January 30, 2012

If You Could See What I Dream …

Spirit Dog Farm is very much a work in progress. Planning (and amending those plans) helps me while away rainy or off-season days, stay enthused, become re-enthused and prioritize the work. At first, our planning was verbal and frequently led to an occasional difference of opinion between my husband and I. I’ve learned that if I literally draw out what I’m talking about, we avoid those differences and work on the same page. We thought you might enjoy not only seeing what we dream for our farm, but learning about some of the tools we’ve found to illustrate and plan.

First and foremost are the following offline tools:

Graph paper pad (get one with a good strong back as you’ll undoubtedly carry it outside from time to time to note measurements, etc.
Composition Notebooks (depending on your planning, you may want more than one! I keep three going: My Farm “Wishbook”, one strictly for the market garden, and one for farm crafts like quilting, etc.)
Rulers: Get good ones with true edges and markings. I like stainless steel architectural rulers in a variety of lengths from our local art supply house.
A compass and a protractor: Again, get good ones that work well!
Scotch tape (for adding drawings and clippings to the note pages in your composition books)
Scissors (for clipping out inspirational photos, articles, etc)

Online tools:

Plangarden.com – You’ll still want to do at least your early planning with the offline tools, but this site is great down the road.
Your local extension office website
Your local Farm Service Agency and Soil Conservation District website
Your state agricultural office website
Any other relevant websites – especially local – that publish information relevant to what you’re planning.

To give you an idea of what you can do with plangarden.com, we thought we’d show you a small portion of our “dream” we laid out using their online tools: