A Good Set of Snips

Life is too short, and work too frustrating, using cheaply made tools. So today I have two recommendations for an everyday item for anybody with a garden.

One of my favorite local merchants is called Down the Garden Path, and they pop up at local garden shows. They carry lots of decor, but I go to them for hand tools, especially ones from Japan or with specialized, high-quality materials.

With an in-person purchase out of the question for Spring, I contacted them about ordering a larger set of Barebones snips that I'd gotten a few years back. I find them indispensable for harvesting greens, peas, and other produce. They snip twine I use for trellising peas and other spindly things.

I was greatly disappointed that Barebones is out of stock on that tool, but I got a different set and I'll compare how they work.

Barebones Small Shears

My small Barebones shears embody the company ethos: campers, DIYers, foragers, contrarians about consumer culture. People with tattoos who actually work in flannel shirts, not simply wear them at the brewpub or gallery opening.

These are my People: they'd rather split wood than push a button to have heat from a furnace. They'd tell stories instead of watching television. They'd drive a 1970...

Okay, I need to control myself. Maybe they do like TV, but they make some stunning axes, as well as gear for dining outdoors. We'd already gotten their hori-hori, based upon its heft and obvious quality.

I didn't know who they were when I bought the snips, but something about the design appealed to me. The metal looks sturdy, the wood grips on the handles remind me of quality grips on a old-time single-action cowboy revolver (another fetish of mine). The ergonomics are right; the big finger holes mean that you can get more than a single finger in when cutting, and that reduces strain on the hand when you are, say, going down 100 feet of row. There is no rattling about the pivot for the blades nor screw to work loose. The blades have a positive stop when fully open, so you don't overdo things.

Actually, scissors-geeks call that a pivot ride or balance face. Well, Barebones gots 'em!

It was only after using the tool that I found their site and realized I was in the company of other tractorpunks.

I shop my values, and I wanted snips that would outlive me. Barbones supplied them. We liked them so much we bought a second pair. At under $30, that's a good investment. They have never seen the sharpening stone.

Joshua Roth GardenCut #130

Back to my dread of trying another set of snips, after finding perfection, when the folks at Down the Garden Path suggested that I do so. They sent me these when the large Barebones were out of stock and they were gracious, as the Joshua Roths run 5-10 bucks more than the other shears. Again, that's yet another reason to buy locally. Amazon won't curate a purchase for you like that.

Happily, these "pruning shears," made in Taiwan, worked really well. They have the same dedication to quality I find in the Barebones tools. And unlike tools from the Mainland, ones from Taiwan have always impressed me, so I gave them a go.

Big plus that they are favored for Bonsai, a fiddly hobby I admire from a distance, having enough fiddling to do. Yet that speaks volumes about their sharpness and accuracy.

The reader will see that the blades are actually shorter than the Barebones, but the extra length of the handles and big finger holes mean they can do bigger jobs.

They also open WIDE, so I can snip something the size of a broccoli stalk. I've been using Felcos to cut rose canes, but I think these shears will soon perform that duty.  They do not have quite the tractorpunk gravitas of the Barebones, and, gasp, the finger holes are encased in plastic, I mean "polyflex soft vinyl," not Colt .45 walnut, partner. Despite that caveat, the vinyl has a pleasant give and I challenge you to get a blister using them. The metal is cutlery grade steel, so it should last a long time if treated well.

I'm happy to store both in the kitchen tool drawer. I cannot bring myself to toss them into the garden bucket, and in the kitchen I find many culinary uses for them.  Yes, I'll get more, starting with the larger Barebones. It's a sickness.

Now then, back to gardening!

Down the Garden Path, and Other Metaphors

I have a guilty secret: I am enjoying the lockdown. It coincides with the finest season for putting in a garden. With that in mind, I’m going to bring out metaphors for May that are garden-related.

This post will do double duty in my other blog, Richmond Writing, where I write about language and writing pedagogy.  

At Tractorpunk  I’ve also collected metaphors about time. Use this year’s extra time on your hands well; may I suggest planting a garden? I love growing and preserving (canning, dehydrating, freezing) as much of my own food as possible. I hope that’s a long-term impact of this pandemic. We need more home cooking with local food.

Many of these metaphors do indeed work in academic prose. Lots of them I learned from my mother, an avid gardener. She would sing “I’m a lonely little petunia in an onion patch” when weeding. I got my green thumb from her.

Bad seed: Nothing good comes of bad seeds in the greenhouse. They produce stunted plants or none at all. Metaphorically, a person is a bad seed if they come from a family with a history of trouble.

Down the garden path: I’ve not a clue why this metaphor is negative. It means to be led astray, to be deceived. To me, the garden path is one of the most pleasant places to wander. There’s no deception in a well-tended garden.

Early frost / blooming early / blighted: Though not all early bloomers come to grief, early frost is a sad situation, in the garden or in a person’s life. Things go awry early, and failure results. At least a watchful gardener can put buckets on top of small plants or drape row-cover over the lettuce (I had lettuce all winter this year). You cannot do that for a person who blooms early and then is blighted. Some of us are, however, late bloomers.

Make hay when the sun shines: I have a very small hay-making operation, so small that instead of purchasing a big baler, I hand-bale my cut hay on about an acre of tall grass. The yield is 3 or 4 small bales annually. It seasons for a year in my barn and then becomes weed-block or in our raised-beds or litter in our chicken coops.

No matter the method, haymaking depends on a stretch of sunny weather, preferably one with enough breeze to dry the cut stalks after they are raked (my favorite part of the operation is hand-raking with a beautiful handmade Italian hay rake). Wet weather ruins hay, making it rot on the ground.

So metaphorically, there’s a time for any activity: do it in its best season, neither hurrying it nor waiting too long: not quite the same as Carpe Diem, but certainly a metaphorical cousin. For problems, you want to nip them in the bud.

Peas in a pod: As in, “like two peas in a pod.” Okay, it’s a simile, not a metaphor, but it’s Mother’s Day and my mother was fond of this one. It can mean anything identical, but for mom it mean two people who did the same things, usually something stupid. Her wit was withering.

Reaping what you sow: I tend to over-seed my beds and then do a lot of thinning. We also are putting a six-acre field into wildlife management, which means suppressing invasive plants without chemicals but with a heavy application (think, tons) of buckwheat, clover, sunflower, bean and winter rye seed. That is most certainly not sown by hand but with a large device that looks like a rocket motor, inverted, behind my small tractor.

But if you put out no seeds, or the wrong ones, you get what you get, in the garden or outside it. When I learned to code, we said “garbage in, garbage out” about sloppy programming habits.  So much trouble results from poor planning and poor execution.

Snake in the grass: one of my least-favorite things. I keep the grass in and around the garden short, since last year I shot four Copperheads right in the garden or by the house. I will spare you the photo of a dead one shot in our chicken run, stretched out by my shotgun barrel–at 30″ they were the same length. In the woods, it’s another matter: snakes can go their own way. I don’t mind Black Racers or Rat Snakes at all, often moving them to spots where they can eat mice and keep the Copperheads at bay; I welcome black snakes into my barn and garage, though I keep an eye out! The metaphor of something dangerous in hiding conveys well with this metaphor. Watch your step around certain people!

Tender shoots: I hear this one each time a recovery comes after an economic downturn. But it’s true: the first shoots of new growth are really tender. They break or freeze easily.

Tough row to hoe: Bermuda or “wire” grass loves to sneak into our raised beds, and I don’t employ any herbicide or pesticides, preferring labor to cancer. So this metaphor comes into play a lot, when the weeds won’t come out of the ground and the bugs won’t go away; metaphorically, we all face similar tasks constantly. I think of this term as Southern, but it may well be universal.

Transplant: I grow a few hundred seedlings every year, moving from indoor grow-light station to greenhouse to raised beds. Whenever we move a plant from one growing medium to another, it’s transplanted. Think of how this metaphor works for humans. We are also uprooted. We put down new roots. We might decide to bloom where we are planted. Or we may wither in the wrong place or job. Mom was metaphorical here, too, about plants. When transplanting, she anthropomorphized her plants, saying “their feelings get hurt.” But in time, the plants would “get over it.”

Weeding and thinning: After venomous snakes, my least favorite thing. Yet you cannot grow plants as I do, without herbicides, without a lot of hand weeding. We weed in our lives all the time, from our personal libraries to our “friends” lists (I seldom do that, as I don’t accept friend offers unless I know someone in person). We also thin things, a more pleasant occupation since the over-sown seedling can go right to a flock of very eager chickens.

Windfall: Often paired with "profit," in economic journalism, but in an orchard wind often means an early crop of perhaps underripe fruit. My one experience with windfalls has been with tall persimmon trees. The fruit is best after frost, and it does not leave the tree easily. I have to shake the tree, pick low-hanging fruit, or wait for windfall before I bake my Thanksgiving persimmon pie.

We keep bees and chickens, and these provide fertile soil for other clusters of metaphors. Stay tuned! If I missed any of your favorite garden metaphors, send them my way. I’ll be harvesting them all summer!

 

Ad-Hoc Patches & Long-Term Consequences

All of us in education are scrambling, breaking old habits and a few rules to deliver remote education. I began to think about longer-term issues for Higher Education, really not the subject of his blog, but certainly fodder for my writing students' final project of the semester.

We'll figure it out. Right now there are bottlenecks, administratively, of the same sort that keep toilet paper and paper towels from getting to stores. The supply is there, but the system has temporarily bogged down.  Except for those items, our stores are well stocked.  Early runs on meat and other staples have abated. Produce is picked over, but for cooking oil, flour, vinegar, and other things low a week ago, stocks are up (just as the stock market is down).

All this thinking led me back to the local and rural; what will be the effects of our current crisis on localism, food networks, rural ways? Here are a few concerns, speculations, and hopes.

Loss of Elders

Though COVID-19 shows itself quite capable of wiping out young people, the mortality among the elders among us is likely to astound us all. I fear here a loss of rural memory, akin to what happens at my university when a key, long-term colleague retires or passes on. These folk have "institutional memory," a real link to the past and how things were done, including during crises past.

Soon we'll have no living memory, save for interviews and film, of how Americans coped the the Great Depression. We may have to rediscover the wisdom of our grandparents the hard way, but saving your twist-ties is not akin to learning how to tan leather, repair a carburetor (something I did today on a balky antique tractor), or fell a tree. YouTube is a pale substitute for first-hand, hands-on learning.

Farmers' Markets & Foodie Culture

These are closed, and some small farms dependent upon them and restaurant trade will go out of business.  One bright spot for a friend who farms at Dellicarpini Farms, Dominic Carpin, has been a Distributor / Online Farmers' Market, Fall Line Farms. Dominic had his biggest order yet this week. By combining services of many small farmers and taking a cut, Fall Line can get produce directly to consumers and allow farmers to, well, farm. From their Web site:

Each week our producers post the products they have available, setting their own prices, uploading their own descriptions and photos. You can read about their farming practices and contact them directly with questions.

Using our Buying Pages, you shop online with us any time between Friday at noon to Monday at midnight. You pay for your order online and then pick it up on the following Thursday afternoon at one of our Richmond area pickup locations.

Orders are delivered fresh, straight from the farms on Thursdays. Our producers share in the delivery process and we rely on volunteers to sort the orders at the pickup locations. This cooperative system allows us to keep delivery costs down to a minimum meaning more money goes back to the producers.

It's not as fun as strolling a farmer's market, but it keeps food local.  Foodies may have to settle for Spring Kale in place of their Tuscan Kale, but that is a real first-world problem. Thank goodness we have greens, period.

Home Gardens, Chickens, and More

A related issue is the increase of interest in home gardening. Where I live most folk keep a garden, but now they are doubling down on expanding for summer "just in case." I plowed and disc-harrowed my neighbor Lloyd's 1/4 acre plot last weekend. He had a garden there last year, but this year he's expanding. If seed sales are any indication, Lloyd is not alone.

Chick and pullet sales are up, too, as urbanites keep small flocks and rural folk expand. I expect there to be an egg glut soon. In Colonial times, as I learned in 2017 at King's Landing Historical Park in New Brunswick, eggs were not worth anything in barter. Everyone had yard-birds.

MOAR Data, Pleeeze?

Rural broadband is expensive, if it exists at all. We are on satellite via Viasat (clever name, that). We burned through our 50 GB of data last month without streaming one movie. We had remote teaching and lots of video conferences. But hope is on the way. Poking about in their Web site, I found an unlimited data plan for $50 more per month, less than I spent last month buying a few additional GB.  These plans may prioritize essential and less-essential sites....so caveat emptor. Still, it's a bargain and we can switch without penalty back to our old plan. They'll send us a new router, too.

I suspect many folks out here are doing the same, with a windfall coming for providers. Likewise this emergency will likely speed the rollout of 5G mobile networks.

So far, that's all I see, but the peak in cases locally may not come until June. Stand by for updates. Let's hope for better news, and stay safe, sane, and healthy!

Cornmeal or Gunpowder?

I'm going with cornmeal. Hell, I can roll ammo every day on my reloading press, but I can't eat bullets.

A few weeks back, I called the current situation a hurricane, but with lights and power.

So very wrong, that analogy. The same colleague who asked about prepping just got garden produce hand-delivered, at an acceptable social distance, to his front door. Yesterday, while going to our closed-down campus for a few books, I made my egg-and-greens deliveries that usually get dropped off at academic departments.

First difference: one does not self-isolate during a hurricane.

My university, friends, is a ghost town. The few students left are being cared for, as we prepare for getting them home. As for those already home, we are using technologies I know well to provide remote learning.

I can come in to the office as often as I wish, to an empty building and campus. Food service will close when the last students leave, so I'll pack lunch.  If I'm still healthy, I'll ride my bike around in what may be a cruel April.

Meanwhile, I get edgy reports of increased gun sales, mostly by folk who never before owned one. Oh, what could possibly go wrong? Even at online forums for reloading, no hotbed of gun-control sentiment, there's a good deal of concern about these folk who are prepping without much of a plan.

Hence, my call for cornmeal, not gunpowder. While shopping with my normal weekly list, recently, I noticed a curious phenomenon: in addition to predictable shortages of cleaning supplies and toilet paper, folks out here in the country had run low the stocks of corn meal, wheat flour, oil, sugar.

Good on them: Southerners may be recalling Granny's stories of hard times past. These are basics, like beans or rice, that keep body and soul together.

People might learn how to cook again. I will never forget, on my part, my dad's tales of onion sandwiches in the Great Depression. He was not overly fond of onions, afterward. My mom told me how dad and his Lebanese mother would go to a big field, now the site of a downtown Lowes, to pick dandelion greens for dinner.

We are far from that point, but I'd say that I see hopeful signs in pieces like this from the New York Times, about how cornbread is making a comeback during these uncertain times. Closer to home, Joel Salatin wrote one of his stronger posts about how the pandemic might be a time of close reflection upon what is essential: keeping a larder, staying home with loved ones, avoiding frivolous expenses, and the like. Joel and I disagree on many things, but with that post I'm with him 100%.

You can learn to cook, as the cashier at my local organic/local market told some fretting Gen-Zs who had no experience. When the restaurants close, you'll have YouTube and allrecipes.com.

Use them. And for God's sake, instead of spending money to binge on some TV show, get some DVDs free from the local library. That closed? Read a good book.

Next up for me? After Amin Maalouf's Samarkand, I'm going to embark on a virtual tour of London with Peter Ackroyd’s London: A Biography. I'll get back to that favorite city of mine, in time. Every journey teaches me something, especially the ones through the seasons of the year. This was our first winter with lettuce and greens, all through the cool months (we did not have snow or a real winter). We used a low tunnel to stretch the fall into March.

So will these times we are in. How about learning to make cornbread?

Pandemic? Huh? Oh, Yeah, Like a Hurricane. With Lights and Water

In all seriousness today, a colleague asked others at our lunch table "you guys prepping yet?"

He is stocking up on food. With two young children, it's not a bad idea. COVID-19 shows every sign of a national outbreak. I figure in a week, the first widespread cases will emerge, and then the masks will go on and panic will set in. I'm certain we'll see a few supply-chain disruption and some empty grocery shelves. Americans do not handle emergencies well, in my experience during hurricanes.

For our part, we have enough non-perishable food to feeds two humans for at least a month. Since I spend a good amount of time in harvest season canning and dehydrating, we are set on that count. Unlike surviving a hurricane, even in a widespread outbreak we'll have power for the house, for tools, and to pump water from the well.

I live by the adage that my nephew Chris, an employee of Homeland Security, shared: every family needs clean water and food to last them two weeks, in the case of a natural disaster. In winter, if you live the country particularly, you need a backup source of heat (our woodpile more than suffices). If one approaches a scary situation that way, matters get much less scary. Spend a bit of time looking over likely emergencies at the CDC Web site's page on planning. You may feel a bit better after.

One thing we decided, however, was to stock up on food for the animals. Our two dogs go through about 80 pounds of kibble and 10 pounds of dehydrated treats in a month. Our cats might eat 10 pounds of dry food. So their needs are paramount. Humans do not consider it often enough, but these creatures who give us so much and ask for so little live at our mercy.

Our chickens have plenty of feed, and in an emergency we'd do what our grannies did every day: set them out further to free-range for bugs and greens. We might lose one or two to predators or a bad weed, but the flock would not starve.

What are you doing to get ready for what seems inevitable?  Are  your Plan B skills up to snuff?

Boots Update: One Barge Sank. The Other Sailed. Redwing Flew!

Footwear makes or breaks hard work outside.

I wrote late in 2019 about my experiment with Barge contact cement.

I'm still a believer, though one of my sets of boots blew out after a month. Here's why.

My Statesman Wellingtons have a thick rubber sole attached to a flimsy boot bottom, some of it no more than a layer of fabric. Despite clamping the boots after gluing, it was only a matter of time before they blew out again. Off to the landfill for them!

My Cabelas slip-on low boots, however, are far sturdier, in both the lower portion of the boot just below the upper and the material of the sole.  They have held up to two months of walking and really hard work after some Barge and a few furniture clamps, overnight.

I won't miss those cheaply made Wellies. Instead, I'm going to try a heavy waterproofed leather boot with a Vibram sole. I've a lot of experience waterproofing leather, something that will need to be done every few months.

Mending is still better than ending, but sometimes you have  to cut your losses. No glue can fix "cheapass."

And no one in their right mind would call Redwing boots cheap, let alone cheapass. I've owned two pairs since I began my crazy apprenticeship with Big Ed, my father in law, in the early 2000s. I knew I'd want the best possible boots for working outdoors, ones that had steel toes and shanks, and ones that could be repaired.

That's where Redwing comes in a cut above other shoemakers (Mephisto comes to mind, but I've yet to see their work boots). Both companies share a belief that their shoe is so useful, long-term, that they'll recondition them for substantially less than the purchase price. Redwing offers a variety of repairs. The photo at the top shows my newer (grin) pair of Redwings. The bottom photo shows how they came back to me. I didn't expect brand new; these are not boots you wear to a formal dinner.

What I did except, and got, were new soles, repaired grommets, reconditioned leather, and new laces. Redwing packed all that in a new shoe box and included a can of their leather conditioner.

Price, with shipping? About $125.

On my older boots, not pictured, they capped a toe that had been worn down to steel. These Jed-Clampett stompers are my backups now. I should have them bronzed.

The test of any shoe, of course, is how they feel outdoors, in all weathers, for a long day's work. While the Wellingtons are not the ticket for that, the Cabelas and Redwing boots are top notch for eight, even twelve hours of work.

Still searching for a slip-on, knee-high snakeproof pair of boots. Or perhaps knee-high gaiters to go over the Redwings. Too many close calls last year, and my Kevlar chaps get hot doing brushwork in high summer.Working hillside, where a Copperhead might be above me, I'll still wear protection up to the waist.

Shop accordingly, and for the long haul. Happy stomping!

2019 Wrapup: Things for which I am thankful

Folks, it's been a momentous year. So here goes: the things for which I'm thankful. They are somewhat in order. As always, I am most thankful to my wonderful and tolerant spouse, Nancy.

1) I am thankful that I didn't die "in nasty ways," to quote Monty Python. The year began with me having heart palpitations, and that led me right to the doctor. My blood sugar was dangerously high. 40 pounds lighter and much happier, I'm glad I listened to medical advice and got on a low-carb diet.

Second, it was a "year of the snake," which me dispatching four Copperheads dangerously close to me or our animals. A fifth one bit one of our livestock dogs right on her big nose! She endured and is as feisty as ever.

Then there was the trespasser, armed with a 9mm handgun jammed in his jeans and a flimsy story, wandering around our property. Thanks to a notice and then help from my neighbor Tim, we convinced him peacefully to leave and then called the sheriff. He's never come back (and I know his name and employer).

Friday the 13th in December got me rammed by a Dodge Ram. I was not even shaken, but my beloved Honda 2004 CRV of 14 years ownership was totaled. Better than me getting totaled!

2) I am thankful that I helped restore a meadow for native birds. Nan has long dreamed of the field across from us going into wildlife management. I am thankful that I found a $450 seeder for $150 cash that makes the job a LOT easier.

My in-laws agreed to let me manage six acres of open space. The photos show the process of mowing, plowing, and seeding cover crops. We worked with our extension agent on a management plan that will reduce or eliminate invasive species, without spraying an ounce of herbicide.

In two years, it will be in wildflowers for quail and whippoorwill habitat. Though our bee hives had a difficult year, we now have ample forage for them: I sowed buckwheat in summer and rye-grass cover crop for winter. The weather was difficult: a spring rain so heavy I got my brother-in-law's big tractor stuck, and a fall drought so severe the rye took a LONG time to germinate. Thankfully, it did.

3) I am thankful that I found the best fishing since the 1980s for me, and I began hunting a bit more. This year I got serious about fishing, again, and I was able to locate a perfect spot (it requires a State Forest Use Permit). I won't tell anyone where it is. My kayak is getting a workout, and we enjoy dinners of panfish.

My neighbor Tim, a fellow hunter, has been out deer-stalking with me a few times. It's great to have a hunting buddy again after 30 years. We have not been a danger to deer, but eventually we'll fill the freezer with venison.

4) I am thankful that I found a farm helper, Quentin Harris, who has carpentry skills. We have worked on a barn roof, jacked up and reinforced a run-in that threatened to fall into a ravine, and cut up a grove of Virginia Pine that fall over a lot in wind because...they are Virginia Pines and that is what Virginia Pines like to do.

5) I am thankful that got an item off my bucket list, one that corresponded with some success as a writer. I have always wanted to drive a manual-transmission car, and a black 99 Mazda Miata nick-named "Marco" came by way in late Fall. I'm enjoying it and so far, the gears and clutch are holding together. I'm still at work on my 74 Buick Apollo, due for priming and painting in 2020, all by me.

I also began writing with a by-line about this and other matters for Hemmings Motor News. That's a great source of pride for me, as great as the anthology of essays I co-edited with my friend and colleague from VCU, Brian McTague.

To add whipped cream on an already high-carb sundae, Fran Wilde (shown here with Lamar Giles, for a reading of stories based on Edgar Allan Poe) visited my campus for a VCU / UR workshop on voice in writing.

I'm also lucky that that when I was doing a story for Hemmings about the car-focused display at the Richmond Folk Festival, my old college buddy Chris Cosner came to visit. Here he and designer / restorer Marty Martino pose with a Jetsons' flying car Marty is making. Yes, Marty even had a friend with a hovercraft offer him the running gear.

I don't know where the road will take us, but may all your friends have hovercraft in 2020. It's about time!