“In front of the greenhouse here, we bring in those tires and stack them up. They’ll absorb heat during the day and provide that heat to the greenhouse at night. It’ll help regulate the temperature.”
“Really?” Lenore asked.
“Absolutely,” Brandon said. “And it works year-round. I helped Libby and Mister Glover put a greenhouse behind their place a couple years ago.” He offered her a blindingly handsome smile. “We painted barrels black and filled those with water. Black absorbs the heat, and the water holds it for a long time. Then, it releases it slowly as temperatures cool. It’s extremely regulatory.”
He moved the tip of his pencil to another part of the drawing. “Along this side is where we stack your firewood. It could be right along the back deck. Then, in the winter, all you have to do is go out and grab it. It can be sheltered by a roof extension that cuts the wind from the north and allows you easy access to your firewood at the same time.”
“Okay,” Lenore said, the word falling from her mouth.
“Down here.” Brandon took a breath and kept on going. “We create low-level beds, only a foot or so off the ground. We shelter them with railroad ties that are three or four feet up. That will help block the wind, and the railroad ties help keep the soil warm in the winter. We can cover them in the summer to keep the sun off and help reduce evaporation. We can run irrigation lines out of the bottom of the greenhouse here to each of these beds.”
He made broad strokes with his pencil, indicating where the water lines would go. Lenore heard the words coming out of his mouth. She saw the drawing. Everything seemed to make perfect sense—yet she had no idea how to execute any of it.
“How much will this cost?” she asked instead of admitting that she had no clue how to even move the building attached to the side of her cabin.Move a building.Who would know how to do that?
“I don’t think it’ll cost us anything,” Brandon said. “Just our time and energy.”
“Really?” Lenore asked. “That can’t be true.”
“You’ve got the tires here, don’t you?” he asked. “I saw several pallets over there. Those just need to be chopped up and stacked as firewood. Bam. Wind blind. You’ve got the greenhouse right here. Maybe we’d need a hose, but I bet your barn is gonna have some hosing in it. I think we’re going to be able to find so much on this land, Lenore, to use any way we want.”
“What about the beds?” she asked. “I don’t know if I have railroad ties.”
“We’ll upcycle and recycle anything we find,” he said easily, as if the supplies and materials they needed would simply materialize out of the weeds. To be honest, Lenore thought they might. Brandon was that magical, that magnetic.
He nodded toward the door of the greenhouse, and she went out first, as it was a one-way in and one-way out situation. She waited for him, and he went around the greenhouse to the back of the cabin.
“You’ve got a nice back deck like mine,” he said. “Good roof here. I can extend it on this side.”
He walked the entire width of the cabin, his eyes searching the rain gutter. “We’ll put a roof extender here. We’ll put the greenhouse over here where it gets more sun in the winter. We can put the beds all along here. I bet we can do five, uh…probably five three-by-ten-foot beds. That’ll give you an additional one hundred fifty feet of gardening.”
He walked out past the deck another fifteen or twenty feet. “And we’ll build a new wind blind right here,” he said. “Between the cabins.”
“What will that be?” she asked.
Brandon looked thoughtful for a moment, then glanced down at his clipboard and out at the land again.
It held so much potential. And in that moment, Lenore felt it down in her soul. This landwantedto be doing more than it currently was. And Brandon could bring it to life.
Heck, he ignited something inside of her that had been brought to life. She couldn't wait to see what else he could do, and what other ideas he came up with.
“Maybe we can do a small storage shed,” he said. “Or—this is a better idea: an open-air stable-type unit where you can house your four-wheelers and other equipment—wheelbarrows, lawn mowers, rakes. That would act as a wind blindandface the gardening area for easy access to your gardening tools. It would just be one side and a roof, with poles.” He looked at her, those hazel eyes intensely serious and oh-so-pretty because of it. “I can build that in a couple of days.”
She had no doubt that he could, so she simply nodded. He started down the other side of the house, glancing up at the roof and muttering to himself as Lenore trailed in his wake.
“I think if we can get your garden area bigger,” he said. “And your greenhouse moved to the right place, you can grow food—good food—all year long. Potatoes, carrots, green peppers, tomatoes, lettuce. Not just herbs and kale.”
“That sounds amazing,” Lenore said.
“We’ll get that chicken coop fixed up. Have you ever thought about having mobile mini coops?”
“Mobile mini coops?” Lenore repeated, the words not quite sounding right in her own voice.
“I can see you’ve got a lot of bugs here,” Brandon said. “A neighbor of mine brought in guinea fowl to get rid of his termites and bugs. I don’t think we need to go that far. I think we can build some little mini coops that you can move by hand, that can house six or seven chickens, and they can clean up all those bugs. Then you move them to a new location the next day.”
Mobile mini coops. Lenore had never heard of such a thing.
“Not only that,” he continued. “But chicken poop acts as a natural fertilizer, and that can help our soil become better for planting next spring.”
