It has just this morning occurred to me, as I fired up the computer and looked over our past blog posts, that I haven’t written anything since June. As in six months ago. Ugh. I mean, it was a busy summer, don’t get me wrong, but really? Thank goodness Lizzy stepped in; if maintaining and updating this blog were solely my responsibility you’d just now be reading about how exhausting our moving day was.

I’d love to attribute my lack of posting to laziness, but there’s more to it than that. I won’t bore you about it now, though.

Anyway, it looks like Lizzy, in her last post, pretty much wrapped up all the garden stuff. If you read it you got the gist: we wound up with boatloads of veggies. Way more than a family of three could ever dream of eating its way through. This is, by now, old news. Still, I feel like I should post one last pic:

That’s a lot of tomatoes. I wish I could tell you that was our haul for the year, but no – what you see here represents maybe 1/8th of what we grew. As Lizzy alluded to in her earlier post we dried them, canned them, froze them, made them into paste, threw them at solicitors and, of course, ate them fresh – and still had many tomatoes rot on the vine.

So…maybe next year we’ll do fewer tomatoes.

Anyway, as I said, let’s consider the garden wrapped up. Enough already!

Of the many non-garden related projects we’ve undertaken these last months, the largest by far, and most significant in terms of preparing ourselves for a sustainable life, are fencing the properties and constructing a root cellar in the hill directly behind the house.

I mean, you can’t very well run a farm with livestock and such and not have a bunch of fencing, right? Apparently in many respects farm animals aren’t dissimilar to infant humans: they tend to eat lots of grass and dirt, poop everywhere, tear through neighbors’ living rooms, and then run into the street where they are instantly struck and killed by a truck delivering beef jerky to the liquor store down the road. Our plan is to avoid that sort of thing.

And a root cellar is a no-brainer if every year you’re going to grow and harvest, thanks to a garden plot the size of a football field, enough vegetables to feed the planet several times over. Did we mention that we grew a lot of vegetables? Well, we did. So many, in fact, that had we done this prior to 1984 the super group Band Aid would never have existed. That’s right – no depressing Christmas song thanking God for starving most of Africa. Heck, for all we know Bono might have given up music all together and switched to a more constructive career, like landscaping or owning a car wash. The thought absolutely boggles the mind.

Dammit, now I’m on about the garden again. Sorry.

There’s no way I’ll have enough room in this post to write about both the fencing and the root cellar, so I’ll stick with the fencing. I think we’ve written somewhere that Lizzy had found a good deal on tons of corner-posts, studded metal t-posts, and deer-fencing while browsing the Craig’s List “Farm and Garden” section.

They were basically half the price of brand-new material, so of course we couldn’t pass up the opportunity. Unfortunately, when I write that it was a “ton” of fencing I’m not being entirely accurate. It was more like two or three tons. The stuff was so heavy we had to borrow a burly neighbor and his utility truck to transport the metal material over the twenty-ish miles from Bonny Doon to Watsonville, and it still took us several trips. Separately, we used our pickup truck to move the corner posts (8 foot, 4×8 pressure treated. Maybe sixty of them) and that took two trips and nearly killed the poor truck. The experience was, in its back-breaking potential, second only to our experiment in building our own garden fence (http://wp.me/p1OmAa-cM if you’d like to revisit it).

But we got it done, and having all that inexpensive fencing proved to be huge for our budget. We did have, after all, several acres throughout two different parcels of very hilly land to fence in. Naturally, we weren’t about to undertake this sort of thing ourselves, so we found a good contractor – a guy who had worked for us before and we trusted – and began the process of transforming our open land into a place that goats and wee lambs can graze and frolic in safely and happily, at least until we eat them.

Each fenced-in section covers about three acres of land: the apple orchard below the house and the “upper pasture” extending from the driveway away from the house. Each has two 14 foot gates (for truck and tractor access) and a couple of 4 foot gates (for, you know, just people). Not included in the newly fenced-in areas are an access road we carved into the hill between the house and the orchard/chicken yard, the front plateaus by the main road (where the vegetable garden, burn pile and future olive grove are) a couple of acres of brush, bramble and eucalyptus behind the house, and the house and yard itself.

So here, at the risk of boring you with pictures of fences, are some pictures of fences:

So now that’s done. We’re eager to get our animals now, but first we have to provide some sort of shelter for them to sleep in. Of course that’ll involve me, lumber and power tools, so we may wait until this spring, as building anything larger than a coat rack involves more ambition than I have readily available, as well as many hours browsing YouTube for tutorials on how to use a hammer.

Next up, the root cellar!

-J.