An organization called Western Iowa Advantage has posted an article about us on their website. Here is a little bit about them from their website.

Western Iowa Advantage is a collaborative effort of economic development officials in Adair, Audubon, Carroll, Crawford, Greene, Guthrie, Ida and Sac Counties. Our objectives are to embrace, leverage and promote our strengths of the region which are: quality of life, renewable energy, manufacturing and biosciences.

Click Here to Take A Look

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While in the garden picking onions a few days ago, the 8 year old asks, “Can I sweat these onions??” Later, while making marinated tomatoes, he instructs you on proper knife techniques and how to defrost your duck. We are starting to think he watches too much of Alton Brown’s Good Eats shows. We’ve started calling him “Mason Brown”

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Rich got the driveway at the farm opened up. There were 4 full trees and many limbs down. We haven’t even started on getting parts of the barn out of Bill Sutton’s corn field!

My achilles tendon has been bugging me, so I stayed in the least physical part of the farm. Weeding massive weeds from my organic garden. It took me an hour to weed one row of tomatoes. We have 4! Got all those done and started to unearth the cauliflower, jalapenos and banana peppers. Despite the lack of attention we gave the garden this spring, it’s doing pretty well.

I made marinated tomato and onion salad with our early crop of a few romas and massive red burgermaster onions. I used a variation of Rich’s Mom’s Gazpacho recipe. Yum!

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Tired of daily posts yet?

Ok, OK, OK you got me, I spent 4 hours on Wednesday, and 9 hours on Saturday working on the driveway.  It went from this:

To This:

There is still plenty left on the sides, and those trunks to deal with.  We do have a driveway again.  We have two trunks to drop, quite a few suspended branches left, and a few piles of brush left.

PS.  I figured out it was a seized mule unit, not the PTO clutch stopping the mower from working.

PPS.  From a non-farm pint of view:  Go Sastre, CSC, and Cervelo!!!!!!!!

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Yes, the barn fell down.  Well actually, it looks like it exploded.

The local news channel said there were 104mph straight line winds.  No one believes them.  I met someone near Scranton who saw several funnels, heard the “freight train” sound, then saw a wall of white in the lightning lit sky.  Many others reported the freight train effect as well, including one of our closest neighbors in Cooper.  Someone from Oklahoma who was riding RAGBRAI said this was not wind.  He lived through several tornadoes, and recognized the damage, random and intense destruction.  I swear it looked like a path in the corn leading straight to the barn.  Ohh, we had weird stuff, like the glass light fixtures attached to the undersides of the roof — intact.  The stack of 2×6’s in the hay loft, are still sitting up there.
For comparison.  104mph winds is almost a f2 tornado, or a cat3 hurricane.

How we found out?  Well, we awoke to weather messages being sent to the phone with an hour long tornado warnings at 2am.  We used the laptop to watch a radar image of red, purple, and balls of white crossing the screen.  Even the local weatherman said “…and these areas are into the white.  I don’t know what happening in there, but it’s bad.”  I’ve only seen small dots of purple before.  The sirens never went off, and the storm moved fast.  But it was intense.  I saw the wind curling rain over the neighbors car, and guessed the winds to be 50mph.  I checked the high schools weather station, 47mph.

I was more worried about RAGBRAI.  It was coming that day.  We had porta-potties all over the street, vendor tents blown 2 blocks, and branches on most of the roads.  The color was gone from some of the chalk drawings we did, but you could see them a little.  The big painted logos were fine, and only 1 sign was damaged.  I heard from Chuck Offenburger that our friend, Doug Lawton, was driving around Cooper and checking on things and nothing to report of my place.

But I started hearing of reports of RAGBRAI riders being moved inside at Harlan, and the damage along roads and how areas south of town were much worse.  After getting things mostly setup, I took the back way down to the farm.  I came in from the East and was staring at the corn crib.  Everything looked ok.  It was standing, siding was on, electrical box there, roof intact.  Good.  Then I got to the driveway.  4 of the huge trees were collapsed into it and leaning on the machine shed.  Just the leafy little ends, nothing major.  I got out and started climbing through the driveway.  It sits a little lower than the bank around it, when I  realized that I had just looked towards the barn, and saw sky.  There should have been a wall over there.  I started climbing up the bank and only found the first floor remains standing.  I had to get over there and found the two sides of the roof well separated from the barn.  One was in a corn field, the other was only 50 feet away.  I took a few pictures with the camera phone.  Reagan called, I didn’t tell her until I got home and showed her what was left.
Two good things.  1.  The wall I replaced was still standing.  I’m proud of that.  2.  We no longer are in a rush to re-roof the barn.

However, we have been thinking.  Reagan has been looking for meaning.  We had crazy house plans before leaving Colorado, but had dropped them when we found these barns.  Nothing else would look right next to them.  Well, clean slate, should we think of something else now?  An underground concrete vault is sounding real good right now.

Yes, underground.  There was a round house plan we liked, but maybe we use concrete and build it like a walk-out basement.  That way, there is only a roof above ground…..well wait.  Maybe we use a living roof and bury the house.  We could mow the roof when the grass gets too long.  We could sleep soundly during the next storm or tornado.

Progress:  Half of the first tree has been cut out of there.  Used the truck to spin the trunk around and get it to fall the rest of the way to the ground.  This weekend will be full of clean up.
Don’t forget to see the damage here (2 pages):

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