The Cold, Clear Light of Day

I recall my mom's advice when frustrated or scared, "It will look better in the clear light of day."

That's great advice for anyone struggling with rural life. I didn't grow up with it and am still very much a city boy. I may always be, deep inside, despite all the skills I've slowly acquired.

Yesterday was one of those awful days. I had struggled with a large rotary mower I use several times a year. We'd had a great success clearing a large patch of Tree of Paradise, amid a jungle of vines. I wanted to mow them before the snow flies again, as it's about to do today. We are talking about enough piles of vines, cut and still attached, to overflow two 8' pickup beds.

Everything seemed aligned, cosmically, until the tractor's PTO shaft would not align with the mower's drive shaft. It's a tedious, heavy job that involves pry bars, cinder blocks, and cursing. In fact, I increasingly see why farmers have multiple tractors for multiple jobs. My dedicated bush-hog tractor, a Ford 8N, is simply too fast in reverse to trust near hills, and it lacks a seat belt or roll bar.

As I tried to connect the mower, the light faded from the sky. I put the tractor on a slope, with the loader bucket down, to increase the distance between the connections. No dice. Nothing, including adjusting all the linkages, would make something fit that has fit many times before.

As it got dark, I recalled my mom's advice. I put up the gear and then it hit me: the next day I would shorten the drive shaft about an inch. I was bone tired and needed a stiff drink.

I did that early, with a reciprocating saw. Then with my Dremel I beveled the edges. The shaft fit, the tractor cut the vines, and I was done in 45 minutes.

If you push yourself too hard when tired, a friend advised me once when chainsawing, you are going to end up in the hospital.

Good advice at twilight. Wait until the clear, cold light of day, then get back to work.

Urban Flannel? How about Chamois Cheapass?

I have long hoped to use the word "cheapass" in a blog post. Now you have it.

For as many years as I've been interested in outdoor recreation, I've sworn by chamois cloth shirts. It began in Indiana, where my former father-in-law, a dedicated hunter of deer, ducks, grouse, and geese, gave me my first L.L. Bean shirt.

It and others that followed, from Bean and a firm called Five Brother that is still around (thank God), seemed as durable as plate armor. They wore in over the years, gently, to become as comfortable as any garment you'd want.  They were cotton flannel, a type of cloth, in woolen form, that may date to the 16th Century or earlier. There's more on the history of the cloth here.

Now, however, I find that Bean has gone for a look that is outdoorsy rather than really for outdoors work. My last chamois from them, worked moderately actually chopping wood and hunting, ripped after only 10 or so wearings in two years.

Ah, but to look like a lumberjack without doing work! In the photo above, note the unused axe. Sure looks good, though, walking into the microbrewery! I suppose Lumbersexual urban men with their skinny jeans, spotless boots, and groomed beards look great in thin chamois cloth. To quote from City Pages, where I copped the image:

He's old enough to grow a beard, but not so old as to hold hints of salt in the black pepper. He longs for the days when life wasn't complicated by big-city dreams, when a man could eke out a living off the land. But the closest he's gotten to downing a tree is stuffing his face with bûche de Noël.

 That's some great writing, but these shirts are not worth a damn.

I'm chopping wood today, and it will be in a Cabela's shirt. Now that Bass Pro has acquired that firm, I expect their chamois cloth to take a dive, too.  A friend wisecracked that "if Cabelas is the redneck L.L. Bean, Bass Pro is the redneck Cabelas."

Full disclosure: beard oil really is useful. Thank you, Lumbersexuals. Now help me bring back good chamois. I've ordered a very Lumbersexual-correct plaid from Five Brother, in their "Brawny" line of shirts. Not a solid color (my preference) but it looks promising. We'll see if they have cheaped out, too. I'm hopeful that the answer is no. The company still has separate listings for "Jeans" and "Dungarees." It's also a good sign that 1) Their Web site is not fully functional and 2) They don't pick up the phone on Saturday.

Probably gone hunting.

Planet Lumberjack Oldguy, here I come.

Superfluous Roosters

One problem about hatching your own poultry: you are going to end up with too many roosters. The one pictured above was a "keeper." He's doing his work, watching out for his girlfriends so they get to eat and nothing sneaks up to eat them.

But what if you have to eat a rooster?

Next year, a slightly higher temperature on the incubator should result in fewer males, but this year, we had six roosters. Four were mean birds, that charged you and pecked at you, no matter what. Their fate?

Butchered and eaten, or in the euphemistic sense, "sent to freezer camp."

I'd never done this before, so I enlisted the help of a theoretical physicist and his architect wife.

Yes, on paper that sounds very unqualified, but they both grew up in Romania under Communism. One advantage of that otherwise dreadful system was that city kids often learned rural skills, and my friends are no exception. Of course, our grandmothers were all laughing at us for the grand production we made of "processing" the birds.

Except for the first rooster, I did the worst part: the quick dispatch.

No, there are no photos here. Yes, we tried mightily to get the extra roosters adopted. If you belong to any lists about poultry, you'll find lots of handsome males up for adoption. Nearly all are listed as "sweet tempered."

We were lucky to have two roosters survive. Both are defensive of their harems when it comes to predators, but they let me pet them and their ladies. They eat out of my hand and come up to talk to me.

That's the only thing better than eating a rooster. Coq au Vin is, however, excellent.

So, if you are faced with no other options, here are some excellent resources I used:

• how to humanely butcher and clean a chicken.
• an excellent Coq au Vin recipe from New York Times.
• how to clean chicken feet.

Electrical Devices: Simple is Best

I cannot believe how two months rolled by since my last post, but the muggy summer, a weekly blog for my employer, and lots of projects simply got in the way of blogging here. That said, the tempo may pick up at Tractorpunk with better weather and the transition to Fall work.

We had lightning strike very close to the house, destroying an over-engineered, gadget-laden Samsung French Door refrigerator that no service tech would work on. That also goes for LG appliances around here. The reason? Complexity and expensive parts.  So after an insurance claim out went the fancy machine and in went a Maytag top-freezer with nothing fancier than an ice-maker. For cool water? Keep the pitcher filled we used when we were filtering water for a month. The Maytag is highly rated and US built, from their plant in Iowa. I'm not the "buy American" sort but when a US-made item is superior and at a good price, that's my preference.  The new "icebox" (a term I love) has so far provided sterling service and if (when) the ice maker breaks, replacements for a DIY fix can be had for $50.

I'm not quite ready to go back to my parents' defrost-twice-a-year Frigidaire, a unit they got in the heady days right after WWII ended, and dad came back from the Navy to a Postwar boom and his and mom's first home. They kept that icebox for nearly 30  years. For those who don't recall Postwar fridges, check Denis Byrne's The Antique Refrigerator site. The claim there is that these old units are getting trendy again. One reloader in my acquaintance uses one to store gunpowder (it's not plugged in).

We will see if defrosting a fridge gets trendy again. I rather doubt that.

Speaking of reloading, recently another over-engineered device, my electronic scale, began to show "drift": the powder-charges shown were varying to unsafe levels, even after the scale had warmed up. I found myself checking every load with a balance-beam scale of the sort used for decades.  Now that the manufacturer is going to fix or replace my electronic scale under warranty, I plan to sell it and keep doing things the old-fashioned way. It is just as fast, though I ordered a set of "check weights" to be sure my mechanical scale always gets properly zeroed and calibrated when I load ammo.

I used the balance-beam scale recently to reload a batch of .38 special. It was just as fast as the electric. 

These two very different, and differently priced, devices taught me an important lesson about unneeded complexity in the equipment we use. This blog began with a post about the virtues of simple farm tractors. I have been rightly accused by being a throwback, not wanting power locks or windows on my cars; I "got off easy" for $240 having the door-lock actuator in the driver's side door of my Honda C-RV replaced. That sounds fair, until you consider that I can replace the door lock on my '74 Buick project car for a quarter that price and do the work myself.

Then consider that the Honda has three other lock actuators.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Water Water Everywhere

And not a drop to drink until you boil it 5 minutes or run it through a filter.

If you get your water from a well, you are effectively a water-quality manager who oversees a water-treatment facility.  And when things go wrong, you learn about hydraulic engineering, geology, and pathogens.

For the past three weeks that has been our life, since seven inches of rain fell in a few days' time. Our dug well had developed a crack and a bit of missing casing, most likely from the earthquake of 2011, and that meant fecal coliform bacteria in the drinking water rose to levels that are not necessarily healthy. We had a water test last year, through a Virginia Tech extension agency program, and that proved marginal for coliform. The heavy rain changed things, fast.

Soil filters rain water, and coliform bacteria are present in most soil. Yet that can present an issue for Dug wells, commonly found on older properties, which are more prone to contamination; I understand that some banks will not issue a mortgage to a home that does not have a modern bored, deep well.

That's not us. Our well is only about 30 feet deep and 3 feet in diameter. I tested again when the heavy rains made our water cloudy. Test kits are cheap, and the consequences of not testing regularly? Serious illness in the worst cases.

In my home test after the rains, we failed. So what to do if you suddenly find yourself living in the 1840s? Digging a new well or even repairing this one would cost many thousands of dollars we do not have handy.

Time to boil and filter, as I would on a backpacking trip or, more ominously, after some disaster.

There's an entire section at Cabelas I call "The Doomsday Aisle" full of "survival" rations and gear, including some serious water filters and purifiers. The the distinction is critical; the latter remove bacteria from water. Most simple filters do not. I have used prefilters when camping, if rainwater has debris. An old Melita coffee filter does the trick.

I suppose The Doomsday Aisle gives suburban preppers the same false confidence that a backyard bomb shelter provided in the late 50s or, today, a seldom-fired handgun tucked in the nightstand or worse for the untrained, waistband. But I have found that these same folks also vainly try to "tick proof" their manicured lawns, killing helpful insects in the process, and panic at every tick bite; I keep a jar of the four or five that get me, weekly.

Thus I have decided to give up on telling such people that you cannot buy skills. But if you are still reading, here's a tip: only buy gear that you actually use sometimes, not tuck away in the utility room. The test of such supplies and, in our case, water filter, need not be the coming of Mad Max. It might simply be a hurricane that interrupts power and potable water for two weeks, as happened in 2003 during Hurricane Isabel. My nephew Chris, with Homeland Security, gets blue in the face trying to explain that two weeks of supplies are all one needs to mean the difference between life and illness or death.

That photo is so reassuring looking, isn't it, to those fretting about apocalypse? Yet no supplies will help you without potable water. I got a $60 purifier at Cabelas, made by Sawyer; I like their backpacking purifiers a lot. Like the smaller units, the big one is reverse-flushable and good for 100,000 gallons. More than enough! I like that it could be mounted to a bucket and gravity fed into a container to drink.

The first step in addressing problems such as ours was to "shock our well." Those of you on city water may imagine me sneaking up and yelling "boo" into the well house, or telling an off-color joke to the plumbing. As the Centers for Disease Control's site makes plain, however, it's a rather lengthy process.  You make a bleach-water solution (in our case, 3 gallons of bleach), pour it in the well, wash down the inner casing, and run the taps. A lot.

Eventually the bleach smell vanishes, and our shower tiles were cleaner. But a week later, I tested the water again for bacteria.

Another Epic Fail.

We had our well service visit, the folks who fixed the well several years ago. They suggested that short a very expensive repair, we install a UV light in the well, at the cost of $1100 and with an annual maintenance fee of $150.

Of course we said "yes. NOW." As for timing, we are still about two weeks out from installation, perhaps another from when I test the water again.  We have gotten adept at filtering drinking water nightly, using tap water to wash pots and pans, and running the dishwasher on "sanitize." So it's less 1840 and more an inconvenience. We could, in theory, go on this this forever.

But I am thankful that we do not have to.

When You Have to Put an Animal Down

One of the hardest things any pet owner must do is make the painful decision to end an animal's life. That is most often done by injection at the Vet's. But what if you had to do it yourself?

Without going into the (blessedly non-gory) details, I had to euthanize a sick chicken (not any of the ones pictured) a few weeks back. It was harder than killing a wild animal, something I do with varmints or, for food, with deer.

Our Vet performs necroscopies, which confirmed cancer as the culprit for the creature's visible pain.  It's not likely systemic to our flock, but we are keeping an eye out.

That's only the fourth chicken we have lost in four years, with two to heat and another to a sudden illness, but it's the first where I had to end the animal's suffering. We really think so little of chickens, don't we? Those nuggets hardly seem to have come from something that once made noise and walked around, though industrial-production chickens lead lives of horror.

For many of us, however, the most personable pampered hen lacks the warm feeling of a loyal dog or purring cat, but they do have individual personalities and often follow you around clucking for treats.  We don't eat our birds, so they have become pets even after the flock grew to nearly 20 animals, with our first rooster and about 7 more hens on the way.

Chicken keepers may have a tough time finding Vets to treat a bird, unless one lives in town where urban chicken-keeping seems to have replaced beekeeping as the ecological hobby du jour.  I phoned one of those in-town vets and they treat animals but do not do any postmortem exams. Luckily, our  country Vet here was more than happy to assist.

As for the death of the hen, it was painless for her. There's a great blog post here with advice I used to euthanize the bird. When I have to process my surplus roosters I cannot re-home, I'll use the same technique. No hatchets or helicoptering for me. I treat living things with respect, and the method shown really keeps the animal comforted and tranquil until death. Yes, a chicken will thrash after severing its spinal cord, but that's involuntary. The deed is done and if animals go somewhere after they leave this world, our hen made the passage.

Since we began raising chicks, I've not eaten any chicken. Oddly, euthanizing the bird bothered me little more than killing a fish for supper. But I'm not quite ready to eat one of our flock.

Dehydrating Food: First Efforts

As much as I love canning, I have been eager to try my hand at dyhydrating food. It offers some advantages for processing, and unlike my canned goods, dry ingredients do not need refrigeration after opening.

Originally we'd set our hearts upon a solar dehydrator, to the point where I'd purchased a book on how to build one. That ran into a snag right away, though "damp and horribly moldy blanket" might be the preferred metaphor. Central VA summers are too humid for solar dehydration to work, though getting an oven to 125 degrees would be as simple as sitting a box outside on any sunny day from late May to early September.

The Cabelas sporting goods chain sells units that range in size from a large toaster oven to a full-sized range. All of them circulate air over the food as it dries out. For small items like garlic flakes, I put parchment paper on top of each wire tray. Do not use waxed paper unless you enjoy making a melted mess. I was happy to discover that online before my first attempts.

We chose a mid-sized unit the size of  dishwasher that holds many trays of fruit or vegetables.  at 80 pounds boxed, I could easily lift it onto a small table in our shop, where mice won't crawl as easily into the works to make nests.  Plus we have at least one black snake there, on the prowl, helping me with mouse-management strategies.

Our first efforts involved a bunch of organic bananas, and the results impressed me. I set the unit to dry the overnight, and by breakfast we had bananas dry but not crunchy; they maintain good flavor and we stored a quart jar of them out of the sunlight in our cabinet. No sign of mold, yet.

We do not grow bananas, but we do grow several pounds of garlic that I cure in an unheated utility room off the side of our house. It stays warm without freezing; the year before, I hung the garlic up from the ceiling in our root shelter to keep mice at bay. This season, however, I used a lot of the garlic and just stepping down into the utility room made the process really easy.

Two sites advised me on drying garlic. I found the advice at Self Reliant School excellent overall, but I did not wish to vacuum seal the jars. That step adds an expensive piece of equipment. Then I asked Dave, the author of the Our Happy Acres blog about this processing. He assured me that sealed jars left out of daylight would keep a year. That's enough for my purposes. Here are my results.

We used the hand-cranked food processor advised by Jennifer at Self Reliant School; Amazon seems short on them, but I found one on eBay for under $20, new, with free shipping. It made short work of the process, though there was no short cut for peeling 5 pounds of garlic cloves! The processor was sturdy enough to endure the work and cranking it required no great effort. I did freeze all but the center jar; dried garlic thaws well and can be put right into the pantry.

My next week involves peeling and chopping about 5 pounds of carrots that overwintered in the soil. I cooked a few and they taste great. Now we'll extend the harvest with them, as well. Look online and  you'll find many recipes. Unlike canning, this food is simpler to process. It will be safe as long as you dry it thoroughly and store it well.