Spring….how nice.  And time to go find the farm again.

I have stopped by about once a month over the winter.  The snow is gone and the ground is dry.  The crib appears to have stayed dry, and the shed did far better then expected.  I still have got to do something about the bottom of those shed doors.  There seems to be quite a bit of rabbit poo in there.  Luckily, a little bit more of the barn seems to have settled lower again.  And of course, a few branches have been shed from the trees.

A few days ago, I had to get something out of storage in the corn crib.  While I was there, I mounted the end joist for the platform on the staircase, and cut out the 2nd stringer.  It was too cool to see the first pair of them line up after waiting all winter.  They were all traced from the same pattern of course, but this was the first 3D vision of them.

Yesterday, in the middle of a bike ride with the Cyclists of Greene (COG) a few of us made it as far South as our property from town.  My plan was to stop there and get a recent wood delivery placed inside.  While I was there I started a new project, the potato planter.

I de-nailed a stack of old board that used to line the galley under the corn crib and cut them into 4′ lengths.  I also used a couple of the old bin-wall studs (4×6’s) to make 3′ tall corner posts.  The plan/experiment this year is to plant potatoes inside this frame.  As the plant grows each week you nearly bury it again, adding more side boards as needed.  After a summer of this, you should have a large cube, full of potatoes.  All the lower leaves and branches are supposed to turn into roots and give layers and layers of potatoes in a small area.  All the hardware for the first few layers is ready.

The tractor has undergone a minor overhaul.  I’ll be hooking up the mower deck tonight, followed by a quick test - why not.  Then I need to get the truck from the farm, load the tractor in it, then bring it all back down to the farm.  We need some dirt tilled so that we can plant these potatoes and a bunch of onion sets soon.

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Wow, over a month has past.

Anything exciting happen?  Not really, and yes.

After a winter here in Iowa, that has put us near the top of any recorded snow record, it turned warm real quick.  From 20 to 40 degrees for a week, then a few days of rain, then more warm air.  The snow melted quick.  Another interesting thing we learned, was that farmers were not finding much frost.  The snow came so fast and deep, the ground was not exposed to the cold air of winter.  Apparently, this lets the melt absorb, rather then run off.  In our yard, even though there was not much snow against the house, the water table quickly shot up to about a foot higher then our basement floor.

How did we know?  The dog told us.  Really, during one of the first heavy rains, the dog started running around the house at 3am.  So, I got up and let him out for a quick piddle.  He then kept up with his around the house pacing.  Since the rain was hitting the windows rather hard, I thought this new sound, not heard since last Fall, was disturbing him.  I got up again and dragged him downstairs.  I was going to put him in his crate, but saw him ball up on the couch.  Good enough.  Then I turned around and my toes got wet.

I flipped on the lights and found a puddle in the center of the basement.  Did the dog pee here already?  No, it didn’t smell.  Did rain leak in the basement?  Nope, no trails coming from the walls, especially where we can get some water in during downspout failures.  The old water heater vent, it has a drip hole in the bottom of the stack, that just 2 feet away.  No, it was dry and no sign of water underneath it.

Where was it coming from?  Well, there was a faint hairline crack here, and it was coming from a corner near the cinderblock walls and the floor slab.  I threw a towel on it, and went and looked at the floor drain.  Now, I did notice that 36 hours earlier, that our furnace drains into it, and it stopped draining.  Every time the furnace ran, it would fill up the floor drain impression.  I had removed the lid and used a small cup to bilge it out now and then.  This time it was just overflowing and I gave it another bilge.  I took the now full pot upstairs to the sink to drain it and returned it back downstairs.  When I returned, there was a large puddle here.  The cup would not keep up, so I grabbed a nearby mason jar.  I filled the pot every minute, and could not keep up.  I started using the pot, and filling the shop vac.  (NOTE:  The floor drain appears to be connected to a french/tile drain that surrounds the foundation.  It was working in reverse.  Luckily, it was not hooked to city sewer)
MAYDAY!  I had to wake Reagan, and by this time, the water was ankle deep in this quadrant of the basement.  She bailed, as I thew water down the driveway.  At the 30 minute mark, I gave up and remembered there was a transfer pump over at my dad’s house.  I went over and woke him up (that’s a new turn) I came back with a pump that was draining the basement at high speed, right out the door and down the driveway.  When we made headway, I re-ran the house through the window so we could close the door.  Still, every 15 minutes, the pump had to be ran.

At 7:00, I hit the stores.  I found a pump controller that would sense water levels.  Perfect!  I brought it home, hooked it up, and it failed after 3 cycles.  Damn.  I found another automated floor-sucker pump.  However, it would not stay on long enough to get ahead of the flow, then take 5 minutes to re-cycle.  Fail.  I checked every store in town, and Grampy hit 6 stores in Des Moines before we found a solution.

Another water sensor, and a small pump.  With serious pumping from the floor drain, we could keep the floor dry.  The more we pumped, the longer it would take to re-flood.  We shoved the intake hose far down the drain, and throttled it back and let it run for a half hour before it sucked air.  We dried the floor best as could be and used epoxy putty and a underwater grade caulk to stick a 5 gallon bucket to the floor around the drain.  We had cut the bottom off this bucket and created an above ground sump pit.  It actually did work, as it would fill to a foot, before we saw any seepage.  This was enough to run a pump.  The controller let us sleep.

A few days later, we had no choice.  I had just gotten a hammer drill and we made 14 pilot holes in the basement floor.  There was water coming back up through all of them.  We used a hand-held air hammer, a chisel, and eventually a sledgehammer to create a deep enough score out and break open a hole for the sump pit liner.  This hole kept filling up rapidly, and we used this small pump and controller for several days.  On the next weekend, I got a new PVC line out of the house, and have gotten a permanent pump in place.  Luckily, just as we have finished, the water intake has slowed down, but the waterline is still a foot under slab level.

Damage…  A few nights with little sleep.  Sore backs from digging out concrete and moving anything important in the basement.  And a users manual to one device that we really do need.  Very little damage.  Luckily, we kept everything in plastic and raised several inches down here —-just in case.
Greene Bean Coffee did get a new roaster.  It’s amazing and I have it dialed right in to produce large, consistent batches.
Besides that….it’s starting to feel like Spring.  Bike tires hit the road today, birds are showing up, geese are flying north, crocus’s are blooming.  I’m sure we will be getting some real updates soon.

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Hibernate!  Not really, but you sure hole up a little bit.  I don’t know how it started, but when the temp starts dropping I usually start baking bread.  Something about a warm over just makes the day better.  We also had experimented with several pies.  Many were good, but there were a few failures.  We gave one of our favorites to a friend of ours, who wrote such a rave review online that we could have walked away with several orders.  However, once this coffee shop idea comes through, pie might be a good side dish now and then.  Hmmmm.

I’ve also made a few more things from scratch lately.  I created a week-long bake off on the best homemade mac and cheese recipe.  Once in a while, I like fish tacos.  These need a little cabbage.  The down fall is that you usually end up buying a whole head and using 6 leaves from it and let it begin to compost in the fridge.  This time, I helped it.  I shreaded the whole thing and used the leftovers to create a homemade batch of sauerkraut.  A trip to the deli caused a rash of Rubens to appear around here.

The most interesting thing in the kitchen was a chicken.  I bought one of those pre-roasted birds from the deli and it served as dinner.  After stripping it of all leftover meat, the next day the bones found themselves simmering in a stock pot all day.  At dinner time, it quickly turned into the most amazing chicken soup I’ve ever had.  Finally, the leftover chicken meat turned into a batch of chicken enchiladas for our 3rd great meal from a single chicken.
Winter is getting a little old around here.  The snow is far deeper then I’ve seen in Iowa and the old-timers keep mentioning they haven’t seen storms or a winter like this for years.  Having the JD tractor in the garage with the snowblower on it makes for easy snow cleanup.  We are lucky we have this, as the building downtown we own has sidewalks that drift like you wouldn’t believe.  I’ve seen storms that leave as little as 2″ in our yard here.  A few blocks away, the sidewalk is waist deep.  I’ve given up any dignity and have driven the tractor downtown several times now this year.  At least I don’t drive it to the gas station to fill up like many do in the summer, and I’ve seen 3 others out there this winter too.

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A few things around here got a little slack during the first half of the winter.  Finally, all these little projects are getting out of the way.  In celebration of the photo gallery getting fixed, I noticed that we never posted our last few pictures of progress from the fall.  Click HERE to see them.

For no real reason, I attacked the side of the corn crib with a circular saw, and hung up a pair of storm windows I had found in the barn.  I guess they are a little more solid then the slat wall, but having a view is real nice.  I used another window to cover the hole on the east side that had a piece of metal covering it.  The top windows were plugged with plywood to keep snow out this winter.  I’ve visited a few times, and things are staying nice and dry.

We did frame out the 3 door openings we wanted in the greenhouse.  While I was at it, I also planned and cut the framing for the big bank of windows on the west end of the 2nd floor.  Come spring, all these will be installed and we can look out at the bike path.  My last project was to figure out the stairs.  I got the first stringer cut, and 3 others traced.  The first one got hung so that we would know the height that the landing would be at.  Most people would have this planned out on paper first, but we changed the pitch of the stairs slightly after seeing the actual hole, and the center concrete floor did come out higher then we originally plan on paper.  We did end up saving a few steps.  The nice part is the fact that our staircase will be 4 feet wide.

Winter happenings….besides blizzards and ice storms?

-Mason and I did good at the Pinewood derby.  The cars were fast, but not quite fast enough.  Mason did take home the ‘Best Themed Car’ award.

-Bought a restaurant grade stainless steel set of pots and pans.  Oh, they are nice to cook with.  More of our home kitchen keeps upgrading.  I’m never buying consumer grade stuff again.
-My resume just got a little nicer looking.  I started working for StorageTek about 6.5 years ago.  They got bought by Sun Microsystems. This week it became official, that I now work for Oracle due to the last purchase.  I did get paid my Microsoft for a small project once. If I can add Apple and Google I think I would score some sort of Bingo or Yahtzee for listing all the biggest and best tech names out there.

-Greene Bean Coffee is still growing great.  Next is an upgrade to the license for ‘food plant’.  That will allow us to wholesale and let people re-sell the coffee for us.  I think I’ll start construction on that tomorrow.

-Reagan is taking Master Gardener classes.  Mason has marked everything he wants in the seed catalog for us to grow next year.

-RAGBRAI towns were just announced.  Short and flat.  442 miles, 14,500+ feet of climb.

-Finally saw Avatar 3D today.  Most amazing!

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Wow what?

First, the counter…..9966.  I bet by the time people tune in for this update, it might roll over.  Thanks for reading!
Picture gallery has been fixed.
Iowa Winter:  Snow, Blizzard, Blizzard, COLD, Blizzard, ICE, Warm, Blizzard.  Spring, please come.

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