Mice in the Root Shelter!

I check our "Root Shelter," fashioned from a Cold-War Fallout shelter, weekly. So far the pumpkins and garlic in there have held up well, but I've had a special concern about the small harvest of sweet potatoes (no more than 25 pounds) that we gleaned this year. A neighbor gave me another 25 pounds, and I've kept them in a cool utility room. I've been planning to move them to the Root Shelter  but have been rather lazy about it.

Finally I went to check things today.  I am glad I did. The tubers already there were wrapped in newspaper to absorb any moisture and put in bushel baskets with lots of air circulation. The door is tight and features breathing holes with 1/4" hardware cloth. The walls are cinder block and the whole thing is underground.

Imagine my disgust when over half our sweet potatoes had been gnawed by mice!  I took a basket full of basket cases out to our compost heap.

Our pumpkins, garlic, and pearl onions were fine, untouched by the little gluttons.

This warning meant going back to the drawing board about the Shelter and how food get stored.  Baby mice can squeeze through an opening the diameter of a pencil; adults, I've read, can get through a hole the size of a human pinkie.  They can gnaw wood and plastic with ease. Metal will stop them. So will our building's resident black snakes, which are hibernating now, and barn cats.

We don't have a barn cat with access to the building, since we keep it locked. Killing mice myself poses no moral problems at all, but I won't employ poisons. A dead mouse could be eaten by our predators, killing our pest control service! Poison could also find its way onto the food in the shelter. I am not squeamish at all about setting snap-traps, but the potatoes still needed better storage. Next year we will harvest a large number of Kabocha Squash for a local restaurant, and I don't want this happening again for a cash crop.

Homesteading and survivalist forums are full of tales about how to store things in root cellars. Mice can gnaw through plastic, so a simple ventilated tote would not do.

Some folks employ metal trash cans, which I have used with great success for feed for our chickens, cats, and the dog. Drilling lots of holes (no more than 1/4" across would not be too onerous, but I had a tote and hardware cloth. So I got right to work.

My invention involved using a tote with a removable, one-piece top, rather than a hinged one. I cut away all but the rim, so the contents would breathe, and put hardware cloth inside, fastened to the plastic by screws and washers. Next I lined the inside of the tote with more hardware cloth, after drilling lots of 1/8" holes all over the tub's bottom and sides.  The metal sides come up high enough to meet the wire on top.

I plan to check this frequently, especially now that I have some snap-traps down, baited with peanut butter.  I hope we have sweet potatoes come spring! None of our seed potatoes were eaten, so we'll be starting fresh for a bigger harvest in 2016.

DMCA Reversal that Helps the DIYer

Ironic, isn't it? At the very time of "Maker Fairs" and a renewed DIY culture, it takes Federal action to insure we can work on our own modern cars and tractors.

Glad to learn from Hemmings Daily's Terry Shea that the Federal Government has clarified the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to permit owners to work on their own cars.  I am not joking.  To crack the code of a modern computer-assisted vehicle--for the farm or the road--risked violating Federal law, because the code and many of the tools used were proprietary to the company making the original equipment.

John Deere apparently was among the firms fighting to keep the safeguards for their profits in place buy penalizing any customers who worked on equipment they owned. Shame on Deere. At one time, as with my 1950 M, the company deliberately designed all machinery so a small farmer could do any repairs that did not require a machine shop. I saw that on a friend's Farmall Super A as well, where we pulled the cam and replaced the cam gear with hand tools.

Modern computer-assisted systems make such tasks harder, but not out of reach of the enterprising DIYer. Go at it, friends. Check YouTube for how-to videos. I learned to reverse-flush the power-steering system on our Honda after the dealer told me doing so would run $120. NAPA had a sale on the Honda-only fluid at $3 per bottle, so for $12 and 30 minutes of my time (plus 15 more watching videos) I did the job myself.

I would be the first to say that we should not return to the engines of the 1950s. They ran dirtier and consumed fuel at rates that would make us stagger today. Car engines might last 50K miles before being shot. Yet at a time when our phones have more power than any early PC, we should be able to get diagnostic tools and connect them to our cars to repairs and other modification, including, yep, hot-rodding. I felt damned good after rebuilding my first carburetor.

There's a hunger for this out there. I see it at festivals and meetings. Perhaps we can blame Steve Jobs.

He helped to make many of us even more helpless, and in the age of mobile phones I'm actually seeing my students LESS able to write code, manipulate software, or fix hardware-software problems than their peers 10 years ago. Jobs, unlike Apple co-founder Wozniak, wanted enclosed boxes with proprietary hardware--damned well made and lovely hardware. The look of Apple speaks to me like the lines of a '67 Pontiac GTO or a current Audi coupe.

Maybe I'm shallow, but I buy cars that look fast and trucks that look like trucks, not toys.

Apple fanatic I am, mostly for the hackability of their UNIX-undperpinned OS and durable hardware, I should not be a critic. Yet Jobs never wanted ease-of-modification in his hardware. I've come to realize that it was an anomaly of the late 90s when he came back to Apple. My wife has owned two Mac desktops that have worked well for a total of 16 years. But I was able to update their hardware. I added Firewire to a "gumdrop" iMac in a lickable grape color that lasted us a solid six years until it could not run the newest Mac OS. A parent in Alaska bought it on eBay from me and his daughter continued to use it. I then replaced the beloved gumdrop with a G5 that lasted nearly a decade. I put a power supply in that second machine, using a unit from a mom-and-pop repairer in New Jersey, and sold the G5 for a handsome sum on eBay to a guy who was going to replace all the capacitors on the mother-board (my soldering skills are pretty good but not that good). It was near the end of the line for Macs that could be opened easily and upgraded. I'd still have that G5 and bought a new set of capacitors if the generation of computer ran a current operating system or applications.

Jobs' plans for his customers resulted in my being unable to hack my iPhone or sleek MacBook Pro easily. Though Nan's amazing new MacBook Air looks ready to last a long time (partly due to having a solid-state hard drive) it's as incomprehensible inside as our Mini Cooper's engine bay.

Microsoft is going the same route with Windows 10 and its alluring-looking Surface laptop, it seems. I do love the docking-station / keyboard aspect of Surface, something that steals a march on Apple's designs, yet I expect Microsoft to emulate Apple's model under the hood. Hacking Windows' Registry has, after all, always been far more daunting than getting deep into Apple's OS.

Making us consumers brings profits, and DIYers can be dangerous to the bottom line.

The allure of early PCs, the Apple II, and the Macs of the 90s-early 2000s was how one could open the cases and have fun tinkering. Given the DMCA changes, some upstart maker like Tesla will figure this out and make vehicles for tinkerers again. I'll be in line to buy one. For the small farmer, I'd say buy old equipment if your operation is small. Careful repairs and maintenance can keep the old stuff going nearly forever.

January Garden? Waste Nothing.

With luck, our lettuce may last until it bolts in May. My fellow Virginians will declare me daft for saying how mild our season has been, without real snowfall other than a dusting twice. I miss snow greatly and the hard freezes that were once more common. At least, in both November and early this month, we did get a good freeze. It heaves the soil well for spring, when I'm going to get serious and plant our entire 6500 square feet of garden.  Yet even now, in the deepest part of what passes for "winter" here, there is something stirring in the garden.

Mostly it is fallow, though a few brave onions and garlic wait out the dormant season. This time of  year means letting the chickens turn soil on rows that have nothing as I peek, on warmer days, into the row-covers where we have some real food waiting. With only a bit of work in fall, any gardener around here can manage it. This year, I have harvested beets and radishes (now done), plus we continue to get lettuce, collards, and broccoli.

My focus for this post is the final item. We long ago harvested the main heads of broccoli; the side ones got nipped in the last really cold weather, even under the row-covers.  But something else remains: the greens. They taught me a small lesson this year.

Americans who enjoy broccoli rabe probably have not given much thought to the tender leaves and small stems of broccoli itself. I found, when making broccoletti this fall, that the leaves work really well when chopped and sauteed. My recipe uses pine nuts, lots of garlic, and sometimes, since we have strong palates, anchovies. We top it all with aged Romano or Parmesan.

As we came to crave this pasta dish as much as we do pesto, I wanted to stretch my supply of broccoli. I was delighted to see that the leaves are great for cooking. They compare well to my collards and kale, so it would be a shame to toss them in the compost heap.

My interest in that part of the plant made me think about what other edibles we casually discard in the garden. In the leanest part of the year, every little scrap counts. Partly my attitude comes from not wanting to waste anything in soil I prepared myself. Partly it comes from a family story of the Depression, when my father and his mom, not long arrived in the US from Lebanon, went to open fields to pick Dandelion greens so they would have a vegetable for dinner. It shamed my dad and he did not tell the story too freely, but it did not shame me. Nature is an abundant gardener, if we know where to look.

If you have a garden, be sure to go out as soon as the wild onions are up. Eat them and be thankful that the lean months are behind us. And then think about what you don't want to waste from every plant you grow. I guarantee you will both eat well and throw a lot less food away.

Old Man Winter's Friend

It's not fashionable to claim that one enjoys cold weather. I think that fondness for the warm months comes from the easy availability of central air conditioning.  People have grown soft, or at least they complain more than older folks I used to know, people who grew up before climate controls and climate change that force us, increasingly, indoors.  When I go to big-box DIY stores, I see the ideal of the suburban cocoon: a place with all new fixtures and floors so warm and smooth that the models pictured in the displays are in socks or barefoot.

I live in a home where you'll get an inch-long splinter in your foot if  you try that.  And I like that.  I live in a home where we set the heat-pump LOW to save money and once in a while, I have to restock the woodstove in the middle of the night to keep the house warm. And I like that, too.

There's merit to not living with every possible modern comfort. One hard fact of country life is that one must work outdoors in all seasons and weather. In July and August, for the past two decades, I have been required to get up early, at hours my students could never fathom, and work outdoors. Once I only did that to go fishing. My academic year permits this latitude with hours during the dog-days of Summer, yet my job also works against my being out doors during the very best months in Virginia for putting in fences, mowing fields, repairing building, cutting wood, and all of the million things that my father-in-law taught me.

Now, living in the country instead of simply apprenticing, I make the best of whatever weather I get. I do have more time on a hot day, early in the morning, to do a few chores before the burning tyrant called the Sun rises and makes the day and me suffer. In winter, however, I can excel on most days, save one like today, where the thermometer struggles to get out of the single digits. That's very odd for Virginia, though historically, the region could count on a few single-digit lows each year.

So today I sit indoors, work on the semester ahead, and wish there were snow as well as cold. They just don't come together here, as they once did.

Cold weather does cut down on mosquitoes in summer, and it makes life bearable cleaning out barns or working in tight spots where, come spring, I might find a Copperhead ready to bite me.  Black Widows are still around, that that is why gloves are a godsend (and you don't work in this sort of cold without gloves).

Winter has a spiritual side, too. The long dark nights lead a person to introspection. Yes, that's not fashionable in this day, either; to turn off the mobile device and just think about things. But when it's cold, and the coffee and tobacco pipe are warm by the wood stove, there are few things in life more comforting. Then the trek to the log-rack becomes a reminder that we should never take warmth and comfort as expectations.

If life were a little harder, day to day, what would we stop taking for granted?

What is your address??

Image: Joe & Bunny rock on, winter 2011-2012

On the day many folks felt that the Maya predicted the end of things, we spent our first day as full-time rural dwellers. Winter Solstice, and the return of light. Not a bad place and time to begin.

Welcome to Tractorpunk, my blog about this transition. First, there was the housewarming party, where many very city folks decided to make the trek to our farm. I got a first lesson about rural and city distances. How do you explain that addresses, mere numbers on a legal map and a mailbox, matter less here than mileage? When the choice got made for us about where to retire, the family farm where my wife grew up, I think we did well: 11 acres in an area zoned firmly against suburban development by habit of centuries and the presence of lots of wealthy and horsy folk, both from-and-come-here residents. Right on.

So I answer “This many miles past the end of the four-lane road.” But my former neighbor from the city looks confused. “But what is the address?” I dutifully give it, knowing that unless my city friend looks carefully, her Honda will sail right by the mail box at the end of the driveway. When she did arrive, it was at about 20 miles per hour, with a long and patient line of cars behind her. But find us she did.

It is at such moments—and there are many of them—that I have come to realize how far indeed we have traveled, not in miles but in years. The rhythm of this place is still that of thirty years ago. It’s why folk came, and perhaps it will be that way for a long time. No one can control the flow of events, but I suspect that the decades as I drift on toward my personal twilight will see me change more than my surroundings.

As this blog evolves, I’ll chart my transition to rural life, hobby farming, and a more sustainable manner of living. I’m no greenhorn: for twenty years I’ve helped operate tractors, split my own wood, made my own lumber, sometimes starting from a tree we felled, grown and canned a good deal of my own food. Some principles will guide me:

•  Unlike “In a Strange Land,” my long-running blog about virtual worlds and technoculture, this blog will be light on snark. I’ll leave that to my Second Life avatar Iggy and his worlds. The tone for Tractorpunk will be far more positive. Urban irony and Hipster style are as useless here as the single-speed bikes and sleeves of tattoos to be found not 25 miles from my new doorstep.
• DIY and intense localism will be focal points. As in my work with virtual worlds and non-corporate uses of technology in education, my DIY ethos is very much intact here in the hinterlands of Central Virginia. Some new equipment had to be purchased to get started and more on that later; mostly our work has involved making do, re-making from old materials, and doing without. The watchwords are economic and environmental sustainability. 
• Tractorpunk will focus less on Peak Oil and decline than have my occasional forays in print and at the other blog. Here I break with my occasional correspondent and fellow hater-of-suburia, James Howard Kunstler. Jim is convinced that we face an era of non-linear events, from climate change to resource depletion and the end of our economic system. My attitude has been that we’ll muddle along with what Jim calls “the project of civilization,” but the easy times are indeed over; technology old and new will help blunt the edges of an edgy new reality, but we are not headed for a reset to, say, the Colonial times.
• Preaching won’t be part of these postings. If this venture turns at all didactic, it will be to help others who are venturing out from urban and suburban life not in the manner of idealists from the early 1970s but as sojourners who very much plan to stay and make part or all of a living on and from the land.
• Spirituality will not be a heavy part of this blog. I feel a kinship to the land and a need to learn from it but I won’t be straying into neo-pagan reveries and magical thinking. There is magic enough in the day to day and the passing of the seasons.

More will follow. Many thanks to Bryan Alexander's Scaling the Peak and the young DIYers at Farmhack for some needed inspiration.