Category: Farming

The Would-Be Farm...The Build Begins

8/13/2019

First-time visitors always ask why we don't renovate the little old farmhouse that's slowly surrendering to gravity at the Would-Be Farm.

It's kind of cute. And the top-line is as straight as a ruler.

Well, we say, shouldering open the door so they can see for themselves, it's only about 20 feet from the road.

And the floor is collapsing into the cellar, which is –– in turn –– earth-to-earth returning. Things roll and gather in the low spots, including the signs of many a wild animal.

Oh, they say, peering in from the doorway and sniffing gingerly. Oh, I see.

Base Camp –– a slightly tarted up camper-trailer that's perched on a bluff at the Would-Be farm –– has served our housing needs with economy. Five years into this adventure, the initial cost and renovations make Base Camp work out to something like $250 a year.

I've nannered on about Base Camp here. (Cliff Notes version: Jeff worked hard and I showed that white paint will cover a multitude of sins)

Cheap yes, Base Camp, but also an excellent starting point: there's a propane stove for cooking, a bathroom with a door, pressurized water, a solar panel that keeps the 12-volt batteries topped up, screens.

After we built a shed roof over the whole production, it doesn't even leak.

But there's one thing.

Well, a couple of things, but the one thing about which I shall complain this day?

An elderly camper trailer has very little insulative chutzpah. Wind whistles through the windows. When it's chilly, an optimist would call it excellent sleeping weather.

But in the morning, when the time comes to emerge from that cozy nest of down-filled comforters, hot-water bottles, and wool blankets?

If it's 30 degrees outside, it's 30 dang degrees inside Base Camp!

While waiting for the little propane heater to take the edge off (in its vaguely hazardous way) one spring morning, I said to Mr. Linton, "Whatever else we might want, I think we start with a wood stove."

And so the Farm will be getting a dwelling. A Cottage. A Cabin. As the locals call it, a Camp. A Woodbee.

Something larger than a tiny house, but smaller than the average American home structure.

Say 600 square feet, not including a wide, big porch.

We've lived through a large home improvement project, but we never hired someone to build from scratch before. Or at this kind of long distance.

It proves a predictably nerve-wracking experience.

I send a check and got a description of the new well (420 feet deep! Dang!) and the pump. Months pass.

The contractor is abstemious with the photos, which might be a strategy for managing his customers.

The piers go in!

I send a cheerful, encouraging text: "Don't be afraid to send photos, even if nothing is going on!"
The contractor replies "K!" And maintains radio silence.

For a Christmas present, my sister takes a field trip to the site and snaps some photos.

Late in January, the contractor sends an exciting visual update:

The suspense! The planning! Ooo la la.

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The Would-Be Farm: Wildflowers

6/12/2019

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They show up. How cool is that?

I may have planted these columbines.

I might have planted them last year.

They might have been growing for decades, regardless my interference or ambitions.

One of the downsides of being an absentee farmer is that things happen –– and don't happen –– without our being there to witness it.

Sometimes we do.

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You Chee, I Chee, We All Chee for Lychee

6/4/2019

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Scientific name: Sapindaceae Lichi.

Yeah, okay, I know lychee-tinis are SO 2012. But a lychee smoothie? With vanilla almond-milk and crushed ice?

Lychee warm from the tree, with the leathery rind splitting under the pressure of a thumb?

Or a plain frozen slurry of lychee, gobbled straight from the cup?

Lychee harvest, 2019

Some fruits are easy: drop a loquat seed –– Japanese plum, or Eriobotrya Japonica –– into the ground and before long, you have fifteen of the things (maybe fewer if you were a more conscientious weeder, but there you go...). And likewise, buckets of the nice juicy yellow fruit. We eat them straight off the tree, bending at the waist to avoid the unavoidable sloppy drips.

So many shirts at our house have been transformed into "work shirts" by the application of loquat juice.

Loquats in March.

Lychee blossoms. No saying how many will set fruit.

Other fruits –– once you see them as fruits –– are even easier to grow. Try stopping staghorn sumac (Rufus typhena).

Plant blackberry canes, forget about them, come back a few years later and they (Rosascea family) have established a stable government, border security, and a thriving economy.

Others, like apples at the Would-Be Farm, are fussier and more delicate. In Florida, I think the fussy ones are the lychees. (We'll avoid the idea of citrus, what with canker and citrus greening and my neighbor with the Roundup through the fence.)

We've planted a couple of lychees, but they break your heart: plenty of leaves, but year after year no fruit at all. Mr. Linton occasionally brandishes the loppers and tells the tree: "Fruit or these. Your choice."

Over the past ten years or so, when the weather and the trees actually do produce a crop, roving thieves have stripped the tree of fruit overnight. Seriously, stealing fruit from my very lawn. It's enough to make a mare bite her colt.

But then comes the odd pay-out year.

When the tree is heavy with fruit and Uncle Markie has put an actual fence around the front yard with the eldest of the lychees, which strangely enough, DOES keep the damnable sneak-theives away.

When there are buckets of lychees. An extravagance of the pearly goodness.

When, at least for a week or two, lychees are our favorite fruit.

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The Would-Be Farm: I Twig That.

5/7/2019

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Reluctantly stepping away from the dusty hallway that leads to a discussion of deverbal nouns, I give you the word "twig."

It's a stick, AND it's a verb that means "to understand."

Okay, maybe just one tiny step down that hallway: twig as a branchy bit of tree derives from Germanic Old English. It's related to the word "twain." As in, to be cleft in two.

Okay, okay, hustling it along: the verb twig comes either from theives' cant or from Gaelic (not pointing a finger, but come on, English scholars, really?!) "tuig," meaning "to understand."

Photo courtesy Mary Tone Rodgers.

Twig is also the name of a genre of decoration. Twig tables. Twig chairs. Twig frames.

Those enormous Adirondack camps, white birchbark stuff, bent willow rustic chairs? All twig.

I picked up a reference book on the subject at the library book sale over the winter and took the instructions at face value.

As one does.

I wanted to construct a couple of chairs for the gazebo, and the book had a nifty-looking pattern.

A folding twig chair based –– so the author claimed –– on a Hopi design. Rugged but comfortable, held together with metal rods that bend slightly to accommodate a rounded human form.

Heaven knows we have plenty of twigs at the Would-Be Farm. And a crafty project is right up the alley for the Farm's stated goal of helping foster fresh neural pathways.

Though it looked "funny" in print, I went ahead and cut the 37 or so pieces of wood –– carefully following the directions.

Do NOT follow these instructions.

And then re-measured and cut most of them again, using my trusty loppers and a measuring jig Daddo would have been proud to see.

Precision is not my middle name, but I was quite careful.

It did not work.

At the end of Day 1, I sat on my heels and considered the challenge of threading eleven twigs onto a quarter-inch rod when the neatly bored holes simply did not line up –– by INCHES.

On the second day, following my favorite skipper/rough carpenter's advice, I started with fresh material and drilled holes to fit the threaded rods.

Ah, so much better!

Until it came to the question of legs.

A full 50% of the chair's legs left unaccounted for.

The diagram I'd been trying to follow simply did not mention how to incorporate the two back appendages.

I should not have been surprised.

Even knowing that the instructions were crap, I couldn't help but bemoan the injustice of it.

Instructions that don't.

Measuring guides that don't.

Reference that isn't.

Jeesh.

Eventually I wandered over to the square yard or so of good cell coverage at the Would-Be Farm –– in the middle of the field –– and Googled some help. Huh. Common theme of the Amazon reviews of the book:

A farther scouring of the inter web revealed many many distractions.

Yet, near the distal reach of the digital universe, a couple of nearly related YouTube videos and websites that at least helped me figure out how to get all four legs integrated into the design.

Day 2 ended when I tested the chair and inadvertently converted it into a recliner.

No blood no foul, but for pity's sake --!

By Day 3, I was grimly determined to best the beast. I studied physics in college. I have been making things by hand and by brain for some years now. I will not be thwarted!

It was so. darned. close. to being there.

Mr. Linton lent his good hand (short story: don't drop a Sunfish. And if you do, don't let your hand be caught underneath the fiberglass boat.) and practical cleverness to the effort. He was the one to suggest using the planks of the deck to square up the legs.

This time when I tested the rake of the chair-back, my own old quads suspended me.

Crouching builder, hidden sand-trap.

By gum, at the end of Day 3, we had ourselves a twig chair.

A bit battered. Not rated to hold an actual human. Handy for keeping my gardening gloves off the floor.

Still, it's a prototype suitable for the next round of construction.

And I can barely wait to begin again.

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The Would-Be Farm: Annual Animal Array

4/18/2019

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Wind-fall bonfire material gathered from the trails. .

It was bound to happen. While clearing trail –– it's on the to-do list whenever we first get to the Would-Be Farm –– we found a game camera that we'd forgotten all about...16K photos of waving grass. I guess that's why we lost track of the danged thing. I'll spare you.

Here are some better photos from the game cameras:

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The Would-Be Farm: Fruit!

1/15/2019

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In 2014, Mr. Linton and I started planting fruiting trees on the Would-Be Farm.

Yes, we found two hilltops full of mature old apple trees on the land, but was that enough for my agricultural ambitions?

Nope.

And like so many would-be farmers, I chose the wrong spot for plants first.

The Empire apple tree didn't survive the first winter. Both of those first pear trees frosted back to their wild roots. Of course, they were ordinary trees imported in for the local nurseries, and I put them in the ground RIGHT where the wind howls through the valley.

Some of my orchard notes.

I've since became an enthusiastic customer of St. Lawrence Nurseries, where the trees are bred to survive the harshest of North Country weather. We made sheltered havens where we've planted heirloom apples, pears, hazelnuts, elderberries, basket willows, and, the point of the blog: aronia berries.

Aronia is the formal name for what is sometimes known as a "chokeberry." (NOT a "chokecherry," btw) It's a small, hardy, brushy tree that bears dark little fruits. They are quite astringent until ripe.

Scientific studies show that it's bursting with super-fruit power, and I'm hoping for an aronia cordial or a mixed berry pie next fall.

It's not an easy lot, trying to be a good sapling on the Would-Be Farm. You'll have to survive lots of rain, or not enough rain, plus biblical-level plagues of insects and marauding deer. You'll get ignored and crowded by weeds for months at a time.

But when fruit arrives, as this aronia did this past autumn, a young sapling can expect a bit of a party.

Hurrah the Aronia! Nice work, little fella!

Hope you are having a decent winter up there! You'll be getting a birthday cake of fertilizer in April! Yay you!

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The Would-Be Farm: Success!

11/26/2018

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I'm kind of proud of the asparagus.

The roots went into the ground in 2015. Of course I wrote about it.

Lo and behold, up they came. And up. And up.

So lush that the well-drilling guy stopped and marveled.

So enormous that my gardening neighbors ask –– with palpable envy –– how do we make them thrive?

So thick that I no longer have a view of the cool half-plough that Mr. Linton found for me.

Uncontested success is rare on the farm. So when it arrives, we like to recognize and celebrate it.

All hail kale?
Nu-uh: Rush lush Asparagus!

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Open Banditry on the Would-Be Farm

10/16/2018

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When the sun sets on the Would-Be Farm, the local population gets a little wilder and more lively.

Mice wake up and start scampering about.

Skunks and porcupines saunter through the camp.

Coyotes slope along, sniffing at the traces of our dinner.

Deer graze their way through, and raccoons ––well, the raccoons are kind of freaking me out.

Half asleep in our narrow berth inside Base Camp, we are roused by sound: a crunching, rattling, scratching assault on the recycling container, a lengthy effort to unsnap the cooler, a hissing dust-up over a piece of aluminum foil that once held roasted chicken.

Eventually, Mr. Linton or I will have had Just About Enough and shout at the intruders. Angry-Daddo-Voice invective, which sometimes works, but does require warning the other person. ("Hey, I'm going to yell." "All right." "GERRROUT OF IT!")

Scamper scamper scamper.

If I can manage to get the door open and the flashlight on (assuming the game camera is NOT likely to catch the maniacal image) I sometimes burst out onto the porch and chase the raccoons.

But they tend to hear me coming and vanish into the underbrush before I have the satisfaction of frightening them.

As it happens, raccoons are determined creatures with pretty good memories.

They had a single night of access into the cooler last spring when someone (me) failed to fully snap the lid closure.

For the rest of the season, they proved quite willing to chew their way back in.

We ended up putting one cooler on top of another and setting out an array of hair-trigger mousetraps to dissuade them.

We kept them from destroying the cooler, but they haven't yet given up.

Raccoons will chew through a cooler.

This autumn, they discovered both suet and the bird feeders.

As Jeff put it: they ate a whole LOAF of suet.

Naturally, they knocked a bird feeder over and emptied it also.

I'm as judgmental as the next person. Probably more (said she, snortling in a juvenile way at the irony.)

I do make a moral judgement about "good birds" and "bad birds" at my bird feeder, and without the shadow of moral doubt, raccoons are no-good birds.

I decided on a new routine: every evening, I stow the feeders out of reach of raccoons (as well as beyond the stretch of bears, rats, the neighbor's cat, squirrels, et cetera).

But I didn't think about the large glass pickle-jar that holds the seed before it's dispensed to birds good or bad.

However, the raccoons did.

The first morning, I found the jar tipped over, the lid unscrewed and a small, tidy spill of seeds on the porch.

Huh, I thought. I better tighten that lid.

The next night I heard the jar tip over.

Wakeful under my cozy quilt, I gloated over the thought of the raccoon. He'd be bent over the jar, tiny ebony hand spread flat on the metal lid, a grimace and a grunt accompanying the futile effort to unscrew the lid.

Hope he busts a gut, I thought.

Then I thought, I sure hope he doesn't bust a jar. Damnit.

In the morning, the birdseed was not on my mind. I was blithely drinking my coffee and being all China-to-Peru about the dew-laden field opposite the porch.

Mr. Linton has a somewhat alarming way of striding off vigorously early in the morning at the Farm. Coffee is nothing to him, giving him a considerable head start on the day.

As is his wont, he strode back presently, asking without preamble, "Do you know what I found halfway up the hill?!"

I turned to look, and lo, he was carrying the jar –– blessedly intact –– full of birdseed.

"They got it nearly all the way UP the hill," he reiterated, annoyance at war with disbelief.

"Heading for their lair."

We gazed at the object.

Raccoons hadn't learned yet how to break the glass. They hadn't gotten the lid off with their odd little hands or their sharp teeth.

But who could say what resources they had back at Raccoon Headquarters?

What sharp teethesies you have.

I changed lids and put the jar inside. Thin the tin walls of Base Camp may be, and permeable as sponge, but there is a geographical limit to transgression.

You'd think, anyhow.

When the light slants just right, a distinct handprint can be seen on the window that looks into the sleeping nook at Base Camp. Maybe two inches across, the little handprint is smeared on the window that stands a good three feet off the ground.

I try not to imagine why a raccoon climbed up and appears to have pushed –– pushed!–– on the window that looks into our sleeping quarters.

Nevertheless, I find myself weighing a few options:

an electric fence,
a wider perimeter of hair-trigger mouse-trips
–– rat-traps even! ––
the lend of a noisy dog,
buckets of water and Rube Goldbergian trip-lines,
noise-making contraptions,
firecrackers,
preemptive strikes,
firepower,
becoming the new sheriff with a fast draw ("Names Spackler, Carl Spackler, ma'm.")

via GIPHY

Which is where I hit pause. The bandits were here first. They raid for a living.

I'll start by making it prohibitively difficult for them to get satisfaction around Base Camp before taking lethal steps. Muah ha ha.

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Life and Death on the Would-Be Farm

9/28/2018

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The summer of 2018 was a big one for mice at the Would-Be Farm.

Since we left in April, they set up a series of wee discotheques and squalid flophouses throughout Base Camp.

Let the record show: They did a little dance, made a little love. They got down that night.

But in shadows? As with every happening hotspot in the known world, predators are just waiting for the opportunity to prey.

It might be a small life-and-death drama, but at the Farm, we are talking actual life and death.

The scene: a moonlit night deep in the cupboard...The cupboard in the back of the rickety little camper.

The night is sultry. Crickets are singing. Wait. No, actually, cue Tom Waits.

Things have been getting romantic in the little love nest.

Maybe things have progressed to post-coital pillow-talk –– be it as it may, I think we need not peep too closely.

Along comes the big bad. Slithering. Licking the air with a forked tongue for the scent of mousey love. Perhaps the big bad has developed a taste for these tender morsels in their nuptial bower. Or wants to.

In a moment comes a squeaking in the humid dark. A thump perhaps, and a scrabble...A fierce little battle that no diminutive St. George can hope to win.

A final squeak and silence fills Base Camp.

The big bad curls around a full tummy and snoozes for a day or a week, and wakes to the delightfully stretchy feeling of impending shed. The nuptial bower now a spa room. Exfoliation and microderm abrasion. Buffed. Polished.

And then vamoosed.

Leaving the mess for the maid.

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The Would-Be farm: Who's been wandering through the woods?

9/9/2018

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The modern game-trail camera is an enduring pleasure. Eight lithium batteries and a 16-gig card about doubles the price for one of these sturdy little gizmos, but it's still an bargain peep into the wildlife show at the Farm.

Each season brings its surprises past the motion detector. Sometimes a bear. Sometimes a bird –– or squirrel! –– mid-flight. We nearly always have coyotes and deer.

But the surprise this summer was the repeated photo of a free-range Highland Cow (knows in Scotland as the Heeland Coo).

We were rooting for her: she the last of her herd, escaped from the roundup when the neighbor sold off all of his cows in the spring. We heard how she'd jumped the fence and headed for the hills.

When wrangled into an old barn, she leaped through a glass window for freedom. Burst out and was gone with what I imagine was a sassy flick of her blonde tail.

There, we thought, is a cow who knows which side of the fence is which. Cue the music from Born Free.

She looks so at home, as wary as a deer in the woods.

I didn't want to ask the follow-up question in September.

Let's all pretend that she's running free still.

Let's pretend that instead of thinking about whether she irritated the guy with the gun, or how she got packaged by the pound. Or any of her last moments.

Thanks Matt Munro, for the words Andy Williams sings on the dopey movie that gave me an unreasonable penchant for dented old Land Rovers: "Stay free where no walls divide you/You're free as the roaring tide/So there's no need to hide. Born free."

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<<Previous

The Would-Be Farm...The Build Begins

The Would-Be Farm: Wildflowers

You Chee, I Chee, We All Chee for Lychee

The Would-Be Farm: I Twig That.

The Would-Be Farm: Annual Animal Array

The Would-Be Farm: Fruit!

The Would-Be Farm: Success!

Open Banditry on the Would-Be Farm

Life and Death on the Would-Be Farm

The Would-Be farm: Who's been wandering through the woods?

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