Pumpitude For Your Rain Barrels

 

The Zen Koan for "before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment...same thing" can be applied in my semi-retirement. "Chop Wood (From Fall to Mid-Spring) Pump Water (other times)."

 

I enjoy more unharried time, free from the dreariness of campus politics and trifling administrivia, to focus on three things: writing, teaching a single class, and working on our farm. All stimulate different parts of my being: they are intellectual pursuits, though one is more social  than the other two, and only one includes physical labor.

That labor need not be onerous, especially as one's body ages. Watering a big (5,000 sq. foot) garden takes about 40 gallons at least weekly, often more in on a high summer evening, just as the lightning bugs start their show. How to get that all from rain barrels far away? Drip irrigation works for big operations but costs a lot of money and is not portable. It may work for you. All you need is water uphill and fixed beds for the system.

Or carry water in buckets and cans, oh Enlightened Sage. Not me. I let a pump do that. You see the two types I've tried. Both have their advantages and shortcomings.

 

The green pump, a cheapie from Harbor Freight or Northern Tool (I forget), has become my favorite, even though I damaged it by letting it run dry. It still works but now I let the weight of water in the rain barrel do the work for the pump, by connecting barrel's spigot to the pump's inlet (I had to make a female-female connecting hose). This same technique can be used for our pressure washer. I mounted the transfer pump on a small piece of 2x6 treated wood to keep it level and off damp ground.

 

Transfer pumps tend to be lighter than the submersible black one, also a really cheap Northern Tool purchase. Both pumps have grown old and cranky as I am doing, likewise acting up at times, needing only a tap from a hammer to get them running. That may be my fate one day. Bonk bonk on the head.

 

But as I said, they are cheap pumps. Submersibles work great if the top of your barrel or cistern (ours is a copious 500 gallons) is not crisscrossed with bracing, as some of our barrels are, and (strongly recommended) you get a submersible with a float that will shut the pump off as soon as the water level falls too low (again, running dry burns out the pump motor in short order). We had a pump with float, a promising stainless steel model, but it's now at the scrap-dealer's pile. Also a cheap pump, it gave out after 2 or 3 years of powerful service. It never ran dry.

 

Why not buy a nicer pump? I will next time. $100 is not too much, even $200, for one that will last many many years with proper care. Or you can spend $40 to $75. Be sure you have a hammer handy. 

 

Which type of pump is for you? My hose runs 200' from the barrels to the garden, or from cistern to barrels uphill when we transfer water from deep storage. 

 

Unless a hose kinks, the water-flow is powerful and the source sustainable (we have a shallow well we don't use to irrigate. Rainwater only). I use the nozzle shown below to save water. It's a powerful jet nozzle (a tiny one) of solid brass. I can dial it to a stream or spray. The only issue involves debris that can clog the jet. When that happens, I crimp the hose (no 200' walk in July, please) and remove the nozzle and crank it fully open. I then visually inspect it and either puff up my cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie and blow out the debris, or I find a piece of straw from the garden mulch and clear the jam. 

 

Then I watch the plants grow. Now that's enlightenment, Grasshopper. Happy Gardening in 2025. 

 

Now's the Time to Trim and Plant

 

Apple-tree spreaders do their thing

With the weeds just starting their journey to domination, I got busy on some undone tasks. This is the time, friends. Get out there.

Fruit Trees: We cut back our apples and figs. They've gotten so tall that I need a big ladder to get fruit from the tops. While we were at it, I used split branches from fallen maple limbs to make spreaders that train limbs on sides where I want growth. I split the ends of small pieces of maple or use a Y branch, bracing the other cut end against the trunk. When the sap rises, the branch will tend to stay in place. If not, I can cut another spreader.

Too Late for Alliums? I missed the planting-window for garlic and multiplier onions in Fall. First it was too wet, then too cold. Then I got busy cleaning out my campus office. Now here we are, at the end of frost season, planting them. To force growth I'm going to hill them, as I saw done recently in the garden of the Governor's Palace at Colonial Williamsburg.

Hilling has some advantages in our clay soil, avoiding rot. At the same time, in the hot part of the year I'm going to need to weed and water fanatically to get a good crop. As for the hard-neck garlic I love? It will wait until Fall, when I can order more seed-garlic. I'll plant some organic grocery-store variety to tide us over. 

Weeding Before Summer: You really don't want to deal with established weeds and dry soil, so why not get out there now? We let the chickens into the garden all winter, and they loosened even the wire grass. With tiller and cultivator, I got the soil looking lovely. The weeds will return, as always, but they'll be smaller and have roots that are not so deep.

New Tiller: This gets its own post soon, but I purchased a light-duty Stihl tiller to replace the heavy, and not very reliable rear-tine beast I've been using. I'm going to repair the latter and then sell it. The Stihl uses a power-head I know well from our weed-whackers (and it's no wimp; it's a professional model with a lot of torque). I'm getting too old for the rear-tine monster, anyhow, and with our minimal-till method and already amended soil, I just want to turn in ashes and compost. I don't need to bust the sod. For that, I get out a tractor. 

Calling Some Guy: I've a dead oak that needs felling, and it's in an odd place where it might fall on a fence or chicken coop. Then there's a huge red maple that needs a major limb dropped or maybe the entire tree, as it's pulling out of the ground. Enter an expert. I'll get two estimates and the firewood. 

Know your limits! And keep gardening.

Pride of Workmanship?

As I retire from full-time work in a month, I have been thinking about pride in one's work a great deal. I have never been fully satisfied with my career, which may be a good thing: too much complacency leads to a numbing of the soul. I would instead invent new directions to pursue. This sort of free-lancing stands at odds with the values of corporatism, including the variety now infecting higher education. Not so oddly, I find the opposite--a sense of pride in serving one's community--in small businesses locally owned. It's a delight in our time of anonymous and virtual commerce to encounter vestiges of craftsmanship and civic pride. 

So often, however, it's just the opposite.

I spotted the worst paint-job in many years recently, pictured, at a roadside place in Buckingham County. I hope the owners did not pay much for the job. The painter, using a spray-gun, clearly cared nothing about putting glossy red paint on the grass and parking lot. Ironically, the paint was not well applied to the picnic table. The finish had run, pooled, and left thin or unpainted spots.

At our own picnic table, not yet "painted," I noticed that the original finish was a good-quality penetrating stain, not paint. Stain provides a better sealant for outdoor furniture, too. It can be renewed easily without scraping, even on the oldest wood, as I found not long ago with the old fence at our rental property.

Yet someone painted over the old stain, and once you put paint over stain, there's no going back. In a year, that haphazard paint-job will peel. The owner will either have to scrape the tables down or, as I fear, toss them out and get new ones. They are not bad tables, either. I'd like to get one, sand the heck out of it, and stain it again.

Usually we take our burgers and go to a nearby pocket-park, a tiny miracle of good craftwork. It features durable picnic tables, nice plantings, and a permeable-surfaced parking area.  You don't see trash on the ground, either. I don't imagine that it cost the county that much to build and maintain. It also speaks to something so old-fashioned we rarely hear its name today: civic pride. The town government does not know the travelers or locals who might stop for a smoke break or a sandwich; the small amenity simply says to everyone "you are welcome."

Pride is a dodgy commodity. "What is the return on investment?" a wily and short-sighted American capitalist might ask.

A great deal, I'd answer, but not something to measure in dollars and cents, the false American god of our era. Especially in the mad rush of Black Friday.

Today, of all days, on Black Friday, our water heater decided to start leaking heavily. The unit, at 12 years old, still looks great, but that's the outside. Not wanting to brave the crowds at the suburban asteroid-belt of big-box stores, I went to our local hardware. They had a heater more efficient than our old one and with the same volume. It took me all day to finish the job, but we have guests arriving and they'll want hot water. "Calling some guy" would not suffice, and I've installed two smaller electric water-heaters.

I needed a few tools not in my plumbing box, one a crimper for the little copper rings that make watertight seals on Pex pipe. A novice can learn this sort of plumbing, as compared to expensive mysteries of sweating copper pipe or the cheap, easily broken PVC pipes that I find mostly good for building hoop-houses nowadays.

A young man helped me find the fittings for the new heater, after I discovered that my old pipes were about 3 inches too short to reach the new tank's inlets. The new hardware was cheap enough, but the crimp-tool cost 60 dollars, almost 10% of what I'd paid for the heater. Yet I needed the tool, badly. The young man looked it over and said "This is a nice piece. You take good care of it and it will last the rest of your life."

I joked about only needing 30 years, but his remark stuck with me. I want to hear more of that in a time of disposable products and bad paint-jobs. I do indeed take very good care of all my tools. In the end, our new water heater is no thing of beauty, but it is firmly placed, not leaking, and looks as if a professional installed it. I'm proud that by sundown, I could have a martini and say "job well done" as hot water again flowed from the taps. I'd done it myself, probably saving 500 dollars. 

You could, too.

Chainsaw Logic: That One Little Wire...

I think this post constitutes part of a series. I've written often here about Occam's Razor, and in this instance it and the old "For the Want of a Nail" allegory.  

It's easy to forget the simple, in our age of wonders, how one simple technical issue can make everything stop. Right now, I am streaming a BBC World Cafe concert with Gillan Welch and David Rawlings. My 1980 self could not even fathomed that as possible.

It's a form of magic, following the precepts of Clarke's Law. Remember, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." We get baffled when the technomancy suddenly halts, the screen locking up or the phone "bricking," even a damned advertisement on the YouTube concert-feed popping up mid-song, despite my ad-blocker. The spell is broken, though in my case that stupid ad lead me to the NPR ad-free original. 

Until we fix things, we sit like our primate ancestors before a sacred stone, bewildered at the departure of our gods. Yet sometimes we can bring fallen technological deities back to life.

Recently a friend of my wife's had an enormous Red Oak tree fall in her yard, nearly hitting her house. It would have totaled the place, frankly. now it lays in her yard, some 70' of tree with 40' being straight and nearly 36" in diameter. It's what furniture-makers would call a "veneer log" for the lack of hollow core, lack of limbs, and straightness. Yet we cannot get any log buyer to look. Apparently these folk want a bunch of such logs (worth several thousand dollars each) before driving out.

After inspecting the tree, I came back with my little "firewood" saw and The Big Dog, a $1000 Husqvarna 365 with 5hp and a 20" bar.  I had planned to keep the beast the rest of my life.

"Woof Woof!" said this Big Dog, until it would not bark for me, let alone start. 

I gnashed my teeth. I pulled at my beard, having no hair on my skull. I cursed the gods of Sweden and two-stroke internal combustion, to no avail. I considered the expense of even a diagnosis at the dealer, looked at (heresy!) a $500 Stihl "Farm Boss" saw, ready to spend MORE money. 

No. I was doing what an academic colleague calls "catastrophizing failure," meaning that I assumed a small setback would lead to an utter and permanent disaster. 

Realizing then where I went wrong, I began replacing Husqvarna parts myself, starting with the simplest parts and least expensive that can lock up a saw: a new spark plug, a kill switch, then an ignition coil. Still, Occam failed me. The saw would not even "burp." A second wave of self-doubt followed as I watched more YouTube "how to" chainsaw videos by burly men with Southern US, Scottish, or Scandinavian accents.

Then $30 later, I fixed the saw and it fired right up. Even that 30 could have stayed in the bank. I checked the electronics, working backward, to my new spark plug. What if the wire that attaches to the plug had turned sideways when I pressed on the rubber "boot" that covers the end of the plug? 

With a razor blade I cut open enough of the cover to see that the wire loop connected to the plug. It's the little metal piece shown in the image at the top of the post. I slipped it over the plug. Then I pulled the cord.

"Woof! VROOM!" The Big Dog barked!

I've learned from working on engines a little bit, whether on old tractors or late-model cars: a single wire can bring done tons of working metal. So can a pinched gas line. So once again, Occam proved right in the end. This is why we pay a mechanic 25 cents for a screw, and $50 for knowing which screw to replace.

Now back to that tree. I just felled a section the size of a normal tree in 30 seconds, a task impossible with my firewood saw. 

Never give up working on stuff. A fix may be simpler than it seems. And now I have some spare parts for the saw. 

I was about to put the saw on a pagan altar and make offerings to it. Clarke was right but so was Occam. Keep moving up the chain of causality to the problem, and one can fix nearly any machine (and maybe large societal or environmental woes, as well).

Grandfather's Hammer and Keeping Old Things in Service

Some of you may know the Grandfather's Axe paradox. I encountered it a few years ago. The paradox asks us that if every part of an item is replaced one by one, in the end, is it still the same item? I heard it stated as "this is my grandfather's axe. Since he used it it has had two new handles and one new axe head."

So is it the same axe? The empirical, scientific answer is "no." Every molecule of the original item has been replaced, even if it looks identical.  I'm a Humanist, so I'm going to sail off in a different direction.

The paradox stretches back to ancient Greece, where it was called The Ship of Theseus. I really enjoy logical paradoxes, if you cannot already tell. I am not going to give you my philosophical opinion, right away, but I will talk about an item that evades the paradox because it is pretty much the same as when my grandfather used it.

He was a junk-dealer by trade, an immigrant from Hatay in what is now the southeastern corner of Turkey. Arriving in Richmond in 1911, in time he acquired an old truck and combed the countryside for scrap metal, old broken tools, furniture, or anything that might have some intrinsic value. Somewhere along the way, he found an old claw hammer, or at least the head of one. He fixed it to a length of metal pipe and used a giant nail to hold the head to the new handle.

I found that hammer when cleaning out his basement in Richmond, a couple of months after his passing in 1982. It went into an old tool box I still have in my barn, but the hammer recently re-appeared in my shop, when I found myself in need of something for driving masonry nails in the cinder-block wall for hanging tools, old tin signs, and other bric-a-brac. The old hammer works like a charm.

For years, every time I saw it, my Type-A, rationalist side would say "that old hammer needs a proper hickory handle," but somehow I never quite got around to it. I'm happy about that now. I'm slightly less Type A (and probably less rational) after a dozen years in the country, since farmwork requires a certain amount of clutter and temporary disorder when, say, the garden is bursting with food as it is right now.

We live in a time of fast food, fast fashion, disposable electronics. No thank you. My anti-consumerist, Humanist side wants to stake a claim to keeping old things that work well around as long as possible, even if, especially if like The Ship of Theseus, every single part has been replaced at least once. I recently put new front wheels on an old Woods belly mower that my late father-in-law slung under a 1951 John Deere M tractor he purchased new. In the years that I've been custodian of the machine, I restored and repainted it, replaced the seat, swapped out a new wire harness and battery, put in an electronic ignition. I bought a new mesh inner panel for the grille, a gas cap, and lots more.

Is it the same tractor? Mostly, yes, and it does exactly what my father-in-law did with it. When I'm gone, a grandchild or great-grandchild will get Grandpa's tractor, and one of my nieces or nephews who has a taste for DIY work will get my grandfather's hammer. Perhaps the paradox becomes meaningless if the object's purpose remains the same, and that object gets passed from generation to generation. I hope they don't just use the John Deere for parades or the hammer as garage-art.

It will help if I can get someone to form a bond with the tractor or the hammer, telling the story once a younger person shows interest. Luckily, the interest is there for lots of things that have been family heirlooms, but most of those objects I've handed on have not been tools. To merely hang the hammer on a wall (as I did the mower's old wheels, one of them still quite usable) seems to break a chain.

I don't have a fancy philosophical name for this but "the thingness of things" has been my go-to. I feel the material presence of my forebearers when I get on that tractor, hammer a nail, use a biscuit-cutter that belonged to my late mother-in-law. My favorite skillets are cheap and thin Taiwanese-made ones my mom got me at a Roses store in the summer of 1982, when I was returning to college and an apartment for my final year. I use those pans daily now and think of my mom, gone nearly two decades.

So look around the shop and house at old things your ancestors used to make life simpler: a rolling pin, a favorite casserole dish, the old Buick sedan that grandpa loved so much. Look at the well-made furniture that is not modern chic but still perfectly useful.

Could you still use those things? Why not?

January is My Favorite Month

A recent op-ed in the New York Times, from a fellow lover of winter, got me to consider why January, called fondly "dim and a bit lonesome," and February are my favorite months. I've written about the second month here, before. That post is full of advice from writers I admire. I'll repeat "Time itself is nothing; the experiencing of it is everything" by Dutch novelist and travel-writer, Cees Nooteboom.

Now let's give January its due. It's 1/12 of your year, after all.

It's no secret that I am not a people-person. I try to cultivate Stoic Marcus Aurelius's equanimity toward others while admitting their their trauma lies beyond my control. He found that one must "end your journey content." I find too many humans "energy vampires" and lost souls glued to screens full of fluff and worse, poison. As I glide toward retirement in 2025, I am letting go of some of their borrowed anxiety about their needs, or even mine. I just can say "I hear you. We'll work on that" and enjoy the passing show.

It's different at what I consider to be my "real" job, working on the farm with our animals, equipment and land. In that case, while the demands are constant, the best season for doing certain things, in our changing Mid-Atlantic climate at least, falls during winter. The days are shorter, the ground often sodden, yet the sky! At the zenith in late afternoon, the sky is almost an ultramarine Klein Blue some days. The temperatures can be in the 50s, perfect for outdoor work without freezing or dehydrating. I can put in fence-posts, chop firewood, till the soil if it gets dry, do work on buildings that does not involve painting.

Walks in the quiet woods here invigorate me, with their vistas and their revelations of what lies at ground level. After late spring, all those details of old cemeteries, tumbled walls and fences, and building foundations vanish in the undergrowth. Speaking of that, there's no better time to take chainsaw and loppers to trim or remove saplings, fell larger crooked trees, or do pathwork.

Why don't more of us love the first month? If you don't enjoy chores but can travel now, do it. You'll find prices to non-skiing destinations at their lowest, with restaurants and lodging eager for your custom.

I cannot do that, yet, so I'll get outside instead. The temperature will plummet this weekend, not rising above freezing, so it's just the time to bush-hog half of the six-acre field we will are using to cultivate habitat for ground-nesting birds. 

I'll wrap up and have a blast.

The Joy Begins When the Wrench Stops Turning

Yesterday, while changing spark plugs on our 2006 Honda, I said to no one in particular, “I hate this!” I had dropped a magnetic tool that lifts plugs out of the deep wells in the engine’s head. The tool clattered into the inky depths of the engine compartment, to lodge itself about 1" beyond my reach. Even with the car on the lift, it took me 30 minutes to get the magnet as well as the tool that tried to retrieve it, after I dropped that too. 

Yet would I do it again? Or call some guy?

I would do it again myself in a heartbeat. Here’s why.

I look forward to reading Matthew Crawford’s book Why We Drive. I met him a few times and talked mechanic-talk when his wife Beth worked at my university. Our philosophy about being gearheads and DIYers is similar. I think he has a Distributist bent, as I do. We seem to both disdain US corporate capitalism, where billionaires own most things and pay the least, as well as communist ideals of "workers controlling the means of production," which so often means a different elite concentrates ownership of capital while duping those workers. As I currently understand Distributism, we all ARE the means of production. In an ideal world of this economic model, we'd all build our own cars or have 100 co-ops doing this to achieve an economy of scale. We'd grow our own food and build our own houses. We'd do a lot by barter.

Think Amish with more tech, though the Amish I've met are very savvy capitalists.

But back to DIY work. Matt enjoys working on vehicles more than I do. That said, we share a passion for knowing our machines. Modern vehicles are fiendishly complex, designed to force us back to the dealership’s overpriced service department. Yet there exists a sweet spot between the Model A Ford's knuckle-busting simplicity, with its concurrent lack of safety and environmental features, and today's computers on wheels. For most of these vehicles from the 1940s-early 2000s, most wrench-turners can do routine repairs and service at home with the help of the parts store and YouTube.  

When I'm done and things work well, I then enjoy the result. My passion to do more gets rekindled.

Yes, I have the enormous advantage of a full tool kit and an automotive lift. But I didn't start that way, when Uncle Carlyle and I first changed the oil on my original 1974 Buick Apollo: we used ramps, a catch pan, shop rags, and a small set of wrenches.  Today, oil-changes are easy for me and often I have them finished in 15 minutes. I feel great satisfaction, too, knowing I used the best components for less than a quick-lube shop would charge me for hasty work and bargain-grade lubricant.

You may have a vehicle that is very complex; these are modern vehicles that I've yet to have break on me, though my wife's 2017 Mini has a control panel that terrifies me. It's a $9500 fix, but for now, it is under warranty. For these complex cars and trucks, feature-creep that means every system on a vehicle gets monitored by sensors and subject to proprietary software that costs thousands of dollars, if a company will even share it (not all states have right-to-repair laws). In consequence, a clerk at Advance Auto, while selling me a battery for a car, told me they no longer can help with most vehicles after the 2013 or 14 model year; they have to be taken to a dealership to have the computer reset.

That's far beyond my skills, though I can read and reset Check-Engine codes with a 20-buck OBD II scanner and my smart phone. We do what we can, but overall, I'd still purchase the most minimalist technology I can to avoid the expenses of dealer-mandated service.

I want to invite each of you reading to this fix something instead of saying "call some guy!" My old man, whose tool kit consisted of a claw hammer and a 16D nail, would say that constantly when his two tools could not fix something. I refused to comply with his orders regarding repairs. After my Uncle showed me how to change my own oil, dad told me to have "some guy" at an auto shop check after me. I told him "hell no."

Now I want to start a handyman service called "Some Guy Repairs." Our motto: Call Some Guy Right Now!

You may well break the item you try to fix the first time. You might get it half-way right. You may lose parts. But as a colleague at work always reminds me, "don't let perfect be the enemy of good."

Start with a simple item; I don't recommend you trying to repair a home HVAC system or your car's brakes, but you might fix the cord on an electric fan or figure out how to change your own tire, so you can take the flat to the shop instead of having the vehicle towed.

You will end up with dirty hands but a sense of accomplishment.

Slowing Down To Save Time

Yes, this sounds paradoxical. But one thing that 10 years of rural life have taught me is this: when you have plenty of space to put things, you can get sloppy about it.  

That is not my tool box. Not by a light year. But before talking about why,  let's consider socket sets. Yes, sockets.

I have hundreds of the things, mostly inherited. The few dozen I brought with me from town were well organized in an old tool box I once purchased with S&H Green Stamps. I could always put my hand on what I needed, fast.

Finding myself with three places where we store equipment, I could see why my father-in-law put tools everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Unlike my small stash, however, these tools were not sorted. He worked at a breakneck pace and the work was good, but organizing things for later use? He called that "piddling," and it was not real work to him.  He had buckets of tools, jars of fasteners, and sockets every darned place you could imagine.

I'm Type-A about clutter, so it drove me bonkers until I discovered a simple truth about any pile of stuff: if you go after it methodically and do not add more stuff, it will eventually sort itself out. So this Fall, I began to organize sockets: 1/4", 3/8", and 1/2" drives, SAE, Metric, "deeps," "shallows," six-point and twelve-point sockets. I have specialty ones for removing oxygen sensors and spark plugs.

I am nearly done, and guess what? I have a full set for each of the places where we park tractors or cars. My father-in-law was always hunting for just the right size. When I'm done, I won't have to do that any more. Any sizes I'm missing I'll buy individually, until everything is ready to roll without me walking to another building to get one measly socket.

Makes one wonder what we might do if we addressed every mess that way. We confront messes daily but if we also clean up a little bit daily, without adding to it, we might save our mental health, our neighborhoods, the places we call home. 

We might save the world.

Creative Commons image from Publicdomainpictures.net

Where Have All The Ringshanks Gone?

A bout of COVID, and it was not fun, kept me occupied for far too long last month, so this blog, as well as my DIY projects slipped their schedules. Now that I'm finally putting homemade weatherboard siding up on our addition, in place of hideous, unsustainable vinyl or expensive cement-board, I have a problem.

Nails.

Before the chronic shortages and inflation of our recent past hit, I purchased a Cadillac of nail-guns: a Paslode cordless that uses gas cartridges for framing. It's perfect for doing work from ladders where a long cord to a compressor could prove deadly. My old framing gun blew its seals years ago. 

First, I found that the gas cartridges are in short supply, and I want to save what I have for a Fall 2022 project to expand our hen-yard with a new coop. Second, nail guns can split thin weatherboard at the ends, so I planned to hand-nail every nail after drilling a pilot-hole. We did an entire house that way once; it's slow, meditative, Amish-style work, especially when a family member cut down the trees, ran the logs through a sawmill, helped you strap down and "sticker" the lumber to season, before you planed the boards.

That type of work makes one not waste a single scrap of wood. Not one. I even use the chips from the planer in our hen houses and in muddy spots during the winter.

In times past, I would go to the big-box or local DIY place and find lots of galvanized nails with "ring shanks." These little rings make it hard to remove a nail. That's a pain when taking down siding, but it also slows down the way in which a board exposed to the elements will pull away from the building, warp, twist, and do all sorts of non-linear things after just a few years in heat and cold.

So to Lowes, Home Depot, Pleasants, Lacy's Hardware, and the gem of Crozet VA, Crozet Hardware I went. 

At the small stores they knew what I wanted. At the big ones? Crickets. The problem has been that for years, because of the omnipresence of nail guns, shops no longer carry the variety of hand nails they once did. I scored a few tiny boxes at Pleasants, enough to keep the siding job going. 

No one carries my favored brand, Stormguard, that are USA-made and very reliable. Even I rarely bend any. 

So what did I do? Amazon had Stormguards, of course with free shipping for a five-pound box at a price that did not make me scream. I did not check the amazing lumber-yard Siewers, but I will and buy a few pounds of nails if they have them in stock. 

 For some reason, this situation scared me more than seeing empty grocery shelves and expensive gasoline. When we forget how to hand-nail things, it seems a moment in a slow descent into barbarism.  Machines break. Hammers, rarely.

 My father-in-law, who weathered the Great Depression, never ran short of fasteners: he kept pounds and pounds. Now, I will, too.

 So far, 2022 has had many bad omens. Add this particular shortage to my worry-list.

Image courtesy of QC Supply: stock up! 

Keep a Lid on it! The Right Lid.

Tattler reusable lids at work

My year in the garden has been "interesting," as in five Copperhead snakes in with our animals or at my feet, suddenly.

I thought my post would be about snakes, but there's something far more lethal in many homes: canning lids. 

We do a lot of canning every year: four gallons of Middle-Eastern tomato sauce, strawberry and fig jams, sometimes pickles. I go through a stack of lids.

During the pandemic, more than a few friends decided to try home canning. I've long extolled the virtues of the National Center for Home Food Preservation, my go-to for canning advice. Yet they are silent about something that happened to me the first time this year: cheapass canning lids.

In the Fall, a massive shortage of lids emerged. It might have been the prior President's stupid trade war with China, with its associated bottlenecks. It might have simply been demand. In consequence, I bought a bunch of lids from Amazon, and several in each batch this year have "buckled."  Read more about the phenomenon here. The food is still good, but the jars must be processed again or put in the refrigerator.

Buckled lids. Re-processed with Tattlers

Eating from such a jar after it has sat on a shelf a while? It might prove fatal. 

I'm relegating my cheapass Chinese bargain lids to the storage of dehydrated foods in mason jars I keep in our freezer, for stockpiling dry beans, lentils, rice, and other staples with an oxygen-absorber pack. For canning? I'm again experimenting with US-made Tattler reusable lids. I've had some for a while, and I found that when one follows their directions exactly, they work wonderfully for up to a year (I usually eat my canned food by then). Some users of the lids complain about them not sealing, but I suspect they don't read directions well. We have yet to have a problem.

My other fall back? Paying high prices to get a couple of boxes of Ball-brand lids. They have yet to fail me and though the Muncie, Indiana plant has closed, the products are still made in the US and Canada. They will be there if the Tattlers disappoint.

Does all this rage matter? Yes, and not for geopolitical reasons. The Chinese lids are often lower quality, and there are reports (well, it's the Internet) of scam-lids made to look like Ball lids but made to lower standards in China.

So spend a few more bucks on a trusted product. Boutulism? Now that is expensive.

Combustion v. Capacity for Firewood: If it Burns, Burn it! Part Two

Some time back, I discussed the ways to properly burn really old wood, softwood that is seasoned, and less desirable hardwoods. Let's revisit that idea, as recently someone worried recently that I do indeed burn pine.  It can be safe to do, but you'll have to season it and burn a lot more wood in an year.  The numbers bear it out.

I will revert to my failed attempt to be an engineer, just for a moment.  Values follow for the combustion values of different types of firewood. Here are a few that I burn, copied from an excellent resource with many types of wood listed:

• White Oak: 47.2, 4010, 25.7
• White Pine: 26.3, 2240, 14.3

The first number gives density (pounds per cubic foot) of dry wood, the second the weight of a dry cord. The third measures heat value in millions of BTUs/dry cord.

A cord, incidentally, means closely stacked pile 8' x 4' x 4'.

Imagine a pile of logs, closely stacked, 32' long by 4' wide by 4' wide: four cords is what I project to burn by mid-March, when our heating needs ease to "morning and after dinner warm ups."  By early April, we'll stop. Yet we barely have enough wood in the barn, because we are home more, all day for me, during the pandemic. My wife retires this year, so next winter, she'll be around all day. 

 Where to find all those BTUs?

Hickory and Hornbeam are even better heaters than oak, but I don't have access to either in any quantity. Poplar, a common hardwood on our land, does not rate a listing but it's a light soft wood and closer to pine than oak. Maple, somewhat plentiful and Beech, more plentiful still, fall much closer to oak. Naturally, I try to mix in the softer stuff with the harder wood, to get the stove to its peak efficiency.

With pine, I need 1.8 cords to equal 1 cord of white oak, if I want the same heating value. Red Oak, a tree we have and I love to see in the forest for its stately height and shape, is not close to White Oak but more efficient than White Pine. Not all Pines are equal, either. Learning to identify trees provides a nice side-effect of learning to run a wood stove.

Firewood when purchased should be hardwood and seasoned, period. Don't pay for pine unless that's the only thing that grows in your area; many Canadians and Scandinavians have managed to stay alive for many winters burning it. I only use it because I cut so much of it, maintaining our property, often after a huge pine falls in a storm. Gradually, we are eliminating all pines on the edges of our roads.

For the outdoor fire pit? Pick up anything dry off the ground. Use what is left over in the barn. As farmer and friend Dominic, paterfamilias at delli Carpini Farms, likes to say "If it burns, burn it!"

Whatever the wood, the goals are simple when heating a building: avoid a chimney fire from creosote buildup and, as a distant second, not run out of wood. At worst, dealers will deliver but it's going to cost more in what passes for deep winter in Central Virginia. One retired neighbor runs a firewood business, but it pains me to buy wood.

Our house will stay warm (66-70 degrees downstairs, for us) if our stove shows 450-500 degrees F. Any green wood runs the risk of creosote, but seasoned Pine is no worse than any other seasoned wood if the stove maintains a hot-enough fire. Our evidence? Close inspection of the flue during our annual chimney sweeping.

This winter, not bitingly cold but consistently below 50 degrees, has meant that we have burned more wood than in any winter when we've been using it as a primary source of heat. 

I want to increase our firewood storage for 2021-22 by 50%; that's not a problem, as we'll just build a few more wood boxes outdoors for the fuel to season; my new run-in has other uses and is not ideal for wood storage. For the first time, I'm cutting down healthy trees, too, but I'm picking crooked and leaning ones and retaining straight trees that could make good lumber while providing shelter for animals. Another consideration nowadays, with climate change causing more frequent and more severe storms, has been to limit blow-downs and chain reactions when one occurs. That's a subject meriting a future post, but I'm still learning.

In our woods we have many small beeches growing right against each other, and I plan to thin several that are 30-40' tall this Spring. They will season for 9 months. As we fell pines, I factor in needing a lot more of it.  We cut 20 small ones in early Spring 2020, to fell leaners and clear thickets as we expanded our chicken run and dog run back into the shade of the hardwoods. That pine seasoned well but burned fast; I'd estimate we had a full cord of small pine logs in November but nary a stick now.

These lessons about woodlot management came from an expert. I heard Joel Salatin talk at length about the subject when we visited him at Polyface Farm. Joel took us greenhorns around in his woods and talked about how many rural landowners squander a renewable source of energy, shade, and wildlife habitat by not managing second-growth forest properly.

His woods look idyllic, but they are working woods. If you own woodland, go visit Polyface and see what Joel is up to. He's a character but every working farmer I know is one. Comes with the fresh air and woodsmoke, I reckon.

This year, when the stove is cold for months on end, I will be on the lookout for books presenting Earth-friendly, sustainable methods on managing woodland.

COVID-19 And Six Acres of Solitude

I want to begin by making one thing clear: I want this terrible pandemic over. I feel sorry for those whose lives and livelihoods have been hurting.  No snark forthcoming. It will be a blessing to us all to have a vaccine widely available.

This post will discuss, briefly, my enjoyment in solitary pursuits, and give some tips about field management from a decidedly novice point of view.

In the relative silence of these months, I realized that I do not miss the pre-pandemic world; even my desire to eat an artisanal meal at a locally owned restaurant has been blunted. Part of my feelings are old habits of solitude, as compared to the more social people I know. As I get older, other people seem to wear me out with their constant neediness and lack of resilience in the face of adversity.

My wife and I have been inordinately blessed to have farm work, and lots of it, to keep us occupied and outdoors during the pandemic. We built two structures, improved our raised beds in the garden, expanded the dog run and chicken run, laid in a winter's worth of firewood, and more. Next up, replacing an elderly tractor's wiring harness and working a young livestock dog into our pack of pups, to watch the perimeter.

One huge project, that I've only noted in passing because other projects leave me little time to post more here, involves cultivating six acres of ten across the road from us that belong to my wife's brother. It's a former farm field where dad, aka Big Ed, used to grow tobacco, then soybeans. It went to weeds and saplings years ago, getting only an occasional bush hogging. Over time any ground-nesting birds vanished because fescue (shame on you, Blogger, for not recognizing that word) crept in and it mats too thickly to permit nesting.

My wife's family wanted to hear whippoorwills again and attract coveys of quail. To that end, I've spend about 80 hours in the past two years running heavy machinery and smoking cigars from the tractor seat (okay, about 4 hours of smoking, I'd estimate). The rhythm of the work is really satisfying in a Marie-Kondo sort of way. 

Last year, a landscape biologist from our Extension Agency walked the property and gave us lots of advice, mostly good. I say "mostly" because even the "organic" method of controlling fescue would still involve several thousand dollars for spraying Roundup or similar around the perimeter. That is a DIY cost, mind you, which meant buying a tank and sprayer, too, in order to block fescue creeping in and to leave an ATV/tractor road at the edge. 

The non-organic method involves spraying the entire field. This would kill all the pollinators, including our honeybees.

"No. Hell no," was my response. "I want that crap banned." That's usually my reply to folks who advocate spraying. Granted, the little bottle of Roundup concentrate I apply with a paint brush to Tree of Paradise is still dangerous, but it's hardly the hundred gallons or so we would need to spray a perimeter.

If we want our ecosystem to endure, we need to get beyond our species' suicidal habit of automatically reaching for dangerous chemicals. Period. So our management plan involved mowing the perimeter very short, then plowing, discing, and sowing the ground with plants that suppress weeds and build up the soil.

During the course of the hours on and off the tractors, I learned about managing for wildlife. The first principle involves contacting your extension agent and getting advice. We got a full management plan, free of charge. 

Even if I don't agree with 10% of it, the other 90% is worth its weight in...wild birds. I also highly recommend, for those in my region at least, a PDF guide, Managing Land in the Piedmont of Virginia, authored by the American Bird Conservancy, Piedmont Environmental Council, and the Virginia Department of Game & Inland Fisheries. Check with your state agency to see what they may offer for your bioregion.

Beyond that:

• Think long-term: What are the goals for the property in 5, 10, 20 years? 100? I wished we thought more like that about all our land. But it's good to make a plan that can adapt to a drought, flood, or in these parts an actually cold winter. And farmers should make provisions for keeping the land in family hands and in production. That's another issue for another post.
  
• Know when and if to mow: We had to mow the fescue before tilling it under, to suppress what we did not want. Weeds were up to my shoulders and that meant mowing. Sadly, I had to do so at a time when fauns might be in the grass. I didn't see any, but I began from midfield and mowed outward, rather than starting from an edge; this let wildlife escape.
  
• Not everyone can burn a field: Controlled burns sound great! They mimic what happens in meadow ecosystems, naturally. But good luck finding a crew that wants to take on smaller fields. We were told that below 40 acres, you won't get many offers. So we chose the mow, till, plant method. And for the love of God, don't try a controlled burn if you've never done it. It's a job for pros.
  
• Don't make things worse by cultivating: Soil too wet? You will make a mud field and likely get the tractor stuck. I did that once in a low spot. Too dry? It's Grapes of Wrath time, with a mini Dustbowl of your own making on a windy day. I found that following my two-share plow with a disc harrow as soon as possible, then discing across the furrows really worked well. The second time I put down seed right after, and we had rain. The cover crop / green manure sprouted within a week.
  
• Plant right to improve the soil while attracting game: Ask the extension agent about a soil test if you are unsure. With our heavy clay soil, we opted for adding nitrogen and breaking up the clay. We planted about 700 pounds of seed in 2 plantings: buckwheat, Peredovik sunflower, and iron-clay peas (excellent in clay, as the name suggests) to suppress weeds, followed by a winter crop of rye.  This all gets disced in the next year as a green manure, before replanting. The next spring, I had a tough time finding the peas so I went with buckwheat and the sunflowers. For this winter, I just cut the field but let the weeds and seeds persist, as I see very little fescue. Next year, I'll disc and sow selectively (1 strip disced 6' wide, skip 12', disc again) to begin attracting birds that require some bare spots of soil to build nests. With foxes vanishing around here as coyotes arrive, we may get lucky soon.
  
• Be humble about it all: a neighbor looked out one day and saw a tractor mired, hub-deep, in a furrow. That's because I'd tried to hurry, discing when the ground was too wet. He's an experienced farmer and said nothing, though had the tractor stayed there long enough, I'm sure he'd have offered to pull it out. I should have done it right after plowing...or waited, but no. I learned something about weather and patience. Nature does not work on our schedule. Now I watch the weather, the frost forecast, and the advice of those who know more than I ever will.

By bringing tidiness to the field, what remains sparks joy, as Marie Kondo would say. It also, as practiced, builds habitat for the sorts of animals getting ever scarcer as old fields grow back to forest and active ones are managed with a relentless application of metal blades and poisons. There's personal as well as environmental mindfulness at play. You get you know your inner self when you spend that much time alone without a screen.

You don't need six acres, or 6000, to practice some of these ideas. Spend some time alone on your property without distractions. Then ask:

What would my yard/field/farm/woodland look like if I planted and managed it with the next 100 years in mind? Sounds subversive, doesn't it?

Good.

 

Putting Like with Like

I have a Type-A, OCD personality. Clutter drives me wild with anxiety. It can keep me awake, nights, just as lack of social capital or "FOMO" (fear of missing out) keep my anxious students glued to phones all day and sleep deprived.

Yet in a barn, let's get real: Entropy is more than a Law of Physics. It's a way of life. My wife jokes that I can tolerate dirt, making a space merely "guy clean," as long as nothing but the unstoppable cats are on our counters.

Yet gradually, ever so gradually, I've come to accept if not love the inevitable clutter of rural life and DIY projects.  At the same time, why waste half an hour looking for a tool or the right-sized board when that time could be spent making, fixing, planning? One way to reduce wasted time comes, as with my last post, from a common-sense saying. My mom was always fighting a long delaying action with chaos; with six kids, what else could she do? She would fold clothes as I watched, in wonder. How could that jumble get into such a neat pattern?

"Put like with like, Joey!" And ever since, that has been my rule.

On one occasion, with 20 bored undergraduates unable to hammer nails at a Habitat for Humanity build, and certainly not capable of doing roofing or running a miter saw, I put them in teams, each with a pair of buckets, while a kid with skills and I got on a roof to put down tar paper. My charge: "Go pick up every nail you find, put it in bucket A. All the screws go in bucket B. We'll be saving them hundreds of bucks!" For a few hours, the kids stayed busy. The Habitat folks were amazed when we trudged up with pounds and pounds of dropped fasteners.

This can be overdone.  My habits drove my friend Jeff, a talented carpenter, insane when I helped him. I'd clean up the site before he'd finished, and at least once I saw him reach back for some fasteners but he hand closed on empty air.

Cussing ensued. I learned to delay my compulsions.


Now I have a more subtle way of approaching the mess made by projects. Every week an empty hour or two opens up, time enough for something small but not a big item from my to-do list around our property. Sometimes I load up a hundred rounds of ammo, or check a small box off as I restore my old car. Increasingly, however, I turn that spare time sorting tools and materials--there are acres and acres of time, if you refuse to watch TV or whatever movie is now popular, except on your own schedule. And if you prepare extra food on the weekend, then freeze it? You save more hours and money not eating out.

My like-with-like method is simple. I :

• Tidy at least one square foot of space every time I clean up. 
• Sort items waiting for their final home into boxes I find (plastic or wood, not cardboard. Need to see what is inside!)
• Move sorted items to the spot where they'll be used. So blades for my two miter-box saws, scattered between two buildings, went to a spot nearest the saw they fit. Same with the arbor saw; all those blades will not fit the other saws.  Warning: this can be an endless process if you have lots of tools.
• Put things away, ASAP, when I'm sure (thanks, Jeff) I'm done.
• Toss or recycle anything broken beyond further use. I do scrounge usable bits for later use before I toss the rest.
• Sort small parts (springs, fasteners, etc) into labeled carpenter chests, using that old Dymo label maker to know what is what.
• Stage things: I keep a tool tray out for frequently used tools like my impact driver, fencing pliers, and batteries plus a plastic jar of a few dozen decking screws in a plastic jar. Grab and go! This aligns with the Roman philosophy of making haste, slowly, or festina lente.
• Buy multiple copies of common items and stage them. We have flashlights near the chicken coops, socket sets, screwdrivers, wrenches, and screwdrivers in tool boxes around the place. I keep a wrench and a hammer on the tractor for dealing with balky three-point-hitch fittings or cotter pins.
• Keep the floors clean. This keeps things from vanishing in dust, wood shavings, mouse droppings, snake skins, and more. I now rarely trip on cords or grab a snake (did that once with a black racer on a cold morning; he was torpid but not happy with me).

Do I still waste time looking for stuff? YES. But not as I once did. Try it in the house, too!

Meanwhile, back to work.

If it Burns...BURN IT

Thank you, farmer-friend Dominic, for the title of this post. He puts on his fake Western Hanover County accent and declares this whenever I'm a bit short of firewood.

Which, at present, I am. It's my own damned fault.  If you heat with wood as I do, you may still want a backup for those cold nights when you don't want to go downstairs to fill the stove at 4am.  Of course, you may have to get up anyhow for other reasons, a consequence of reaching middle age.

That said, it's good to have backup. Our new Trane furnace had a manufacturing defect, a bent connection in the heat-exchanger, so it was blowing only cold air. This happened, of course, in the middle of a Polar Vortex. Our installer was on the job quickly, but his firm had to fight Trane for replacement parts. And the thermometer dropped.

The woodpile dropped, fast, too. My four full cords (a stack that would measure 32' x 4' x 4', stacked closely) was getting to it's final stages. I've been cutting and splitting white oak for 2019-20 since I plan to keep not four, but six cords on hand at all times. We already have plenty of green wood for next season but what to do until then?

I recalled an old run-in back in the woods, a haunt of snakes, full of really old firewood. So off I went to get it.

Surprisingly, a lot of wood was still hefty and not paperlike. I found at least one more useable cord, part of which I've pictured here. Yeah, yeah, I know that the firewood geeks (they do exist) caution against burning old wood. They also caution against pine. One imagines millions of Scandinavians freezing to death, every winter, because they don't have hardwood to burn.

The trick to any wood is to have a thermometer on the stove, to avoid two linked catastrophes that can cost you your house, maybe your life. We make sure that no matter what we burn, we avoid creosote build-up in the chimney or an overly hot stove. It's not hard, and despite popular stories about pine or cedar gumming up a flue, they won't in a hot stove. We've never had, in our annual cleanings of the chimney, reports of excess creosote.

Having seen a chimney fire once at a neighbor's house, I don't ever want to see one again. But if you are careful, if it burns, burn it!

Plan B Skills

All of us dream, right? Of that perfect job, that special place we want to live, that special someone. We know that even with those three ingredients, if we have difficulty, help is a phone-call away. And there's Internet everywhere, true?

Many times it all ends well. But not always. So what are some key skills that every person should have by, say, age 25? Here's a stab at it, without going down the Prepper rabbit hole. Some of these skills would be of NO use in an apocalypse.

I thought of this after hiring Quentin, a man in his 20s who had very good skills with a chainsaw. He impressed my taciturn, highly skilled brother-in-law, too: a real feat. We'll be hiring him again.

So here goes. No, no instructions or lessons. That's your quest. I think we should all know how to:

Build a fire, using matches: The trick is twofold, finding dry wood and building a "tipi" type fire.

Sharpen a cutting edge: Hatchet, knife, axe, shears...it doesn't matter. With a stone or a metal tool. Keeping blades sharp, paradoxically, keeps you from cutting yourself. Mom taught me that one.

Change a tire: This requires learning to use the jack in the car and understanding how to loosen, then tighten lug-nuts by hand. Not every car has run-flats. There's a thing called an "owner's manual" in nearly every car. Read yours.

Jump-start a car: How can it be so hard? Positive to positive, negative to negative. But oh, the results of crossing those wires!

Start and run a chainsaw safely: I use these a lot, as we heat with wood. No need to rehash the advice here, but a novice can learn the basics: Check for a sharp chain and tight chain. Add lubricant for the chain when you fill the other tank with gas (and knowing which tank is which). Learn to use a choke. As for how to cut up a downed tree or how to fell one, that's something I'm still learning in baby steps.

Drive a vehicle with a manual transmission: Guilty! Busted! I'm learning, however. It's been a lifelong goal to own a straight-shift vehicle other than a tractor. I'm going to have one soon.

Find directions by sun or the North Star:  If you know how to find the Big Dipper, you can find Polaris and north. And if you roughly know the time of day, you can find at least one direction by the sun, though it gets tougher at mid day.

Understand investing: Basics here, the difference between equities, bonds, cash, and precious metals. I follow Bloomberg's site regularly. Do you know the difference between the DOW and S&P? Long and short-term bonds? Trends for gold and silver? What it means when the Fed changes the money supply or interest rates?

Do simple math by hand and manage a monthly budget: Here I love it that I learned and can still do long division.  Knowing these basics lets you keep track of expenses and project where you need to be, financially, in a month or two.

Be on time & be neat: Quentin really impressed me here. When he ran a little late for an understandable reason one day, he contacted me. He smokes, and like a soldier on a five-minute break for his squad leader, he cleaned up his cigs after. Compare that to the "friend" of a house-sitter one summer, who ruined one of our watering cans with hundreds of butts. Better than putting them in our yard, but that sitter was not hired again and we docked her pay for the cost of replacing a nicotine-ruined watering can.

Load and fire a handgun, shotgun, and rifle: Controversial, but I'd claim that knowing how to operate a semi-automatic handgun or revolver is a life skill you never wish to have to use, but if so...I'd add bolt-action rifle to the mix. Semiautomatic rifles can be more complex, but the "manuals of arms" for most pistols and revolvers are similar enough. Hitting a paper target with any of them at 30 feet is also needed for basic competence.

What skills have I left out? This might become a series!

Urban Flannel? How about Chamois Cheapass?

I have long hoped to use the word "cheapass" in a blog post. Now you have it.

For as many years as I've been interested in outdoor recreation, I've sworn by chamois cloth shirts. It began in Indiana, where my former father-in-law, a dedicated hunter of deer, ducks, grouse, and geese, gave me my first L.L. Bean shirt.

It and others that followed, from Bean and a firm called Five Brother that is still around (thank God), seemed as durable as plate armor. They wore in over the years, gently, to become as comfortable as any garment you'd want.  They were cotton flannel, a type of cloth, in woolen form, that may date to the 16th Century or earlier. There's more on the history of the cloth here.

Now, however, I find that Bean has gone for a look that is outdoorsy rather than really for outdoors work. My last chamois from them, worked moderately actually chopping wood and hunting, ripped after only 10 or so wearings in two years.

Ah, but to look like a lumberjack without doing work! In the photo above, note the unused axe. Sure looks good, though, walking into the microbrewery! I suppose Lumbersexual urban men with their skinny jeans, spotless boots, and groomed beards look great in thin chamois cloth. To quote from City Pages, where I copped the image:

He's old enough to grow a beard, but not so old as to hold hints of salt in the black pepper. He longs for the days when life wasn't complicated by big-city dreams, when a man could eke out a living off the land. But the closest he's gotten to downing a tree is stuffing his face with bûche de Noël.

 That's some great writing, but these shirts are not worth a damn.

I'm chopping wood today, and it will be in a Cabela's shirt. Now that Bass Pro has acquired that firm, I expect their chamois cloth to take a dive, too.  A friend wisecracked that "if Cabelas is the redneck L.L. Bean, Bass Pro is the redneck Cabelas."

Full disclosure: beard oil really is useful. Thank you, Lumbersexuals. Now help me bring back good chamois. I've ordered a very Lumbersexual-correct plaid from Five Brother, in their "Brawny" line of shirts. Not a solid color (my preference) but it looks promising. We'll see if they have cheaped out, too. I'm hopeful that the answer is no. The company still has separate listings for "Jeans" and "Dungarees." It's also a good sign that 1) Their Web site is not fully functional and 2) They don't pick up the phone on Saturday.

Probably gone hunting.

Planet Lumberjack Oldguy, here I come.

Superfluous Roosters

One problem about hatching your own poultry: you are going to end up with too many roosters. The one pictured above was a "keeper." He's doing his work, watching out for his girlfriends so they get to eat and nothing sneaks up to eat them.

But what if you have to eat a rooster?

Next year, a slightly higher temperature on the incubator should result in fewer males, but this year, we had six roosters. Four were mean birds, that charged you and pecked at you, no matter what. Their fate?

Butchered and eaten, or in the euphemistic sense, "sent to freezer camp."

I'd never done this before, so I enlisted the help of a theoretical physicist and his architect wife.

Yes, on paper that sounds very unqualified, but they both grew up in Romania under Communism. One advantage of that otherwise dreadful system was that city kids often learned rural skills, and my friends are no exception. Of course, our grandmothers were all laughing at us for the grand production we made of "processing" the birds.

Except for the first rooster, I did the worst part: the quick dispatch.

No, there are no photos here. Yes, we tried mightily to get the extra roosters adopted. If you belong to any lists about poultry, you'll find lots of handsome males up for adoption. Nearly all are listed as "sweet tempered."

We were lucky to have two roosters survive. Both are defensive of their harems when it comes to predators, but they let me pet them and their ladies. They eat out of my hand and come up to talk to me.

That's the only thing better than eating a rooster. Coq au Vin is, however, excellent.

So, if you are faced with no other options, here are some excellent resources I used:

• how to humanely butcher and clean a chicken.
• an excellent Coq au Vin recipe from New York Times.
• how to clean chicken feet.

I Mark the Line

Every year, once the snakes vanish after frost, I tell myself "this year I need to walk the property lines and mark our boundaries."

Easier said than done on 100 acres. Our home has 11, so that was not a big deal despite a few creek-crossings in temperatures that hovered in the low teens.  I put on blaze orange to alert any late-season hunters and grabbed some "no hunting" signs.

On the other hand, one could wander in circles for days on 100 acres  in Buckingham County and die of exposure. Yet marking one's property is a very good practice. All rural land-owners whose property ends not in fences but in woodland should do it, regularly.

With my brother-in-law and our neighbor Bunny, we trekked the boundaries of the family's property in Buckingham. The family had just purchased two more parcels that had come on the market, so I toted along two spray cans of paint, a compass, and my usual hiking swag. Our property map would not suffice except for vague references; plats may have notes such as "large stone with paint blaze" or "metal rod" with vague (or no) GPS coordinates.  In any case, the land is far beyond any sort of cellular reception.

One thing I had forgotten that day was our surveyor's wheel, a must-have for this work.

Still, we slogged along old logging roads, followed streams, and soon had used all our paint. The timber-company neighbor had marked a good deal accurately, but some of the blazes were old and needed renewing before the next harvest. They plant only Loblolly Pine, so that helps them identify where their land ends and ours begins.  We also wanted to post no-hunting signs, a must if you want to deter hunters. If caught hunting on posted land, they can face stiffer fines than they do otherwise. We do hunt the land ourselves, as does Bunny, which is why he was so eager to help; though I did not bag one during my abbreviated season of three days in a stand, it's thick with whitetail deer.

I'm not paranoid, but when I walk alone I take a holstered revolver. I was attacked by a pack of dogs in Spain, and though I drove them away, without injury, using a satchel of textbooks, that awful memory lingers. Poachers may also be detained by a landowner until the cops arrive (good luck with getting them swiftly, with no cell reception). A friend once held a pair of men until the sheriff came for them.

So usually we walk in pairs or trios.

The most useful part of this exercise was learning landmarks. If you do walk your land regularly, you spot large trees, water courses, and other useful things. We IDed a couple of oaks in decline or in places where they can be felled without hurting the diversity of the forest. With my brother-in-law's little sawmill, we can make boards for our buildings.

 

We also began to make plans for a few ATV roads we can use to skid logs out. In winter, you can really see the best routes, which are often the old roads that are lost in the undergrowth of summer. 

Get to know your land, and get neighbors involved. It's a good way to make friends. Bunny does a lot for us, because we gave him permission to hunt on our property. His help is worth its weight in gold.

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.