Landlessons

Good Day For a Hanging

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Mon, 15 Jun 2015 15:40:00 +0000

Time for a new anti-sag clothesline stick!

I'm not the only one interested in blackberries

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Sun, 29 Jun 2014 16:11:00 +0000

As this little guy proved -- or tried to -- when I was clearing one of the blackberry patches.

Not so little, actually -- 27 inches of copperhead wanting nothing more than to be a copperhead.

But this one was doing its copperhead thing too close to the house, and so it is now a former copperhead.

Blackberries Soon

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Sun, 29 Jun 2014 15:46:00 +0000

Nearly there!

Maybe as early as tomorrow (and I will probably find at least one or two that are ready this afternoon), and certainly by Tuesday . . . Blackberries!.

Just in time for the Fourth!

And judging by how productive the plants are this year, plenty of berries for the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh, too.

Some Snow Don't Want To Go

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 02:03:00 +0000

Even 68 degrees today hadn't managed to persuade these stragglers to complete their melt:

By tomorrow, this last bit should be just a memory.

But a pleasant one -- I enjoyed this snow.

A lot.

Where the Snow Goes When It Melts

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 01:19:00 +0000

The big snow lasted on the ground well over a week here at the farm, and when it began in earnest to depart, a fair amount of it exited by way of our creek. Just a day after I visited its snow-covered banks, the creek had taken on a wholly different character:

The Snows of Yesterweek

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Sun, 23 Feb 2014 23:13:00 +0000

Hard to believe, walking and working in close to 70 degree weather today, that just a few days I was walking and working in very different conditions.

Here's a photo taken during my return to the house on Tuesday, almost a week to the hour after the first flakes began to fall.

The snow was starting to go then, but it had a ways to go before it would be gone.

I was returning from a snowy stroll to the creek, its banks still heavy with snow, though not so heavy as they had been just a day or two before:

Tis the Season . ..

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 22:29:00 +0000

For . . .

SEED CATALOGS!

My favorite winter reading.

The Calm Before

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Sat, 07 Dec 2013 23:24:00 +0000

Is there ice coming?

Probably.

Enough to knock the power out?

Won't know until the lights go off -- or stay on.

But I've made sure there's plenty of water in jugs and bottles. The lamps and flashlights and book lights are all ready. Plenty of food. A big pot of turkey and rice soup taking shape in my mind in preparation for it taking slow shape in my stock pot starting sometime between midnight and dawn. Propane grill ready if needed.

The radios have new batteries.

The propane fireplaces are doing fine.

Nice stack of books beside my reading chair; some science and other journals to catch up on too. Plenty of sharpened pencils for continuing to write books of my own. (And my pencil sharpener has a crank handle, and doesn't need electricity any more than the same model sharpener needed it fifty or a hundred years ago.)

Good sweaters and heavy socks ready for whatever tomorrow brings.

Good flannels and a Hudson Bay blanket ready for the night shift.

Could be sausage and biscuits here sometime before the sun comes up.

Ice storm?

Hope it misses us -- and especially hope it misses those for whom it would be a real and dangerous hardship.

But if not --

Bring it on.

Afternoon of the Fauns

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 17:18:00 +0000

Now that we've had the first real hint that summer will be ending, I've been thinking back over this one, and the spring before it, the things I've done here, grown here, seen here. I've been busy doing them, not writing about them, but I thought I'd take a moment now and then to look back, and share those glances here.

One of the best things I saw this season was a pair of fauns, whom I found in tall grass very close to the house. (Unexpected benefit of not mowing!)

When I came around the corner of the house their mother took off, snorting and shouting with every maternal energy she owned, but the fauns were unmoved both literally and by my presence. The fauns remained in place, let me get very close to them. They waited there place until I returned with the iPad, then allowied me to record them for a few seconds before I stepped back around the corner to let them find their way to their mother, who had taken up position in the woods near the creek, calling frantically and without cease.

It took them awhile to make their move, and when they did they took a tentative meandering route -- one of them spent some time in the now unoccupied horse stalls. Had it not been for the doe's desperate calls -- and the fauns' smaller, bleated but equally desperate answers -- and the fact that The Yearling imprinted so deeply on me when I was a child, I would have been more tempted to close the stall and keep the faun close for a bit than I was.

Eventually mother and offspring were reunited. I am more than half-convinced that I heard the fauns speak their species' version of "You left us!" to the doe.

I have seen the fauns again, on and off, all through the summer, growing nicely -- thanks in no small part to the smorgasbord my gardens provide (I don't mind, mostly). They are far more wary now, although they still come closer to the house than most deer.

I am always happy to see them. Someday perhaps they will fall to a hunter elsewhere. I don't permit hunting on my property -- but I do permit myself the thought that someday or or the other of them might bring the next generation by the house on their way, do doubt, to show the new kids the salad bar that I grow as much for them as for me.

Gardening in Suspension

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 16:11:00 +0000

Long rainy night, with more rain expected, on and off throughout the day, after a rainy day yesterday. Raining heavily now. My gauge shows just under two inches here since Monday night. Less than the three inches or more that the local TV weather clones predicted..

Still, more rain than we needed (not that we have any say in the matter), and more than enough to slow down work in the garden for a few days.

This isn't a complaint, or isn't intended as one anyway. The weather is what the weather is -- as it always has been. (The climate is something else. The climate is becoming what we have made of it. And that, of course, affects the weather, a fact (sic) that the local weather clones continue to decline to mention.

Where weather is concerned, I have been accurately accused of loving it all -- mild or stormy, clear or cloudy, too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry. And, with the exception of the devastating and often tragic consequences of extreme weather, I do.

Even when it slows down or halts my garden work. I'm no gardening Goldilocks -- I try to work with what I have. And what I have this year is a lot of mud.

Day before yesterday I talked for awhile with my good neighbor Jewell Brown. Central among the many things we discussed was the challenge of farming (for Jewel;) and gardening (for me) when the weather is as wet as it has been here this spring and early summer. No matter how well a garden drains, it can't drain this much rain coming this intensely and constantly.

I mentioned my father's comment that it was far easier to work land that was too dry than too wet, a sentiment that anyone who's sunk a boot -- much less a tire or wagon wheel -- into deep, and deeply supersaturated soil knows all too well. The kind of mud that can pull a boot from your foot while you're trying to pull the boot from the mud.

Jewel nodded his long-time farmer's nod. He's seen it all, and the weather is a far more serious matter for him than for me. He makes his living from the land; I am simply sustained by it.

I have been watching the mud in the garden pretty closely this year. trying to gauge the point at which my garden soil ceased being solid and became instead a suspension, a solution. And not the sort of solution that solves problems, but rather the sort of solution that is one.

That point, which has happened three or four times this year, is rapidly approaching once more. Another inch or so of rain today should do it -- and we're expected to get much more than another inch.

Then it becomes a race as to whether or not the garden dries out enough to be worked before the rains return again.

I suspect that when I step out to the main garden a little later I will discover that this week's race is already lost -- we have more rain on the way.

I will spend some time looking at the mud, the suspension whose only solution is time and dry weather.

"You get a better harvest from too dry than too wet," Jewell said to me before we parted beneath gathering rain clouds.

But you also grow what you can grow in the conditions available to you.

In other words, sometimes when I plant collards, what grows best is colloids.

Berries Coming Along

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 21:36:00 +0000

My favorite early summer challenge -- waiting for the blackberries to be ready for picking . . .

And eating!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Sunday by the Creek

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Sun, 05 May 2013 18:39:00 +0000

I spent some time this morning beside the creek that flows so gently through beside this farm.

YouTube Video

As always, undiminished after nearly eighteen years, this flow captivates and restores me.

The Newest Neighbors

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Sat, 04 May 2013 18:09:00 +0000

Beautiful babies, beautiful mothers, beautiful little farm, all very well cared-for.
Such good neighbors.

YouTube Video

Cool

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Sat, 04 May 2013 17:54:00 +0000

A good cool Saturday, fifteen degrees or morebelow normal -- the temperature sign in town said 50 at noon. Cloudy but dry.

Garden day!

Ready For The Cicadas To Sing

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Fri, 03 May 2013 18:54:00 +0000

It shouldn't be long now, and I'm ready, both because I love their song and all that it conveys. . .

And because they'll be singing loud enough to drown out the sound of the grass growing -- which I am convinced is louder than the sound of the mower that can't keep up with how fast the grass grows.

Sheep may safely graze

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 15:07:00 +0000

Lambs, too, on a neighbor's nice farm.

YouTube Video

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

New Year's Possibilities

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 21:47:00 +0000

Seed catalogs started arriving today.

Which means that some of my favorite reading of the year begins today as well.

New Year, Old Lessons

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 21:22:00 +0000

2013 begins, with all the promise and all the challenge that each new year brings.

I'm looking forward, as always, to learning -- and re-learning -- some of the old lessons that this land has tried so hard to teach me. I am doing so in hopes of really learning the lessons this time.

In so far as anyone ever does.

That, it seems to me, is one of the great gifts of a piece of land and all that comes with it. The chance to learn and to go on learning, the same lessons year after year, and discovering that the lessons, however often learned, and the learning itself, never grow old.

I love this little farm more than I can say. It has taught me so much, and continues to.

What Part Of This Sign Don't People Understand?

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 21:34:00 +0000

Clearly not the request -- NO BRUSH ALLOWED -- which is actually an instruction, but just as clearly the depositors are beyond instruction.

No doubt there are tires beneath the non-allowed brush as well.
Incredible!
And all too typical.

One Last Taste

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 19:31:00 +0000

YouTube Video

I had thought that last week's cold snap -- no frost yet, and nights not quite down into the 30s, but still -- would have signaled the end of thistle meals and bees partaking of them.
Evidently not, as witness my discovery this warm and sunny Sunday afternoon.
Bon appetit!
For now, anyway.

Good Day Rainfall

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 15:02:00 +0000

The first chill drizzle of the fall, and not unexpected.

Nor unwelcome. An opportunity for long gazes through water-beaded windows, the world beyond the panes slipping away from the shores summer and their promises and pleasures, and on into the landscape of fall with its different, more contemplative, perspectives.

A good day.

Thistle Down

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:52:00 +0000

The butterfly and bee buffet is closing for the season.

But even as it shuts down, preparation for another buffet is well under way.

The winds bringing in a cold front should help scatter the down.

Ensuring another feast, about this time -- thistle time -- next year.

The Sign You Hate To See On A Neighboring Farm

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 20:45:00 +0000

The odds that the land will be bought by a farmer rather than a developer may not be large, but we can hope.

Maybe the difference will be split, and an investor will buy it and lease out the farming rights.

That's essentially what's been done with the land for the last decade and more. I've always enjoyed passing these fields as I come in to my place, and have always used the various stages of work, from planting in the spring tithe stubble of winter as one of my indices of time passing here.

But that's changeless time, season after season of crops, work, rest, and changelessness is an illusion at best.

The auction is about six weeks from now. Not much time to savor something I thought changeless.

But when is there ever?

Who's Afraid of Thomas Wolfe?

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 21:39:00 +0000

October clearly on my mind -- and this farm blog -- I found myself writing of that great October (and all the other months, too), Thomas Wolfe on my other, more wide-ranging (or just less focused blog, Cultivating Keith.

It struck me that some of you might enjoy that piece -- if you know Wolfe's work, you know how aware he was of the rhythms of nature, the power of the seasons, the promise of the land. If you don't know his work (and how it was treated), there's a glimpse in the long post I wrote about him, October, and Of Time and the River:

If you take a look, let me know what you think.

More importantly:

Do any of you read Thomas Wolfe? Of all of our great novelists, he and Faulkner had the most finely developed senses of nature. Both of course have much to say to us today, about nature, and our place in it.

And They Stayed Gray All Day

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Ferrell) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 20:51:00 +0000

Before long we'll be having the other kind of October day and October sky -- brilliant blue and bracing.
But yesterday and today have been unbroken gray, drizzly and misty.
Late in the day the gray began to lessen, letting us know that "before long" means tomorrow, probably

I love October.