The New Farm Sign

The old sign circa 2007 (the white one, not the yellow one). As you can see, you cannot read it from any distance. This is an example of a horrible farm sign

After 5 years of having really bad signage we now have a very nice sign for the Farm and people should start noticing that there is a produce farm on US 127. And it has already had effect. Before we even have the sign completely done people stopped and said they had never noticed the farm before.

The sign has been 6 years in the making. We bought two of them from a local Dunkard who was getting out of the clock repair and sales biz. He had been bothering us to buy his 2 huge signs for about a year and finally he offered the two signs for $50 each (they cost him $1500 each). We at the time had no real use for the signs but we went out on a cold windy day and cut both signs down. one fell on me and almost caused me great harm. The guy's father saw us taking one of the signs and assumed we were stealing his son's signs and almost called the sheriff on us. But we explained that his son had sold us the signs so he called him first and found we were telling the truth and left us to our work.

The signs laid around the Crubaugh Rd farm for a couple of years than were moved to this farm with the intent of getting at least one erected within a year. But since I did not want to go the vinyl letter route-I hate vinyl lettering- it took a bit longer. I wanted a proper sign that was painted by an artist. I was hoping that perhaps my father could do it but by the time we got around to getting our shit together enough to get one of the boards painted my Dad was in failing health. So that did not happen. I asked around to various artist friends and acquaintances I know and no one wanted to do the sign (I was pretty amazed, especially with the younger artists, that no one seemed to want money for their art. I guess sign painting is considered too low brow). Finally, our friend, artist and farming colleague Debra Bowles said she would do it.

So we got the big board we planned on using prepped for her (it had been, in a former life been a clock repair and sales shop sign) and took it to her farm in the spring of 2008 and waited. Many months went by and nothing had been done on the sign. Autumn happened and Debra told us she still had not had time to work on the sign because of family, goats and other issues and and now it was getting too cold to paint her unheated space. My brother visited for Thanksgiving and we told him of our sign progress and he made the observation that we were using a hippy artist and we would just have to be patient. That the result would likely be wonderful. I believe he said the fact we were using a hippy artist was perfect for us (and one who learned her craft under the teaching of Crossan Curry, one of my Dad's best friends, a person I have known my entire life and a wonderful master artist in his own right. So keeping all this in the family, so to speak).

Winter passed and spring and warmer weather was upon us and still no sign.

At this point (early May) Debra implied that perhaps she was not the person to do the sign after all. This hit me hard. Now we were looking at paying someone close to $1000 to create a design in vinyl, resurface the sign (which had been primed for pain by this point) and apply the design. Yes, we would have likely gotten a decent sign (and far, far better than what we had) but it would have been vinyl. Somehow she seemed to feel my bitter disappointment and decided that she could do the sign. So in mid May the project finally was started in earnest and by mid June she told us it was finished and we could pick it up. We drove to her farm and put the new sign in the back of the van and took it home where it languished on the front porch of the store until yesterday.

We now have a beautiful new sign and just in time for the 127 Yard Sale. I suspect this will increase business by several hundred percent in the next few weeks. I cannot use this coming week to gauge as I expect business to increase by at least 2000% during the yard Sale (as it has the past 4 years)

Eugen dismantles the old sign

Digging out the eastern post that had been cracked in half 3 weeks ago by a truck that had hit it

Surveying the work so far-old sign down, new sign about to be erected



First post being put in place

Second post erected and Eugene with his trusty level is getting his bearings on where the post need to be exactly in their post holes so the entire sign is level

Sign is up but not quite finished. Eugene is bring a rope to put around the sign so the side bolts can be tightened

Sign is up and almost finished. Still needed to pour concrete in the post holes and than the final step is painting the white horizontal board so it matches the rest of the sign.

Storm Damage Pix

The storm damaged the roof of the barn. This is the Southwest corner of the barn and Eugene has had to fix it before when we had a wind storm last year that nearly took off this section in 40mph winds. His fix held in high winds but could not deal with 4 hours of 50 mph+ winds with 70 mph+ gusts. Looks like today Eugene will fix the roof instead of going to market. I believe we have everything needed to put it back together and make it stronger than before. yesterday we bought metal at Carter's Lumber in Eaton, which was open despite having no electric (cash or checks only)

The storm pushed over both of our portable signs. I put the other one back together before thinking of taking pictures but since this one is at the bottom of the hill it did not get immediate attention so I could photograph a bit of the minor sign damage (we lost two "K"'s on the sign up top and this sign was slightly bent). Note the corn lying beside the sign. That is our "lodged" popcorn crop which is not quite ready to harvest. the term "lodged" means corn that has been pushed down by wind, making it quite hard to harvest by hand and pretty much impossible to harvest with machines. There is a lot of lodged corn in western and central Ohio from the storm. By a lot I would estimate at least 60% of the corn is pretty much unharvestable. What started out as a pretty good corn crop in Ohio is quickly becoming a disaster for the corn farmers.

This is one of my favorite trees. It's an old locust tree that was living on our fence/property line. it looked from a distance like some sort of tree you would see on the African Savanna (maybe an accacia). Last spring a big part of it was blown down in a lesser storm and now this storm too the rest. Since it blew down on our neighbor's side of the fence they get the wood

Eugene looking at the downed locust tree.

New Windows are In Place

windows today. The plan was to get about 1/2 of the windows installed but as I write this they are finishing up installing all but one window (one was damaged and was sent back to Our buddy Mark showed up late last night in order to help Eugene put in our new pellaPella when we picked them up at Lowe's. It will be here in a week or two), pretty slick.

While they took out the old nasty very untight old windows, I spent my time cleaning up some of the many onions we have curing, cleaning dried dill that has been sitting in a dehydrator for a couple of weeks waiting for me to do something with it (dill is a very tedious herb to clean so I avoided doing so for a long time). Now I have around 1/2 pound of dried dill in a freezer. I doubt I will dry any more of it, I have enough to sell and use for the rest of the year.

Waited on a few customers while I was cleaning the dill. Sold some tomatoes, strawberries and green beans.

Than I decided it was time to process tomatoes so I got the Victorio out and put it together, brought in a crate of tomatoes and got to work putting them through the Victorio. After 15 minutes the thing jammed and than fell off the table and tomatoes, tomato juice and tomato waste flew everywhere. I angerly tossed the contraption into the sink (avoiding the thawing turkey) and grabbed a mop to mop up all the tomato crap all over the floor, chair, crate (that was still half full of maters) and table. Took the crate of tomatoes outside and hosed everything down (which meant I found a rotting tomato) and got the crate and fruit really clean.

Now the house is a mess. The boys used some sort of expandable foam that looks a whole lot like marshmallow fluff and that has gotten all over the place (mostly where it needs to be). I have not gone upstairs yet (I think I will avoid doing so until bed time as I heard a lot of crashing up there) but I assume it is messier than the kitchen.

The good news is everything is in place and now all that needs to be done is the finish work, which will start next weekend. Oh yeah and one window is MIA and still needs to be done start to finish.

I gotta say the new windows are marvelous and already are keeping the heat from pouring in the house (and I am certain will keep the cold out of the house). They have an R value of 25 which is far better than the walls that surround them. I don't know what the R value of the old windows was but probably well below an R15. We will be using a lot less energy this winter to keep the house warm and that is a good thing on a lot of levels. For one, it is a very green thing to do and to me, that alone, is worth the $2100 or so this project has cost so far. I am sure by the end of this winter the windows will be close to paying for themselves, certainly over the next 5 years they will in fuel savings alone.

The New Packing Shed

Putting the uprights on the concrete footers

Just about ready to put the decking on

Eugene and Mark putting last bit of decking on the porch.

Mark nailing the roof onto the structure

The finished product

Last week we took a space that was being used to "store" trash metal and turned it into a useful and beautiful packing shed/wash porch by Thursday. I was hoping to post several pictures of the construction but I did not realize that I did not have the memory card in my camera and the images are now stuck in the camera's memory because I cannot find the proper USB cable to hook the thing into my computer and get everything off of the camera's memory (which is now full so I wonder what else is on there?).

At the 127 yard sale I found the cable I needed to download the picture that were in the camera and as you can see I have now posted them. The 7 or so pictures I took of this construction filled up the camera's memory. Good thing they make memory cards.

Building this thing was really stressful and quite expensive (around $1600 for lumber, nails, concrete, metal roofing) Our friend Mark had quoted us about half that price for materials as he was going by 2007 prices and did not realize the price of everything has gone up 100% to 400% in the past 6 months.

Fortunately, we are have a great growing and marketing year so can afford the more expensive materials and this will allow us to to do more work more easily. I made good use of it Friday and it works well and makes me feel good just to look at it.