rotten apples

Here are some hedge apples, being left out for the winter to rot. I got some from brother Tom and some from sister in law Brenda. The plan is to start experimenting with living fencing. I've read a bit about Osage Orange, aka hedge apple, and its history as a windbreak and hedge, but don't know how well it will do this far north. If it works out, the periodic pruning and coppicing will provide excellent firewood, as it has by far the highest heating btu content of trees in North America. You are supposed to let them decompose through the winter, then turn them into a souply mess, and dribble the seeds into a furrow in the spring, thinning as required after they get started. The technique requires close planting, and severe pruning to keep them from getting out of hand and to encourage lower level branch growth. You can then get as fancy as you like, bending over and weaving, and even laying hedge like in England, but I don't know how far down that road I'll go. The other experiment will be Hawthorne. I'm finding it harder to get "free" starts, so may go slower with that stretch till I find a good source. Just fencing the 25 acre field will require about a quarter mile of fence, depending on how much I want to enclose, so this is a long term project.

Of course the other rotten apples are the ones from our apple tree that never did sweeten up, even after frost. They looked good on the tree, but did not taste good. After a hard freeze, they turned brown and softened up, so they will be deer food. Gotta make a cider press. The backlog for my yet to be built workshop is getting longer.....

choose wisely

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade- The ancient knight says "you must choose, but choose wisely".

So, it always helps if someone else goes first, right? Make note of others mistakes and DO NOT repeat them. The next memorable quote from the movie "he chose..... poorly". Indy then gets one of those under pressure leaps of insight that only happen in movies, and picks the right goblet. Would that life were like that more often. We make mistakes our whole lives, some big, some small, some are of the game over variety. Because of the upcoming discontinuity I think might happen, this is not time to copy what others are doing, and just go along without thinking 20 years out.

So in my preparations to get a permaculture farm up and running, I have been talking to our local permaculture expert and serious hands on practitioner, and reading books. Some books will be useful reference to keep on the shelf, but some will give me reason to alter current plans and deepen my understanding of the system aspects that must be accounted for.

The excellent advise and shared wisdom I am gathering right now is from the book by Harvey Ussery "The Small Scale Poultry Flock". I recommend it ( for what that is worth, this blog is more of a diary than anything) for anyone with the room and inclination to raise chickens. The book is both filling in the detail of what I only had a general notion of, as well as making me realize I have even more work to do than I thought to create a productive efficient biosystem on our farm.

the apple cycles

Last year, we got quite quite a few apples, and still have some canned apple sauce from them. This year not so much. I think everyone knows that the spring was weird, with an abnormal early warmth, followed with a late hard frost. This hurt fruit trees to varying degrees in the midwest, and then we had a very dry summer. These seem like the most obvious variables that would cause yield to bounce up and down from year to year, but I imagine there are others I don't recognize yet.

We had very few apples on several of the trees this year, but one had a middling yield, but had a lot of the disease shown above. I still know practically nothing about trees yet, so don't know what it is. Adding to the oddness, one tree, off by itself around 50 yards from the others, is absolutely loaded, and no sign of any disease or insect damage. We will probably harvest this next weekend. The apples are rather small, probably more because they should have been thinned some.

I hope to be better prepared to do a decent thinning job next spring. (After some hard pruning this winter, these trees had no attention for years).

It seemed like out tomatoes took forever to start ripening, but we ended up with an ok yield. We had to pick the last of them while green, since we wouldn't be back up before the likely first frost. Here is what they look like as they slowly ripen. Every couple days, we process a small batch, and as of today, they are almost all done.

pole barns

We need a building. We need under roof storage, so the garage can resume its normal function, we plan to do livestock, and I need a workshop area. Hence a barn. Since we don't live there yet, and a pole barn is a big project, we will use a local contractor to build it for us next summer.

So now I'm learning that pole barns ( or pole sheds, as many insist on calling them. I guess in my size range, maybe "barn" is a tad presumptuous. ) are apparently such a standard and well known commodity, that everyone just assumes we know all the details involved. I really have avoided revealing I'm an engineer, but rather trot out the yuppie from the suburbs schtik to explain my ignorance. To inquire about the design basis, or how they determine the truss size or spacing evokes hesitation and a slightly embarrassed perplexity as to how to answer.

I am doing parallel study in the internet, but haven't dug too much yet. I know that many details and standard methods are driven by building codes and years of knowledge passed down, and are fine if done to code, but how do I know whether an individual guy is making it up or is cutting corners? One more reason I'm getting three quotes.

And one of the contractors is Amish, which brings a whole new layer of communication difficulty. I drove out to his house twice just to initiate discussions. He will be mailing me his quote in the next few days. I was fortunate that he is one of the Amish who uses phones, though I believe the phone is in a little shed outside the house. Turns out that because of where we live, he figures he will use the horses to come to work. Beyond a certain radius, he hires a "English" driver to haul him, his crew and tools to out place.

We also have had a heck of a time choosing a flat, accessible location. As it is, we'll be doing some dirt work and recontouring part of the pasture. The issue with getting a building permit deserves a whole other post.

saw buck

Here is the sawbuck. I'm getting the hang of the best saw stroke, but still need to come up with a good way to quickly grip the wood during cut, then release for the next piece. Current setup works, but is a kludge. This is all large branches left from the wind downed trees in July. It's soft maple, so easy to cut.

Here is a bonus photo of our earlier garlic harvest. With the heat and drought, garlic finished early, but the size was good and we had a pretty good crop. It's all cured and stowed away now. We'll actually be planting from some of these bulbs soon, probably our trip in late October.

crosscut saw

I got the 42" one man crosscut saw I ordered, so had to then build a sawbuck to hold wood for cutting. I found a few example designs on line, and built one.

To these unschooled eyes, the teeth looked sharp enough, so I started cutting, Man, chain saws are a great invention.

I quickly found out that sawbucks are fine for cutting wood with a chainsaw, but crosscuts put lots of lateral force on the wood, causing the wood to rotate, and the sawbuck to want to tip over.

I jury rigged a chain and some weight, but need to come up with an efficient scheme so make the routine faster, Photos to follow after I get that done.

I also got the basic sharpening kit, but need to build a saw clamp to hold it while I sharpen. So many things that used to be common you either have to buy on the antique section of ebay, or make your own. Sharpening crosscuts is rather a chore, and I've never done it before, so I hope the saw stays sharp a good long while.

speak of the devil........

Well; In my last post, I mentioned the concern of dry weather the first year new trees are planted, so we have had the worst drought in 50 years. Many trees are dead, some have died back, and we will need to wait till spring to see if they went dormant enough to resprout. We won't know the total loss till then, but it looks like it is at least one third. And of course, the deer browse isn't helping. We talked with Mark and were looking at a plan B option of buying a large plastic tank and drip hose to try to save them, but a couple big rains in late July made us decide to save our money and cross our fingers.

Here is one of the little guys in late spring, before the drought started taking it's toll. We had already had a low snow winter, so the ground was not starting out wet as normal anyway. The white plastic tube is to keep rodents from chewing the trunk. I understand that will primarily serve it's purpose in winter. We are heading up this weekend for garden tending ( the garden didn't do so well either, that is a whole other post) and preserving tomatoes. We knew that remote gardening would be a suboptimal experiment, but this year has been pretty lousy because of the drought.