Make your own seasoning

Though the color did not come through in the photo, believe me that the product is a lovely shade of green.

What we have here is veggie and herb foliage from this summer's solar drying campaign. When we don't have tomatoes and apples in the dryers, we cut leaves from whatever and dry those. This year's mix is mostly collard greens with kale, red cabbage, green cabbage, chard, broccoli leaves, cauliflower leaves, beet greens, spinach, bok choi, nasturtiums, mint, garlic and onion leaves, basil, lettuce, dandelions, chickweed, lambs-quarters, marjoram, rosemary, sage, thyme, cilantro, celery, parsley (not necessarily in descending order). 2009 featured most of the above, except turnip greens in the place of collards.

The leaves, when onion-skin dry, are then manually crumbled with the veins and midribs picked out, then stored in airtight jars. They can be used in breads, soups, and such as is, and any excess can be mixed with the poultry's winter feed as a supplement.

To make the seasoning, simply run it all through the grinder as shown. If the moisture content is higher than you thought, this is when you will notice, as the grinder will clog. But otherwise it is easy. The result tastes great, and a pinch of it sprinkled over your breakfast eggs, or added to mashed or baked potatoes and so on, gives meals a certain sophistication -- or anyway Risa thinks so ...

A light dusting

 A light dusting of the white stuff. Chickens, geese and Khaki Campbells are not fazed, but the Ancona ducks are sulking in their shed.

 It will go to 16F tonight, they're now saying. Risa will try to cover a few things and reset the mudroom door, which is leaking too much heat.

For once, we're not the only house in the neighborhood with a white roof!

Update: It only went down to 29. That's a long way from 16. Predicting weather seems to be getting more difficult as time goes by. Are you noticing this too?

Hang onto the bucket

It's about to be serious cooking time here at Stony Run, with fifteen invited guests. Heck, if you're nearby, come on over! But please watch the road reports. Many people we know will have snow tonight, maybe even us, and tomorrow night is predicted for a low of 18F.

We have never owned a dishwasher, and our kitchen sink currently does not have a drain connection. So, you may well wonder how we function for an occasion such as this.

In warmer weather, I like to go into the washer room, where there is a spigot over the laundry sink, right by the hot water heater, that dispenses very hot water. I carry a big pitcher out to that spigot for my dish water, because the pipes, though they are insulated, seem to take a long, long time getting hot enough water to the kitchen for actual use.

In wood-burning weather, our dishwater heats up on the wood heat stove in the dining room.

We use a biodegradable garden-safe dish soap.

Two dishpans, a wash and a rinse. When the water needs changing we pour it into a white bucket. This is also the compost bucket. Between us, the chickens, and the ducks, very little kitchen waste actually makes it to the bucket.

After its contents have cooled (capture all heat in the house) the bucket goes out to the mudroom and an empty one is brought in.

When opportunity arises, kitchen buckets go to fruit trees. A little straw now and then does the cosmetic number on any crushed eggshells that might otherwise be regarded as unsightly.

As these bucketfuls tend to be slightly alkaline, they are not offered to blueberries, rhodies and the like.

We clean the sink from time to time, perhaps with some Dr. Bronners or with homemade vinegar, and let it drain into a bucket under the sink. This water goes on the small lawn (about 1/8 the size of the lawn that was here when we got here).

It's very hard to fix pipes in our crawl space. Even though we expect to climb under there and do the work sometime, we might still hang onto the bucket system as it saves on irrigation.

Slugs into eggs

The ducks, unlike the chickens, don't nuke the garden when allowed into it; so we keep the chickens in the chicken moat, which here is hidden behind the forest of sunchokes behind the collards. There are ducks that live in the moat as well -- Khaki Campbells. They would do just as well in the garden, but separating them out would be more work than we're really up for. These are Anconas.

Still no frost, so there is lots going on in those beds to interest the ducks. They chow down whenever they're not napping -- mostly slugs, pill bugs, earwigs, and various kinds of bug eggs. All this gets converted into duck eggs for quiche and such. They would eat kale eventually if they ran out of bugs, but so far, so good. They need the bucket of water while visiting as it's a ways to their pools from here, and their beaks cake up with mud. They have to run to the bucket whenever the mud covers their nostrils. So the bucket's pretty important to them.

Double duty

In the crock pot is chicken and rice with chopped celery and onions, and spices. Risa has removed the lid, inserted a bowl of collard, chard, kale, and beet greens, and popped the pot lid over the greens. The one will steam while the other cooks. No other dinner prep needed today -- or tomorrow, she thinks.

Taking advantage

Winter is icumen in, albeit slowly. We have had only one frost -- October 27 this year -- and it was a very light one. But NOAA has promised us a wet, windy and long winter, due to La Niña, and our first serious storm came through, throwing hail and lightning bolts, raising thirty-foot swells on the ocean, dropping snow in the highlands, and knocking out our neighborhood's power for a couple of hours. This was nothing like what people went through in Minnesota recently, but it served as a reminder. Risa moved dinner from the crockpot to the stockpot and set it on the wood stove, and bustled around the house trimming wicks and cleaning lamp chimneys, just in case. She also inventoried the stored water and decided we were down to about half of what we'd need for a longer outage, so when the power was restored, she set about replacing old water and storing more.

We have enough flush water year round, as we installed a pitcher pump on the spare well, and half the year there's a running creek behind the house (still dry this year). But we like to put up drinking water for long outages. Vodka bottles, with just a few drops of the strong stuff left in the bottom, are our favorites, as they seem to last a long time without maintenance. Other bottles have to be changed out and washed from time to time. We store the water in crates in the cold room, and bring them up as needed during the power outages.

This is a dark house in winter and we tend to move into the dining room until spring. The wood stove is there, and next to it is our biggest window. Eighteen years ago, when we moved in, we were dismayed at the amount of heat loss through this single-pane "picture" window, so we rehabilitated it by framing a salvaged sliding glass door, of similar dimensions, into it, which pretty much stopped the cold without stopping the light. This window faces west, and has to be shaded in summer, but in the cold months, it's a delight. We've mounted a shelf outside it, the length of the window, to offer seed for small winter birds, and we sit by the stove nibbling our feed while they nibble theirs.

During outages, the light from this window becomes as important as the stove during the day. Here, and nowhere else, it's light enough to thread a needle and catch up on mending, or pick up a novel or play a board game, without electricity. I think, if you don't have a spot where you can easily cook over wood and do chores by winter sunlight, it can really worth your while to make one.

The rains were incessant enough that Risa brought the laptop over to the dining room table and re-edited one of her books and published it on Lulu, then built a "scenic" calendar and published it the very next day. The calendar, featuring Stony Run photos, is not cheap, but we'll get our copies at cost and they will make nice gifts for our scattered clan.

After three days of wind and rain, we had, yesterday, a surprisingly summery day-long "blue hole." Tee shirt weather! Risa put down the computer and picked up her scythe. The garden had been waiting to be put to bed.

After the squash and bean vines, and the eggplants and tomatoes were felled, eighteen bags of leaves were spread, followed by a cosmetic dusting of straw. The giant collards, kale, broccoli, chard, and beet greens, along with some new favas, have been left standing to see how they do. We'll be on the lookout for more leaves, but the bulk of the work got done in one day! One of the glories of retirement is that when such an opportunity arises, you're like as not there to take advantage of it.

What to do

Now for the serious post -- and then back to our regular programming. (I know, I keep saying that).

A lot of bloggers in Risa's circle, and Risa will admit she falls into this category, are like passengers on the Titanic who, having read up on icebergs in the North Atlantic, and learned a little from confidantes among the crew -- concerning rate of travel, turning radius, inertia, and visibility -- and, having some awareness of risk management (as explained to them by the insurance companies who are always raising their rates), send a little note to the Captain: "Shouldn't we -- umm -- slow down a little?"

And we're Pollyanna enough to hope that the Captain might consider this plea. But he has orders from his own 'Captains" -- the Captains of Industry: full speed ahead.

So we see that our own painstakingly acquired risk assessment is not to be taken into account. Risk assessment is supposed to lead to a decision tree, which one consults in order to take some action. If there's no action forthcoming from the authorities, perhaps we creep back to our berths and think about ways to get our hands on a life vest and maybe even a seat on one of the boats?

There are damned few of these boats, though. And if you look at China's spending patterns over the last five years, you realize the seats are being bought up fast.

Why all the interest in lifeboats?

Okay -- and here Risa is mostly cribbing from a left-leaning but usually moderately cautious statistician whom she greatly admires -- let's think about this: there's this index, called the Palmer Index, thought up in the 60s, for studying drought. +4 is very wet conditions. -4 is very dry. Charts of this usually show light yellow and light green as near normal precipitation and soil moisture for the mean climate in any given location -- it's a relative index, not absolute precipitation.

The Palmer picture of the world in the 1950s looks like this:



There were some droughts. Farmers in Nebraska and Ukraine may still remember them.

Now: Stuart Staniford, Risa's statistician, calls attention in his blog to a post by Kevin Drum on a paper by Aiguo Dai (a scientist at NCAR) that reviews all the available peer-reviewed projections of drought given the rise of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere (yes, we're harping on that again).

The concatenation of those projections paints this picture for the 2030s:



This is the wet-areas-will-get-wetter, dry-areas-will-get-dryer scenario climate scientists keep talking about. The red areas are about the same as the Dust Bowl in the U.S. in the 1930s. But see all that purple? That's a Palmer Index of -8 to -20. Worse than the Dust Bowl. In about twenty garden years. Think about how many people live in those areas now.

For those who are young yet, here's the Palmer chart for fifty years out:



Think about how many people live in those areas now.

For those of us still interested in voting for Tea Party-type candidates, remember that nearly every one of those denies there is any truth in any of this whatever -- it's a "scam" by a "conspiracy" that wants your money and to return you to the good old days of Stalin. So to forestall Mr. Stalin they are all about "Full Speed Ahead" on our version of the Titanic.

But that seems to be true no matter who's in charge; as our world comes up against its limits, and our economic well-being is increasingly tied to borrowings that will never be repaid, risk assessment becomes social capital we no longer have -- a luxury. We mostly don't fix the dikes, even after a Katrina, because we don't see how we can afford it.

So everyone's life is now being placed on the line, based on the older risk assessments that were formulated under the conditions that prevailed in the 1950s.

Meditate on the first chart above, then the other two, again.

The projections, remember, are not worst-case.

They are an average of available projections -- the kind real insurance companies use. Iceberg right ahead.

So, uhh, what to do now?

Answer: not so much.

Dmitri Orlov has just posted on what kind of social order is likely to arise under such conditions.

Survivalists start their spiel here, and talk about "bug-out-bags" and "retreats" -- but those aren't really likely to be seats in the lifeboat, long term. Not with that much purple on the Palmer. Ultimately, all the successful testosterone-y survivalists will be on Toyotas. 

 

 

 

For however long that lasts.

For the rest of us, there will be two options: 1. Go back to the house and say our tearful goodbyes. 2. Go back to the house and Get to know the neighbors.

Risa likes the second one, though she admits she's been shilly-shallying. What she's doing in the meantime is learning how to adapt her water-conserving and food-raising habits to the already changing conditions. If she turns out to be good at it, she might have something to offer the neighborhood.

Oh, come on, the reader might say -- lame.

Well, maybe, but it beats riding the Toyota (she has a bad back) or trying to reach Canada (at her age?) or spending the remainder of her days watching record hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods on Fox News (and listening to the worse-than-inane commentary: "this is all Obama's fault"). When not adapting, she can (while circumstances allow) always play a few board games or pour some mint tea for a friend. Until, maybe, her kidneys blow out. Which, maybe, was next anyway, yes?

You there, in the far back, behind the sleepers snoring in the twelfth row -- you had a question? Louder, please -- very deaf. Oh -- about that adapting?

Okay, assume enough stability that you get to grow some things and harvest them. Kindest thing to do while waiting for a killer drought -- for yourself and others.

There's a read she can recommend so that you can make the fewest mistakes in pursuit of this commendable "adapting" goal: The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times.

Carol Deppe, the author, basically makes the case for attention, in most (formerly?) "temperate" climes, to five crops: Potatoes. Ducks. The Three Sisters -- Squash (winter), Beans, and Flint Corn.

Get out of debt. Stay out of debt. Move, if necessary, to where you can do these things. Locate water. Double up, if necessary. It's not just selfish behavior. By doing this you reduce the burden on others elsewhere. Right now, for example, in Risa's county, an agricultural county in one of the richest valleys in the world, we're a quarter of a million producing about five per cent of the food we consume. So everyone who starts a potato patch is helping everyone else -- not just themselves.

Can't move? There's another way to approach this, and it doesn't depend on getting in line for a tiny plot in the community gardens.

Aaron Newton, an "edible landscape" designer who writes books with adaptation maven Sharon Astyk, wrote, back in March, my favorite all-time blog post. In it he talks about his neighborhood, showing first a map with only his own place marked in red.

I started by going across the street and asking my elderly neighbor if I could garden in her backyard. Then I recruited Eric who grows food in his backyard and is transitioning into a career as a farmer. Next I was able to start a garden in the backyard of the rental house next door to my property. It was part of a bartering arrangement whereby the landlord agreed to take down a few dying trees and in return I now grow food on her property. All of these active gardens are shown in dark green.

The green bits expand over time and several iterations of the map. Great, you say -- only not everyone has either a strong back or land they want to turn into a garden.

But! Everyone likes to eat.


Blue is those who would like to buy the produce. Orange is those who would be willing to contribute compost (grass clippings, for example). Perhaps we need purple -- for the Toyota that might just be willing to trade protection for our diligence in farming?

Ok, so maybe we lost some of you there. But the rest ... got it now? This -- small farming, smaller farming, or even smaller farming -- or any neighborhood-based trade to trade for the produce of such farms -- is what to do.

A nice kind of conversation

Yesterday was our closest brush with frost so far, with a low of 36F, so Risa's thoughts have turned to chutney. There are zukes, cukes, green tomatoes and apples in varying states of non-storability, and Beloved brought home three boxes of jam pint and half-pint jars for her to play with. So today is play day.

Risa's running the grater over a mixing bowl, grating a zucchini, a cuke, an apple, an elephant garlic clove, an onion, four green tomatoes, and repeat. When there's about a gallon and a half in the pot, with about two quarts of homemade vinegar, a cup of molasses, some brown sugar, a small handful of sea salt, and a handful of dehydrated greens, she cooks it all down a ways, does a taste test, adds cinnamon, nutmeg, and paprika until she's satisfied, and cooks off a lot of the moisture, stirring frequently to prevent burning. Another approach, in case she can't hang around to stir, is to cook it down in the crock pot(s).

Sometimes there's stems, such as from broccoli, chard, cabbage or kale leaves, or celery; these Risa dices up very small with her cleaver and precooks them in the zapper before adding them to the chutney. Green tomatoes that moosh too much in the grater may get the cleaver treatment as well. She's never seen the need to use electric gadgets for this sort of thing. In cold enough weather, she does the cooking part on the wood stove instead of an electric burner. That electric stove thingy runs a serious amount of juice.

The densest material today is the green-zuke-skin part. When that reaches palatability, she takes the pot off the burner, puts the canning kettle on, fills the jars, runs them for about 18 minutes at the boil, and sets them aside to seal.

Risa looks through the steamed-up kitchen window. Leaves are drifting down from the cottonwood onto the blueberry patch, which is aflame with our only real fall foliage so far. Camouflaged by the cottonwood and blueberry leaves, California quail are visiting, sifting through the mulch for small bugs and other tidbits.

The jars are sealing. "Tink," one says. Another replies. It's a nice kind of conversation.

Life of Marley

"Fire season" has begun

There was an expression, beginning to fade now from the language: "Life of Riley." Riley was a sitcom character who, my parents told me, always managed to find his way to the hammock; he was used in our family as an example of someone not to emulate. I don't remember the show, though we had television by the time I was four, though pictures of the star, William Bendix, do look familiar to me.

I have noticed that the meaning of the expression as generally used has a different connotation than it did to us; one envisions a certain tone of entitlement. One gets to live the life of Riley if one can afford to, either through money or after a lifetime of hard work. I'm told the usage dates back to nineteenth century Ireland and the O'Reillys, who at one time minted their own coinage.

There has always been a cat, sometimes two, at Stony Run; we've been here long enough to lose two from old age. We're not especially cat people, but circumstances have led to the presence of these moderately standoffish creatures at "barn and hearth" -- mostly hearth. They freeload a lot, and deem their keep paid for by the rare gift of a mouse at the doorstep.

The current cat, Marley, was hard on us at first. She wasn't raised here as a kitten, and she'd had the run of the counters and tabletops in her former home. Cat food was disdained as beneath her. We would find the butter licked and the chicken despoiled at our every turn, and would snatch her from the pancake batter and chuck her out the front door, only to have her muddy the walls, dismantle the window screens and scratch up the panes in her efforts to return to her chosen avocation. Just entering the house at night was difficult for us; Marley would have no truck with the farm after sundown, and would bowl us over to get inside.

We thought of handing her on -- but to whom? It wouldn't be fair to anyone we knew.

But Marley's middle years have arrived. It's getting harder for her to pursue her former prey -- the forbidden bread, quiches and pies of her misspent youth. Yet, at the same time, she's hunting more -- and more effectively. She avoids the barn itself, perhaps thinking the hens will walk up behind her and commence pecking, but she handles rodent traffic in that general direction reasonably well.

The current crop of window screens are unslashed. We do find her on a table from time to time, but we long ago learned to keep the butter covered; and she seems less inclined to lift and toss aside the lid than formerly. Never a lap cat in her youth, she's beginning to take into consideration the advantages of lap-high radiant heating. Winter is a-comin' in, and as the woodstove routine begins, Marley finds her way to the "hammock" of her choice -- Beloved's lap.

Thus have we learned that even those who get a late start can earn enough points to attain a "life of Marley."

"I like th' food"

Dawn patrol

We roll into October warmer than expected, and the garden shows no signs of being willing to be put to bed. So we've excluded the poultry for now, as the chickens were pecking at every tomato that showed a hint of pink.

A benefit of all this hen-scratching has been that they aren't very partial to potatoes. Several sacks full have been uncovered for the picking up without our resorting to the potato hook. With backs as old as ours, that is quite a plus.

Risa has continued juicing and would share her grape-apple-blackberry-tomato recipe but it hasn't found favor with anyone but her, so far. That's the way of it with "yard foodie" cuisine. Once you limit yourself, largely, to what's on hand and in season, your palate quickly adjusts, but this leaves behind most, if not all, of "Rabbit's friends and relations," who may view your concoctions with increasing distrust and distance.

Risa's cooking has improved of late, through practice, but, in the eyes of some, it has suffered from her self-imposed limits of trying to work with what she's grown or gathered. She thinks it's good practice for what's down the road; they'd rather wait and cross that bridge when they come to it. But what if the bridge is down when we all get there? Studied your bridge-building yet?

A study of what's being eaten in "remote" (i.e., not hyper-trained to HFCS) portions of the globe will show that, to most, food is food and be damned glad you've got it. This is much the refrain that Risa heard when she was at table in her childhood; her dad grew up in a very destitute sharecropper's family and experienced the worst of the Depression, an experience that still dictates the old man's views today, at 94.

But there is something to it. The crop gains promised by the "green revolution" -- more and  better chemicals toward a better life for all -- have become more and more unreliable as the weaknesses of monoculture become evident. Also, unfavorable weather is increasing in the presence of a troposphere increasingly laden with moisture and energy as solar heat, bouncing back up through the air as infrared radiation, is trapped in more and more carbon dioxide. This is an effect easily demonstrated in any high school science classroom and vehemently denied by corporate flacks and their favored politicians. As a result, "yard foodies" -- and the odd meals that implies -- seem likely to be a wave of the near future, even in nations that have become accustomed to "plenty."

There was a short-lived sitcom, years ago, that featured a new prisoner being shown the ways of a prison by the experienced cons -- how to cheat the system mostly, but also all the best ways of venting. They were showing him how to bitch about the prison food, but a big Georgia boy a ways down the table, chowing down vigorously, opined, "I like th' food."

Risa's dad laughed loud and long, and ever after, at the drop of some bony squirrel stew from someone's spoon, would pass the terrifying bowl to the visitor again, saying: "I like th' food." It became his all-time favorite expression, to the exasperation of missus and daughter. But, then, he'd been a drill instructor in the military. That's said to affect one's outlook.

Years later, as she desperately invents one over-aged-kale recipe after another in her study of yard-only fooding, Risa remembers the saying. She's tempted to try it on her Safeway-trained visitors. But she's learned to keep two kinds of food supplies on hand, and also to rely on Beloved's greater experience when "entertaining." You gotta know when folks are ready for things, if you hope to see them again any time soon!

The land bank

We only know a few of our neighbors, after eighteen years; it's a very conservative community and we're a "non-traditional" couple. Yet the folks we've actually met, we like. Get-togethers are rare; if you aren't going to the local church (ours is in town) you aren't going to be invited to the parties. We have friends over regularly but they are mostly from the urban center, twenty minutes away via gasoline.

One way to get to know people is to join the Neighborhood Watch and attend meetings. We plan to do that but, uhhh, we've not yet discovered when and where those are. But it's a potential starting point. I have heard that our local one was started because many of the young people being raised around here have reached the age where it's cool to raid your buddies' parents' house for stuff. A phase; they'll grow out of it, we hope. Stony Run doesn't seem to be part of that loop at present, thank goodness.

Meanwhile, it's fun to speculate on what might happen around here if neighbors were suddenly forced to rely on those in their immediate surroundings for survival.

It's an exercise we can recommend. Do a walk tour or a bike tour (Cowboy did his on horseback, which he discovered opens up conversations) and see what's out there. Where's the water? The timber? Stone, gravel? Good soil? What kinds of buildings are there? Who's advertising their skills as home businesses? What's growing? What could be grown? How adaptable are the various properties? Here's a three-mile bike loop with a few notes on what's to be seen.

This place, on a street corner with a strategic Neighborhood Watch sign, is the edge of a built-up section. It was forty acres once, but was subdivided into five acre plots, still with one owner, though. The first time Risa saw it, it was all in wheat. For the last 35 years, it's had hay taken off it and one rental house, a double-wide, installed. It's much better land than Stony Run's and would easily support a wide variety of agricultural activities, and would be a good site for a farm stand as well. Except for the hay going away, it has essentially fallowed all this time. This is very typical for the area. The Mighty River flows by in the middle distance, at the foot of the mountains -- about a mile away. Some farmers have irrigation rights from there, but not all do. Much would depend on the availability of wells. Drought has been known to affect these.

Much of the open land one sees while pedaling through here is in pasture, and much of that is for horses. The grass is plentiful and nutritious but dries up in late summer and also becomes relatively non-nutritious in the ubiquitous winter rains; much hay and feed is bought in. The horses tend to be play-pretties. Some get ridden; most don't. None locally are doing any plowing or carting, though one supposes they could be re-trained in a pinch. Most transportation is by massive V-8s.

Exotics are popular; llamas, alpacas and emus abound. People buy them for a lot of money, feed them for a few years, then sell at a loss. Not sure what that's about. One farmer keeps a regular mid-sized flock of sheep with one llama for coyote protection and that does seem to work well.

A number of residents keep beef cattle, from a handful to fifty or so. Word is that there are some free-range pigs and goat-cheese operations around, but none show up in the bike tour. There are no CAFOs, apparently; which is a blessing. The mountain in the distance is all Federal lands -- about half Bureau of Land Management and half National Forest. Logging (by clearcut), though much reduced over the last couple of decades, is the principal economic activity in this rural area.

The light green stripe near the mountain is feed corn -- about 100 acres. This is bottom land, near the river. Corn, like other summer crops, is a bit of a risk, though, as the growing season in this valley is shorter so close to the mountain range. Not shown here are the many tractors and attachments left out in the long winter rains -- here, as elsewhere, Americans are notable for their unwillingness to maintain equipment they will wish they still had, someday. The whole mountain is a park, by the way -- frequented by hordes of hikers from the nearby urban center.

There are a number of nurseries; most of them seem to specialize in shrubs and small trees for landscaping, with some focus on things like blueberries and fruit trees. Orcharding was tried a couple of generations ago, and there was extensive dairying and truck farming as well. None of these pays at present. The vegetables and fruits all come from California and dairying is over-regulated and under-paid. The area is zoned agricultural and everyone is happy with that; but with so few actually farming, the impression one has is that folks are waiting out the strange economy, hoping to get back into farming "someday."

Horses are one of the few true industries; some owners breed, others board and train. There are quite a few stables and paddocks around.

New construction, though rare of late, is mostly of the McMansion style; the ideas seems to be to come up with a play room suitable for installing the largest possible screen for watching 24-hour agitprop and football channels. That said, the homes are better built than in many other areas and would, in a pinch, make good communes. In fact, with the ailing economy, a number of extended families have pulled together at "the old home place" in the manner noted by Sharon Astyk. The only difference is that most of these don't seem to have started gardens yet.

The biggest farmer in the area uses large (for here) acreages and gigantic machinery to turn over an important local cash crop annually: grass seed. The combines actually would be overkill for this size acreage, but they are hired and come into the area once a year, lumbering along the narrow roads. When this recently-sprouted field reaches a certain level of maturity, hundreds of sheep will be run on it over the winter to produce lambs, then the seed and straw will be taken off next summer. Yes, it's a very chemical-intensive rotation; we buy our lamb from an organic-farmer friend.

You may have noticed the high-tension wires in various shots; they are from a hydroelectric project nearby (where Risa does most of her paddling and trout-gathering). In TEOTWAWKI these would undoubtedly fall into disuse; meanwhile, we're pleased to know that locally most of the electricity doesn't come from coal.

 

Last stop, another of the grass seed fields. The little rise in the distance, by the power towers, is another farm, and this past year they had wheat there. Wheat has its own problems, but it's food, so it's kind of nice to see it making a comeback.

So, what did we learn? a) It's really beautiful around here. b) There's somewhat of a culture gap between Stony Run and its surroundings, but everyone is kindly towards those around them, skilled, and sensible. c) We're not ruining or developing the land as much as one might see elsewhere, and it should retain its tilth for some time to come. This is kind of surprising given the incentive to develop -- four acres, a double-wide house and horse barn are on offer around the corner for over $250,000. d) Potential for sustainable community subsistence is immense -- given the means to assure water supply to all these acreages in the long rainless summers -- but almost completely untapped and likely to remain so.

What this neighborhood really is, is a kind of privately held land bank.

While it's sad (and ultimately dangerous) that the county we live in gets 95% of its food from elsewhere, and there are one billion underfed people in the world, and economics leads this neighborhood into pretty much ignoring the short-term situation, the upside is that future generations may be glad all this soil around here remained intact.

Risa's Chicken Moat Pattern

Click image to see better. Still ugly, I know ... but hopefully a pattern worth applying to the suburban farms to come. Not original at all; it's just our take on an idea we think should spread farther.

Every garden offers wonders

While waiting for the seeded grapes to reach sufficient sugar content to make good wine (something they might well fail to do this year), Risa decided to try to use some of them with the faster-maturing seedless grapes for canning up some grape juice.

She's learning, as an empty-nester, to work with smaller batches of things. Once upon a time, we would only have done this in the giant stock pot, which will burn fruity things if not faithfully attended. This time she ran the grapes through the blender, poured them off into the crockpots, and let them simmer. This will stop enzymes and yeast and also shove out the air bubbles introduced by the blender, which could be fatal to Mason jars -- take it from the one who, not being very good at canning, has been there...

...and without burning the juice at the bottom of the pot. When she feels the crock pots have done their business, everything goes through the strainer into a pitcher and from there to the pint jars. This is a pretty strong grape juice, not being peak-of-season, and will be mixed with a little honey and water before serving.

The three crockpots made nine pints of strained juice. They're funny little things -- two are in "avocado," that magnificently hideous 70s color. Five bucks each at Goodwill and worth a good deal more, we think.

As you can see, the garden is pretty but looks much as it did in late June, which is very odd. Corn, tomatoes, eggplants and winter squash have just sat there all summer, doing little if anything. They are just trying to get going as the cold rains set in. The cabbages, kale, and chard, however, are having a banner year. Very little bolting, even when the temperatures neared 100. Never seen nothin' like it. But when we walk there, we walk amidst beauty. Every garden offers wonders, it seems.

Potatoes from nowhere

Risa has been across the creek in the recent dry spell, mowing some green manure and pasture and lifting potatoes.

Mostly we grow potatoes in the garden beds along with everything else, in a hodgepodge "arrangement" often called polyculture. But last year there were lots and lots of potatoes, and Risa did not find them all, so at planting time this year there were too many to plant, both because we didn't manage to eat much more than half of what we'd stored, and volunteers were coming up in the beds. What to do?

Back where she used to work, they got in a hundred new computers, and called her up to come and get the empty boxes. Aha!

Risa flattened and spread the boxes on a disused space in the west "pasture," spread leaves and straw on the boxes, spread chitted potatoes on the straw, and heaped more straw, in humps, over the potatoes. It's a ways away from nearly everything else, so she knew she wouldn't be irrigating much, and said "good luck" to the new spud patch and moved on to the next item on her list.

Come September and the threat of rain, and she remembered the spuds and went to have a look. A few of the chits, perhaps a higher proportion than in the garden, had failed to crop at all. The rest produced a mixed bag of tiny, small, medium and decent-sized potatoes, plus several giants.

It wouldn't be much to write home about, except that, yes, there's more than she started with; besides which this crop represents little more than no labor from a patch of sod, beneath which the soil is very stony. As she raked over the bed with her potato hook, she found much of the cardboard intact, and beneath it, lots of moss not quite dead yet. Very few vegetables could have made so much of such a new and sour spot. It didn't even attract earthworms, something cardboard does almost anywhere you put it.

But the potatoes grew! If  those in the garden do no better than these, we should still have a very decent spud year, with plenty to have over the winter and plenty to plant. If you find yourself with extra sprouted potatoes on hand and a full garden, you can try this. Amaze your friends! Influence people! -- with your mysterious "Potatoes from Nowhere."

"Instant spoon bread"

Even in a relatively poor garden year, early fall in the country can be a time of too many options. There are potatoes in baskets, scattered along countertops, in bags, and still in the ground. Apples are all over the place, the freezer is full of bags of blackberries and containers of lightly blanched zucchini, eggplants and peppers hang forlornly from their branches waiting, like wallflowers, to be noticed, and the arbor groans with grapes. So, even though we've halved the size of the loaves we bake, it's still possible to wind up with a hunk of stale bread that's about to turn blue all along one edge.

At this point, one might decide it's chicken feed or compost. But we like our bread, into which we've put a lot of work, and often try to think of ways to redeem that last bit.

One is to slice it thin and toast it with a little cheese or homemade garlic-and-basil butter. Another is to crumble it up into a bowl of cooked-up cracked wheat or other grain. Yet another is to add it back to the next batch of dough, and still another is to use it in soup, just like crackers.

Risa likes to break down such chunks into bite-size bits, add sliced tomatoes, basil, chard, onion greens, chives or other fresh herbs, add some kale or other greens, shredded, then sprinkle on some grated local cheddar, and stick the bowl in the zapper for one to one-and-a-half minutes. She calls it her "instant spoon bread."

Some of her friends are still leery of zappers, but she observes them chattering away with powerful radiation-emitting cell phones jammed against their heads, and thinks she's chosen the lesser of same evils, so to speak. But if you're one of these friends, consider using the rice steamer for this "recipe." It takes only a little longer, and the results are only a little morewilty. A toaster oven might do. In cooler weather, you can set the bowl on a trivet on top of the woodstove or in a Dutch oven set there. What Risa tries to avoid, most of the time, is relying on the energy black hole that's the oven in her electric range. The broiler works well, but it sets the meter on the outside of the house spinning like a pinwheel in a hurricane.

A wide range of ingredients, almost whatever is on hand, can go into such "spoon breads." But we'll stop here. The truly eclectic country eater can feed herself much more easily than she can feed company, if they're not used to, say, cooked apple slices with eggs ...

Blackberry season is still on

Note happy chickens at lower right. Wire at upper right is not attached to Risa's head; it's a hawk stopper.

 

Most of our fruit trees, of which there are now almost forty, are still too young to bear: figs, nectarines, persimmons, pears (lots of pears), sweet cherries, pineapple quinces, plums, peaches. The kiwis, goumi, aronia, and blueberries are too young, too, and we didn't keep after the strawberries or, some time ago, now, the raspberries. Of the older trees, the pie cherry and most of the apples and plums skipped this year as well, leaving the three apples down by the road to cover all bases.

Risa has been trying to dehydrate more apples than last year, but has fallen behind due to a longish spell of wet weather, which is only just now breaking up. So she's been madly canning applesauce (freezer being full of other things) -- but we know we only go through so much applesauce in a year, even as gifts -- there's some left from last year.

Part of that is that when you open a quart of applesauce, there you are with 4/5 of a quart open in the fridge. We're suddenly what are called senior citizens, with a reduced appetite, and also, after decades of kids in the house, empty-nesters. We have hundreds of empty quart canning jars, and they are suddenly just "not my size."

So, this year's canning session has been all about wide-mouth pints, of which there aren't yet enough. So far so good, but the apples are getting monotonous-looking, even with all the "pumpkin" spice -- cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, allspice, and a hint of ginger (well, hey, that's how we like it) that Risa's putting in.

Earlier, when the Himalaya berries were in full swing, Risa picked many, many pints of these for the freezer. Beloved uses them in her endless parade of bowls of (locally made, organic, famous brand) yogurt.

But the rain has put paid to Himalaya gathering: mold. Just as Risa was gearing up to make blackberry jam in 1/2 pint jars.

All is not lost, however.

There are two kinds of (giant, land-gobbling) runaway commercial blackberries prowling the fence lines and pastures here. The broad-leaved ones are the Himalayas. The thin-leaved ones, the ones with twice the thorns (sharper, too!), whose fruit is not quite as plump and fruity as the Himalayas, are the Evergreens. Both were brought in by pioneer farmers, and both are the bane of landowners ever since -- they're our local equivalent of kudzu -- but they are fabulously productive.

And the Evergreens aren't molding.

A bonus is the fun she can have with the chickens when she's picking in their pasture. Any berry that's not quite quite -- too hard, too mushy, or with a red side -- she can drop at her feet, and the hens are on it in a flash. They've become adept at darting in and stealing one from a compatriot whose beak is just closing round the morsel. One actually went into a classic major-league slide on her fanny, one leg high, to spike the rooster as he craned his neck for a grounder, and steal second base. Endlessly entertaining.

So, blackberry season -- which had begun to look a bit grim --  is still on. This will make up some for the lack of other fruit -- not to mention most of the -- still green -- tomatoes.

:::

We're not, here at SRF, such serious blackberry pickers as we once were -- all over the Northwest, at this time of year, you can see whole families of the underemployed, in fields, along hedgerows, fences, roadsides, and in parks, berrying on contract for yogurt processors and the like. There's a professional look to them. If you want to berry on this scale, carry a pair of pruners to get through the unproductive first-year canes and wear a belt with a cut-away milk jug strung on it by the handle (you need both hands). Also, and this is the main trick, have with you a ten-foot-long two-by-eight for each picker, tricked out with a towing handle (made of thick rope if you can get it) and with a tread nailed on, made of one-by-two, every fourteen inches or so. Pick around the perimeter of your patch, and when you're ready to establish a beachhead, so to speak, grab your surfboard by the handle end and toss the other end into the patch. Walk up the board, picking as you go. Fun and productive! If you get hooked, push, don't pull, to get loose from the thorns. I actually work fastest with bare arms.

If you want to get even more serious, find out who's buying, make a deal, then go and get permission from landowners. The best grounds are already taken, of course, but persistence, as with anything else, pays. Park rangers can be surprisingly cooperative. Happy picking!

Enjoy the sunrises

I'm not, at root, a despairing type. So I plug along with my adaptive seed-saving and homestead projects, and everyone smiles at my "hobbies."

I believe in a slow descent, beginning in my lifetime. It's already begun. But I'm not running for the hills. (Can't anyway, I'm 61!) The emphasis is on slow. But descent (from the high tide of "civilization") is in the picture for sure.

No, not so much from the global warming. That won't start killing rich white kids until after about 2050, meaning certain countries, mine included, won't feel sufficiently threatened by it to take action (way too late to do any good) until long after my time. And they will have enough troubles by then that they won't be able to take those actions.

No, not so much from peak oil. There's truth in that, too, but at peak we have half the recoverable oil yet to burn (and choke on). It could be awhile before we panic much over that either.

No, it will begin more, I think, with social disintegration. Conservatives have noticed this, and blame liberals (and blacks and browns and Asians and Muslims and gays and even transpeople (that would be little old me) for it, which is essentially false; but liberals blame conservatives for it, too, which is also pretty close to being false. That trouble originates not with people whose values have, or once had, their roots in a functional diversified subsistence agriculture, but with the cynical industrialists and bankers who  have, for a long time now, been playing us all for chumps -- and co-opting conservatives.

I personally lay much of the blame for this on television, radio, print and Internet advertising and corporate sponsorships, including that for public media such as NPR -- and lobbying and campaign spending, all of which is rooted in the U.S. Supreme Court decision, back in the 1800s, to regard corporations as persons with rights -- the megacorporations' ads and commercials and Capital Hill connivings, with their wink-nudge ethos, have sapped the public domain and the will of millions to seek knowledge and judge of it critically. The target of this century-long attack is the commons, and the commons is just about expired.

We, as a world, are slowly going insane from megacorporatism. And there's no cure. At best we can scurry around hoping the rotten apparatus doesn't hit us when it falls.

As government processes driven by any other impulse than service to megacorporations grind to a halt, infrastructure service to the public will fray and ultimately shatter in many places; and as the local public infrastructures are all intimately bound together by what was, briefly in human history, the greatest public infrastructure of all time, the effects are extremely likely to snowball and bring the whole thing crashing down. Like what very nearly happened, on a smaller scale, in the fall of 2008.

And then the conservatives will point to the liberals and the liberals will point to the conservatives and say, almost in unison, see, I told you so! While the industrialists and the bankers, much more at fault, will tiptoe away to their hideouts, which they've been fortifying for at least two generations now. From their point of view, all this is just so much population control, and it will have been successful -- except I don't think as highly of their fortresses' security measures as they do.

Fossil energy will still be around in large quantities, but become difficult to transport or market effectively. This will exacerbate the food shortages, the water shortages, the sporadic attempts to mitigate the warming (which was caused by the transportation and marketing of fossil fuels), the electricity grid failures, all leading to further social disintegration, leading to more failures, and very likely to world resource war. Scarcity in the midst of plenty, brought on by simple greed "at the top."

So social disintegration, for a largely urban (and very large) population within a framework of extreme infrastructure complexity, is the great danger.

Almost anything can now nudge us off our balance beam: floods, storms, droughts, loss of ice cover or groundwater, crop failures, epidemics -- all of these are statistically associated with the warming, as actuaries in the insurance industry can tell you -- including the giant snowstorms. But also earthquakes and volcanoes and solar storms -- because disaster strains infrastructure, and our infrastructure is approaching the point at which it becomes more and more difficult to maintain.

Y'wanna try and fix all this? Say, at the polls? Heh. Here in the U.S., the extra-constitutional 60-vote rule in the Senate will stop you before you start. Similar safeguards are in place elsewhere.

Better start small. You won't fix anything, but you might mitigate the pain, for yourself and others, for awhile. After that, who knows?

I'm fond of the endearing Transition Towns project, which if you are starry-eyed enough to want to sit in a circle thinking up ways, with like-minded nice people, to regain the public domain in your town, may all the gods assist you, and may you succeed. I mean it.

But I don't see much chance of convincing my largely Tea-Partyish neighbors to go that route, personally. TT takes hold most easily in countries that still have a modicum of public discourse.

What's left to try, then, here? In my neighborhood? Starting even smaller, perhaps...

The most accessible adaptive strategy, other than TT, I've seen online has been Mr. Greer's somewhat unfortunately named Green Wizards project. He is a proponent of General Systems Theory, which was the scientific movement, aka "cybernetics," that was the underpinning of, among other things, the Whole Earth Catalog and Coevolution Quarterly, both of which became redundant when the Internet came along.

General Systems Theory was largely an academic movement with a side helping of back-to-the-landers, and its moderate success (Jerry Brown was a proponent) in the "real world," i.e., politics led to its being targeted and shut down by Ronald Reagan, whose administration pulled all the grants out from under everyone involved.

Fritz Schumacher, who wrote Small is Beautiful, was a general systems thinker, and founded the Intermediate Technology Development Group, which was (and still is, under the name Practical Action) an effort to liaison with third world subsistence economies and help resist conversion to industrial/world trade economies -- because subsistence is more resilient. At one time, back in the 70s, they had all of their hard-won knowledge -- over 7,000 how-to documents, or was it 20,000? -- on microfiche in a library smaller than a shoebox, with a reader that did not require electricity, available to anyone for a very reasonable price -- this was before the World Wide Web, of course. I often wished I'd I'd bought one. Now I have the Web. But will my grandkids, when they're grown?

Green Wizards will attempt to collect adaptive literature from that bygone era and make it available (he urges that we print everything out), organized in three Rings: Food, Heat, Crafts. The idea is that when our local communities get desperate, we might find an audience for these strategies, and be useful to them from a subsistence-and-mutual-aid standpoint. It's a form of hoarding public domain subsistence/resilience skills on the public's behalf.

I see Green Wizards as like Practical Action, but aimed at the "first world's" impending poverty as well as that of the "third world." It's somewhere along that continuum. So, I hope, are you and I.

Transition Towns and Green Wizards have been taking swipes at each other lately, and I wish they wouldn't. We will need what they are both doing, very likely. 

I recommend subsistence and resilience, along with getting to know the neighbors, a mixture of Greer and Sharon Astyk, as the sane approach. What might be called the true liberal's calling: pre-industrialist conservatism. But don't ask me if I think it will work ... sigh. S'gonna go down heavy.

But not all that soon. I think.

So, meanwhile, let's enjoy the sunrises.

Best of both worlds.

A granddaughter is here, and the long weekend is like a fabulous staycation, with things to do during the days: reading Moomintroll books aloud, or picking blackberries for the chickens that are too high for them to reach, or unearthing potatoes.

During Beloved's on-duty times with Granddaughter, Risa has added to the woodpile and finished the "white roof." Temperatures and glare had soared while she was up there, and upon coming down the ladder, she headed straight for the shower -- pure survival mode, as Risa much prefers baths.

We had a day when it reached 91F, and this means the apple slices and the veggie leaves in the dehydrators finished up early, so now we are trying some tomato slices. Not many -- but any is a treat.

Risa's procedure with tomatoes is a bit different from that of others who do this -- wax paper has a meltdown in her dehydrator design, and tomato slices have penchant for sticking to screening -- she takes a tomato and makes silver-dollar size slices off all the sides and the top and bottom, and lays them on the substrate (currently opened egg cartons have done fine) skin-side down. Those will be the solar dehydrated tomatoes. Then the "naked" remainders become canned tomatoes, tomato puree, or are simply sliced and added to various recipes fresh -- thus saving the step of getting the acid-y skins off. Best of both worlds.

We then made four loaves of bread, using for stock the liquid from bathing home-grown organic apple slices in sugar-and-cinnamon water. It also has in it wheat, barley, rye, oats, honey, bits of onion greens and apple slices diced small.

In the evening there have been things to drink beneath the strings of lights on the lilacs on the patio. Last agenda item before bed is to count bats in the gathering night, who are swooping low at present to nab winged termites migrating through. The termites head unerringly for the house, so every time a bat hits one, a cheer erupts from the cluster of lawn chairs. If I were a child facing school com Tuesday, this is how I'd want to spend my Labor Day weekend. How was yours?

September is a feast for the eyes

September is a feast for the eyes.

Counting of blessings

The garden was possibly our least productive, for the effort going into it, of the last 35 years. This was the result of what we think of as winter extending into mid-June, causing planting delays and crop failures. The soil, in its depths, has never really warmed up, and went, in the suddenly hot weather straight from a cold brown soup to a hard iron-like consistency that resists watering. Flats, in the house, grow tunnel, or potting shed resisted germination as well.

That said, some things did well: sunchokes, lettuce, broccoli, chard, kale, cabbage, favas, peas, comfrey, perennial spices, potatoes (though small), zucchini (oddly enough). Some things did okay: the fifth planting of green beans, the fourth planting of runner beans (very small crop), cucumbers (one of three plantings). A small field of dry beans will make it. Tomatoes eventually established themselves but are very slow to redden, in spite of a hot July and August. Winter squash and corn are almost a complete disaster, eggplants and peppers little better. Spinach, beets, radishes, carrots, parsnips, and turnips all failed.

How the heck do you have a crop failure of radishes?

Figs, cherries, quinces, plums, persimmons, nectarines, peaches, pears, and filberts made no crop. Some of these are young and no crop was expected, but the plums are a sad disappointment. We are gathering apples from half the apple trees and collecting all the blackberries we have time to pick. Blueberries are new but had a good year; however, two of them are dying. One peach and one plum died and were removed; all the other new trees survived. There might not be any canning done this year other than some applesauce. Alternatively, a lot of vegetable leaves have been dehydrated and crumbled; this makes a nutritious add-on to soups, breads, and assorted dishes such as potatoes or pasta, and can be given as gifts in jelly jars.

Kiwis and most of the hops made it through the summer. They are new and very small as yet. The grapes are doing well, as usual -- our steadiest crop.

The Ancona ducks managed to hatch three newbies, who are doing well. If we had penned a duck with a clutch she might have raised many more. We blew out fifty-three goose eggs for psanki. Poultry in general had a good year and eggs were superabundant year-round.

With relatively little to do on the farm, we concentrated more on physical plant.The grow tunnel was taken down in the garden to set up by the barn, but it looks like we will skip a year. We added a room to the house (mudroom, former front porch), set up and furnished the downstairs bedroom for guests, rebuilt the entryway ceiling which was falling in, rebuilt the potting shed, cleaned out the upper barn, and coated (most of, so far) the house roof with white roofing compound. Painting goes on in a desultory fashion. Firewooding has gone well. We got in a generous supply of used building materials, some of which went directly into the mudroom construction. We updated the living room and are no longer too embarassed to have visitors.

Synchronized paddles!

Risa has met a couple of personal goals: she paddled from Eugene to Portland on the Willamette River and started a post-apocalyptic novel (blovel) that is up to twenty-six chapters. She also got up to the wilderness areas twice (hopes to go twice more), made it to the beach once, and has done some volunteering at a state park. Friends came over to watch for the Perseids (mostly we all fell asleep). Risa and Beloved had a short vacation at a mountain cabin, with a day trip to Crater Lake. Fishing went well and there are lots of trout in the freezer. Beloved's job looks like it will be good for another year, barring a spectacular city-budget blowout.

Planned for the next year, "God-willin'-an'-th'-crick-don't-rise": finish the roof, do the same for the barn roofs, rebuild the grow tunnel, pour a floor in half the upper barn (for goats or a small Dexter cow and calf or pigs, depending), develop the second well for irrigation, improve the seed-sprouting arrangements. Move the goumi plants inside the deer fence and plant tea (camellia sinensis). Fix the kitchen sink (bucket brigade at present). Finish insulation under the house. Paddle with Granddaughter. Paddle the river again, with Daughter. Go see family back East, via train. Wipe out Daughter's school debt. Make wine (instead of vinegar; we have plenty now!). Have a little bit of coffee by the fire and count our blessings.

Particularly the coffee and counting of blessings.

Apple chips

Risa has learned, through experience, that the storeroom is right for potatoes but not very good for apples -- they store better in lower humidity than she can provide. And while everyone likes her applesauce, the supply goes more slowly than we think -- there's lots from last year, still. She could freeze some, but the space is taken. So she'll dry all she can, though it looks like it will be a short drying season. She's gonna start right now, though the apples on the second-maturing tree (first one's apples have been eaten) are still a bit green.

She takes a bowl, puts in it a teaspoon of vitamin C, 1/4 cup of salt, 1/2 cup of sugar, a teaspoon of cinnamon, and a cup of homemade cider apple vinegar, and adds water. This is the dip-bowl, in which the chips will pick up a bit of flavor and lose some of their hurry to turn brown.

She picks a basket of apples. With her favorite kitchen knife and chopping block, she reduces a number of apples into slim chips which are thrown into the bowl right away as she throws each core in a bucket destined for the chickens. Then she spreads the chips on a screen.

The screen is carried to the potting shed, which will get close to 100(F) today -- nice and warm. The process is then repeated till three screens are full. That's about as many chips as she can deal with at one time.

As the sun doesn't reach all the chips in this setup, she's running a little fan to help with the dehydration. Next year, maybe a better system. In about four days these should be done, and ready to throw into a dry jar or bucket. And then she'll do another batch, and so on until the weather is too cold to bother. The remaining apples can go into storage if in great shape, but more likely into cider.

Each batch of apples will be sweeter (but also, perhaps wormier) than the preceding one. The chips make good snacks but can be reconstituted for use in hot cereals, with yogurt, or in pies, cakes, and breads.

Fabulously rugged

It's going up into the nineties for a few days, but Risa suspects that's it for this year -- the Canada geese have left -- like they know something we don't, and the orb-weaver spiders are everywhere.

So her thoughts have turned to firewooding.

She might have enough wood for this year, or she might not. To be sure, she needs to fill one more bay in the woodshed. There's plenty of lodgepole on hand, not the best wood, but it was free. We picked up eleven truckloads of it from a place where the utility was clearing power lines, courtesy of the landowner and Craigslist.

Larger diameters of lodgepole present a similar problem to one we're familiar with from cutting up cherry logs. The bark fibers wind tightly around the bole, and the pieces resist splitting. Moisture will stay inside the logs for practically forever unless they are split. Risa's solution to this is to run a slot down the length of the log, vertically end to end, half an inch deep, with the chainsaw. Maybe two slots sometimes.

These chunks average thirty inches in length and range from ten to twenty inches in diameter. They're too much work for the little electric saw, and Risa dislikes using gasoline saws where there's an electricity supply. And don't talk to her about bucksaws -- she often works alone, and needs some kind of slave energy source at age 61.

Fortunately, the friends who gave her the garden shed to tear down also offered her some other odds and ends.

"You want this?"

"Wow, what a saw. Where'd you come up with that?"

"Garage sale, five dollars, over a decade ago, "she said. "We cut a lot of wood with it for awhile, but lately the chain won't stay tight. We figure you'll know what to do with that."

"Maybe ... sure, let's put it on the truck."

Back home, Risa examined her new treasure. It's a ten-amp industrial-standard electric Skil chain saw, with a heavy-duty twenty-inch bar and chain, and extremely heavy. She suspects it was built between 1957 and 1963. Fifty years old! The bar is tightened with the usual screw, but instead of a pair of 9/16 lock nuts on embedded bolts, as one finds nowadays, the bar is locked down with a bolt mounted in a spoked knob. The end of the bolt had worn down to the point that tightened the knob all the way would not secure the bar. She rummaged around in the garage and found a lock washer large enough to shim the gap, and the problem was fixed.

The chain wanted sharpening, which was soon done. The only non-trivial repair would be to fix the saw-bar oil pump. But this was solved by simply remembering to hand-oil the chain before each log.

Risa set up her "sawhorse," which is a wheelbarrow to catch sawdust (for blueberry beds and the like), with a slotted wooden pallet mounted on top. The new saw performed even better than anticipated -- the motor is fabulously rugged and does not overheat while cutting a twenty-inch diameter log.

With any luck, Risa will be back in the garden by the time the hot spell is over, picking such tomatoes as will ripen this year, starting the apple-drying operation, getting in the last beans, and planting out the peas she's started in flats.