Dear Friends,
So this week I took a well deserved break to do back breaking work at my house instead of the workshop. Thankfully I have an excellent team to keep the wheels from falling off the bus. Since our bar stock is now up enough, I was able to take the first real time away from the prison that has been my machine time in months. Good thing too, since its planting time here in Wisconsin.
Now I am a man caught between two worlds. On one hand I look around at the current climate here in the US and think that perhaps the end of the status quo I have known all my life and the country has known for over 150 years is about to end in an unfortunate blaze of glory. On the flip side, living in fear of something that might happen is a horrible way to run a business. If I acted as though the sky was falling in my business, I would just hunker down and not take any risks. That would likely have disastrous effects.
Walking this line however is a balancing act I take seriously. Thus this year, my wife and I are going from her small 8'x10' garden bed last year to planting over a half acre of staple crops and an enormous garden with 5 beds measuring 4'x30' which should provide some real foundational food staples for whatever might come.
In true Colin fashion, I expected to take one day this week to do the tilling, and setup for the field and the garden... it took 3 and I haven't yet got anything in the ground yet...
I am blessed to live in the countryside, a little ways out of town proper. We have a bit over 4 acres that we bought in 2020 (which may prove to be the single most important financial decision of my life considering the future of interest rates and housing prices). I always had envisioned a peaceful life of hobby farming and livestock raising. This vision is shared by my lovely wife, and we have hoped that within 3 years from now that we can have full normal meals most days made from things grown or raised on our little slice of heaven on earth.
So on Monday, with things securely managed at the workshop, I decided I was going to go rent a small disc plow to pull behind my John Deere lawn tractor (which are incidentally made a few miles from my house). Unfortunately the local rental place informed me that the plow I was hoping to use had been broken over the weekend. Not to be deterred by a little thing like the breaking of a necessary piece of equipment, I asked what other tools they had that might do the job.
Half an hour later I was driving through town on a very large tractor with a power tiller attachment swinging behind me.
To the shops credit, they were right that the tractor would absolutely get the job done and quickly too. I will admit that I have scarcely had as much fun as I did plowing my field on that great big machine. After getting the area tilled up, I then went and used it to make my wife her garden beds closer to the house.
We had intended on setting up her garden at a much more modest size, but since I had the tractor, and I know that this is just the beginning of our farming adventure, I convinced her to go big. Way bigger than even I had initially thought. This had some unintended downstream effects that I will dive into later.
The tractor rental still had a few hours left on it after I came back from my lunch break so Leah convinced me to trim the apple trees in our orchard (which neither of us had any experience in, nor have we done anything with them in years). We watched a short YouTube video on how to trim apple trees and got to work.
I may have been a bit overzealous...
Driving past the trees now, it looks like I pruned them with a grenade launcher. So we will see if they survive. If they do, I'm confident they will produce better fruit and eventually will be better for it.
I did accidentally kill the battery on the tractor by leaving the electronics on while I went in for lunch. So that took some effort to jump it and get it back working.
The tractor did come in handy getting the limbs of the tree out of the way from the yard and I was able to clear the land under a spot where we are going to put up a tire swing for the kids, so it was a good time.
It was that evening when my wife pointed out that I would need to put up some type of fence around the garden. This is where my desire to "go big" came back to bit me. By making the garden the size I did, I would need over 160 feet of fence to enclose it. She pointed out that fencing it in was necessary since the chickens we have would likely scratch up the small plants, or the many wildlife we have scampering around the property would eat it all before we got to harvest.
In light of the fact that this project was already way over budget, I opted to use some of the left over wood from another prior project (making her butcher block countertops, another wildly ambitious project that took way longer than I had thought). I still had to buy chicken wire and then there was the matter of pounding 40 posts into the ground and attaching the wire. That took two days to accomplish, and unlike the first day which was the perfect sunny day, the next two were a miserable spitting rain.
It is however done...
Now I just need to get some plants in the ground.
The garden is her domain, my area is the enormous field I tilled on the far end of the property. This is where I once again put myself into a challenging place. The ground is tilled, and at a great expense no less, so I must use it all. However, upon my estimation of what the three subfields would be growing I came to a realization. I don't know where I am going to put this all when its is harvested (or know how long I'm committing myself to harvest.)
The three fields I had planned would hold potatoes, wheat, and corn planted so that they wouldn't block each other's sunlight. If I fully utilize the potato field, properly planting a the correct distances, the low end estimate of the yield would be 8,000 potatoes, the wheat estimate would be 800lbs of wheat berries, and 700 ears of corn...
That's a lot.
It's encouraging in that the field I plowed represents about 1/8th of my total property, and even in a future where we grow food to feed animals, we have enough to cover them. All in all though, I may need to adjust my plans for what I am putting into the ground.
Either way, I am back at my normal work today and filling in for one of the usual production people who is out on vacation. Soon I will be diving into my next big project.
Stay tuned for more letters on Thursdays in the coming weeks and be sure to go subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you like and watch the videos it helps us get promoted more by the algorithm to people who may never have heard of us.
Ever your servant,
Colin Murdy
CEO/Owner
Murdy Creative Co.
Cell: 414-434-9001
MurdyCreative.Co
