Abundance and The Root Shelter

It's been a year with a lot of summer rain. The rain-barrels are brim-full with water we don't need, the garden bursting with produce and more than a few harmful insects. Every time I put down diatomaceous earth to murder the squash-bugs, the rain comes down and washes my powder away. I am using a slurry of 3 tablespoons to a gallon of water, and spraying it over and under the leaves, as well as around the bases of the plants. The pumpkins are coming in early, as a result. The first two are sun-curing in the garden for a few more days before they go into long-term storage.

My canning skills are well honed by putting up about four gallons of tomato sauce annually, so it has been a busy month for putting up pickles. I've a professional pressure-canner for the low-acid foods, and we've been using a simmering or boiling water-bath canner for produce that can be safe with that sort of treatment.

We froze a lot of green peas and now are doing the same for blackberries that grow wild around here. I am going to try to recall all of this abundance when winter arrives. It's easy to forget!

One trick to keeping things going will be our new "root shelter," a dry windowless room in the basement of a building where we store equipment. It's completely below ground.

It's not a true root cellar, since it lacks an earthen floor. The 8 by 8 room, of cinder-block walls was, in fact, a fallout shelter from the 60s. It never got finished, since it has no venting to the outside, which makes it less than perfect for surviving a nuclear attack or for getting air circulating for other purposes.

After I made the old door tight but before it got a coat of paint, I knocked out the panel over the transom and lined it with a layer of hardware cloth (a stout metal screening with 1/8 or 1/4" holes) and also window screen. This keeps out rodents and black snakes, one of which chases mice around our building and occasionally leaves a skin draped over the tractor seat or rafters.

With a drill bit used to bore holes in doors for lock-sets, I bored three large holes in the bottom of the door. Those too got covered with hardware cloth and screen. Shelving is basic: with low-humidity in the room, old 2x6 pine boards and cinder blocks serve us well. A small electric fan blows air out the transom, and that encourages cool air to enter the bottom of the door.

I plan to keep early-harvest pumpkins in there, since we have a local market that will buy all I grow. My garlic harvest, only about a dozen bulbs, and some onions I pulled after curing them in our utility room will also go on the shelves. This sort of "root shelter," as I call it, will store winter squash and sweet potatoes.

A damp root cellar would be perfect for vegetables that need more humidity. With a backhoe, a hillside that faces northwest, and lots of cinder blocks I think this will be a future project for my LLC's harvest. And it will vent to the outside world. No nuclear attack needed.

30 Months of Lessons

It has been two and a half years since we began living here; three since we began taking care of this piece of rural land. I had no idea then what lessons I'd have learned, this far along. I was already somewhat handy and very Type-A about learning things that interest me. If something or someone does not interest me, I won't recall it or them. I'm bad at names that way.

What follows is not a bragging list but a taking stock. I've failed at most of these things too. Still, how much of this would I have learned had I sat before this screen and played video games? Obsessively checked others' Facebook profiles?

What really counts in life? Socrates said that only the examined life was worth living. I am not very social, so you can guess that I'd pick items on this list over more time with online "friends." Sometimes over seeing people I cherish face-to-face, when I'm on-task, a habit familiar to every successful academic.

Anyhow, see how much of this arcana of DIY life would be new to you:

Financial:

• Setting up an LLC and learning the basics of State and IRS rules
• Learning to scour Craig's List like a pro
• Honing my haggling skills with equipment suppliers, sellers of used gear, and repair shops. I will blame my Middle-Eastern heritage here for being tough when haggling.

Mechanical: 

• Cleaning points in a distributor
• Straining all gas and diesel through paint filters
• Knowing the difference between load needles and idle screws in a carburetor
• Learning how to set the gap on a spark plug
• Painting with an auto-paint gun
• Helping a friend tear down a tractor engine, replace a cam gear, and finally see how valves, tappets, and a cam dance together to make a big heavy machine move.

Garden:

• Watching the life-cycle of pests such as squash-bugs and beginning to interrupt it
• Keeping ground hogs and raccoons out of the garden.  Improving head-shots when these critters enter a trap. Live-trapping and safely releasing a skunk without being sprayed (skunk seemed to think it was a game and appeared to enjoy it)
•  Learning how to air-cure garlic and onions and store them in a root cellar
• Building that root cellar
• Living with black snakes (those great mousers) in every out building
• Installing 400' of dog-pen fence and an equal amount of wooden-post-and-wire garden fence, using a tractor-mounted post-hole digger
• Figuring out how to hand-bale hay and straw
• Continuing to avoid pesticides and herbicides (we still paint stumps of Tree of Paradise with Roundup and will spray our apple trees next year--once, when not in blossom--with Captan)
• Expanding out rainwater-collection system to 1200 gallons (and getting closer to a goal of 3000 gallons for the main garden).

Kitchen:

• Getting much more serious about canning. Mainstays now have grown from tomato sauce and pickles to include green beans,  apple sauce, and grape leaves
• Freezing peas, squash, butter beans, and blackberries with success
• Drying and saving seed from hot peppers and string beans.

Handyman:

• Cutting out areas of rotten wood and repairing with Bondo
• Planing a sticky door until it closes and looks good
• Building sag-free garden gates 6' tall by 8' wide
• Learning to use well a router and planer
• Figuring out what to reuse and what to toss with 10,000 square feet of barns and out buildings.
• Installing a hardwood floor of salvaged oak flooring tucked in a corner of the barn.

The next 30 months will bring more adventures, and I will return to this list to see what can be added.

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!

Hay Making Experiment!

A few times each year, we mow a couple of fields of pasture grass, with very few weeds, in Buckingham Country. I would like to mow less often and keep the hay. On second cuttings, we could get straw, with fewer seeds and more potential as garden mulch. If we start keeping a few goats next  year, we'd want hay. What's the difference between hay and straw? Read all you would EVER want to know, right here.

The inputs into our food matter, and when we can we grow our own food or buy organic. For animals we feel the same way. I am confident that our grass here and in Buckingham is free of pesticide and herbicides, so the fields we mow can provide good fodder or animals or mulch for our rows of plants.

Sounds great until one prices out a baler and tedder. I don't own a sickle mower for the tractor but the other implements can set one back $20,000 new. Thus I'm not likely to go that route for might amount to 100 or so bales annually (not that we currently use more than 20). Luckily, not all of the world has turned to massively expensive techniques. This page from Ethopia, for small-scale herding operations, shows some techniques I plan to adopt.

While I think a hay tedder for the tractor may be a reasonable investment, so I can windrow the hay easily after cutting with the rotary mower on the tractor, a baler is big money. I'd rather pay a farm-hand a couple hundred dollars a year to help me hand-bale the hay. Stacking would we really fun, if the fields were near where I have gardens and animals. Scratch that: it's 50+ miles from field to farm-site.

My research on this turned up the Rev. J.D. Hooker's article about how to build a baler-box. It's very similar to the box shown on the Ethiopian page. It was a snap to make. I only needed a few screws and some 3/4 plywood. I added L brackets around each side since I'd be standing IN the box, stomping.

We cut and transported the grass to dry at home, but I'd prefer to windrow the hay and bale it at the site.  I  turned the hay once and checked for moisture. If it rots or gets moldy, it will go out for mulch or be spread in the chicken run.

My experiment produced three 2'x2'x18" bales out of 3/4 load of hay from the pickup's bed. With its 8' bed, the truck will hold 16 bales. I baled three in 15 minutes, so when I next mow a few acres, I think I'll take a farm-hand and get 50 or so bales done. We can stack and cover the ones we don't trasport with a tarp, though a farm wagon for moving our tractor will one day double for moving bales.

I've ordered a European-Style hay rake and will now hand-scythe some rye-grass right here at home to see how well it does. I will get a few more bales locally before practicing on the big field at Buckingham.

Farm Auction

Yesterday we attended our second-ever agricultural auction. I'd been discouraged the first time, seeing a post-hole digger soar past my $300 maximum in about 3 bids. The irony was that I found an even nicer used one for $500, including extra auger bits, a few weeks later at an equipment dealer in the mountains.

If one is beginning to farm casually or professionally, however, there's no better place to learn the prices of used equipment.

At auction, tractors can be had for great prices. Yesterday a really nice John Deere 850 with just over 1800 hours on it went for $4100, a real steal. Similar machines bring $6000. I don't regret buying a new tractor when we began our rural adventure, but that payment to Mr. Deere reminds me, every month, of how much I have learned since then. I can easily maintain equipment now and know what will run well, as opposed to what merely looks good, in farm equipment.

This tractor looks great, doesn't it?

If you ever consider bidding on such machinery, bring along someone experienced with tractors and implements. This machine had a hydraulic leak from the left rear axle. An auction company employee claimed he'd overfilled the reservoir and parked on a slanted surface. I'm not so sure; he'd have to vastly overfill it because the incline was really slight.

The tractor was hurriedly and recently painted: gas dripping form the carb, which can cause a fire, had worn off the new paint under a drip. From here I can see that gas-leak. I don't think they rebuilt the gravity-fed fuel system, a $100 job within reach of a skilled amateur. Doing it right can save you from a fiery death; I only learned this when rebuilding the fuel system on my old John Deere M.  Replacing the fuel lines and rebuilding a one-barrel carburetor are simple, unlike fixing hydraulics or axles; those require a tear-down and new seals. These are repairs costing many hundreds of dollars.

Though the tractors did not tempt me, this time I did bid! I tried my hand at snagging a stack of old-school milk crates, not the cheap-ass ones from Staples but from actual dairies. I have about 10 but you can never have enough! At $15 I dropped out, as I did for a lot of galvanized carriage bolts (one can simply not have enough fasteners at such prices).

It was fun to bid. The day got too hot to stay around for a PTO-attachment, a nice tiller I will need when I expand my garden to field-grown crops. I bet it went for around $300,  a real bargain.  Maybe next time. In any case, the crowd made the day: salt-of-the-earth types who all know each other and that one never sees in town or even in numbers at a country store.

Cheap-ass

Gardeners and other DIYers grow fond of good tool that do the job well.  If a tool lasts years, however, it becomes part of one's life. For my part, I hate cheap tools like the "Garden Plus" one pictured. This week, the welded-on head the cheaply made Chinese hoe I'd found in our barn broke clean of its shaft. A search at our local Southern States turned up nothing forged except a $50 hoe with the blade attached to the handle by a really flimsy looking metal collar.  I passed. For $50 more, I could have a tool to last a lifetime.

I began learning this lesson from Andre Viette, the famous gardener of Viette Nurseries and the radio show "In The Garden." He gives workshops just over the mountains from us, in Fishersville, and I recall one where he held up an impressive looking shovel.

"Bulldog!" Viette exclaimed, showing us the brand name. This was not the well-crafted British line of forged tools you will find here; it was a relic from a big-box store. Viette's prop for a tool lesson cost less than twenty dollars.

Then he pointed out every detail about the shovel that made it less impressive than its canine namesake. It lacked a forged head, and the collar was merely bent steel. The rivets were wimpy. The handle was not quite long enough. But it was painted a vivid color!

Viette noted, wryly, that men like to buy tough-sounding tools, and he advised us to avoid sidewinders, rattlesnakes, sharks, and lions.  I have followed his policy every since.  I made that choice for a Spear and Jackson digging fork and spade. A local greenhouse stocked them for many years, until they realized most of their customers preferred cheap-ass tools made in cheap-labor nations.

Not me. We only presume that we can infinitely go to buy whatever we need, whenever something breaks.

What if globalization broke? I hope it does not; I'm no "Doomer." My Japanese Yanmar diesel in our small tractor, and the bigger Yanmar in the backhoe, brought the very best international technology to our farm.

Whatever the origin, I'm going to find the right tool and hold on to it. Kudos to companies like Duluth Trading for bringing that philosophy back to clothing and tools. An unnamed cheap-ass relative admitted about my Duluth socks, which are amazing, "they are expensive."

Exactly the point. You get what you pay for in work-socks, mechanical watches, tractors, and garden tools (all obsessions of mine). Incidentally, I never lend my tools, from tractors to chainsaws to garden spades, unless I come along to use them. But that is another post for Tractorpunk.

Old Technologies That Should Go

As Spring comes on full-force in VA, I find time between planting and pruning to get a lot of things fixed that I cannot mend myself. Just today, I picked up two pairs of boots from a cobbler (yes, I know where to find THREE such shops) and a rainproof jacket from the alterations section of my dry cleaners. The jacket, one I have used since 2006, had a ripped pocket-lining.

Other less frugal folks would just buy another jacket and new shoes. They might call me a spendthrift, noting "Joe! you paid $225 for getting two pairs of boots resoled!" Worth every penny, I'd reply. Both sets of boots, ones for the office, not farm, do feel great all day long, and they are in styles you will never find in shoe-stores nowadays. One pair is 20+ years old and drop-dead cool.

Of course, I might fairly be accused of hating change. The John Deere M I will use again this season to mow is 65 years old. The restoration and repaint are nearly done.

Fashion and my love of antique technologies aside, I do find that some older tech needs to perish from the earth. Here are a few examples, randomly.

Sweating Pipes: I never learned this art, one that threatens to engulf a home in flames if done poorly. I have to repair a run of copper in an outbuilding, and it's delightful to do that with push-to-seal copper fasteners that will also work with pex or pvc pipe. I predict that no American will have to melt solder into a pipe in a generation. I also predict the demise of copper pipe, generally. Pex is an amazing replacement, taking below freezing temperatures and offering flexibility that pvc never had.

Using AC fence chargers: I have no  desire to run underground lines to my electric fencing. I had the circuit board in my solar fence-charger fixed last year, after many years of good service. It's ready to go again.  I want things that are sustainable. I understand some systems use deep-cell Marine batteries to charge a fence. That's a better option than a buried line from the house, but I prefer to turn to the sun.

Pushing Around Gasoline-Powered Lawn Mowers: I have a talent for getting old gas mowers working well. I service my little fleet of four (!) annually. Two live here, trimming around walls and other spots I will not take a tractor; one lives at a home we rent; another lives at a country place that our friend Bunny mows for us so I can focus on thrice-annual bush-hogging of a large field.

That said, gasoline mowers are fussy, polluting machines. If one burns ethanol-addictive fuel, they need constant care to avoid trouble; I burn only eth-free gas in our small engines.

Home owners dispose of mowers at the first sign of trouble, unless they own a really fancy model.  With battery charges being what they are, why on earth won't we all use cordless electrics in a decade?

I'll predict autonomous mowers, too, outdoor versions of Roombas that will do work for suburbanites, much to the chagrin of neighborhood kids who mow lawns (do they still exist?), "mow-blow-and-go" services, male waistlines, and the occasional squirrel who fails to escape a lawn robot's blades.

So what other old technology needs to die, because we simply have better ways of doing things?