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AMY SMITH LINTON

The Would-Be Farm: Mulch

1/27/2020

7 Comments

 
Ah, mulch.

Mulch is the collective noun for material that evolves into actual soil. It's organic material (leaves! bark! wood-chips!) that gets defined by function: it's used to protect tender plants, and add good stuff to the soil.  By etymology, it comes from a word for "soft."

​Wood chips are my preferred mulch at the Farm.
Amy in Orchard
Neem oil in hand, she stalks the orchard...
It's super-neat-o how it works: you apply a layer of wood chips around the base of your plant.

​It smothers weeds and –– rather faster than you might imagine –– the mulch turns into rich, light soil in a sweet ring around around young fruit trees and asparagus. 

The mulch provides extra insulation over the winter, and gives emerging plants a little additional opportunity to stay safe in the chancy spring weather. ​
Mixed in with the native clay of at the Farm, these wood chips (plus whatever other amendments we can find) are the start of the most important rehabilitation of the farm: the ground.

First, understand that soil is made up of two things: minerals and organic material. Minerals can be in the form of a very fine grind like espresso, which makes for heavy clay soil, or a more coarse grind (sand), all the way up to, of course, solid rock.

The organic component includes leaves, roots, decaying matter plus soil microbes and other busy little creatures under the surface.  

There's an ideal mix of minerals and organic material, and it's rare to find it –– especially on a neglected old dairy farm like the Would-Be. The very best soil is rich, airy, full of nutrition and microbial life.

Unlike most of the ground around the Farm.

First line of remedy: a compost pile.
Compost heap
The Would-Be Farm's main compost heap is slightly disguised by a stack of logs.
Where else to pitch coffee grounds and carrot peelings and used chicken bedding from the neighbors' coop?

​Where else to pile grass clippings and weeds?


I took an actual composing class a few years ago. I'm not an expert, though I am a believer.  Long story short: a smart gardener just keeps heaping stuff onto the compost pile, turning it from time to time, and using the finished, good-looking stuff from the bottom of the pile to improve the soil under the plants.

Lucky for my trees,
 a friend had an enormous pile of chipped tree –– the remains of a big ole maple –– to share for mulching purposes.

Truckload by squatting truckload, we've conveyed chips to the farm over the past couple of years. I used square yards of it to coddle my young trees and the asparagus.  A few chips made it into the compost heap, along with mule-loads of grass clippings and eggshells. 

Alas, all good things come to an end.  Even the remains of a big ole maple. 

With chips thin on the ground that autumn, I toted a couple of bales of straw to the farm to bed things down for the winter.  

Always an experiment.  

​I figured straw was a better option than hay.

The terms are used interchangeably by some: after all, both are some sort of dry vegetation that come packaged in bale form and are used in animal husbandry.  

But straw (like the plastic ones we now think of first), is generally the hollow, dry, stalk of an oat or wheat plant. The middle of the plant. Hay, meanwhile, is the tops of various grasses and plants ––  cut green and allowed to dry. Hay might include clover, timothy, broom, alfalfa, and any manner of meadow plants.

Naturally, hay is full of flower-heads. Any gardener will tell you, the point of flowers is seed. So if you aim to smother weeds (and weeds are just plants growing where you don't want them to grow), you do NOT want to spread flower-heads around.

Ipso dipso facto macto, you'd think straw would be a pretty solid choice to protect plants and not compete with the resources at root...
sprouting wheat




sprouting wheat
Surprise surprise surprise.

​The wheat straw made a miraculous rise from the cold soil this spring.
Wheat head
Instead of simply blanketing my sleeping plants and giving itself over to the forces of bacteria and mushrooms, the straw followed its own generative agenda.

Full disclosure: It did seem odd to see actual heads of wheat in the bale last fall, but I didn't take the time to investigate.  

It's always hurry-up time when the cold weather is coming.  
​
Alas. 

via GIPHY

Wheat is a lovely crop. I am not knocking wheat. I'm good with gluten, and I admire wheaten gold waving on an autumn field.  

​But as a crop, it's not a good match for the Would Be Farm. Or a good mulch. I'm guessing it will continue to pop up around my daffodils and plum trees for years. Probably not enough, however, for even a single loaf of artisanal, hand-ground-grain bread.

I vowed not to be caught chipless again.  I've been checking Craig's List a little too regularly. So far, none of the chippers are just right for our needs.  
Until I find the appropriate tractor-powered equipment –– somewhere between "wimpy" and "Fargo" sized––I am obliged to hunt chips where I may. The county maintenance guys have not panned out, nor is there a lively tree-service economy nearby.

Sadly, in June, I ended up paying good money for a truck-load of funky, treated commercial stuff from the local wood-pellet operation.

via GIPHY

In the parlance of our friend Curt, the going rate for a pickup truck-load of dark brown landscaper's friend is a pizza and a half.  ​

​I'd rather have the pizza and make my own dang chips, but as Mumsie used to say, if wishes were horses, and horses could fly, there'd be nothing but horses in the sky... 
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Lazing on a Saturday Afternoon

1/23/2020

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It's a thing we've enjoyed every now and then now for decades: an afternoon slouch on the couch watching whatever dope crap Jeff selects. 
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Back in our early courting days, we were en couchant watching some Voyage of Sinbad or another.  You remember the kind of movie: claymation, sparkly costumes, "exotic" locales somewhere in the hills east of Hollywood. 

In any case, our heroes were bundled to the teeth, trudging across a featureless frozen sea when Jeff pipes up with, "Oh-oh, watch out for the giant walrus." 

Me: What?

Jeff can flatten the affect right out of his voice so while it seems like a warning, the phrase comes out completely without urgency. He spoke to the television screen again, "Oh, no, look out for the giant walrus,"

Me: What in the world are you talk ––

And at that moment, on the little rounded screen of my apartment's television, an enormous walrus broke through the styrofoam ice and speared one of Sinbad's less fortunate companions with a long tusk.

My astonishment was complete. I said, "You've SEEN this before?!"  Honestly, watching it for the first time seemed faintly ridiculous, but it did have novelty value going for it.

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Little did I know that Jeff's tolerance for ridiculous movies was nearly as deep as my own ability to grouse about them while nestled next to him on the sofa.

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​It's kind of a match made in heaven.
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Musical Selection:

1/16/2020

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I have a high tolerance for foreign language music. Here are a couple of selections that are fairly heavy rotation.

The first is from that marvelous animated film The Triplets of Belleville.
And, though it's hard for me not to reference John Prime's infectious Let's Talk Dirty in Hawaiian, some Iz cannot go awry.  Especially when a person has been studying the uke for a few months now...
And to round out the trio, I was torn between a short documentary about Dancehall music in Japan (after all, I went down this rabbit hole, might as well bring back a treat...) and an Australian video that shows you how to sing Despacito using English words, which is, by the way a work of genius.  

Remember the television ad, "If you can spell socks, you can speak Spanish!"? Somebody certainly has not been measuring out his life with coffee spoons!

Anyway, none of that is on my actual playlist.  But this is:
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A New Year...More New Projects

1/2/2020

9 Comments

 
My favorite skipper and I eloped when it came time to get married.

He'd been through a big wedding already and I wanted neither the pouffy dress nor to stand at the center of that kind of social attention. 

The legalizing deed was performed at the Wee Chapel of Love, which used to lurk on Gandy Boulevard in Tampa. 

On the way to the Wee Chapel, we did a quick pre-nup.  "I'm going to buy boats and forget to tell you," Mr. Linton said.

Picture
After a considering moment, I came back with "I'll get fruity furniture, like chaise lounges, and I just don't want any lip about it."

​We both found these demands reasonable. And so it has gone.
This fall, between Flying Scotting, Sunfishing, and warming up Spawn (and then repairing the damage), himself started sailing a 2.4 Meter.  

As a boat design, the 2.4 Meter looks very much like the old school America's Cup boats:  a classic pointy bow and sweetly curved belly. Those yachty yachts of Newport Rhode Island fame. Dennis Conner and that gang. 

Only, 2.4 meters comes out to a diminutive 13 or so feet long.  So it's an America's Cup boat considered from the wrong end of the telescope. 
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The boat is large enough for a single person, who sits inside the hull with not much more than a noggin showing above decks.

As if Paul Bunyan had taken to the high seas, or as if a person had inexplicably shrunk down into a shoe.
The boat has been used in the Paralympics, as well as for the able-bodied; it's difficult to sink or flip.

It's got a mass of spaghetti line controls in the cockpit and Jeff will be using his feet to steer.

Of course he's excited for the new adventure. The man does love a new sailing challenge. 

He went halvsies on a 2.4 Meter owned by a friend and began working on it, as he does.

Gelcoat, fiberglass, carbon fiber, epoxy, refiguring hardware, rejigging lines...it's all good.

A bigger project maybe than he expected, but intellectually stimulating.

In December, he got invited to a regatta in Port Charlotte, Florida.

One of the 2.4 Meter guys had a nearly brand-new boat that he'd lend Jeff for the race.

​A nice shiny new boat. 

Mr. Linton came home with an particular, peculiar expression on his face (or maybe it's the way he holds his neck).

​An expression I have come to identify.  

I said, "Did you buy that boat?"

Yes. Yes he did. 

​Happy New Year!

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