Apple-Tree Pruning

I am rather astounded that so far in Tractorpunk I have not said a word about apple trees. Perhaps it was humility; a few years and two classes later, I am only starting to understand the principles of managing a few trees.  My trees all looked like the mess shown above, at first.

The rewards of good pruning are immense; there are few locally grown foods with more lore, and more taste, than a good apple.  I began my quest to raise apples with a few varieties purchased from Albemarle Cider Works south of Charlottesville; we planted three trees in a fenced area near three very neglected older trees, intending to bring them all into production. Earlier we'd put two more in a very wild location, a seldom-visited meadow in Buckingham County, where I once saw a mama bear and her three cubs dining on the fruit from a pear tree. At least we'd feed the bears there.

Over the past few years I have attended two pruning workshops. I've learned that must be patient with apple trees, and some pruning must be done annually and carefully. In time apples can be harvested every year, even with the organic methods I currently use. I may eventually resort to one spraying of the fungicide Captan, after bloom and pollen-collection, each year. Otherwise I will just fertilize and maintain the trees.  Our climate in Central VA is changing, whatever some politicians ignorantly claim, in ways that may not permit apple-growing in a decade or so. In the mean time, I'll see what happens.

This time of year, the earliest part of Spring, is best for pruning. Much of what I learned about pruning can be found here, but here are a few other things I have discovered. 

1) Pruning really does help with blight. Our older trees were full of "Shepherd's Crooks" and blackened foliage, indicating Fire Blight. It's hard to eradicate with organic methods, but not impossible.

Last year I pruned all three trees heavily and cleaned up all the debris, then put it in the landfill in a plastic bag. I was told by an orchard manager that burning the trimmings can just make blight-spores go airborne again! Tools have to be clean, so I reach for rubbing alcohol and wipe the blades of pruners and pruning saw frequently, or I make a 1/9 solution of bleach and water and dip the tools frequently in a bucket.

2) Do not fertilize too much. Pruning makes one want to put down fruit-tree fertilizer, but that can be counterproductive. My reading indicates that fertilizing after heavy pruning will produce water-sprouts and lots of foliage growth; such young growth is susceptible to Fire Blight, one of the factors that led me to prune in the first place. Also lots of new leaves in the wrong places block sunlight and air from getting into the center of the tree, something essential for good health.

3) Could a little kid climb your tree? The answer should be "yes." I loved that bit of advice from our extension agent. Here the goal is to make a tree with an open center and not too many branches.

I aim to create a "vase shape" such as in this illustration from Stark Brothers.

While my trees did not get as severe a pruning as shown on the left, I did cut them hard again this  year.  This close-up shows how crossed and cluttered the branches were on a five-year-old tree we planted in Buckingham County and have only pruned one time before:

 

After pruning this tree, it's probably too long at the ends, but now the tree has room for air circulation and light. Next year I'll step back the main branches to keep them from getting too long; long thin branches often break under the weight of fruit.

4) Apple trees are tough. In the classes I took, the extension agents and apple growers stressed that many novices are terrified of pruning, yet trees can bounce back from poor cuts.

In my case, I am certain not all of my cuts are right, especially high in the trees where I cannot get a close look at the buds. There I use a pole pruner. Where it is safe to climb a pruned tree, I will step up to the first branching of major limbs and inspect, or lean a small ladder against a tree. Mostly I use my Felco #2 pruners or a set of bypass loppers, keeping them sharp always with a few passes from a Bergamo sharpening stone I found at One Scythe Revolution.

Guns, Varmints, and the Farm

Almost no subject divides Americans as much as firearms. I probably use one more often than most civilians I know, mostly for shooting four-legged varmints at close range.

Yet I hesitate to write about guns here; the issue is so fraught with disagreement.

If you live on a farm, the answer to "what gun do I need?" probably does not mean "no gun." I leave that up to you. To me firearms are tools and owning them is not about defending one's property from humans; it means shooting critters. As I've written before here, my state's laws prevent me from "re-homing" varmints caught in my live traps. I do release skunks right where I find them, because shooting them is a nightmare of chemical consequences. Besides, they are cute and seem to enjoy my method of releasing them (itself worth an entire post). The same goes for the rare squirrel I catch; the hawks here make them a rarity.

Groundhogs, possums, and raccoons? Not so much. Kaboom.

In writing about shooting, I will not discuss the uses an urbanite or suburbanite might have for a firearm: deterring another human being or, failing that, killing him and not yourself or a family member. All I'll say on that count is "take some basic classes, shoot a lot at a gun range, rent various semi-automatics and revolvers, then pick a weapon with which you feel comfortable, not the coolest-looking or biggest gun. Keep it locked up and near where it can be gotten quickly by the right person." And though I have a conceal-carry license, I have yet to tote around a handgun. I might bag one to go to the range, but conceal-carry is a fine art. One needs to take holster-qualifying and defensive handgun classes. Such training is worth every cent, as your life or another's may depend upon your skills.

There are few classes in good judgement, so I leave that up to you and your inner conversation to resolve.

I also don't have enough recent experience with deer or waterfowl hunting to advise anyone there who might want to bag a buck or be wet and miserable in a duck blind. More on deer next year, as I'm going to haul my WWII era Lee-Enfield .303 up into tree stands and, if lucky, get some venison for our freezer.

For pest animals that can elude even well designed fences to murder your chickens, little ones can be live-trapped and then shot at close range with a .22 LR. I use a simple bolt-action Remington, a single-shot weapon that had been in my wife's family for many years. At 12 feet or so, it's deadly accurate though I swiftly dispatch my "visitor" with a single round to the head and a second round to make sure the creature does not suffer.  Such .22s are not expensive, and they are simple to maintain. Most such bolt-actions are.

Then there are venomous snakes. After my close calls last year, I've decided to open-carry a Taurus Model 85 .38 Special with #6 shot shells. I do not wish to get in garden-hoe range of a big Copperhead again. They can move FAST, so I'd prefer ten feet with the .38.  In the picture below, the shooter apparently had a "near disaster" at 5 feet. I'd, for one, have stood further away and not shot at anything crawling over cement.  Perhaps he posed the dead snake there, but he killed a 5' long Copperhead not unlike the one that nearly bit me.

I'll keep the gun on my hip when mowing fields and when working around brush-piles. The weapon holds 5 shots. One could, with practice, carry a specialized snake-killer of the sort shown here. If you want to save money, however, go for a used .38 revolver. What is called "Gun Culture 2.0" with its love of tactical rifles and high-capacity polymer guns has pushed these older and dead reliable (pardon the pun) steel guns to the side. One only needs a few shots for a snake encounter.

Such a simple weapon can still be upgraded; I'm in the process of zeroing in laser sights integral to the revolver's grips. Such sights are not cheap, and if the batteries die, you had best have trained with the "iron sights" native to your gun. Moreover, do not be a skinflint on a holster. I've no recommendations there, though I like what I read about the traditional leather belt-holsters from Wright Leather works.  There's also a local company right across the river from me, Master's, that makes some nice products. I'll let readers now how they work out.

The only "cool" gun I'll note is the Taurus Judge and Smith and Wesson Governor. These large revolvers shoot .410 shotgun shells or .45 Long Colt rounds. I give a slight edge to the Governor because it also shoots .45 ACP, my favorite handgun caliber for human varmints. You would need a BIG snake for either the Judge or Governor; I'll pass but I'd love to shoot one.

Like these large revolvers, larger critters are beyond my scope(s) but for smaller ones I spot and can safely shoot at a distance, I have used an old Marlin .22 Magnum rifle with a telescopic sight. That round is longer than a .22 LR and packs a bigger punch, especially in a hollowpoint. Just because one chooses to shoot an animal does not mean one should be cruel. Practice until you can be sure of a killing shot, or don't take the shot at all.

Once I saw a rabid raccoon stumbling around in broad daylight. I hit it twice with the .22 Magnum and, in a Zombie-Movie moment, the animal flinched, then turned to stare at me as my wife said "get a bigger gun." My shotgun was far away at the time. Thankfully, the raccoon staggered off to die. I'd not recommend an AR-15 for such work but if you prefer a rifle, some new bolt-actions chamber the AR's .223 high-velocity round. Whatever the weapon, you'll need to zero in your scope well, and nothing I've found works better than a laser bore-sight. It goes in the barrel of an (unloaded!) rifle. The shooter need only adjust windage and elevation of the scope until it lines up with the laser's dot.

I've not spent much time writing about shotguns, though I own a very old Mossberg New Haven 12 gauge pump shotgun that I used for sporting clays as well as goose, deer, and duck hunting thirty years ago. It's reliable and simple, though there's little I need it for these days as I rarely need to shoot anything at range. My chickens and garden would be downrange now when critters appear, which is why I adopted a "trap and shoot" policy. My mantra for shotguns has always been "the simpler the better," and like the Remington .22,  one cannot find a much simpler weapon.  I admit a fondness for double-barrel shotguns. Nothing could be simpler, except throwing a rock.

So how much for a simple Tractorpunk arsenal? For used guns checked out by a competent gunsmith, less than a thousand bucks will buy a long arm, revolver, cleaning supplies, and ammo to equip the rural landowner, not including training and a gun safe.

Then, mindfully, let the lead fly if and when you must.

Before the Heat: Late Winter Chores

Seventy degrees outside. Yep. Today. Convertible top down on my car, I ride into town when I should be skipping school to do some farm work.

In our part of the country, especially as the climate continues to change for the warmer, Spring comes earlier. That means what follows--the hellish heat and humidity of the Mid-Atlantic states--hits sometimes in early June and does not let up until September. People who do not work outside praise the warmth. I dread what it means.

That means I have a LOT to do in February and March. I find myself trimming trees, cutting back vines, cutting down trees, chopping wood for the next winter.  On warmer days I paint things, as long as rain is not about to fall.

Soon the weeds will sprout and last year they choked out some of our kitchen garden, even imperiled our cash crop of Thai Dragon Peppers.  This year I'm going to ready our raised beds early; some are already done. I surface-tilled, weeded, and amended the soil in December, covered it with the thickest weed-block fabric that A.M. Leonard sells, then topped that with a bit of straw for both aesthetics and UV protection. We built new arches for our eagle netting, and the chickens' run has one new gate and another on the way.

Imagine doing all that in July!  My next gig will be to disassemble and repaint our 1952 Ford 8N tractor, a stalwart from our land in Buckingham County that is going into semi-retirement with us, coming out every few weeks to run a bush-hog. Our big Allis Chalmers will take its place on the remote property.

Summer is great in the early morning, dew and all. After 10am, however, I'm done until dusk most days, though when the sun hits the treeline I often get on the tractor to mow for an hour or so. At this time of year, as little as I like the freakishly warm water and what it portends for the next generations, I get out there and work all day long.

Good luck planting and growing this season. It's been a bitter fall for our nation, but there will be change and progress, whatever setbacks we encounter on the way.

Chickens in the Garden. Hah.

We have had chickens for more than 18 months, currently a flock of 13 hens. Number 14 (I don't like naming them; my wife does) perished in the heat last summer, getting trapped in a raised bed garden and unable to escape the fencing.

As we have discovered, those cute pictures on gardening books that feature chickens are comfortable lies.

Photos like the one above (not our garden, not our chicken! They'd make short work of the Nasturtiums) make a novice gardener think that hens will simply avoid plants you want for food in order to get at the lovely scratch and chicken feed you set out for them. I'm guessing that these are the same urban owners who put little sweaters on their chickens and walk them on leashes. Perhaps they are working on a much smaller scale than we employ; our big garden measures over 5000 square feet, about 3000 of it in raised beds, so projects like building "chicken tunnels" and other elaborate structures run into the steamy reality of Virginia summers where weeds can grow 6 inches after a bad week of heavy rain.

Our experience with chickens shows us that they can be wonderful in and around fallow beds, where they turn and manure the soil. They turn compost faster than I can. I did add boards to keep them from kicking out all the topsoil and compost into the paths, but when I added mesh fencing to beds, chickens would get into the smallest hole, and often they could not get out. They do fly, a bit, and one variety, the Golden Comet, is a great flyer even when we trimmed back the feathers on their wingtips. Over the fence they went!

To prevent more dead birds and ruined crops, we will keep the chickens out of all the beds in summer of 2017. The flock will now have a nice shady run and  their own coop area for scratching and resting. In fall, we'll have 5' tall permanent horse-fencing around our strawberry-and-rhubarb spot and the asparagus bed we are gradually expanding to about 150 square feet.  One other bed will get the 5' fencing and host our winter-greens garden.

I enjoy our chickens. They are good entertainment, they eat a lot of bugs, and they give me breakfast every day of the year. They can, as this author claims, do many things that farm machinery or back-aching labor accomplish.

But, in the end, they are livestock, not pets. If you want to keep chickens, keep in mind that vigilance is the price of having them near a garden, let alone in one.

Intensity or Communion?

"The search for intensity is the shadow side of the healer."  One of my Yoga teachers, Nitya, said that, something she'd learned from one of her teachers. Now I share it here.

So what in the Sam Hill does that principle of Yoga have to do with DIY country life?

A lot, actually.

Modern farming--to feed a nation of more than 300 million souls--does involve a great deal of intensity, not all of it sustainable. Yet food is the best healer I know.

I suppose that if farmers saw themselves as healers, fewer of them would engage in practices that are fouling our rivers and depleting our topsoil. They'd put back in windrows and riparian barriers around waterways.

If consumers saw that food was healing, those who could afford it would pay more for local food grown sustainably, even if it meant cutting portions and losing a bit of weight. I joked that for our Thanksgiving turkey, I felt as though I knew the turkey. I did now which farm it came from.

If county councils saw the land is what heals us now and will sustain the next generations, they'd not rezone things so suburban sprawl, that odd mixture of cancer and cannibalism, engulfs prime farmland. These "public servants" would thus serve future generations, not merely the next election cycle and the pressure from deep-pocketed developers. As Edward Abbey, whose work so influenced my thinking in my 20s and 30s, put it, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

It's a dream that we'll change our ways, but dreaming is good. In the dark years to come following a disastrous election, we are going to need to keep our own long visions as the evil in high places destroys itself. It so often does.

I'll keep turning the soil, but keep in mind that Shadow, the shadow of intensity.  Edward Abbey also advised us to "Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards."

I plan to do so, and I dream of those days to come.  Begin your own journey by healing yourself, and then spare a little healing for the soil that birthed you and sustains you still.

Blessed Solstice, all.

Best Home Canning Site, Ever

Canning is a science, even if recipes are an art.  This time of year is the time to get the last canning done. To make a mistake may, at best, spoil the food. At worst? You kill someone or at least make them seriously ill.

There are a few principles I follow, based upon my reading of the University of Georgia's amazing site, The National Center for Home Food Preservation.

I send that site to anyone canning their harvest for the first time.

This post is short because any advice I can give pales next to that. I will add the following ideas for those determined to use Granny's yellowed index cards:

• The science of food preservation has come a long way in the past few decades. See if you can adapt granny's recipe to modern techniques. That probably means adding lemon juice or citric acid.
• Modern tomato varieties are not as acidic as they once were, so you will have to add lemon juice or citric acid.
• No one I know recommends canning in any containers larger than a quart. Save granny's old half-gallon Ball jars for dried herbs or beans.
• Try to use canned goods in a year, maybe two. I have figs in honey that I still trust ten years on, but honey is a perfect antibacterial. I'd not use tomatoes or pickles after that many years!
• No matter how Granny canned, if the site I've listed says "pressure cooker" go with that. Don't go with a boiling-water-bath technique unless the U Georgia site gives you a thumbs-up.

Enjoy your harvest!

Fall and All That

Around this time of year little weekly and freebie papers (as in newspapers, remember them?) that usually focus on phone-sex ads and supermarket coupons give their beleaguered staffs a little freedom. These writers then run sentimental pieces about the season.

Let me essay that with my quivering quill, "The russet leaves of the towering oaks, 'neath which the scampering squirrels nimbly put away their toothsome treasures against the bitter blasts to come. Oh, as I once told Linda, my lost love, summer hath all too short a lease..."

Alliteration. Adjective strings. Really bad infusions of pseudo-Elizabethan English.

Out, damned feel-wistful columns and a pox upon thee! I have other sentiments to express about  Autumn. Namely, that it sucks to lose two old colleagues in two days. And all your squash.

First, the humans lost. Both were here at the university when I arrived in 1991; one had been here when my late brother enrolled in '66, only to be booted two years later right into the US Army and, but for the deescalating grace of Richard Nixon, all the way to Danang. Nearly fifty years have flown since then.

Our campus flag flies at half-staff one day for each of my old academic commiserators. A day later, the little slip of paper with information on their lives and accomplishments, put in an acetate holder on the flagpole, goes right to the recycling bin.  Game over.

With all that in mind, 'neath the towering oaks around Westhampton Lake, I took a pleasant stroll today to think about what is really important not on a college campus, but beyond its boundaries. For me, it was I learned in a difficult summer about working the land.

The clouds did indeed look like October, and the lake has grown more woodsy since I began walking around it, 'neath various moons, with girlfriends back in the 1970s.  Days like this, with a good northwestern breeze, invite reflection. The light is slanted so the blue deepens in the sky.

To a Deist like me, it becomes consolation enough. There was a time thirty years ago, however when I stopped believing in a Providential God and nearly went full-on Paul Bowles into existentialist atheism. You know, The Sheltering Sky. That sky is there, Bowles claims, only to keep us from recognizing the horror beyond it. That type of nihilism is terribly easy.

Today I am less Bowlesian, but I still repeat, in my first-year seminar on The Space Race, the bald fact that we each are specks, in a crowd of other specks, who live on a speck circling a hotter speck, itself on the outskirts of a speck in a cloud of hundreds of billions of specks. Each sentient speck must think that at some point it is the center of creation. Then it is gone, as surely as my wiping out the compost bin under the sink and its clusters of fruit-fly eggs. Poof.

In 30-plus years, my particular speck will be as gone as my departed colleagues. What will I leave as a legacy? Some furrows where I grew hot peppers fairly well for a local restaurant? A restored tractor that someone will buy at an estate sale?

Or maybe these blog posts, gathering pixeldust in Google's bowels, until some purge or merger leads Blogger, Blogspot, and associated content to vanish?

Say, maybe I'll put them together, with transitions and new content, into a popular book that I'll sign at events like the recent Heritage Harvest Festival! Then tour the entire country, giving talks about buying the right tractor or the right farm pickup! That's it, Immortalitatem Ex Libris!


Or the book will be remaindered for $5 on a side table at Barnes & Noble and I'll report my travel expenses to the IRS and go back to growing peppers.

Thus, the turn to the squash. That, friends, I can not only control under the sheltering sky but even enjoy.

We planted 100 row-feet of Kabocha Squash this  year for a customer who wants a few bushels a year for a restaurant special. I was wary of squash bugs, so half my plants began under row cover. These were new beds never used for fruiting plants before. I planted late in the summer to try to avoid the bugs' most prolific weeks. They multiply not arithmetically, but exponentially.

And so they did. Some wilting in the uncovered rows warned me of catastrophe at hand. I opened the covered rows and it rivaled a zombie's feast out of a Roger Corman film: the dead vines, with thousands of squash bugs and nymphs. No application of diatomaceous earth could save the remaining plants. One day I came out to find all the rest withered. So what did I learn? Stop using organic practices and hit the aisle-o-death at Home Depot?

No. A friend brought me a perfect Kabocha she'd grown. I stuffed it with a Middle-Eastern tomato sauce, lamb, and rice, and baked it. And I am drying and saving all the seeds. She used one part Dr. Bronner's Eucalyptus Soap to 9 parts water, spraying weekly.

Bowles, in a haunting and disturbing (like all his work) piece called "Next to Nothing," says "no one can know where he is, until he knows where he has been."

So the desire just to keep going on, mindful of where he has been, can be enough. Try again with different variables: late planting, Dr. Bronner's, crop rotation. Read the paper on the flagpole and remember Irby's hilarious imitations of James Dean, "the worst actor ever to be famous," or Harry, who wrote dozens of well regarded books but never learned to drive until he was in his 40s. His belches in the Dining Hall were Rabelaisian.

These are the lessons of Fall, on campus or on the farm. Remember. Despair is easy in a bitter season, when anger and stupidity contend to see which force is mightier.

Endurance is a harder lesson still. Learn it.