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.

Those Lights in the Window

It's a dark winter ahead, existentially and literally, and there's no denying it. So why do I feel good today, despite an annoying upper-respiratory infection?

In a time of looming oppression and likely despair, which it promises to be for many of my friends and colleagues, I step into retirement from full-time work. That's not my source of hope: it's the uncanny circularity of a few events that mark the closing of one door, the opening of another.

Everyone at the university says "hey! You'll have more time at the farm," and this is true. As weather and skills permit, I'll be doing repairs on our house, on vehicles, on farm equipment. I'll hunt next year for deer and fish more often from my kayak. 

Doing these things keep various Hobgoblins and Imps of the Perverse at bay.

Second, some interesting developments occurred at work. My retirement party was delightful, and I was humbled by the presence of so many colleagues and students who came out to bid me farewell. I received Emeritus status, the first ever for a Director on our campus.

Then came good news from an editor; an article that had been accepted, pending revisions, would appear in January, just in time for my student co-author's applications to grad school. And if that were not enough, a London publisher queried me about writing a book on Artificial Intelligence in teaching. That's a long way from Tractorpunk work, but it's a gig, even if royalties on the last book only net about $50 a  year. Such projects are more about service to others and not enriching a writer.

Every small event seemed portentous: grading the final papers, holding the last class, doing final payroll, working with a writer in our Writing Center one last time. The wheel kept turning, of course: my grad class has made for spring, and it will mean one full day on campus weekly. As I told students "they haven't put me in a box...yet." And when asked if it were bittersweet, my answer has been the same "only sweet." Sometimes you need to move on.

On the day of my final one-on-one meeting with my supervisor, a letter (remember them?) appeared in my office mailbox. I recognized the name of a former student and employee who had gone on to affluence in the business world. He's a thoughtful man, with a background in the liberal arts and business theory, now entering middle age. He sent our program a parting gift, a check for $4000 that repeats the gift he gave us a decade ago. I presented it to my boss, and we grinned ear to ear, marking our final exchange with a promise of future rewards: bringing in a guest speaker, maybe hosting a local conference.

Packing is actually momentous, too. I keep finding things as I clean up my office: old books inscribed by deceased colleagues, mementos from conferences I attended, even the stray stapler or binder that sat in my office the day I arrived for work, in 1991.  They are all breadcrumbs leading back to my initial uncertainty when I returned from Indiana to my home town, never intending to stay. The Mountain West beyond the humid East beckoned to me then and still does, but not as my home today.

I'm glad I stayed. My mind goes back to kids I've assisted in finding direction. Today I helped a student whose nation is embroiled in civil war. Some terrible tragedy recently afflicted his family. As a result, he did not do his best work for his final project. I considered an incomplete, but I grew concerned about his Visa status. Were he to return home, he might be snatched by militia "recruiters" as soon as he cleared Customs. Americans should ponder that fact deeply and slowly.

In the best tradition of Stoicism, I changed only the thing I could. I cannot save his family or country, but I could help him. So I reached out, offering him the chance to revise. He had a decent passing grade, based upon earlier work. In the event, I wanted to give him hope and a second chance after the holidays. He was delighted. It made me think of those lights in the window, seen as we rush down the highway.

As I put them in our windows today, I noted how they mark a ritual of passing along a road, metaphorically, to arrive not at an exit ramp but onto a new route that seems familiar. What a strange thing, pagan most likely from Winter Solstice rituals, to put little lights in our windows to shine into the blackness during the longest nights of the year. It's a tradition that transcends the religious ceremonies of various faiths. All lighting of candles are acts of hope. 

Nature, too, sends us her signals. Out in the field sloping below the spot where we buried our beloved livestock dog Vela, little green shoots are coming up. I'd harrowed and seeded the field with winter rye, far too late in my estimation. It was simply too busy on the job to find a day when it was not raining or the soil too dry. Yet up the sprouts came, to be tilled under in spring as a green manure, so I can plant Buckwheat for our pollinators and sunflowers for our wild birds.

They don't despair except, perhaps, when no food can be found. I'm going to help with that and provide them some hope, too. Do what you can. Small acts are going to count mightily.

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.

Tis the Season: For $90 Fraser Firs

Sorry, Charlie Brown. There are no trees for you at the local lot.

Even folks who sell trees call the spindly ones with a bad side "Charlie Browns," but they are hard to come by. I saw two prices today outside Pleasants Hardware: $74.99 and $94.99. I recall $5 trees on Christmas Eve, whenever possible Scotch Pines, our family favorites. We usually put up the tree Christmas Eve not out of tradition, but to save money. Mine was not a wealthy family in the late 1960s.

Today, a hundred bucks. Gulp. We have not bought a live tree in many years, preferring a Cedar we cut from our land. We remove crooked saplings and selectively thin to promote a healthy woodlot and reduce fire hazards every winter, as soon as the frost means not stepping on a Copperhead. At the edges of the woods, Red Cedars abound, and if they get sun, they usually have only one bad side and a lot of branches.

That may not be an option for many readers. Let's say you don't want to spend a bundle on a cut tree but want something nice-looking and sustainable.

I'd actually argue for a few ideas different from typical Christmas trees today. In fact, some of my ideas once marked the fad of their era.

1) Go Lucy van Pelt, not Charlie Brown. We bought, in a moment of irony, a silver tinsel tree. It's only 2' tall but it evokes childhood memories of the basement of Standard Drug in what is now Richmond's Carytown. The basement was only open in those years for the holiday season, stocked with toys and a lot of aluminum trees in one corner. The drug store put out a really nice winter wonderland, with fake snow, lots of ornaments, and colored lighting. It was magical to a kid, especially blue lights on the silver trees. The whole idea of metallic trees fell from favor for many decades but now it's BACK. Mind you, today's fake trees are Chinese made, not from a factory in Hoboken or Sheboygan or San Diego. 

2) Spend a lot on a really nice artificial tree. Not in the mood for a shiny pink aluminum tree, Charlie? A quick look online to find realistic-looking green trees ranging from 200 to 2000 dollars. To be honest, the mid-range ones appear fantastic. Look for ones that are not too regular; I saw a tree for nearly $2000 that had every branch shaped identically. Real trees do  not look that way. Once  you find the right tree, however, it could last you decades. Amortize a $400 tree and you might spend 20 dollars for each of 20 seasons. That's a quarter what a tree-lot example costs, without inflation. Like my tinsel tree, these trees do not need water and won't drop needles.

3) Plant a live tree and decorate it outside. If you have the yard for it, a 6' evergreen can come your way for under $150. For five years or so, until it gets too large, you can add lights and all-season decorations. If it's a dwarf conifer, you might be able to make it your Christmas tree for decades.

4) Get Your Goose (Feather). There's a German tradition of the "Goose Feather Tree" I only learned about today. Take a gander with Mr. Google or Mr. Bing or that Duck Duck Go fellow. The original Goose-feather trees were created by dyeing feathers green to simulate branches, then attaching them to a trunk. You can buy them ready to assemble today, at decent prices. They don't have the density of Fraser Firs, but the sparse branches let you show off large ornaments.They look quaint and cozy to me, like a Walton's tree John Boy brought down the mountain.

5) Become a Druid. A friend who studied modern-day Druidry had a bare branch in her home, beautifully decorated. It evoked the slumber of our current season. It was striking to see and when Yuletide ended, it could go in the compost or wood stove.

I am out of ideas.  But have a tree, whatever your faith. It's a wonderful tradition. A Blessed Solstice, Happy Hanukkah, and a Merry Christmas to  you.

"Darkness is Good for Us": A Contrarian Idea About Winter

I had planned a post to review some promising new rechargable flashlights we used on farm, when a story caught my eye on Firefox's home screen. At first I thought it clickbait, until I spotted Atlas Obscura. The word "Darkness" intrigued my roving eye, and I clicked. 

My class had just finished reading LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea, a fine book for younger readers about a talented young man's journey to wisdom, focusing on his Taoist realization that darkness and light need to exist in balance. It's a contrary approach than that taken in much fantasy literature, where a Manichean division exists: Sauron vs. Aragorn, for instance. Darkness in Tolkien is usually metaphorical and dangerous. It tempts us to power over others, rather than power from within.

But Tolkien rises above moral dualism; he loved the natural world. In his books we get dark skies full of stars that the Elves enjoy. That literal sense of darkness as awe-inspiring and necessary brings us to a lesson from Moffat, Scotland that we might employ in our lives. To a small degree, we have been trying it where we live.  This quotation, by "Astrophotographer and dark skies advocate Josh Dury" struck me as particularly wise:

“If you squeeze the whole of human evolution into a single day, artificial lighting has been around for a minute,” says Dury. “Exposure to light at night can have serious health implications.” He adds: “It can particularly affect our body’s hormones, including the production of melatonin, which is responsible for maintaining sleep patterns and nocturnal rhythms.” 

Read the piece for inspiration. Moffat succeeded where other communities continue to blot out the sky, at enormous cost to our natural sleep cycles and the stability of our climate. Even low-energy LEDs require power to run, so they are far from carbon-neutral.

Even if we dim our own small lights, not all of us live in places where we can turn down community lighting to see the Milky Way arch over our suddenly tiny heads. We are puny, compared to the panorama overhead.

What can each of us do to bring back some darkness? I don't always succeed every day but:

• Steering clear of all screens for an hour or more before bedtime
• Leaving house lights off in rooms that are empty
• Avoiding the American trend of spotlighting a house to show it off at night
  
• Replacing interior and exterior lighting that blots out the night with task lighting where possible, and where not?
• Installing security lighting triggered by motion. Always-on means always injected carbon dioxide into our air.
  
• Considering where all lights point. We replaced large floodlights with equally bright but lower-energy LED floods pointing downward. That way, when we need to check outside during the time when Copperhead snakes roam our yards, we can see them. Once back inside, out go the lights.

Winter remains my favorite season, partly for the lack of hot, humid weather and the orderliness of a winter landscape, but also for the power of the dark sky. It's perfect for stargazing. This year I learned a few new winter constellations that I can, luckily, see where I live. Cassiopeia, Andromeda, and Perseus became nightly companions. 

In town, it was Orion. That was about it. During a trip to New York City? Nothing except the Moon. Times Square is magical at night, but I'd not be able to live in a large city again for more than a short while. I'd miss the dark too much.

I hope that in years to come, we'll rediscover how powerfully darkness helps us, as creatures who evolved to benefit from both light and dark. 

Next time, the flashlights!

image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Gleaning Time

This word will be a good one for my workplace blog, where I propose a Word of the Week and Metaphor of the Month.

On the farm, or even in a small garden, gleaning has a strong purpose of connecting us with the final turn of the season of warmth to the colder, darker months ahead. I tend to glean--gather whatever remains from my final heavy harvest--on the day of first frosts. That would be tonight and tomorrow night in Central Virginia!

I filled a bushel basket with some summer squash, a lone cucumber, a few tomatoes, and many, many hot peppers bound for chopping and fermenting. It sounds sad, this last picking of fruits, but really it's a fun way to say "thank you" to the garden beds and "hello!" to fall plantings: broccoli, lettuce, kale, garlic and onions mostly. 

Nan and I then put heavy row cover on the smallest seedlings and trucked giant piles of dying weeds and garden debris to our two compost piles (a long-term one for weeds, a shorter-term pile for soil amendments, leaves, and kitchen scraps).  We spread fresh straw around the new plants we have for fall (Kale appeared just as the basil finished up) and continued to glean lessons from a rather bad year in the garden. Mostly that was my fault: late start, travel in May, laziness in July and August.

 Next year we will change how we manage our raised beds and mowing our paths, and remove any remaining weed-block fabric. We will rotate basil more mindfully (black spot appeared on it at season's end, so it cannot be composted).  We also gleaned some good ideas about planting a second crop of squash in late August, to beat the squash-bug cycle.  One lesson we gleaned involved herbicides: sadly, we cannot manage 300' of fence-line without some judicious application. With a good deal of that fence now covered in thick vines, we'll cut, spray, and maintain it better to keep weeds out and the sun on our garden. We lost a lot of produce to the shade this year. 

That all said, I managed to put up a gallon of tomato sauce in pint jars, nearly that much Blackberry and Fig jam, and get a fair onion crop. The garlic did not get harvested in time, so it sprouted. I gleaned all that; the soft-neck variety will be trimmed and pickled; the hard-necks went right back into a new bed. Next year, hard-necks will be our speciality as they keep so well.

I hope the lessons you gleaned from your gardens help in 2023.

The Silence of The Roosters and Other Fall Traditions

Sad to do it, but we get to the point every year when a few formerly cute little chicks morph into nightmarish teenage boys who fight each other and roughly molest hens. One nearly blinded our former Alpha rooster, Big Daddy. BD now is our Beta, and we'd be sorry to lose him. As Roger our "chicken whisperer" tells us, older males mating with young hens result in fewer male chicks.

Win win.

And the aggressor? That punk teenager went into a dutch oven today. Young roos "taste just like chicken." Only older birds prove too tough to eat, good only for the stockpot.

Culling roosters we cannot re-home with Roger is, thankfully, only one of the annual rituals that begin about the time of the Autumnal Equinox. The heat and humidity have broken, so I get entire days for physical labor of splitting firewood and stacking it, pruning trees ahead of hurricanes, baling a bit of late-cut hay, planting garlic and onions, putting in kale and lettuce, picking figs and last tomatoes for last batches of jam and sauce.

As my full-time professional career nears its end, I'm ever more in love with this perfect time of year. I cannot sit still for long or look at screens except to write or study more about my hobbies. At night I read books, but while there's enough light in the evenings I get a bit more work done. There's also enough cool, dry air to make sweating fun. It's not hunting season yet, but the lakes are good for fishing for quite a while longer.  We even suddenly, after my wife's retirement, have time now for short vacations. It requires a farm-sitter, but the "shoulder months" are good for that, without fretting about animals needing constant attention to water and shade in summer or well-prepared shelter and fresh dry bedding in winter.

With Fall in mind, I went to the movie theater and sat in front of a big screen for the first time since COVID-19. I was deeply moved by Brett Morgen's film Moonage Daydream, about my favorite musician, David Bowie. I've missed his music terribly since his passing; he never seemed to run out of good ideas, even late in life.

Bowie's passing may have left a hole, but the film provided closure appropriately connected to my thoughts about Autumn.

 Fall can seem sad to some folks I know, yet to others "the veil is thin" between us and eternity. Our ancestors seem near. It was a good time to see that film. Bowie left this coda in the film, expressed as a prose-poem, and it fits well with any meditation about Fall:

You're aware of a deeper existence
Maybe a temporary reassurance that indeed there is no beginning, no end
And all at once, the outward appearance of meaning is transcended
And you find yourself struggling to comprehend a deep  and formidable mystery
I'm dying
You are dying
Second by second
All is transient
Does it matter?
Do I bother?
Yes, I do
Life is fantastic, it never ends, it only changes
Flesh to stone to flesh
And 'round and 'round
Bеst keep walking. 

Yes, keep walking. I'm walking outside now to cut up some limbs that fell in the last storm, before what is left of Hurricane Ian arrives.

All Things Must...

Why a skylight? What on earth does that have to do with rural life and DIY projects?

Last month, I learned that Om On, a little Yoga studio near my job, will close in December. It's a sweet space, and Kelly the owner has made us all feel welcome for the better part of a decade. My time on the mat there helps ease the aches and pains of both my physical work on the farm and the sedentary life in the office. I don't know the reasons for the closure, but the studio lacks space to expand, rents high, and competition fierce. I do know that I'll miss the skylights.

The skylight shows the changing late afternoon sky when one is doing reclined poses. At times the view is such a deep, clear blue beyond the skylight that it makes my heart break. There's something spiritual there, a letting go of the sort I suppose we all have to face (or ignore, at our peril).  Given those feelings, I selected a spot so dear to me for a skylight view that I get to the studio early to set up and stake my claim. My usual teacher on Friday, Twyla, knows about my crazy ways and I've explained to her that I just don't like change all that much, at least when it comes to physical space. I hate it when old buildings I've known vanish; every change of that sort seems a slow erasure of one's very life.

When my old pal Steve Gott passed in October of 2013, I consoled myself by playing George Harrison's opus, All Things Must Pass, almost constantly. I highly recommend it as perhaps the strongest project album of the early 1970s. That's a lot coming from a guy who was always more a Stones than Beatles fan.  Harrison's deep Hindu faith led him past the end of the Fab Four into considering the very erasure I just mentioned. I'm no Hindu, but I see a real appeal in the cycles of death, rebirth, and evolution of the soul there. As with the monotheistic notion of an afterlife, there's a sense of renewal present.

We can, of course, hoodwink the Reaper, a bit. I've had a health scare that put me on a low-carb diet; 40 pounds lighter, all aspects of my life seem renewed. It's an extension rather than a reprieve, like the sturdy low tunnel I built to let us finish our butter beans, plus protect tender lettuce seedlings and young broccoli that I hope will take us into and perhaps through the winter. Of course, it only prolongs things until we can plant our Spring crop.  Elsewhere our greens will just have to overwinter as best they can, a type of outdoor veggie crisper for our table.

It's no accident that George Harrison was an ardent, and talented, gardener. I don't know about his Yoga practice, but I suspect he'd appreciate how I feel about that skylight. He'd also remind me to let it go, to cherish the memory without clinging too much. Attachment is something we learn to respect, guardedly, in Yoga, non-attachment a virtue we cultivate.

It cannot always be summer, or even a lovely Fall when the rain finally came after drought. I managed to snag all the last Thai Dragon Peppers, cutting off the plants at the ground, piling them onto a blanket, and hauling them into an unheated building just before the first frost. Then I could harvest them at leisure. The dry weather earlier made them fiery, just what our customer wants.

Paying attention to the weather helped me avoid a disaster. I could have lost 20 pounds of fruit.  But nothing would stop the cold that night. As Winter comes, that's a good lesson. All things must pass.

Rain at Last!

One of the saddest facts about human-caused climate change is how easy it is, for urbanites and suburbanites, to ignore its effects on other living things. In Richmond, most folks seem to only notice our ever-more-common dry spells in early Fall when their monoculture lawns die off, or the city limits watering.

In the country, however, those not on deep wells began to fret this year about the time of our State Fair. That's usually when we get rains to break the dry, hot weather.

Not this year. Even our 2000 gallons of stored water did not seen likely to outlast this drought. As of last week, about half of that had been used for garden and perennials, plus some recently planted trees we were struggling to keep alive.

With a high-pressure system the size of a small nation parked over the East Coast, even tropical systems steered around it. That's a salutary side effect, with one aspect of climate change battling another. We living things, both animal and vegetable, got got caught in the middle of this clash of titans. And yet hardly a drop of rain fell in my part of Virginia for eight long weeks.

Now, thankfully, we have a real soaker, just in time to save the small trees that have been so stressed on our property. We've lost a few, but others we kept going with watering bags of various sorts.

I hope we see more rain like this, on and off and not in deluges, in 2020. This recent day of rain may have broken a pattern but it did not do more than dent the drought. I checked a six-acre field that I needs to till this weekend. Below an inch down, the soil seems as dry as the deserts of Mars. Yet there's more rain in the forecast for Sunday. Hope, unlike rain, does seem to come upon us through an act of will.

We need other changes, too, if we are to address climate change's pernicious and, ultimately, civilization-ending dark promise. Let's get busy on that and vote for sense. Virginia has an election in a month, an I plan to vote against the party of environmental destruction. I hope  you do, too.

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.

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.

Fall and All That

Around this time of year little weekly and freebie papers (as in newspapers, remember them?) that usually focus on phone-sex ads and supermarket coupons give their beleaguered staffs a little freedom. These writers then run sentimental pieces about the season.

Let me essay that with my quivering quill, "The russet leaves of the towering oaks, 'neath which the scampering squirrels nimbly put away their toothsome treasures against the bitter blasts to come. Oh, as I once told Linda, my lost love, summer hath all too short a lease..."

Alliteration. Adjective strings. Really bad infusions of pseudo-Elizabethan English.

Out, damned feel-wistful columns and a pox upon thee! I have other sentiments to express about  Autumn. Namely, that it sucks to lose two old colleagues in two days. And all your squash.

First, the humans lost. Both were here at the university when I arrived in 1991; one had been here when my late brother enrolled in '66, only to be booted two years later right into the US Army and, but for the deescalating grace of Richard Nixon, all the way to Danang. Nearly fifty years have flown since then.

Our campus flag flies at half-staff one day for each of my old academic commiserators. A day later, the little slip of paper with information on their lives and accomplishments, put in an acetate holder on the flagpole, goes right to the recycling bin.  Game over.

With all that in mind, 'neath the towering oaks around Westhampton Lake, I took a pleasant stroll today to think about what is really important not on a college campus, but beyond its boundaries. For me, it was I learned in a difficult summer about working the land.

The clouds did indeed look like October, and the lake has grown more woodsy since I began walking around it, 'neath various moons, with girlfriends back in the 1970s.  Days like this, with a good northwestern breeze, invite reflection. The light is slanted so the blue deepens in the sky.

To a Deist like me, it becomes consolation enough. There was a time thirty years ago, however when I stopped believing in a Providential God and nearly went full-on Paul Bowles into existentialist atheism. You know, The Sheltering Sky. That sky is there, Bowles claims, only to keep us from recognizing the horror beyond it. That type of nihilism is terribly easy.

Today I am less Bowlesian, but I still repeat, in my first-year seminar on The Space Race, the bald fact that we each are specks, in a crowd of other specks, who live on a speck circling a hotter speck, itself on the outskirts of a speck in a cloud of hundreds of billions of specks. Each sentient speck must think that at some point it is the center of creation. Then it is gone, as surely as my wiping out the compost bin under the sink and its clusters of fruit-fly eggs. Poof.

In 30-plus years, my particular speck will be as gone as my departed colleagues. What will I leave as a legacy? Some furrows where I grew hot peppers fairly well for a local restaurant? A restored tractor that someone will buy at an estate sale?

Or maybe these blog posts, gathering pixeldust in Google's bowels, until some purge or merger leads Blogger, Blogspot, and associated content to vanish?

Say, maybe I'll put them together, with transitions and new content, into a popular book that I'll sign at events like the recent Heritage Harvest Festival! Then tour the entire country, giving talks about buying the right tractor or the right farm pickup! That's it, Immortalitatem Ex Libris!


Or the book will be remaindered for $5 on a side table at Barnes & Noble and I'll report my travel expenses to the IRS and go back to growing peppers.

Thus, the turn to the squash. That, friends, I can not only control under the sheltering sky but even enjoy.

We planted 100 row-feet of Kabocha Squash this  year for a customer who wants a few bushels a year for a restaurant special. I was wary of squash bugs, so half my plants began under row cover. These were new beds never used for fruiting plants before. I planted late in the summer to try to avoid the bugs' most prolific weeks. They multiply not arithmetically, but exponentially.

And so they did. Some wilting in the uncovered rows warned me of catastrophe at hand. I opened the covered rows and it rivaled a zombie's feast out of a Roger Corman film: the dead vines, with thousands of squash bugs and nymphs. No application of diatomaceous earth could save the remaining plants. One day I came out to find all the rest withered. So what did I learn? Stop using organic practices and hit the aisle-o-death at Home Depot?

No. A friend brought me a perfect Kabocha she'd grown. I stuffed it with a Middle-Eastern tomato sauce, lamb, and rice, and baked it. And I am drying and saving all the seeds. She used one part Dr. Bronner's Eucalyptus Soap to 9 parts water, spraying weekly.

Bowles, in a haunting and disturbing (like all his work) piece called "Next to Nothing," says "no one can know where he is, until he knows where he has been."

So the desire just to keep going on, mindful of where he has been, can be enough. Try again with different variables: late planting, Dr. Bronner's, crop rotation. Read the paper on the flagpole and remember Irby's hilarious imitations of James Dean, "the worst actor ever to be famous," or Harry, who wrote dozens of well regarded books but never learned to drive until he was in his 40s. His belches in the Dining Hall were Rabelaisian.

These are the lessons of Fall, on campus or on the farm. Remember. Despair is easy in a bitter season, when anger and stupidity contend to see which force is mightier.

Endurance is a harder lesson still. Learn it.

Snowstorm in The Country

I had the bad luck to be on a suburban commercial six-lane the night before our big storm of the winter hit. The traffic around the grocery stores was hellish. Even the day before, when I did a little shopping, I found nearly no milk or bread at two stores I regularly visit.

Being well-stocked on both, I just shrugged. I did, however, snag fatayer, lavash pita, and some kibbie at my Mediterranean grocer. One can never be too prepared for a Southern blizzard, a rare-enough event to make folks get a little crazy.  I got in my usual quips in person and online about my favored season to folks who'd just as soon have our state's climate resemble Florida's.

Not me. For a day or two, I can revel in weather that is not all about making us feel comfortable, weather that shows us the universe is not about us and cares little for us, yet is pure and lovely in that indifference. The snow began after 9am, about the time I put up my wife's car in the garage and helped her get a little shelter ready for our flock of pullets, just beside the little coop the four of them use. The older hens, who are just beginning to mingle with the new girls, have a fancy shelter we built  last year, but they are not the sort to be sharing.

As I write this I think we have about 8 to 9 inches on the ground, not bad for 13 hours of snowfall with many more hours of snow on the way. Weather sites online were full of photos like this one I snagged from weather.com, of stores practically looted by folks who would only be in their houses, at best, for a day or two. A month ago, shelf-pegs at our locally owned hardware store were groaning with unsold snow shovels. The temperature then was in the 70s. Now I'm betting those cheap shovels have sold out.

The differences in city and country behavior have taught me a lot, every time it snows. We do not loot the stores here, and drivers generally know how and when to employ four-wheel drive. I try to fit in, but I had lessons long before I moved out to the sticks. Most of my life I was a city boy, but my dad, who was never handy in other ways, always had a knack for being prepared. He was the only man on our block who found decent drinking water during Hurricane Camille in 1969, when Richmond had no potable water for weeks and the Army brought in tanker trucks of foul-tasting stuff. Dad said he never wanted a shovel that would break, so he bought two excellent shovels I still own, 35 years later. I repainted them this summer and rubbed Danish oil into the handles.

My own preparations began a few days ago, getting our last big unsplit logs into the barn to dry out a bit, moving split and seasoned wood up the porch, and putting finishing touches on a greenhouse where I'll start plants for our LLC in just a few weeks.  I ran a last load of wood up to the porch in the first snow, checked our root shelter for mice--we've bagged three since my last post--and tidied up the house while watching the wonder outside.

Partly I do these chores to focus me. I think that is why the ritual of looting the supermarket happens, too. It might be too much, emotionally, to think about what Nature tells us about our little personal lives during a blizzard or hurricane.

It can be depressing to think that we fade as fast as fallen snow after the temperature rises. No, I am not at peace with that. Things might end in ice, Robert Frost said in his poem, yet for me ice does not suffice. It does, however, make me appreciate Spring.

Everything ends in ice, according to The Second Law of Thermodynamics. It's daunting to consider that hypothetical ninth plant that astronomers are now hunting, way out beyond the Sun's Kuiper Belt. Its orbit is so distant that Planet Nine could take between 10 and 20 thousands years to circle the sun.  Any snow that far out is not just water and it is eternal.

After that sort of pondering, plowing the driveway and drinking some hot chocolate are more than welcome. Those are things I can influence.

Winter Chores

We did not have too much of a winter until last week, thanks to El Niño. I don't much care for warm Decembers, but some Fall chores did get done. My old friend Dominic and I began working to paint a barn roof and I was able to service some equipment that gets harder to do when the mercury drops below freezing.

It has been pleasantly refreshing to hear people note, usually at the cashier's station in rural stores, that this warm weather "just ain't right." In town, however, one does not hear as much of that. It's tempting to give someone a tongue-lashing, so instead I just say "enjoy the season for what it is."

Out in the sticks, my answer is to use the cold weather we finally got for that which is best done in the cold. On the farm that means clearing land for future planting or to prevent saplings from shading our garden out of existence. Winter means getting into places that will certainly be "snakey" in April and May. Having nearly stepped on a a basking Copperhead in 2012, I now appreciate better where serpents like to have a home, and I respect that as long as they respect my space.  For now, my resident and nonpoisonous black snakes are under ground or in a cozy barn-corner, waiting for mouse-hunting season to resume.  The barn, meanwhile, gets filled with additional firewood just in case March surprises us.

In our soggy low places, the ground often freezes nicely.  I can then tromp around and post no-hunting signs and clear an old road to get through the woods to the beeyard. Two junked cars block it for now, but they'll be gone soon. Lots of other junk gets pulled out of the woods to be discarded or reused (mostly, junked). We cut a road to an old run-in full of overly seasoned but usable firewood. It's a pile I dare not disturb after April Fool's Day.

The nicest accidental discovery of the season came via Nancy's looking online about blackberries. She discovered that they fruit best on second-year canes, and that fact provides a great method to keep two huge "patches" in production, yielding jam, pies, and cobbler for us and provender for the wildlife.  I will run a rotary mower (aka "Bush Hog," a brand name) over 1/3 of each patch annually.  That will cut in lanes for harvesting without stepping on snakes or getting tangled in thorny canes. One only picks blackberries at the edge of a patch, though the best ones always seem just out of reach! There's a lesson of something.

All these things and more are possible in the coldest months, as long as the snow does not fall too deeply. This week, as Dom and I put window panels in our new greenhouse, a flurry blessed us for a few moments with the wonder of the season. It hissed down and reminded us, as it piled up quickly, that the universe is both indifferent to us and, with the right attitude, lovely in its indifference.

And later there will be blackberries.

Garden Journal: Eating Seasonally

What an interesting cool season it has been. I did a salvage harvest of our last hot peepers before setting the chickens loose in the beds. Our one customer has bought 80 pounds so far. Meanwhile I fenced our greens and covered our tender ones though the short freezes we have experienced.  We are doing our best to eat seasonally from our garden and chicken coop.

December looks warmer than average, which gives me the chance to enjoy more greens. I'm thankful to Dominic Carpin of delli Carpini Farm for pointing out to me that one should harvest late in the day and on a sunny day if possible, which is now my practice, to avoid picking greens with too many nitrates in them.

So in the spirit of the holidays, here's a recipe for winter greens over pasta. I adapted it from a Martha Stewart recipe for creamed chard and I've added more of a Mediterranean twist. I suggest a top-quality egg pasta from Italy. You will not be disappointed.

Braised Autumn Greens in Cream Sauce

• 1/3 cup sweet onion, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped fine
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 1/2 pounds (big bunch) of coarsely chopped Broccoli Rabe, Swiss Chard, or Broccoli leaves. Remove large stems from the chard before chopping. Chop any Broccoli stems finely.
• 8 oz. whole milk
• 1 tbsp flour
• 1/4 tsp grated nutmeg
• 1 tsp salt & 1/2 tsp black pepper

Sautee the onion and garlic in the oil and garlic and, when translucent, add the greens and stir until their volume is greatly reduced. To me that means "wilting but not dark." They should retain their color and most of their texture.

Remove greens and onion/garlic to a plate and add milk to skillet, stirring in flour, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Stir over low-to-medium heat until mixture begins to thicken a bit, then add back the greens mixture. Heat thoroughly, and serve over pasta. Top with grated Romano or Parmesan if you wish and a dash of red pepper.

This makes a great main or a side dish. Happy Holidays!

First Light Lessons

Montpellier sunrise, photo courtesy of Dominic Carpin, the pater familias at Delli Carpini Farms

"Living six months inside a dog's mouth," is how Novelist and public intellectual James Howard Kunstler describes life in the South during the summer. I have a newly adopted 90 lb dog at my side, an Anatolian / Great Pyrennes mix. She is breathing on me, and there's no way in hell I want to live in that mouth.

Thank God for air conditioning. Yet I can't carry the AC outside on days like tomorrow, when I have to pour 600 pounds of concrete into trenches to make footings / blocks by the dog pen, so the enormous dog does not dig her way out. That means an early start. I will be up at 5am, and my Millennial helper, who has the surprising ability to start early--such a credit to his generation!--will join me at 7.

His peers in my classes cannot bestir themselves before 10 am. Even then they are bleary eyed and feckless. Now what on earth would I do with one of these pampered children on a farm? They'd quit inside of 10 minutes on a day like today, where I was loading 12 bags of quickset concrete into the bed of the pickup while the thermometer read 97and the humidity was at least 80%. But the hard work was already done.

At 6 am, I hung up a trolley-cable run for the dog, so she can stay outside with us tomorrow while we work on her pen. I also took care of some other chores of watering and staging gear for tomorrow, and I was done by 10. It was hot work, but not unbearable. I took a little time to squash some squash bugs and pick cukes for a batch of icebox pickles that I put up after lunch.

I wonder how many of my college kid have even seen a sunrise, unless it was after an all-nighter? It can be a magical event. Last summer, approaching Iceland, I saw the red line of sunrise as a Boston night receded before the Midnight Sun. The sunrise took many minutes, from that bloody line on the curve of the earth to a fully flowering garden of purples and reds. I was stunned enough to not want to nap. I asked the beautiful Icelandic woman serving coffee to bring me a refill. I wanted to see night become day. A nap could wait.

It can be as magical, if not as exotic, to see first light from the seat of a tractor or from the back of the garden. The chickens are already awake. They need no prompting to go on a bug-hunt before the scorching heat of midday drives them into the hard shade under the coop. That is the time to mow hay by hand, to work the chores in the garden, to put soap and oil sprays on young plants before the sun hits them.

The dew is a constant feature of a Virginia early morning. With transpiration rates of about 1 inch weekly in Central VA, and the rainfall ever less certain in our time of rapid climate change, the dew can mean life or death to small plants. I work with wet boots often, dragging hoses to water or, more recently, trucking 35 gallons in the bed of the ATV up to tree-bags around our newly planted fruit trees.

By 10am, unless we are really working it, I'm inside for a shower and another cup of coffee. Some days the heat proves so intense that by 1pm I take a nap. That's an academic's luxury in summer, when we can stay away from the office more,  but then I'd be doing none of this if I were in some cubicle in the land of corporate slavery.

I cannot imagine those poor folks working my garden, either. They'd simply perish. Their experience of heat is that of moving from the car across the parking lot to an air-conditioned office, just in time for the petty humiliations of the work day to commence.

What would have happened if we had no air conditioning in the South? Jim Kunstler has predicted that we'd again become a rural and agricultural backwater. Jim has visited my class and worked with my students; he has a strange fascination with the craziness of The South, and though he and I disagree on some issues about the future, in this regard I find his arguments compelling.

I do know one thing: without air conditioning we would have taken strident action to mitigate climate change. On days like today, the sauna is simply not bearable.

It's the shape of things to come, but for the years I have left, I will have the solace of the cool of day at first light.

Here's the Icebox-Pickle Recipe I pinched from a very old Pillsbury cookbook. It has never failed me:

• 7 medium pickling cucumbers, thinly sliced. I used gherkins and Asian cukes today.
• 1 tablespoon pickling salt (DO NOT use table salt, Cheap-Ass. Buy the right salt)
• 2 medium (2 cups) onion, chopped
• 1 green pepper, chopped (I omit this)
• 2 cups sugar (I go light on this)
• 1 tablespoon celery seed
• 1 tablespoon mustard seed
• 1 cup vinegar

In a large bowl, mix the cukes and salt well. Let it stand for 30 minutes, then drain well. Meanwhile, combine the other ingredients in a bowl. After draining the cukes, pour the mixture in the bowl over the pickles. Pack into pint jars and be sure the veggies are covered with syrup. I add a bit of vinegar if it is low. This will keep 3 months in the refrigerator.

Yield is about 3 quarts. Enjoy!

Time Enough? Time for February

I have heard people despair out loud about the "wasted month" of February. I guess they want time to run faster so they can get on with whatever business awaits in March. I am not so sure. First, the second month of the year is perfect for trimming woody plants back, perfect for outdoor projects too dangerous when the snakes begin to crawl in the thickets.

Second, the light creeps back into the day, to encourage us all. But I like the dark half of the year enough to use a good bit of February for reading by the wood stove. One of my pursuits involves writing down what writers a lot smarter than I am say about time.

Here are a few favorites from my book of quotations. Naguib Mahfouz called the course of the years "careening, unstoppable Time" and that is my favorite metaphor. These other meditations about time are also quite fine. I end with Annie Dillard's, perhaps my second favorite.

Find some time, take some time, borrow some time, steal some time, save some time to read this month. Just do not waste time.

"And what are two thousand years? What, indeed, if you look down from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot with outlast Shakespeare"

     Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once."

     Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

"Time slides past, slides past beyond recall, while, spellbound, we drift off among details"

    Virgil, The Georgics I: 284-85

"When the waves receded, the shores of Time would spread out there clean, empty, shining with infinite grains of memory and little else."

     Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

"Pass through this moment in time in harmony with nature, and end your journey content, as an olive falls when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew."

     Marcus Aurelius, Meditations IV, 48

"Time itself is nothing; the experiencing of it is everything."

"Time itself, that weightless thing, could only go in one direction, no matter how you defined it or tried to step on its tail--that much at least seemed certain. Nobody knew what time was, but even if you placed all the clocks in the world in a circle, time would still run straight on, and should there be a finite end to time it was not one that could be imagined by human beings with a sense of vertigo. But what then were memories? Time that had been left behind and had now caught up with you, or that you yourself, by moving against the tide of time--doing the impossible in fact--could retrieve."

     Cees Nooteboom, Nomad's Hotel

"He would explore the lateral byways now, the side doors, as it were, in the corridors of time. There months could be an eternity."

     J.G. Ballard, "The Voices of Time"

"Hold to the now, the here, through which the future plunges to the past."

     James Joyce, Ulysses

"We sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it's time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it's time to break our necks for home."

     Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

The Hungry Stove

From now until April, the wood-stove will gobble up cord after cord of seasoned firewood. A cord measures 8' x 4' x 4' and we may well use FOUR of them this winter, if the cold endures as it did in 2013-14.  If I load it right, the stove will burn nearly all night and keeps the entire house warm. Last night was a cold one for November, and I came downstairs at about 3am and added logs. I was up anyway. When I woke again at 6, the fire was still burning a bit. Add more wood and the house responded.

All that burning brings to mind a few things, and that's not bad when one spends so much evening time by the hungry stove, sipping a good whisky and writing.  I think there is a time-suck called television, but ignoring it for the stove's show is one reason I get so many things done, including learning about what matters to me.

First, there is the notion of burning wood itself. I plan to do so until I am physically unable, but already I've outlasted a few contemporaries who find wood too much trouble. They want to come home flip a switch, and warm up by the simulacrum of a wood fire. That's their choice to make, but to me the entire point of a wood stove is to make you work for heat. The effort to split wood is great, even with a hydraulic-ram splitter such as the one I use for twisted or large logs. Increasingly I hand-split just to get some exercise, a trip to the gym being my idea of hell. Thus the old adage that wood warms you three times: splitting, toting, and burning. 

Gas logs do not add a thing to the garden, and between Dominic's market-garden and mine, we went through 100 gallons of wood ash to raise the PH of our acidic top soil. I will barely replenish that in a season of burning, but it is good to know that ash goes back into the cycle of planting and harvesting out here, not into the landfill. My gas-log acquaintances tend to go to gyms and gripe about the ash-removal part, as they do about raking (or for them, blowing) leaves. I take away leaves and actually bring them here to compost, to add leaf-mold to our garden.

The earth is as hungry like the stove, after all, as are our bellies. Now, after nearly two years of rural life, nearly every meal we fix includes a home-grown ingredient. Some meals are nearly all from the garden, a life-long goal of mine. All that ash and compost is doing the job well.

The biggest lesson of having a stove is spiritual. The second half of life should be a time of letting go, gently. Dylan Thomas was wrong: we should go gentle. So tending stove becomes a ritual of personal and even metaphysical import: I'm reminded of the Busk, a Native-American tradition that Thoreau discusses in Walden, after he encountered it in the travel narratives of William Bartram (a writer I wish we remembers more).  We refer to "busking" today as a way to sell things, but the old word was quite the opposite: it was an act of creative and cleansing destruction.  Tribes would burn old and broken possessions, worn-out furniture, and other items to make way for the new.

My stove is doing exactly that, by trading old wood and kindling (the latter from a hundred carpentry projects) for a Spring garden. The fire-pit outside burns other less seasoned and softer woods, but also outdated paperwork and such. It's a wonderful tradition we might revive in our consumerist present.

And thus, be a bit thankful about letting things go. Happy Thanksgiving and stay warm!

Mowing the Upper Field: Some Autumnal Bliss

There's a small field on the family's Buckingham County property that once was part of an organic farm. The last owner, a cousin to my wife's, cultivated several areas and I've kept them open with an eye toward my project of growing Christmas trees without herbicides or pesticides.

To keep these outer fields viable, I have to mow them with a rotary cutter; folks call them Bush Hogs, although that's a brand name, one made as generic as "Kleenex" and "Xerox." I mow the field twice annually, in Spring after the fawns have grown up enough to move around and in Fall after the milkweed sets its seeds. I want to encourage wildlife, both four-legged and threatened butterflies, so twice a year is enough until we put in our Christmas tree saplings. There's a lone Persimmon tree there, too, so I'm sure the wild turkeys haunt the place.

Mowing a field in summer can be really hard work in the hot sun, even when sitting on the seat of a tractor. In Fall it is very different. The air is crisp and the sky a perfect deep blue overhead. The trees start to turn, first with the Tulip Poplars.  The contrast is shocking, as is the quiet. The four-cylinder engine for our old Ford 8N is not deafening, though I wear ear plugs at all times. When I get off the tractor to move a log, as I often do in this field where sapling pines topple over from the edges, the silence grows profound and watchful.

Some of my friends in the Unitarian-Universalist Church follow an earth-centered spiritual path, and they believe in Fall the veil between our world and that of our departed, beloved ancestors grows thin. We can hear them if we are very quiet. At Halloween, the old Celtic festival of Samhain marking the final harvest, the departed come down to Earth again and walk about. The Jack o' Lanterns could be seen as benevolent guides to lead old friends to our doorsteps or as warning beacons to keep less friendly spirits away.

As I mowed today I mused. The spirit of the last owner, Ray, seemed to be watching from the trees, as did my in-laws who bought that 8N so my wife and I could learn to use a tractor that was small and easy to manage.  That was a good plan. Some of our big diesels are real beasts.

Today, as the little Ford putted along, even a few friends who died recently seemed close at hand. That made the job less solitary, though solitude is my goal when I go to the upper field. Not being a social person, I like that feeling of separation from a world hurrying after phantoms, and not the ghosts of old friends and family. Just dots on a screen, dots that distract us from the seasons turning and the ephemeral, artist's light of a late fall afternoon.

Go out and enjoy some of that weather, if you have Fall where you live. I'd not live anywhere that did not have an Autumn.

Why February Matters

On Facebook recently, some urban friends noted that this is a wasted month. Nonsense.

I used to think that too, but since moving to the country, I have come to really enjoy this shortest of months. It's one of the best months in Virginia for getting serious work done outdoors.  In New Hampshire or North Dakota, it would be a different matter.

Of course, the weather has to cooperate. Today was one such day. The academic life has many advantages, but my favorite is the flexibility of my hours. Today showed nothing on my work calendar and foul weather ahead for Saturday. So, thought I, flip your Saturday for your Friday, and get work done outside while the weather is fair. Tomorrow will suffice for school work. In the countryside of the 21st Century, it's easy enough to have a VPN connection and high-enough speed Internet. My academic work will get done before Monday.

But today, with waxing daylight and temperatures in the mid-40s, it's time to hit the fencerows.

That's February for me. It's my time to prune fruit trees, clear areas around our little apple orchard, plant garlic in raised beds, get rid of an overgrown chain-link fence, limb up cedars broken by storms, run the wood-chipper, plant roses and other woody plants, take a little time off to do some target practice with the varmit-rifle.  It is a snake-free month to do the real Spring-cleaning chores. The old truck body, shown above, is one of several eyesores on our property I'm removing. It has a nice home now, as storage space at a landscaping company locally.

February is not a wasted month.  The cold air is different from January. There's a tiny hint of Spring.

No month is a wasted month, even in town. Go outside and see the daylight growing every day, preferably while taking a walk with the phone turned off.