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>Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 00:34:51 -0700
>From: Tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>
>Subject: Gardening to the end
>To: Homestead mailing list <homestead AT listserv.unc.edu>
>Reply-to: Homestead mailing list <homestead AT listserv.unc.edu>

>
>Marie McHarry wrote:
>>
>> The last time I asked a really serious homesteading question back in
>> October
>> 2003, I didn't get much practical help (that was when I was about to have
>> surgery on my destroyed right arm). Well, I survived the surgery, and I
>> figured out ways to do a number of things. However, I was so disabled for
>> the 3 months post-op that I would have frozen (it's hard to load a
>> wood-burning boiler with only one arm) and my chickens and goats would
>> have
>> starved except that my mother let me have her hired man for a couple of
>> hours a day. It's really good to have a semi-functional arm again
>> --just in
>> time for gardening season. There's nothing like losing functionality
>> to make
>> a person appreciate simple pleasures, like for example, being able to put
>> the dishes away.
>
>(Lyris break)
>
>>
>> It seems to me that several of us on this list are getting a bit
>> geriatric
>> (and some of us are even older than that). How's about a discussion of
>> how
>> to keep on homesteading when you've got arthritis and the other
>> degenerative
>> diseases of old age.
>> I know, I know, if you live a really good life, you won't degenerate
>> until
>> you're really old, but I agree completely with my mother (she's 85)
>> who said
>> once that she _could_ move to a retirement center if she had to, but what
>> would be the point of living if she couldn't stay out in the country and
>> have a garden and enjoy life as she has known it all these years.
>>
>> I look forward to a discussion on this topic.
>>
>> Marie
>>
>> tvoivozd---decide what you can do and what you can/t (or shouldn't do)
>> That's the only guide you need.  Plan far enough ahead so you can do a
>> few things you enjoy in the final stage of decay---my plan is to
>> garden outside as long as I possibly can.  I should build a greenhouse
>> for the time that becomes impossible, but I don't want to waste money
>> on a house that will shortly be torn down, not even a lean-to
>> greenhouse on a south-facing wall.
>>
>>
>a.  Vehicles.  I had an uncle who had 20/20 vision into his nineties,
>dying at 96.  Drove a car until the day he died, distressing his
>children immensely.  They weren't so worried about him driving into
>somebody or something as their worry he would have a heart attack miles
>from help.  This is not a good idea for anyone of lesser physical
>capability, vision or mental alertness.  On all points I rarely drive
>anywhere and would never even think about driving at night.  I live
>about four miles from a country store. I haven't been there for several
>months, and ceased even emergency driving to Roanoke over a year ago. I
>recommend everyone of advanced age carefully assess their capabilities
>and stop driving before it becomes dangerous---you really shouldn't need
>a wreck to tell you when that moment has arrived.
>
>I had a big (too big) industrial Massey Harris industrial tractor with a
>six-foot wide front-end loader.  Got too hard to climb up and down.  I
>sorely miss the front-end loader, but I sold it. Without an observer
>along it was more of a hazard than a help. My oldest daughter has cat
>fits about me being outside unattended anyway.
>I had a smaller, but heavily built Case-Ingersoll tractor with a
>hydraulic drive and two-wheel dump wagon.  Even that was too difficult
>to control, so I gave it to a rural repair shop whose owner had done
>many favors in the past for me, including repairing the Massey Harris
>for damned near nothing.  I forgot I had a good mower deck for it, saw
>it in one of the barns yesterday, and he is coming over tomorrow to get
>it.  He better bring a couple of helpers along---one good man cannot
>lift it.
>
>I do drive around the farm with an ancient four-wheel drive
>Ranger---slowly and carefully, if I need to carry something or pull
>something.  It will never leave the farm again. When I stop, the shift
>lever is in first gear forward (reverse is not as good), and the brake
>is on.  I have forgotten to take off the brake occasionally---the truck
>tells me how stupid I am in doing so, so I take it off.
>
>(b)  Tools.  I have been a toolaholic all my life.  The machine shop
>tools are all gone---eyesight does not permit their use.  I have a good
>Stihl chainsaw a couple years old---unlike my previous Echo which
>cranked easily and could not be prevented from starting even if it stood
>idle for six months, a Stihl is hard to crank even with a compression
>release, and is a summertime saw.  In winter it requires a handy can of
>starting fluid or it is as useful in sawing wood as a ship's anchor.  I
>live in fear that one of my kids who have not lived with dangerous
>machines as long as I have (from five years of age) , will pick up and
>try to operate that chainsaw---absolutely the most dangerous piece of
>equipment on the farm.  It will go while I am still living. I regret its
>departure, but I am not physically capable of sawing trees down and
>cutting them up any more.  I think any of the children can handle the
>straight-shaft Echo weedeater, so that will stay.  Very little else but
>simple hand tools still remain in plastic boxes labeled for their
>contents.  Big print, so even if anyone is half blind, they can read it.
>
>As long as we have lived here, we have cut and burned wood.  I value it
>as an inexhaustible supply of fuel that additionally provided needed
>exercise. I have to dispense with exercise, so the Aladdin Quadrifire
>woodstove is shortly being replaced by an oil furnace (gravity-fed
>burner so there will be heat when the power goes our).  It is a
>temporary expedient, but a woodstove needs constant attendance and
>feeding, unless it is an outside Hardy forced-draft boiler furnace.  If
>I am not here to watch it, it is likely no one will or can do so (didn't
>get that home manufacturing business cranked up for my daughter last
>year as I should have done). Automatic, timed heat is a necessity, hence
>the oil burner.
>
>I think the new house will start going up this year.  The design will be
>modified to produce an excess of solar heat with  insulating glass in
>the North side bank of French doors (where a beautiful view is)---If it
>is necessary, and only if it is necessary, supplementary French door
>insulation in  some form, will be added to their interiors---a
>wait-and-see job.  The house will probably not have supplementary
>heat---if it does, it is unlikely it will be a woodstove, much as I like
>to look at psychologically comforting flames.  It will be resistance
>baseboard heat, powered by a minimally expensive uncontrolled output
>wind turbine.  Halfway down between ridge and valley, where the house
>will be, there is sufficient winter wind  (when heat might be needed) to
>drive it.  It would be shut down at all other times.  The house is
>small, but acts big because of no corridors and few walls---visually
>melding inside and out., and using open-angle rooms to further give the
>psychological illusion of more space than is actually provide.
>Unfortunately I won't build it, my daughter will have to hire a
>professional contractor for that.  Not easy, the good ones are snowed
>under with business and won't take another building contract unless they
>have a year or two to begin construction.  If I am still around, I will
>select, contract for and hire subcontractors---tight specs and
>performance agreements.  It would save twenty percent of the building
>cost and proceed as fast as would a general contractor.
>
>I don't want any of my kids or grandkids to be exposed to dangerous
>pesticides---more than enough toxic chemicals come across the hill
>between me and West Virginia coal-burning utilities.  So some pretty
>expensive backpack stprayers will disappear, a few 1.6 liter sprayers
>for a small garden will remain---one containing foliar fertilizer,
>another copper sulfate to inhibit early blight of tomatoes, another with
>soap solution for aphids, another with dormant oil for a few fruit
>trees---you get the idea, the contents are all harmless..
>
>c.  Garden.  Shrink to the size you can handle.  Forget about tilling (a
>bad idea anyway and hoeing.  Take it easy and put down three or four
>layers of newspapers on 36 to 50 square feet of garden every day the
>weather is decent.  Cover them with six inches of mulch and put your
>transplants into the mulch. when your soil thermometer says they will be
>happy.  Some of my recent posts discuss how to fight off rabbits,
>woodchucks, raccoon and deer. Do it once and do it right---for all but
>rabbits, I'm going the phaser pain field route.  Tiger pits are
>emotionally satisfying, but too much work.  Birds get the flapping owl,
>holographic-eye tape, and if necessary, bird netting treatment..Do
>whatever you have to do to provide a lot of mulch.  I hit up the people
>who chip trees the county doesn't want growing at the sides of roads to
>interfere with clear vision of oncoming traffic.  Roanoke has a chipping
>plant  on a northside East-West road.  They will load, and you can haul
>off as much as you want for free.  Salem houseowners place enormous
>amounts of bagged tree leaves by the curb for pickup.  I used to beat
>the garbage collectors to fill my truck.  I even bought a gasoline
>blower that will suck up roadside leaves along the last mile of county
>road to this place (and pulverize them so they are immediately usable as
>mulch or you can compost them inside of two weeks in a plastic sack or
>barrel (add green grass for the 30 to 1 leaf carbon to grass nitrogen
>ratio.)  If you can physically handle it, grind wood chips from any
>source in an old chipper-grinder (not a chipper-shredder), used to be
>called a hammermill.
>Kemps, WW-Grinders and McKissics often show up in the local trader
>magazines at ridiculously low prices.  They have removable screens to
>size the grind---half-inch and three-eighth inch work best.  I would
>always replace the engine though.  You want a minimum of eight
>horsepower and should always add a centrifugal clutch (about $29.95) so
>you can crank the engine without the added drag of the rotor and its
>hammers.
>
>Last year I put down subsurface irrigation for strawberries, tomatoes,
>peppers, canteloupe and the like.  Good thing, this year I couldn't do
>it, but I can connect water hose to the tubing and put a timer I bought
>last year on the house spigot that feeds the "leaky hose" irrigation
>tubing. Overhead irrigation induces early blight in tomatoes---I lost
>the best tomato plants I have ever seen in one hot, rainy, humid early
>summer to early blight---beautiful one day and two days later, all
>dead.  They were all caged in three-foot diameter roadmesh
>cages---impossible to get a drying breeze through the heavy foliage.  I
>no longer use cages.  A zig-zag roadmesh fence is very good, or the
>tomato vines can be suspended from a heavy wire such as used to brace
>wooden fenceposts, the wire supported by steel T-bar fenceposts at
>twelve foot intervals.  I use sisal binder twine to support or tie
>tomatoes in preference to anything else---it is strong enough to last
>one season, and biodegrades thereafter.  If you anticipate really tall
>tomato vines, lash to each six-foot T-bar a two or three foot extension,
>wood is easiest.  If the plants want to grow higher, I clip the top end
>off, don't like to have it bend down and flop around.  Plenty of
>tomatoes will blossom and grow elsewhere.
>
>Not sure it will happen, but I may transfer the strawberry bed to
>home-made ringbarrels I have also mentioned before---reducing berry care
>still further and picking them at chest height instead of ankle height
>
>(Farm work.) Anything I can't hire done, won't get done.  That is
>primarily fence installation, maintenance and repair.  Fortunatily I
>have a reliable fence installer who doesn't work for free, but the price
>is always fair.  My daughter and I have discussed how to extract maximum
>satisfaction and moderate income for the land.  She wants to keep a
>couple Jersey cows for her milk, both with calves so she can milk if and
>when she wants to---the calves will happily gulp down the surplus.  For
>revenue to pay the taxes she will take in a few riding
>horses---providing only pasture, water from the creeks, and windbreak
>from one of the barns.  $150 a month per horse is more profitable than
>running cattle and the location appeals to horseowners---at the end of a
>tertiary blacktop road and fifteen miles from both Roanoke and
>Blacksburg.  No hazard to horses that I know of, except the black bears
>on the ridge behind us.  Unless their food runs short in a dry year,
>they won't come down in the valley. Forgot to mention, the Jersey cows
>will freshen six months apart for a constant supply of milk, they will
>have access to a tank (gravel pad around it), which is fed from plastic
>tubing from the lake forty feet above the valley floor, and which runs
>under our private road through one of the 30-inch diameter corrugated
>pipes.  No tank float valve, just water tubing in and four inches below
>the top, a wastewater tube which empties back into the main creek.  The
>bridge containing the corrugated pipes was built this spring---making it
>unnecessary to use a hydraulic ram pump operating off a nearby big
>spring the lower valley tank where the Jerseys will look after
>themselves.  In winter they will stay inside or on the leeward side of a
>barn and of course, be fed hay (which will be purchased, not made here.
>Big round bales of good hay are always easy to come by, and the seller
>will almost always load them on your pickup truck or trailer---you, or a
>neighbor can roll them off).
>
>I like chickens and eggs that don't go flat as a pancake.  However if
>they have to be left for a few days, they still have to be let out in
>the morning, put in at night, fed and watered. That's one of the things
>I reluctantly gave up, along with the mobile chickenhouse I built
>several years back.
>
>
>Some of the farm is devoted to orchard and nut trees---the nut trees
>will have to get by on their own---and now the damned beavers are dead,
>can do so.  The last beaver was a forty-eight pounder, too big  for my
>dog.  Given the size of beaver teeth, and the strength of their jaws, I
>wouldn't let a dog near them anyway.  Should have blown up their beaver
>house last year when I still could do so.  Keep fenced orchard work to a
>minimum by running Baby Doll Southdowns, or Dwarf Romneys under the
>trees to trim the grass.  Probably will supplement the sheep with
>Guineas to keep down insect pests.  May train them when young to go
>inside a small building for shelter at night---if they roost in the
>trees the owls will get them  Again, like the chickens, may dispense
>with the guineas, and for the same reason---can't leave them for any
>length of time.  Next door neighbors have a nice, new barn and a lot of
>goats---they would take the dwarf sheep for any length of time if no one
>was here to take care of them, but taking in uncooperative Guineas
>wouldn't be possible.
>
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