Chopping wood for winter

I used to have a neighbor, George.  Lived about 3 football fields from the house...the trailer is still there.  Not lived, I guess, visited.  He came from somewhere in the Philly area.  He would pack up his car, his wife and sometimes a few of his teenage kids, drive up here and shoot guns.  I got to know him cause almost from the day I bought the place he would visit on his ATV and monologue me to death.  The man could talk.

Not more than 3 months after being here, he warned me that others were hunting on my property and in an effort to 'protect me', he posted my ground.  Big white ugly signs, all over the place that indicated this property was mine.  The reality was George was posting my land so that he could trespass on it all by himself.  I didn't really care. I was rarely here and if he wanted the land to hunt on all by his lonesome, so be it.

Then about 2 years ago I had a phone call from my other neighbor, Jason.  George's body was found on my land at the bottom of a steep cliff, with his ATV rolled over ontop of him.  It seems that George had decided to take a tour of my property in the winter when a slick ice patch had glazed over one of the steep logging trails.  Once George drove over it, his tires slipped on the ice and over the edge he went.  The death was instant.

The ice patch is part of a swift, seasonal stream that tumbles down this intense slope and when I saw that George's body was found at the bottom of it, I decided to call the stream George Falls.  Morbid, but memorable.

So yesterday, I'm sawing wood up in the same hills, got to by the same trails as those often walked by George.  I was thinking about the dangers of steep hillside and about George's death when I took a turn further up from George Falls and heard something break loose.

The 300 pound wagon that I was pulling with the ATV to collect the wood gave way and the carriage commenced to race down the summit.  The pin holding it had snapped and now the wagon was charging down the mountain on its own.  I was actually shocked to see it travel the distance it did on its own before, as though cued by George himself, it took a sharp left at George Falls and threw itself headlong into the abyss.  The remaining journey I could only chart with my ears.  Three loud, terrible bangs and then an agonizing silence.  When I peered over the edge of the cliff to look, I saw the wagon, badly dented, flipped on its back and wedged in a deep ravine.  After a few attempts to get it out, I left it for today when I could attack the situation with renewed vigor.  Three scotches and a good night's sleep later, I used the winch on the ATV and three long chains to pull that poor, bruised bastard of a wagon up.  And damn if the thing still wasn't in good working order.

On another note, I finished a THIRD garden row and see that there is room for a fourth.  I don't get to play outside today though, I have to spend the entire time inside working on my 'real work'.  As you can see, I'm gearing up for it now.

The old garden...and I'll post pictures so you can see, is four 100 foot rows.  One with asparagus, another for strawberries, the third for red, gold and black raspberries and the last for whatever I feet like growing (potatoes, arugula, spinach, etc).  I've decided to give a break to this last, over-used row and in preparation covered it with about 4 inches of raw manure.  Next spring, I'll turn the manure under (I read somewhere that it's best to turn the soil in the spring since the fungal hyphae systems you upturn release valuable nutrients.), then plant the row with early spring crops of spinach, peas, scallions and radishes before turning it under again in July.   After the strawberry row produces (also around July), I'll move the suckered strawberry plants to the newly turned row and dig up the old strawberry row to be the new misc vegetable row for 2012.

Oh brother, there goes the alarm.  Time to go work.  See you in the fields, friends!

  

The official end of the 2010 Growing Season

Well, it was bound to happen.  You could see your breath by 7pm and the sky had a space-ice kind of clarity.  When I woke up this morning, not only Jack, but Jill, June and Jennifer Frost, his wife, daughter and cousin on his father's side respectively, had all made an appearance.  They made short order of the fields, ran up and down the tomato patch, sat (?) on the blueberries, and took an ice cream dump on the red raspberries.  So long folks, we'll see you next year!

Spent all day yesterday working on a spreadsheet for one of my accounts.  Came out great, but it wasn't till 12 midnight, when my friend James called me, that I was able to figure out a little hiccough in it that was preventing the numbers working correctly.  God bless him for doing that.

Today, I'm committed to getting some outdoor chores done.  There is so much to do that it can be a little overwhelming, but I'm just going to dive in and get started, probably the most important thing I can do.

The good thing about the frost...now that I know those asparagus ferns are dead, I'm going to cut them back and cover the whole row with that beautiful manure.

Here comes the Fall

(Portentious title, no?)Some of you know that I started my own business.  There's good news and bad news.

Good News:  I'm able to work from home.
Bad News:  I'm too busy to do any of the fun work I wanted to do while I was home.

Good News:  Business is a hit
Bad News:  I'm constantly traveling, so I'm never at home to work from home.

I'm trying to build a patio.  Well, I'm not trying, I'm actually DOING.  I had Yoda come over and he said (Yoda voice),  "Try?!  Try not.  DO or do not.  There is no try."

So I'm building a patio.  I started out the way my Aunt Gertie would have started out. Grabbed some rocks and started putting em on the ground.

Oh I have all kinds of detractors (including some voices inside my own head), but I'm plowing forward.  The soil where I want to put the stone has been compacted hard from the construction around the house, so I'm only adding a layer of gravel and a big fucking flat rock on top and filling in the seams with some dirt and more rock.   It's slower going than you would expect because I'm using rocks from th farm that are all varying levels of thickness and some of them, I don't mind telling you, are heavier than Aunt Salome's ass, so you have to do a lot of struggling and maneuvering to make them fit.   Then I have a dog up my backside, bugging me to throw a ball every 15 seconds...throw in an urge to jerk off every 2 hours and you have one long drawn out process.

But this is about gay farming, so let's get out those pitchforks and get to work.

On today's docket (after I finish my MnFn' obligation to my 'business'), we're going...that's right WE are going...over to the fresh manure pile.  Oh. Yes. We. Are.  And you know what we're going to do over there?  We're going to load the ATV wagon full of that fresh shit and haul it down to the potato row.  And that's not all.  After that, we're going to hitch up the brush hog and mow through two big patches of weeds to clear the way for a sunflower garden, a corn patch and more general garden space.  If we're lucky, we'll take a second to get lost in the tall, dry goldenrod, make out and play with each other's cocks ;)

It's been two years since we've planted our current potato row and the soil there needs a break. I'm afraid we've accumulated disease in that area, friendly to the spud-men, and we're going to try leafy greens there next spring which is WHY we are going to create the new potato garden.  And it's going to be big. Cause daddy likes his taters.  Oh. Yes. He. Does.  You know what kind?  I like the red kind that have the red all the way through the potato.  Ever have those?  You can get them from Irish Eyes...the best potato catalogue company around.  You can also get those Kennebecs which are so delicious.  This year I planted the all blue kind which sort of tastes like you're eating some native American I-just-dug-this-crap-up-in-the-woods-cause-my-corn-failed tuber.  Not good.  I also planted a 'German Butterball' variety that I'll skip next year as well.  Not awful...just poor producer and no big deal on the dinner plate.

Anyway where was I...Oh yes, we're putting together a potato patch.  The soil in the area where we'll be working is fairly easy to dig, so the plan is, mow it, dig it and manure it.  By next spring, we should have ourselves some nice composed rows to put our potatoes in.

As for the corn-slash-sunflower-slash-whatever garden patch we're going to put in.  I'd like to try a variation on that 'Lasagna Garden' technique everybody always talks about.   I have a whole bunch of c ardboard in the barn that I plan to lay down in rows over the freshly mowed site and then cover them up with cow shit.  "Are you going to till the soil before you do that, Farmer Gay?" I hear someone asking in the back.  The answer is no, I'm not.  And the expanded answer is, I don't feel like it.  We're talking sunflowers and corn...they'll figure it out.  If I dig through the cardboard when planting the seeds ( or setting out the plants), the soil beneath should be suitable to new'ly forming roots of the starting plants.  That's the theory anyway and I'm sticking to it.

Now mind you, we still need to finish this patio (get rocks, get shale, set the stones, throw the ball for the dog), get wood for the upcoming winter (drive the ATV up the hill, cut  the logs, load the logs, split the logs, stack the logs) cut the grass again before winter, clean up around the orchard, mow the asparagus and cover it with fresh compost.  So you queens have a lot of work to do.  So pack up those pink waders and high tail it over here so you can help me out.

And so this is the Gay Farmer signing off for now.  Wishing you a sturdy Spade with a long, stiff handle.