Let’s pick back up with what’s kept me occupied every weekend for the past month:

I leveled the mulch and topsoil piles.

Just like with the azaleas, I am on a mission to clean up the extraneous piles and anything that gets in the way of easy mowing (all the trees I keep planting notwithstanding). The tarp-covered piles were just as attractive to snakes as they were to a hot dog on an 80+ degree March day. In fact, last fall I found a five-foot snakeskin in this mess.

But really it was the sight of the Katrina chic blue tarp on the latest satellite map shot of the farm that finally embarrassed me into action. Got to have this place looking good, even from the air!

Now, it’s much cleaner! I spread the extra mulch around trees and used the soil to fill in more low spots around the house.

Finally, I dug out the previous owner’s boulder collection and leveled “forsythia ridge.”

April 2009, the first day I saw the property

There was an old stepping stone path from the wellhouse to the big oak tree behind it. At one time I suspect the path traveled to a clothes line, but now it didn’t do much more than beat up the mower blade. My dad popped the stones out with the backhoe and we tipped them in the bucket. Turns out the “little” stone were actually huge. They had just been in place so long that grass had grown over them! They’re nice stones—and waiting in a pile in the woods to be called into service again.

With the boulder collection gone, we knocked down a high spot in this area to greatly improve the levelness of the ground. This ridge was left over from the previous owner’s forsythia installation, which was actually a couple of sad little bushes intermixed with honeysuckle and wild blackberries that were choking out a big old Rose of Sharon. I am not a forsythia fan, so we dug them out and now Rosie has room to breathe and there’s nothing blocking the pasture and mountain view.

Of all the work that I’ve done this spring, cleaning up this particular section has been the most rewarding. When I bought this property, this area—which is in direct view out the kitchen window—was full of junk, including a huge satellite dish stand, a couple of termite-infested rotten whiskey barrels full of dead plants, the remains of a giant stump that no one had bothered to remove, and—oh—a giant electrical pole. Then I added a satellite internet dish. The human junk along with the misplaced bushes and uneven ground pocked with huge rocks always made this little patch feel forsaken. It’s taken three years to remove all of the above and more. Finally having this small area stripped to clean dirt area makes me feel like I am erasing the abuse and neglect heaped upon this property by previous caretaker and replacing their story with mine.

And with all this newly bare dirt to cover, I am off to buy another 50 pound sack of grass seed!

It’s that time of year again, when writing blog posts about projects takes a back seat to the actual projects. Spring sprang in early March, more than a month ahead of schedule in Virginia, and with it came an onslaught of seasonal tasks that usually start ramping up in late April. So every nonoffice moment has been spent outdoors, primarily in pursuit of my spring goal, which is to tidy up the messes and impediments to mowing around the property. So in the past month I’ve:

Bushogged the front field.

This field hadn’t been cut in more than a year, and I was sick of the straggly grass and generous deer habitat uncomfortably close to the house. So much nicer now!

Seeded the worst bare patches with grass.

The worst part about mowing, which I otherwise enjoy, is going over bare patches. If it’s dry, the mower kick up so much dirt that I am blowing red boogers for days.

It took me six hours on a Saturday to seed all these spots, but if I can get grass to grow, mowing will be much more enjoyable.

Disappeared the dirt mountain behind the chicken coop.

This pile of dirt had been here since building the house. It was the soil excavated when the crawlspace was deepened. I was sick of looking at it and weedwacking around it, so with about six scoops of the tractor bucket the soil was gone and distributed around the fields, where I shoveled it into low spots. And I got a sweet new tractor parking spot out of the deal!

Got rid of the azalea pit.

This was where I had stored the big old azaleas removed from around the foundation of the house I tore down. But I’ve finally accepted that I don’t even like azaleas, and I was tired of mowing around this mess in the middle of the field. A few minutes of backhoe action and they’ve gone to a new home, a ditch out of sight in the woods.

Up next…the landscraping continues…

Been waiting for this all week.

Porch sitting begins. It’s officially spring.

And the extra special deliciousness is coming inside after sundown to sit by the hot woodstove. Best of both worlds.

The morning of Feb. 20 I awoke to a brilliant blue sky and a perfect snow. In this strangely warm winter that’s seen the daffodils already bloom and noted scientists and plantspeople rue the fate of spring, I thought it might be my only chance for snow photos. So before work I headed out for a very quick circuit around the property.

The silver maple is already budded out in red.

Entering the woods

A black wolf cleared the trail.

Emerging from the woods

Sleeping garden, working worms all warm under the white duvet

And back to the house! How lovely to do a five-minute nature walk—in my bathrobe and chore boots!

This time on the not-yet-flowering crab apple.

With Buck Mountain in the background.

I want to opt out until April.

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.