grapes & greens

our himrod grape vine leans on some rebar until it reaches the trellis wire

future salad

Hopalong & Der Kaiser

Clyde has been tripodal lately, getting around only 3 legs. April and I have both given his left rear leg the squeeze, twist and stretch work-over and he doesn't seem to be in any pain but he won't put any weight on it. This first started way back around January, but after a few hops Clyde always went back to being 4 legged. Now, he has been hopping for almost 4 days straight so I took him in for his first vet appointment today. The vet also has a blue heeler and seemed to take a shine to Clyde. The dog doctor put his leg through the same exam that April had, squeezing, twisting and stretching it but could not figure out what was going on either. We have heard patellar luxation (dislocated kneecap) is pretty common in Australian Cattle Dogs and were hoping that it would be that instead of a ACL tear or a hip problem. Lil Clyde will have to go back in this Friday to be knocked out for some X-rays and a thorough workup. He also got his rabies vaccination and weighed in at a hefty 50 lbs, Otto towers over him but only weighs 75lbs after a turkey dinner. We are a little concerned that Hopalong is having issues with his leg at only 6 months old, we want to see if we can get whatever is ailing him taken care of before it gets any worse. The title of today's post I stole from April, when she pulls in the driveway the dogs scramble to see who can greet her first. Usually Clyde wins, but today I think he may have lost by a nose to the old Kaiser.

hopalong tries to take the purple hippo from der Kaiser

On a happier note, we're getting some rain tonight which will do our trees and crops good. I built a 3rd raised bed last week and added on a potato box yesterday, so all told we have about 400 sq feet planted.

latest raised bed

We planted an entire bed of the three sisters (corn, beans & peas) last Friday to supplement our herbs, greens, tomatoes and peppers. The idea is to see if we can subsist primarily off what we are growing this summer and reduce our grocery bill down as much a possible. That will be a lot easier now that we have some staple carbohydrates in the ground and growing. I researched a bunch of different methods to grow the taters before I settled on extending the 3rd raised bed another 5 feet to give us a 25 sq foot potato box. Some of the more interesting ideas were growing the spuds in stacked tires filled with dirt or straw or building a "potato tower." After checking out some gardening forums and looking over the comments and pics, I was almost ready to do things the old fashioned way and just stick the seed potatos in a trench in the ground. But as our garden has risen, I have grown to see the benefits creating my own "super soil" with a mix of compost, peat moss and Black Kow topsoil. In this case, I added some of the Espoma organic fertilizer for acid loving plants I had leftover from our blueberry bushes since potatoes also thrive in an acidic soil. I should mention that the blueberry bushes are about the only things we have planted that hasn't really taken off, out of the 5 bushes we planted in half whiskey barrels only 2 are thriving. I think it has to do with the drainage in the whiskey barrels, blueberry bushes can't stand a damp soil and even with the extra holes I drilled in the barrels they stay way too damp.


bad bush

I think I have won the war against the eastern tent caterpillars. The defoliated trees are leafy and green again and I can't find a single tent in any of them. Love seeing little cherry, peach and apple buds forming where flowers used to be and hope some of those little guys will survive to meet our taste buds this summer.

baby cherries

Who knows what other nefarious insect army will try to steal their deliciousness from us? I really appreciate the rain more than I have ever before, each drop promises to nourish the plants and save me the the trouble of watering. Rain used to be an inconvenience, something to bring an umbrella for or wear a jacket against, now it is precious, life-giving. Although blue skies are beautiful in their own way...

if god isn't a tarheel, why is the sky carolina blue?

defenders of the hose

Serpents Strike on Tuesdays

Today was the first Tuesday out of the last 3 weeks that I did NOT lose a hen to the black snakes. I held off on posting these pics from last Tuesday because they are a bit morbid. Now that I have beefed up security around the coop with mothballs, snake-B-gone and 1/4 inch hardware cloth, I'm hoping they will be the last of the dead snake series...God willing.

the death dealer nailed to the barn, a warning to others who might consider visiting the coop

blood atonement

Worm Wars

I have met the enemy and it is the Eastern Tent Caterpillar.

a medium sized fuzzy devil

These voracious bastards are among the most highly evolved worms and possess a special taste for the apple and cherry trees that make up most of our orchard. Since apple and cherry tree leaves contain small amounts of cyanide, these worms have learned to regurgitate a cyanide laced vomit to deter birds and other bugs from eating them. Their fuzzy hairs are also a strong deterrent to predators, leaving the cuckoo bird as nearly their only nemesis in the animal kingdom. We started noticing their silk tents in the crotches of our trees about a month ago when the weather began to warm and I naively thought I could control them by climbing the trees and tearing down their nests by hand and stick or blasting the nests too high to reach with a hose.

the silky fortress of the enemy worm

Turns out I severely misunderestimated these cyborg caterpillars of doom. So, next I tried pruning entire limbs off where they have woven their tents and then squishing and burning the worms on the ground. When I had trouble igniting their silken fortresses, I developed my own "agent orange" for worms consisting of Club Man aftershave and April's hairspray. While it was satisfying to torch the enemy, the process was too slow to combat the 10 or more nests in some trees and I realized I would never be able to keep up with all 75 trees with these tactics. My desire to grow everything organically was diminishing as some trees were becoming nearly completely defoliated.

to the right is a tree, on the left is a tree on bugs

a closer look at the damage

With each leaf they consumed, the caterpillar army grew stronger and my morale sunk lower until I began to contemplate the "nuclear" option. I did some research trying to identify a chemical or pesticide that would destroy the worms without killing April's bees and finally hit the jackpot when I stumbled across a soil dwelling bacteria known as Bacillus thuringiensis or BT. This commonly used biological alternative to pesticide meant I could stop the caterpillars with no collateral damage to the hives and still stay organic. I was almost giddy as I envisioned the carnage I could inflict upon the worms as soon as my biological weapons arrived, my soul became less soft hearted and more like Saddam Hussein imagining the devastation of Wormpocalypse. When April brought home my package from Amazon on Monday evening, I was so excited she counted the number of times I said, "It's on like Donkey Kong!" somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 or 8. So, early Tuesday morning, before the worms had squirmed out of their silk tents to feast on my trees; I mixed up 4 tablespoons of Safer Brand Caterpillar Killer with BT per gallon of water in my sprayer and headed out to slay the fuzzy dragons. I neglected to read the directions, because when at war there is rarely time for such things as reading the directions. I spent from 8am until late in the afternoon going from tree to tree with my sprayer and tree saw, blasting each nest I could reach and pruning down the ones I couldn't before blasting them too. Then, to make sure they were good and dead, I stomped and ground the wriggling masses of worms into the dirt with my boots. I was sunburnt and exhausted when I retreated to the house for a glass of cherry limeade and decided to check the internet to see why some worms were stubbornly refusing to die. Turns out I should have read the directions. You aren't supposed to spray the worms themselves, but the leaves on the trees instead so that the bacteria will be ingested before it can paralyze their digestive system. I was somewhat disappointed that I had wasted the day and nearly a whole jar of BT, but I had ordered extra so I mixed up some more bug juice and returned to the frontlines. I was able to get through spraying the foliage of every tree in the front orchard before night fell and I grew tired of battle. I was able to get to the back orchard a day later but was caught by a surprise attack as the worms had recruited a new ally in the war against me, Fireblight. Unlike my bacterial ally, BT, fireblight is a contagious, destructive protobacteria that leaves tree bark looking torched and there is no known cure besides pruning off infected limbs or even cutting down the entire tree to prevent its spread. Between the worms and the blight, I was beginning to feel bitchslapped by mother nature and wondering whether organic farming was really the wave of the future or just for city born idiots who enjoy being outsmarted by insects and bacteria. I did my best to prune out the blighted and dead branches along with the nests and sprayed the foliage thoroughly. But no matter how much I cut and sprayed it seemed there was always another silken bag of writhing worms to contend with. I consulted with the local county agricultural agent at my master gardener class and he recommended spraying the foliage with a real pesticide like Sevin as soon as the blossoms had dropped off the trees; but I was still concerned about April's bees who I am becoming fond of in a stupid hippie sort of way. So I turned to the wizened beepeople of the Caldwell County Beekeepers Clubs at our annual picnic on Thursday night; asking for their ideas on controlling the Tent Caterpillars. Finally, I got the answer I had been looking for. Cooking Oil, Lemon Joy and hot water well mixed becomes a deadly caterpillar coating gel that suffocates them by clogging their air exchange mechanism. It was just the sort of folksy remedy I had been hoping for and when I mixed up a batch and began to spray around our raised beds where the worms had advanced, I was delighted to see it was both instant and deadly. As I write these words, I have probably spent around 30 or more hours waging war with the Eastern Tent Caterpillar and have grudgingly grown to respect this worthy foe. I have tried feeding some prisoners of war to the chickens but they refuse to consume the fuzzy, cyanide laced warriors. With only my boots and a lemon scented blend of soap and oil to defend our fruit trees the battle rages on. Only time will tell who shall emerge triumphant to taste the sweet fruits of victory...

will the sun set on the caterpillar empire or my dreams of organic farming?

hanging with my chicas

giving my girls a late night snack

april captures me taking a picture of her bees

Turkey-huntin' and Bee-hivin': Part 1

The alarm went off well before dawn on Saturday. It was the first day of wild turkey hunting season, and since we bought this place everyone from family to the DirectTV guy have asked and hinted for permission to hunt our land. We had already promised access to our friend Barlowe, who came up and walked the land with Jon last week looking for turkey scratchings and scouting for the perfect place to blast Tom. So Jon arose very early to don his camo and prepare to go sit in the woods and not say anything for 6 hours. I got the rare treat of stretching each one of my limbs into a quadrant of the bed and snuggling back down to sleep, until the dogs decided to jump up and cut the circulation off my legs by draping themselves over each knee. I finally got up and regained use of my limbs from the canine crushing crew in order to do morning chores and set up my beehives.
We had picked the bees up from Miller Bee Supply in Wilkesboro on Friday: 2 packages of bees weighing 3 pounds each. The queen for each hive was packaged in a smaller box with 3-4 attendants. I had also bought screened bottom boards for each hive to replace the solid boards that came with my hive packages. These screened boards are the latest in varroa mite management, and allows the mites to fall onto the ground below instead of reinfecting the bees, and without chemical that may breed resistance. So I had to hustle to paint the exterior of these new screens before I could assemble the hive. So after letting the chicks out and feeding them, grading the ground for the hives, and painting the boards, I literally sat. down. to. watch. paint. dry. Throughout the morning, I heard various turkey calls and gunshots echo up the ridge and across the various hollars (hollows) around our place, and wondered if any of those were from Jon’s piece bagging us a bird.
Now, growing up in the country, I have been around guns since before I was old enough to know what they are. Gunshots echoed through the woods all the time as I would play outside. Kids are handed their first gun here when they are strong enough to hold it, and it’s never a toy Red Ryder, but usually a little .22 varmint plinker, so you typically knew a shooter was someone who learned at their daddy’s knee how to use it and had common sense not to do anything stupid—in most cases. In contrast, hearing gunshots in San Francisco always gave me chills because you knew the intended target was not a 10-pointer! Here though, the opening day of deer season meant a 40% drop in school attendance that day, and on occasion, the hooky-player returning to school at 3 pm to show off the kill in their truck bed in the parking lot as school lets out! At my school, we were required to take Hunter Education as part of our 9th grade Health and PE class (a fact which tended to elicit surprise and/or stifled guffaws in California at my backwoods, banjo-picking roots), and after the daily pop quiz on how to build a duck blind or indentify animal scat, the lecture would inevitably dissolve into a storytelling session between the junior backwoodsmen and our teacher, a gruff, slightly inappropriate anger management-class-dropout with a twisted sense of humor and a fuse the size of my pinky toenail.
So I graded the land and stacked the hive parts that Jon and I had so painstakingly assembled with glue and nails on those cold winter evenings. I had found the perfect area to put them: close to our raised beds and front orchard, facing southeast in line with early sunlight to rouse them to start working before the nectar evaporates in the mid-morning, but with tree cover enough to offer them dappled sunlight in the mid-day. As I finished the assembly, the dogs started barking and howling toward the back portion of our land, and up strode Jon and Barlowe... To "bee" continued...

Clyde showing the grass who's boss

Snake Slayer

Well the inevitable finally happened, I lost another chicken from my brood. The culprit was a monster 5 and a half foot black snake. He paid dearly for his dinner this evening. It went down like this, I had been planting peppers and tomatoes into the "salsa" raised bed for about 3 hours this afternoon and figured I should check on the girls. I try to make a habit of counting my chickens anytime I go out to the coop to make sure none are missing or hiding or in this case, eaten. I had been in and out of their outdoor play area 3 times filling their food and replenishing their water when I realized I was stuck on 23 chickens. Looking over the flock more carefully, I spied a large, shiny black shape amidst my girls up against the wall of the coop. I got over my disbelief quickly and realized it was an enormous black snake swollen wide after eating one of the hens. I wasn't as freaked out as I should have been, I was pissed off. I strode back to the house to grab some weaponry and called April's brother to ask which caliber suited chicken eating snakes the best. He told me .38 special would be overkill and to go for the .22 or a hoe. I thanked him for the advice and grabbed the Ruger 10/22 and made haste back towards the coop, on the way I grabbed the hoe just to be sure. When I arrived back at the scene of the crime, I was amazed to see my bird brained ladies standing all around the massive snake. One may have been perched on his bloated body but I was really not that interested in how dumb the chickens were, I was out for blood. I cocked the slide on the Ruger and leveled it against the intruder, the first shot went through the fat part of the snake in case my chicken was still suffering being digested alive. Then I left off three to the dome of the black bastard. To my amazement that just seemed to piss him off, he started slithering towards me and hissing. After emptying the clip into the serpent terminator, I was wishing I had brought the .38 revolver. I had another clip in my pocket but I was concerned about ricochet since the snake had advanced up against a metal plate I had used to seal off the bottom of the coop (without much success, apparently.) Instead, I grabbed the hoe, raised it and brought it down like an executioner; the hoe struck the snake and the metal plate about equally causing blood and sparks to fly like an Ozzy Osborne concert. When I was fairly sure that the killing machine was dead, I scooped it with the hoe and brought it outside the coop. I went back to the house to get my camera, a tape measure and a beer. While inside, I decided to go a quick Google search on how to preserve a snakeskin, thinking a hat band or belt would make a nice trophy. Once I returned for the triumphant photo-op, I was dismayed by the snake's inability to lay still. Out of mercy, I popped a few more rounds through his noggin to hasten his demise but he continued to writhe and slither out of my attempts to pose him against the tape measure.

I finally gave up and decided to take the boys down to the creek to cool off since it was near 90 degrees again. While we were walking back to the house, I heard April coming up the drive and hustled up to the garage to show off. She isn't normally too fond of snakes but made an exception for this one since he was dead.

I was determined to not let the terminator go to waste, so after a little more research I got down to the business of skinning and preserving his exterior.

Borax is supposedly one of the tricks of the trade for taxidermists, so once I peeled the epidermis off the viscera I tacked the skin to a piece of wood and coated liberally with 20 Mule Team powder. I left it to dry in my truck bed and after about a week of sun, I'm planning on making it nice and pliable with some glycerin skin lotion.

For those who hate snakes as much as my wife here's a butterfly chaser...

The Woodchipper

So we finally rented the woodchipper on Friday morning, I was pretty stoked about finally transforming the two epic woodpiles into mulch to go around our raised beds. We needed to fuel up our bodies before we started the rental clock ticking at $20 an hour, so we decided to stop for some breakfast on the way to Valley Rentals. Breakfast at Hardee's. A Hardee's packed to the gills with rejected extras from "The Hills Have Eyes 3". Damn, I may not leave the farm much but I felt like I was a tourist in a foreign land or watching the hyenas devour something at a zoo. There was a line at least 20 deep of people who could not wait to lay their paws on blueberry glazed biscuits or biscuits & gravy or ultimate loaded biscuits, which is what I ended up ordering. How can you go wrong with 4 different kinds of pig on a freshly baked biscuit? It was Good Friday and school was out for the day and it seemed like half of Caldwell County had decided to take the young'uns out for a breakfast celebrating Easter and pork. I can't front though, my biscuit was tasty and we departed full of the potential energy necessary to chip wood on a 90 degree day.

Let me introduce ya'll to the Bandit Model 85XL, capable of handling branches up to 6'' in diameter. On the way home, while towing this bad boy, April mentioned the movie "Fargo" at least twice.

Once we had got it up the steep driveway to the first pile of branches, we began to realize just how hot it was. Got out the Peltor hearing protection we use when we shoot and covered up the target area with a tarp for easy cleanup. It was chipping time, firing up the beast and cranking up the throttle I felt the same way I did when I watched "Conan the Barbarian" for the first time. We fed a few of the larger sticks through to get a sense for the machine and then proceeded to violate nearly all of the safety directions on the sticker next to the intake by reaching in to force larger and larger piles of wood debris through the mangler.

We got through the first brush pile in about an hour and were ready to move on to the pile on our "back forty." The main concern was whether we would be able to get the woodchipper back there and then turned around to tow it back out. We plotted a course and were pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to get the woodchipper over some rough terrain and in place by the second pile.

After laying some landscaping plastic down where we intended the woodchips to go, we fired up the beast again and resumed chipping. It was easily the hottest day of the year and by this point we were both sweating up a storm and feeling the effects of the heat and humidity. Manhandling large logs and gathering little sticks into piles sufficient to stuff down the maw of the Bandit XL is tough under the angry spring sun. We were on the clock so breaks weren't really in the gameplan, but ended up being necessary to avoid heatstroke. We got through the pile and I ventured out into the woods to see if I could find anything else to chip. I wanted to make full use of the chipper while we had it. A couple of the logs I found just were too much for the Bandit so we set them aside to use as retaining walls for the mulch. We decided to wrap up the operation after about 5 hours and towed the Bandit back to the rental place after topping up the gas tank which was almost empty by that point. We didn't get around to spreading the woodchip mulch until today but were pretty happy to cover up all that landscaping fabric with something a little classier. Here's a little taste of the mulched goodness now surrounding the raised beds:

our spring chickens

these black australorps remind me of the raptors from " Jurassic Park"

lois the rhode island red hen

April calls these gals"leopards"