As often happens when the summer season winds down and  the fall begins, I sort of fell out of the habit of blogging.  Resolution:  Get back to it!  Fall is always crazy busy for me, and I seem to get slammed with allergies or something every fall as well, so the period between September 1 and December 31 flies by before I can even turn around twice.

So a general catch-up.  In October, we finally completed construction on our commercial kitchen/commercial coach/food service facility!  (What it’s called depends entirely upon what government agency is currently inquiring.  They apparently don’t speak to one another, and they all have different terminology, and none of them have guidelines for exactly what we’ve done.  I didn’t think it was that outside the box, but apparently so…)   Very excited to have the facility up and running, but unfortunately it came about 18 months too late for the bills.  So, we’re going to be ramping up actual production slower than I’d anticipated, because I’ve had to take a full time job in the Real World ™ again.  But life is funny, because the job I’ve gotten is right up my alley, should be busy and fun and the people are wonderful, and a regular paycheck should ease a lot of stress around here, not to mention regular health care again!   And if it means I have to focus more sharply and take it a little slower on the food production, well, that might actually be helpful anyway.  I was feeling a little unfocused, and now I have to really narrow it down and get organized, which is how I operate best.

In October, we also went to our biggest show ever, the Tacoma Holiday Food and Gift Show.  It was both a great show and a bad show.  It was great, in that I sold more product than I’ve ever sold anywhere.  I met a lot of great customers, gave out a lot of cards, and got some wonderful feedback on my products.  I learned a lot about what did and didn’t work for my packaging.  I got a banner for the booth, and learned a little more about display techniques specific to food, and got a handwashing station built.  I got easily transportable containers filled with necessary equipment for sampling food, and for administrative purposes.  I’ve learned a lot about the shelf life of my non-preserved food products (and it’s all good news…remarkably long shelf life for having no preservatives beyond sugar!)   On the down side, we spent more than we took in, largely because the show was insanely expensive to enter, and we had to drive about 100 miles each way to get there, one of us towing an RV, and the other of us making the trip twice in the same week.  I won’t be doing the show again, but it was a good experience.

So.  Coming up in 2012, lots of changes.  We have a greenhouse to start plants for the first time, so I’ll be out poking around in there earlier than I used to be.  We’ll be getting new chickens later in the spring, though we’ve nixed the idea of Blue Andalusians because they’re so loud and Jersey Giants because they’re kind of boring.  Still hunting Lavender Orpingtons!  We’ll be reconsidering the idea of a very small CSA locally, with a slightly different, non-subscription model including canned fruits and jams.  And we’ll be posting old-fashioned, small-batch, handmade foods to our website, finally!   The first up will be Cherry Almond Vanilla Jam, Ginger Peach Jam, Rhubarb Orange Marmalade, and Blueberry Lavender Jelly.  Very soon we will be producing another batch of our sold-out Pflaummenmus, which is a wonderful, lightly sweetened spiced German plum jam which has received rave reviews, even from some native Germans, which was enormously flattering and a bit surprising to me.

Looking forward to a great year with all kinds of changes on the food front and around the Homestead!

So we’ve been installing our trailer for a while now.  Mostly we’ve gotten a pier-built deck put on (many many thanks to my Father and Jesus, his gardener/handyman).  We’ve peeled out part of the flooring.  And then we went on Quest for Sewer.  Yeah.

First Todd dug down to where the outlet for the garage sink should be.  No pipe.  He went inside and shined a light into the trap, and realized the pipe went South, not East.  Rats.   So they dug that way.  Instead of a pipe they found…a 36″ wide, concrete-sided French drain, which received water from both the garage sink and the garage and house roof drains.  Wonderful.  According to the neighbors, it drains from there down drain tiles to the creek, but given how full of sediment it seems to be, I think it doesn’t really drain anywhere except slowly straight down.

Then we called in a plumber to track the sewer.  That was fun.  There was apparently no clean-out in our house plumbing.  Made an appointment to have one installed in the weird bit of pipe that comes out of the basement ceiling and goes almost directly into the basement wall…only to discover that there was indeed a cleanout on that pipe, inside the wall.  Well, that’s some good news I suppose.  (Turns out there’s only one plumbing vent on our house as well, and there should be at least three.  I have no idea how that works.)

After finding the clean-out, we had a guy come out with a tracker and a camera, and he determined that our sewer runs straight out the back of the house, under the concrete walkway, then does a 90 degree turn north and ends up…at the French Drain.  ???!?  He does say it goes down about 5-6 feet beneath the drain, so it should be a real sewer pipe, but as to why there’s a French drain above it…I have no idea.  Neither does anyone else.  Dad’s called the former two owners of the house, taking it back to 1976, and they don’t know either.  House was built in 1947, so that still leaves about 30 years of history, but theoretically it was hooked to sewer before 1976.  That doesn’t gibe with what the neighbors to the south claim, but the city has no record either.  Sigh.

So then Dad went down to City Hall to talk to them.  Big, big can of worms.  We’re now waiting on a sewer permit and a water permit (something we were told we didn’t need as long as we were doing something to our own property, and not tying into a bigger system).  Once we get those, we have to get a permit from Labor and Industries to modify the trailer (shouldn’t be a problem, but it’s , I expect, just expensive), and then an electrical permit from the State for the electrical work.  THEN we might be able to proceed to attempt to hook the trailer up to the sewer in the first place.  I think a gray water tank and a black water tank would have been infinitely easier at this point, but what’s done is done.  So we wait for water and sewer permits from the city, and talk to L&I, and see.

And as I’m writing this, I get a call from Dad.  Turns out L&I doesn’t actually probably care unless it’s a “concession stand”, like a Taco Wagon or a Lunch Cart or a Hot Dog Trolley thingy.  (That’s what we were told originally, so it’s probably true.)  We have no employees, and we aren’t serving directly out of the kitchen.   Seems like no one knows what the hell to do with this.  Does this mean I’m thinking Out Of The Box, since it seems like this giant crazy thing no one can wrap their heads around?  Awfully small box, if so.

I think part of the problem might stem from the fact that we keep referring to it as a “Commercial Kitchen”, when really it’s a “Food Processing Facility”.  Or maybe not, I’m not sure any of them know what either one is.  I’ve also just been told I need a Home Occupancy Permit, which goes against what I read.  I specifically chose this size trailer to stay beneath the square footage needed to require a Home Occupancy Permit.   And while they’re telling me they have no jurisdiction over the remodel of the trailer because it’s a trailer, they’re also telling me the windows are “non-conforming”.  You can’t have it both ways…either you have jurisdiction over the trailer, or you don’t.  Bureaucracy makes me crazy.  I’m going back to bed.

Plans have been afoot for some time around the Homestead to get me set up with a commercial kitchen.  Okay, technically, a “Commercial Food Processing Facility”.  Difference?  Commercial Kitchens are certified by the county health department, and typically serve people directly from the kitchen.  Think restaurant, hot dog cart, taco wagon, Grange hall kitchen, things of that nature.   Commercial Food Processing Facilities are certified by the WSDA and are used to produce food primarily for sale at retail outlets or through retail venues (like Farmers Markets and the Internet), rather than on-site.  But for ease of speech, I tend to use the term Commercial Kitchen.

For a while, we contemplated putting a new kitchen in our basement.  However, that would have required walling off a portion of our basement from the rest of the house, leaving us with no direct outdoor access from the basement proper, and no easy access to the bathroom without going through a playroom/bedroom.  In Washington, we can’t have the primary house kitchen certified, so that was out.  We thought about renting one, but the rental costs run from $15 to $100 per hour, often don’t include the use of utensils, and require me to load up everything from salt to baking pans and take it with, unload, cook, reload, bring it home, unload, lather rinse repeat.  While that’d be fine, it didn’t seem the optimal way.

Somewhere in there, we hit on the idea of a trailer.  Hmmm.  Well, Battle Ground doesn’t view renovations of a trailer (a non-permanent structure…heck, it has wheels and a tongue) as anything requiring a permit, as it’s not part of the property itself.  Win. WSDA doesn’t care if my kitchen is on wheels or concrete, as long as it has all the necessary food safety measures and accoutrements.  Win.  I can rent out the facility myself to others if I own it, and if it’s not in my house I can rent it out during hours I might not care to be conscious.  Win.  I can start from scratch and renovate to my liking without disrupting life in the house.  Win.  In the event that we move at some point, we can haul it with us.  Win.  In the event that it doesn’t work out, or in the better event that it’s so successful I have to upgrade facilities, I can sell the trailer or lease it out to someone to have on their own site.  Win. 

It’s been so rainy for the last month we hadn’t been able to get the trailer delivered.  But finally on Tuesday, Ed brought out the trailer.  Ed rocks.  He was completely calm about having to manuever his truck within a handful of feet from three beehives, despite being deadly allergic.  He was good natured about getting his wheel stuck in our Pit O’ Pea Gravel.  He was *amazing* at driving the truck and getting the trailer in exactly where we wanted it, exactly level, and exactly parallel to the garage.  Sweet!  He has to come back some time in the next couple of weeks to do a tie-down procedure, but for now it’s on metal stands and wheels, and is stable enough to work in.  The ties are really only to make it earthquake-resistant anyway.

We’ve ordered the linoleum; we went with the cheapest commercial grade we could, but in a lovely stonework pattern.  Looks like we’re going for Rustic Kitchen in most respects, with a gray mottled counter, gray slate-looking floors, and gray faux-weathered wood paneling on the walls.  Sweet. 

The most complex part is coming up immediately:  installing a toilet and the plumbing and electric for the entire structure.  The toilet will be a blackwater tank, ew, and the rest of the drains will be graywater only, draining into the one drain I have in the garage sink.  The toilet is to satisfy the requirements of the WSDA for a Processing Facility in case I want to rent the facility out; for my own purposes, I intend to use the one in the house!  All that means is that I probably will very, very rarely have to empty the blackwater tank.  Thank goodness.

It’s kind of an ugly beastie out there right now, all hulking gray and on an ugly foundation.  But we’ll get there!  Plans are to paint it to match the house, add window boxes, skirt it with T111 siding, and put potted plants all around it.  I better be able to tolerate it aesthetically, because the plan is for me to be either in it or in the garden where I can see it 40+ hours a week!