Farm Trip!

We’re flying out this morning for a few days at the farm to knock out some maintenance projects that I’d rather not leave until Spring.

I know, it’s the middle of winter.  And yes, there’s a whopper snowstorm of epic and historic proportions clobbering the Ohio Valley and mid-Atlantic but I am hoping the worst of it will pass well north of the farm.  It’s snowing there right now, but only lightly.  Nothing like what will fall further east.  

I had a tip-off that there would be a dry spell for our location into next week which is turning out to be innaccurate, but you have to make travel plans and reservations in advance and so, this was the best I could do.  I was hoping I could do some off-season pasture maintenance.  We’ll see.  So far the 10-day forecast on weather.com predicts 30-40% chance of light snowshowers mid-week; not exactly a dry spell.  I’ll keep my expectations low and do what I can, weather and ground conditions permitting.  There’s always something that can be done.

Bear will be adding extra dead-bolt locks to house and barn doors, and we were excited about the arrival of my newest piece of work equipment, a 6X4 Diesel JD Gator, ordered from the local dealer and scheduled to be delivered on Monday, but it has been delayed.  So we’ll have to pick it up on our Spring trip. 

This little rig will be my salvation when I get there, toting me and my tools and fencing supplies etc up the hill and around the pastures like nothing else can.  I’m down with getting lots of exercise walking everywhere but the hill road is a steep quarter-mile and the pastures are flung out like a giant’s hand; I’ll appreciate a vehicle that can carry a load and go everywhere without batting an eye and with minimal impact.

So, wrapping up here at Bear and Thistle West and heading east to the Farm.  Blocks for Wall #2 are stacked and ready for my return and the three-day weekend that follows.  Good work, and I’m looking forward to all of it.  

I’ll update on Friday when we return; stay safe and warm, all.

Grow what you can, where you can

Container-grown broccoli

I’m only feeding the two of us, so a few container-grown broccoli plants are gracing our table with plenty of goodness this winter.

The brussels sprouts will follow close behind; I’m anxiously awaiting their bounty.

On the way down to the mailbox yesterday I stopped to chat with our neighbor Les, who was conversing with another neighbor from up the street aways, an older gent named Bill, who it turns out is also a container vegetable gardener.  Those of us with small yards must grow what we can, where we can.  Bill was interested to hear of my terracing project and rued the fact his backyard hill faces north, which rules out growing vegetables there.

I advised him to tear up his front yard and plant his vegetable garden there.  I was not kidding.  It was good to talk with someone who goes to the same trouble I do to grow a little bit of food for their table.  Here in suburbia we are a dying breed. 

My passion for growing and putting by my own food is a thing of wonder to my neighbors, friends, and coworkers.  I am born to it, and have felt this urge since I learned to cook and garden and can at my mother’s elbow; it is purt’ near genetic, as far as I can tell.  And that’s just fine by me.  Keeps me out of the atrocities they call grocery stores.

Wall building and terrace #1

It’s been a good week of projecting, I’d say. 

This photo, taken yesterday around 4 pm, captures the end result of a lot of really hard work.  Yes, that is a wine glass in my hand.  I am celebrating, and trying to get the knot behind my right shoulder blade to relax.  Not only is the first wall now at full height, but the terrace bed it contains is now cut back into the hill full width – five feet, plus another foot for where the second wall will lay. 

That’s a 35-foot long wall, plus the rounded corner.

My next step is to order the block for wall #2 and get it moved down onto the first bed, which will be my work surface until the next terrace is complete.  Then, once I’m done tromping all over it and the blocks are well-tamped and settled, I’ll remove 16″ or so of the granite fill in this first terrace and replace it with a topsoil/compost mix for some serious vegetable gardening.

But first, I’m enjoying an enormous feeling of accomplishment, and letting my bones rest.  However, do not be alarmed at the tonnage of concrete and dirt moved and the manual labor involved; I work slowly and steadily and pay particular attention to ergonomics, keeping loads low and close and engaging core muscles before every lift.  And I take lots of rest breaks.  So other than being stiffer than usual and this darned knot behind my right shoulder, I’m no worse for the wear after working like a mule for the past week.

Surprisingly enough, moving the block around was not the most grueling part of this job.  If you look to the left of my head in that first picture, you’ll see a pile of plant material perched up on the top edge of the hill.  It doesn’t look like a huge pile, but let me assure you, it is. 

If you will compare the first picture taken when I started this project to this post’s picture, you will notice a lot of the ice plant that used to cover this hill from top to bottom has been cut off and removed.  It looks all neat and tidy now, like I just sliced it off with a laser beam and Poof! it went away.  Oh how I wish. 

Left undisturbed for more than a decade, the ice plant was thriving atop a foot-deep layer of partially decomposed older plants; the leaves had turned to crumbly black humus, but the stems all needed to be cut somehow.  A swath at a time, with the help of my trusty loppers and my indespensible garden trugs, I got ‘er done.  One trug-load at a time cut, pulled, and trudged up to the top of the hill.  My legs feel like I climbed Mt. Everest.  And my arms are pretty darned tired, too. 

Really now:  with leisure-time activities like this, who needs a gym membership?

Taming the back hill

This is one of those projects I’ve wanted to tackle for a long time.

All the backyards along our side of Redlands Place perch atop the rim of a spacious and wild chaparral canyon, with half the property in back of the houses comprising a rather steep hill that merges into the hillside below.  Most of our neighbors have installed pools or decks to extend their back yard space; from the beginning I planned to terrace our bit of hillside into garden beds, to take advantage of the south-east exposure.  But there were challenges.

The previous owner had planted two bunches of invasive pampas grass in the bottom corners and a variety of ice plant (also very invasive) along the remaining slope.  The pampas grass had grown into impenetrable tangles of vegetation nearly 20 feet across at the base that took many hours of labor back in 2002 to remove.  Since then I built a rough-hewn set of free-form concrete stairs to the bottom level for access, but with the exception of removing the pampas grass clumps, we’d done nothing to improve the hillside.

But the time has finally come to tame the hill.  My container garden that takes up half the flat part of the backyard needs to expand into a permanent home, and I need room to stage materials for the fence rebuild project.  So energized by my project plan, I inhaled deeply, took measurements, and ordered enough interlocking block to build the bottom wall for the first terrace bed.  The block and half-yard of gravel was delivered Friday, amidst pouring rain and occasional hailstorms.  My goal is to complete the first retaining wall before we leave for our Kentucky farm trip on 6 Feb.

Here is what the hill looked like before I started:

The brown line of dead plants across is the ice plant I pulled out about a month ago, that had grown down from the bottom of the stairs to the fence (out of the picture at the right) at the bottom property boundary.  In one year.   Ice plant is a very vigorous, succulent invasive from South Africa, growing up to a meter in one season and rooting anywhere a stem touches the ground.  Since it needed to dry out a little before running it through the shredder to make into compost,  I threw it uphill as I pulled it.  This current project started with pulling all that half-dried material down to the bottom, and moving it laboriously up the stairs to my utility yard one forkful at a time, where the huge mound of it awaits an afternoon’s work with Chewie, my stalwart Troy-bilt chipper-shredder.

160 Keystone Legacy block will build a 35-foot long, 3-foot high wall.  I spent the afternoon and part of Saturday morning imitating a small draft animal, first carting trugs of gravel down to the bottom and then 4 blocks at a time on my garden cart from the driveway to the edge of the hill in the backyard.  I’d already dug the footer trench for the wall (see first photo) and laid a couple of block when I realized I needed to somehow get all of them down to the bottom before I could really start serious wall building.  So Sunday morning, that is what I did.

My method was what I’d call “ghetto.”  One woman, 160 blocks needing to be moved down 20 feet of ice plant on a 45 degree incline.  Carrying them down the stairs one by one was out of the question.  So I gerry-rigged an old half sheet of plywood backstop against the chainlink fence at the bottom, padded the whole affair with prunings of ice plant, and started rolling 55-lb blocks like bowling pins.

It worked.  No blocks were damaged in the making of this blog post.  And at $3.50 apiece, that’s a good thing.  Man, it was a lot of work, though.   I managed to get three at a time rolled down without hitting each other, then had to clamber down the spongy bed of ice plant to stack them safely out of the way, and climb back up to the top for another round of ghetto block bowling.

After a bit of rest, Sunday afternoon I started laying the first course.  This is the most important element of the wall, these first blocks; they must be perfectly level or everything above will turn out badly.  Following instructions, I laid a couple of inches of sharp gravel down, then set the block.  Ever laid flagstone or brick?  Levelling on a bed of sand is tricky at best; on gravel, near impossible.  So, I cheated a little and used a bit of decomposed granite fill dirt overtop the gravel, to get the level right. 

It’s turning out well.  I’ll backfill with gravel and lay weed-barrier cloth before pulling the dirt down as the courses go up.  More ice plant removal will be required.  Lots of compost to be made, hooray. 

Garden beds are dancing like sugar plums behind my eyelids.  I can’t look at that hill without seeing all three terraced beds completed and a marvelous Spring garden emerging from the compost-enriched soil.

The projecting begins

Things are getting busy here at Bear and Thistle West.

It finally sunk in over the holidays that my time here is short, and if I don’t plan things out I will never finish all the projects I’ve been wanting to do before I have to leave. 

The truth is (and I’m ok with this, really), if I don’t do them, they won’t get done.  Things like painting the house inside and out, replacing the falling-down back fence, rebuilding the termite-eaten pergola over the back patio, re-laying the cracked flagstone pathways over concrete, re-insulating the attic.  Stuff that needs done before the house is sold, several years down the road – basic material condition items that will ensure it gets a fair price and we’ll get as much equity out of it as possible.

Quite a lot of work, you might say, and you’re right.  But I’m loathe to pay someone to do a job I can do myself, and I actually like building and fixing stuff, so I’ll hire out only the most difficult tasks and perhaps the ones I cannot get to for lack of time.

We bought this little stucco and tile roof house nearly 11 years ago, long before I figured out I was a farmer and needed more than an eighth of an acre to be happy; until 4 years ago I thought I had years to tackle all the basic material improvements any 25-year-old residence needs.  After two long deployments and much time on the road, my projecting window is now a mere 22 months long.

Yikes.

So, the time has come to do some serious planning.  And I found just the thing:  a Gantt chart on Google Docs that I can access anywhere, and update and modify as I go along.  It took a few days to populate, and I’m sure my time estimates will need to flex as projects unfold, but what a great help it is, to be able to map out a proposed schedule over the next two Springs, Summers, and Winters (and one Fall), lining up outside work with long daylight months and reserving inside work for winter months.

Will I get it all done?  Maybe, maybe not.  But check it out – I am certain to accomplish more with a plan that lets me focus on one project at a time, knowing that “all that other stuff” will have its time; and the incentive of keeping to a schedule is just the motivation I need to use every little scrap of time gainfully, whether I’m able to stick to the project schedule or not.

I’m stoked.  And I love being stoked.  It’s one of my favorite feelings in all the world.

Project #1, Attic Decking and Re-insulation, evolved into a two-phase job.  It kicked off with the installation of a pull-down attic ladder done back in November, something I’d threatened to do for years, to make the house attic accessible for plumbing repairs and future ventilation upgrades.  Every time we had to drag the ladder in from the garage and climb up through the little access hole, I swore, loudly.   

The ladder had to be framed in offset of the ceiling joists to center on the hallway; a pain in the neck to say the least.  Bear was a great help with the sawzall and demolition, leaving the framing of the opening to me, and we teamed up to get the ladder hung, one person above and one below.  After I hung a couple of fluorescent lights from the trusses I could see where to lay down plywood decking so we weren’t just scrambling around on joists and rafters, and it quickly became apparent that the blown-in insulation was pitifully inadequate. 

So after the holidays I started the decking in earnest, which required adding more insulation, one section at a time, moving about on hands and knees or ducking under the waist-high truss members.  6 sheets of plywood sawn in fourths and five bales of cellulose insulation later, I have a fine storage attic, all holes sealed with foam, plenty of space to walk around, and insulation restored.  The cathedral ceiling portions of the attic, though, still need work.

Which will be Phase Two, done at a later date, because my Project Chart has me starting the back hill terracing and retaining wall construction this week.  I’d like to get that done so my Spring garden can go in those new growing beds, which will open up the backyard for the summer’s fence rebuilding project.

It’s good to have a plan.

New peas in January

It took a fair bit of self-discipline to pick the first pound of peas (just enough for two servings) and save them for shelling and cooking, instead of eating them like snacks right off the vine.

But it was so worth it.

This is a first for me; I’ve never grown English peas in my backyard garden, so I’ve never tasted the incredible sweet freshness of lightly-steamed new peas next to my steak and baked potato.  Let me tell you, it was heaven.  I could not believe my taste buds.

Thankfully I planted a second crop to follow this one, so we’ll have peas all winter, if all goes well.  I’m stoked.

Staying warm wherever you are

Brutal cold is making life difficult in many parts of the country right now.  Even Florida is feeling it, god bless ‘em, where fruit growers are spraying fields to protect their fruits with a coating of ice.

Just hunkering down in a warm house is a blessing when it’s this cold.  For all the folks out on roads and highways, this weather is a nightmare; scary, nerve-wracking, unpredictable.  And for those whose fortunes do not currently include a warm house to stay cozy in, it’s life-threatening.

I lived with bitter cold for many years, growing up in northern Colorado.  I remember it well, as do my fingertips; they still tingle with memory of mild frostbite and turn white and numb if I fail to protect them with gloves when the temperature drops.  And looking at Moonmeadow Farm’s  picture of her wood cookstove reminds me of waking up to frigid mornings in a drafty logging cabin at 6,000 ft, shivering out of bed to light a fire in the cold, dark mornings before work.  Yes, I know cold.  It’s been awhile, but I remember it.

It is 24 degrees this morning east of Campbellsville, KY at the Farm, and a light snow is falling.  At Ridgewind Farm in Virginia, where the horses are, it’s 22 but “feels like” 10 degrees, and cloudy.  In Vail, CO where Skidder is working the ski resorts, it’s 10 degrees and cloudy, too.

Out east of Fort Collins, Colorado (my home town) where the good folks of Boyles Family Farms  are hunkered down next to the wood stove, it is minus eleven degrees.  Now that’s cold!

In Bonita, California where I am it is currently 45 degrees and clear.  And it’ll probably get up to 75 this afternoon.  The disparity between our winter temps and what is experienced across the rest of the nation is never far from my mind.  I am mentally bracing myself, I think, to return to the real world of seasons that include the discomfort of cold.

Meanwhile, although it doesn’t take much to warm a 1,500-sq-ft house at this latitude, we burn a small fire in the evenings to take the chill off, with eucalyptus firewood bought locally from Garcia’s Firewood in El Cajon.  My little Toyota Tacoma has to make two trips to bring home half a cord, but that will last us well into next year, so the trouble is worth it.  The ashes enrich my compost pile and the labor of stacking and carrying in keeps me from getting too soft.

Wherever you are this morning, bundle up well when you go outside, shut the doors firmly behind you when you come in, keep the fire well-stoked, and stay warm.

What’s cooking got to do with farming?

Food is on my mind a lot these days, probably because the holidays are so centered around it in our home.

It’s getting a lot of attention everywhere, though.  In the press, in new book releases, documentaries, and on the internet, many urgent conversations are going on about finding, growing, buying, and eating nutritious, organic, and local food.  

Perhaps I am just being optimistic, but in my experience at least, an increasing awareness seems to be taking hold and spreading in the general populace, creating a ground swell of movement in favor of sustainable agriculture.  More people than ever before are being exposed to the awful truth about our failing industrial food system, realizing that our grandparents ate better tasting and higher quality food than we do, and are looking to get that pre-WWII level of nutrition and food safety back.

The good news is, that’s possible.  The not-so-good news is, it requires skills, that not everyone have. 

Mainly, that way of eating involved a lot of cooking, from scratch.  Not just heating up food out of a can, or assembling meals from prepared ingredients, or microwaving frozen dinners.  Cooking before the age of supermarkets with their vast offerings of ready-to-eat, processed foods was the real deal.  You started with simple, single ingredients, and transformed them into soups, casseroles, breads and pies; main dishes, snacks, breakfast and lunch, and don’t forget, deserts. 

Sounds romantic and a bit magical, doesn’t it? 

For the non-cook, it is.  My husband, for instance, would never, ever, attempt to bake a pie.  He loves pie, just doesn’t have the foggiest idea how to turn flour, butter, pumpkin, eggs, milk, and various spices into a delicious holiday dessert.  And vegetables?  If given a pound each of carrots and beets, a half an onion, three cloves of garlic, and a jar of home-canned chicken stock, he could no more make a pot of soup than pull a bunny from a hat.

Without my cooking skills, pie for him comes from the bakery section of the grocery store, and soup comes from a can.  He’s not alone in that category, and it isn’t just because he’s a man, that he doesn’t know how to cook.

It also generally takes more time to cook from scratch, and it creates more dirty dishes than making meals from cans and packages and freezer boxes.  These were the drawbacks that Madison Avenue capitalized on as the post-war economy blasted into the rocket age:  advertisers convinced women everywhere that cooking was a drudgery that had to be escaped from.  The new technology promised fast, delicious, convenient meals for the modern family, and with women joining the work force in leaps and bounds, it was a reasonable proposition with few detractors. 

Seemingly overnight, cooking became as simple as 1-2-3.   Brown some meat, boil some noodles, add a can of soup, and call it dinner.  Or, remove pizza from box, bake until cheese is brown and bubbly, and serve.  Better yet:  cut slit in plastic film over vegetables, microwave on high for 3 minutes; stir, heat 2 minutes more, and enjoy.

Not much skill involved, but that’s what makes those sorts of meals really convenient and hard to resist.  Sure beats eating out or ordering in on evenings when time is at a premium and the refrigerator is empty; sometimes a frozen pizza is all I have time or energy for, too.

Which is as much a part of the skill of cooking as knowing what to do with the ingredients. 

Planning meals around available foodstuffs, keeping basic ingredients on hand, knowing how to use produce in season, and being willing to invest the daily time and effort required to create meals from real food; this is an entire complex of essential skills for anyone really interested in eating well, whether you grow your own food, buy it from a farmer or farmers market, or shop the organic section in your local supermarket.

It is not difficult, but it is a lot of work, if you’re not used to it.  It is certainly more work than I want to do at the end of a long day sometimes, and I’m only cooking for two.  And I love to cook.  And, I’ve been cooking for thirty years, which means I’ve learned a few shortcuts and techniques that make it fun, and I’ve accumulated a wealth of kitchen tools and equipment that make it easier.   Still, doing it right can be a struggle many days.

But it is worth it.  Yes, it is very much worth it.  Because every meal I create from food taken straight from the ground or the pasture, as close to where it is grown as possible, is an act of farming.  It means I do not need the industrial food system, with its endless, empty variety and addicting convenience, to feed myself and my family.  I firmly believe that knowing how to cook with real food is just as critical to changing the shape of agriculture as is making different choices in the food we buy to eat.  

As surely as eating is an agricultural act, as Wendell Berry has so eloquently said, so too is cooking. 

Because let’s face it:  all the fresh, organic vegetables and meat from healthy, happy animals grown on sustainable farms, are just pretty photo props if you can’t turn them into dinner.

It’s Christmas!

Lots of places in the country are cold and covered with snow; not here, in San Diego, and not at the farm, where it’s raining and 50 degrees, but lots of other places.  Dallas got a White Christmas this year, for pete’s sake. 

But I can pretend, and be glad for my current climate.  So while the men-folk are out with the horses and dogs on the pond, cutting ice and hauling it to the ice house, I’ll get the pie dough made, start the bacon and eggs and cranberry muffins for breakfast, and prep the potatoes for this evening’s ham feast.

Speaking of food, I made a beet-and-carrot soup last night that is sure to become a Christmas tradition.  Photos and recipe later; it was delicious!

Merry Christmas to all, stay warm out there!

Moving snow (and hay) with horses

Jason sent this photo from southwest Virginia, where they are pretty well snowed in.  They’re hauling hay up the hill to the horses on this “pony” grader, as well as plowing snow with it, obviously.

Those aren’t ponies, though; those are Jason’s Suffolk geldings, Tong and Wedge.   So why’s this thing called a pony grader?  I had to google that… and the one pertinent result was from the History Trust of South Australia’s website: 

Very light and small graders were used in areas that bigger machinery could not access. They were made entirely of steel and could be pulled by a ‘light’ horse – hence the nickname ‘pony grader’. The graders were considered particularly useful on steep narrow tracks, where turning was difficult. For this purpose it could be used with two ‘light’ horses. These graders had only two axles and four wheels, the front wheels are much smaller than the rear wheels. They had a work capacity of 2-3 kms an hour. Unfortunately because of their light frame, the small graders could not work in rocky terrain, and they only operated effectively if the soil was moist. This limited use of the graders to two or three months of the year.

I would have a great deal of use for one of these on my farm, with my long, steep road up to the hilltop pastures that requires regular grading, and plans to build access roads around and across my pastures as time and energy permits.

Won’t have so much use for moving snow with it, though.  Was just telling Jason that my area there in south-central Kentucky only gets a few snowfalls each winter, of the several inches variety, and the snow melts quickly.  That’s a blessing in many ways, as getting chores and work done with snow on the ground is always more difficult, and sometimes impossible. 

I will have to find a different excuse for hunkering down by the woodstove in the middle of the winter, then.