Garden Lessons, 2017

2017 was a year of many lessons, not all of them good. I don't know that my experiences will help others, but here's what happened.

Weather:

With a challenging summer, first hot and wet, then hot and arid, it was good that we had 1200 gallons of stored rain water. One tropical system moved west, only giving us perhaps half an inch of rain when we could have used two.  We tapped the 500 gallon cistern once, pulling about 200 gallons out after we'd been through another 300 in our smaller rain barrels.  We'll see about adding another 250 gallon tank next year, so we can water young trees as well as the garden.

Our harvest, save for white potatoes, was still very good. Frost arrived a month after the average date, so I was harvesting tomatoes and peppers later than ever. I save a window-ripened green tomato in the fridge now, in time for Thanksgiving.

Hot Peppers: 

Let's start with the bad news. Despite beds that grew into thickets of hot-pepper bushes, it's likely my last season growing them in bulk for a local restaurant. At the prices I can get per pound, we are better off giving up some of the garden for increasing our flock of laying hens. We just cannot meet demand, and if we even sold two more dozen per week, we'd make as much money as we do with the peppers.

The hours of work starting seeds in the greenhouse, transplanting to larger pots, then harvesting the peppers simply do not add up to economic sense. I've yet to tell our customer, but he may want a different source in any case: despite cross-pollinating our Thai Dragons with super-hot peppers, the heavy rain early on and the later-than-normal harvest may have made their heat content too low.  I watered deeply once per week when the dry weather came and stayed. That should not have been excessive, but the peppers lacked the bite we want.

I've learned an adage that my friend Dominic, at Dellicarpini Farms, told me: focus on crops that provide more pounds of harvest. Thai Peppers are small and difficult to harvest. I'll still grow a few for myself and to continue my cross-pollination ideas.

We also lost a verbal contract for a crop of super-hot Ghosts and Scorpions. The would-be buyer had told me he'd buy "every pepper I grew" the year before, then turned about to say he'd not need any at all. I sold a few pounds, but about 20 pounds froze on the plants and are now compost.

So next year several raised beds dedicated to peppers will go to other plants, as we rotate our garden and let the soil rest.  Two beds will be given up entirely, as we expand the chicken run to add a coop for a laying flock and our first rooster.

One good thing that came from the pepper crop was a method I learned for curbing weed growth. We rolled out 4 oz weed-block fabric from A.M. Leonard, and then we cut slits in the fabric for transplanting. It's labor-intensive at first, but in the long run we saved hours and hours weeding. The fabric gets rolled back in winter, so our chickens can scratch up the raised beds.

Tomatoes:

Okay, I gotta cage the beasts; next year it will be welded wire cages. We had good luck with Mortgage-Lifters, Long Keeper, Yellow Pear, and Sungold Cherry varieties. I saved seeds from the best plants; some of the Yellow Pears had wilt and others did not. So I chose wisely when saving seed for 2018.

Cucumbers:

We experimented with using Doctor Bronner's Eucalyptus soap (1 part to 9 parts water) on the plants weekly. We did not pickle this year, but we had slicers until the vines died in the heat of early July. Squash bugs were rare this year. I'm going to try the same treatment next year on our cukes and our squash; we did not put in any this year.

Our Lima Bean harvest was sufficient for the two of us, and there too I sprayed the Dr. Bronners a couple of times. It's cheap enough on the scale we grow.

Garlic:

While our multiplier onions only produced enough bulbs to replant this fall, we hope that next year we'll expand our crop enough to actually eat some!  I need to side-dress the onions a bit, as the bulbs were small.

Garlic, however, proved a real bonanza for us. I credit Ira Wallace's workshop from the 2016 Heritage Harvest Festival. She plants late, up to mid-November in prepared beds. We more than replaced our seed garlic this year, both hard-neck and soft-neck varieties.

I froze a lot of last year's crop, in March, that we stored in our root cellar. I put the peeled cloves in olive oil and froze that, in small tubs. We used that all summer for a weekly pesto dinner.

Greens:

These have been another ongoing success. We ate lettuce (Slow Bolt) into June, and I replanted with seeds (that variety plus Tennis Ball and Spotted Aleppo) in September. We are eating lettuce now that we put under a row cover.

Chard survived the summer, looking horrid and blasted, to feed us again in Fall. The freeze nipped it, but we keep cutting and cooking good leaves. Our mustard and collards, however, are thriving after the freeze and are very sweet. We put them in in the bed that had the garlic and onions until harvest.

Potatoes and Sweet Potatoes:

I stupidly planted the white potatoes in not enough soil, over a layer of weed block. We got four small tubers and ate them in one meal.

The Becca's Purple sweet potatoes, however, were amazing. In a raised bed I got nearly 60 pounds that will carry us through the winter. They are great weed-blockers, only needing attention when the drought got really bad or when Japanese Beetles really got after them. We handed picked the plants daily, and the crop shrugged off the pests.


Berries:

Our first year of jam! We had a nice early crop, and we'd have had more had I weeded more later. That is the plan next year. The plants draw critters, and I shot one groundhog in the patch, despite good fencing: the whistle-pig found a gap at the gate.

Rabbits also had fun in there, but with a scoped small-bore rifle I rid the garden of a few of them. Our livestock guardian dog got others, to judge by the skulls at the back of her run.

That, too, is nature. Everyone has to eat.

Our wild blackberries came in heavily. This winter I need to bushhog two thickets of old canes, so we'll get young canes and new fruit. We got enough as it was to freeze several pounds for winter.

So next year I'll put these lessons to work and see where 2018 take us all. In dark and difficult times, full of so many disappointments and tragedies in our nation, it's good to at least eat food you grow yourself.

Homesteaders of America Conference, 2017

We had the great pleasure of attending the first-ever national conference of the Homesteaders of America.  I've been delinquent in my conference reviews this year, especially of the recent Heritage Harvest Festival.  I will cover that event soon, but I have to say that the Homesteader gathering was a Tractorpunk's paradise.

We attended two speakers' presentations and talked to a lot of vendors. The event sold out, so I'm glad we bought tickets in advance.

Warrenton VA hosted the gathering at their Fauquier County Fair Grounds. It provided a perfect rural setting. The area there is building up fast with DC commuters, but it's not all awful sprawl. The twee little downtown area, as well as a sentimental favorite of mine, Frost Diner, show that suburban and rural can coexist. I hope they can maintain that balance.

The balance between a hurry-scurry life of consumerism and debt vs. the potential freedom, monetary and spiritual, of the homesteading life was central to talks by Doug and Stacy, the stars of the YouTube Channel "Off the Grid with Doug and Stacy," as well as author, farmer, and rural philosopher Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms.

Now just a moment. Folks living with no internet connection or electric power but with a series of YouTube videos? Oh yeah, and using their own drone to film the event? At that moment, I knew I was in the right crowd: no Luddites here, just, to paraphrase Howard Rheingold's point about the Amish, very clever techno-selectives.  Think: farm truck to charge electronics + unlimited data for Verizon cellular users. Makes at least as much sense as me building my own shaving horse to do woodwork.

The couple talked about our culture as one that rewards staying in debt, becoming dependent on technology we do not understand, of severing our ties with the soil and the rest of nature. Salatin continued that with his talk later in the day. I grinned at both of their references to "The Man," which propelled me mentally to the early 70s again.

And yet, they are correct. As Doug put it, "barter is what The Man is scared of," and Salatin later chimed in that we are desperately in need of "relationship rather than consumerism." Fine and good, that, thought I, preaching to the choir.  As if anticipating my very snark, Salatin added that the choir did need some preaching-to, so we would be energized to share with others our foodways, our practices that build wealth in the soil and self-reliance in the home. Homesteaders are gentle missionaries of a way once taken but left behind after the Second World War. I was greatly moved by Salatin's remarks, for which he noted Michael Pollan's ideas, that "we know that eating like Great Grandma is healthier and safer."

Yes, I too worry about the slow accumulation of pesticides and herbicides in our bodies without any longitudinal studies of their impact. As Salatin noted, in his Christian-Libertarian way that I found suddenly reasonable, our government now sells us on the safety of GMOs when, just a generation ago, it found that margarine would be safer than real butter and all of the carbs at the bottom of the food pyramid--an innovation of 1979--were equal nutritionally: Twinkies and taters apparently sustain us equally.

It's easy, when on the mass-comsumption treadmill, to dismiss homesteaders as crackpots. One of my colleagues who toured Polyface with Salatin found him to be half visionary, half crackpot. And he charmed my colleague utterly. I agree. It may seem ludicrous to tell a culture seemingly content with morbid obesity, car-based lifestyles, and land-use plans intent of paving our best farmland that "you are insane." Jim Kunstler has been doing so for years. Salatin does it with a different method of delivery, and Stacy and Doug live that vision of a world (almost) made by hand.

So I came away inspired. There is much left to do, but each step adds something in a movement toward more self-reliance. Next year for us? Food dehydration and cooking with a solar oven. We found an inexpensive one available from a vendor. My own plans would cook but not dyhydrate, so having one professionally made tool will be the route I take in 2018. We will also be raising chicks from incubated eggs.

This year we've expanded our seed-saving to tomatoes, begun reloading ammo, and I'm about to hunt deer for the first time in 30 years. Others will pick different skills from our frontier history, but one or two steps at a time will get us closer to what worked for our ancestors. I've critiqued the myth of self-sufficiency here before, so it pleased me that the speakers discussed the need not to build bomb-proof silos but rather resilient communities where we develop some of the skills our grandparents had. In the end we might create collapse-proof communities, if the worst that they and Kunstler fear comes to pass.

I learned a whole lot and, true to the spirit of the event, did not spend a lot of money beyond buying a really nice gardening knife to replace my easily broken hori-hori (replaced once already under warranty).  I will use the new tool this weekend to weed as I harvest hot peppers for our one restaurant customer.

A few quibbles about the event are inevitable, and I think the organizers can iron them out. Next  year, I hope they offer more food. We plan to pack our own food--very rural-thrifty of us--but a hot cup of coffee on a foggy morning would have been ideal. The one vendor with that beverage was overwhelmed by a long line at his food truck. The same problem occurred at Monticello in September, for the Heritage Harvest Festival. I hope the organizers of each event can lure more food trucks--so often a source of farm-to-table fare--to their gatherings.

We who paid ahead for admissions and speakers got first dibs for seating. It was not a problem but being a "Green Wristband" and thus encouraged to get seating made me uncomfortable. I'd recommend just charging one price next year; luckily no fights erupted because we call got seats. I'm looking forward to my own tour soon of Polyface with my fellow crackpot, Joel Salatin. I just wish I could get that "visionary" part going for me. The crackpot part I have down just fine.

Four Essential Shop Tools (+1)

Having lived this way for nearly five years (!) I took some time to take stock, walking around the shop and just thinking "which of these things has proven most useful to me?"

Here are a few answers.

The Vise

The Columbian vise pictured above was in my grandfather's basement for decades, then my dad's garage for twenty years. As far as I know, neither of them ever used it. My grandfather was a junk-man and tinkerer. He probably bought the vise for its potential value as scrap steel. His basement was full of such things, and it's rather hard to imagine one making a living peddling junk these days, when our thrift stores are chock-full of ancestors' possessions no Millennial apparently wants to have.

But I digress. When I saw the vise the first time, I knew I wanted it. The solidity of the thing! It radiates the sort of sleeves-rolled-up, baseball-on-the-AM-radio DIY of a different era. And the metal is as formidable as the Battleship Wisconsin, another relic of that time.

My pipe-cleaner arms of my early teens could barley budge it. My dad knew its worth as a good tool, so after his father passed, dad stuck it in a corner of his garage. My dad's idea of DIY consisted of "call some guy" after his two tools--a claw hammer and 16d nail--would not solve the problem. All right, I'm exaggerating. Dad had a set of pliers too, if he could find them in the kitchen drawer.

When Dad passed, I grabbed the vise and asked my father-in-law to media-blast it. He then primed it, and I painted it with a heavy-duty monument paint that should last down the decades.  But the vise is not bit of hipster decor. I have used it many times for many projects. The jaws grip firmly enough for hammering metal into curves or bending bar-stock metal, though it occasionally serves the prosaic purpose of holding a #2 pencil that holds a spool of fishing line, when I restring my reels. The top of it can be used for cold-hammering metal flat, rather like an anvil.

So this tool is my #1 go-to in the shop. I could not live as I do without it.

The Drill Press

I've never owned one of these before, but my father-in-law left one on the property and it works wonderfully. The trick to a good press is that is spins slowly but has enormous torque. I've bored through sheet steel a quarter of an inch thick, with no problems. I use a cutting oil to make things go smoothly and the motor does not suffer undue wear.

I don't know much about modern drill-presses, but this one has real staying power. There are so many uses for it that I'd need a chapter of a book to list them all. But the press gives precision when precision is needed, or when very large bores for bolts need drilling. I used the press to make seat bracket adapters for a car I'm restoring and our 1950 John Deere M tractor.

Note the safety glasses nearby. Though the bit spins slowly, slivers of metal are no joke when flying through the air!

The Bench Grinder

These are salted around our property like Dandelions. I must have found six in various states of disrepair, including one very new and very cheaply made Chinese one in the box. It has no torque; if you press down on the wheel, you can slow it down! It is, however, perfect for light materials.

The best of the lot is shown, a vintage Craftsman from when Sears not only was the King of Retail, not a dying memory, the innovator purveyor of just about everything America's then burgeoning middle class needed for the good life.

The best grinders offer a work light, sturdy tempered-glass shields to protect one's face from sparks, and two grits of wheel or a wheel and wire brush (my favorite combo). As with the drill press, the torque on a good grinder can be immense. I usually have to hold work by hand to grind it, so I wear thick gloves to keep my hands from burning, and I never get distracted. Imagine having a finger pulled into the metal guard by the grinding wheel!

Grinders work for wood too; my first experience was as a 10 year old, making a Pinewood Derby car when I was a Scout.

The Miter-Box Saw

I own two, one of them a professional model Bosch with a 12" blade that is heavy and rides around on a folding stand. It  does great work, but the handiest saw of the lot I own is a little Hitachi, one that cost me less and $100. It is light enough to tote to the job site in one hand, and the 10" blade big enough to do all sorts of chores. It angles in both directions

and can accommodate lots of different sorts of blades.

I have used this little saw for wood (of course) but with a masonry blade, I've cut HardiePlank paneling for a siding job. An installer told me that his firm saves old saw blades and mounts them backward to cut such cement-board planking, as clever an adaptive reuse as I've encountered.

Safety with such a saw involves reading the manual and slowing down when making cuts. I wear googles and make sure I know where every finger is, so one day I don't come up, um, short.

That's four essential tools, but then I remembered my own example of adaptive reuse

The Floor Safe

I could not figure out what to do with a floor safe that had no working dial. Someone drilled all that

out years ago, but there it sat in my shop.

Recently I purchased a few fireworks for a 4th of July Party we didn't have. Where could I store them, safely? Then the old safe came to mind. I put them  and my jug of gunpowder for reloading in the old safe. There's a plastic jug of Alliant Bullseye pistol powder in there now.

The door shuts well and only needs to be pulled open. The thing weighs a few hundred pounds, incidentally.

So if you find a broken safe for sale, cheap, get some helpers to bring it to your shop.

Pro tip: If  you do reload, keep your primers elsewhere. Those can explode. Gunpowder only burns until it's confined in a cartridge or firework.

Get a second broken safe! Or even one that works for free. I see a 1966 post-office safe on Craig's List locally, an 1100 pound beauty. The catch?

It is "on wheels but is located in a small room in a basement that does have a walk out...however the walk out is into the yard not a driveway, so this is going to be a challenge. But if you want a cool big old safe and like a challenge, contact us."

Have at it! You can never have enough safes.

Why I Like "Fiddly" Hobbies

My last post about canning discussed my desire for hobbies that focus the mind completely. They also produce something I can use or enjoy in some way. One reason you will not find me staring at the smart phone all that much or watching TV comes from my belief that when I'm done, I can, in the words of my late father-in-law, "have something I can put my hands on." A friend called such hobbies "fierce" but I prefer "fiddly" because they involve a lot of geeky knowledge combined with special tools and learned craft.

I suppose writing has all that going for it. For many of us, hobbies enrich our knowledge while keeping at bay what writer Joseph Conrad called "that obscure feeling that life is but a waste of days."  Hobbies can immerse us in social circles online and in person.

There's also something more at work with fiddly hobbies. Consider the urge refinish furniture, make one's own clothing or knitwear, spin wool, restore old cars, fly fish, and renovate historic houses. All these tasks immerse ourselves not only (when needed) in the virtual but in what I call, with a twist on Baudrillard's term, "The Garden of the Real." Gardening, too, can be a fiddly hobby, when practiced a certain way.

Yet fiddly hobbies are different from other pastimes I enjoy, such as travel done well and off the tourist track.  My travels change me and leave me with memories and some mementos. Fiddly hobbies are like a good holiday from the day-to-day that never ends.

Since the 1960s, I've built scale models. In fact, my earliest modeling memory is of spray-painting my eyeball in 1968, during the Richmond riots following the death of Martin Luther King Jr. As glass broke from looters a block from our house, my mom, without a car, had to phone the hospital to get advice on how to rinse out my eye.  Yet I most recall how good the Jaguar E-Type looked to me in a decidedly non-stock shade of metallic Lilac.

I still build a kit or two every year. My current project honors a deceased friend, Gary Braswell, an avid collector of realistic action figures. He had in his stash a nice American Volunteer Group "Flying Tiger" pilot standing about 12 inches tall as well as, in the same scale, a Zero-Fighter pilot from Pearl Harbor. I decided to pose each pilot with a scale model of his sort of plane.

Getting the kits together involves a lot more detail than my long-lost Jaguar and, for that matter, a lot more safety. Today I use airbrushes, different types of glues, specialized tools, and I take months on a kit. I do a lot of research on aspects of correct paints and the weathering on particular subjects, going so far to mix my own shades of paint for certain projects.

Reloading is my newest fiddly hobby, and I bring to it the same level of research that I employ with models, but even more care. I picture a few reloading tools here, for .38 Special and .45 ACP rounds I shoot for target practice. I have a case trimmer, different measures and a "trickler" for gunpowder, a Swiss-made caliper good to thousandths of an inch. There's a fat Lyman manual with precise information, because a mistake, such as overcharging a bullet with powder, could mean a trip to the hospital or the Great Beyond.

Reloading led me to an epiphany about American gun culture that has almost nothing to do with firearms.

Long ago, most of us could work on our cars, if we wanted. Today, even an oil change is difficult without a lift or special tools. To a large degree, our cars have become a collection of computers on four wheels. Meanwhile, what seemed a safe refuge for tinkerers has vanished. Just a short decade and a half ago, I built both PC and Mac desktops from old parts, and I donated them to needy families and local charities. Now, in the age of SSD drives, flat-screen displays, and wafer-thin laptop cases, there's not a lot inside a CPU that a user can service.

I cannot even imagine working on a smart phone.

Modern gun owners, compared to the old guys who went out to hunt with a bolt-action rifle and kept a simple revolver in the night stand, trick out their firearms with optics, special triggers, new grips, and all sorts of internal and external upgrades. It amazes me how geeky the gun forums become with tales of amateur gun-smithing, barrel swaps, and changes to recoil springs.

Whatever the political and moral questions that swirl around America's fetish for guns, there's this fiddly-hobby, hot-rodder aspect that most critics and enthusiasts of firearms tend to ignore.  Of course, for some of the gun hobbyists I meet, I'd feel safer if they decided to build a few model planes.

Whatever  the hobby, the need to tinker exists on both sides of the Atlantic; in the UK I've been shown many DIY projects and the products of fiddly hobbies. There is something delightful about the hours slipping by, slow enough to savor their passing, as one engages in a fiddly hobby.  I might, if I can find one still on radio, have a baseball game in the background.

You just won't catch me in front of a TV watching hours of baseball or other sports. Now playing baseball, that most fiddly of sports? Perhaps in my next life.

Meanwhile, I have my 2017 fishing license and that involves infinite fiddling with lures, leaders, sinkers, respooling old reels, and stocking the cooler. I'm a fierce fisherman, too. I don't tend to go fishing to drink beer. It's about catching fish, finding the deep spots where they linger, scouting a bank for just the right overhanging tree to cast under (but sometimes into). Soon I'll have a lifetime fishing and hunting license from the State of Virginia, so I can continue my fiddly hobbies until I'm too old to clamber into a boat or get up a tree into a deer stand.

Overwhelmed By Tomatoes? Get Crackin' Now!

Time for my annual exhortation to can your own vegetables.

I'm abnormal when it comes to modern American life; I cannot identify most TV shows or celebrities, but I can tell you more than you'd want to know about what a friend calls "fierce hobbies," such a model making, reloading my own ammunition, or, yep, canning. All of them require a lot of attention to detail and tend to focus the mind and body completely.

Yet of them all, canning is perhaps the most gentle and productive. A few generations back, many folks, urban or rural, did it every summer. And to be honest, the longest part of making good tomato sauce for canning is slow-cooking it. The canning can be done in two hours. So please do not tell me you lack time to can your own sauce. There are few more rewarding things in one's kitchen, in the dead of winter, than opening a jar and evoking summer again.

As to how to do it? I've long favored a U Georgia site for the scientific principles espoused in the recipes.   Now that tomatoes are cheap, why not save some money and put up a few gallons?

Some advice if  you are ready to get cracking with this wonderful way to save the harvest. Modern tomatoes lack the acidity of older varieties, and even when I can heirlooms, I add a teaspoon of lemon juice to every pint jar.  I also tend to pressure-can tomatoes these days; granny never did, but the science of food preservation has come a long way. Cherish her recipes but use modern techniques in the canning kitchen. I employ both my first canner, a Presto, and my heavy duty All American Canner for summer chores. Great advice on canning marinara sauce, as well as a decent recipe, can be found here.

I have little time for folks who tell me "I don't have time to do [insert DIY activity]."  If one were to count the hours and hours wasted on the "smart" phone or watching videos of people injuring themselves, there would be enough time to restore a Model T or build a lake cottage.

Get Cracking. Summer is swiftly passing us by and the boxes of canning tomatoes will soon be gone from the farmer's market.  If  you grow your own, I find that a bushel of tomatoes yields about 3 gallons of finished sauce, depending on the variety of tomato and how much you cook it down.

Putting the Farmer Back in The Market

I cannot grow everything I eat, and since I do a lot of canning, I have to buy extra tomatoes, green peppers, and, some years, cucumbers. We usually get our own produce at a farmer's market. It can be  great bargain; I've snagged 25 lb. boxes of locally grown canning tomatoes for as little as $10, as the markets wind down.

Though you'd not think it from the crowded Saturdays around here, there's been some discussion at major newspapers that these are in decline nationally, and that bothers me for many reasons.

First, eating well should be more than a "lifestyle choice," as the author of the piece to which I've linked noted, when talking about the younger customers visiting the DuPont Circle market in DC. I don't want the less affluent to have to settle for less than the pouty fusspots who insist on nary a single worm-hole in their arugula.

Second, the "lifestyle" may not have a lot to do with cooking food.

The DuPont Market is a bustling place, but according to some of the vendors, the younger visitors seem more interested in the scene than in supporting local agriculture. They tend to buy prepared foods more than farmer-grown produce. That would be fine if the farmers could make a living; many are saying it's getting tougher. Treehugger.com gives many reasons for the decline.

Granted, I do see Millennials eating out, a lot, and I don't know too many of my students who cook, though I'm sure they are out there. I only really began to learn to cook in my last year of college, and my Middle-Eastern sauces in the 1980s were nowhere near as good as what I cooked all day long today, using my own tomatoes plus some farmers' market peppers.

It's more critical than ever for all of us to support local food, and I'm not sure the best venue is that artisanal and hip restaurant that buys up all the locality's micro-greens.  If you want to really know about your food, find the growers and then prepare the results yourself.

At the farmer's market you should chat with producers. Make sure, too, that they grew what they sell; resellers are getting more and more common, and it's something I don't like one bit. It dilutes the entire premise of a grower's market.  I'd argue that if a farmer cannot fill the table with fresh produce, then add prepared foods, dried herbs, jams and jellies. But make it all yourself.

It's now a question I ask at the market.  If I want to patronize a reseller, there's a nice old guy who runs a fruit stand near my university. The food is well selected and quite fresh. I've been buying melons from him for years.

Finally, the best way to appreciate a farmers' market is to learn how to cook.

Cooking is one of those essential skills we all need at some point. I'm no professional chef, but I'm a good cook. I can look into the refrigerator and canning shelves and produce dinner from leftovers. I can follow a recipe as I learn, too. If you claim you cannot cook, go out to the piles of used books at the thrift stores and pull down a copy of something basic, like The Joy of Cooking. Start with something basic, like meatloaf. I'm not kidding; when well prepared and paired with potatoes and a green salad, it's a time-machine to a simpler era.

Learn to can and preserve, too. Our grocery stores stock only three days worth of food. It would not take an Apocalypse to  make a lot of folks very, very hungry fast.  Wouldn't it be nice to have a few weeks' worth of produce in the cupboard, socked away against that next big hurricane or snowstorm?

After reading these articles about farmers' markets, I'm more determined than ever to buy more this year at market. Please join me.

Old School Tools: The Perfect Book for DIY Farmers

Every sharpened a knife with a whetstone? Want to learn how? I've just the book for you.

What a surprise that after 90 minutes of being overwhelmed in Powells Books in Portland, OR, I found Professor Mack Jones' 1945 guide Shopwork on the Farm, just as I was leaving the store. It was like finding The Rosetta Stone. Suddenly, all of these mysterious objects in our shop or barn began to make sense. Professor Jones, at the University of Missouri, would have encountered many landowners and tenant farmers doing things much the way their grandparents had done.

There was a time when most small farms operated nearly as a closed system; the farm was also an amateur mechanic, blacksmith, plumber, and carpenter. At the end of WWII, many rural areas still lacked electricity, so hand tools were the rule and remained that way for a long time. Power tools were expensive, and farmers on small holdings tend to be a thrifty lot. Sadly, with the passing of generations, the coming of cheap big-box-store tools, and the movement off the small farms to large industrial operations, many old-timey skills have faded.  That's why this book is such a treasure to me. I own so many of the tools described, yet for some I had no idea how they might be used.

To any Millennials who want to try rural life, I'd recommend doing a lot of research first. This book would prove an excellent starting place. Nearly everything I have done with a circular saw, a table saw, a power drill, or an electric planer can be done by hand. And simple tools we rely upon, such as an electric bench grinder, can be put safely to many uses I'd not considered before. Jones' advice is well presented and easy to follow. I realized that all these years I've been using a whetstone incorrectly!

He has advice on everything from using an anvil properly to heating and bending metal in a hand-pumped forge; these are skills I will be putting to the test in the next year when I next shape metal.

While you may not wish to make your own lead-based paints, there is a recipe if you can find enough white lead for the job.  Forgotten those lessons on tying knots in Scouts? Mack Jones has you all set.

Before you ask: I don't loan books or any form of media, even to the closest friends. You'll have to snag your own copy cheaply, at ABE or at Amazon. If  you live in the country and want to do so as off the grid as possible, or if circumstances force your hand, this book will be worth its weight in gold.

Farewell Robert Pirsig

This post began as a comment at Hemmings Motor News, which announced the passing of the author.  At this distance, I can say with certainty that Robert Pirsig's book had a long-lasting impact on who I am now, though at the time I did not recognize it.

Just the other day, I noticed my lilac-colored copy of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance the other day: when I was the worst aerospace-engineering student ever to attend UVA, the book was required reading for all engineers. It’s the only book I saved from that part of my education, and I reread it once while living abroad.

Funny how Socrates’ dialog with Phaedrus means a lot more to me now than anything Pirsig wrote then, but the name did stick and I got curious about why Phaedrus was so important to Pirsig. In a nutshell, Phaedrus was a punk kid who thought the new technology called “writing” was spiffy, while Socrates derided it as a block to really remembering things. It was an early warning against the cheapened, the simulated, the virtual.

What did Pirsig teach me that I most recall? The story of climbing a mountain with his son. The boy only wanted to summit, while the author was content with enjoying the journey and knowing when to turn back. I’ve lived by that philosophy ever since, as well as the need–a nearly glandular one–to avoid Interstates and mass culture when I travel. Blue Highways, by Least-Heat Moon, did me in for all that, permanently. I read it not long after Pirsig’s book.

As for motorcycles? They still terrify me and I’ll never ride one. As for books? I am a colleague of Matthew Crawford’s wife, which is NOT why I recommend Shop Class as Soulcraft for a better take on this topic for gearheads or beatnik-farmers like me.

So farewell Robert Pirsig, and thank you for helping me along my crooked and continuing journey away from the boring and banal.

The Shaving Bench & Hand Tools

I did not know who L.P. Hartley was until I searched for the famous dictum "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Hartley wrote a number of books, some very well received; his obscurity now makes a writer pause and think "why bother?"

But why bother at anything? In 100 years, anyone old enough to read this post will, at best, be a half-recalled series of stories told by descendants and an inscription on a stone, somewhere.

Now that I have depressed you thoroughly, let's hop into a time machine and cheer ourselves up a bit. It's one way I find solace as I face, as we all do, the final erasure of ourselves and our accomplishments. I'll use Rod Taylor's gizmo from the George Pal film; I think it best captures the intentions of H.G. Wells. I look forward to teaching the novel in my course on Science Fiction and Fantasy, this Fall. It puts human vanity into perspective.

So did William Faulkner, when he claimed that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." I feel that way whenever I visit Colonial Williamsburg. It always gives me a strange hope that whatever our species does in the near future, short of nuclear catastrophe an interesting and more sustainable life for our descendants will be possible.  I am beginning to regard the Past as a foreign country, but one we can visit.

Beyond Williamsburg's occasional theme-park dissonance, as bored or dumb tourists meet very savvy historical reenactors, I find something precious for the future of our civilization going on: the conservation of old-time skills. I've become increasingly obsessive to learn a few, myself, from scything and baling hay by hand to acquiring more skill with hand-tools. These were skills that most rural residents possessed in living memory. As a Williamburg employee, working on a hand-built sawpit and barn, reminded me, you don't have to go back 200+ years to find the skills he used. In 1950, my late father-in-law built structures using most of the same techniques and many of the same tools.

After a recent visit I decided upon a hot-weather project: building a "shaving bench" or "shaving horse." That's not for shaving oneself or anything equine, but it holds wood for smoothing out with either a hand planer or a "spoke shave." This site shows how one can be made easily in a home shop. It should last a lifetime, unlike many modern power tools.

No, it is not as cool-looking than George Pal's rendition of Wells' time machine, but it serves a similar purpose: adventuring into another era. Whereas The Time Traveler went into the dim and grim future of the human race, then, heartbroken, beyond to the end of the Sun, my Shaving Bench will take me back no more than a century, so I can begin using hand tools for more woodworking. I'm learning to be good with our hand-auger and have long been decent at hand-sawing, but it's a journey to unlearn muscle-memory honed with table or chop saws, drill-presses, and jigsaws. I will use some of these power-tools to fashion the shaving bench, in both the interest of time and in order to conserve materials.

There is a focus all tools engender, simply because you can too easily nip off a finger or worse by not paying attention. Hand tools add something to that focus, because the experience is quiet enough to eliminate hearing protection and, depending on the tool, bulky safety glasses.

At times like that, I realize that as hard as our ancestors worked, the experience was less mediated. The world was a wooden one, as ours largely is, but the experiential distance from tree to board to finished good was much shorter. 

I plan to travel back to that foreign country, increasingly.

Apple-Tree Pruning

I am rather astounded that so far in Tractorpunk I have not said a word about apple trees. Perhaps it was humility; a few years and two classes later, I am only starting to understand the principles of managing a few trees.  My trees all looked like the mess shown above, at first.

The rewards of good pruning are immense; there are few locally grown foods with more lore, and more taste, than a good apple.  I began my quest to raise apples with a few varieties purchased from Albemarle Cider Works south of Charlottesville; we planted three trees in a fenced area near three very neglected older trees, intending to bring them all into production. Earlier we'd put two more in a very wild location, a seldom-visited meadow in Buckingham County, where I once saw a mama bear and her three cubs dining on the fruit from a pear tree. At least we'd feed the bears there.

Over the past few years I have attended two pruning workshops. I've learned that must be patient with apple trees, and some pruning must be done annually and carefully. In time apples can be harvested every year, even with the organic methods I currently use. I may eventually resort to one spraying of the fungicide Captan, after bloom and pollen-collection, each year. Otherwise I will just fertilize and maintain the trees.  Our climate in Central VA is changing, whatever some politicians ignorantly claim, in ways that may not permit apple-growing in a decade or so. In the mean time, I'll see what happens.

This time of year, the earliest part of Spring, is best for pruning. Much of what I learned about pruning can be found here, but here are a few other things I have discovered. 

1) Pruning really does help with blight. Our older trees were full of "Shepherd's Crooks" and blackened foliage, indicating Fire Blight. It's hard to eradicate with organic methods, but not impossible.

Last year I pruned all three trees heavily and cleaned up all the debris, then put it in the landfill in a plastic bag. I was told by an orchard manager that burning the trimmings can just make blight-spores go airborne again! Tools have to be clean, so I reach for rubbing alcohol and wipe the blades of pruners and pruning saw frequently, or I make a 1/9 solution of bleach and water and dip the tools frequently in a bucket.

2) Do not fertilize too much. Pruning makes one want to put down fruit-tree fertilizer, but that can be counterproductive. My reading indicates that fertilizing after heavy pruning will produce water-sprouts and lots of foliage growth; such young growth is susceptible to Fire Blight, one of the factors that led me to prune in the first place. Also lots of new leaves in the wrong places block sunlight and air from getting into the center of the tree, something essential for good health.

3) Could a little kid climb your tree? The answer should be "yes." I loved that bit of advice from our extension agent. Here the goal is to make a tree with an open center and not too many branches.

I aim to create a "vase shape" such as in this illustration from Stark Brothers.

While my trees did not get as severe a pruning as shown on the left, I did cut them hard again this  year.  This close-up shows how crossed and cluttered the branches were on a five-year-old tree we planted in Buckingham County and have only pruned one time before:

 

After pruning this tree, it's probably too long at the ends, but now the tree has room for air circulation and light. Next year I'll step back the main branches to keep them from getting too long; long thin branches often break under the weight of fruit.

4) Apple trees are tough. In the classes I took, the extension agents and apple growers stressed that many novices are terrified of pruning, yet trees can bounce back from poor cuts.

In my case, I am certain not all of my cuts are right, especially high in the trees where I cannot get a close look at the buds. There I use a pole pruner. Where it is safe to climb a pruned tree, I will step up to the first branching of major limbs and inspect, or lean a small ladder against a tree. Mostly I use my Felco #2 pruners or a set of bypass loppers, keeping them sharp always with a few passes from a Bergamo sharpening stone I found at One Scythe Revolution.

Guns, Varmints, and the Farm

Almost no subject divides Americans as much as firearms. I probably use one more often than most civilians I know, mostly for shooting four-legged varmints at close range.

Yet I hesitate to write about guns here; the issue is so fraught with disagreement.

If you live on a farm, the answer to "what gun do I need?" probably does not mean "no gun." I leave that up to you. To me firearms are tools and owning them is not about defending one's property from humans; it means shooting critters. As I've written before here, my state's laws prevent me from "re-homing" varmints caught in my live traps. I do release skunks right where I find them, because shooting them is a nightmare of chemical consequences. Besides, they are cute and seem to enjoy my method of releasing them (itself worth an entire post). The same goes for the rare squirrel I catch; the hawks here make them a rarity.

Groundhogs, possums, and raccoons? Not so much. Kaboom.

In writing about shooting, I will not discuss the uses an urbanite or suburbanite might have for a firearm: deterring another human being or, failing that, killing him and not yourself or a family member. All I'll say on that count is "take some basic classes, shoot a lot at a gun range, rent various semi-automatics and revolvers, then pick a weapon with which you feel comfortable, not the coolest-looking or biggest gun. Keep it locked up and near where it can be gotten quickly by the right person." And though I have a conceal-carry license, I have yet to tote around a handgun. I might bag one to go to the range, but conceal-carry is a fine art. One needs to take holster-qualifying and defensive handgun classes. Such training is worth every cent, as your life or another's may depend upon your skills.

There are few classes in good judgement, so I leave that up to you and your inner conversation to resolve.

I also don't have enough recent experience with deer or waterfowl hunting to advise anyone there who might want to bag a buck or be wet and miserable in a duck blind. More on deer next year, as I'm going to haul my WWII era Lee-Enfield .303 up into tree stands and, if lucky, get some venison for our freezer.

For pest animals that can elude even well designed fences to murder your chickens, little ones can be live-trapped and then shot at close range with a .22 LR. I use a simple bolt-action Remington, a single-shot weapon that had been in my wife's family for many years. At 12 feet or so, it's deadly accurate though I swiftly dispatch my "visitor" with a single round to the head and a second round to make sure the creature does not suffer.  Such .22s are not expensive, and they are simple to maintain. Most such bolt-actions are.

Then there are venomous snakes. After my close calls last year, I've decided to open-carry a Taurus Model 85 .38 Special with #6 shot shells. I do not wish to get in garden-hoe range of a big Copperhead again. They can move FAST, so I'd prefer ten feet with the .38.  In the picture below, the shooter apparently had a "near disaster" at 5 feet. I'd, for one, have stood further away and not shot at anything crawling over cement.  Perhaps he posed the dead snake there, but he killed a 5' long Copperhead not unlike the one that nearly bit me.

I'll keep the gun on my hip when mowing fields and when working around brush-piles. The weapon holds 5 shots. One could, with practice, carry a specialized snake-killer of the sort shown here. If you want to save money, however, go for a used .38 revolver. What is called "Gun Culture 2.0" with its love of tactical rifles and high-capacity polymer guns has pushed these older and dead reliable (pardon the pun) steel guns to the side. One only needs a few shots for a snake encounter.

Such a simple weapon can still be upgraded; I'm in the process of zeroing in laser sights integral to the revolver's grips. Such sights are not cheap, and if the batteries die, you had best have trained with the "iron sights" native to your gun. Moreover, do not be a skinflint on a holster. I've no recommendations there, though I like what I read about the traditional leather belt-holsters from Wright Leather works.  There's also a local company right across the river from me, Master's, that makes some nice products. I'll let readers now how they work out.

The only "cool" gun I'll note is the Taurus Judge and Smith and Wesson Governor. These large revolvers shoot .410 shotgun shells or .45 Long Colt rounds. I give a slight edge to the Governor because it also shoots .45 ACP, my favorite handgun caliber for human varmints. You would need a BIG snake for either the Judge or Governor; I'll pass but I'd love to shoot one.

Like these large revolvers, larger critters are beyond my scope(s) but for smaller ones I spot and can safely shoot at a distance, I have used an old Marlin .22 Magnum rifle with a telescopic sight. That round is longer than a .22 LR and packs a bigger punch, especially in a hollowpoint. Just because one chooses to shoot an animal does not mean one should be cruel. Practice until you can be sure of a killing shot, or don't take the shot at all.

Once I saw a rabid raccoon stumbling around in broad daylight. I hit it twice with the .22 Magnum and, in a Zombie-Movie moment, the animal flinched, then turned to stare at me as my wife said "get a bigger gun." My shotgun was far away at the time. Thankfully, the raccoon staggered off to die. I'd not recommend an AR-15 for such work but if you prefer a rifle, some new bolt-actions chamber the AR's .223 high-velocity round. Whatever the weapon, you'll need to zero in your scope well, and nothing I've found works better than a laser bore-sight. It goes in the barrel of an (unloaded!) rifle. The shooter need only adjust windage and elevation of the scope until it lines up with the laser's dot.

I've not spent much time writing about shotguns, though I own a very old Mossberg New Haven 12 gauge pump shotgun that I used for sporting clays as well as goose, deer, and duck hunting thirty years ago. It's reliable and simple, though there's little I need it for these days as I rarely need to shoot anything at range. My chickens and garden would be downrange now when critters appear, which is why I adopted a "trap and shoot" policy. My mantra for shotguns has always been "the simpler the better," and like the Remington .22,  one cannot find a much simpler weapon.  I admit a fondness for double-barrel shotguns. Nothing could be simpler, except throwing a rock.

So how much for a simple Tractorpunk arsenal? For used guns checked out by a competent gunsmith, less than a thousand bucks will buy a long arm, revolver, cleaning supplies, and ammo to equip the rural landowner, not including training and a gun safe.

Then, mindfully, let the lead fly if and when you must.

Before the Heat: Late Winter Chores

Seventy degrees outside. Yep. Today. Convertible top down on my car, I ride into town when I should be skipping school to do some farm work.

In our part of the country, especially as the climate continues to change for the warmer, Spring comes earlier. That means what follows--the hellish heat and humidity of the Mid-Atlantic states--hits sometimes in early June and does not let up until September. People who do not work outside praise the warmth. I dread what it means.

That means I have a LOT to do in February and March. I find myself trimming trees, cutting back vines, cutting down trees, chopping wood for the next winter.  On warmer days I paint things, as long as rain is not about to fall.

Soon the weeds will sprout and last year they choked out some of our kitchen garden, even imperiled our cash crop of Thai Dragon Peppers.  This year I'm going to ready our raised beds early; some are already done. I surface-tilled, weeded, and amended the soil in December, covered it with the thickest weed-block fabric that A.M. Leonard sells, then topped that with a bit of straw for both aesthetics and UV protection. We built new arches for our eagle netting, and the chickens' run has one new gate and another on the way.

Imagine doing all that in July!  My next gig will be to disassemble and repaint our 1952 Ford 8N tractor, a stalwart from our land in Buckingham County that is going into semi-retirement with us, coming out every few weeks to run a bush-hog. Our big Allis Chalmers will take its place on the remote property.

Summer is great in the early morning, dew and all. After 10am, however, I'm done until dusk most days, though when the sun hits the treeline I often get on the tractor to mow for an hour or so. At this time of year, as little as I like the freakishly warm water and what it portends for the next generations, I get out there and work all day long.

Good luck planting and growing this season. It's been a bitter fall for our nation, but there will be change and progress, whatever setbacks we encounter on the way.

Chickens in the Garden. Hah.

We have had chickens for more than 18 months, currently a flock of 13 hens. Number 14 (I don't like naming them; my wife does) perished in the heat last summer, getting trapped in a raised bed garden and unable to escape the fencing.

As we have discovered, those cute pictures on gardening books that feature chickens are comfortable lies.

Photos like the one above (not our garden, not our chicken! They'd make short work of the Nasturtiums) make a novice gardener think that hens will simply avoid plants you want for food in order to get at the lovely scratch and chicken feed you set out for them. I'm guessing that these are the same urban owners who put little sweaters on their chickens and walk them on leashes. Perhaps they are working on a much smaller scale than we employ; our big garden measures over 5000 square feet, about 3000 of it in raised beds, so projects like building "chicken tunnels" and other elaborate structures run into the steamy reality of Virginia summers where weeds can grow 6 inches after a bad week of heavy rain.

Our experience with chickens shows us that they can be wonderful in and around fallow beds, where they turn and manure the soil. They turn compost faster than I can. I did add boards to keep them from kicking out all the topsoil and compost into the paths, but when I added mesh fencing to beds, chickens would get into the smallest hole, and often they could not get out. They do fly, a bit, and one variety, the Golden Comet, is a great flyer even when we trimmed back the feathers on their wingtips. Over the fence they went!

To prevent more dead birds and ruined crops, we will keep the chickens out of all the beds in summer of 2017. The flock will now have a nice shady run and  their own coop area for scratching and resting. In fall, we'll have 5' tall permanent horse-fencing around our strawberry-and-rhubarb spot and the asparagus bed we are gradually expanding to about 150 square feet.  One other bed will get the 5' fencing and host our winter-greens garden.

I enjoy our chickens. They are good entertainment, they eat a lot of bugs, and they give me breakfast every day of the year. They can, as this author claims, do many things that farm machinery or back-aching labor accomplish.

But, in the end, they are livestock, not pets. If you want to keep chickens, keep in mind that vigilance is the price of having them near a garden, let alone in one.