Fifth Year on the Farm (est. 3/29/2007)

Early Maple Sugar Time

2012-01-24T16:27:00.000-08:00

It is so warm out this week that I went out and tapped the maple trees. Six of them were dry but five taps started running as I drilled into the tree. By evening we had about two gallons of sap and I am boiling it down on the kitchen stove right now. We try to make a gallon of syrup for the year. We did not use up all of last year's so we will probably cook with some, maybe make jam with it.

I am getting ready to build a small barn and have been designing the structure. The big problem is figuring out all the mortise and tenon joints in the beams. Several beams converge in one level on the posts making it tricky to fit three tenons in one spot. I have to draw up all the joints and figure out all the angles and lengths of each piece before I can start cutting. The sawmill should be cutting the white pine in the next couple of weeks. So in the evening I draw and at night I wake up and think everything through.
I am now drawing templates to trace onto the beams. I will cut them out of hardboard and label each one. That should simplify the layout. Now I need the mill to cut me some wood!

Once the frame is cut and laid out I hope to have a barn raising with some friends.

We were fortunate to be given enough sheet steel roofing to cover the whole building. It looks like I will be able to build this for close to a $1000. It will be 24 by 36 feet with half of it two stories. It will initially hold tractor equipment and hay in the second story. I am putting in a small threshing room on one end also.

Meanwhile back in the Eight Acre Field, I put the old cellar house roof out there. I had pulled it off the root cellar 5 years ago and build a beautiful cellar house on top of it. The roof has been setting around the farm on blocks waiting to be put to use. I tried lifting it near the garage last year and a wind blew it off the piers I had built out of blocks. Then I moved it to the EAF and started lifting it with the tractor bucket. I accidentally pushed it with the tractor and knocked it back to earth! This week I started again and with Scott's help we got it seven feet up. We drilled some post holes and put in locust posts. I cut a ledge into the post and we attached 14 foot long 2x 8's to the top of the posts and set the roof on them. Success!

I left a tractor under the roof. We have more to do, namely to put walls around it.

Let's hope the plans work!
Take care and stay warm.

Planning

2012-01-17T04:00:00.000-08:00

I visited John and we drew up the plans for mortise and tenon joints on posts and beams. I hope to build a small barn this year. We should have a real barn raising some time. I will make all the parts and then in one day we can hammer them together and lift up each bent and have a barn.
It was warm and I stretched another piece of woven wire fence in the afternoon. I need one more roll and the orchard will have a fence around it.

Some Small Tasks

2012-01-15T14:19:00.000-08:00

We held the Potluck Jug Band practice at our home last night. The most important part of the band is the potluck and we ate well. We baked an Amish ham and a braided whole wheat poppy seed loaf. I took a cabbage out of the root cellar and made a slaw with our carrots and mustard greens. We had organic blue corn chips and opened a jar of our green salsa. Cindy thawed some goat cheese she made last November before the goats dried up for the winter. Our friends brought a potatoes and onions dish, Brussels sprouts and a homemade cherry pie. After dinner we played into the night.
We always start the day being thankful and today was no exception.
We also had coffee.

Cindy making soap

We made two turns of soap: one patchouli and the other calendula flower petals. We collected the petals last October. It is a flower that does well in the cool fall nights. A tray of calendula flowers, orange and yellow, is a beautiful sight that pulls your eyes back again and again.
I bottled a dark beer later in the day. It has been brewing in the basement for a week and will be ready in a month. It has a little chocolate in the brew and two types of hops. We have 54 bottles!

I am starting on weaving a rag rug so I cut up a dozen pairs of blue jeans today. I hope I can remember how to warp a loom. I have four pounds of strips ready. I have the warp measured and half of it dyed with black walnut husks to a deep brown. If I can get the warp on we can start weaving.

The sun is dropping toward the horizon after the clouds blew away from the morning. We have 5 inches of snow and it snowed all morning leaving every twig outlined in white. As the sun pushed through the clouds the high snow started to melt and then froze in the cold air leaving small icicles hanging like Christmas ornaments from every branch. It will drop down another 5 or 6 degrees to 15 tonight. Tomorrow we will pull a cover back and cut some fresh lettuce, mustard greens and claytonia for our salad and marvel again at the bright and deep greens against the pure white snow.
Be well and let us know how your day went.

Winter Tasks

2012-01-14T06:57:00.000-08:00

Some quince flowering.

I finally got around to the shell beans drying in the Cellar House. Last fall we pulled the plants and laid them out on frames we use in the greenhouse for growing flats. So all the room in there was taken up by these two large frames piled high with drying bean plants. We had grown Jacobs Cattle beans from seeds Cindy had gotten from a neighbor 30 years ago. Well, I mean she had planted them year after year for 30 years and saved the seeds. We also grew a large black bean.
I tried running the plants through our garden shredder to loosen the beans from the shell but unfortunately the shredder made flour out of the seeds themselves. I plan to modify a shredder this year to run very slowly and try again.
So I pulled all the beans off the plants, put them in a feed sack and tromped all over it. Then I dumped them in a big tub and sifted through the shells, loosening any beans that stayed in the shells as I went. It took a couple of hours to do this with the Jacobs Cattle. It was windy (and snowy) outside so I poured the beans from one tub to another and winnowed out the debris quite quickly. All that remained was to pick out the rotten beans and put them in jars. We had 2 gallons of them or about 14 pounds.
The black beans came out to one gallon.
My brother was visiting and of course we had to do some activity or another while he was here. The weather was spring like; sunny and 50 degrees or so. I figured that anything a little less than filthy would do so we pruned apple trees. It was great to work with him and chat about our kids and the state of the world. Absolutely no solutions were found for either. I mentioned that I wanted to put a shortcut through a stone wall into the entrance of the root cellar while we were pruning a tree next to it and Mark said, "Let's do it."

The root cellar had a long level entrance into the underground room. It is about 35 feet long and bounded by two stone walls. You may remember that I am espaliering pear trees over it. We needed to cut through the stone wall and dig a space for stairs down to the level of the door. No big deal, 4 steps would do it. My Uncle Neil laid the stone wall and cemented it together and we found a convenient spot between two pear trees and close to the door. This would save us a lot of steps when we needed some potatoes or cabbage.

Generally when you lay up stones, bricks or cement blocks one would use mortar, a mix of Portland cement, lime and sand. This makes a softer and sticky material and easy to use. It is pretty easy to break loose if one was to tear down a wall. Portland cement is hard and tough, stronger than bricks, rocks and blocks and that is what Uncle Neil used. We had a heck of a time taking down that stone wall. We had to use an eight pound sledge and the 6 foot digging bar to pound our way between the rocks in the wall. We pounded on a chisel and totally distorted the end of it trying to remove some of this cement. But we persevered and cut our gap in the wall about three feet wide.

I had collected some rocks from our garden over the past few years and conveniently stacked them near the root cellar. So we looked through the stack and picked out several that were at least four feet wide, two feet deep and 4 to six inches thick. We moved them with the front end loader on the tractor and slid them carefully into place. The extra dirt was carted over to the pond dam where it was a bit low.

The next morning we fit stones into the side of the stairs to keep the soil back. I am thrilled with the shortcut. I jumped down quite often before but learned that carrying a bushel of potatoes and jumping three feet down was hard on my knees so stopped doing that. Now I can easily walk down the new stairs.

Today it is cold and snowy. We are hosting the Potluck Jug Band practice today which will warm the house and our hearts.

The Wandering Chicken

2011-12-17T12:47:00.000-08:00

Here we go again. It seems that every time I turn around I have the hammer and the saw out. This time it was a mobile chicken house.
I took an old 4 by 8 foot utility trailer and modified to to have a small house on wheels. First thing I noticed is that the tongue had rusted off. This is a very light weight trailer! So I fired up the welder and added a bunch of angle iron to the tongue and trailer. That seemed to do alright. I painted it with some rust stopping paint.

This was built using 2" by 2" framing- actual size- from rough cut poplar. To keep it light I bought 4 sheets of 3/8" siding from Lowes and used two 10' sheets of metal roofing. The hardware was recycled: hinges I had collected from hurricane debris, screws and nails from yard sales.

This is the nest box which is accessible from outside. The lid tucks under the trim board so that rain and snow will not drip into the house. I made the lid from oak boards I bought from a neighbor and made them tongue and groove on a table saw so rain will not drip into the nest box.

Buck gave me this broken trailer jack and I welded a stout bolt to it so it can swivel out of the way when I move it. I welded two bigger nuts onto the frame that the bolt swivels inside.

This is the pop door for the chickens. It is about 10 by 14 inches. The door swings up and is held up with a hook and eye. It is important to close up the chickens every night away from raccoons. Chickens like mis-matched hardware because it gives them soemthing to cluck about.

A chicken needs a couple of square feet of space in a house and a foot of space on a roost. I put two maple saplings the length of the house for a roost. Here you see the ends are inside the nest box which has three nests. They are about 2 feet off the ground. We plan to put 14 laying hens in here.

These chickens will be touring the Eight Acre field enjoying the grass and grasshoppers. We will surround them with a flexible electric fence so they can safely come out of the house and eat. The fence will keep the coyotes and dogs away from the hens. Each day we will let them out early and feed them and lock the door up at night. By the way, they will know to go to sleep in the house every evening. I won't have to herd them in. This will spread the manure on the field, too.

As for the gardens, we are still eating out of them, but we have to push the snow away to harvest.

Be well and celebrate Christmas with joy in your hearts.

Sunny Again

2011-11-09T05:14:00.000-08:00

Today is another sunny fall day. I have a large pile of garden debris to shred and compost. So I will empty the chicken house floor and mix up a potent brew.

I am removing the blue tubes from the 300 blueberries this fall. I will have to spray them with deer repelent for the winter. We may get some berries from them this year. They are small plants yet but they are growing. I had to cover the 100 plants to get berries last summer. I hope I will not have to cover the 300, too.

I have been harvesting forage radishes lately. I have a couple of bushels in the root cellar. The tops go to the chickens and the roots are for next year's pigs. Every day I harvest a few more. My neighbors are coming over and taking some for dinner every couple of days. They do taste good and make great soup.

Rock pile

2011-11-08T15:08:00.000-08:00

I have been putting the big rocks I dug out of the garden in front of the house to build a wall but today I gave that up and hauled them all over the hill. I still have them available if I get a burning desire to pile up rocks.
Then I pulled up the sod next to the patio and turned over the ground. Cindy planted day lilies there where the wall was going to be. Done!

I found a lot of dandelion roots and had some dandelion tea when I was visiting Robert and Lillian so I roasted it and put it in a bag. It is pretty easy to do. Wash the roots, chop them in the food processor and bake at 250 for a couple of hours or until browned. I will let you know how I like it soon.

Nov. Sun Days

2011-11-07T13:45:00.000-08:00

We cut the pastures this weekend. There is about 15 acres out there. Someday we may make hay out there. I have limed it and next year the plan is to run the chickens over the field to fertilize it. I have to build a mobile hen house before spring.
We put fencing around each small tree in the orchard today. We lost one tree last year because I had mulched it heavily and fenced it from the deer. Then the mice moved into the mulch and ate the trees roots. In the spring I noticed the tree leaning and when I touched it it fell out of the ground. It was my favorite young tree, a Ashmead's Kernel. This is an old tree from England that has a greenish yellow mottled fruit that keeps well and tastes great in January. I will have to graft a new one next year.
We chopped up the corn stalks and planted rye in that half acre. I hope it sprouts this month. If the warm weather holds it will.
We have had a ton of deer damage this fall. We have 4 young fawns who believe they own the place. I wish they would take a trip.
Enjoy the day.

Snow in October

2011-10-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

We woke up to 6 inches of snow this morning and a cancelled Farmers Market. A hundred lettuce plants sleeping under the white blanket and kale drooping into Christmas tree shapes. It was the last market. I hope we can sell some of the fresh and cold vegetables.

We ate delicious broccoli last night. It is like the carrots, sweeter in the fall. Our pears are ripe and we will either juice them or can them this weekend. I would like some canned this year. We have a couple of bushels of apples to juice also. Our orchard was not full of apples this year and I let too many fall to the deer. I picked our neighbor's apples from his one tree and yesterday I found the tree had fallen, its trunk was rotten and it broke off flush to the ground. I am happy it did not break when I was up in it. It was a semi dwarf tree and they do not live so long. I have been planting and grafting standard size trees here. They do not make fruit as fast as dwarf trees but they can live 100 years.

The main garden gate.

We have been working on firewood lately. We had a large sugar maple that was dying cut down. It was four feet in diameter. I spent a couple of days sawing it up and being very grateful that I have a chain saw. My friend Dave lent me his wood splitter! So I have been splitting up some of the wood piles around the house and getting ready to grunt with the big boys from that maple. Then it snowed. I guess I will wait until Monday.

Today we are going to jam with the old time music people at the college. Then a potluck dinner with the Master Gardeners. Tomorrow we have the Potluck Jug Band practice. I will be making salads for those dinners.

I remember the good old days.

My two sons and I standing in front of a 14,000 foot peak, Longs Peak, in Colorado last week.

Have a great snowy weekend.

October

2011-10-26T11:19:00.000-07:00

We are still harvesting in the gardens. We have had three light frosts and still have tomatoes out in the flower bed. We pulled all the peppers today and shared a bunch with a neighbor. We have lettuce, kale, Chinese cabbage, cabbages, turnips, carrots, broccoli, sunflowers, dahlias,sugar snap peas,red raspberries, celery, cilantro, and parsley growing.
We will be making cider this weekend. We have a bunch of pears to throw in also.
We have two chicken tractors in one garden and they are scratching and fertilizing that garden right now. They pretty much leave it completely tilled up and ready to plant. We move the tractors every morning.

Reid's Yellow Dent corn and a tomato.

A hundred elk or so.

Dylan and I looking at the Rockies.

Long's Peak

We are now feeding our chickens with the field corn we planted last spring. We also throw them kale and turnip greens daily. We planted Reid's yellow dent corn, a soft kernel that the chickens can grind themselves, saving us the trouble. They can peck it off the cob also. They love this corn better than the scratch we have been buying.
I spent a week out in Colorado where my two sons live. We did a little hiking and rock climbing while we were there.

Fall Cometh

2011-10-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

We have been busy putting compost on the gardens, turning them and planting cover crops. It is like putting them to bed. They look pretty in the evening light. We have been putting oats in for a cover crop. Oats are pretty neat because they grow and then in the middle of the winter they die and fall over providing a mulch for the spring. Since the light does not get to the ground weeds don't grow.

We grew a half acre of corn for the chickens and it is almost ready to pick. So I am building a corn crib currently. I hope it gets done soon. It is pretty small, 6 by 6. I also added a small feed room to the front of it. We can put chicken feed in there and pull out corn for them at the same time. We put a wide door on the feed room and then we walk in to the corn crib from there. I hope it will be rodent proof. I lined it with half inch hardware cloth. It will have a steel roof.

Late sunflowers brightening up the garden. Do you see the fence row of sugar snap peas there?

Digging sweet potatoes. We grew two 25 foot rows. Another good crop. We will sell some at the market.

My sweet potato.

The white oak floor of the feed room and corn crib combo.

The ole John Deere dug the fence post holes.

Walls and rafters going up.

I sealed the eaves to keep birds and rodents out of the corn.

A wide door on a tiny building.

The peppers are still going at it but the tomatoes are dying. However we have a row of young tomatoes that are just setting fruit. I planted them a month later than usual. We try to get them in June 1 but it was July 1 when they started. If we keep the frost at bay for the month of October, we will have red tomatoes. Frost date here is Sept. 20. We have had two years of frost free Octobers already.

Today has been a cool and rainy. It has been 39 most of the day. Cindy put up food. She canned both sauerkraut and broth. Right now she is canning peppers and eggplant in garlic oil. These are wide mouth pints with stacks of broiled eggplant slices, roasted red peppers and basil leaves. They are covered in olive oil and cider vinegar. They sure look pretty.

I made egg noodles this morning and am putting together a chicken soup. I had to go out in the cold rain and get celery stalks and chives. brrr. We put our shitakes and wild hen of the woods mushrooms in it. The chicken is canned from old laying hens.

Our stand at the near the end of the market. We sold most of what we brought.

Our field corn is about 11 inches long and that is a big yellow tomato, too.

We bought a small tractor with a front end loader. It has helped me move compost into the gardens. What a great help that has been. I moved 20 tons this week.

We installed a wood stove into the fireplace last week, in the nick of time!

We have had a great year with the honey bees and I have sold 20 quarts of honey. We hope they make through the winter and do well again next year.

Stay warm, be grateful and keep in touch.

Easy Biochar and Charcoal

2011-09-12T17:03:00.000-07:00

I decided to make some charcoal for grilling. The idea is to heat wood without oxygen. The volatiles boil off and leave behind charcoal. I looked around for methods to do this and there are plans out there to weld together double walled pipes and chimneys but that is difficult and costs money. Then inspiration struck.
I was in the feed building getting some scratch for the chickens and there were two metal barrels in there. A 55 gallon and a 20 or 30 gallon one.

A box of charcoal we made.

I cut square holes every 5 or 6 inches a inch or so from the bottom with a pick. It was so easy.

Here is the small barrel bottom side up in the large barrel. I filled this with 8 inch long 3 diameter branches from a sugar maple. I put cardboard over the top and tied it on with baling twine. I turned over the barrel and picked it up using the twine as a handle and put it into the big barrel. I stuffed crumpled newspaper around the edge and pushed it in with a stick. Then I added kindling. I stuck branches into the gap all the way around.

I lit the paper through the holes and it started right up. In a half hour it was humming along and hot as the blazes. A couple of hours later it was just smoldering. The next morning I turned it over and poured out the barrel which was half full of charcoal, about 15 gallons of charcoal. It started burning now that oxygen was available and I had to pour water on it to put it out.

My next barrel was filled to the brim with sawdust. I want to use this to mix into the greenhouse soil to hold water and provide an environment for bacteria and mycelium. These will pull nitrogen out of the air and then it will be available to the plants. The neat thing is that the carbon will not break down further so it will stay there forever and providing a service to many living things. It will sequester the carbon in the soil.

Unfortunately the sawdust did not turn to charcoal. About two inches around the edge of the barrel were charred. I believe the sawdust insulated itself from the heat. I might try again and add more firewood to the barrel as it burns out. I suppose it will continue charring as I keep the heat on. Of course I can grind the larger pieces of charcoal and add them to the soil in our garden chipper shredder.

By the way, after the fire I poured water into the barrel before I turned it over. This effectively put out the fire in the bottom and the charcoal did not ignite when it was given oxygen.

The charcoal must be soaked in water before putting it into the soil because the carbon rejects wetting initially.

I am saving charcoal for grilling, too.

I hope all your plans come to fruition.

Mid-September

2011-09-11T05:52:00.000-07:00

We are seeing the tomatoes slow down. We have some blight ruining plants and we got three inches of rain that made the ripe tomatoes swell and crack reducing the harvest. The chickens are getting sick of tomatoes and leaving them in their yard for a day or so. The ducks still love them.
We moved the three young turkeys in with the chickens and and after three days they began to enjoy sleeping in the chicken house and noshing at the cornucopia feeder inside. They seem so naive and spend a lot of time looking lost and confused. I guess they don't have too much upstairs.
The two turkey hens are setting on eggs out in the blueberry patch. Come Tuesday it will be 28 days that I know they have been setting and the eggs should be hatching. This is the third try to hatch this year and they have been unsuccessful. I believe they leave the eggs too often the first week and the eggs get cold. By the second week they are in the mood good and stay on the eggs very well but by then the eggs are dead. We don't hold out much hope for them. I will remove the eggs next week if they don't hatch. When I do that the hens will look confused and try setting on the empty nest for a day and then give it up.
We are enjoying cantaloupes this month for breakfast. We grew a couple of vines on plastic. We have some small watermelons for afternoon snacks as well.
The market has slowed down considerably this week and several vendors have quit coming. We have about 5 more weeks of market and then the season is over here. We have planted a lot of fall crops so I hope they come in before the market is over. I just ordered chard and onion seeds to plant this coming week. The chard is going in the greenhouse and the onions will be for the spring market.
Everyone's gardens are over in our neighborhood and being left fallow for the winter. I am planting rye or oats in every clear space.
We have the right away tree trimmers in the area right now and they have lots of work to do for the next month. When Cindy pointed out that they were driving by I jumped in my truck and followed them. I met Paulino when he stopped a mile down the road and asked if he could dump the chipped branches in our field. He followed me home and I showed him the flat spot along the road. Then I gave him tomatoes, peppers, lettuce and the promise of sweet corn if he stopped by on the way home (he did).
Paulino was true to his word and we have eight truck loads of chips out there now and more coming.
I also asked if they could cut down the massive sugar maple along the road. It has two main trucks and one is dead. The dead side is losing branches all the time and I am worried that it might fall any time. They cut it down yesterday and left it in the yard. I will make some firewood out of it. What a relief to have it done.
The chips will make their way to the berry bushes and I will mulch them all six to eight inches deep.
Well, breakfast is ready, so I will sign off now.

Groundhogs and Wheat Fields

2011-09-06T04:38:00.000-07:00

This morning, August 10th, I cut the tiny wheat field next to the chicken yard. I have the chickens fenced into it and hope the fallen wheat will provide their lunch. This small patch was planted in rows a foot apart so I could get in and weed the plot. It held field corn last year but I had let some weed seed out and I knew the wheat would need some attention. This spring was very wet and the weeds grew well in that wheat patch but it was too wet to get in there and pull them out. By June I knew that I was not going to have a wheat harvest for the kitchen. The back up plan was to feed the chickens so I let them in a couple of weeks ago. I thought they would see those standing stalks and pull them down to eat. Nope.
Today I went in and cut down the wheat for the chickens. In the middle of the patch there was a tall stand of blackberry canes and it was quite a job to hack through them. Under these canes were three holes in the ground, one big and two small. The big one was the main entrance for a ground hog and the two small holes were its secret escape holes. However, there was no hog. It was gone.
We have seen a groundhog all year but they are here. I found gnawed pumpkins in our big patch in the 8 acre field. A hog was going around and tasting every other pumpkin as it got ripe. Geez, how about eating one whole one and leaving the rest for the winter? I threw the damaged ones out near its hole and moved the almost ripe ones to the front yard, in a row on the sidewalk. I sprayed the rest with garlic spray. That has worked pretty well, but I need to re-spray.
The field corn is growing with those pumpkins and now the crows are working the far edge of the field. They sit on an ear of corn and peck it to death. So I have walked out and shot at them. (News flash: I am not a good wing shot) The crows are not fond of me and make snide comments as the fly away. Anyway, last time I walked out there I scared a hog in the middle of the corn pulling down stalks to eat the corn. I could not see him in the thicket of stalks but I could hear him.

Our market stand

Cindy on mandolin, me on bass. The Potluck Jug Band debut.

The pumpkin and field corn patch.

Cellar house and orchard.

Across the road we have a small stand of sweet corn, Silver Queen. The deer have finally tried it out and a couple of nights ago pulled down 20 or so stalks and ate the sweet corn. Last night I put up a few stakes with plastic bags hanging on them to scare them. It probably is too little, too late but I will check it out once the sun comes up. I am going to add an electric fence today. One strand 18 inches high and baited with peanut butter.
Actually, today's weather is 100 percent rain and up to 4 inches deep, so I am going to work on the small gas leak under the kitchen. This means turning off all the gas to the house and taking apart the iron pipe, putting in some valves between different areas because there is only one valve on the system and that is outside the house. Once I have the valves installed I can put the pipe back and test each area for leaks. I hope this goes well.
This summer has been very busy with the gardens. We have done well at the market and our customers have said that our produce is very clean and high quality. I love hearing that. We have had requests for more okra but we only have 4 plants so I have new ones coming on but they will not make it before the cold weather. We have tons of tomatoes so if anyone wants to can or freeze tomatoes, let me know. It is easy to freeze tomato sauce: chop them up, simmer until reduced by half, pack them in containers and freeze.

Lauren looked into our bee hive and we took off some honey. Then we extracted it and voila!

Our scare crow is going to be moved over to where the crows are eating my corn. I suppose they will move to another part of the field then.

A cart full of elephant garlic.

Another foggy morning.

I just returned from feeding the chickens and letting them out for the day. The deer left the sweet corn alone last night and the crows were not in the corn.

We hope you all are enjoying cooler weather. I hope I write more often!

News of the Farm

2011-07-15T16:32:00.000-07:00

We are busy in the harvesting, weeding in every corner of the farm. It is a whirlwind of jobs that need attending and, by golly, we are on them. If only I had a clone.

The blueberries are really starting to produce. Once the netting was in place and the birds were locked out I started finding blue and ripe berries. We do not have this problem with red raspberries. The birds eat a few but there are plenty left for us. That is not true of cherries. The starlings come in waves and devour the heck out of the cherries. I picked 25 pints of blueberries for this Saturday market. We sell them at $4.00 a pint. We also have a few gallons in the freezer for the winter! Yes!

We are stopping for a break and snack every day and my favorite is yogurt with tons of berries in it. Today we put in some peaches we froze last year (with honey) and it was wonderful. Speaking of peaches, one tree has a bushel ripening and the deer have not eaten them. Maybe because I put a small fence around the tree the other day.

We have seen a lot of deer lately. We spent a week away from the farm while visiting family in New York State. When we returned the deer felt like they had the run of the place. They were nibbling through the orchard in the evening and quite surprised when I happened upon them.

We have been seeing wild turkeys in the big field out back pretty much all year.

Lauren, a young woman from Ohio, stopped by on her way home from South America and spent a couple of days. She joined right in with all the chores of the farm. We weeded the bean patch and shoveled compost on the rows. Then we picked berries. Later we pulled a super of honey from one hive and found a couple of gallons of buckwheat honey. ( we planted a large patch of it this summer- now it is planted to yellow clover) The next morning we slaughtered 10 chickens. I have to admit that I was pretty worn out. I guess working with a young person encouraged me to work a bit harder than I usually do. Oh, the travesty of getting old. Of course, I approve of it, for me, at least.

We had a good start on the farm year when we put in four 80 foot rows of broccoli and the same of lettuce. Yesterday I put the tiller to them and turned them under. It was a bit harder than that, darn it. I had covered the broccoli with floating row cover and it took a lot to keep it there with the spring winds. We had a pile of rocks I had already removed from the garden and, crazy me. I had put them back in the garden to hold down the fabric. It was hard to talk my self into going out there and picking them up again. Actually, the job was on my list for two days before I got on it. Like many jobs, once I started it went OK. This area will be planted in winter wheat this fall, so I am keeping it fallow and running the tiller through it every couple of weeks to reduce the weed pressure. We are sprouting the weeds and tilling them in repeatedly.

Henny Penny has three chicks these days and has found a way out of the chicken yard each day to terrorize the flower gardens. I pulled down the small 16 inch tall rabbit fence when I turned in the broccoli and Henny Penny, hearing the tiller was right there with her chicks. She then found the tomato patch which had been mulched 5 inches deep in grass clipping and got to work. She turned over an area about 8 feet square before I noticed her. I had to change her name to Attiller the Hen. She was hard to chase out of there, too.

Setting up the farmers market.

The cutting garden before the market. We cut flowers early!

The circle garden in the morning.

Trouble in Chickentown

2011-06-19T18:25:00.000-07:00

The chickens are pretty broody right now and we have several hens acting that way and two turkey hens. I am afraid the Grey Lady turkey, a blue slate, is unsuccessful. She show have hatched her dozen eggs last week and I am giving her a couple more days before I remove them and let her get back to life as we know it. I guess she did not keep them warm early on. She was leaving the nest to eat and hang with Mr.T quite a bit a month ago. But who knows, maybe she did not have room to turn the eggs as she was crowded between the garage wall and a bee hive. (actually that was a very safe place)

Henny Penny hatched out her eggs two days ago and somehow left two chicks in the nest and they died. I think they got cold while she was sporting around with the early hatchers. There was two eggs unhatched and the today I was surprised to see they both hatched too. Henny Penny was ignoring them also so I moved the chicks over to her where she was feeding her chicks. I checked back several times and one was bobbing a weaving (as they do) but getting around. The other had been buried by Henny Penny relentless scratching.

So I found the poor limp thing and put it under a heat lamp. After an hour it was bobbing and weaving and coming along. Later I checked on it and it looked like the cat had tossed it around...but it was still alive. I hope it makes it. I am checking on it more. I hope to re-introduce it back to the mother hen.

Henny Penny thinking.

New Turkeys barely able to stand up.

I just went out and slipped the chick into the nest with Henny Penny and she clucked, just like a mother.

Now we have two more hens take a turn at hatching eggs. I am running out of places to put them.

Wish them all luck.

A Cool June Day

2011-06-13T18:00:00.000-07:00

We had cooler temperatures today. The last two weeks we have had 90's over and over. Today it barely made 70 and it was a pleasure to be out in the field.

I started the day sewing up the netting over the blueberries and have it pretty tight. I had some movement the other night when we had a thunder storm blow in. I hope it is better because some of the netting caught in the berries and there they went. It is suspended on hi-tensile wire with strainers on each wire to pull it tight.

Dinner from the gardens and root cellar.

A chicken egg and a duck egg yolk.

We have four young turkey poults in a fence next to this table. Mr. T has spent the last week trying to impress the four youngsters. Today he found a better place to show off.

I mowed and collected the grass clippings today. Then pulled any weeds around berry bushes and poured on the grass clippings.

Have a great day.

Middle of June and Busy Times

2011-06-12T09:50:00.000-07:00

The ducks follow.

Hay into corn.

I plow while the dogwoods bloom.

Katie's bees swarmed.

Rainbow over the blueberries.

Where to start? So many different activities this time of the year.

We are selling at the Elkins Farmers Market and my rows of broccoli are coming in...finally. We had them covered with a light row cover and they were growing great. I had put down cardboard to keep the weeds down and just let them grow- not checking on them for a month. That was a mistake since the row cover protected the voles and mice who had to eat something and something was broccoli. We had to replant twice and these are 80 foot rows. Augh. I poisoned the voles and we are getting beautiful heads and side shoots. We took 3 pounds to the market last weekend and should be increasing a lot over the next 6 weeks.

The great thing about the row cover was the first wave of cabbage moths did not lay any eggs so the plants are free of any damage and those green worms. Now we are getting the worms so tonight I will spray Bt, a cabbage worm disease.

The ducks have departed for cooler climates, specifically the freezer. Removing the feathers was a lot of work. We pulled down and saved it for a pillow and then dipped them in hot water and pulled and pulled. We left them in the refrigerator for two days to tenderize and then froze them. One was slowly roasted for three hours and was delicious for two dinners. I probably will not do ducks next year.

I covered the 100 blueberries with netting yesterday. I stretched wire over the 6 rows on 8 foot tall posts and then laid bird netting over. The netting is 20 feet wide so I have to stitch it together yet. There are gaps all along the seams. I have it hooked together with metal rings every 4 feet and hope I can overlap it enough to discourage the birds. One good thing is they are not ripe yet so the birds have not had a taste of them. Today there are no birds in the large net room - it is 135 by 70 and 7 or 8 feet tall. Just getting the netting over them all has felt great. We have lots of berries on the plants which are three to four feet tall and four years old.

We are trying to grow field corn for the chickens this year. It has been a learning experience! I borrowed a double plow from John down the road and for the first time flipped sod to create a garden. I have always either hand dug or tilled our gardens. The first few rows did not turn very well and I had to hook some chains to the three point hitch to hold it in place- it was swaying left and right behind the tractor. Then the sod cutters ( a sharp wheel in front of the plow blade) was clogging up with sod instead of cutting it. So we removed it. This was three old men, Kenny, John and I standing around the old '54 John Deere, discussing how to make this plow do its job and then tackling it with large wrenches, logging chains, cold chisel and sledge hammer on a hot sunny hay field.

So I drove the tractor over a half acre of hay field laying the sod over up the gentle hill with one tire in the furrow and the other riding high on the sod. John lives at the end of Goode Rd. and I drove the plow back in 4th gear (woo, fast on that tractor) and picked up the old rusty disc. Running the disc over the field made me realize how nice it would have been if all the sod had flipped and none of it was up clumping up the corn field. If only the roots were up the field would have been ready to plant after a couple of passes. As it was I then borrowed a tiller and ran that over the field a couple of times, too. Of course, all this took a few days and between the rains it stretched into another week.

George, my cousin, was listening in to all this via our phone calls and offered a horse drawn corn planter if it wasn't too deep in the shed and the next day I found it propped up against the garage door (without a horse). I got Kenny to drive the lawn tractor and I handled the handles as we trolled across the field in straight rows three feet apart. It was going great for a few rows before I noticed that it wasn't using much seed corn. We turned it over and found the drop tube was closed up with about 2 inches of packed mud. We quit that morning saying the ground was too wet. About noon I called George and told him what had happened and he drove right out to help. He took one look and said that, "Maybe I was planting a bit deep" since the planting furrows looked 5 inches deep. I allowed that he might be right.

George showed me how the planter could be adjusted but the bolts were rusted tight after 80 years of life but we attached it to a three point hitch draw bar that we could raise and lower. I used a screw driver to clean the drop tube and sprayed it with oil to try and keep it clean. So we loaded the planter and with George at the reins of the tractor, me at the handles, off we rode and it worked! We planted the the field and started on replanting the initial rows when we ran out of seed. By the way we are planting Reid's Yellow Dent, an old field corn, we got from, Langstroth, the oldest seed company in the country.

Within two weeks the corn was up, the crows did not pull out any of the rows, and the initial rows did not have any corn in them (except the first row). So I will plant the first 6 rows with Abenaki flint corn. We got this seed from a local farmer 3 years ago and have been growing it ever since.

Spring flowers.

Picking chamomile blossoms.

We grew Red Cornish Cross chickens for meat for the last 11 weeks and have been very happy with them. They ended up 5.5 pounds and were very healthy and moved around well. We put about 150 pounds in the freezer. It sure feels good to have all this good food stored away.

More to come!

More Ducks

2011-05-07T18:28:00.000-07:00

Every morning I get out of bed and put on some clothes, drink a glass of water and head out into the garage. I don a pair of rubber boots and pick up a plastic container, fill it up with poultry feed and open the back door.
The robin on her nest squacks and fly down into the grass behind the plum tree and peers at me with one eye to see, I suppose, if I am going to climb the post and steal her eggs.
I walk across the lawn and step over the flexible fence back there. The robin watches me tromp away and when my back is turned flies back into the nest, sure that she has outwitted the slow-witted giant again.
The ducks are in their little red roofed A-frame and they hear me coming even if I tiptoe and started up their peeping, I took a short course in duck and they are actually yelling at me, "let me out what is taking you so long, what's for breakfast." I open the door and hook the chain to keep it that way and out they come. I pour a dish of feed out and fill the enamel pan with water next to it and they look at me suspiciously. "Why are you standing so close to the water pan, Dad?" I move along and they spring into action...more like waddle into action... and have a bill to eat, washing it down with cool clear water.

The Cornish cross chickens are in the same field in their chicken tractors and as I walk across to them I hear the young rooster sounding like a creaky barn door. He is the only one talking today and I pop open their doors. They pile out and gather around the drinking fountain and dipping their beaks, look up at the sky and determine the weather of the day. Too bad I did not take a course in chicken, I might be able to tell you if its going to rain.
About this time the ducks have noticed they are full and I have left. I turn when I hear the crescendo of noise and here they come barreling through the tall wet grass toward me. They are strung out in a tight line and their forward direction is a lurch to the left and then to the right somehow managing to average out to the object of their ...affection? They get about 4 feet from me, see I noticed and suddenly veer off to the side and get very interested in the quality of the grass there. They keep one eye on me but meanwhile their bills are shimmying into the grass to ferret out a worm or slug.
I walk around the tractors filling up the feeders and they keep pace with me, a line of yellow ducks, fading to white now they are teenagers, studiously ignoring me like, "Who me, follow you? Naw, get real, I was just planning a little duck excursion in this general direction." (It's handy that I took that duck course)
By the time I have filled in the feeders, their attention span has waned and I walk back across the 200 feet to the fence and fill their enamel pan again (they do drink a lot).
They hear that noise and here they come again, lined up and waddling, peeping to beat the band.
One of the ducklings has got a frog in his throat. He is sounding a bit scratchy and the sound that comes out is almost sounding like a quack. Pretty soon they will be clothed in white feathers and quacking when they see me. Pretty much like a teenage boy's voice breaking, you know times are changing.
The other day I came out of the house, the robin squacked (this is more like the sound she makes) and flew out of her nest, and 4 ducks charged the fence making all kinds of racket. "What is going on", I asked, "where are your other 3 pals?" I hurried over the fence and behind their duck house, I found them corralled in a little fence around a peach tree. They had found and entrance, a little break in the fence and could not find their way out. I opened it up and out they came, demanding a drink. Sometimes I feel the same way.

The new duck house, all recycled materials except for the paint which soon was applied.

Spring Tidings of Joy

2011-04-13T07:45:00.000-07:00

The daffodils are blooming all around the farm. We have some pretty fancy ones: doubles, triples, orange cups, pale pink cups, tiny and large. Our tables are awash in flowers these days.

Ducks eating their oatmeal.

We have two white Pekin ducks, given to us by a neighbor, and the pair lay an egg a day. So I put one egg a day in a box and waited until I had a clutch. I put 11 in our new incubator for 28 long, long days and at 2:00 AM Friday a duck struggled out of the egg. Let me tell you, a duckling cannot fit inside an egg, there is way to much duck. He came out wet and limp and looked like he was barely alive. In four hours he was up and peeping.
The next guys poked holes in their eggs and peeped sadly for a day and a half. Finally I broke the rules (the rules say do not help them out of their eggs) and started peeling back the shells. By Sunday I was popping them out like toast from a toaster.
The last ducks were weak and their necks couldn't hold up their heads. I was sure we would lose them and went out into the garden and planted all day long. When we came in that evening we had 7 lively happy ducks who couldn't wait to see me. I put my hand down in their home and they all crowd around to be petted. They happily nibble on my fingers and pull the hair on the back of my hand. I love the way they cock their heads over and peer at me with one shiny black eye.
We drilled several white oak logs for shitake mushrooms with our friends. We had a cool cloudy day for it and made 40 logs. We hope we can sell some mushrooms this year. Several of last years logs have already fruited. I soak them for a day to inspire them to fruit but these logs just up and did it on their own.

Kylie, George, Kyle, Dave plugging spawn into the logs.

We have been planting our gardens for the Market between rain showers. Yesterday we got 2 1/2 inches of rain so we will not be out planting for another week. The big pond overflowed its dam. It did not cut a channel and empty, thank the Lord. I need to build up the dam in that one spot- about 20 feet wide.
We planted a long double row of broccoli and put head lettuce on each side of that. It is an 80 foot row and we covered it with a low tunnel and agricultural fabric to keep the cabbage moths off. I hope I put enough compost on to feed those plants. They are heavy feeders.
We also have in spring onions, shell peas, snap peas, carrots, radishes, potatoes and Asian greens.
I put in the 100 fence posts on Thursday with my neighbor's help. He has a post driver. We started around 9:30 and finished right after lunch. I supplied drinking water and lined up the posts. It had taken me three days to put in the corners- all of 19 posts- with a post hole digger and a truck full of rocks. This is what owning a 20 thousand dollar tractor versus my three thousand dollar antique does for a farmer. Of course, I do not have a loan chasing me and I don't have an income to pay for a loan.
So I sit here writing a note to friends, watching the rain come down and getting ready to transplant lettuce and make some soap for the market, without too many cares. I was going to say w
without a care in the world but that ain't even close to the truth.
Just outside the kitchen window we have a porch roof. We watched a robin fly up onto the top of the post and turn once around. He flew off but was right back and turned around once more. He came back a couple of minutes later with a woman. She looked at the post top and then danced a little tap dance on it. She turned around and hopped off, hopped back on and did her tap dance again. She seemed to be checking to see if the six inch by six inch solid red oak post would hold her weight and the additional weight of a nest and eggs. It must have suited her because she flew off and returned with a twig and laid claim to that real estate.
Of course, we walk in and out of the back door quite often and the robin couple gave up on that post. But yesterday we had a drencher, 2 1/2 inches of rain and the world sparkles like a jewel and the daffodils sag like old beaten men. It must have been too wet where ever the Robin's tried to nest because today they are back throwing caution to the wind and sticks on the post top.

Today's chicks.

Today we got a call at 6:00 AM. The post office had a box of chicks peeping up the room. I drove downtown and while I was there, filled up all the gas cans that run this farm. I parked at the loading dock of the post office and as I was walking up a mail person jumped out of her car and joined me at the back door. She unlocked and we walked in together and looked into the box of peepers- all alive and well. It is wonderful to live in a little town of friendly people who look out for each other and share the little joys of baby chicks and foggy mornings. I drove back home in the mystery of fog bound hollows and bright hope of clear ridges, listening to the contented peeps of warm chicks ( they were next to the heater) and the promise of hot coffee at home.

The plum trees blooming surrounded by daffodils.

Inside the low tunnel showing the broccoli and the lettuce plants. We covered the ground with cardboard weighted down with rocks I dug out of the garden. There is a box with mouse poison on the left.

The low tunnel.

Blue berries in blue tree tubes. We are having trouble with them blowing away and I am re-staking them with white oak stakes (they had skinny bamboo stakes). The fenced row is 130 feet of grapevines both seedless eating and a few wine grapes.

The roof I was lifting into the air on cement and wood blocks until a big wind blew it off the columns. Now I get to disassemble it. I hope to build a small barn in its place.

Our two bee hives both survived the winter and are loving the spring flowers, just like we do.

A fancy daffodil.

A fancy double.

Later I called the Extension agent about our beekeeper club. We have a little extra money in the pot and voted to help a young person get started in beekeeping. It is a pretty daunting task to raise bees these days. We have several diseases and pests that attack bee hives these days and it is not unusual to lose a hive over the winter. Mark B lost 33 hives this winter out of 34! So our club will give a youngster a hive, bees, a bee suit and veil and a mentor to help them through the year. I called the Extension agent about presenting this to 4H clubs. I talked to two different offices to try to get some ideas of how to present and about an essay contest to decide on the winner. Everyone I talked to was willing and helpful. I got ideas and phone numbers of other people to talk to. They are sending me emails with other contest rules to look at. To me this is what good government is: responsive and knowledgeable. I want our government to continue funding this kind of thing; things that help the citizens of our country.

The robin is sitting on its nest beginnings. It is about three quarters of an inch high and she is poking the sticks and pushing them around in a circle about her body. Now she is stamping on the center. Off she goes again. The eaves are dripping, the clouds appear to be thinning, perhaps we will see the sun again. Have a great day and try to pick a few flowers for the table.

Snowy Morning in March

2011-03-27T07:03:00.000-07:00

We woke up to two inches of snow this morning. Mr. T, our tom turkey, who sleeps out on the rail fence, was pacing in front of the chicken house, dragging his wings in display for his two hens between gobbles. The yard was covered by his big foot steps surrounded by long lines of his drooping wing tips. The eggs the two turkey hens were setting on did not hatch and I took them away 3 days ago. I will let you know when they start laying eggs again.
We have 8 duck eggs in the incubator. I hope we have some successful hatches. They are due mid April.

We usually have chickens setting by the beginning of March but this year has been different. We have no setting hens as of yet. We ordered some peeps from an Amish company in Pennsylvania and have 26 Red Cornish Crosses in the basement starting to grow. They are very cute and I got to dip all their beaks in water as they came out of the box. We also have a dozen Delaware chickens that are about three weeks old. They will be going outside as soon as the snowy weather relents. We are still trying to find a heritage breed that puts on weight reasonably fast so we do not have to keep buying the Cornish crosses. Each chick we buy costs over $2.50 but they still save more than that in feed conversion costs. I hope the Delawares do it. So keep in touch and find out what the results are.

The Gates are up on the main garden. We love how they look and we will have asarina vines growing on them this summer.

I put an airlock entry into the root cellar and insulated it with 1.5 inch foam. I hope it will keep the cellar a little cooler this summer. So far the temperatures are in the low forties currently and the potatoes are holding really well. The apples a very wrinkly but I made an apple crisp with Ashmead's Kernel and it was great and the apple slices were firm.

Butts, the cat, rolls over in greeting.

The pair of setting hen turkeys.

I turned a bowl from spalted maple. John and Pam gave me cut off piece of trunk.

Taking the peeps out of the box they were shipped in.

Rupert

I am working on fencing the 8 acre field this month. I have a local older farmer coming to drive posts in after I put the corners in place. I bought treated posts from Tractor Supply on Thursday and started digging post holes Saturday. These posts need to be in three to four feet and I am feeling fortunate if I can get down three feet. I have a posthole digger on the tractor and it is an effective rock locating tool. I get down a foot and then use the spud bar, a six foot chisel tipped steel bar weighing 20 pounds, to break up the rock or pry it out of the hole. A gate post next to the access road required digging through solid rock for a foot, inch by inch, and then concreting the post into that hole. My friend Tom is a fence contractor and he came by to lend me advice, but unfortunately no labor. So Saturday I put in two corners and one gate post. These posts all have secondary posts, cross pieces and diagonal wires to make them sturdy. So I actually put 8 posts into the ground. I need to put in three more corners and three gate posts yet.

We have been weeding the blueberries and rhubarb and it looks good, the rhubarb has a lot of growth going on. We should be able to sell all the stalks. We have a 50 foot row and I am not eating all of that.

Have a great spring week.

Gates for the Garden

2011-03-12T17:15:00.000-08:00

This past week I have been working on new gates for the main garden. This is fenced with 5 foot 2 by 4 woven wire and it has kept out the deer from day one, four years ago. We grow most of our vegetables in this garden and last year turned half into permanent raised beds. The gates on it now are simple two by four frames with one inch drilled holes in which I put bamboo sticks I had cut from a thicket. The tops were left branched and it made a very lively looking gate.

When I was 15 years old I wanted to make a bicycle on skis. My Dad agreed to help me and he went to the lumber store and bought a 1 by 4 by 8 of ash wood. We had looked up bending wood in the encyclopedia and ash was the best wood for bending. I got an old bike and removed the wheels and chain. We made a cut the ash to length and made a form in the shape of a ski tip out of old two by fours, nailing them together and cutting the curve on the band saw.
We then built a wooden box and ran a hose from Mom's pressure cooker into the box and laid the ash boards in them. After an hour we clamped the boards into the forms and made a couple of skis. We glued and screwed some blocks to the top of the skis and bolted them in place of the wheels. I used it all winter instead of a sled. It was fast and I could steer it with the handle bars and my feet.

The new gates have a steam bent arch to them and I can thank my Dad for helping me some 40 years ago. Here I have eight foot long white oak boards inside a piece of pipe. The house coming off the stove is plugged into the canner.

I screwed curved blocks of wood to the gate and then bent the board over these blocks to get an arch effect. I ran out of clamps so I screwed the bent piece to the first gate and then re-used the clamps for the second one.

The completed gates leaning against the garage door. They are six feet tall and together about eight feet wide.

I used Titebond III waterproof glue and mortised and tenoned the frames together. The staves are notched into the frame and screwed and glued. Now to hang them in place of the old gates.

Wet Weather and Sunny Days

2011-03-09T06:16:00.000-08:00

Oh, the wind and the rain. We are having a wet spring interspersed with sunny warm days.

One sunny day I took my chain saw out and cut a couple of planks out of a black walnut log in I had brought in last fall. That is slow going but patience won the day and I got two 2 inch thick by 10 inch wide boards. One was uneven from the day I had cut the log in half with my too short bar so I used it to make a shaving horse.

This is five feet long and has red oak turned legs and the arm, foot pedal, table and dumbhead are made from locust. This shaving horse will make it easier to make handles and other rounded objects using a drawknife. Perhaps we will make white oak splints for baskets some day. The dumbhead is the heavy block on top of the arm which clamps your project.

Cindy finished her first weaving project. Our friend Paula gave us a beautiful old loom. Lisbet showed Cindy how to warp the loom and answered every question. Cindy used a selection of different colored cloth to make this rag rug style table runner. Next some rag rugs!

Here is a picture of the storm clouds coming up from the west over our orchard. The Cellar House stands vigil.

Johnny Jump Ups waiting to be carried out to the driveway on sunny days.

Cindy and her sister toured a farm in Maryland and bought us some Delaware peeps to raise. We are trying another breed chickens for our meat birds. Wish us luck with that.

Pictured are two snaths, the handles of a scythe. I made these of white oak and steam bent the bottom ten inches. They are made in a European style and we are getting Austrian scythe blades for them. These blades are hammered sharp on a tiny anvil, rather than sharpened with a stone. The hammering stretches the metal out very thin on the edge and work hardens it as well. Once you have the razor sharp edge the work goes easy. We are planning to mow the orchard with these and continue with the wheat growing. I made one for each of us.

This week we will be drilling the mushroom logs for shitake mushrooms.

Have a great day.

Mush On

2011-02-22T15:16:00.000-08:00

The snow melted and thoughts soon turned to spring. I cut the logs for our shitake operation the other day. It was a tricky job because the oak trees I needed were in a forest and their was no room to fall. I laid the first one down but it also took down another tree. I thought it was a dead snag but, no, the top had buds and flexible twigs. I looked at the stump again and it was rotten all the way through except for the outer half inch, which was alive and growing. It was a red oak. We cut white oaks for the mushrooms but added the red to the pile. Here is a pile of 70 white oak logs to inoculate:

Shitakes need bark on the logs so we had to carry the logs out of the forest and carefully lay them out in the truck bed. Soon we will be drilling and pushing the spawn into the holes. That is the hard work. We will be drilling 50 or 60 holes in every log.

We have lots of plants started. We are planning to sell lettuce boxes at the market- a rectangular pot about a foot long with 3 lettuce plants and some viola plants. Here are the violas:

Meanwhile we are eating beautiful chard.

Winter has returned and the snow is back on the ground. I will have to get the dog team out and mush on.

Into the Cellar House

2011-02-13T16:39:00.000-08:00

This farm has a large root cellar that has been keeping our apples and potatoes through the winter. We even have friends' apples stored in it. We have a couple of bushels of large onions sitting on a shelf. I am storing our hard cider there, too.We also keep tubers and roots of flowers in the cellar. I have been keeping a record of the temperature through this winter and the condition of the stored produce. This winter the temperature has been down close to zero three times. Early in January the temperature in the cellar got down to 34 and I turned on the light (a incandescent bulb) for three nights to warm it up. Even with the outside temperature of 3 degrees the cellar temperature went up to 36 from the heat of that bulb.

Our cellar has a long level entrance between stone walls that extends down the hill making it easy to run a wheel barrow full of potatoes into the cellar. Sometimes it is a bit of an extra walk to go around to the entrance and walk in, so I just hop over the wall and take the short cut. That long entrance intrigued me and I have thought and ruminated on the unusual shape of it. Last fall I had an idea and I have been working on it lately.

I planted 6 pear rootstocks on both sides of the entrance. They are ten feet apart. Then on a warm day a couple of weeks ago, I dug 12 post holes, two next to each rootstock and poured concrete in them with a short piece of galvanized pipe centered in it. Today I put 20 foot pieces of rebar into the pipes, arching them over the entrance. I used more rebar to weld them all together making a arched entrance to the cellar. I will graft some pear scions on to the rootstock and as they grow tie them to the arches. Check back in five or ten years.

Steam Bent Hay Rakes

2011-02-08T07:09:00.000-08:00

I cut out the parts for a Hay Rake yesterday and this morning steam bent the handles. Above is our canner with two handles sticking out the top. The towel and the aluminum foil keep the steam in. The steam was coming out where the handles came through the foil. I steamed them for 35 minutes. They ends were 1/2 inch by 1".

This is the jig I used laying on a beautiful handmade rag rug made by Paula. It is pretty simple and uses one clamp.

I am clamping the second handle in a jig. The wood deformed really easily and is now 8 inches wide at the end. I will mortise and tenon the handle to the rake head in a couple of days. The handles will be in the jigs for two days.

I may as well open that fiddle case.

Here are the two finished rakes.

Farm Weekend

2011-02-06T16:55:00.000-08:00

We had a great weekend with some nice Saturday morning weather (sunny and in the 40's) then rain and snow in the afternoon. Sunday was cloudy and 30 degrees.

I put the tree tubes back up that had blown down. We had used 3/8ths inch three foot bamboo to hold them against the wind last April. I am replacing them with white oak stakes as I cut them out of the boards. The tree tubes helped the blueberry starts a lot over the summer, protecting them from wind, deer and rabbits and keeping them in a more moist environment.

Cutting firewood and mushroom logs next to the big pond. We damaged a white oak tree digging this pond last spring. I left it standing all year in hopes that I could cut it for mushroom logs in February. Shitake mushrooms grow in oak logs. I managed to get 17 three foot long logs and two trailers full of firewood out of the tree. This white oak, quercus alba, was about 75 years old. It grew fairly slowly because it was over shadowed by a red oak.

Cindy weaving a table runner using different colored strips of cloth.

Spraying the house plants for spider mites and scale on a warm day.

Bending conduit for low tunnels to put in the garden. They are six feet wide and three feet tall. I have a form bolted to the table top to bend the conduit in. I will create 80 foot long tunnels with these for the rafters and 14 foot wide light row cover. These will have broccoli in them covered with a light row cover to protect them from cabbage moths. I made 28 bows in about a half hour.

The new bathroom sink cabinet. I made it out of cherry and then tiled the top to match the shower.

The narrow cabinet behind the shower. It was a 10 inch wide space in the bathroom and now has 3 drawers and a shelf with a door.

Plants are starting under grow lights mostly Johnny Jump-Ups.

Stihl chainsaw does its work. I put a sharp chain on it before I cut the tree down.

Have a great week, and keep in touch.

Snow Again

2011-01-28T05:32:00.000-08:00

Here I am crossing the orchard with stick in hand. We were knocking six inches of snow off the branches so they wouldn't break.

The hoop house collected a lot of snow and we raked it off twice that day.

One of the original apple trees.

Our house from the entrance to the farm. The hollies are so overloaded that they look like Norway spruce to me.

This hoop house is 7 feet tall so I must be standing on 18 inches of snow.

We are digging out from another 15 inches of heavy snowfall. The JD did its work.

Electric went out on Wednesday night and Cindy pulled out a box of kerosene lamps and candles. It was very quiet and beautiful out as dusk descended on Goode Rd. All the 24 hour lights down the road were out and the bucolic landscape glowed with an inner white light. The house was silent without the hum of the refrigerator and swoosh of the furnace fan. We sat at the living room window and contemplated our plans for spring.

After a couple of hours I decided to start the generator. We had pulled it into the garage in November and I had started it. That took a bit of work. I cleaned the carburetor and changed the gasoline. All set of the worst of winter weather. We have never lost power in the previous 3 winters we have lived here.

So I walked out into the garage, pulled the choke, flipped the gasoline valve to on, and yanked the starter cord. Nothing. More nothing. It was going to be a cold night. The generator allows the furnace to operate, as well as, the freezers.

About an hour later the electric came back on.

I have the bathroom almost finished. I installed the sink cabinet and made the counter. I tiled the counter to match the shower and plumbed the sink and faucet. I ordered oak baseboard from my cousin Jerry Yeager. He works for Wilson Planing Mill and they have a coater so he is finishing the trim for me. The coater paints on a finish and dries it. Once I have the baseboard installed I will replace the commode and it will be done.

We are looking at a rural development grant that would help pay for installation of solar panels to provide electricity for irrigation and the electric fence charger. It is a lot of work to plan and write a grant and then a ton of work to install new infrastructure. Keep in touch and see how that goes.

I am going out to shovel the walk and driveway. Take care.

It is Snowing

2011-01-23T04:32:00.000-08:00

We are having another snowy winter and the poultry are not happy about it. Once in awhile Cindy shovels the snow off the grass and lets them at it. They love that. We have extra greens growing in the hoop house and take the thinnings out to them. They get all excited when they see greens.

Duck eggs with one small chicken egg.

The hen turkeys fly out of the chicken yard to lay eggs and we are getting one every other day from the gray hen. She flies out and wanders around the paths we dig and finds the little bit of grass uncovered by the snow shovels. Then she heads for the little chicken tractor we have set up for her. It is nice and dark in there and she has a thick bed of straw. After she is done she goes back to the gate into the yard and waits, longing for the company of the other hen just on the other side. There is grain in there and she can see the chickens happily scratching and enjoying it. Oh, if only the gate were open, if only she could get inside. I go out and check on the chickens and there she is, waiting. I go over to the gate but she knows that trick and runs away. I leave the gate open and give the chickens inside a treat. She sidles over to the gate again but seeing me inside the gate, she is afraid to enter. So I go out the gate and my back is turned. She then, unbeknownst to me, slips in. I can then turn around and close the gate.

This is going to be a problem once the snow leaves. Right now the chickens have no interest and going out the gate into the deep snow. We have a small part of the yard shoveled for their enjoyment and they stay. The chickens do not like walking in the deep snow.
However, the drake duck seems to like taking a snowshoe constitutional of the area every morning. He comes equiped with orange snow shoes. Another instance of intelligent design.

This is the new shower stall. It is made up off little stone tiles. It has been two weeks in the making. We painted the room and now I need to install the sink cabinet and make the counter top (which will be tiled like the shower).

We have been planning the gardens, specifically where everything will be planted. We do not have enough fenced gardens so things outside of the fence must be deer proof. We planted the garlic across the Goode Rd. and will add onions and potatoes out there.

We are adding three ninety foot rows of black raspberries near the 300 blueberries. This area is fenced on one side but has electric fence as the top wire. So we can add some electric fence to surround those rows. We ordered some plants but not enough to fill the rows so we will plant some of the crops for chicken feed in those rows. We will expand the berries in the fall to fill the rows.

One goal is to feed our chickens from the farm. Chicken feed has gone up a lot again this winter. The feed store guy says it is because of ethanol plants buying up the corn and raising the price. We are not a big enough farm to get subsidies for feed from the US government. I get to build a corn crib this summer.

Meanwhile we fiddle away the time.

We are looking forward to spring.

Sneaky Turkeys

2011-01-18T16:49:00.000-08:00

One evening last week the white hen turkey did not show up in the chicken house. We looked around but couldn't find her. In the morning we rushed out to see what had happened and noticed the trail of large tracks in the snow. The snow was a foot deep so it was hard to miss them. We followed them right to the doghouse and there she was, hunkered down and ready to hiss.We did not even know she was laying. Actually we had one turkey egg laid in the chicken house one morning, but that was it. I thought they were just beginning to lay. When the hen left the dog house I found 15 eggs in there. Some were broken- they had frozen in the nights she had not sat on them.
The hen would be happy to go broody and set for a month or two on these eggs but they would not hatch because they had frozen. So I boarded up the door and kept her out. That evening she was disconsolate wandering around the doghouse and giving half hearted peeps every once in awhile. If you have never had a turkey hen standing in a foot of snow looking hopeless and bereft you might not understand the heartbreaking scene.
In the morning, again, I rushed out to see what had happened. There she was waiting at the gate to the chicken yard, happy as a clam and hungry, to boot. I fed and watered everyone and then started looking around for where she had spent the night. Following tracks in the snow, this is five day old snow, was discombobulating. They went everywhere. So did I. I found her nest and an egg under the electric fence charger that is hung on the wall of the garage. It gave her some protection and I picked up the egg and left a wooden egg in its place.
The grey turkey hen was wandering around the doghouse the next day. She had been laying eggs in there too and was confused by the boarded up door. Cindy and I cleared away some snow next to it and carried over one of the broody hen boxes. These are 4 by 9 feet and have a door into them and half the roof lifts up so we can get in them. We partitioned off half of the space with plywood and filled that half with straw. The turkey couldn't wait to go in. She looked around and was not thrilled, so she left!
This broody box has semi-clear roof and chicken wire sides so we decided that it was too bright in there. I put another piece of plywood over the chicken wire and added a piece of plywood on top of the roof. All these alterations made the interior fairly dim. Our dimwitted turkey hurried back in and laid an egg!
We are going to hatch these eggs ourselves since the turkeys are not very good at it. They hatched 7 last year and only one survived their motherly care. I think they stepped on six with their clodhopper feet. So I picked up the turkey egg and put it in the basement until we have a dozen.
Now I need an incubator. Anyone have one?

On into 2011

2011-01-10T10:51:00.000-08:00

I did count the rings on the tree our friends cut down. (see previous post) We counted 110 rings. That tree hatched in the year 1900. It was a big old maple tree on the banks of the Tygart Valley River.

We had another snow fall of 3 inches last night. The wind howled and Mr. T sat on his fence through it all. We got up at 5:30 and had a cup of coffee. Once the sky lightened I went out with a bucket of water and fed the chickens. I shoveled them some clear ground and scattered some scratch feed around. Our chicken house has some hardware cloth around the bottom which lets in some air. I did that to promote air flow in the summer but when it snows I shovel some snow against the house to close that down. We had one duck egg laid this morning. We have two white Pekin ducks, one female, and she lays every day before dawn. We got 14 chicken eggs yesterday.

I talked to Tim at the woodwork shop about his sons 100 laying hens. He mentioned that they are getting 3 or 4 eggs a day. I have a light in our chicken house that turns on about 4:00 AM. Chickens need at least 14 hours of light to lay eggs. Once spring arrives, the sun is out for 14 hours and the chickens start laying like crazy. We fool the hens and they lay all winter. We have many young pullets who have not started laying yet but every week another one comes online. We can tell because the first egg is tiny. They also need water and 12 % protein.
My old friend Tom used to give his chickens snow balls for water (the chickens did not get out of the house). That does not work well. If you melt down a snow ball you might get a quarter cup of water in exchange for all the heat you provide. Chickens need at least a cup of water each because an egg is mostly water. And feeding them frozen water means they are using up the energy of the feed to heat water. So you would be wasting feed. Our hens walk around in the snow and then go drink water in our hen house. We provide heated water. I use a coffee cup warmer under a chicken waterer. I works fine and was inexpensive.
If you feed just corn to your hens (4% protein) you would have to wait 3 days to get enough protein for an egg. So your hens would be laying every three days instead of everyday if you provide the higher protein.

Baxter, the super dog, and Lauren

We are keeping a record of temperature and vegetable conditions in the root cellar. I have read several books about using a root cellar and they all tell us what the perfect temperatures for storage of crops. I pick apples when they are ripe. Our apples ripen from August through December. The early apples do not store well and we cook, juice, sell or dry them (a bunch go to the chickens, too). Later apples do store well and they head for the root cellar. So in October the root cellar was 55 degrees. That is about what the ground temperature is 4 feet deep year around. In the root cellar books they all say store apples at 32 degrees. So am I doing something wrong? How do all these expert book writers get their root cellar to 32 degrees in October? Do they live in Nome? So I wrote to one author and she said her root cellar is 50 degrees in October when she puts her apples in. Why not put that in the book?
I am keeping a record of our root cellar and I will create a timeline with temperature, dates and when crops are put in and taken out. Maybe we can see what a real cellar is doing and how it actually works.

We have tried the hard cider and it ain't so good. It needs to wait another 3 months and we will try it again. It may need a year of melding flavors before it is good. Wish me luck. However, Mimi and Alain made some and it "tastes like Chardonnay." We are trying it tomorrow when they come over for dinner. I want to make some like theirs! We will open a few and compare. Stay tuned.

We are changing the bathroom this month. Yesterday I cut up the perfectly good bathtub and today I will repair the cut off valve (which leaks steadily) and then take out the tub. We are replacing the floor and the shower with tile. We have a beautiful random rock tile to put in the shower stall and some light colored stone tile for the floor of the bathroom. I will be pouring a concrete pad for under the shower soon. I built a cherry wash stand for the sink last week, too.

We are going to cover the blueberries with bird netting this summer. So I put in 10 foot posts at the ends of rows ( they stand almost 8 feet above the ground). These are locust posts cut and split on the farm. Next we will put a band of boards across the top and suspend high tensile wire over the row of bushes. The netting can be hung on the wires. I hope we can do it without too much trouble. The bushes are three years old and three feet tall.

Wish me a good year and a happy birthday.

A Quiet Christmas

2010-12-26T07:09:00.000-08:00

Here I am, sitting in front of the Christmas tree and holding the walnut serving tray I made for us. The walnut was cut on the farm!

A few friends came over for a Christmas eve dinner. Is that Santa on the right? You can see the new candle chandelier over the dining room table.

We are having another big snow storm today. We are taking a tour of the farm as we do every Christmas in the snow. Maybe we will do it on cross country skis.

Enjoy the snow!

Woodworking and Snow

2010-12-23T07:27:00.000-08:00

This has started out to be a snowy winter. We have had over two feet of snow and there is a foot on the ground right now. We should have a white Christmas.
The decorations are up. We make roping with spruce, pine and holly to wrap around the porch posts and some wreaths. Inside the house we have a tree decorated. We hope you are becoming full of the spirit of Christmas.

This is me hanging the roping.

I joined a woodworking co-op and have been happily working on projects for the house. This week a cherry sink cabinet is coming together. It is very nice to have inside projects to work on with this cold weather.

Some duck eggs and one chicken egg.

We have 20 hens right now and several are just getting old enough to lay eggs. We are getting 9 eggs a day and one duck egg. Yesterday we got a small pullet egg, so another hen is starting to lay. The first egg a hen lays is often rather small and sometimes does not have a yolk.

Here are some of the crazy farmers at the Christmas market in Elkins. It was cold.

We are playing more music now that it is too cold to be outside. I am working on the fiddle as always.

We hope that you have had many blessings this year and will have many more in 2011.

A Lost Tree

2010-12-03T19:54:00.000-08:00

Our friends had a tree cut down. It was injured years ago, probably by lightning and the branches, heavy large branches were in danger of falling on the gazebo. After living with that fear for several years they decided to have it taken down and today it fell. It was 48 inches in diameter at the base and tomorrow they will count the rings to see how old it was. To have an ancient being struck down by their whim was a huge thing and our conversations touched on it several times during the evening. This tree, beside the flowing Tygart Valley River, probably grew fast and strong, its tap roots soaking up the never ending drink on the muddy bank. I suspect it is not over one hundred years old and has added inches every decade. It is a maple tree and will warm their house for the next two years and maybe more.
John and I are going to look at the wood and if it is promising, cut a few pieces out and turn a bowl or two. We are looking for spalted wood, wood that is turning to rot but still strong with black lines running through it showing the influx of the bacteria.

It has made me remember the sacredness of every life and that as we live we take from the life around us. I have a feeling of gratitude in every action I take, grateful for my home, my friends, my gardens and my stock. May life bless you.

Preparing for Thanksgiving

2010-11-21T10:50:00.000-08:00

Today was turkey day in the worst sense. Joel and Katie came over to help and we got started around 8:30 on this cold gray day. We had put the two boys in a chicken tractor but we decided to give Joel a young hen for the help, but she was running around loose. So the first task was to catch the young hen. She was having none of it and she flew right out of the yard and then when I chased her again, she flew right back in. Then ran down to the pond and back up. Around the 7th attempt, Joel caught her in the fishing net that has come in handy so many times before.

We put her in a feed sack with a small hole cut in the bottom corner and poked her head out that hole. Then holding her under an arm walked her up to the block. We had two 12 penny common nails about an inch and a quarter apart and placed her neck between them. We pulled her back a bit and with her neck outstretched used the ax. Joel held her body down so she did not thrash around.

The next two were easier to catch and we followed
the same procedure. It worked well.

The two boys weighed 13.5 pounds and the girl weighed in at 8 pounds. She was the youngest turkey.

Then to plucking and eviscerating and clean up. Clean up always takes the longest time.

We grew these heritage turkeys over the summer. They are Blue Slate turkeys. I will let you know how they taste in the next installment of Fourth Year on the Farm, same bat time, same bat channel.

A Mis-Step

2010-11-19T11:56:00.000-08:00

About to start raising the roof on a tractor shed, I was waiting for Scot to show up and started cutting the bad parts off the beeswax I had gathered. We slice the cappings off the cells to remove the honey and I had put it in a double boiler. Cindy drained the honey and laid out the cake of beeswax. The bottom of it was dark with bee parts and propolis. I started slicing this off and the knife sliced my left thumb. I grabbed a paper towel to staunch the flow of blood and then Cindy and I went to the bathroom to put a band-aid on and decide to go to the doctor and get it sewed up.
Then the door bell rang. Scott had arrived. He helped out by closing up the garage doors and actually tying my shoes since I was incapacitated. I spent the time holding my thumb up in the air.
We called the Belington Clinic and they said come on down. We left Scott touring the farm and drove to town. The clinic had my chart out and asked me to sit in the waiting room. In a minute I was called and put in a room weighed and started soaking my thumb. A couple of minutes later the doctor came in asked a couple of questions (tetanus?) and started to work. He numbed my thumb and started sewing when I interrupted the process by fainting. Some tough old farmer I am. That got the nurses in and when I awoke feeling nauseous, there were four gathered around. The doc started sewing again and I am the proud owner of five stitches.
After the tetanus shot we left and I got sick just outside our driveway and took the rest of the day off. I am feeling better although my thumb hurts. I guess I will do anything to get out of work.
Be safe.

Small House

2010-11-18T04:36:00.000-08:00

The house across the street is going to be up for rent this winter. It is a small 3 bedroom suburban looking white house with a 3 pitch roof. It is on 3 acres and we always have lent a garden spot to them. We live just 3 miles from Rt 33 four lane road and about 6 miles from Belington. We would love to find some like minded neighbors.

Mid November

2010-11-16T15:52:00.000-08:00

As we walked up to the pond we smelled the strong scent of cat urine. It was rank and we were a good 150 feet from the pond. It got stronger. In the live trap there was a beautiful brown mink with his neat ears and curious eyes. The mink seemed calm and not agitated when we looked in the trap but when I started to release him he screamed a frightening noise. It sounded like sheet metal scraped on sheet metal. It put me on tender hooks so I used two sticks to pry open the door which is on a strong spring. Once the bottom of the door was up an inch the mink stuck his nose through and looked at me quite carefully before he flowed out. He ran and then bounded over the goldenrod and grasses to a couple of logs laying in the woods and disappeared under them.

I decided to prepare for screening the blueberries from the birds. The bushes are 3 years old now and we hope, really hope, we have a crop next summer. I am putting in eight foot tall posts made from locust trees on the farm. First thing yesterday I took a sledge and wedge and split an eleven foot trunk into three pieces. That warmed me up good. I cut another large locust and got three more good posts and two seven foot besides. I used the old John Deere to drill eight holes at the ends of the rows and put in two of the posts before dinner. This little paragraph is a day.

These two handsome guys days are limited. The two gray boys were born in April and are going to grace our table for Thanksgiving. We do not know how much they weigh because, frankly, they are too strong to grab a hold of and control. Mostly when I try to catch one they beat me silly and I lie recumbent on the ground while they make their escape. So hopefully we will eat them for Thanksgiving. ( I do take advice, so send your ideas.)

We replaced the green truck this week with a red Silverado truck. It is a 2002 with 75,000 miles but it has been rode hard and put away wet. It was a firewood truck and had some dents and bruises but it needed some touch up paint work anyways.

I asked around and Delbert was recommended highly. I drove over late one morning last week and parked in his yard. I recognized it by the broken down vehicles scattered about. His garage is a patched up affair made of board and batten, steel roofing, plywood (painted and unpainted) and tattered blue tarp. Outside the front is a pile of discarded auto parts: transmissions, the roof of a Chevelle, brake drums and half a toilet. The driveway is his beer can crusher and most of the cans were flat; there were only ten or twenty new ones from last night. The radio was blaring so I opened the door into the chaos and found no one at home. About then his mom came out of the house with her pack of miniature dogs, wearing a house dress and apron. She said he was in the house and I climbed up the porch steps and looked in. Three men were in recline around the television. Delbert levered himself up and came to the door. He is in his fifties, white hair and deeply fissured face, about five eight and slim. I asked if he could touch up the rust spots on my truck and he said, "I have a lot of work this week and I don't know if I have time. It has to be warm enough to paint and it is November." I told him the weather report gave us 7 more days of sun and warmth. So he allowed we might try at the end of the week.

On Thursday I dropped in and he was working on enclosing his porch. He explained that his son had been in a car accident and was wheelchair bound. He was enclosing the porch for his son to live in. He said he was going to call me and was ready to start on the truck. Cindy and I drove it over at 9 the next morning and he said it should be ready Monday.

I checked in on Monday and Delbert was mixing paint in the garage, my truck was sitting outside with the rust gone and primer over the bad spots. He was deep in the fumes and did not hear me approach so I stood around and admired the old Chevy he had started working on some time ago. All the body work was done but it needed trim around the windshield and an engine. He came out and shot some paint in the air to clear the nozzle before he noticed me. Then put the paint sprayer away and talked for awhile with the ease of nothing pressing. I finally said I would get out of his way and see him tomorrow. As I walked away I heard him clear the nozzle again and turned around. He was crouched down by the fender and waving the sprayer across the primed metal with grace and finesse. He could have been conducting an orchestra through a slow movement. We pick up the truck later tonight.

The hoop house is packed full of greens! We have chard, lettuce, kale and cilantro. There is some spinach and some cold weather greens: claytonia and mache. We are enjoying the salads so much. In the middle is a stand I made for the sprinkler. It holds it up and makes it easy to direct it.

I was at Lowes and the bulbs were 75% off. It was too good of a bargain and anyways, Cindy always plants the tulips. I bought 100 tulips and 40 King Alfred daffodils. Once I was home we had to figure a spot of them and I had just the place. A bit of grass between the new patio and the garage. All it needed was a stone wall, the sod removed and the dirt loosened. Soon I was digging, carrying and laying a dry stone wall. We lost a lot of bulbs over the winter to voles so I removed the dirt and spread gravel, laid the bulbs down with some dirt and covered that with more gravel. I believe the voles will not dig through the gravel to get to the bulbs, maybe. Pretty soon I had half the tulips planted. The picture above shows the new stone wall behind the pot of mums. Then I dug out another tulip bed and did the same treatment. This one I poured a cement curb around it to keep the grass from creeping in. Then dug a double row for the daffodils near the chicken yard.

Meanwhile Cindy was cleaning up the last of the garden. We had rows of pepper plants, corn stalks and glads to remove and take to the compost. She filled the cart abundantly over and over again. The gardens are now put to bed and ready for spring.

Morning sun is way south now. Be joyous.

Odds and Ends in the Late Fall

2010-10-27T06:49:00.000-07:00

Well, I have been building again. I enjoy the heft of a hammer and find it rewarding to make something that lasts beyond the next growth of weeds. Last month we had enlarged the back door concrete pad to extend out to the end of the garage. Last week I put a roof over it. I still have to get the gutters hung and drainage fixed up for them. I will be grilling in the rain and be dry as a duckling hiding under its mother.

We are getting the gardens ready for winter and covered the Swiss chard for the frost. It is a pretty sensitive plant but will hang in there for another month with some protection. Our chard is looking great...some of it anyways. The younger plants are very robust. You can see a few chards that did not get covered here. The grass growing around the cover is annual rye. This grass will get killed by the cold weather and then be a mulch to discourage weeds in the spring. We try to put a cover crop over all the gardens in the winter to prevent the winter winds from blowing away the lighter parts of the soil: humus and bits of plant matter.

These three rows are lettuce, another sensitive plant, but we have a lot of lettuce since the farmers market closed down and we grew a bunch that did not develop before the end. We had such a dry August that the plants just sat there. We need more irrigation, I guess.

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There is a beautiful woman wandering about the gardens with a handful of nasturtiums. If you visit you might run into her. Cindy has been working very hard weeding all the gardens and removing flowering plants that have seeded themselves in the cutting gardens. We had a couple of pickup truck loads of spent plants to shred and compost piling up near our compost bins. I finally hooked up the shredder and spent a day turning them into compost sized pieces.

We have been making cider for the spring in the basement. I bottled up 60 wine bottles and put them into the root cellar with apples, onions and potatoes. We will move the onions to the garage soon because they like it cool and dry while the apples and the pomme de terre love cool and wet. The wine rack made of some white oak I had bought to build a shed. It is five-quarter thick and so strong I can stand on one of the cross pieces. White oak resists rot so it should last a long time in the cool damp cellar.

We have a large root cellar and added some foam insulation to the walls and ceiling. It is hard to get the temperature down cool enough for the root crops. Last spring we ran an underground cable to the cellar house and I installed a light and outlet into the root cellar. Last month I put in a bathroom exhaust fan operated on a timer to pull the warm air from the ceiling outside. On the other side of the cellar I ran a five inch diameter pipe from the vent window to the floor. When the fan runs I can feel air being pulled into the room through this pipe.

Another morning letting the chickens out. The turkeys all gobble a raucous good morning as we walk across the yard. The ducks are quacking in the hen house impatient for their morning swim. The young hens, with Mini-Roo, march down to the pond and take a little drink, too. Enjoy a sunrise, it is good for the soul.

Fall Activity

2010-10-14T14:43:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we went to Hillsboro and enjoyed an evening dancing with the Droop Mountain Civil War Re-en-actors. Our friends, Les and Mary, were playing for the dance. A lot of the women were wearing hoop skirts and the men were in uniform. Out in the woods, playing the fiddle and dancing, it looked like back in the 19th Century. We enjoyed it.
The next day we bicycled a bit of the Greenbrier River Trail. We traveled about 10 miles north and ate lunch in Marlington and then turned it around and pedaled back. It is a very smooth trail and a beautiful river to ride next to. I hope to go back in May for the spring flowers.

Yesterday we went up in the mountains and picked cranberries in a high bog. It was a beautiful day with clear blue skies and temperature in the 70's. The colors were striking especially with the dark green of the spruce against the gold of the sugar maples. The bog was burgundy from the cranberries and the ground blackberries. with pale green of the sphagnum moss. We picked nine gallons of cranberries and then stopped by Scott and Barbara's to pick up a food co-op order. Scott invited us to dinner and we had a wonderful time talking about the farms and life in general. Scott is a great chef and we thoroughly enjoyed the dinner.

A couple of days ago I went to Blue Rock and picked apples with some friends at Don Olson's farm. We picked several trees and with the four bushels I brought pressed out around 25 gallons of cider. Don has been grafting trees for a while and he had one branch of Ashmead's Kernel apple. I have a young tree here and have been waiting for a couple of years to taste them. It is a heirloom apple from England which is green and unassuming. It don't look like much. It is supposed to be a the greatest keeper apple and once January or February comes around it should be the best desert apple around. Fedco's description is "each bite is an intense aromatic sting of sharp and sweet, with hints of other indescribable but absolutely wonderful tastes and aftertastes." It makes great cider, too. So I cadged a ten pounds of the apple and put them in my root cellar.

Speaking of the cellar. I have a bathroom exhaust fan in there pulling cool air at night in but we still are at 55 degrees. I want to get it cooled off a bit more. We have three bushels of potatoes and probably that many onions and apples, too. We have about 8 gallons of garlic (and we need to start planting them). I just added two cases of hard cider in wine bottles and a case in beer bottles. Let's hope the cider tastes good some day. It should be ready in February. I can have a glass and eat an Ashmead's Kernel.

More about Cider

2010-10-08T06:26:00.000-07:00

We had some more apples in the garage, about 10 bushels, and sitting out in front is the cider mill. So Thursday John came over and we started grinding them up. We made a gallon for John, a gallon for a neighbor who had provided some apples and four more for the freezer. Some of the apples were wild apples from Kelly Mountain and they are bitter little things. The cider from them will go into more hard cider and then some converted into vinegar.
Cider must have an alcohol content of at least 6% in order to keep. If it is too little other organisms have a chance to grow and make off flavors. It is easy to figure out what will happen if you have a hydrometer. This gives one the specific gravity of the liquid. Water has a specific gravity of 1.000. Yeast turns sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. If we know the amount of sugar in the cider we can estimate the alcohol content once the yeast is done. So before we pitch the yeast into the cider drop the hydrometer into the cider and take a reading. A specific gravity of 1.050 will result in cider with 6% alcohol. To increase the percentage of alcohol 1% we would have to add about 2.25 ounces of sugar per gallon to a specific gravity of 1.065. To get to wine strength of around 12% we need a specific gravity of 1.090.
Adding sugar to the cider is OK because the sugar does convert to fructose when in the presence the acids in the cider. Honey can be used instead of sugar (2.25 oz. sugar to 3 oz. honey).

All this figuring needs to be done before the yeast starts its work. Once the yeast starts converting the sugar we will not have any idea of where the alcohol content will end up. The sugar will all be converted once the specific gravity is back to 1.000.

Cider is naturally a little cloudy because of the pectin in the apples and we can clarify it with an enzyme. I am not doing that this year since it is the first year we have tried this we are trying to keep it simple. Yes, the simple life ain't so simple.

The alcohol can change into vinegar about 1% per month. We want 6% vinegar so I have made some 6% alcohol cider and in about 6 months we will have vinegar. This will be made in another area away from the hard cider so we don't contaminate the hard cider area.

Next spring we will get the results of all the trials.

Beautiful Day and a Little Fun

2010-10-01T09:10:00.000-07:00

We had the most beautiful light one evening and took a few pictures of the gardens. Here is one with the gardener extraordinaire.

Our mailbox post had rotted out at the base and we replaced it with a leg. This is a little concrete sculpture by the writer.

We harvested some shitake mushrooms the other day and are drying them on a screen. We are cracking hickory nuts, shelling black turtle beans and drying corn for cornmeal. Our gardens are still going great guns and we have lettuce, beans, tomatoes, peppers, kale, chard, herbs, and sweet corn growing.

A broody hen has 4 duck eggs under her. Boy, will she be surprised when they start swimming. They are due around the 18th.

We finally have been getting rain again. We had 3 inches over the last week. My dad had over 7 inches yesterday in North Carolina. The pond springs are running now! They are wet weather springs.

Enjoy the cool fall weather.

Yellow Jackets and Concrete

2010-09-28T07:33:00.000-07:00

Framing up the pour behind the garage.

We poured a bit of concrete this week. I had stacked some large flat rocks I found in our garden over near the greenhouse with the plan to lay them out as a patio. As I ruminated on the relative weight between the rocks and me it left me daunted. These puppies weighed in at 3 to 5 hundred pounds and I hadn't reached 15 stone yet ( stone is an old English weight equal to 14 pounds).
So we ordered up three and a half yards of concrete from the plant in Philippi which arrived about 10:00 AM on Thursday morning. Buck came over and helped with the pour and in a couple of hours we had two new outdoor floors. We poured a larger back porch floor behind the garage and the patio in front of the greenhouse.

This time of year the yellow jackets nests have built up to hundreds of bees and they are on the prowl for sweet things.. I have been making cider and that is a very good attractant for them. So I have two reasons to destroy the nests when I find them (the other being the nasty sting). I try not to use poisons on our farm and have happened on an easy and effective way to solve the problem. I found a large nest in the ground near the root cellar on Sunday while I was weed whacking. Fortunately I did not get stung but I noticed the cloud of bees hovering over the ground behind me and got away with alacrity.

The dish over the the yellow jackets.

The next day I took a glass casserole dish and plopped it over the hole which was about an inch in diameter. Then I took a bunch of grass clippings and put them around the edge of the dish to keep light from seeping in under the edge. The bees try to get out by going toward the light and only toward the light so they spent the day bouncing their heads against the glass roof. The ones left outside the nest spent the day hovering around the outside but did not think to dig their way in. Now one might wonder if this operation is dangerous. It is not because the bees are quite simple minded and do not worry about an old farmer walking by the nest as long as he doesn't step on it they leave him alone. Once the glass is on the hole the ones inside are safe and the ones outside are not upset with the farmer but just trying to fly on home. So it looks way more dangerous than it really is. On a sunny day they are dead by evening but a cool rainy day extends their lives a bit more.

Using the antique cider press

We made another six gallons of cider yesterday. I picked some trees on Talbott Rd. and then ground them up with the last four bushels of Smokehouse and Winesap apples from our trees. We put most of them in the freezer for the winter.

We grew black turtle beans this year and dried them on the fence. Then took the beans up to the attic on an old sheet to finsih drying. We will sit in front of the fire and shell them soon. We had a gallon and a half of the Jacob's cattle beans packed away already.

Beans drying on the fence.

Coyotes

2010-09-24T05:44:00.000-07:00

I was driving home after looking at some lumber in town and a half mile from the house a coyote sauntered across the road. I slowed and a second one crossed just in front of my car. They dropped over the edge of the road and into a deep valley roughly wooded and continued down to the creek. They were tall, thin, with beautiful thick fur and a black tip on the brushy tail. They reminded me of wolves so much and I thought about what dangerous chicken predators they obviously are.

We have a small dog that takes care of the farm. Baxter has protected the chickens for three and a half years here and defended our gardens from ground hogs, to boot. However, he is just 16 pounds and snackin' size for those two coyotes. So far so good and we hope he keeps on guarding the farm into his old age. He is 13 now, in great shape, and I expect he will live another 5 or 6 years easy.

Have a good weekend.

Apples for Cider

2010-09-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

The apples seem early this year and are falling out of our trees so I pulled the cider press out of storage and put it in the driveway in front of the garage. I ran the hose water through it and cleaned it up as best as I could. We spent some time picking apples and putting them in five gallon buckets from the tree between the garages, the smokehouse apple tree and the winesap. We saved out the perfect apples for storage and put them in the root cellar.

I washed them and cut them in half to look for rotten spots. We had about four 5 gallon buckets when I was done and I put them through the grinder. This old grinder crushes them into 50 cent pieces and we filled the basket to the top. We have a double thick poplar wood round to put on top of the basket and then the press pushes down on that. I use a six foot 2X4 to turn the screw on the press. After a dozen turns the juice pours out and into a pitcher. I keep turning until the lever moves the whole press instead of turning the screw. We pulled six half gallons from those apples.
I took a quart of cider and added champagne yeast to it. It frothed up in a short time and I will use it to start a batch of hard cider. We want to make a few bottles of cider and two gallons of cider vinegar. The vinegar takes several months to make but the cider can be bottled in a month. Then the cider will have to rest for 4 more months before it is drinkable.
Real cider vinegar is very healthy for the body. We are looking forward to having our own.

We have been picking up drops and sending them to the eight acre field for the deer for a month. I bet we have put out five bushels and there is another five bushels on the ground. So I picked the tree and came up with 10 bushels of fruit which I put into the garage to ripen a bit.

Last week Dave House came over and we went out to the highway and picked two bushels off a wild apple tree and then stopped at an abandoned farm and picked another two off the planted trees. One tree was red delicious (and not very productive) and the others we could not name. We took these apples and ran them through our old apple cider press. It has an old clanking hand grinder that we took turns on. We pressed seven gallons of cider and put five in a glass carboy to turn to hard cider. We can then make some into cider vinegar for cooking.

Hard cider was the national drink back in the colonial days. The story of Johnny Appleseed was about growing apples for cider making. Cider was safe to drink whereas the water was soon fouled by cattle and other unclean practices of the early settlers. The only way to keep cider was to let it go hard since there was no canning or refrigeration back in the day. We enjoy a glass of wine at dinner but this area is not conducive to wine grapes so we are trying to make cider as a substitute.

Yesterday I made four gallons of cider and put it in the refrigerator until I have enough for another batch.

The ducks have been a great addition to the fowl yard. We have two white ducks our neighbor foisted off on us. They live with the chickens and quack to warn them if I ever approach. We have a small black plastic tray we fill with water for them. It is for making a small batch of concrete and about 24” X 32” and 5” deep. We fill it from the rainwater tank in the morning and the ducks stand and wait excitedly. Then they come over and drink noisily a bit, squirting water between their bills, before climbing awkwardly in. Then its bath time and one will sinuously put its head under and lift water over its back and water does run off a duck’s back quickly. The duck will be wiggling all thrilled and excited then climb out and run wildly in circles shaking and shimmying. Yesterday the drake climbed on the hen while she was in the little black tub and they had a little hanky panky. This means the hen lifts her tail and the drake lowers his around her tail, he all excited and shaking. Suddenly he lost his balance and rolled off and upside down and out over the edge of the tub and landed on his back in the grass. Ahh, love is a many splendored thing.

The little pond in the chicken yard, the minnow pond is down about half way and begging for rain. I hope we can keep more water in it next year. The large pond is holding water well but it is down about 18 inches, too. We are still losing a fish now and then, we find one floating on the surface every week or so. Early on we lost quite a few until I threw a 50 pound block of salt into the pond and the fish got healthy.

We dug potatoes and they were big! The best potatoes we had ever grown. I had put compost on the rows after I planted and that was a good thing. We will sell a bunch at the market and we have four bushels for us in the root cellar. Those will be to eat and to plant next year.

We pulled the two double rows of dry beans last week and dried them on a fence. We have Jacob’s cattle beans, a white and red speckled bean, and a black turtle bean. We will spend some time shelling them in front of the fire some cool evening.

We bought new bicycles this month so we can get some exercise. These are crank forward bicycles and are a more relaxed bike to ride. The seat is very low so we can put feet down without standing on tippy-toe. There is no pressure on my wrists and we don’t have to crank our necks back to see since we sit upright. The seat is generous, too. These are Rans Fusion bicycles. We have been riding several times a week since we got them on the rail trail from Elkins to Parsons.

A very pretty ride.
Fall is almost here, I hope you can get out and ride the trails.

Good Bread

2010-08-27T05:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we ground up a couple of pounds of the wheat and baked bread from our home grown wheat and it was good. There was some wild onion seeds in the crop and we could smell garlic as we ground it but we did not notice it in the baked bread. I think the wild onion came with original seed since there were no onions in the field I planted. That seed looks just like a wheat berry.

The bread is very good. It is tasty and chewy like a good loaf of homemade whole wheat bread. A success!

THE HAZELNUT HARVEST:

Yep, that's all of them. I am going to have to improve and there is plenty of room for improvement here.

Have a great day.

Pancakes for Breakfast

2010-08-25T06:41:00.000-07:00

Cart full of wheat.Joel threshing with the pipe.

We started threshing the wheat on Monday around noon. Joel, the baker, and I moved the sheaves from the cellar house to the garage where I had hung a plastic sheet curtain to contain the flying wheat berries. We took one sheaf and divided it in half laying the heads of the wheat together with the straw sticking out towards the two sides of the room. I had made a short flail from a stout cherry tomato stake and we tried that unsuccessfully. Then we took a seven foot long black plastic water pipe and started beating the wheat as it lay. This broke the heads loose and chaff was piling up. We spent about four hours laying the pipe down on the concrete floor and carrying the spent straw out to the chicken yard. The chickens, ducks and turkeys loved it and spent the whole afternoon frolicking in the straw.

Winnowing with a fan.

We ended up with a pile of chaff and wheat about four feet wide and two feet tall. I winnowed out a pound to make pancakes.

Yesterday I built three nesting screens with three different sized hardware cloth: 1/2 inch, 1/4 inch and 1/8 inch. I sifted some of the chaff and then put the stuff that would not go through the screens into a feed sack to beat on again.

Breakfast today was hickory nut pancakes, sliced fresh peaches, Blue Rock Organic maple syrup, butter, and coffee. Cindy made the pancakes from our eggs, hickory nuts and wheat.

Pancake Recipe for Two:
2 eggs
1 1/4 whole wheat flour
1 1/4 milk
1 tsp oil
pinch of salt
2 tsp baking powder
Handful of hickory nuts

Beat the egg whites stiff in one bowl.
In a larger bowl mix egg yolks, oil and salt and one cup of the milk.
Stir in the flour and baking powder.
Add enough milk to make a thick batter.
Fold in the egg whites.

Ladle in a pancake on the grill and add hickory nut halves to the pancake.

Our friends up at Blue Rock, WV make maple syrup every winter and we enjoy their syrup. bluerockstudio@hotmail.com or 304-335 8239

So we sat in the sunroom and enjoyed the breakfast looking over the garden. The corner post has a bluebird house that fledged out three families this year. A Grandpa Ott's morning glory is curling up the post and we watched a hummingbird visit each bloom. A Carolina wren was sitting on the post and flitting into the grapevine occasionally. Two mourning doves were working their way across the lawn following the trail of wheat stems lost when we moved them to the garage. Then a group of phoebes arrived and sat on the fence bobbing their tails before flying off after a bug or two. The sunflower there is nodding its' heads attacting goldfinches and we are sipping coffee and marveling at the life and activity this cool cloudy morning on the farm.

Live, love and laugh.

Foggy morning in August

2010-08-20T17:43:00.000-07:00

Another beautiful morning with the dew heavy on the grass.

Late in August 2010

2010-08-18T09:02:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago we finally took the eggs from the turkey that was setting on them. She looked confused for a day then she joined the other turkeys and started eating, a lot. The hens fly in and out of the chicken yard but poor old Mr. T, the gobbler, has not figured it out. He struts all day in the fence and looks longingly at the hens strolling the grounds.
The eggs under the hen turkey were not fertile but since then Mr. T has done his job and done it every morning since. We also have two young toms learning to strut and display. Today one did his first gobble, a pathetic gobble, but a gobble nonetheless. Mr. T answered, distressed with the young upstart, and pushed his inflated self right into the young gobbler. You are still king, Mr. T.

We have been picking red raspberries and black berries every other day or so and putting them in the freezer until we have time to make jams and jellies. Sunday we were out in the ticket of blackberries and I stepped on a gray rock amidst the canes and it moved under my foot. Yow! Then it hissed! I had put my foot square on the back of the slate turkey hen. She was setting on eggs and had hidden herself very well. Later that day she came out and had lunch so I ran down to look in the nest. The hens had been laying and the nest was full.

We have enjoyed the Augusta Heritage Festival over the five weeks. We had season tickets to the concerts and made it to most of them. Tom and Kathy took advanced Irish fiddle and Irish step dancing one week and stayed at our house. The last week, Old Time Music, we had six people staying over one day or another. Mike took standup bass and I took a mini class in it, too.

We took a trip to Clifftop and played with Mary Gordon and friends under the canopy. We have been listening to her CD and learning a few of the tunes. I played at festival speed on Snake River Reel and Shoe Fly. It was great and the food was, too.

We are starting to pick apples today in the rain.
Enjoy your day and keep in touch.

August Begins

2010-08-06T17:59:00.000-07:00

We are hauling in tomatoes by the bucket this week. We have so many to can that it is daunting. We will be using the weekend to can chopped tomatoes and sauce made with garlic, onions and peppers.

I try to get into the bee hives every week or so. So I checked them today after picking all the veggies for the market tomorrow. The small hive was cooking along great and I added the super I had just emptied of honey last week. This should give them some room to work in and maybe they will fill it with honey. Our large hive lost its queen and they are not happy about it. So don't walk in front of that hive. It takes a new queen about two weeks to start laying and it has been three. All the larva in the hive have hatched and the hive is loaded with bees but there are no new ones coming. The queen makes a pheromone that all the bees smell and it calms them down. They are a bit agitated when Mom is missing. I will try to get a queen to replace her tomorrow. It is really frustrating to lose a queen in the middle of the summer. It means the death of the hive if I can't find a queen.
We had a queen in there and we saw her; a sweet little virgin queen, and she must have gotten eaten on her maiden flight by some passing bird.
I never saw the bees swarm and fly off into the woods. The hives are out of sight of the house and we just can't sit around looking at them. So I set up an empty hive near the two hives and maybe, if we have another swarm, they will find it and go right in. Righto.

The large pond is holding water and we had 2 inches of rain this week which topped it off. The small pond is down about 18 inches and holding there. I suspect that might be where it holds. We do not expect rain for a week now and after 2 inches we should be fine.

I tilled the basketball garden and am going to plant diakon radishes in it this weekend. They grow 2 feet long and I want them to break into the clay below the topsoil. We need that clay broken up so plants can get deeper roots and do better in the dry times. The radish root will stay in the soil, I will till the top off and leave the root penetrating the clay. Later the root will rot and leave a void that will fill with the top soil and provide a pathway for less agressive roots. Ahh, the simple life. It ain't so simple.

The End of July 2010

2010-08-01T18:42:00.000-07:00

The end of a hot month and the tomatoes are big. This is a Hillbilly tomato and it tends to split before it ripens. It is tasty however we can't sell it. We have been selling tomatoes are $3.00 a pound and this would earn us $5.50. So it goes. We make a BLT with it and it was good.

We pulled honey from one hive today. I still do not have all the tools of a beekeeper so this is what I did. I just wear long pants and a long sleeve shirt then I put on gloves and a head net. I filled the smoker with pieces of balers twine and lit it. I made a bunch of smoke and I walked over to the hive and pried loose the top and the first super. (a super is about 5 inches tall and holds 10 frames of honey) The smoker went out then and the bees were flying around my head so I stepped back and stuffed some more twine in the smoker and lit it again. With a puff of smoke the bees slowed down and did not have the angry whir of wings that kind of freaks me out. I feel pretty darn safe in the head net but an angry bee makes me stand up and notice (and 400 angry bees... well, you get my drift). So I pull the top super off and set it down off to the side of the hive. I use a hive tool, a small pry bar, to loosen the outside frame and pull it out. It is not even drawn out into comb; it is still mostly flat wax foundation that the bees will pull out into those nice little hexagon tubes. The next frame is heavy with honey. It is capped with beautiful white beeswax and covered with fifty or so bees on each side. I carry it back to the hive and use a brush to knock all the bees off. They hit the hive top that is laying on the ground like a handful of pebbles and come storming back at me. I ignore them and brush off the other side then walk away from the hive brushing off the rest of the bees. The swarm of bees that were flying around my head stay at the hive and I just walk out of them. I set the frame in another super and cover it with a screen top.

So then I just continue pulling frames, restarting the smoker and brushing off bees. I collect 13 frames heavy with honey and capped. I do find several frames with uncapped honey and I leave them in the hive. That honey would go bad if we put it in a jar because it still has too much water in it. The bees will not cap it unless it has lost enough water so it will not ferment or support bacteria.

I carry the two supers over to the house and uncap each frame with a knife and put them in a centrifuge. This is powered by my drill and spins the honey out. I have to reverse the frames and spin it again (I also have to take frames out and uncap the other side that I forgot to uncap in the first place).
The centrifuge has a gate valve on the bottom and we pour the honey into quart canning jars. The honey is very light and clear in several frames and then very dark in the bottom of one frame. The rest have a light amber color. We think the very light color is white clover. I divide the honey into light, which I bottle first and then the darker. We end up with a little more than 11 quarts.
Then I hose out the pans and centrifuge. Baxter cleans up all the honey on the floor and I wipe down the table and the floor. I wipe off all the jars and we have honey for the winter. The bees have two hive boxes each about half full of honey. That would be about 50 pounds for them and we got 35 pounds for us. I hope we get to pull some more in the fall.

Have a sweet day,
David

Another Day

2010-07-18T17:13:00.000-07:00

We woke up this morning to rain and cool weather. We set up the canopy, put out a work table and caught eight chickens. We put them in their next home: the refridgerator. It took about 2 hours. Cindy packed them up and I cleaned up the yard. We buried the evisera in the compost pile.

After that we took all the recycling to the center in Buckhannon. We also went through our closets and took some clothes and shoes to Goodwill. Then restocked the closets with a few purchases at Goodwill. I guess we will never learn. I got two nice short sleeve shirts to work in the gardens with.

We picked mushrooms and got quite a lot off the four or five logs we can soak at a time. Here are few logs that fruited and some that did not. They are shitake mushrooms and delicious to eat. We dry them and eat them all year around by soaking them in boiling water and adding them to sauces and casserols.

Here is Cindy carrying in a basket of the mushrooms.

We then planted a flat of lettuce and put an inch of compost on it. Dinner was chicken wings, papaya plum squash with onion and a salad with lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers. I hope you have a wonderful week.

Bee News

2010-07-17T17:07:00.000-07:00

We hosted the Barbour County Beekeepers Club for lunch today. It was a potluck lunch and the tables were piled high with all kinds of foods and desserts. The rain started just as the first person arrived, Joyce, the club president. So we quickly moved inside and all 25 or so of us ate and talked through the noon hour. After we could eat no more I called us out to the bee yard.
We have two hives and Janet, the bee expert of the club, took over and we started to open the hives. I had bought a Nuc from her in mid-June and she wanted to see how it was doing. The Nuc, from nucleus, is four frames of comb, two full of brood and two with honey, and a queen. My hive now consists of a hive body and thin super. The hive body is about 8 inches deep and holds 10 frames of comb. The super is about 5 inches tall and again holds 10 frames of comb. We opened the super and about half the combs were drawn out and the other half was flat foundation wax that needed to be drawn out into those little hexagonal chambers for the honey. Then we set that aside and looked at the hive body. Again about half the comb was drawn out and Janet said I had put the super on too early. If I had waited until all the comb was drawn out before adding the super it would be better. Nevertheless the hive looked strong and their were eggs and larva in the comb, so the queen was laying good and the hive had a good chance of making it through the winter. We might be able to take honey off the hive this summer if they keep going like they are.
We then opened the older hive. It consists of two hive bodies and three supers. The top super was just added a week ago and they were drawing out comb there. The next super was full of capped honey, about 35 pounds of it. A quart weighs three pounds. The last super was about half full of honey. I had moved four full frames out of it and into the top super a week ago, putting empty frames into the middle of it.

When we got into the hive body we found queen cells! Queen cells are larger than worker bee cells and hang vertically instead of horizontal. This means that the hive is getting ready to swarm which is not a good thing. A swarm takes the queen and worker bees away and there goes the production. So we worked our way through the frames and there were no eggs or young larva. This meant the swarm already left with our queen and the hive did not have a queen to lay eggs. Ouch!

We decided to move two frames with queen cells into a Nuc to start a new hive. A queen would hatch and then go around a kill all the other queens. Then she would have a mating flight and get to work laying eggs. We looked over the frames and, low and behold, there was a virgin queen walking around on it. (A virgin queen is skinnier than a mated one.) We put her back into the original hive and moved the Nuc away. A Nuc box holds five frames and I was unprepared and did not have any extra frames.

We reassembled the original hive with the virgin queen, who could go about the business of killing her rivals, and left them alone. She will go on a mating flight and hopefully mate, in midair, with 10 to 20 drones. This will fertilizer her enough to lay eggs of two or three years.

We had a meeting and everyone dispersed.

I called Doug, another beekeeper, and went to his house to add foundation to five frames so I could fill in the Nuc and the Hive. He was very helpful explaining how to avoid a swarm and that I needed to keep extra foundation, hive bodies and my wits about me.

I hope you can keep your wits about you, too.

Return to the Farm and Cutting the Wheat

2010-07-07T18:45:00.000-07:00

We returned yesterday from DC where we interned Cindy's Mom. She lived to be 83 and all six of her children and all 15 of her grandchildren attended. She will be missed.

Unfortunately we were rear ended on the highway on our way to the cemetery. Our bumper was bent and we were shook up. We also were pushed into Cindy's sister's car and scratched it. Later as we were driving home the alert for low tire pressure light lit up. We were going 65 and having a flat at that speed is scary. We pulled over and all the tires were fine. I guess the accident damaged the sensor.

Here is Alain messing around with the scythe and wheat.

We had several women friends over for a lunch today and two husbands came along. Cindy and her friends celebrated and after the men ate we went out and started cutting the wheat.

Michael showing us how high he can go.

It was really interesting to me to scythe the wheat, an old technique that still works. We sharpened the long grain blade with a sanding disc. Then I touched it up with a stone. The grain cradle was broken when I bought it at a garage sale a year ago. I had replaced the broken pieces with thin birch dowel rods. As we scythed down the wheat the dowel rods broke and the cradle came apart. It worked well when it was together giving us a sheaf of grain all laid out on the cradle. But then what to do with it. I set down the scythe and picked up the grain. That did not seem right.

Michael was with us and he had watched farmers do this years ago. So he gave it a try and dumped the grain out at the end of the swing. He made a windrow of the wheat behind him that we could gather up with our hands. That worked better and we tried that until the cradle came apart.

We laid the grain on the ground on top of a piece of string. We pulled it tight and tied up a bundle. After a while we had 8 bundles and we went in for a glass of water. It was thirsty work.

Meanwhile, back in the land of turkeys, we lost two more. It seems they got sick and expired. We put them on copper sulphate water for the rest of the week. Turkeys are very difficult to raise and it just feels bad to lose one after another. I hope we end up with two for Thanksgiving.

Have a great summer and send us some rain.

July 4th Celebration of the Free

2010-07-04T12:58:00.000-07:00

It is the 4th and I am doing what I want to do in a country that allows me so much freedom. Let's all keep it this way.

Our wheat is dry in the field and we are about to cut it and then dry it some more in the barn or shed. I sharpened the blade on the scythe and did a few practice cuts in the field and made up a sheaf of wheat. I immediately understood what the gleaners did. The Gleaners is an painting by Jean-François Millet done in 1857. It shows a three women picking up stray heads of grain in a field. Once I had cut a few swaths and picked up the straw I found quite a few heads of grain had fallen off the straw and lay in the field. One could do pretty good gleaning after me.

The grain will be cut this week and we will then have to figure out how to get it into the kitchen and make some bread. It is pretty amazing that we are doing something that was done around here when my father was a youngster. At that time there were more tools around to do the work so we have to go way back in history to thresh the grain off the straw.

Hay and straw are two different things. Straw is the stalk of a grain and all the life is out of that stalk. THe stalks are hollow and a pretty tan color. The plant is done and has put all its energy into the grain on the top of the stalk. Hay usually grass leaves. It is green when you cut it and the energy of the plant is in those leaves. We dry the grass and keep it for winter to feed a cow or a horse (we have neither). We use hay to mulch the gardens and that puts a lot of energy back into the ground.

We had Cindy's brother and his wife and four boys visiting us last week. We had a great time with Sam, Tom, John and Michael. They are fun guys and between the ages of 6 and 13. We took rides in the trailer pulled by the old John Deere. We built bird houses and we picked cucumbers. Unfortunately, Cindy's Mom passed on and we had to all leave for Maryland to attend the funeral. Ken's family wants to come again for another week next year and do all the things we missed out on this year.These boys are watching their Dad cut the hay field with the 1954 John Deere Model M Utility tractor.

He looks pretty cool there.

We are raising some turkeys for Thanksgiving and have invited all of Cindy's siblings to attend. She has three sisters and two brothers. With the children it will turn into a large gathering. We have 4 young turkeys growing right now. We are down from ten! They are hard to keep going. Sometimes the hens step on the young ones and that's it! Right now we are having a hard time keeping them penned up. I wish I had never named him Houdini.

We have two ducks, white ducks, given to us from across the street. We love to watch them stick their heads in the water and splash it with their bills. We put them into the pond and it scared them to no end. Out they paddled as fast as they could go and ran up the hill giving me angry looks over their shoulders. How dare I throw them into the pond? So far they keep as far away from that big water as they can! I fanally gave them a small pool to wade in about 3 feet across. They like it and shake their tail feathers in it many times during the day.

We have been harvesting lots of shitake mushrooms and drying them on the drying rack I built last winter. We have about a gallon of them now. We grow them on white oak logs that we soak in rain water several times through the summer. They fruit a week after we soak them.

Well, back to the garden work. Take care and keep in touch.

What to do?

2010-06-21T15:26:00.000-07:00

Reagan became president and lowered taxes for the rich and raised spending for the military. This resulted in an increase of debt for the country from 995 billion to 2.87 trillion dollars. This change created a lot of change for the vast majority of people in the USA, but it increased the wealth of the very wealthy by a lot. The top 1% in the world owns 40% of the assests of the world! Before the ecomomic melt down they had slightly less than 80 trillion dollars but after it, after all the stockholders like you and me lost 30% of our wealth, they had more than 83 trillion dollars. It is like they siphoned off 3 trillion dollars out of someone's pocket. Whose pocket had less money, I ask.
George W. Bush increased tax cuts for the wealthy and increased military spending and his last year in office had a deficit of 1.4 trillion dollars- this is for a single year!
Reagan took office in 1981. Look at what happened to the USA- it went from a creditor nation to a debtor nation:

So that change made it harder for the regular person and small business to borrow money and encouraged business to move to a country that had the money to support the move (Asia Countries).

Check out when people went into debt:

Coincidence?

Our debt happened when the money (a limited resource) moved toward the top 10%.

Notice the years the money was in the hands of the wealthy: before the Depression and Now. The years of the 50's until the 80's was the years the Middle Class grew and became the strong force it was. Now the middle class is diminishing and its power has moved.

So if we simply change the tax rates to pre-Reagan levels and lower military spending, as well, we would solve the deficit problem and make the people of the United States much more wealthy.
So why is this not done? We have to ask our Congress. We can ask the commentators on Fox and other conservative medias. They are against supporting the people of our fine country and for supporting the very wealthy.
We the people need to restore the balance of the tax rate so that the majority of people are supported by it. Yes, the tax rate can support the middle class. Ask your Congress people to do the right thing.

The First Day of Summer

2010-06-21T04:29:00.000-07:00

It is a cool and bright morning with promises of heat. We have all the blinds on the east side of the house closed against the rays of the sun. Outside the birds are singing their springtime songs not knowing it is now truly summer. Seeds in the garden know. The rows of beans sprang from the ground in a flurry of growth, loving the heat of the rich earth that surrounded them. The tomatoes are lusting for the sky and growing 4 inches a day sending out all together too many side shoots in the effort. However, the brocolli and endive are wilting in the heat, they love those cool spring days.

A cutting garden full of Bachelor Buttons and Larkspur.

Cindy is cutting lavender flowers to dry. We will add them to soap.

Part of the main garden with Swiss chard, rubeckia, statis, peppers, beans and then grapevine.

I retired from Taylor County Schools after 30 years of interesting times. My students won several regional Solar Sprint Races in Pittsburgh PA, a solar powered model car race. I was the Teacher of the Year for Taylor County in 1994. I was a teaching fellow for ASME International for two years, a mechanical engineer society. I learned a lot and enjoyed the students the most of all.

June and Summer Coming

2010-06-07T11:53:00.000-07:00

Oh, the pain, the pain! Our little pond has lost 6 inches of water in a week. I bet it has a leak and it will be hard to plug. How would one find a hole in a clay bottom? We will just wait for August and September, the driest month, and see what is left.

My plan is to hire a couple of pigs, fence them in the pond and let them tromp the clay up. If they get it all worked into a real gloppy mess it may hold water better. The other plan would be to buy bags of clay that are used to clog up ponds.
Mostly we just have to wait and see.
The large pond is full and holding water just fine...so far.

We are growing some strawberries and a few are rather large. We made two cases of jam and several pints of frozen strawberries and then went to market and sold them for $2.00 a pint. We could have sold more.

We sold flowers at the market and then came home and made bouquets for several rooms in the house. This one is margarites, daisies, feverfew and bachelor buttons. Sunday we hosted the Elkins Community Brunch during rain storms and a tornado warning. We mostly stayed inside and ate but ventured out between showers to tour the gardens. It was a wonderful afternoon and Michael and Carrie Kline sat down in the living room and played for two hours to my delight. The house was crowded with about 30 people eating, talking and listening. We marveled at the number of songs they knew all the words to and Michael's guitar picking was great.

We made cheese and strawberry crepes.

Carrie and Michael Kline

Oscar shows off his moves on the dance floor.

Have a great day and keep in touch.

June 1, 2010

2010-06-01T06:22:00.000-07:00

The bounty of the gardens is amazing. We picked a lot of strawberries last evening and 2 pecks of shell peas. We will have enought for the winter.

Cindy's flower garden is amazing right now. It is full of pinks of all kinds and colored from white to a deep pink, almost red. The poppies are extraordinary.

Here is a poppy picture that does not do it justice.

We have two hens setting again. We are trying to have the hens do all the heavy lifting of raising the chicks and keeping them warm. So far we have 15 chicks raised successfully. We lost one yesterday that had escaped the chicken tractor and suddenly did not look well. She just died. I wonder if she hurt herself crawling out under the fence.

We put 8 eggs under each hen and they are happily zoned out in the small chicken tractors waiting the 21 days it takes to hatch.

Turkeys are hard to keep alive it seems. We had 7 hatch under the two hens and we have lost 3 so far. They just start looking slow and uncertain and then the next day they are gone. We hope we can raise enough for Thanksgiving.

The ponds are full and are beautiful to see. The big pond has most of the fish in it and we see them swimming by. The grass is growing on the dam and covering up the scars. We have heard frogs around the edges. The small pond has 1500 minnows in it and we have been seeing a few dead ones in the mornings. We counted 12 one day and 20 the day before. I hope we can keep them alive. I put rock piles in 2 feet of water for the minnows to lay eggs in. They need to be upside down under a rock to lay eggs.

I am having trouble keeping up with the mowing especially through the blueberry bushes. We have so much going on with planting right now that the mowing has to wait. It is knee high right now and it rained last night.

We planted squash and melons yesterday. I finished planting potatoes late last week. I put compost onto the peppers yesterday also. We are trying to get an inch of compost on everything this year.

We are hosting the Elkins Community Brunch next Sunday and want to have the flower gardens beautiful for it. I guess the flowers will do the beauty part for us. Take care, keep in touch and smile.

About the Day

2010-05-27T09:15:00.000-07:00

Spring time flowers are blooming in front of the house. We have daisies, peonies, Autumn Sunset rose, jackmani clematis in this photo.

Here are some fathead minnows being loosed into the small pond. They will eat the mosquito larva and provide bait for the rare trip out to fish. We bought fish from Rainbow Head Farms near Clarksburg WV. http://www.rainbowheadfarms.com/

Here is what we bought and the prices of the different fish:

#    name    size    each      total
80 Bluegill 2-3”     .60        48.00
20 Bluegill 5-7      1.80       36.00
15 cats 6-8          1.00        15.00
20 bass 4-5          1.75        35.00
3# minnows         13.00        39.00

Subtotal                              173.00
6 large plastic bags                18.00
2 small platic bags                   4.00
total cost                              195.00

The owner is Mike Nardella at 304 783 5025. He is a nice guy and very knowledgeable. I wanted the fish to spawn this year if possible and he said the larger bluegills will this summer.
The fathead minnows will spawn 3 or 4 times this year if we provide the right circumstances. They breed upside down on the bottom of rocks. Who would have thought. I will place several piles of rocks in 3 feet of water around the edge of the pond. They need to be about 10 feet apart so the fish do not have conflicts over territory.

Cindy moved the fish around in this cart. We had the bags of fish in coolers.

Last night we walked down to the pond and through in a little fish food. The minnows came right up and bumped the pellets around the surface. I had mowed a bit around the pond earlier and saw a tan colored frog with a dark thin streak down his side from the eye to the tail. We stood at the side of the pond and saw a water bug, the kind that swims with oars, row by. Then a water spider, standing on his dimples, scoot over the surface.
As we waited quietly the tree frogs started to call and then surprise, another frog song on the far side of the pond. The lower croak identified it as a leopard frog, a true pond frog, one that lives in water year round. How it got here in the three weeks the pond has been in existence is all about the wonder of nature. He must have been hopping cross country and happened upon this big empty pond and then decided to take up residence. We are so fortunate to be able to live on this small piece of the mountains and see what happens next.
As dusk descended darkening under the trees and giving the fields, fecund with grasses blooming, a brighter glow, we stood outside the house and listened to the evening cries of the Carolina wren and robin. Off in the bottom where we had sited the large pond Cindy heard it first, the deep throbbing call of the bullfrog. Another frog had found the pond by crossing through thicket and woods to this new opprotunity, this new water. We looked up at the full moon glowing behind a thin veil of clouds and called it a night.

I'm a-going fishin'

2010-05-24T09:48:00.000-07:00

The ponds are full and running over the overflow on the dam. I am just pleased as Punch. The paper had a small advertisement for fish to stock ponds and I called the company this morning. Mike, the owner, spent a little bit of time explaining how to stock the ponds. He has had his business for 15 years over near Clarksburg. They sell all kinds of fish and deliver them to local Southern States stores. Cindy will be picking them up Wednesday afternoon.

It is important to get the correct ratio of fish in the pond so it can stay productive and balanced between prey and predators. So we ordered 20 4" to 5" bass and 100 2"-3" bluegills. The ratio of 1 to 5 is the correct one. We also ordered 15 channel catfish. They can grow quite large and need to be fished out once they are in the 1.5 to 2 pound size. We will eat them. Mike said they do not reproduce in ponds very well. They need a dark place to breed like an undercut bank or hollow logs. However, I read that if we put clay pipes about 3 feet deep for them, they will breed in them. Guess what I will be doing?

I also ordered 3 pounds of fathead minnows, that's about 1500. These are a great bait fish for around here. We are putting some of them in the small pond without a predator. When I have time to fish I will scoop out a couple of dozen. The other half will go in the big pond with the bass. They will provide food for the main attractions.

We should be able to fish next year! The bluegills will be big enough to eat as two year olds. The bass will be returned to the pond to keep the bluegills in check. They say that a bass is worth more in the pond than on the plate.

The primary reason for the ponds is water for the blueberries but that is not the fun part of the ponds. The fun will be in the fishing.

Full!

2010-05-20T06:43:00.000-07:00

A smiling toad has dug himself into the seedlings for the morning nap.

Two weeks and this pond is full to the top! We are thrilled with it.
This is the middle sized pond.

This is the large pond and it needs another foot of water. The island has disappeared below the rising tide. I wonder if I will add height to it and have it show up again. Certainly this will not be on the top of the list.

We feel so fortunate to have these ponds.

We will plant turtle head around the edge, a native plant of the bogs.

Enjoy your day!

Mid-May and Turkeys Hatch

2010-05-17T07:19:00.000-07:00

Finally it is time to plant the main garden. Cindy has been growing plants since March and carefully watering them each day, often three times a day. We can hardly wait to have them all in the ground.

We are making raised beds in half the garden by digging a shallow path between the three foot wide beds. That is a bit of a grunt with the shovel. We left two beds for sweet potatoes and then filled two with onions and leeks. Next came three beds of tomatoes. They look so good and healthy now but will start blighting in mid summer as usual. These beds are 25 feet long. We have three beds of flowers and then three of peppers. That leaves four more beds to plant.

As we plant we are shoveling compost on top of the soil about an inch deep.

Cindy carrying pepper plants to the garden.

A picture of the garden beds in progress. It rained last night and watered all the transplants. We worked all day trying to get in as many plants as we could before the rain. Meanwhile, the ponds are filling up. Love the rain!

A picture from the upstairs of the main garden.

Meanwhile, back in turkey land, the turkeys hatched out seven poults (baby turkeys). They have been hatching for the last two days and Sunday they took their first walkabout with the pair of hens. (They left one poult struggling to get out of its egg and were not there to keep it warm, so we lost it.) The hens were so happy to get out and walk after 30 days sitting in nose to nose in the nest box. These two hens were snuggled up to each other day and night and now were sharing parenting duties.

The first order of business was dust baths. They found a nice tilled spot in the garden and wiggled into the dirt raising on wing at a time to get the vital wing pit area. Then they found a perfect spot under a pair of lilac bushes and made two nests within speaking distance. That's where we found them as dusk descended on the farm.

That would never do! We have predators around: the fox, the coyote and the raccoon. Each would love a poult or hen for their own youngens. We thought we could herd them to their box but when I walked up the gray hen raised her hackles and growled. Then she shot out from under the bush and attempted to flog me to death with her wings. Attempted flogging! So we tried poking them with a stick and the hens got up, but the sweet little balls of fluff were all sleepy and comfortable and would not walk off with the moms. Another attempted flogging had us backpedaling with alacrity.

We did have another worry that kept us at it. The weather report promised three days of rain and these little turks in training could not be outside tromping through the wet grass. It would chill the little guys and that would be the end of them.

I got out ye ole fishing net. When White came charging after me I simply scooped her up and deposited her in the big chicken tractor. This one is 5 feet by 10 feet and has a full roof; a nice dry and safe place to raise a brood.

When I scooped up Gray she flew right out of the net. I have never seen this before. The net usually prevents the birds from opening their wings. Since she just turned around and attacked me again, I scooped her up again and out she flew. What a magnificent pair of wings. They bird is a soft gray color with hints of purple in their very pale pattern. She has a four foot wing span and flies effortlessly.

The next time I put the net over her and held it to the ground and then grabbed her with my hands while Cindy held the net handle. We easily moved her to the cage.

While this is going on we have a cacophony of noise from the hens, the chickens, the gobbler, who is incensed, and the rapid peeping of the seven poults. The two turkey hens are growling and hissing and throwing themselves at us through the chicken wire cage. Poor girls. Cindy and I easily catch the poults and drop them in the cage. The hens call them to the far corner away from us and sit down beak to beak to discuss the outrages perpertrated on them this day.

Cindy and I repaired to dinner and a glass of chardonnay.

May all your days be interesting.

Painting and Chicks

2010-05-13T08:21:00.000-07:00

The two hens have eight chicks each. They have been living in the yard in their small chicken tractors but were starting to get into the gardens to scratch. Chickens can really tear up the mulch and small plants looking for bugs and they have been. So last night I moved the fence to around their homes and locked them into the chicken yard. Of course, the chicks are so small they can walk right through the fence and wander off without their frantic mothers. The calling of the mother hens keeps the chicks close to the chicken yard and out of the gardens.
So after a day in the chicken yard, in the evening I went to close up the doors to the tractors and something was amiss. Henny Penny, the famous mother hen, came out of the nest box and watched me close up. She never does this as she is setting on her chicks keeping them warm at night. So I opened the roof and looked in the box. This box is rather large, long and narrow, with the door in the middle. On one end was Red, the other hen with her 8 chicks, on the other were Henny Penny's 8 larger chicks. Henny was looking at me like I should fix it and throw the bums out. I let sleeping chicks lie.

We painted the white shed to match the cellar house. I figure we will be calling it the white shed for the next 25 years to the confusion of everyone else. We also have the Basketball Garden. No, we do not grow basketballs but there used to be a basketball hoop in the middle of it. So that is how we refer to it. I hope someday the parts of our farm will rename themselves.

The walkway through the greenhouse is finally done. We will eat breakfast on cool mornings in this wonderful spot. We feel so blessed to have this beautiful farm.

Filling Up

2010-05-12T16:52:00.000-07:00

This is the 3000 gallon water tank for the main garden. We are running the roof gutter into it and then we will plumb a shallow well pump into it. We had two shallow well pumps in the black shed when we bought the farm. One is being used for the other tank and provides water for the 100 blueberries and the hoop house. I plugged in the second one and it grunted but did not turn over. So I disassembled it and cleaned out all the rust and tried the motor. It now runs like a top. I built a shelf on the wall inside the cellar house and installed the pump. I need to run the plumbing into the tank and to a hose bib and run electricity to it with a switch to turn it off.

The ponds are happy it is raining. This is the small one below the chicken house. It needs about two more feet.

We grafted some apple trees this year and here is proof that they are growing. Can you see the black electrical tape half way up the stem and leaves above it. I will cut the tape off in a couple of weeks.

This is the big pond. The island is now surrounded by water. It needs about 4 more feet of water. I can't wait to see it full. We can't add fish until the water has some life to it. It needs plankton and algaes growing to feed the fish. I will add a couple of bales of hay to provide food for them.

We are not planting the gardens because they are too wet. It is such an interesting life on the farm.

A short note without pictures

2010-05-10T07:59:00.000-07:00

We had a busy weekend working on various projects. It was cold, windy and rainy Saturday and we worked on indoor projects. I started paving the center circle of the path through the greenhouse. We had laid brick on both ends and a concrete ramp into the garage last winter but I did not have the rocks for the center. We found some nice flat rocks a week ago. I soon ran out but I got half of it laid. Sunday I went out rock picking early in the morning and picked rocks while being serenaded by a wood thrush. The path is now done.
Sunday afternoon we painted the white shed to match the cellar house. I also hung a gutter on the cellar house and directed the water into a 3000 gallon tank. I will plumb it to a pump and we will be able to water the gardens. We moved the water tank into position with the backhoe last week.

Sunday night we had a hard frost so our evening was running around and covering as many plants as we could. We covered the grapes and it looked like billowing ghosts hanging around the arbors. We covered the strawberries and the potatoes. We could not cover the brlueberries nor the black raspberries which are flowering heavily.

In the morning there was a stiff frost in the grass. I will let you know how the farm faired.

The ponds are filling!

Big Changes

2010-05-05T10:57:00.000-07:00

We decided to put in a fish pond last week when my cousin got laid off from his job running heavy equipment. We had a nice swampy area in the bottom, a forest glade. George started digging and found a nice clay bottom to the swamp and in two days had the hole dug. There are three springs on the upper side trickling water into the pond and about 4 or 5 feet of water standing there now.

In this picture there is a little hill that will be an island someday. The backhoe is piling brush and stumps to burn later.

There is a little water in the bottom of this!

Here is the spot we are putting a small pond below the blueberries.

This is why we need all that water. We have lots to water and a very poor well. I will be able to pump water out of the pond and into the holding tank for the blueberries and gardens.

I hope you are all enjoying this beautiful spring. We have apples on the the apple trees and if it doesn't frost hard we will have a good harvest in the fall. I want to make apple cider!

Meanwhile, Hanny Penny is taking care of her chicks. This early morning she was sitting in the wet grass and the chicks were taking turns standing on her back to get their feet dry. One is sitting in the doghouse which is doing double duty as a nest box. Henny has hatched a lot of chicks for us over the last 5 years. She is one tough lady.

Take care and wish us luck with the ponds.

Happy Mr. T

2010-04-29T11:15:00.000-07:00

The turkey hens got up and decided to take a walk today. They have been sitting on eggs for a couple of weeks and are expected to stay ont he nest for 28 days. The pair of them have been sitting practically on top of each other in a little house between the sheds. It gave us an opprotunity to count the eggs! There are 17. When we last counted there was 8. We added several we had saved out and I guess they layed a few extras after they started setting. Mr. T, the gobbler, has been fenced away from the little house and has been marching back and forth all day long until he rubbed all the beautiful feathers off his chest against the wire. Of course, if he had been allowed to get to the hens they would not be able to set. When the hens came out to take a walk, Mr. T became all excited but for naught. They soon went back to set some more.

We had another frosty morning. It was 30 degrees and there was a little frost on the windshield. It was certainly warmer than yesterday. Cindy pulled the row cover off the strawberries (it will be in the 40's tonight) and looked at the bloom. It looks ok! We will find out in a couple of days for sure but we are hopeful. The apples have not been covered and had to take the frost on their own. It is ok because they can take several hours of freezing temperatures before they damage. Also, there will be some loss- some blooms will freeze off- and that will thin the number of apples maybe to a good number for the tree.

We forgot to lock the chicken door last night but we did not lose any chickens. What luck!

Have a great day and be lucky, if you can.

Frosty Morning

2010-04-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

Oh, we worried that the frost would come. Out last frost date is May 20th and we are not even in May but all the fruit trees are in full flower or already made fruit (really tiny beginnings of frut). Our plums have fruit for the first time ever! So this morning we had a thick frost on the windshield of my truck. It was supposed to be 28 degrees. I think we were a little warmer than that, maybe 30.
Last night I went out to cut aspargus. We have strawberries growing with them and they are all flowering with bright white blooms. We had covered the bed with 2 inches of compost and they love it. With a frost coming, I decided to cover them with thck row cover and found it in the white shed. It was easy to cover this small bed- it is five feet wide and 22 feet long. I put oak stakes down to hold it in case of wind.
When I returned to the house with the spears, Cindy was gone and I found her out in the flower garden cutting daffodils. She said, "Are you going to cover the rest of the strawberries?" So together we covered the two long rows- they are 60 feet long. I hope we get lots of berries. I will let you know if the flowers fall off.
We got one inch of rain over the weekend and we needed it. I looked at the new blueberries and we have lost one of the 300. It has no leaves. All the rest of the plants are showing good growth.
One reason we grow food with compost and mulches is to make the tilth better and to grow the topsoil. I want to have thicker and richer soil all over our farm each year. This is different than farming as practiced by most farmers. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN believes we lose 83 billion tons of topsoil each year. This is washed into the sea or blown away in the wind. People survive on the thin layer of topsoil that rests on top of the Earth.
Scientists have estimated it takes 500 years to grow an inch of soil. I hope to grow even an eighth of inch in a year by adding compost to the farm and preventing as much run off and wind erosion as possible by keeping the gardens covered in cover crops or mulch most of the year.
We made seven tons of compost out of our chicken manure and the plants we cleaned up from the garden. We are putting this back on the garden as we prepare it for plants. We also have another compost pile equally big that we are turning. I collect sawdust and horse manure from our friends, Tom and Kathy, which is added on. Meanwhile, we are carrying away the riches when we sell flowers and vegetables to our community. It takes a lot of work to make up for that loss.

Mushrooms and Corn

2010-04-26T06:24:00.000-07:00

There is nothing like a good mushroom pizza and shitake mushrooms are delicious. We dry enough in the summer to fill two gallon jars. So this Saturday morning we drove to Scott and Barbara's home early in the beautiful sunny morning. The red bud were blooming and the dogwoods were hinting color. They have a new puppy, Marly, a Mountain Fiest, who was glad to have us there.

Scott had done the heavy lifting and cut 67 three foot white oak logs on the steep hillside. It is the dangerous work that must be done in the winter time. In the winter the bark is held tight to the log, an important issue with shitake mushrooms. The wood is also holding a lot of sugars in readiness for spring growth so it will grow more mushrooms. Shitakes will grow on these logs as long as they have bark. Once the bark falls off it is all over.
So Scott was up on the steep ground slipping and sliding and operating a chain saw. Then carefully carry the logs off the hill keeping the bark intact. When we arrived the logs were neatly stacked in the shed and not growing: another important consideration.

We had to drill about 35 holes in each log, stuff mushroom spawn into the hole and paint it over with wax. This took about 4 or 5 hours with all 6 of us working along. The tool to insert the spawn is a copper tube injector which we hit with the palm of our hand. It was the slow point in the operation so we are buying a second one for next year.

So we drove home with 25 mushroom logs and stacked them under the eaves of the root cellar house to grow for 5 or 6 months before they fruit. We will let you know when they do.

We had a few bushels of corn drying in the root cellar house over the winter and bought a hand cranked corn sheller a short time ago. On Sunday we shelled all the corn saving out the best ears for seed corn this year and most for the chickens. They like it roughly ground but we threw in a couple of gallons whole in the afternoon. They ate some of it and will probably eat the rest today. We also saved out a peck of corn to grind for us. I put it under pizza and we occasionally make corn bread.

Later we hoed up the three rows of peas and put grass mulch down on the outer row to keep the weeds from encroaching. The peas are up about 5 or 6 inches.

We had covered the potato rows with black mulch material and when we checked Sunday, the potatos were up under it. So we picked up all the boards holding the material down in the wind and rolled up the mulch. We had not covered about 10 feet of one row and there were no potatoes up in that section. The black mulch heated the soil enough to give those potatoes a head start. We will sell new potatoes at the market.

We need more rain.

I hope you have good weather, too.

Spring and Broody

2010-04-19T08:20:00.000-07:00

Our turkey hens are getting broody. They are young and seem to not understand what the heck is going on. The gray girl has sat all day on her eggs and then gone back to the house for the night. The white hen is sitting with her for a couple of hours and then wandering off. Yesterday both were in the little nest box, the white hen sitting half on the gray's head. As night approached they both stayed tight to the nest. I decided that the gray girl was ready.
We have been keeping back a few turkey eggs to add to her nest on the counter of the kitchen. We had five eggs with dates written on them in pencil. I carried them out and opened the top of the nest box. Gray started growling at me, deep rr's coming out, and puffing up her feathers. I placed the eggs against her side while she threatened me with all she had.
Then I walked off and waited. She did not move for a while but then she looked over her shoulder. She could not believe her luck, eggs, eggs right next to her. The egg fairy must have come by, she thought. She used her beak to nuzzle one under her breast and then raised up and scooped the eggs with her wing right under her. She settled back and got that glazed look in her eye and started thinking turkey thoughts.

I have been getting that glazed look in my eye over the economic meltdown and the news coming out from it now that things are getting back to something called normal. I was reading a report by David DeGraw where he outlines that the top 1% of of our country controls 70% of the assets. Inequality of wealth in this country is at an all time high. This does not bother my turkey, but it bothers me. I have a financial stake in how rich the people that surround me are (so they can buy my blueberries). What I believe is that there is not an unlimited amount of money out there and if 1% have 70% of it, my neighbors have less. During 2009 wealthy people became more wealthy ( we now have 1,011 billionaires - 793 in 2008).

How do they do it? With great firms like Wells Fargo with CEO John Stumpf making 21 million last year and Wells Fargo paying zero in taxes. How do they do it? I pay 30% and Wells Fargo pays nothing! Bank of America- nothing. JP Morgan Chase made S12 billion profit and they are getting a tax refund of $1.4 billion. Can this be right, make a profit, pay no tax and get a refund.

Goldman Sachs had its most profitable year ever last year and paid 1% taxes on its profits. Of course, it is the extremely wealthy who get the benefit of this low tax rate and the profits from these financial wizards. Now I understand why 70% of assets end up in the hands of 1% of the people.

The tax rules and refunds ($33 billion to financial firms in 2009) are decided in Congress. I do write my congress people and I suggest more people do. There has to be a more balanced way to do our tax structure. It seems obvious on the face of it that a 1% tax on enormous profits is a bit unfair to the vast majority of United States citizens. My turkeys just sit with a glazed look on their eyes.

Springtime in April

2010-04-12T08:17:00.000-07:00

The fruit trees are flowering and the sky is blue. What more could a young man, young at heart man, want? This is our Juneberry tree, also called Sarvis, Shadblow, Service berry, We pick the berries in early June and make pies and jams with it.

We spent sometime weeding the strawberry bed! It was a a mess of sorrel and a runner grass.

This is an after picture of the strawberries, weeded and compost applied. (a stray backberry is trying to get in on the compost)

Buck and I are working on a three rail fence behind the orchard. That is our fine 1954 Model M Utility tractor made by John Deere. We have a post hole digger on the back and a dog in the undercarriage. The dog is Baxter, the wonder dog. He is an excellent ground hog treer.

A little peek into the growing room for this year's garden. We have lots of flowers and vegetables started. The bushy plant on the left is parsley.

This is flowering tabacco which perfumes the air in the greenhouse every evening. It does not smell at all during the day.

The daffodils are blooming. This is a row of unusual daffodils.

We are waiting for the spinach to grow but the peas are up about two inches tall. We are picking asparagus, kale and lettuce.

Enjoy this warm sunny spring weather.

A Hot Weekend in April

2010-04-08T12:09:00.000-07:00

It has been so hot this past week that the fruit trees are bursting out in bloom and the daffodils are wilting in the heat. It has been dry at the same time and I am looking for some relief from the need to water. We have planted so many shrubs and trees this week that are starting to leaf out and will need lots of water to help them develop the roots they need.
We have the last frost date of May 20th. With this early warm spell it will be tough for the apples, peaches, cherries and pears to make it. Our blueberries have not flowered yet, but they will this week it looks like. I watch the sky like it is TV.

Everything from the garden for dinner.

We are starting a few plants in the sand box. These are red currants. We also have a dozen grape cuttings starting in a bed in the main garden. I picked the best grape vines that are being productive to start new ones from. We have a few seedless grapes and I want to grow more of them.

The gobbler is doing a lot of strutting around puffed up like a big balloon. It reminds us of the Macy Day Parade and the turkey balloon wobbling along the road. Our Mr. T wobbles as he struts trying to interest the ladies. The chickens have gotten used to him now and mostly ignore him and he does not care. It is the two turkey hens he wants to impress.

I put 8 Chinese Chestnuts in the back of the orchard protected by tree tubes. I happen to like nut trees. We planted some native wetland shrubs in the swampy area of the field. These are Aronia and Button bush. We filled the area with some 30 shrubs. Aronias, chokeberries, are favored by birds and other animals. Button bush are enjoyed by butterflies and bees. We added to the evergreen trees also with Canaan Firs.

Have a great day and keep in touch.

The Planting

2010-04-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

We woke up early on Good Friday with 310 blueberry plants sitting in a dark cardboard box in the garage. We got right to work moving compost over to the field in a wheelbarrow.

Our secret weapon was this team of planters, Cindy and Pam, who worked all day planting and putting the blue tree tubes on. I followed with compost and sawdust around the tube and then water. This held it from spinning on the stake in the wind. Later John came and helped with compost and sawdust.

As we wore out my co-worker, Val, came with two of her children, Roschelle and Tim, and gave us a shot in the arm. We planted 220 on Friday and Cindy and I planted the rest on Saturday morning.

This is Mr. T our new gobbler. He declared himself top dog on Friday morning and chased several roosters right over the fence. He spends his days puffed up and important.

Spring Tasks

2010-03-31T07:02:00.000-07:00

The main thing about spring is getting out and enjoying the weather and everything that is coming up. After months of snow covering everything it is such a pleasure to see the grass greening up. We have put in lots of croci, daffodils and other spring bulbs in the areas of the lawn that do not grow grass very well. They are blooming now and adding the color that means spring to me.

This is moss flowering! Every flower is a tiny golden cup.

We have to tour all the gardens and enjoy the new flowers, these ma be tete a tetes- (French for head to head)- a small daffodil that blooms early. This is at the main garden gate.

Another task is mulching the small fruit. This is a 50 foot row of red raspberries. We put 3 or 4 inches of compost on the plants and then 4 inches of sawdust. These plants will love it this year.

Enjoy your day, be well and keep in touch.

Planting the 300

2010-03-30T11:00:00.000-07:00

This is it! The week has finally arrived.

We are getting 300 small blueberry plants in the mail tomorrow and we will plant them Friday. Come on down and help out.

Here is the plan:

1. Soak the roots in mycorrhizal spores and planting gel. The spores grow symbiotic fungi specifically for blueberries. The gel helps keep the roots hydrated.

2. Using a trowel, plant the small bush near the stakes that are already laid out in the field. We have tilled the ground last fall to prepare for this planting. Spread the roots wide and cover with soil, planting at the same depth they grew at.

3. Take a shovel full of compost and cover the soil.

4. Put a tree tube over the bush and push it a couple of inches in the soil- do not damage roots. Tie the tube to the stake.

5. Water the baby.

The weather report is for 70 degrees and sunny so wear a hat and bring sun screen.

Enjoy!

Simply

2010-03-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

“To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never. In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. This is to be my symphony.”

William Henry Channing
1810-1884

Well, living on a farm is not simple. It keeps me thinking all the time about how to do the many and varied things that interest us. Take for instance the wheat. We decided where to plant based on the idea of rotating crops, a old method of keeping the land fertile before the advent of modern fertilizers. This required research and keeping a record of what we have done in the past.
The next problem will be how to harvest and thresh the grain without an enormous amount of work. I remember that Jesus was scolded for harvesting wheat on the Sabbath. He plucked some heads and rubbed the grain free to snack on as they walked along. That will not be our method. We will buy or make the tools necessary and then store them in a building for the next season. Complications all. The next problem will be grinding and then making the bread and pancakes.

Guess I'll take a walk.

The Dry Week of March

2010-03-22T07:28:00.000-07:00

Every year one week of March has beautiful spring weather: dry, warm, and sunny. This year it worked out great, 5 dry days and then the weekend with a sunny Saturday and chance of showers Sunday. Saturday morning we got up early to till some garden space. We turned up some sod and planted 50 pounds of potatoes. Then covered them with black mulch fabric. This will warm the soil and get them to grow faster. In 3 or 4 weeks they will poke up and we will remove the fabric.

We tilled up the old corn patch and planted wheat. Wheat does better with less nitrogen and the corn removed it for us. I planted 1300 square feet, a small plot that might give us enough wheat for 50 loaves. We do not have a combine so harvesting will be the trick. If we have no luck the chickens can harvest it for us.

Here I am planting the wheat in rows with an Earthway seeder every 8 inches. This is 65 foot rows and 20 feet wide.

Every time I till that field I find another rock or two. Here are two of the monsters.

We also had time to spray all the apples with dormant oil spray. This smothers the insects and their eggs and may help give us better quality apples this year.

I pruned the grape vines and pretty much had a massacre. I had the hardest time understanding the pruning books and pretty much cut the plants down to nothing. We will see how it goes but I suspect we will have very few grapes this year.

Cindy moved roses that suffered from low air flow and consequently disease. We put them out in airier spots. The put a couple inches of compost on them.

We tilled a new spot for corn and fenced the chickens in it and they had a ball. They turned the sod over a second and a third time. We are getting about 15 eggs a day. We have a problem though. There are rats digging into the chicken house at night and they do not like rat poison nor peanut butter on rat traps. We need a solution!

The first daffodils bloomed. We have had crocus for a week. Have a great spring!

What's up these days.

2010-03-18T06:03:00.000-07:00

This is the field the 300 blueberries are going in. You may be able to tell that the ground is turned over in 6 rows and I have put bamboo stakes every three feet. The blueberry plants will be put at each stake and then I will attach a tree tube that will protect the plant. The sawdust piles will be used to mulch the plants.

The chickens and turkeys are in a moveable fence. We move them around to give them fresh grass and bugs. The boxes are chicken tractors. We raise the chicks inside them and move them daily through the fields. They fertilize the grass.

The flats of vegetables and flowers. The wooden box has leeks.

A scion taped to root stock and waiting to grow. It has three buds on it and I taped the cutoff on the top to prevent it from drying out.

More flats inside the greenhouse. There is lettuce and arugala growing in the ground here.

Enjoy the great warm spring weather,
David

Grafting On

2010-03-15T08:14:00.000-07:00

Saturday arrived wet and foggy and we were up early with a cup of coffee and gentle conversation. I picked up a new 3 by 5 card and started laying out my day. Cindy had a brilliant idea and we talked for awhile about it and how to implement it.
We moved the roof off the root cellar a year ago. My neighbor, Davis, brought over his Dodge Ram truck and a large trailer with steel rails around the bed. We jacked up the roof and put 3 inch pipe under it and on top of the block foundation. With great effort we slid the roof onto the trailer and backed it up next to the old barn floor (a couple hundred yards away). We jacked it up and put stacks of blocks at the four corners and left it there, three feet in the air and in the wrong place. I wanted it over the concrete floor but there was a stack of ceramic blocks in the way, so I left it just in front. It stayed there for the past year. Cindy suggested we raise it where it is and continue the roof out over the slab. This would be way easier and give us a larger building as a bonus. I need the space under a roof for tractor equipment. On the 3 by 5 card I laid out the roof and extension with Cindy as we discussed the possibilities. It makes it happen because I will not have to get Davis over to move it the twelve feet back.

I flipped the card over and listed the weekend’s chores. I love the diversity that gives my hands, back, feet and mind each a chance to work a bit. As I looked out into the fog and heard the birds singing love songs from high branches, I realized it was time to graft the apple trees. I had cut the scions a couple of weeks ago and kept them about 35 degrees wrapped in damp newspaper and in plastic. Everyone had a tag naming the tree. I got the cart and filled it with sawdust, tags and cardboard. I sharpened my knife to razor sharp and cut my roll of black electrician’s tape a quarter inch wide. We planted 10 standard size apple tree root stock last year and let them grow. Unfortunately, deer had nibbled off the tops over the winter, sticking their noses through the fencing. I had used a very small circle of fence. I will have to fence them better this year.

I pulled off the fence and knelt of a plastic strip to keep my knees dry. I cut the trunk of the root stock in a long slanting cut, pulling up with my knife at a steep angle. Then I choose a scion the same caliber as the root stock and made a matching slanting cut. I needed to match the cambium layers together and then tape them securely. The tape, being very thin, made an air tight cover over the graft. Apples and pears are fairly easy to graft successfully and over a couple of hours I mated ten apples and one pear. Then I tried the cherries. I have been cutting around seedling sour cherry trees for the last three years. These are bird planted from our large sour cherry. I cut scions from two of the named sweet cherries and grafted them to the seedlings. I do not have a lot of hope for them- cherries are difficult- but there is a small hope.

In some ways I have grafted myself to this farm. The advantage of grafting is you get plants that are true to the fruit. If you plant a Macintosh apple seed you will not get a Mac apple. They do not come true to seed since all apples are hybrids. The root stock gives your tree a strong foundation or, in the case of dwarf root stock, a weak system that makes a miniature tree. The farm has strong roots for me. It was owned by my great grandparents and later by my uncle. It has water and good top soil. I have found that it has been well used and the fields are worn out and in need of fertilizer and lime.

So here I am rooted in a farm that needs some tender loving care and wanting it to bear fruit. Since I am who I am, with the skills and interests that I came here with, I want to make the farm flourish. Poverty grass in the fields needs to disappear, the pasture grass needs to grow thick and tall (it currently grows about a foot tall over the season). The ground is very acidic, so I started growing a plant that likes that: blueberries. The fields will be limed and then chicken tractors run over them to fertilize the grass (and that works great). Hopefully this graft will take,

Spring is Coming

2010-03-08T06:18:00.000-08:00

We are planting flats now for the spring gardens. We have about a dozen flats in the greenhouse or the basement. Violas can be planted out the earliest and they fill in the gardens when so many plants are just waking up. They are great for the whole year and bloom late into the fall.
We have rosemary and lavender up. We are trying to grow them for soap making.
We repotted the tomatoes and they doubled in size in one day. I guess they were ready. THey now have two true leaves.
Dan and Dylan were in a rock climbing competition at Hocking College in Ohio last weekend. Dan won advanced men's, Dylan came in 6th. Carla won the women's division! We had a great weekend together. We ate at Casa Nueve and it was good. I came home with Lauren's cat for the summer while she is in Ecuador to learn Spanish. She plans to teach a yoga class while she is there. Her door had a sign on it that said, "Puerta."

These flats are from last year and we are not this far along right now, but soon. Have a great week.

Going Batty

2010-02-27T13:07:00.000-08:00

Did I mention we got some snow? This drift appeared over night, but notice that on the left the ground is bare from the wind.

This is the front of the house and the snow is higher than the porch floor!

This is a bat house about three feet and 16 inches wide. The bottom back board extends 8 inches below the front and has window screen over it to provide a landing zone for the bats. There is a 1/2 inch by 6 inch slot in the center for another entrance.

This is looking up the bottom of the bat house. I used old pegboard that I was going to toss. I scored the slick side with my knife to provide something to grip but the back is very rough and the bats will be able to grab on to it. The gaps are 3/4 inch and the boards are about 14 by 24 inches. This bat house can hold over 100 bats.

This is the side of the bat house and shows another slot entrance. There are three 1/2 by 6 inch slots in this house. I will stain it very dark and hang it about 15 feet up in the air. Bats like it very warm when they are having pups. I constructed this out of all used materials even the screws.

Let's look for spring.

Blizzard

2010-02-26T11:29:00.000-08:00

THE wind was banging against the house last night and we woke to a white world, just as white as it has been for the last two months. We started shoveling and it was two and three feet deep in the driveway. It was a while before we could get to the chickens and water and feed them. They were taking no strolls outside today.
Wednesday evening we emptied the truck of sawdust and drove over to Tom's to pick up the manure wagon. It was a nice evening and the temperature was mid thirties. I was anxious to empty it before this snow. It was overfull and Tom, Cindy and I had trouble lifting the tongue to the truck hitch. We pulled it home and on Chestnut Flats we saw a coyote! It was running across a snow covered field and afforded us a long look as it cantered away. It had a beautiful bushy tail and was a mottled brown color. We have not heard or seen a chicken predator on our farm but this coyote was about a half mile away and certainly could survey our farm. It was heading down into the river valley when he disappeared over the rise. We are on a plateau above the river. I was able to get most of the manure out of the trailer but even with the mattock left about 4 or 5 inches frozen in the front half. I returned it and pushed the trailer back through the 6 or 8 inches of snow near their barn.

I made a couple of bluebird houses this week. These are made from poplar and wormy chestnut. There used to be lots of chestnut here on Chestnut Flats and these boards came from my Great Gandparents house. We love seeing them in the fields in the summer and we need to have them up this month for the males to check out. Bluebirds like two or three acres around their house and at least 100 yards between boxes. I will wait for the blizzard to leave before I hang them.

I had to repot the orchids so made a couple of cedar boxes for them. They are big enough for about two years growth.

I go stuck in the road with the tractor on the ice and a little grade. The blade was up and stuck on the ice clumps left by the street plow. I dug it out to no avail and then got some gravel and that helped a little. I was still sitting in one place with the left wheel spinning when I noticed the two brake pedals. On a tractor you can push the brake on the left side alone. So I did and the left wheel stopped spinning and the right caught hold. We moved up an inch or so, so I pushed the right brake and we crept forward a hair more. SOon I was braking alternate sides and mossying up the hill inch by inch, foot by foot (Niagra Falls, slowly I turn, step by step) until I grabbed road and drove home. Phew!
The grader jsut drove by and pushed the 3 and 4 foot drifts out of the road. We can get out now!
I hope you can, too.

Apple Grafting

2010-02-22T09:23:00.000-08:00

We are going to graft some apples this spring and I have been scouting all my friends for old fashioned apples. Sunday we drove over to Rock Cave and collected scions. Scions are short twigs from the apples. We need new growth and apples tend to grow water sprouts every summer. These vertical branches that appear on branches are perfect size and new growth. For some reason grafts are more successful with new wood.
We arrived at Tom and Graces farm around 10:30 on a warm winter day. The snow waa about 6 to 8 inches deep and so was their road. We climbed it carefully in the Subaru and drove past their orchard on the side of a steep hill.

Tom put on tall boots and grabbed his Felco pruners and out the door we went. I had plastic bags, marking tape and a off we went. Tom has all the trees marked with hanging tags and knows where each variety is. We went after the old timey apples with names like Red Royal Limbertwig and Foxwhelp.

Here's Tom emptying his boot.

Cindy and Grace kept tabs on us from the top of the hill. All the young trees are fenced for the deer.

I took the whips home and cut them to a size I could store at 32 degrees. They are wrapped in wet newspaper and put in bags. I can't keep them in the refridgerator because of the ethelene gas from the vegetables will damage the buds.

Tom and Grace grow some odd plants in their greenhouse. These are Venus Flytraps.

They also grow Sundews. This one we brought home with us.

I installed the stained glass windows into the cellar house this weekend.

Enjoy the week. We are expecting more snow mid week. I hope you have good weather.