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  • From: Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>
  • To: Homestead mailing list digest <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Notes From the Farm (Summer 2006)
  • Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 10:32:48 -0700

As usual, the big heat waves wait until autumn. It's been 86 deg. for 3 days in a row. It's a good day for typing, and drying laundry on the line, since even dishwashing will heat the house.

Finally a few pimentos are ripening, so I made machaca from them. I gave up on beans long ago; it was amazing. I did get to do a little preserving between heat waves. I froze parsnips and green beans; pickled beans, beets and cucumbers; and froze several batches of tomatoes and strawberries. There's no choice but to deal with squash, so I made a giant pot of Italian-style zucchini in tomato sauce and canned 14 pints of it. Months ago we also harvested memorable quantities of sugar snap peas.

The filberts bore a quantity of nuts for the first time, and for some reason the squirrels are incompetent this year, so I cured several dozen of them. Best of all, the seedling (non-grafted, so pot luck) walnut had 8 nuts, despite being still small. That virtually guarantees good harvests in years to come. And my two little cherries, along with the larger one by the shed, whose fruits were mostly unreachable, yielded about 5 gallons of cherries! We put lots of them into the rumpot, along with many other early berries. And the grape harvest is more enormous than ever, with 3 kinds of table grapes (Canadice, Interlaken Seedless, and Himrod) and 2 wine grapes (Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, two of each). Today is about the last good day of ripening, and I had to battle yellow jackets just to sample them, even in the morning. There were almost no Japanese plums or peaches thanks to the February freeze. But I did dry lots of nice Italian prunes.

Just as I'm practically bathing in salsa, the tomato syndicate seems to have it all sown up, with the lowest price in supermarkets around $1.89, whether here or in S. California. From the looks of them, it seems they might even be from last year. I guess people are being trained to think of winter, the Mexican tomato season, as _the_ tomato season. Oh well, the overripe red ones that I throw to the geese are probably too sweet to make good salsa, and those who don't know the difference might as well stick with the greenish-orange ones, or select a canned product, since tomatoes aren't worth $4 a pound.

I finally settled on the simplest possible scheme for raising well water. Actually I thought of it years ago, but for some reason I didn't take it seriously. If you just submerge a vertical pipe halfway in water, and place the end of an air tube inside the pipe near the bottom, and blow air into the tube, you'll see that water gushes out of the pipe. That's because the foam created is much less dense than plain water, so it's negatively buoyant relative to the surrounding water. Experiment shows that the greatest efficiency is achieved when there's a 60-40 ratio between the lengths of pipe above and below the water level. So to haul water up 108 feet from my well, it would need to have at least 72 feet of clearance under the water line. This is unrealistic, so I looked at other types of systems. But then I realized that just by hanging 3 eighteen-foot long water reservoirs, made of 2" PVC with an end cap, at different heights in the well shaft, weighing a total of less than 100 pounds, I can divide that lift into 4 stages. Each stage dumps water into the reservoir for the next. It takes 4 times the rate of air flow, but the pressure required is only 1/4 as great. Here's the clever part. In order for the system to work, each stage must pump water very slightly slower than the one below it, so that the reservoirs stay full. There are more difficult ways to try to do this, but the simplest is just to make every stage exactly the same, and connect them to the air supply starting with the bottom stage first. It's guaranteed that each successive stage will run slightly slower, since devices with the shortest air hose supply get the air first. Yesterday I brought home the 4-cylinder engine that we'll be converting into a compressor.

The other day I had another "bat" experience. This time he was face down in the cat water, and I rescued him. He was obviously a boy bat. Lee keeps warning me about rabies, and I suppose that when the bat in question has been found in association with water, there's greater cause for alarm, but I was careful not to handle him. I placed him in a towel and dried him with the calves' heat lamp. I felt that rush which only comes from bringing creatures back from the verge of death, like the calves last spring. When he was about dry I tried to take him outside to a nice bush with lots of sticks to hang from, but he started flying on the enclosed porch. He seemed fine. For a few moments I was in awe of what appeared to be a giant black butterfly. He did not seem the least bit disoriented, but nevertheless dropped to the ground when he "heard" that there was no way out. I scooped him up again, and this time he made it to the bush. A few minutes later I checked and he was gone, apparently no worse for wear, just like the brave little swimmer I found in the bathroom sink one summer morning years ago. That little guy needed the whole day to sleep and recuperate before flying. Ain't I silly? I guess I can't help but think of myself lying there in that pool of water.

We didn't finish any new garden beds this summer. I think I'm switching to a new type of in-ground protected bed. My existing raised beds take an enormous amount of water. The time we saved was poured into fencing another half-acre of property. This area isn't even cleared yet, although I've been working on it, but animals will help. Next year I plan to keep the calves in there when they get too big, and make a steer excluder that only allows small sheep and goats to come and go into the main pasture. I'll have to feed them, but I did so last year too. The one thing that one cannot abide, with growing calves, is walking down with them to where they'll be eating while holding the feed. One could easily be trampled.

I discovered that the chittem trees in the woods make excellent feed for lambs. It's easy to break down small saplings of the "cascara sagrada" as forage. They carefully avoid the laxative bark. This is actually a real find, considering how barren and dry it is for the most part. It's better than grape prunings, which lambs really love.

Speaking of dry weather, it rained about a half-inch over about one week's time. That brings our total for the rain year to 71.42", which will probably be the final total, since no more is expected until after October 1.

I'm happy to have finished Step 0 (deciding what it is you need/want) on several building projects. In the front yard we're converting the old lamp tower to an obelisk, and building a trapezoidal arch to walk under, for an Incan theme. To discourage people from going around the archway, there'll be a low trapezoidal sundial to the side. It's design will be truly unique. The gnomon will be a smaller replica of the obelisk, standing apart from the trapezoidal face. An ordinary sundial makes a great calendar in winter and fall, but in spring and summer the shadow is so short that you can't easily resolve what date it is. So I had a great idea to position things so that the shadow falls in the normal way onto the flat face only in fall and winter. In spring and summer the shadow will fall onto the side of the trapezoidal block. Conveniently, the side pattern will resemble a plant stem, to go with the flower motif that will appear on the top (actually the mathematical curves for each hour of the day that resemble flower petals).

We also agreed that the logical place for an outdoor kitchen is east of the existing kitchen, between the proposed deck and existing driveway. I'm planning a winter sweat lodge (a "lly^s-lle^", if Welsh spelling may be used for writing the local language of the upper Coquille; sounds appropriately like "sleaze sleigh") that will only measure 12' x 10', to escape Draconian building restrictions, where the cast-iron cook stove is going. And we decided on the size and location of a pond for storing summer water. But my favorite of all is the summer bathing facility (for calves, of course, should an inspector inquire). ;) I wracked my brain trying to see how to fit an outdoor solar-heated shower for summer use on the south side of the shed, and also accommodate terraria for insect-eating plants. Then I realized that if I make the shower enclosure quite magnificent, from tall, graceful, clear polycarbonate panels that I already have, it will only require buying enough lumber for the framework, and a door, since the roof and one side are already provided by the building overhang. Then Nepenthes vines can amble about the cathedral ceiling, small plants like Venus' fly-trap can be displayed prominently on a shelf, and giant sundews and pitcher plants can grow up from pots on the floor. I'll be able to open the barn window and let flies into the chamber at night, then close it in time for bathing. Now I don't have to make any terraria at all from old glass, except maybe one for the front porch. This will accommodate all insectivores except the cool-loving indigenous Darlingtonia, the cobra lily or California pitcher, which will loom dramatically from an island in a koi pond tucked inside the L-shape formed by the shed, and some tropicals which may have to be moved to the (sunnier) front porch for winter.

The reputation of Dr. Jones, Medicine Man, continues to grow. Again my Biodynamic buddy Orlando had a calf with scours (diarrhea, for the uninitiated), and once again ___I___ cured it (or so I'd like to think). I had him make the usual mix of dextrose, salt, and homemade potassium citrate, but this time we added a little yogurt whey. Then, of course, it's vital to give lots of yogurt (with live cultures) along with the formula once regular feeding resumes. And voila! You'll have calves that are tough as nails.

Back in June, we traveled all the way to S. California to pick up the Prias, which was finally repaired. On the way back we went to San Francisco, to turn in our paperwork at the Secretary of State's office. Can you believe I actually stood in the Governor's office? But he wasn't in. It took almost one full week (for the whole trip, not just to be searched at the state office building). When we returned we were exhausted. I managed to ruin my bad knee by walking too fast, and it took another week to get back to normal. It really set us back for the summer. I've got half a mind to just call some concrete contractors and have them put in 1000 sq. ft. of new beds, to make up for it.

I'm really eager to begin work on the roller coaster software. We decided to go ahead and do the red/blue 3-D. This requires placing two pictures, a red one and a blue one, on the screen at the same time. So you can't just plot a blue dot; you have to make it purple if it's already colored red. Unfortunately the existing line drawing commands don't support that, so the program will have to draw lines dot by dot. Still, there are comparatively few dots that need to be plotted for each frame of motion, since it will draw only the track and the stars, along with their reflections off the "water", so I expect it will still be fast enough.

The landscape project at the extension building has turned into a total mess. Two years ago, we were told that no one was interested in the project, so several of us volunteered. It turned out that our great leader had her own ideas, so she decided to replace the plans of others by her own. She packed areas that other people had spent a lot of time planning with leftover, winter-disappearing plants from the plant sale; not just a couple, but in an obviously territorial way, since the whole place still needs plants everywhere. Just as she had showed us all who's boss, by spending $2000 of our money on an ugly greenhouse, the de facto boss of the extension service threw her and her entire unauthorized work party off the property when their tractor broke the cement walk ("work parties" had replaced "meetings" as it became clear that only grunt labor, not creative input, would be required from the rank-and-file), and told her to stuff the greenhouse. I even heard that the government employee in charge of the program has been threatened with dismissal over her loss of control over the situation. All of this happened with no influence from me whatsoever. And now, what was to be someone's herbal shrine to herself is but an ugly pile of boulders, rather resembling dirty asphalt, in front of a government office building; they won't be allowed to build the windbreak that would have kept the proposed herb garden warm (assuming any of the rank-and-file will ever want to volunteer there again). I think that people with this level of control freak tendencies should seek professional help, because maybe just like kleptomania, it's a situation where they don't even realize what their doing.

Viva el 27 de septiembre! Today I'm having baked --yes baked, not fried, thanks to a special technique-- rolled tacos with guacamole, carne asada burritos, and strawberry spongecake with whipped cream.

Have a great autumn and a joyous Columbus Day!

Bill




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