Idle Capital
Mayda found a guy to take down the two big, dead ash trees at Kirsten's house, and he'll cut it up and haul it over here for us to use as firewood. I'm going to do the smaller, third one myself before he does, and leave it there for him to haul. But we needed a place to put all that wood, and I haven't yet built a woodshed, so Mayda came up with the idea of turning what used to be my second hen house ("Egg 2") into a woodshed. This meant I had to move some other stuff out of it, and I had to clean up other places so I had somewhere to move that stuff to.
In doing this, I moved $600 worth of plastic chicken crates and a $35 automatic chicken waterer. These are crates I have no birds to put into, and no working truck to load them onto. The waterer presently does nothing. And unless we get the land next door, it's going to stay that way. Same for the $900 picker I've got in the barn over at Kirsten's. I spent an entire spring fixing up this shed and got a $400 nesting box stolen out of it. But at least we'll have a woodshed.
It's the middle of March, and I still haven't planted anything. I should have had trays under lights a month ago. As I put the chicken crates away into the pole barn ("Egg 1"), I saw not only the disused roosts and nesting boxes, but the coils of drip line that I paid for and so painstakingly rolled out and staked into place under plastic last year to water the tomatoes, only to end up never actually connecting it to any water. (I forget whether I was missing a connector or something was leaking or what.) I have rain barrels scattered all over, but no gutters to feed them. That, at least, I can do something about. But the chicken stuff...it just breaks my heart to see so much money and hope sunk into stuff I can't do anything with. I see that and get discouraged and it just saps away any energy I had to work on anything else. I kept going anyway, but it was hard to feel good about it.
Bit by bit, little projects like this will get the place cleaned up and closer to being fixed, but none of it produces any revenue. None of it gives me a product to sell. I'm reading a book, a post-apocalyptic thing, where the characters are defending farms against bandits, and I'm reading about people trading hundreds of pounds of corn for things they need, or about their livestock feeding them and providing them an income. I went to the OEFFA conference and mingled with all these people whose farms actually earned them money, and it just makes me feel so left out, like I'm the kid who got sent to baseball camp with no bat and no glove. But for the analogy to be more accurate, it's more like I have the bat and the glove and plenty of other equipment besides, but I'm not allowed to play.
I noticed that the county auditor has listed the southernmost parcel of the land next door as a separate address from the other two. I'm wondering if the land bank is going to sell that one to the school and the other two to me. I contacted the guy I've been talking with at the land bank. I emailed him Saturday. We'll see what he says.
In doing this, I moved $600 worth of plastic chicken crates and a $35 automatic chicken waterer. These are crates I have no birds to put into, and no working truck to load them onto. The waterer presently does nothing. And unless we get the land next door, it's going to stay that way. Same for the $900 picker I've got in the barn over at Kirsten's. I spent an entire spring fixing up this shed and got a $400 nesting box stolen out of it. But at least we'll have a woodshed.
It's the middle of March, and I still haven't planted anything. I should have had trays under lights a month ago. As I put the chicken crates away into the pole barn ("Egg 1"), I saw not only the disused roosts and nesting boxes, but the coils of drip line that I paid for and so painstakingly rolled out and staked into place under plastic last year to water the tomatoes, only to end up never actually connecting it to any water. (I forget whether I was missing a connector or something was leaking or what.) I have rain barrels scattered all over, but no gutters to feed them. That, at least, I can do something about. But the chicken stuff...it just breaks my heart to see so much money and hope sunk into stuff I can't do anything with. I see that and get discouraged and it just saps away any energy I had to work on anything else. I kept going anyway, but it was hard to feel good about it.
Bit by bit, little projects like this will get the place cleaned up and closer to being fixed, but none of it produces any revenue. None of it gives me a product to sell. I'm reading a book, a post-apocalyptic thing, where the characters are defending farms against bandits, and I'm reading about people trading hundreds of pounds of corn for things they need, or about their livestock feeding them and providing them an income. I went to the OEFFA conference and mingled with all these people whose farms actually earned them money, and it just makes me feel so left out, like I'm the kid who got sent to baseball camp with no bat and no glove. But for the analogy to be more accurate, it's more like I have the bat and the glove and plenty of other equipment besides, but I'm not allowed to play.
I noticed that the county auditor has listed the southernmost parcel of the land next door as a separate address from the other two. I'm wondering if the land bank is going to sell that one to the school and the other two to me. I contacted the guy I've been talking with at the land bank. I emailed him Saturday. We'll see what he says.