Star Field Farm

 

We have a big hole in the ground. While it looks like a mess of earth and rocks, this is what will be our barn/addition to the house at Star Field Farm. It took some doing, given the weeks of rainy weather, but the preparation work is done and they will begin the next stage of pouring the foundation starting on Thursday.

 

This is what will be the mudroom and new entrance to the house; a connector to the garage and the new master suite above it.

I’m a woman of fairly simple wants. I don’t care about jewelry. Don’t like roses, long stemmed or otherwise. But sweet talk me with a description of a mud room? :swoon:

We had a great meeting with Rich from Geobarns, who will be coordinating the build. Even with my difficulty ‘seeing’ things in my mind’s eye, I could absolutely envision how beautiful this will be, how much it will reflect our aesthetic, how wonderful it will be to have friends and family come to visit.

Our neighbors were upgrading their living room and gave us their old sofa. One U-haul trip later, and they are now in the middle of our dining room. Eventually, we will get a table and the sofa will be moved to what will be my office/spare room upstairs.

We’re in this interesting transition phase: we weren’t ready to move and can only realistically use the place a few weekends a month, depending on Neil’s call schedule. The sellers were not quite ready to move up to their new place in VT. So we have an arrangement where we’ve rented the place back to them for a low rent in return for access two weekends a month. While they are transitioning out, we are slowly moving things in.

The dogs are already at home.

I took them on a long tromp in the woods, despite the threat of ticks. The dogs have their sorresto collars, I have a set of dog walking/hiking clothes I treated with permethrin. And a friend made us a spray bottle with essential oils to try.

After a good 40 minute walk, I was tick free, Mya had one I squashed. Dustin, because he’s lower to the ground and has longer hair, had a half dozen. Most clinging to his tail fur. Interestingly enough, I had sprayed his paws and belly with the essential oils, but not his tail.

What a difference 2 weeks makes. When I was here last, the ferns had just poked up from the ground. I could have harvested a ton of fiddleheads! This weekend, everywhere I walked I saw miniature fairy forests of ferns. (Ohh, good alliteration!)

 

 

 

There is also a profusion of both raspberries and blackberries growing wild all along the woodland paths. It’s going to be a race between Lisa and all the critters to see who gets the ripe berries first!

And speaking of bumper crops! This is one of several peach trees on the property. If you look closely, you will see little baby proto-peaches!  Having never had fruit trees before, I think I’ll need to do a bit of research. I already know I’ll need to cull many of the peaches if I want to have a decent crop, otherwise they will overwhelm the tree’s ability to sustain that many.

 

I will leave you with the glowing eye of Mt. Doom. . . . Or the first bonfire of the season. We sat out on the back porch watching the fire dance and listening to the crackle of wood.

 

 

Everywhere you dig in New England, you find rocks.

 

Rocks, rocks, and more rocks. We knew this at the outset and much of these will be used to grade the slope around the driveway.

 

Ever wonder why there are so many picturesque stone walls in New England? A matter of frugality. When you have an abundance of rocks to clear from a field, you mark your boundaries with those rocks. You build a wall.

There are walls like these running everywhere in the woods of Central Mass.

That’s because just about all the forest in New England is at least second growth. Much of this land was used for grazing animals, some for growing crops.

This is the build site for our addition/barn. And after  bringing in the special hammer drill to get out a particularly large boulder, the excavator found ‘ledge’. That would be a layer of rock under the ground. Which is not good news for our building schedule.

At some point, I think all this lovely gravel will be laid down to smooth the build site ahead of the foundation pour.

 

Despite the frustration of a several week delay, it is still a joy to be here. I had to be at the property today to meet with an electrician and got to enjoy the lilacs. I also discovered that there is asparagus growing. And the apple trees are laden with blossoms.

In January of 2017, Lisa and Neil “bought the farm”.

Fortunately, not in the metaphorical sense, as we are both quite alive and well!

While not quite a farm (yet!) our new piece of heaven is a lovely cape-style home on 54 acres of land in Hardwick, MA.

Neil aspires to be a gentleman farmer in retirement (sometime in the unspecified future) and Lisa is planning to write, daydream, and hold writing retreats there.

We just broke ground on what will be an addition, including a 6-bay garage, a mud room connector to the existing house, and a new master suite.

This is what started on Saturday:

We will be documenting the build here, and posting photos as we discover what blooms on our new land.