Cupola shots

Above: drywall around the cupola window.
I just love taking pictures of this. You can see the tongue-and-groove ceiling pretty well now. There's gonna be some kind of centerpiece hanging down from the middle of it.

Plastering

Above: Brendan, the main plasterer, applying the first coat to the curves around the window in the kitchen. The plasterers came back to apply 1st and some 2nd coats to the inside, and finish off the 2nd coat to the outside. I was helping to sift the clay they needed to make the plaster. Now we're heating the building with the wood stove to dry out the plaster faster, and then Brendan & friends will return to put the final coats on, probably in late April. The final two exterior coats, a lime plaster, won't be applied until June, after the last frost date.
Above: a wall in the library upstairs; this is the second coat. The third and fourth coats will be much finer, much more finished-looking. Below: a wall finished with the 2nd coat. As you can see, two different types of clay were used. The darker one, which we got from Medford, was very hard to work with -- hard to sift, and needed a lot more sand mixed in. So they switched over to some clay from our land, which was much easier.

Above: Lydia, who facilitated the baling of the building last summer, came back for a few days to help plaster. Below: the window plaster, 1st coat.

Tiny Flowers

Some greenhouse shots of seedlings I've got growing for the organic cut flower biz. Above: black hollyhocks, which are the only hollyhocks I've found (so far) that will last in a vase. Below: Eragrostis "Blue Eros", an ornamental grass that should be good as a filler for bouquets. The eragrostis are in soil blocks, a method of seeding I'm trying out this year.

Above, a type of sage popular with cut flower growers called "Blue Bedder"; below: Echinops, or globe thistle, which is a beautiful steel-blue.
Below: Eryngium "Blue Glitter". OK, not everything I'm growing is blue, it just happened that way in this entry.

Catching up with the Drywall

Above, laying on the drywall in the mill room.

Above and below: we ran out of sheet rock, and when it finally arrived, the guys came back and finished off the last two pieces -- the solarium (above) and the high wall above the wood stove in the dining room.

Arbor shots

...Building up the arbor

Friends visit

My friends from the Bay Area came to visit me, and we had a great time. They took a coastal trip in two enormous RVs, stopping at various beautiful redwoody places, and were here in time to celebrate Passover and check out the place. In these pictures, they're lounging after helping me plant flowers in the field. Above, Lia Gaertner, who lives in Sebastopol and like the rest of the Full Bloomers did the farm apprenticeship program at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center.
Above, Lia's daughter Kaia.
Lia's husband Sunje, with their son Kiva in the background.
Joanna, one of my closest friends, and her daughter Ani.

Ocean with Pens up her Nose

...What else is there to say? I love this girl.

...Just shaved off everything yesterday -- a little spring cleaning.

Interior Belly Bands

Autumn (above) and Silas (below) working on the installation of the belly bands...

Some Random Shots

Above: in the foreground, the gravel marks where the farm's packing shed is gonna be -- the place to wash and pack vegetable. In the background, the concrete pad was just poured for the farm's walk-in refrigerator.
Above and below: I just cannot get enough of this view. These shots are from the deck of the common building.

Above: the new shelves that our friend and neighbor Matty built for the farm; below, those shelves all stacked with produce boxes...

First Bedding of the year in the Flower Field

Above: the bedding implement. The horizontal bar with the vertical bars spaced at equal intervals is a way of making lines on the bed so you know where to plant, with the proper spacing. Matt had just welded that piece onto the bedder right before I took this picture.
Next three pix: the bedder in action....

Below: the finished product. Last night I went out and sculpted the beds a bit, cut some paths to break up the linear-ness of the beds and set out some pots of plants. On Wednesday I have a little work party happening here to do the first transplanting!

First Discing of the year in the Flower Field

Right after mowing, Matt came back with the big tractor and the disc implement to break up the soil.


Above: Action shot! You can almost see the soil being broken up...Below: After discing.

First Mowing of the year in the Flower Field

....Matt came in with the mower to mow a small section at the top of the flower field. I'll be transplanting a bunch of last year's perennials that are still in the field, as well as seedlings that have come up farther down in the field, on top of starts from Green Gulch, bulbs from Ryan and a few seeds I bought in January.