took just to get to this point. I also mentioned how it was a pretty crappy year for snow plow in Chicago and how we weren't able to save nearly half as much as we had hoped. However, this lack of work gave us time to research seed, equipment, and infrastructure, as well as potential market streams for our product.

In February we made a short weekend trip down to meet with our new landlords and attend a grower-buyers meeting. The grower-buyers meeting is a chance for farmers to meet with potential wholesale clients and discuss what each can do for each other. This gave me an idea of market demand and what sort of prices I could expect from certain buyers. In addition, we met one-on-one with a local food hub about including our salad mix in their weekly deliveries and went around to various grocery stores to see what they had on the shelves.

I would make two solo trips down in March; the first of which was to get the fields plowed. Since we don't have a tractor and plowing up the field with my little Troy-Built tiller would take half a century, I outsourced this to a local guy on craigslist. He drove up from Hendersonville, but his truck broke down about two miles from the farm. We worked on it for a good 2-3 hours and by the time we got it working it was around 3pm. He started making passes with a middle-buster plow to break up the sod and then went through with a rotovator to break up the chunks. By the time we attached the discs to form the beds it was dark and he was plowing by the headlights of his tractor. I brought him some soup and a beer. Then an hour or so later another beer. He finished up around 10:30pm and the next day upon examining my newly formed beds, I thought, 'Maybe I shouldn't have given him those beers.'

But for $150 bucks I couldn't complain. The next day was spent adding steamed bone meal, lime, and compost. I worked from 7am-10pm with little to no breaks. I didn't have time to till in these amendments and so they were left on the surface of the soil. With snow moving in, I covered my newly plowed fields with silage tarps and sandbags and headed back to Chicago absolutely beat.

The second trip in March involved me and the dog driving out to northern California to get our stuff out of storage. We drove from Chicago to Cali, down the coast and back east to North Carolina in six days. Upon waking, I looked upon my fields to see my silage tarps blown all over the place. Sigh... I unloaded everything from storage, fixed the tarps the best I could, and again headed back to Chicago completely exhausted.

By the time April rolled around it was time for the final move. We filled our truck bed and trailer to the brim, said our good-byes and hit the road excited to be starting out on our new adventure. Now I want to mention, although this had been our dream for a long time and it was finally coming true, the romanticism of any such endeavor begins to wear off pretty quick when you have a dusty old general store cluttered to the brim with all of your stuff, no shower/toliet/sink--and no insulation. It was still pretty cold out and although we would get the wood burning stove going at night, by morning time it was cold enough to see your breath. We all slept together under thick covers on a crash pad on the floor. We lived primarily off oatmeal and soup which we cooked on the wood stove. One good thing about roughing it is you really come to appreciate all the modern conveniences of daily life.

Our first few days were spent scrubbing the store from top to bottom--every nook, cranny, and shelf--and conditioning the wood with Old English. At the same time we managed to setup a little kitchen area with a refrigerator, old cabinets from the barn, and eventually a propane stove I found off craigslist. Since the store didn't have any electrical outlets, we had to run various extension cords from the breaker box outside. These were then connected to power strips at the kitchen, office area, and bedroom. Crazy as it sounds, we also brought some seedlings down with us from Chicago and so we were also tending to these young plants--watering them in the morning, covering them when it rained, and bringing them in at night when it got too cold. In hindsight this was a hassle we should've foregone as we had enough on our plate as it was.

Once we got the store 'livable,' we turned our focus to the field. Ideally I would've liked to have continued getting the cabin setup with running water--shower/sink/toilet, etc., but time was of the essence. Already we were into the latter half of April and I hadn't even touched the garden since coming down in March. I rolled back the tarps on our first three beds, tilled in our amendments, and flattened it with a rake. I knew by tilling I was bringing a plethora of weed seeds to the surface, and I knew that I should really pull the tarp back over, let the weeds die, and then plant--but like I said, we were already behind and with what little cash we had going fast, I knew we needed to get something in the ground.

Those first three beds were a disaster. We planted a variety of crops--cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, etc. These were just meant for the family and although some of them started well, they soon began to succumb to insane weed pressure and a lack of nutrients in the soil. In the early days we had to lug 5 gallon buckets from the creek to water each individual little plant. The creek is also where we bathed; hunching low so people on the road wouldn't see us. Looking back it seems kind of crazy that we went through all of this. The funny thing is, at the time, I didn't really think about it. This was just what had to be done so that we could make our dream a reality.

Finally we got a high-powered pump down by the creek. The pump connected to 2" PVC pipe, ran through a 125 mesh disk filter, and up to the top of our garden plot where I installed an air vent and a spigot. It took some trial and error (and many many trips to the hardware store) but eventually we had water! This also meant we could begin expanding our garden. I planted a row of spinach, kale, and arugula. These were also complete failures. The young seedlings emerged fine, but soon turned yellow and sickly. I quickly realized we had been spoiled with the rich, dark brown loam of my Grandma's backyard. This soil was a thick, light brown clay--extremely acidic with a ph around 5.

Around this time we also erected a 14x100 ft caterpillar tunnel. It costs us about $1400 with shipping and has been worth every penny. We laid landscape fabric along either side and used pallets we got from the dump to keep our propagation trays off the ground. Down the center we planted tomatoes and trellised them using twine attached to 75 lb cable running along the spine of the hoops. It was also around this time that we finally got running water to the house!

Now before I get into it I want to admit that when I started this project I had no idea what I was doing and no idea if it would actually work. I have also never seen this model replicated by anyone else and so I had little to go off. Anyway, here is our system.

Water is pumped from the creek and up to the spigot atop the garden. It then runs through 150 ft of 3/4" heavy-duty hose and into two IBC totes that hold about 600 gallons of water between them. I fill these totes about once a week and add 1g of Calcium Hypochlorite to kill any pathogens that may be present. This water then travels via PVC pipe to a high-pressure electric well pump. This pump has a sensor that kicks it on any time the water pressure in the lines drops below a certain threshold. From the pump we ran CPVC and split the line with one line going to a tankless hot water heater and the other serving as our 'cold line.' From there I ran those two lines to the shower and another two lines to the sink. Beneath the shower is a drain pipe that runs under the house, connecting the sink, and eventually taking our waste water to the culvert. Luckily the house is propped up somewhat and so I was able to crawl underneath to perform all this pipework.

Once it was all connected came the moment of truth. After tinkering around with the water heater for a bit I crossed my fingers and fired it up. Lo and behold it worked! The shower came on nice and hot with great pressure. The sink however seemed to have a clog, but who cares, we got water! That night I took the most gratifying shower I have ever taken. The sweet caress of success--a crazy plan that actually worked. Nothing could stop us now.

That concludes part 2 of this series. Part 3 we'll get into how we actually were able to make this farmstead thing pay and the struggles we encountered. Hope you'll check out our YouTube video above for a grand tour of our new home and leave a comment down below. Love hearing from you guys and again, can't tell you how much I appreciate your support.

Till next time!