Broad River Pastures

As we started our new farm during the summer of 2010 we were blessed with our first 2 student interns, Patrick Wells and Andrew Camp. They are pictured here with the projects they completed for us.

During the 12 weeks of their internship they ran almost 1400 feet of high tensile fence, hand dug over 50 fence posts, hung 13 fence gates, built 2 chicken coops, one duck house, and one shade shack. They also helped with herding animals, running portable electric fence, and numerous other farm chores.

As students in the school of landscape architecture, they also left us with a remarkable plan for an edible landscape around the house. Eventually all new shrubs, bushes, trees and other plants will either be edible, bear fruits, or attract pollinators in keeping with our philosophy that every plant must have a purpose and an active role on the farm.

Patrick & Andrew leave behind their personal signatures on the farm in the form of the projects they completed.

A true story about daily life on the farm.

For the last two mornings on the farm I have woken to no water from our well. When I checked the pump house the electricity was on but the water pressure gauge was reading zero. This means that for some reason the pump was either broken or not getting power. There can be 4 reasons why.

1) the power is turned off or the fuse/breaker has tripped;

2) The pressure switch is bad and not sending power to the control box;

3) the control box is bad (it has a relay and a motor start capacitor); or

4) the pump is bad. In escalating order of cost we have $2 for a fuse, $25 for a pressure switch, $50 for a control box and $330 + labor for a new pump (labor because I don’t know how to replace it)

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Our contractors finished the new outbuilding ahead of schedule.

Thanks to L&R Construction for the grading and concrete work, Turner Concrete for the expert concrete delivery, and Josh @ Better Bilt Buildings (Griffin Ga.) for the building. A special thanks to Lake Russell Building Supply who was able to give Josh a competitive price on the building materials. That allowed us to spend our money within our local community instead of it going to a “big box” home center.

I have YouTube videos of the construction  here. I set up a camera that took sequential pictures every 5 minutes and put it together for a short video each day of construction.

This is is day 2 of construction.

Day 8 of construction.

Click HERE for our Live Cam. It is not guaranteed to be available all the time, but one of my goals is to have several live cams so you can see what is going on around the farm.

//Jon