"Seems Like...." The Farm Report 11-01-2021

 "Seems Like...."
The Farm Report 
01-11-2021

It 'seems like' fall these days. I thought this pic just about summed up my world for you right now. Some firewood to bring in, the Hopi Grey winter squash have been harvested and saved from the soybean combiner going through the fields where they had trespassed, and some nice big roasting potatoes. Perfect!

But it also 'seems like' summer just wouldn't give up and go away! I have my handy globe set up so the pointy corner of the base is pointed right at me sitting in my 'Papasan' chair. I am the sun! I have the base marked off by the months. I move the axis one month at a time so I can see how the earth - how Oakdale Farm - is facing the sun's angle. South America is getting all the rays now. We're out of the heat.

I have decided to invent a new weather tool though. It 'seemed like' summer just dragged on and on. Then I said to myself one night, Aha! The weather gal was giving 'heat index' numbers. She said the 'feel like' temp was about 110F, even though it was only 88 - and buckets of humidity. She said that made it 'seem like' it was way hotter. In the winter, they say we have wind chill indexes that make the cold 'seem like' it is much worse. 'Seems like' is their standby tool for escaping reality. Well why not! said I.

So I have invented the 'seems like' day length tool. Winston Churchill said that if you avoided all the fun but sinful pass times common to lower man, you could extend your time on our rotating celestial mudball, and live to be 100. He then quickly added, 'It will seem like 200."

October 'seemed like' it just evaporated. August 'seemed like' it took forever and 3 more days to move by. So...using my new system, on very nice wonderful days, I might assign a 'one quarter day Seems Like' day length. On those terrible awful August days, I might assign a '10 day Seems Like' day length. Each day seems like 10 days.  That will help me understand why August takes so long, but October just zips by. If the heat index 'seems like' is high, then the 'seems like' day length is longer - lots longer! I could make millions on this idea. Or not....

We planted cover crops on 100% of my fields this year. This field was soybeans. We planted oats (with a sky tractor). The oats fell on the not-quite-ripe soybeans and sprouted down under the bean growth. When the soybeans came out, Bingo! the oats were green and ready spring up. Oats will winter kill, so next spring when it is time to plant corn, Farmer Sterling will not have to do battle with them - but they will have soaked up the fertilizer and held it for us, and they will have added their organic matter to the soil. It really helps. I'm sold on cover cropping!

Hard freezes are predicted for tonight. The gardens are mostly cleaned off now. I've been holding out on digging the dahlia roots. They're pretty sad now, but I still get a blossom or two to enjoy. Annie O. is standing on the new strawberry plants that have traveled out away from the greenhouse. These are the ones I'll dig up and put in the Greenhouse Hydroponic Strawberry tubes next Feb or March.

Bloom girls! for tonight you will die.

My birdhouse gourds produced a huge crop for me. Remember back when? I planted the seeds in the hot dry part of late summer with a 'grow or die' attitude. Well, they grew! Now I'll leave 'em out in the field in the sun and air to cure before I bring them indoors. They make wonderful birdhouses for the wrens and bluebirds. They go to the gourd houses first every time.

Annie found voles in the greenery. She wants to herd anything that moves. She isn't a killer - she's a HERDER! It is so funny to watch her herd mice and voles. Genetics makes for an amazing animal.

Maybe this little guy will be a hummingbird house?

 

A grin and a last bouquet.

The tarp garden has been stripped! That greenery down there is my sage crop. I'll get that cut and indoors to cure pretty soon. I love sage in my dressing, on my roast chicken and in my sausage!

Better lucky than smart! The pretty marigolds are volunteers from last year's hybrid flowers.They grew up from seeds in the sidewalk cracks. No care, no effort, just success. The red salvia behind them is the very expensive seed starts from the greenhouse last spring. Well, yes I did over fertilize them. That's beside the point. They didn't do well at all. Next year, it will be fancy marigolds again - and the seeds from these volunteers will be in rows in my garden.

Did I mention Annie O. will herd anything? If you look closely, she's herding a praying mantis this time. It didn't happen, but I was just waiting for the mantis to jump up and lock onto Annie's nose. That would have been a rodeo!

What do you think of the big planter urns I found for the front porch? I'll glaze them and do some fun patination work this winter so they will look more like really old bronze urns. I will also make them wicking pots so the plants can survive on the long 'seems like 10' days. 

OK, so I'm a little odd. I get it. But here is one of my next fun projects I'm working on. This is the inside view of the root cellar on my Grandfather's farm. It hasn't been used for a root cellar for decades and decades. It is a really neat one though. Built like a bomb shelter probably just before or just after WW I, it is still perfect inside! Perfect, except for the wood and the mess that is. I plan to restore it to full use. If things go really nuts, I might live down there.

See that chair? Well, the story is that my Grandpa had an old house and an old tenant living in it. He paid almost no rent, and Grandpa's 'deal' with him was that he could do anything he wanted to do with the house, but Grandpa was not going to contribute even one penny toward the cost of doing it. They were a matched pair. Mel, the tenant, was very afraid of storms. Solution? He put a lawn chair and a cushion down there so he could sit out tornado warnings in safety. Then he left. Then the racoons moved in. Then every body left. Now I'm moving in....

Everything here has a story. See those quart jars on the shelves? I remember distinctly that my Dad and his brother made some home brew beer one time. They stored it 'down in the cave' to let it age and cool. I also remember they had a hard time climbing up the steps to get out of the cave after having sampled the works of their art down there one time. I'm not going to taste it, but I'm thinking that might be a jar of the elixir they brewed up. Who knows?

These stairs. As far as Annie Oakley is concerned, there are evil spirits (no pun intended, I think) down there and she wanted out! It didn't take long to satisfy her curiosity about 'down in the cave,' and she didn't have any other questions about it, either.

Here is a project from my 'other life' as a furniture restorer I thought might interest some of you. My assignment was to duplicate one of the missing drawer pulls. It came out pretty good, so that is why I'm showing it. No, these are not made from deer antler - although I do use antler for some things.

This project is made from plain old ordinary Sunday Roast Beef Cow bone- as in femur.

Many items on antique furniture which appear to be ivory are in fact bone. I think it is important to know this because people get turned off on the idea of ivory nowadays. Ivory was always a very expensive material. It was seldom used on furniture - except the very elite furniture. Bone looks very much the same - and is free with each roast. I'm showing you how I chuck up and hold the blank on a throw away hardwood mandrel to begin the turning.

Bone doesn't come in great big chunks, so you have to make little parts and put them together. Done properly, they are hand threaded and screwed together. Through luck, some study and a lot of practice - and meeting a mentor named Bill Jones ( a 5th generation Victorian Bone/Ivory/Hardwood turner from England) I learned how to hand cut threads in things.

Here we are in the rough. All turned round, but not colored correctly. 

A little art magic, and the colors came true. One is the original, one is mine.

Topside, bottom side all around all around. When I've done my very best work, you can't tell I've done anything! I live a strange life. Here is a link to more pictures of this project if you're interested: Click Here.

Indoors, the fun never ends. For O.J., it never starts. It's like Annie is saying, "Tim, do you think he would play with me this morning?"

"Maybe if I'm really nice to him, would he play with me?"

"He won't play with me, will he?" No Annie, he won't and you know what he will do if you keep bugging him. Has this ever happened before - like yesterday morning?! O.J. don't play.

But Ziva will! My nephew brought his red heeler, Ziva, out to play with Annie. You can tell by Annie's ears that she is a little cautious about this whole circus. After a 'Hi How Are You' butt sniff or two, they became two sisters of the cloth and had a wonderful time together.  

And finally!.... I have been stacking shop firewood pretty religiously the last month or so. I bring it inside the shop a load at a time and put it up in nice neat stacks as high as I can reach. One morning after stacking, I heard a big noise and a crash. This is what I saw when I went investigating.

I was getting ready to blame myself for poor stacking technique when I spotted the 2X4 laying across the doorway back there. "I smells a rat," said I. I looked for Annie and her ears were about 3-ft long pointing straight up! She denied any knowledge whatsoever of having anything to do with this. Except for that 2X4. It WAS standing straight up leaning on the wall BEHIND the wood pile.

"Somebody," I said, "has been up on the wood pile looking for mice - or for Miss Kitty. Was that you, Annie?" Annie said no, and left the building and stayed outside for the rest of the morning. Busted!

So that's how it has been out here on Oakdale Farm. I hope all is well with you, too. Never pass a chance to have an adventure!

Lost September: The Farm Report 10-05-2021

 Lost September

The Farm Report
10-05-2021

I'm getting to the age where things can get lost in a memory cloud. September was not one of them. It was such a miserable month, I intentionally put it into the trash bin.

A guy has to laugh when he can though. This pic shows a situation that has been making me laugh a little harder every day since it happened. Who would put the coffee creamer in the toilet paper basket next to the biffy in the 'little room' near the front porch? Maybe an Official Old Guy Iowegian Bachealor Farmer like me?

Why am I laughing? Well, one fine day my Officer in Charge of Spit-N-Polish here at Oakdale Manor very carefully, and gently, and tactfully, asked me if I knew anything about the coffee creamer container in my little powder room toilet under the front staircase. 'No,' was my first reaction. Then, as I thought about it, I did remember having one there. Once I explained to her that what was inside that Coffee Creamer container was the hydroponic fertilizer materials I use to water my porch flowers, she seemed relieved. I fill the flower watering can in the sink that is there, add some fertilizer, and go outside to the flower baskets on the porch to deliver the magic elixir of growth. We dropped the subject - "Never mind." 

But over the weeks that have passed, I have come to realize that maybe - just maybe - she thought I might have slipped a notch on a gear somewhere inside the grey cells that live in my noggin's attic. Early dementia? Could he be showing Alzheimer's symptoms? He's starting to lose it! People with dementia do have a history of putting things away in odd places. So the more I think of it, the more it just makes me belly laugh that she thought I had turned the inevitable corner on my way to 'second childhood and mere oblivion' as Shakespeare refers to it. She was so kind and delicate in her approach. I'm still laughing out loud! And it keeps getting funnier and funnier.

"Tim, there isn't anything funny about that whole story. You're embarrassing us. Quit it!"

OK. So September is in the record books, and I'm ready to get back into the firewood. 

While I was away getting a '3 for the price of one' root canal repair on my teeth, the weeds grew around my cut rounds of logs. Maybe that helped me lose track of September, too.

Annie loves to go to the timber, and she's always on the lookout for fun. She actually herds the mice she finds in these logs sometimes. She really does. They are 'deer mice' and they group up together anyway. Still, Annie thinks it is her job to keep 'em all together marching in a pack. She's quick enough to make that happen, too. At least for a little while.

My jib crane is how I get those big heavy rounds back to the splitter and up onto the lift table.

Through the magic of hydraulics, that table raises up level with the splitter beam. All I have to do is pull on a little lever.

Bingo! I also use some homemade-and-handy tools called picaroons to pull the wood where I want it.

When one of those giant oak logs pops in half, but not quite, I use my jib crane to flip the log over and give it another go. No lifting for me, if I can help it!

Annie and I have been going to the timber splitting about every morning now. A Ranger full is about right. I take it back to the shop and put it inside for later - when we need it.

I have been found guilty of hypocrisy. I occasionally say that Texas Heelers and such dogs are not 'lap dogs.' Annie wants to be sure to tell you that I don't always know what I'm talking about. She also thinks there isn't room enough on my lap for everybody who is there.

'Tim, there isn't room for him and me both up here.'

'Tim, there's gotta be some way we can get rid of that cat!' No Annie, there isn't. He was here way before you, and he runs the show - as you know! People who don't have pets are missing a bunch of the fun in life. They are also missing a bunch of the trouble they can cause!

Outside, September (and the whole darned summer for that matter) was not kind to the greenhouse or the garden. Just so you won't think it is always a perfect world out here on the farm. Stuff happens.

Here is a shot of my failed salvia. Yes, that is the salvia for which I paid major big bucks for the seed. My sister says her plants did great. After further review, as they say on TV, I realized that I did probably put too much fertilizer down before I planted them. As I say, stuff happens - sometimes in excess.

After 118 years, we have new steps fitted into the manor. The old ones had never been made correctly, and had been a pain for all that time. I'm thrilled to have the new ones.

I think they look really nice. Plus, I got to meet a really neat guy named Butch Bovier who built them. In his spare time, Butch - who is actually older than I am - builds replicas of Lewis and Clark's river boats. They are called pirogues. He might be building one this winter. He might be building it close to me. I might really enjoy watching all that happen!

The late green beans I planted are about 2 weeks behind the catalog prediction of when the beans should be ready to pick. That is expected since we are losing sunlight hours all the time now. They look great though. I'll be having fresh green beans again soon. Oh Boy!

And other fun in the orchard: This is an apple from one of my two remaining previously unidentified 2009 Mystery Graft trees. I have tasted it (Absolutely Delicious!) and I think I have identified it.

This is the bottom side. It almost looks like a Yellow Delicious. But it isn't (hint!).

It is - drum roll! - a Grimes Golden apple! Grimes Golden is in fact a parent of Yellow Delicious. No wonder they look alike. Grimes fell out of fashion, according to books I read, because even though it is superior in flavor and juiciness, it is slow to bear, and bears fruit unpredictably. True on both counts! So the commercial guys don't like it. I do, however. It is well well well worth the wait. Sweet, snappy, juicy, delicious flavor. All good.

So what is a 2009 Mystery Graft? In 2009, I bench grafted a whole bunch of apple trees in my shop one winter. (I did it sitting on a stool in front of my woodworking bench, hence the name 'bench grafting' - get it?) I used a paint code system to mark the stems of the little trees after I had performed my little whittling surgery so I could tell what was what when I set them out into my garden nursery row. 'White band, white band, red band' was one kind; red band, blue band, orange band, was another kind. I had 8 different kinds I was grafting that day. I carefully wrote down my color combinations on a piece of paper as I worked along.

Well, sometime between then and now, I lost that piece of paper! My color key disappeared. Horrors! So, I made little tree tags for all of them that simply said, 2009 Mystery Graft. I also listed the names of the 8 different possibilities it could be. I had Esopus Spitzenburg, Cornish Gilliflower, Chieftan, Yellow Delicious, Golden Russet, King David, Belle de Boskoop, and of course, Grimes Golden. All this wood came to me through the good wishes of the Arbor Day Orchard's historic preservation orchard. A friend of mine and I were allowed to go in and collect the grafting scion wood ourselves. I am thrilled to have GG in my orchard!

Out to the mailbox one day to get the bills. This soaked package was in there with the other bad news.
 It was dripping wet and smelled of dill and garlic. Oh my!

Oh my, oh my, oh my! Chad and Christina had sent me some of their homemade pickles and the jars didn't make the trip. Dang!

But as I kept digging through the wreckage, I discovered these two little jars of homemade salsa lurking in the safety of the corners surrounded by rotten dill pickles. Unscathed and ready for action! In a poetic sense, they are kinda like me; having been through a bunch of crap this summer and having avoided the real troubles that threatened, we are all primed and ready to move on, full of flavor and zest. Let the good times roll! Here's to a great Fall season ahead.