Baby, it's wet outside

We are having a slower weekend than usual. I have painted around past the printing press along the east wall of the garage, built a bed along the west wall of the house, made a little bit of firewood, planted a few hills of lettuce, chard, calabrese, beets, red cabbage, bok choi, potatoes and peas -- sounds like a lot, but this is only about twenty feet of bed -- an example of polyculture.

A project I have been putting off, because I knew I didn't have the strength, was to take down Tall Son's old basketball hoop. The backboard, I could see, was coming undone -- thirty-year-old particle board backed by three-quarter-inch plywood, mounted on two wings of heavy plywood bolted at regulation height to the power pole that feeds our house with four 9/16X6 inch lag screws. And soggy from the rains, which have come back. As in -- HEAVY.

But, as I looked it over, I realized the thing had been moved to the pole from the front of the garage by my dad, the kind of project in which he excelled back in the day (having been a railroad lineman most of his life), by installing an even bigger bolt four feet higher up, and hoisting the assembly into place with a pulley. All I'd have to do was reverse the operation.

Except the wings would swing past the pole and knock me from the ladder once the last bolt came out. How to get up the ladder and back down without being ... encouraged ... to come down, as in suddenly?

I went to the garage and enlisted the aid of a good long rope.

Mounting the ladder against the back of the pole, I climbed up (carefully, rain coming down in buckets now), threw the rope over the bolt, lipped it through the hoop, and climbed down and carried the rope end across the driveway and tied it off to the keypost of the woodshed. Then tied the other end to a tee post in the garden. What we had now was a rope slide -- the kind you might use to slide out over a swimming hole and drop in. Except the idea here was for the hoop to slide down to the driveway -- away from your truly.

This actually worked pretty well, although the backboard, old, wet, and disintegrative (is that a word?) pulled itself loose from the hoop and fell onto the driveway midway through the slide. The main goal, though -- not to get whacked -- was accomplished.

Every farm needs lots of rope.

I had asked Tall Son if he wanted the hoop, and he didn't (I hope he remembers that), so I pulled all the rotted netting off and carried it out to the right-of-way to see if anyone else might like to have it. Curbing your freebies is a strong tradition around here, and one should give as one gets.

I put my toys away, came in, hung up my coat by the woodstove to dry, and made myself a mug of coffee laced with Irish Cream. Not local, but some indulgences are worth it, till TEOTWAWKI comes anyway.

:::

Beloved went Friday to get feed and asked about Rhode Island Reds.

"We had some, but they're all taken, you wanta get on the list for next Friday?"

"Yes, please. I'd like eight."

So, yesterday, Saturday, she's gone all day to the pruning workshop at Master Gardeners, gets in, and there's a message on the phone: "Your-Reds 're-in-come-and-get-'em-before-five-bye."

"Dang!" she said. (Our idea of strong language doesn't amount to much.) "They're closed. Somebody must have changed their mind and now I have chicks. But I can't get at them."

"How old are they?"

"They're in, like, a big brooder and old enough to eat and drink, so they're safe for a day or two, but the crowd in there tend to trample each other -- I have to get them Monday, but I work."

"Maybe call in late?"

"No, early is important for this shift. What I'm gonna do, I think, is bring the rooster cage Monday morning, with chick feed and a a chick waterer, and pick them up and bring them to work with me; they can stay by my desk ... what?"

"Are you kidding? With the racket they'd make?"

"Oh, my crowd are used to it. I bring ducklings to storytime whenever I have a batch. And -- " (mischievous twinkle in her eye) -- "all of my co-workers are egg customers!"

[note, added later. They are home now and so cute!!!!]

"All at the least possible expense"

 

Although I did plant another sixteen hills of peas and sixteen potatoes, and painted the foundation of the south side of the house, most of the "farm" weekend was devoted to the garage/shop project. Most vertical surfaces are getting a single coat of cheap white latex, the kind that says "tint base" on the can. The results aren't pretty, but it's not why we're doing this.

 It's a generous two-car garage of the kind built sixty years ago, and is cavernous, with open rafters, and dark, with rough-cut barn boards nailed horizontally along full-size 2x6 studs, as in two by six inches, not 1.5 by 5.5 inches. Hundreds of eighteen-penny and twenty-four penny nails protruded from these walls in all directions, and held old loops of baling wire, Romex, fan belts, and odd tools the day we moved in. 

It stormed all that week, and we just hung things right on top of what was already there, and over the next sixteen years, the area became something of a family midden. We're digging out this winter and sorting, putting away, and hauling away, and one of the first things we noticed during the recent pre-project tour of inspection was that it's too dark in there to really try to do any work. And the work benches aren't the worst in the world. 

One way to throw more light on the work areas is increase bulb wattage, but we're reasoning we'd like to do projects in there, on rainy days, by natural light, and should there be a long interruption of power, by lamplight if necessary. Hence the paint. The one coat has enough albedo, even with old moisture stains and rough grain showing through, to brighten up the whole area -- and when a tiny screw falls to the bench, my fifty-nine year old nearsighted eyes can find it! 

You may notice, in the photo, the bench vise and grinder are rather large. Ladies, if you're setting up shop in a space like this for your small farm, don't get a dinky little vise. Unless you have the same upper body strength as the guys (some do!) you will need bigger stuff because the equipment's strength or weight makes up for what you may lack in leverage yourself. You'll also want pipes of varying size and length to slip over handles like the one on our vise so as to give the handle that little bit of extra torque that the he-men provide with their shoulders. 

There's a terrific discussion of the mechanics of women's bodies in a farm setting in an old book (1976) that's worth tracking down: Country Women: A Handbook for the New Farmer by Jeanne Tetrault and Sherry Thomas. I just peeked and Amazon has "14 used and new from $9.89" and I think that's a steal even with the shipping charge. As it says on the front cover, "How to negotiate a land purchase, dig a well, grow vegetables organically, build a fence and shed, deliver a goat, skin a lamb, spin yarn and raise a flock of good egg-laying hens, all at the least possible expense and with minimum reliance on outside and professional help."

We're happy to have renewed access to this space, with countertops and tabletops, because we'll want to build several things in the near term that will need a lot of room while making: first, seven horizontal awnings for the windows that get the most sun, using burlap, lath and shelf brackets; second, a solar food dryer, third, a solar oven using a defunct microwave as the core unit, and fourth, a bicycle trailer capable of hauling either a kayak to the river (1 mile) or a bale of straw from the feed store (2 miles). We'd also like to get back into wine making ... .

And one Italian prune plum tree

Pear trees going into the pasture beyond the plums. Each tree
will get its own wire cage, from a recycled fence, and a mixed
mulch of hay, sawdust, and twigs.

[risa] Beloved, home more than usual for the weekend, tackled her monthly chore of mucking out the barn. Old poultry-enriched straw was forked out and barrowed down to places among the garden beds that won't be planted within ninety days (for health reasons). Then, with the pickup, she went up to the feed store (about two miles) and bought four 100-pound bales of straw. Each one was muscled up to the barn on a wheel barrow and stacked into the barn, and a bale that was already there was cut up and distributed liberally round both barn and chicken pen. This bale had had time to get ever so slightly buggy, so that it was a real treat for the hens, who went about underfoot scratching with hale and hearty abandon.

While all this was going on, I divided my time between planting and spring-cleaning the garage: plant one pear tree, clear a section of garage wall; plant another pear tree, paint the section of wall and then drop the paintbrush in a pail of water and move the ladder; plant peas and potatoes, put away things on a section of wall where the paint has dried ...

Wait a minute, you ask. Peas and potatoes in February? Granted the ground isn't frozen, as Risa lives in the Willamette Valley, but ... ?

Well, I tried the soil thermometer; it's 40 F in the garden soil. Which is okay; but I actually don't plant right into the ground at this time of year, even with peas -- mostly because the poor things may drown in a cold downpour.

Last summer we spread cardboard over fifty-by-three foot beds and covered it with leaves and hay. The cardboard hasn't faded into the soil yet, but it's wet and very fragile. The hay has made some compost, but as you might expect, not much. But there's a way to do early planting in such beds.

I carry a bucket with potting soil in it, a packet of seeds, a small bag of potato slips, a trowel stuck in the potting soil, and a square plastic half-pint freezer container for scooping.

Along one side of the bed (and later the other) I kneel on my little kneeling bench, put the point of the trowel into the hay, and kind of swirl the trowel around, creating a kind of a bird's nest cup in the hay, or shredded leaves, with the cardboard as its floor. When planting seeds, I want the seeds to have little trouble finding soil, so I rough up the cardboard a little bit with the trowel point, so that I do see dirt in the bottom of the hole. With the freezer container (sans lid, of course) I scoop about a cup-and-a-half of potting soil from the bucket, pour it into the hole, and tamp it down a bit (not too much) with the side of the container. This makes a seed bed about five to six inches across. Now I take three peas from the packet, arrange them in a triangular pattern on the potting soil, five inches apart, pressing them down a little, and then scoop another cup-and-a half of potting soil from the bucket over them, tamping down with the empty container again. And move on to the next spot.

Takes much less time to do than to describe.

In effect, this is "hill" planting. In season, you may do it with beets, radishes, beans of all kinds, squash, corn, brassicas, etc. We've done this for years, with our heavy clay soil so cold and wet there was no hope of ever getting it cultivated in time for a proper garden any other way we've heard of. And we're too poorly in the lower back to make real raised beds. We might even try this with tomatoes and peppers, under cloches, and skip the greenhouse step ( there have been problems with mice there). Haven't yet. Will experiment a little this year.

The peas are well above the clammy clay in a dark, friable medium that will hold them as seedlings, out of the wind but well watered, until they can put down roots.

Oh, potatoes! Well, we have been cutting sections (we call them "slips") with sprouts off home-grown (and thus easily sprouted) soup potatoes all winter, and saving them in the cold room for early planting. I had enough for about half a bed, alternating spots with the pea hills, or every 12 inches a hill, another twelve inches, a potato slip. Put it right on the damp cardboard, under six inches (for now) of hay and shredded leaves. So, while it might be too early for the spuds, if the gardening angel smiles, we're good, and she doesn't, we can easily enough replant, as this is only the beginning of our biggest effort toward succession planting to date.

Oh, and! How many pear trees? Two Anjou, two Bartlett, two Bosc. And one Italian prune plum tree, to go with the plums already on hand.
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