Alone in the Wilderness: The Farm Report 03-20-2020

Alone in the Wilderness

The Farm Report
03-20-2020

No, this is not me. It is Richard Proenneke. He was the 'real' Alone in the Wilderness guy.

You can watch him on YouTube here:

https://youtu.be/hy-4NxJRxNQ

With all that is going on right now, maybe I'll become even more like him. He hand built his own log cabin in the woods of remote Alaska a long time ago and then lived there all by himself pretty much year around for about 31 years. He was an interesting guy. If you watch his videos and read his journals you'll discover he was a very religious guy and a curious one. He started his adventure to see if he could do it. He could and he did. He did have short wave radio, but no internet or iPad. I'm not feeling too bad out here on Oakdale Farm. I just went in to town yesterday for supplies and lumber. I'm not eating my beans off of a can lid either, yet....

I am eating my beans though! Joyce and I always enjoyed - let me repeat that: enjoyed! - trying to be self-sufficient and independently productive. We weren't spookie about the boogie man coming to get us, it was/is just fun and a good challenge. I liked the process of growing and preserving our own food a lot. Of course, as a natural born teacher, and an old time Home Economics teacher at that, she canned much of our produce. I learned how from her, by the book! of course. Since I was in college right after we were married, I've canned our own beans. It was kind of my way of spinning yarn. Gandhi did the spinning; I did the canning. We both did our thing for the calming stress relief effect it can have. The sky is falling now, so it will have to land on me and my beans here at the farm. The fancy jars are loaded with my own homemade Chili con Carne for lunches. If you've never made your own beans from scratch - from the plant in your garden on up - you're in for a treat when you do. If you're new to canning, get a Ball Blue Book, or one from Jackie Clay. Her book, 'Growing and Canning Your Own Food' is a great resource for home canning and gardening of all types.

Ah! And look at those fruiting spurs on the Seckel pears. This looks like it could be a fruiting year for these little pears - our first for this tree.

Peas in a bucket! I'll spare you all the old gems of jokes about peas. You know the one about using peas for ice fishing? The fisherman bores a hole in the ice on the lake and puts peas all around the edge of the hole. Then he waits with a club in hand. When a fish comes up to take a pea, the fisherman whacks him in the ice hole! (Chuckle chuckle chuckle....) Or Jon's favorite: Eat every carrot and pea on your plate before you leave the table.... (Chuckle chuckle chuckle....) There's more but I told you I would spare you. This Dutch bucket is the home of some sugar snap peas.

Cascadia Sugar Snap to be exact. They're supposed to be a shorter version of the original Sugar Snaps. The originals are like candy right off the vine. These are said to be even sweeter.

Dutch bucket? See that hole? See that twine? A Dutch bucket is really nothing more than a bucket with a false bottom. For mine, I weave some plastic baling twine across the inside of the bucket about half way down to form a nest bottom. Four crosses is enough. Then (Cue the Sewing machine!) I use ground cover fabric and make up a fabric 'pot' liner that holds the soil for the bucket. It has wick legs sewn into it that go all the way to the bottom - where the water and fertilizer is! That's what the hole is for. I keep it filled to the hole with liquid all season. Sometimes I do it by hand, and sometimes I let a pump on a timer do it for me. The peas don't care which.

Annie thinks the bucket is leaking. She loves water, so she's always on the lookout for some. I knew it was just overfill running out, but she was hopeful it was a leaky bucket for her to play with. And Kev, if you're reading this from England, yes, that is another thing you can do with cattle panels. I cut an old bent up one down to make a plant stand table top.

I like to know what is what. There's a bunch of old jokes for that theme, too. But they aren't appropriate for here. Sorry. To mark my strawberries, I make my own labels. How? Just reverse print your info on cheap plain paper using a laser copier. Then, brush on a heavy layer of glue. I'm using Titebond II because I have it. There are also specialty products like Mod Podge that are made just for this. I didn't have any of that though.

After the glue is spread out nice and thick, lay the paper - print side down - into the glue and quickly wipe off the excess and rub out the air bubbles.

It will look like this. Get everything right side up so it will read correctly when you're ready to take it to the garden. Now, go away for awhile. I went away all night.

Next day - or whenever the mood hits you - run plain old water over the paper. The paper will break up and wash away (with a little helpful rubbing with your fingers) and the toner will remain behind stuck in the glue. Instant sign!

Remember this nasty weed pit from last time? Well it is going to become my new Whizbang Minibed on Plastic garden.

Step one: Clean off the site. Step two: buy a used billboard tarp. This one once urged you to listen to WGBH in Boston, the NPR mothership. I already do that a lot, so I didn't need the urging. I just needed the sign material.

Here's a 'thumbnail' of what it looked like for real.

The white side is for the printed message. The back side is black - perfect for a plastic mulch on the new WMBOP garden. These tarps are cheap - a company sells the used discarded billboard plastic for scrap prices. They are made to last in the weather and sunshine outdoors for sign purposes - and why throw them away? Plus, I'M DONE FIGHTING WEEDS ALL SUMMER! and I don't like the idea of constantly spraying on more weed killer chemicals on my food.

Annie was a big help, of course. The idea - 'invented' and promoted by a guy named Herrick Kimball who runs the Planet Whizbang website - is what I'm following. He has lots of good ideas. I made my Whizbang Chicken Plucker from another of his books. Actually, he is just the final resource. This is a combination of gardening wisdom spurred by Ruth Stout's 'No Work Gardening' system coupled with Tom Doyle's initial work using plastic mulches for 'occultation' with plastic and Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening. So - we build upon each other's successes and failures. Life is in the garden.

With the plastic down, I'm building mini-bed frames. They're each about 30-inches square. Annie is really into this kind of gardening. She can see the potential in it.  I've just temporarily weighted down the plastic for a couple of reasons. One is that I want the plastic to relax and normalize to its full/regular size. The other is that I wanted to see if I could use 4 beds or if I would be limited to 3 in a row. Looks like it's going to be four in a row with about 30-inches between rows. I'll bury the edges and make it all neat and pretty another time.

It was a beautiful day when I started this work outdoors. No wind, sunny, great! Then the skies clouded up. That one little star cloud over by Oakdale Manor (Or our 'Randolph Country Home' as one of my school mates calls it.) should have been my warning signal. Annie was already getting pretty nervous - she somehow knew a storm was coming. I've had more than one dog now that felt I didn't have the sense God gave a goose when it comes to working outside in bad weather. My collie, Lucky, just got in the path of my garden tiller and literally laid down in front of it to stop me one time.  He knew that a tornado was just behind the hill - and I didn't and wasn't paying attention. He saved my bacon that day!

Ah Excrement!

 (Only I didn't really use a 3-syllable word to express myself when I came around the greenhouse corner and saw this. The word I used was much shorter but more quickly descriptive of how I really felt.)

 Maybe the sky really is falling on my head.

During the night, a big storm front with big winds wheeled through and look what happened. Have I ever mentioned that I live in a high wind area? Well apparently I need to remind myself of that little morsel of wisdom from time to time. Oh well, I'll fix it right next time and move on with the project. I never give up!

So besides the obvious, such as it is, all is well at Oakdale Farm. I hope it is with you, too.