week 17: holding down the fort...

this week on the little dream farm

I’ll have to refer all goings-on from the farm this week to Chris who was home on the farm this past week keeping things afloat while I was participating in an exercise taking place in Indiana and Illinois for my current Air Force role.

I headed out for the airport on Tuesday around 2 a.m. and spent the first two days in Indiana south of Indianapolis, the third day in Chicago, and then headed back south of Indy before making my way back home to the farm on Friday afternoon. The exercise is ongoing through this weekend and into next week so I’ve been on duty through the weekend while at home as well.

Meanwhile, back at home it was business as usual. One of the best things about the chores list and schedule we designed is that either Chris or I can plug into it on our own and everything still gets done as it typically would.

I know I mentioned via Instagram that while my mom was recently in town, I taught her all of the chores, and more specifically Chris’ chores while he was traveling in England at the time, and she was able to plug right in and take over, too. I love that when I talk to her on the phone she has such good context of what we’re doing week to week on the farm from being here and getting to do it herself.

When we were designing the chores list, we were just trying to create our own efficiencies and make the chores easier to split, check off, and manage on a regular basis. What we didn’t realize was that we also created a really seamless plug-and-play system for anyone else to be able to take over if or when we get the chance to take a vacation together. So that makes us feel pretty confident about getting some time away together hopefully sometime this year!

If you ask Chris, “How was your week?” he’ll simply tell you, like he told me each night when we’d catch up over the phone while I was away…he got up, did the morning chores, got in some kind of workout, worked all day (he’s always busy with a ton of meetings), knocked out chores between that, tucked everyone in, and watered all the seedlings before falling into bed each night.

That’s been the one big added difference with our chores lately…having Chris take my stead on the seedling front when I’m not home. I have another four-day trip in May and then a week-long trip in August so at that point he’ll be watering seeds inside as well as out in the garden and in the flower patch, too. Chris has a few trips interspersed in there, too, so we’ve each got relatively busy travel schedules coming up!

As each of these trips kept getting added to the schedule I kept wondering if it was putting too much on us to have to tend to it all with each of us being away here and there, but just like with everything else we’ve taken on here on the farm, we know we’ll figure out how to get it done.

We went over the watering routine just before I left and I typed up a little how-to as a reminder, but it’s tough to give exact advice to a total newbie, especially if you hadn’t been staring at the little seedlings every day of their little lives. I gave Chris a “B” on watering duty—which is really great overall! The things that were hard to account for day to day was the temperature in the room and how much water the seeds were needing based on that. I don’t have any special skill, just simply had been doing it consistently every day to know what I was looking at. Chris was bummed he got a B because he’s a real overachiever, but I assured him the fact that the seedlings were still alive was truly the most remarkable part and something to be proud of!

We’ve been having some challenges keeping the seed room cool enough with the 12 LED lights going all day and just an open window and a fan. Next year I may install a simple wood screen door to the bedroom so that the cats still can’t get in there but that the air can flow through the window and out of the room, too.

Next year, in the early part of the seed starting season, I’ll still plan to use the guest bedroom. Then we’ll hopefully be able to transition everything to the greenhouse once it’s warm enough at night not to need a full-time heat source out there since it’d be quite expensive to keep the greenhouse heated. Because of our solar panel, the electric bill went up to $28 this past month (it’s typically a steady $17 every single month) from running those 12 LED lights for 16 hours a day…not bad at all in terms of energy efficiency and not having to run propane heat to a greenhouse!

We’d planned for this weekend and the coming week to be chock full of outside chores to get the cut flower patch ready for planting but we’ve got rain in the forecast from Saturday (yesterday) through Wednesday this coming week. I think that’s Mother Nature’s way of forcing us both to rest after this busy past week.

So, instead of running around checking things off, we’ll be spending our Sunday nice and slow allowing ourselves the rest we know we need.

Hoping this was a wonderful week for each of you and that this weekend is bringing you the rest or productivity or fun or unplugging or whatever it is you may need. Looking forward to hearing how things are over in your neck of the woods if you’d like to share. We’ll be around today to read your comments and always love hearing more about you and yours!

If you could believe it there are 28 trays on this one shelf! Today I’ll be setting up the second shelf and potting up some of the seedlings towards the bottom who need more space to grow!