What’s left to do are the gutters (for rainwater harvesting), build the barn door, enclose the front above where the barn door will go, put the snow rail on the roof and put the metal above where the greenhouse butts up against the barn wall. The crew hasn’t worked yet this week….they are off doing a sheet rock install somewhere. Yesterday it poured rain most of the day, then the temps plummeted and as I write this, we have a wind chill of –3. Crazy weather. Yesterday I was trying to dig little trenches to divert the water away from the barn (because the guys dropped a giant rock in the middle of the drainage ditch and blocked it up). Yesterday is was wet and muddy….today it’s frozen. Luckily I got most of the water drained away so it wouldn’t turn into a giant skating rink.
My son, Jay worked with me last week and we kicked butt on getting the insulated panels installed. It is so much easier to deal with the large panels when there are two people to muscle them into place. We were mighty sore and bruised by the end of the week. The goal was to get at least 10’ up with the panels because according to the electrical code, they can run romex (the wrapped wire like you see that comes into an electrical receptacle) at the 10’ height and then drop down from there with conduit (the wire goes inside a metal pipe). Jay brought his drill and I had my cordless one. When the battery would die in mine, we’d switch over to his drill and keep going while mine charged. The screws that we use are called Fastenmaster Headlok screws. 
We’re using the thinner panel on the shared wall between the greenhouse and the barn. We used the thicker ones on all the other walls. That way, the north, east and west walls have the higher R value. Since our winds come predominately from the west or north-west, we have the most insulation on those walls. Our contractor says we’ll have the best insulated barn that anyone has every seen…better than most people’s houses. Between the Prodex and the SIP’s (structural insulated panels), we’ve got close to R-48. We are filling any cracks with Great Stuff foam to make sure there won’t be any drafts. So back to the panel installation…Jay left early Friday evening and we had made great progress. I continued to work on them Saturday, Sunday and Monday. By 5:30 last evening, I had reached at least 10’ in all of the areas where there will be an electrical run. It made quite a dent in the pile of panels we had accumulated too. I had one 6.5” panel left and still quite a few of the 4.5”. We’re thinking about using the panels to insulate the greenhouse walls too. If we get more of the 4.5” panels over the next week or so, we’ll use those along with the Prodex on the greenhouse walls.
Last Friday the local NRCS agent came to the farm to do a farm plan. We talked about goals over the next 10 years. Most of our goals are spelled out in our permaculture plan that we did this past spring. He will take that info and incorporate it into our plan, which he and I will tweak. Since most of the acreage will be in the CREP program until 2016, we can’t do anything right now with that land so we will focus on the plans for the greenhouse. One of the first things we’re going to look at is doing an energy audit to see the viability of wind or solar for the property. Since 80% of the power needs for the aquaponic system are from the air pump (provides oxygenation to the fish and plant roots), I want to see if a windmill powered system would work at our site. If you recall from an earlier post, there are water aeration windmill systems out there that might be a big help to us. An energy audit would determine if our site is suitable or not. We had a great chat and it’s great to have someone in our corner who “gets” what we want to do, in a permaculture sense. He said there is funding available to help with the transition to organic and with organic certification so we will definitely be looking into that. I spoke with an organic certifying agency last week and she sent me a packet of papers that I need to fill out to get the process rolling. It’s no wonder that organic food costs so much more. Between the additional cost for organic seed and the certification costs (estimated around $3700 per year), it is a pricey investment for a farmer but an important one. I see it as an investment in our land. An investment for the future of our food supply to feed my family and others.
I think that brings us up to where we are right now. We’re ready for the electrician to start. He might not come until Monday but that’s ok. The goal right now is to get the barn door up and the barn cleared out because Linda comes home with the rig this Saturday. With winter making its’ presence known, we need to get the barn buttoned up so the rig will be ok. I’m hopeful that we can get the greenhouse up and closed in before the weather gets too bad but time will tell. At least we’re not in Buffalo, NY where they are expecting 3 feet of snow.
are the “canary in the coal mine”. If harmful chemicals are used, the fish die. It’s as simple as that ! Since we grow food in a closed loop system, where the fish provide all the essential nutrients that the vegetables need, anything that would be sprayed on the plants gets back to the fish. They need clean water to live in and harmful pesticides will kill them. Clean water = healthy, nutritious food.