February 14, 2021 – Happy Valentine’s Day

Hello every one, welcome back to the Newtown Farm and Orchard where we continue to share our undaunted farming story – well, maybe a little daunting, but certainly doable.

This month’s story starts with a sunrise which was picture perfect, which brought the start to a beautiful day. To see it from our balcony, we had to lean way over our porch railing. But it was worth it. The colors filled the sky. It only lasted for a few minutes before the colors faded into a brilliant blue. What a beautiful morning to wake up to!

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Christmas meal this year was very different than our usual ham. A friend raises quail and gave us 6 birds as a “thank you” for giving him some of our honey a few months ago. It was only Joshua, Katie and John, so we decided that quail would be the main course. We deep fried them in the turkey fryer and it was quite a treat. Not sure if this will become a regular but it was a nice change in our usual routine Christmas Dinner.  

After Christmas, we spent a week in Alabama with Katie’s family and our niece’s wedding then returned home to get back to work. We hired a master electrician to remove the old conduit, upgrade our meter and run new electrical service to a new (and empty) panel in the house.  Thank goodness Katie has been studying how to wire the house and is a confident electrician, YouTube Certified. She is actually quite amazing and has done a very professional job hooking all the electrical lines and breakers to the panel. And because we are doing the wiring ourselves, we can add outlets in unique places, like in the attic to light up our stained glass window, or on the shelf over the nook where we can plug in Christmas lights!

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Next, we turned our attention to the laundry/mud room and, thanks to a group of friends, we were able to gut that room, removing all the dry wall and old insulation. These young adults are actually our middle sons close friends (the same ones who came out in early December) and we are blessed that he has such wonderful friends. We were getting a bit stressed due to the inspection which coming soon. By the end of the week, the mud room had all new wiring and lights. We even installed an outside flood light for the back yard.

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We spend each day at our regular jobs then work until 10pm on the house.  When we take a break from the work every other week or so, we are reminded why we are working so hard.  The views from our porch over the snow-covered field/soon-to-be-orchard are motivating!  Right now we are building the infrastructure of something we hope to share with others – a place of hope, joy, and peace. Katie says we are building our ark as did Noah. He most likely worked many hours with little time to play.

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More of our chickens have come into age and are now laying. We have been collecting 10 eggs a day and that will increase in the next month as other hens mature. Last week, while our chickens were foraging around the yard, a dog killed and ran off with one of our buff orpingtons.  We have seen several dogs loose in the area and they are beautiful, but not welcome when they kill our chickens! We are going to contact our neighbors and ask them to keep their dogs on their property. We do not know who owns the dogs yet.

Drawing closer to inspection day and the stress and exhaustion and cold is getting to us. We have continued to burn in the wood stove and use space heaters in the house to make it bearable. Often we have to bring in wet wood for the furnace so we cut it to length on the chop saw then stand the logs around the stove to dry out. At one point we turned and looked at the wood and couldn’t help laughing at the sight of what looked like little wood children standing at attention around an old stove, listening to a story.

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At one point, we thought we were almost finished with the building and wiring. We just had to run wire through 3 studs under a window in the guest bedroom.  Unfortunately, we were faced with another challenge to deal with.  As we were drilling the holes through the studs around one window, we discovered the 3 studs were hollow from termite damage. Neither of us were ready for that. Since we had to replace the studs, we decided to and replace the window, too. It was a two-day process because it had gotten very cold outside. For every 5 minutes spent outside installing the window, we had to spend 10 minutes inside warming up.

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With the window and electrical installed, our “to do” list was very short.  However, those last few things – installing exterior outlets and running our plumbing vents through the ceiling – required us to work outside and our high temps were below freezing for almost a week.  We decided to go ahead and call for the inspection, since we had a deadline of February 15^th. We figured they’d fail us for those 2 things, and we were ready to take those consequences.

Fortunately, four days before inspection, we are informed that the county wants to extend our deadline another month due to the weather. It is just too cold for the inspector (it won’t get above freezing for another week!). What a Godsend. We were getting burned out. Now we have a chance to rest and finish the remaining tasks required for our rough-out inspection. This is such a wonderful blessing.  We don’t want to wait the full month before our inspection.  Joshua is coming home in a month with some of his friends and we want to have a place for them to sleep and we’ve already got our shopping list at Menards started.

This Saturday was our first full day not working on the house.  The high was 10 degrees! Katie did the most logical thing – she planted seeds!  Our last frost date is around April 20^th. That’s just under 10 weeks away so it was time to get those early seeds in.  She planted cauliflower, broccoli, spinach, lettuce, Swiss chard, 8 kinds of onions, kale, cabbage, flowers and a host of herbs. She planted almost 1,000 seeds and put them on heat mats. Once they sprout, we will turn on the purple LED grow lights. If they all germinate, we will be selling seedlings.  Tomatoes, peppers, and a host of other herbs and vegetables will be started in about a month. We definitely plan to start more than we need so we can sell seedlings. We’ve already had a few inquiries, so if you want us to save some for you, let us know asap!

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Today, Sunday, the great snow apocalypse has supposedly started.  If the weathermen are correct, we could get up to 8” of fluffy dry snow by noon on Monday.  So far, we’ve received about 2”. It is very beautiful, but WAY TOO COLD to be outside for long.  After church, we discovered that we had no water in the apartment. We assumed our well pump froze. We were outside for about 15 minutes constructing an insulated building around the pump. It was just too cold and windy to stay out any longer. After we warmed up, we tried a spigot in the well house and got water.  I guess the frozen section is between the well house and the apartment (under ground). Our only solution at this point is to wait for a warm up – and to carry water from the well house!

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Our chickens, however, don’t seem to mind the cold.  As soon as we opened their coop, they all came running out to play in the snow and get some treats.