That Change in the Air

Every year, when the annual cicadas start up their late-July chorus, I begin to grumble that 1) school is about to start and 2) the good weather for working outdoors will be coming, just as I get busy with my day job.

But in 2013, it's been a strange season. I cannot recall a summer when it was actually fun to be painting a metal roof, as I'm now doing in this crisp weather. Soon enough, an old wreck of a building used for painting cars will be reborn as a barn-red paneled gem with a dark green roof.  Getting that building done is worth a summer of labor, but what a summer we have had.

I should have known that an odd summer was coming. It was heralded by the seventeen-year cicadas who emerged with the first really hot weather. While no swarm came closer than a quarter mile from our farm, so we heard only a strange echo of their trilling in the distance, but just five miles west it was deafening, their song that of a squadron of UFOs landing.

Those insects have burrowed down into the earth again, and I'll get to hear them, most likely, once more before I join them underground. Yet their appearance was just the start of the strangeness. For the past several summers, I can't recall letting the garden water itself from the sky or leaving the house windows open nights after, say, mid June.  And yet, in a cool wet summer, punctuated by spells of tropical humidity and heat, the rain barrels went un-tapped and the windows have been left up repeatedly.

What IS this late-September night-breeze, coming through my kitchen window in mid-August?

So we count what good fortune we have. I sold a science-fiction story, my second sale in the past three years. That was magic enough, but then our hilltop garden, a curse in a dry year, is abundant. The tomatoes in Fort Tomato are only now showing signs of excess rainfall: some are splitting, but we've probably gotten out a bushel and a half from a dozen plants.  That means more pots of sauce for winter. I usually can at least two gallons, and I'm almost there with more fruit on the vine.

If I do have to give 3 or so hours weekly to run the tractor to mow the grass in the fields around the garden and in front of the house, it's small payment for such an abundant harvest.  If next summer brings drought and disaster, I'll think back to that cool breeze and the vines  heavy with fruit from 2013.

"Fort Tomato" Nearly Complete, and Just in Time!

Readers may be familiar with an annual tomato-fight in Spain, La Tomatina, held in the Valencian town of Buñol. Spain has lots of tomatoes, as I found out when I lived there for a year, but I'd claim that no one has enough to simply wallow in them. I certainly don't. Each year, depending on our harvest and time, we put up in pint and quart jars between two and four gallons of my Mediterranean tomato sauce, a slow-cooked delight that serves as the the basis for everything from pasta dishes to Lubee (a baroque Lebanese concoction of string beans with lamb).

That means I need a lot of tomatoes. Some years, when the garden is lean or the weather poor, I hit the farmer's markets near closing time; last year I got a twenty-five-pound box of "crooks" for  $10. These are the mishappen tomatoes from the bottom of the vine. My dad was a produce wholesaler who taught me to savor these oddballs from the tomato patch. Their flavor is exqusite.

This  year, we have no shortage of plants or produce, but I'm watchful after two "corn raids" by racoons and earlier incursions by groundhogs. If they finish with the corn, the tomatoes may be next. And that means all-out war.

Note for the non-snarky: that's a plastic Johnny Seven rifle that belonged to my old buddy, the late and legendary Gary Braswell. Before his executor sells his antique toys, I had to pose, just once, with the toy gun every little boy craved in the mid-60s.

Firearms aside, the groundhogs cannot penetrate our new fence, over or under, but raccoons have a little advantage: thumbs.  I've trapped and shot one already, since it's illegal to relocate animals in Virginia. As I write this, I've two traps outside ready for the bandit who gobbled down half our corn last night. I picked the rest, as I wait for the next rows to come in.

Tomorrow "Fort Tomato" will have a finished garden gate. Next year, it will have electric and some dogs to run around 3/4 of it, after I do an outer fence that includes our little apple orchard.

More money, but worth every penny to grow one's own food. Even if the critters get some of it!

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.