Sharpest tool in the shed

So winter is supposed to be the quiet time at a farm. It’s the time to let nature do its system refresh — giving the trees the chill hours they need to produce next year’s fruit, killing off enough bugs to stave off a biblical plague, decomposing the tomato and pepper plants we’ve severed and dropped to the ground.

It’s a time when farmers are supposed to reflect upon the glories of Mother Nature’s restorative cycle, while resting with a hot cup of tea by the fire.

But we’ve been busier than ever at Dew Point Farm.

During the growing season, we officially closed on the neighboring lot, doubling our farm’s size. (Which sounds impressive until you realize that we’ve gone from a sixth of an acre to a third of an acre…) That acquisition has meant a lot of work that had to wait until now, since the summer was filled with, you know, growing and harvesting food. This new work was stuff that falls outside the normal concept of farming: taking down a few trees, for instance, and ripping out 100 feet of chain link fence that colonies of bushes and small trees were winding through and terraforming.

Most exciting for us, though, has been restoring a large galvanized steel shed on the new property, giving us a luxurious 12x20-foot space to store farm tools, soil amendments, irrigation supplies, frost and shade cover, the T-posts we use for trellising, and our tiller. Some of that stuff had been stacked unprettily on perimeter fence at the farm, and though neighbors didn’t seem to mind, we did. Some of it had been chewing up huge amounts of space in our kitchen at home, where the eau de fertilizer always made cooking a treat! The tiller had been loafing in a friend’s garage for two years, not paying rent and drinking all the beer.

So while we spent the first couple of years at the farm optimizing our growing practices, figuring out our market, and building cold storage, we are determined to make this winter and next year about beautifying the space.

And that started with the shed, or “the barn,” as we insist on calling it. It had just one door left, smashed and teetering on rusted hinges. There was also the matter of a goodly hole in the roof, thanks to a dying oak tree that surrendered a gangrenous limb to gravity. About three inches of topsoil had blown or washed in from either the gaping cavity at the front door or the “skylight” up top.

The bones of the shed were strong, though. Whoever built it over-engineered the wooden frame, and it was a fairly simple job to pick up some pressure treated lumber and build a new set of doors for it — especially after kind neighbors dropped us an extension cord for the day to power our miter saw. The previous door was galvanized steel over wood frame, and that piece of steel was the perfect size for patching the roof, which also proved to be a simple job (once we swept off the thick layer of soil that had collected topside, too). After those fixes, it was a matter of shoveling and sweeping out the inside, happily discovering a well-poured concrete slab, then brushing away the cobwebs and moving all our miscellaneous gear out of sight.

The change has been far more than aesthetic.

We’ve reclaimed our kitchen, moving an entire six-foot-tall set of shelves from there to the barn. That room has gone from cramped to cavernous. Stacks of necessary things on the land are now tucked away until we need them. And no longer do we have to take inventory of the materials and tools we’ll need for our day at the farm before we go; it’s all there waiting for us.

The beautification of the farmstead proper soon will go beyond hiding the implements. Jenn’s going to add some paint to the shed doors, and maybe to the galvanized portion, too. She’s been dreaming of a barn quilt across the front.

And once we have that quilt, then we’ll finally be able to get cozy and rest for winter.