Category: Farming

What's the name of that...Whatsit?

6/7/2018

Pariediolia is the name for the native human tendency to construct faces out of random patterns. Like Arcimaboldo's work, but by chance rather than art.

The word comes from the Greek for something like "wrong image." Spotting the face of St. Lucia on your flatbread pizza –– mental illness notwithstanding –– is bonus in our evolutionary heritage of pattern recognition.

It's related to the way that when confronted with a paper plate decorated with bull's eyes, a wee bitty baby serves up the same charming goo-goo eyes for the plate as he gives to actual human faces. Survival of the most charming.

Which tells me that the point of imagination is to actually and genuinely save your life.

But what's it called when you spot horses everywhere?

The local osprey population LOVE using scraps of black polyethylene from construction sites for their own building projects. Naturally, it gets away from them. They don't use nearly enough fasteners. We end up picking a bale of this stuff off the lawn –– and out of the trees –– every January.

References
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/reality-check/201111/11-11-11-apophenia-and-the-meaning-life

http://www.slate.com/blogs/how_babies_work/2013/04/03/babies_and_the_new_science_of_facial_recognition.html

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The Would-Be Farm: Late Spring This Year

5/21/2018

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A long winter, a late spring.

We arrived at the Would-Be Farm a week or so early this year.

Early by the season, if not the actual calendar.

Not even the hint of buds on the trees, lakes still frozen, plenty of snow still on the ground, and a solid weekend of ice-storm.

The shape of the land shows like the ribs of a hungry animal this early in the spring.

Waiting for the arrival of spring, Mr. Linton and I blazed a couple of new trails. It's easier to make a way without having to part that modesty-drape of leaves and grass.

Naming the trails is surprisingly difficult, for what we end up calling them.

At the risk of self-conscious whimsy, there's The Road that goes all the way to the beaver pond, past Porcupine Falls and Long Meadow.

New Trail leads out the northern end of New Pasture past Hickory Corners to Blueberry Hill.

Loop Trail links New Trail to the Road. Thag creates fire!

Gah. I feel as if I missed some important lesson about place names.

All those jokes about housing developments named for the thing it displaces (Osprey Reach, Dolphin Cove, yadda yadda). Ironic.

Anyway, a few days and a few yellow blazes later, we now we have Dead Possum Trail (named for the skeleton we found, natch) and what I first thought would be Trillium Trail.

Then we noticed this:

So, Broken Wagon Trail it is.

Okay, yes, it's not technically a wagon. Neither is it precisely broken. But Abandoned Hay Rake Trail doesn't have the same ring, does it? Plus Mr. Linton named it, and what he says, goes. Sometimes. This time.

Back to the narrative.

Late spring this year: even the old oaks seemed to be having a hard time waking up.

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The Would-Be Farm: Neat Fort!

4/23/2018

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So there's a tumbledown house at the Would-Be Farm –– a modest wooden structure that's slowly collapsing into its foundation after being abandoned sometime in the 1980's.

It sports an outhouse that has been, up until now, frankly, too horrifying for me to examine.

Mr. Linton, however, is a made of sterner stuff. And thus his courage was rewarded:

The photo begs a caption. Or something.

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Annual Photo Album

4/10/2018

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Each spring, one of the first pleasant chores at the Would-Be Farm is a nice mix of high tech and low mud: we retrieve the game cameras and make our observations of the winter action.

Some old friends appear year after year.

Looking at me?

Furry beachball or raccoon?

And a few surprises.

Mink. I think the Canada geese will be thinner on the water.

Um. Beaver? Surely not a wolverine.

Even with thousands of images captured on the tiny photo cards, some creatures are still camera shy.

Others pose.

A rafter of turkeys.

While a couple are hiding in plain sight:

Hawk!

That's no Bullwinkle.

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The Would-Be Farm: Mystery Plants

1/23/2018

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Given that I am often looking to eat the plants at which I am looking, plant identification is more than just an amusement.

There's a certain urgency in figuring out if it's wild carrot (puny, but tasty) or hemlock (deadly).

At the farm, I spend chunks of daylight bent over my reference books, or –– in deference to the small, specific spot of cell coverage –– sitting on a rock in the middle of the field bent over the iPad.

For the first time I can remember –– would that be a telling detail? –– I am having vocabulary troubles.

Plant identification, like most biology, starts with the correct terminology to describe any plant's growth habits. Is it a dicot or monocot? How do the veins grow in the leaves? How do leaves grow on the stem, what do the leaves look like?

Bracts. Pinneately compound whorled. Lobed petolate. Oval sessate...The words seem slippery, and I keep having to flip back to the definitions again and again.

During the all-too-brief week we spent on the Would-Be Farm in early July, I decided to postpone the research by getting clear (clear-ish) photos of the latest crop of mystery plants. This is not rocket science, but I am only just skidding into the new century of digital memory.

When I was a googly-eyed junior in high school, being all moony and swoony over my equally googly-eyed boyfriend, our biology teacher, Mr. V. would shake his head at the sight of us two and mutter under his breath, "Two smarts equal dummy."

Oh, Mr. V., even just the one sometimes equals dummy!

Here's a few of the unknowns:

I figured I'd have tons to time to do the research during my months away from the farm. After all, some of these plants are bound to be edible. So far, not so much research, but the winter is still young...

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The Would-Be Farm: A Drum-roll Please!

11/1/2017

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That's a load of shiitake.

Okay, it's a handful of shiitake, enough for Mr. Linton and me to both enjoy one mushroom uncooked, and then plenty for a pan full of butter-sautéd beauties to go into his ommette and on top of his leftover pizza.

In a word, they were amazing. So much flavor in a tender bite of fungus!

For all I know, mushrooms have been popping up all summer, but we happened to be on hand in time to beat the squirrels and the slugs to harvest this autumn.

Slugs like shiitake. So do squirrels.

He contemplates the shiitake.

A small harvest, perhaps, but a genuine farming success uncomplicated by late frost, drought, tent caterpillars, etc., etc.

The Would-Be Farm is. Hurrah.

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The Would-Be Farm: Automatic Paparazzi*

10/26/2017

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One of the many pleasures of returning to the Would-Be Farm is the ritual of checking the game cameras.

As we have gotten to know the various gamey crossroads, we've added to the numbers of these nifty little devices. In fact, this time we forgot where we'd put that one for several days...

*Sidebar factoid: the term "paparazzi" comes from the name of a character in the 1960 Fellini film La Dolce Vita. That name (Paparazzo) also harks back to a kind of large Italian mosquito.

A few highlights from October 2017 at the Farm.

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The Would-Be Farm: Bears Plus Woods

10/10/2017

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Rumors about the return of the black bear to the neighborhood of the Would-Be Farm started some years ago. Black bears, like wolves and wood bison, were hunted out of the area a hundred years or so ago.

I take most such rumors with a grain of salt. There's a black panther, according to the locals, as well as deer-eating bobcats to be worried about when walking in the woods.

Not to mention the often-repeated story about a covert government plot to re-introduce mountain lions into the Adirondacks.

None of this is impossible, of course, although I'm pretty confident that a bobcat could not manage to get its jaws around the spine of a white-tailed deer. Still, I put it in the wishful category of "maybe, if I see proof."

Kind of like the skunk-ape of the Everglades, Uncle Markie's sighting notwithstanding.

Our game cameras don't lie, however, and a couple of years back, we had a blurry but unmistakable ursus americana sighting.

And chunks of the Would-Be Farm's landscape do seem rather bearish: big patches of brambles and some nice blueberry barrens and broken-rock formations that seem well suited for a bear's long winter torpor.

As time passed, and given that the black bear is a rover, I figured this one must have just been cruising by on its way someplace else. Just a tourist.

But the other thing that doesn't lie? Scat.

(In the interest of kindness, know that the blog is going to take a bathroom-minded turn. With photos.)

In July, I took a quick snap of what might be the product of an over-indulgence of berries for a big raccoon.

In October, I took a photo of what's clearly the kind of thing a bear would do in the woods.

As they say in scatological circles, "That is one big fecal coliform, baby."

Okay, maybe they don't –– turns out that "coliform" doesn't mean what I thought it meant. Huh.

Still, anyone with an eye for such things would be given pause by the appearance of such a display of large-caliber dung in the middle of the trail.

Let's hope it doesn't end in statistics and blood.

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The Would-Be Farm: It's All Re-Runs on Farm TV

9/7/2017

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Beach life. I worked as the first mate on a small passenger ferry* that shuttled tourists from Pass-a-Grille Beach across a short stretch of salt water to an uninhabited barrier island called Shell Key.

If there were customers, we'd also take them on a sunset cruise.

It was a great gig. My sister and I job-shared. We rendered tourists happy by the application of two-hour doses of undeveloped beach and surf. They got to see the real Florida. Sometimes they tipped.

(*The Shell Key Shuttle is still in biz, but under new management.)

The boss, Captain Alva, was perhaps the most mature and sensible adult male I'd known up till then. He offered positive, actionable advice when asked and took joy in the highlights of the day. Still does.

Inevitably, after a sunset cruise, the friendly fishing folk hanging around Merry Pier would ask how the sunset had been.

Because I love to get the laugh, I usually answered with something flip, deadpanned for shock value: "Aw, you know –– same old same old. It was a re-run. Saw it last week."

At the Would-Be Farm, we get a lot of that re-run stuff.

The fire-pit doing its thing, for instance. A bonfire doesn't seem to get old.

Even if we don't have any magic on hand, there's a lot of material for rapid oxidation. Brush transformed to dust. Heat and light. Sticks in the fire, sparks in the sky.

The night-time music is on repeat, too. Between the maniacal Whip-poor-wills and the spring peepers, it's something to have a bit of peace. Not to mention, though I am, the canids.

Coyotes serenade us most nights. We call it the chorus of the damned.

We try to pick out the individual voices in the quavering-howling-yapping-yipping wall of sound. In late summer, the pups join in with typically youthful enthusiasm.

The closest human sound might be atonal music by way of a middle-school band tuning up. An example? Sure, she typed, grinning evilly.

Check this Messiaen YouTube clip. At your own risk, by the by: Despite everything, I think I'm getting addicted to it.

We often end the sunlit day at the beaver pond.

We put a two-seater deer stand up a pine tree so we can get above some of the mosquitoes and see beyond the fringe of cattails that surrounds the pond.

The beavers –– true to stereotype –– clock in at dusk and work their fannies off maintaining the mud dams. They are reliable as clockwork, chugging through the water like mammalian tugboats.

With the right show, we can watch re-runs –– one most devoutly hopes –– for years.

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Would-Be Farm: Rural Archeology

8/25/2017

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Once upon a time, the Would-Be Farm was a young dairy operation.

In its prime –– somewhere between the middle of the 1800's and the middle of the 1900's –– the acreage had a darling little farmhouse, a couple of barns, fresh fenceposts, livestock, plowed fields, newly planted orchards of apple trees.

Back in those days, rural Jefferson County had no public sanitary service: no town dump, no curbside pick-up, no recycling centers.

This was also (mostly) before plastic, so the sheer volume of garbage produced by a family was a fraction of what it is today.

But still, things did break beyond fixing, and generations of folks who lived at the Would-Be farm burned what trash they could. Anything else, they chucked over the edge of the hill in the back yard.

I admire farms that keep things neat and trim. It's a rarity.

Even more than other people, farmers tend to hold onto equipment that they've stopped using. Things pile up. Sometimes they leave it right where it stopped and after a few seasons, the metal begins to melt into the scenery.

Between midden heaps and melting metal, the Would-Be Farm is giving us a rich archeological site to mine.

The barn has been a collapsed wreck for thirty years or more. Locals who come visit don't even remember even when it went. It's a little mystery.

This spring, we hired a guy with a very large excavator to clear out the old foundation and haul the detritus away.

First, because Mr. Linton kept wanting to toss a match and some accelerant into the pile of rotten wood and rank weeds
Second, because we thought we might make use of a limned space already carved out of the side of the hill.
And third, because, well –– squalor.

The old barn foundation run wild.

The old foundation area was chock-full of ancient roofing material, twisted sheets of metal, honeysuckle trees, tumbled rocks, pipes, and miscellany.

Cool miscellany:

Jeff rescued a turn-of-the-century hand plough out of the wreckage for me.

My sister found a lovely old grindstone.

I hauled the enormous lid of an old grain container up the hill to make a sort of hob for the fire-pit. Unsuccessful. Jeff slid it back into the pile.

The man with the excavator (and dump trucks!) showed up while we were racing sailboats in Massachusetts. By the time we arrived back on the farm, only an invoice, some dents in the turf, and a void remained.

Knowing how brambles quickly re-colonize an area, we got to work clearing the rocks* that had tumbled outward from the collapsed western and southern sides of the old foundation. Decades of fallen leaves helped the old timbers and cow manure compost itself into some good-looking soil. We took the opportunity to carve out more garden space.

(*Rock-picking. One of the harder jobs on a farm. Oddly, it did not seem incongruous for me to find myself, decades and degrees later, once again picking rocks from the clay soil of the North Country.)

My friend Len has a metal detector that he uses to great effect. He often sends snapshots of his latest hauls: delicate, old-fashioned ladies' rings, coins, lead weights he's saving for Mr. Linton.

My metal detector is less refined: I use a big magnet on a length of twine.

There's a decided "clink" when a rusty nail jumps onto the magnet. And then there's the odd pull when the metal is too big to heave itself from its bed.

I can't resist saving these things.

The metal chunks range from the obvious –– hinges and horseshoes –– to the arcane.

Nails were evidently cheap, and our guys never used one nail when three were possible.

Astonishing amounts of leather survive, the linseed oil preserving the bits of harness and halters even after half a century or more.

So much peculiar loot! We could open our own Agricultural museum –– or stock a display case or two at least. Until then, we have a level spot to park the tractor, a stretch of reclaimed field, and a new couple of gardens.

I am thinking horseradish and rhubarb, plus a protected winter bed for daffodils and iris. Ahhhh.

The old foundation mostly tamed.

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<<Previous

What's the name of that...Whatsit?

The Would-Be Farm: Late Spring This Year

The Would-Be Farm: Neat Fort!

Annual Photo Album

The Would-Be Farm: Mystery Plants

The Would-Be Farm: A Drum-roll Please!

The Would-Be Farm: Automatic Paparazzi*

The Would-Be Farm: Bears Plus Woods

The Would-Be Farm: It's All Re-Runs on Farm TV

Would-Be Farm: Rural Archeology

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