In 2011 the pace of construction at Bonafide Farm slowed a bit—but of course when compared to building an entire house in 2010 that doesn’t mean much. But thanks to some pretty vigorous goal setting and the sweat of myself and others we accomplished a lot. All items in bold are linked to their original posts if you want to read more.

And so, in 2011, I:

Created a garden from scratch, and fed myself and others from it

Carving a garden space out of a field was a major undertaking, and fencing and tilling and adding soil amendments and lining paths with landscape cloth took much of the fun out of the early garden season. But even with a late start I harvested my own food from May to late December, and for much of the summer ate only produce I grew. Plus, I gave bags of vegetables to coworkers, friends and family. Not bad for the first year out.

Completed the crawl space pit

Several summer weekends, including a historically hot Independence Day weekend, were devoted to mixing and pouring concrete to make the walls of my crawl space entry. This project was started in 2010, and I rest easier knowing my crawlspace is sealed off from, well, the creepy crawlies. The finished product is awesome and will be here long after I am dead and gone, but remind me next time to do concrete work when it’s not 100 degrees outside.

Designed and manufactured garden row covers to fight insects

Sweat + seed ticks is all I will say about this August project. But the infrastructure is in place for 2012’s covered rows.

Installed new forest

A couple of backbreaking weekends in September and I have a new mower slalom course in my back yard. Which, someday, I hope will be a living screen between my neighbors, the road, and my house.

Installed porch ceiling

Dear starlings and mice: Consider yourselves evicted. Now to pick a cool fan for the box up there, install some rope lighting, and reinstall my outdoor speakers…

Trimmed coop

More than a year after the guineas first moved in, their little house is finally looking finished. I just need to hang a window box to pretty it up!

Repaired the garage and installed new doors and openers

This is the post I teased a while back but never got around to writing even though it was the single largest structural and cosmetic undertaking of the year. Much of October and November was spent supervising the repair of this:

Now it looks like this:

And when I come in the driveway after work, it’s such a luxury to push a button and have a garage door open—instead of parking and staring at a depressingly decrepit duct-taped mess.

Painting!

This fall, the completed porch ceiling, repaired garage and newly trimmed coop all got painted to match the house. I am trying to tie all my buildings together and the paint goes a long way toward that goal. As a bonus, I also had the front porch ceiling sealed and both porch floors repainted.

Personal goals

Though all of the above could fall under the personal goal of creating a farmish home, I also got to check off two major life list items.

I learned how to homebrew

For this goal I am grateful to Brad, who set me down the path of true beer appreciation and shared his expertise over a very hoppy early November weekend. I raise a glass of my first IPA to you.

And, I raised a puppy

April 3, 2011

December 23, 2011

Wow, what an experience that was—and, as he nears his first birthday, continues to be! To say he turned my views of both dogs and relationships on their head doesn’t even touch it: all the things I worried about were nonissues and the parts I thought would be easy turned out to be the most challenging. I wouldn’t call much of it fun, but I am incredibly pleased with how Tuck is turning out, and grateful to him that he’s still willing to hang out with me—sleeping at my feet as I type this. I can’t wait to see how he matures.

So those were the highlights of 2011. I think it’s a fair amount accomplished, particularly in addition to living alone and working a full-time job. I am aware, however, of how none of it could have been done on my own. The two people who made most of it possible are my dad, who possesses the magical combination of  neverending creativity, intelligence and energy, and who worked next to me through all these construction projects in addition to having his own full-time job and farm, and my mom, under whose loving attention Tucker has thrived and without whom I would never have been able to cross “raise a puppy” off my life list. Thank you both for being totally awesome.

And I would be remiss if I did not mention the cast of characters who move through this place, lending their skills and friendship to this dream. I am a very blessed girl. Thank you all, and we’ll reconvene soon to talk about plans for 2012.

For strawberry cake!

A friend gifted me with 10 lbs. of strawberries that he just picked out of the field at Seaman’s Orchard in Roseland, Va. All who enjoyed them agreed that they were the best berries in memory. Go pick some today before they’re gone!

Satellite internet, consider yourself dumped.

I am thrilled to announce that, after at least a five-year battle and many, many petitions signed by concerned homeowners, my little section of rural Virginia has joined at least the late 20th century and finally gained high-speed internet access. DSL, baby. It’s a game-changer.

When I bought this property, I had serious concerns about its lack of a viable high-speed internet connection. But I went ahead anyway, thinking I could live “the simple life” without internet and do more productive things in my spare time like churn butter from my own cow’s milk and sew my own clothes. I hadn’t lived this good old way five days before I had a nice young man sinking the post of a satellite internet dish in my back yard.

And the satellite internet was fine. Sure, each month it cost me five times what I will now be paying for DSL. And, yes, it took forever to do simple things like spend money on the Web. Paying bills online became a hit or miss affair as crucial screens timed out before I could even see them. I had to pick and choose my favorite blogs because I didn’t have enough hours in the day to download and read each post. And when snow or monster thunderstorms blocked the skies, I lost all connection to a radar map.

Case in point: I woke up one morning wanting to purchase an online yoga class to kick off a nice healthy weekend. Six hours later the class was still downloading and I was keeping company with my second beer on the couch. So much for New Year’s resolutions. Satellite internet, you brought my best intentions down.

And yet I suppose there was a flip side too. That it took forever to do anything online meant that I often just gave up, shut off my computer, and walked away to engage in more wholesome activities. Such as watching bread rise. Bread I made from wild yeast captured and nurtured in a slurry of flour made from wheat I planted, tended and harvested by hand in all the spare time I had while not being connected to the internet.

Oh well. It’s back to buying my bread and butter at the store, and now that I can rock through an entire department store’s online catalog in just a few minutes, I’ll be spending my time at nordstrom.com instead of sewing my own gingham jumpers.

I can’t say enough good things about Charlottesville-based Relay Foods. I think they have such a good thing going on that I’d go work for them if they’d have me, and I am encouraging everyone I know to try their service so they stay in business!

Basically I order my groceries online, pay with a credit card, and then once a week I drive to a parking lot a minute away from where I work to pick up my order, all packaged up in a nice big tub. Behind the scenes the little Relay elves travel around to all sorts of local Charlottesville business to fill my order, saving me from driving all over town, and many of their options are locally grown and organic. Plus, their web interface is great, their graphic design makes me smile…as do the nice people who load up my groceries. I haven’t found their prices to be prohibitively expensive, but I am happy to occasionally pay  a bit more to avoid the hassle and time of going to the stores myself. As someone who loves to cook but hates the grocery store, Relay Foods is my glimpse of heaven.

All this is backstory to the real story, which is the joy I felt on Thanksgiving when I opened up the carton of these eggs that were part of my Relay order. The eggs came from Hardy Farms in nearby Keswick, Virginia, and the sheer beauty of them was my nicest holiday surprise. And they were nice and fresh, with big orange yolks that sat high above the white. I’ve enjoyed them in pumpkin pies, cookies, and last weekend, in an out-of-this world spaghetti carbonara, which also included some pretty fantastic bacon from Charlottesville’s Organic Butcher. It was my first time making this dish, but it was so good that I am trying to justify cooking a meal whose main ingredients are pasta, egg yolks, heavy cream, cheese and bacon twice in one week! Thus far my best argument is that it’s ridiculously cold and windy outside now (in fact only a few degrees warmer than Anchorage, Alaska), and I need the fat to survive the winter!