The Garden Comes In

And it comes in all at once, too.

There's great satisfaction in seeing so much abundance, in a year when the rain has fallen in buckets. Bunny in Buckingham lost his garden, and he blames it on near-daily rains there. We had torrents, but then a dry-enough spell to get the tomatoes to begin ripening.

Tonight Nan is freezing squash and beans, and I'll soon be making gallons of Middle-Eastern tomato sauce by the gallon. It cans easily.  We probably have enough cukes to pickle but last year I put up a lot. So we'll eat cucumber soup and make gazpacho.

The work of building "Fort Tomato" and the groundhog invasion (one most certainly shot dead, another probable, two remaining) seems worth while. The invaders got about 12 ears of corn but more is on the way and the fence and traps seem to be working.

The year has been odd, as so many summers and winters have been since climate change really began to influence Virginia's two seasons of extremes. I'm happy for the cooler and wetter summer, but there will be hell to pay later.

And then there are the tart blackberries, growing wild everywhere, to contrast with a bowl of ice cream. It does not get much better in a Virginia Summer, our first in the country.

Conversation with a Groundhog

Today a groundhog pulled up in a pint-sized BWM sedan. He wore a spiffy suit and carried a little briefcase. Soon I was looking at prison-time in a whistle-pig burrow.

Groundhog: Mishtur Essit? Is that you, sir?

Blogger: Among other things. What can I do for you?

Groundhog: Do? I hopes you don't DO to me what you done did to Lucius T. Groundhog, offspring of Phyllis T. Groundhog. Namely, shot and killed! Twice!

Blogger: You have evidence of this crime against your species? Blogger then mutters under his breath: second shot is always to be certain.

Groundhog, presenting papers: Evidence, you say! Oh Yesh I does! I is a attorney you knows! I gots testy-moany (Phyllis bein' both in a testy mood and moanin' about her dear dead boy) that you done trapped and killed little ol' Lucius, on account of him nosing around a garden you claims as your own!

Blogger: I admit to live-trapping, then shooting and killing a varmint, yes. He did not give a name when confronted.

Groundhog: He was just a pee-wee, and didn't know nuffin' about gardens, 'specially ones that ain't been fully fenced.

Blogger: That's his problem. Human law lets me remove pests, lethally.

Grounghog: That am SO cruel! An' we ain't humans! You could o' sent him to Miami Beach instead!

Blogger, looking for trap and rifle: I asked the kind-hearted administrative assistant at work if SHE wanted him, when she quailed over my planned use of lethal force. No dice.

Groundhog: You ever seen Caddyshack? We demands restitushun! Demands it!

Blogger: That was a gopher, and this ain't no golf course. See you in court, fuzzy-wuzz.

It Takes a "Bunny"

We are overwhelmed, at times, with nearly 100 acres to manage in one county and 11 at our residence. "Poor you," I hear some readers saying, but while such rural land is a blessing, if one plans to use the land for anything but scenery, a great deal of back-straining work must be done regularly and in all weathers. You can see what our land in Buckingham County looked like, from the photo above, in 2001. Today, thanks to a lot of family labor, the house looks very different indeed.

Ironically, I am trying to type with two very sore arms, the results of weeding, setting live-traps for ground hogs, and helping a contractor renovate an out-building into a usable and snake-free garden house and place to extract honey from our bee-hives.

That would never get done without having paid help one can trust. Try dealing with several 80' pine trees that topple in a snowstorm, all by yourself.

No one can do it all, and a first lesson of country life I've learned involves finding and sustaining community.

I read a great deal about sustainability and homesteading, and some on the fringe of these movements veer into what today the popular media call "Preppers," though I still prefer the term "Survivalist." There is nothing wrong with being prepared for natural or man-made troubles, but one curious fact emerges: many of these folks strive for self-sufficiency that seems improbable. If a chain-saw were to break, the game would be over.

Recently in Buckingham County we confronted about five-acres of waist-high grass that needed cutting. Had we time and equipment, we could have rolled hay.

Even with two passes of a rotary cutter, the grass near the house remained daunting. We'd contracted with our neighbor, Bunny, to cut the grass after that weekend, since renovating a city home to sell and maintaining our new homestead (and editing a book at night for publication!) take every second of my free time.

Bunny is the sort of African-American guy who is the anchor of a local community. Everyone within 20 miles of his home knows how capable Bunny is. His name is ironic, of course: he has reportedly rolled a refrigerator onto a blanket, flapped the blanket over the top, grabbed the four corners, and carried the refrigerator up a flight of stairs. He has helped me build a spillway, move huge logs and boulders, and generally keep our sanity as we do so much hard work.

As my wife despaired of the cut-but-still-formidable grass where the tractor would not reach, she heard another motor. Up roared Bunny on a riding mower with a weed-whacker in a cradle alongside it.  No knight of Camelot looked more heroic.

As I learn more about country life, I find that friendships like Bunny's are to be cultivated on their terms. He gives us cabbages and we give him honey from our hives. We pay him and let him hunt on our land, and he phones whenever trees fall or something else happens nearby.

In the City we had great neighbors and always looked out for each other. The terms of community are different in the country, but the rules don't change: it's a quid-pro-pro system and it works well. No one lives alone, isolated, and can get things done well.  It takes not only community and trust, but some anchors like Bunny, who can do nigh anything.

Praise for Owner's Manuals

After being exasperated about the rotary cutter's manual, especially its lack of clarity for a potentially expensive repair unless maintenance is done, I found a gem.

An old, but never used, Marlin 783 rifle with a nice Bushnell scope came my way. It's a varmit gun par excellence, in case Phyllis and her groundhog family manage to get past the Mountains of Mordor...I mean past the ramparts of what I am now calling "Fort Tomato."  Yes, cute as they are, I'll methodically yet with regret kill ever one I see if they begin destroying the garden.

That's another post I hope I'll never write, since for now, the groundhogs are cute and graze on clover.

Meanwhile, owner's manuals. Guns are even more dangerous than mowers, and though I'm familiar with long arms and pistols, I'm still thankful for this gem from the 1975 edition manual's section to load the weapons with "the bullet end toward the muzzle."

Shooters know what that means. Would a novice? Luckily, a handy photo shows a close up of loading the rifle.  Only a dunce--and there are dunces in abundance--would simply ignore the brief bit of advice and put, say, a bullet in backward. Yet I suppose it has happened, so it has spawned both The Darwin Awards and the titanic owner's manuals of our decade.

Such manuals bother me. By the time a reader wades through 20 pages or so of safety instructions, only then can a new piece of equipment be operated. My concern is that most won't read the manuals at all, facing such a daunting task.

I do read them, but then I wonder if I'm at all typical.

In addition to reading the manuals, I do Internet-based research, plus I chat with old-timers, before I begin with a new piece of gear. Thus I'm working on a chain-guard, common on the fronts and rear decks of newer rotary mowers, to add some protection for me when I pull an antique rotary cutter we have. It cuts grass like a master barber clips hair, but it not safe until modified with a chain guard.


There is no need to have one's name added to the Darwin Awards: read your manuals.

Read The Owner's Manual, Or Maybe Not?

 

Having convinced myself that I damaged the gear box on my rotary mower (machines commonly called by one brand's name, "Bush Hog") I opened the owner's manual.  Yes, I read them, partly to see the illustrations for what can go wrong on the farm.

I've a Frontier 2060 that cost us over $2000 new, and it's the sort of implement that one would expect to give many years of service. I've used these types of mowers for many years, without incident and without doing more than adding gear oil to the gear box or lubing a few grease fittings.

Little did I know, and little did the dealer tell me, that my new mower arrived with a slip clutch. It's a device that has gradually replaced an older technology, a protective bolt designed to shear when the mower hits a stump, big rock, or other obstacle. Lawn mowers have a tiny version of one, and even as a twelve-year-old clueless boy, I helped as a neighbor replace a little one-dollar pin that I broke on a sapling's stump. It's a simple procedure and a logical one. The operator using that sort of mower must sometimes hammer out the old bolt with a punch, but then the mower can be restarted and used.

Slip clutches, conversely, require maintaining, something not explained in my manual but only found online. The farmers at online forums seem to love the things, which can save a tractor or gear-box damage, if the clutch is adjusted and allowed to "slip" a few times a year. Otherwise, it seizes up.

Mine has, and I'm looking at a serious repair. But the antiques again beckon: I've an older rotary mower, with the bolt and not clutch in place. It is as safe to the operator as the new technology, so it will go back into service while the new-fangled one is in the shop.

The new one sure is pretty, but pretty is as pretty does. I may get so angry that I'll sell the new mower!  While old tractors can be dangerous, many old implements are not. Yet dealers do want to sell us new stuff, don't they?

I've got fields to mow, so our little family of groundhogs (Phil ended up being Phyllis, with three offspring) don't grow too brazen about coming near the new garden. Open ground being a farmer's first line of defense, there's cutting to be done.

Garden Journal: Late Planting

I used to keep a "Garden Book" of my observations on paper, and I still may record facts there, but a blog provides an excellent record-keeping device in the form of tagging and fodder in case this project morphs into a book. So here goes for what has been a brand-new garden.

We had to pony up for a cubic yard (about 1500 lbs) to good bedding soil from a local firm specializing in soil, mulch, and gravel. That began but did not end the Kitchen Garden just outside our back door. We fenced with short, green-enameled welded wire, fastened to 4' tall treated posts set in quick-setting cement. That took only a day and the seedlings are now in there.

Yesterday we also seeded the back half of the big garden, really a field, with yellow clover as a soil amendment and as forage for the honey bees. The big garden, 88' by 42', awaits fencing 10' tall and with subterranean barriers for Phil, our groundhog. I don't relish shooting Phil, but the second he gets into the garden, Phil will learn "Rule 303" as quickly as any character in the old film Breaker Morant.  Groundhogs can excavate 700 pounds of earth for a single burrow and dig down a foot, so the old chain-link sections, rolled and buried about the field's perimeter, should keep Phil at bay.

Given our recent move to this land, I did not get my basil and tomatoes germinated on our porch but instead purchased them from firms doing business at Maymont's annual Herbs Galore show. In particular, for my fellow Central Virginians, I recommend Amy's Garden for veggies and A Thyme to Plant for herbs of all sorts. I tend to raise from organic stock or seed, but in the case of tomatoes I went with old favorites among the hybrids suited for a clay soil. Heirlooms have brought tears to me and mortality to my plants, so I  chose Mortgage Lifter, Big Beef, and a Roma variety. In my experience, they have all shown good VFN resistance. The only amendment these plants will need is some calcium spray as they flower and begin to set fruit. This will prevent blossom-end rot.

Tricycle Gardens, a local urban-farming nonprofit that has revitalized empty lots all over the metro area of Richmond, sold me rhubarb.  I love the plant and recall it fondly from my grad-school years in Indiana. In a couple of years, our patch should produce enough for pies and rhubarb divisions for friends.

With a cool and generally wet Spring, I can get away with planting this late. Corn will be sprouted indoors and transplanted to deter crows from picking seeds, and cukes will grow up and over a trellis. Soon the hot weather will arrive. We are lucky for this rain and coolness, even if it delays our gardens.

Pressed into Service: Bring Out the Antiques!

I've read in one of the coffee-table books about old tractors that unlike other collectibles, antique tractors often get pulled out to do useful work. This happens most frequently at planting or harvest time on a large farm.

Our property is modest in size and ambition, but when a broken hydraulic connector on our new tractor put it into the shop, the grass and weeds would not wait for it to return. Thus a 1950 John Deere M, very much in need of TLC scheduled for this summer, got to bask in the glory of a lovely Virginian April. It's a unique machine, having been modified by a local contractor so my father-in-law could step into the saddle after his injury. An M is no easy mount, so I am very thankful for the "back stairs" it now sports.

A big adjustment from city life is the need to stay on top of a large property. To fail at that means a cascading set of failures when it comes time to harvest one's food. With little "critters" eager to get into our new garden if they could be sneak close enough, I wanted a big "kill zone" for hawks and other predators, including snakes, to cut down on our squirrels and mice and voles. I also wanted said snakes at the wood's edge, not near my back door in tall grass. We mostly have non-venomous black snakes, but last year, on open ground and in plain sight, I nearly put my foot down on a Copperhead. Grass too tall only would increase that possibility.

I hold true to my earlier post about tractors: all but the most experienced farmers need a modern machine with safety features to work rough terrain. Luckily for us, only billiard-table flat spots and one gentle slope needed mowing.  The old tractor, despite a seeping oil pan, crazy wiring setup, and leaky carb, did admirably. It's earned a long-overdue servicing and a new set of front tires.

Thus a new homesteader might consider a back-up plan and equipment if one's primary tractor is out of service. An M like the one I'm riding would only set an owner back a few thousand dollars and give many years of service. Now that my new tractor is back, I'll still run the M weekly a bit for light duty. Old farm machines, like older skilled people, seem grateful to be of service.