Category: Handwork

The Would-Be Farm: Rock the Steps

10/31/2021

What might the principal exports of the Would-Be Farm be?

Apples? Rhubarb? Wild turkey? Hickory nuts? Cherry tomatoes? Okay, we have done pretty well with the garden but truth be told, our most reliable products are burdocks, porcupines, and rocks.

Haven't found much use for burdocks and porcupines, but rocks --

I only meant it to be a couple of strategically placed stepping stones.

Instead, as rock-moving projects in my world tend to do, the idea morphed and grew.

We built the cabin on the side of a hill, on piers (or stilts as they would be called, oddly enough, in a coastal setting).

It makes a nicely shaded area under the living room where we can park the tractor and what-not.

Because this was a very wet summer, however, the down-below area was a clay-pit.

The little boat trailer sunk to its axel. Walking around down there meant acquiring an inches-thick sole of clay stuck to the bottom of our shoes.

Solution: pour concrete.

A levitating propane tank. Huh. Don't see that every day.

After some thought, we decided against doing our own concrete work. The guys managed to dig, gravel, and move the concrete by wheelbarrow from where the 'rete truck backed into Jeff's velvet field of green in a single day.

(PS, it took us only a week or so to fill those ruts and overseed the area with clover. The scars on the field are nearly invisible.

So we have a magically smooth concrete floor down below, perfect for parking stuff and enjoying the breeze.

Of course, if you build it, they will come. But anybody wanting to get there will have to make a pell-mell run downhill from the driveway to get to the down-below.

Or use my decorative but winding stepping path through the rock garden.

Neither option is ideal, especially when you just want to turn off the hose or grab the little wagon.

So steps.

I meant to just put a couple of flagstones into the ground, but then the stones started piping up and the hill was asking for more...

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Hey Ho, a Pirate's Life for Me

2/5/2021

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Working. Sigh.

Every once and a while, someone will announce to me that it's cruel to make horses pull carriages, run around a race-track, jump obstacles.

These same people –– so far! –– will NOT agree with me when I suggest that throwing a tennis ball over and over is torture for dogs.

They are quick to assure me that, no! no! fetching is a game!

Sure it is.

Tell that to your average retriever.

via GIPHY

Somehow the very idea of work get the stink eye –– golly, we wouldn't even wish it on our animal friends. The same animal buddies whose stalwart character and skills we've selected for across hundreds of generations.

But did any of us evolve all these years find our joy while melting into the upholstery? Add a bag of chips and a winning Lotto ticket, et voilá! The American Dream nirvana!

I don't mean to rant. Or actually I do. I just don't want to glaze anyone's eyes for them. Save the anesthetized stare for the third season of whatever's streaming today. Grrr.

What kind of malarkey are we putting on toast?

I'm not above it, truly. Work can suck.

Carriage horses sometimes die of heat exhaustion. Racehorses twist an elegant ankle and are seen no more on green pastures.

But can a person deny a horse the joy of running? The snarfling satisfaction of a well-fetched stick? The sweaty pleasure of that last log split and stacked?

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Shark's Teeth

1/28/2021

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As anyone who knows my fondness for Archie MacPhee will testify, I am liable to announce a propos of nada: “Sharks have no bones!”

It was a catchy tagline from a catalog some years ago. And true.

Shark are all cartilage and attitude. And, as one might discover on a foggy January wander along a beach – teeth.

Sharks continually shed teeth and grow more. Row after row of them.

Having no tooth-fairy to look after them, these teeth sink to the bottom of the sea.

Once the chompers hit mud or sand, chemistry does its magic.

Minerals from the mud (or sand) shimmy into the teeth, making the once-pearly whites, dear, into something rich and chestnut-colored, or black.

Or, according to the lore, blue.

Of course everyone wants a 5-inch-long megladon tooth, but these are pretty cool too.,

Walk down the right beach and tune your attention to the y-shape, and dozens of teeth will appear.

Which makes sense, because sharks have been swimming about for millions of years. And some grow up to 35,000 teeth in a lifetime.

I suppose someone has done the math, but it’s a lot of teeth underfoot. One might say, the opposite of hen's teeth, even.

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Would-Be Farm Stones

12/8/2020

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The natural question is, "So, what do you grow at the farm?

"Do you have cows? Corn? Chickens?"

My smart-alecky (but not untrue) answer is that the principal crops of the Would-Be Farm include burdocks, porcupines, and rocks.

Rocks are the only one of those things I've harvested year after year.

It's a kind of obsession, wanting to shunt small boulders and flat stones hither and yon.

Doesn't everyone have this impulse to shuffle chunks of granite or marble or gneiss from one place to another?

Pull a rock from a garden bed, fit it into the border.

Roll one boulder next to another to make a lookout perch.

Set a big flat slab just where you need to step.

Create rock terraces up a slippery slope.

Excavate a tiny pool and line it with mossy cobbles so the spring melt-water will fill and then drizzle musically along its merry way.

Florida offers so little in the line of rocks, at least in our sandy neck of the woods.

But the Would-Be Farm contains lifetimes' worth of movable stones just waiting to get picked up and placed elsewhere.

Perhaps the rock-moving thing is in the blood.

Heaven knows there are stone workers by the shovel-full up the family tree: tin miners in Cornwall, copper miners in Tennessee, the odd silver-miner crushed in freak accident in a Colorado mine.

And after all, I'm not the only one in the family who likes to rearrange the rocky furniture of the world.

I've known my sister to leap from a running car when she spots the stone she needs for her rock-garden.

My own Daddo –– a carpenter and a mason –– showed me to mix cement and set bricks when I was but a wee nipper.

The local quarryman who does the heaviest lifting (making driveways, delivering gravel, etc.) at the Would-Be Farm needs only to be briefly reminded that I am Aunt Prudy's niece and he lights UP.

His reserved "hello" morphs into a grinning, winking welcome. "Oh! If only..." he always ends up sighing. Charming Aunt P makes conquests left and right.

I know she had the quarryman and his crew move and readjust rocks over and over and over again until she had her flagstone patio just the way she liked. It's to her credit that the quarryman made it beautiful and remembers her fondly.

Making a stone surface like that is not just a matter of skipping a few stones into leveling sand and calling it good.

I believe that if you gather five or seven flagstones, there's only going to be one or two "correct" configurations.

And a person might have to tidily-wink rocks around and then contemplate the composition for a few days before finding the right arrangement.

Stones have their own logic and preferences.

You have to listen to them or learn to live with some half-assed, unbalanced construct.

What can be more beautiful than an elegant old stone wall? Running mostly straight, like a seam across a landscape -- ooh, ahh.

I'll own the sentiment second-hand.

I'm not proud.

If I hadn't learned to notice and love the ruins of old farms from my mother, I'd have adopted it from Robert Frost.

Though, in all fairness, I think Frost came from Mumsie as well.

Before google was a verb, we passed one North Country blizzard by pulling "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" –– stanza by sing-song stanza –– from imperfect collective memory.

I remember the blue light of the overcast sky reflecting ice into the dim living-room. The sinking presence of cold at the glass. And the dozens of running, stumbling starts it took for one of us to finally say the poem complete from start to finish.

Many years later, reading Frost's "Home Burial," a second time, maybe because my own name was in it –– I inadvertently learned that stories about pain are better than ones that start and end in happiness alone.

Not an original impulse. Never is, under the sun -- so wrote a world-weary Sumerian* 5,000 years ago.

Although, I remind myself cheerfully, if we each of us waited for a truly original impulse or thought, we would all be mysteries to each other.

* My favorite Sumerian quotation is "there is nothing new under the sun." Which, as it turns out when I research the citation, isn't Sumerian at all but Ecclesiastes. Huh.

My second favorite Sumerian quote? "What kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?"

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The Would-Be Farm Summer Vacation

8/9/2020

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This is the longest stretch in his adult life that my favorite skipper has spent away from sailboats.

Jeff contemplates a pile of fresh bear scat.

For decades, we schedule our year around various regattas. We've missed weddings and birthdays because of our sailing calendar. As I remember, we'd been together for five years before taking a trip that was NOT related to sailing.

Because of regattas, we've traveled to Italy and Sardinia and Greece and all over South America. And North America. Hawaii even. The year the Flying Scot North American championship was held in Texas, we planned a summer adventure that took us looping out West. All for competition at the mercy of wind.

Racing on the bounding main –– it's a sport, a calling, a joy. It's the bones of our life together.

Then along comes the Covid-19 Pandemic, leaving us high and dry.

Which is how we've managed to finish the Woodbee in a matter of months.

When last we left the build, the 600-square-foot structure was dried in, with a pair of walls and a loft accessible by pull-down ladder. Jeff and I had put down flooring, slathered paint on everything that held still, and set the wood stove into place.

When we arrived in late April, the list of to-dos was not inconsiderable: walls, plumbing, electricity, kitchen, bathroom...

Kitchen wall complete!

He's called himself a "rough" carpenter, but he's gotten some chops.

Of course we had help from a local contractor (Joel Zimmer!) and super-handy man John Donovan.

Dry pack concrete and coffee...it's what's for breakfast!

It was then that she realized the importance of a good stretch...

Jiffy-Pop over a wood fire at the end of a long day.

And a drumroll, please....

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The Would-Be Farm: Dealing with A Bad Smoke Alarm.

7/10/2020

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You know how it goes. Everything peaceful and chill.

Maybe the iPod is playing the soundtrack from Hamilton. Perhaps you're watching Rabbit TV (a limited lineup, but endlessly entertaining). Maybe you're cooking on the newly functional propane stove. Anyway, it's relaxed.

When EEEEEEEEEE. and EEEEEEEEE. and EEEEEEEE!

The noise is designed to either wake you from a sound sleep or possibly drive you in-freaking-sane.

Whichever. It works.

Okay, you you press the reset button. Two minutes later –– just as the old heart-rate is returning to normal –– EEEEEEEEE! and EEEEEEEEEEE!

My handsome gallant saves us, holding a thumb over the button repeatedly. It becomes clear that the damn 10-years-guaranteed, never-needs-batteries, save-your-life-and-required-by-law has gone rogue. It will not stop alerting us.

It EEEEEEEs in the bathroom. It EEEEEEEEs outdoors.

Jeff eventually puts it into the van, so it could, as he said, "Simmer down."

All during dinner, an errant wind gave us brief hope, and then, faintly, EEEEEEEEE. and EEEEEEEE.

Dishes done (in a sink! with running hot and cold water! cabin life is better and better!), Jeff betakes himself off and the next thing I notice is that he's taken out the 50-year-old .22 his father gave him.

Whatcha doing? I ask.

He points, and I hear a faint EEEEEEing across the field. He's put the damn thing into a tree. I admire the dispatch with which he handles tech troubles.

A clean through-and-through, and by golly the thing has stopped EEEEEEEing.

The test button suggests that it's still working, but I'm taking it back to the local hardware store where we bought it.

I don't mind explaining why.

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On Retreat, on Making Stuff, Onward

3/25/2020

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Do I even need say that my favorite skipper and I are shut in these days? And that I am not complaining?

So far, so good: despite a near-miss on that cancelled trip to Italy, a nearer-miss on the replacement trip to Manhattan, and even though the head-cold plus a random hot flash FEELS like the onset of Covid-19, we are staying healthy.

Knock wood.

I am grateful that we aren't worried about how to feed our family this week. I'm grateful for a nice window to look out. I'm grateful for the sewing skills imbued in me by my sweet mother-in-law. I'm grateful for the internet.

Back in the days of roaming freely...Mr. Linton exploring the old gatehouse at Teddy Roosevelt National Park.

Mr. Linton has been fishing pretty regularly, though because of last summer's red tide, he can't bring anything home. Social distancing is easy on the water.

And naturally, he has a lot of boat-work to fill his days on shore.

The two 2.4 Meter boats (one fresh, one experienced) are slowly coming into alignment. Jeff's re-rigged the older boat so that it's indistinguishable from the newer one. Fresh paint, fresh lines, carbon-fiber bits and bobs. He orders stuff on-line and obsessively checks delivery times. He splices lines while watching Bosch in the evenings.

Given that many of our upcoming regattas have been cancelled, he seems content.

And me, I'm always looking forward to a chunk of time in which to write but as it happens, I've been distracted by real life. It's hard to make up a story more exciting than the news right now.

So instead, I'm doing a lot of reading (check out my goodreads shelf for the bookwormy details).

And making stuff.

We're avoiding the grocery store –– taco Tuesday involved some freezer-burned ground beef that I might normally have donated to the fishes, but it tasted fine with the fresh greens from the garden –– and keeping our IRL social distance from the world. I've become a big fan of FaceTime right now for actual social interaction. Yay internet!

I'm hoping to settle into whatever this new normal is and get back to my keyboard sometime soon, but in the the meanwhile, as they say in one of my favorite movies, "Rule #32: Enjoy the little things."

Wishing you safety and kindness from here...

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The Would-Be Farm: Mulch

1/27/2020

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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.

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.

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...

Surprise surprise surprise.

The wheat straw made a miraculous rise from the cold soil this spring.

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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A New Year...More New Projects

1/2/2020

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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.

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.

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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The Would-Be Farm: Taking Shape

10/7/2019

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According to cheerful old Plato, an ideal world exists beyond our senses.

Everything we see in the "sensible" world is simply an approximation of the ideal. Just shadows on the wall of a cave.

One of those plastic stacking chairs, a schools teacher's perch, that Frank Lloyd Wright piece, a Heppelwhite seat, Arthur's siege parlous, all are –– according to this argument –– mere reflections of the ideal chair. Imperfect interpretations, shadows, approximations.

Anyhoo. That's one way to look around at the world, perhaps more than a little reductio ad absurdum. But it does somehow lead me to thinking about what makes a shelter.

We humans can live in any manner of places: tents, caves, castles, huts, boats, vans. Even homeless, we have our preferred spots. What's the common denominator?

View from the storage loft.

Maybe that there's an indoor and an outdoor. In most places in the world, I guess, shelter means blocking precipitation. Once the rain can't get in, a spot can become home.

On a build, there's a precipitous teetering moment when the project is "dried in."

It's when the outside stays out and inside is more than a concept. Windows in, roof on, doors that close. It goes from being a build to being a building.

All this noodling as an excuse to post some more photos of the Woodbee.

Thanks for indulging me!