Dispatches From The Farm

Today I Moved The Weather Station

I moved the weather station at about noon today from the back gate between the llama pasture and the garden to the gate at the service yard. It is about nine feet up still, and it is facing north with the solar panel faced south. I have not verified the direction other than to sight it off Sedgwick Peak. This puts it closer to the house, and all I can do is hope that that does nto obstruct the anenometer or the vein for speed and direction of the wind.

I had to make this change because of the new pivot irrigation line that went in on the neighbor’s farm last year. I had moved it then and thougth it was far enough that his last head would not fill the rain guage, but, I was wrong about that. Being one who is not going to say no to free water on the yard, I let it go, and let him keep spraying the place. I am sure I can give a reasonable estimafrom last year’s records of what the rain equivelant is of his sprinkler head, but having been out there and sprayed by it myself, I can tell you it is like being hit in the face with three or four gallons of water from eighty feet or more.

I won’t be collecting water in the rain guage from his irrigation line this year. It would take a pretty good wind to carry it in now, and if it does, it probably deserves to be there. I am almost out of good places to put the weather station without putting it across the street.

The weather station appears in good working order, and operating correctly. I think it would be a good idea to order a replacement battery now so is here at the ready when the one in the station fails and needs replacing. I expect to be able to tell when it has based on weather not reporting in the nights from the station to the reciever inside the house. I don’t want to miss records, so that is the rationale behind this.

I have set up categories on the blog in order to be able to find weather station maintenance records herein.

Welcome Back!

After a little thought and some consideration on how the site had been going before changing hosts, and before I personally reached a lifetime milestone specific to those people who live half a century, I decided to archive the site, and start all over again. Mostly this is because of how the site integrates with the host we chose, and how much more easily WordPress works now than it did on the old host, and certainly much easier than it did when I first started using it all those years ago, and had to install and configure it for myself using an ftp client on the back end of the host. It all seems especially funny when I consider that a WhoIs search of both the new and old hosts provided the same corporate address.

I want to arrange the site differently than before. I hope to keep the blog posts as a journal of the farm, but I also hope to keep useful information in static pages on the site. Such useful information was ending up in the blog before and was not useful there, at all.

Our little farmhouse is part of our homestead, a seven-ish acre plot in extreme southeast Idaho, in the Rocky Mountains, where the winters are often harsh, and the summers are short. We are small, and our farm is intended to help support a craft business run as a side hustle by my wife, hereafter known as Mrs. Bacon. We are in a home that has hosted families for more than a century now; originally part of the Cassandra Whittle Homestead, and built here by her son, William Whittle. The home is storied, and so are the families that have lived here. For some time, we are now a part of each other, the home and our family.

Our family formed in 2002, when Mrs. and I married and lived in the UK for eight years, where she is from. We came here to America in 2010 to help my grandmother with caring for her ailing husband, and we ended up with the house as a part of that. Both grandma and grandpa have passed on now, and we are forging ahead with our little farm. As of this writing, our family at home consists of me, Kelsey Bacon, my wife, Katrina, and our two daughters. We have older sons who are grown and moved out now, but who show up here from time to time.

We are happy to have you along on this journey with us, as we experience life in our chosen manner; more on that soon!