First thing on the to-do list: update this blog which has languished in limbo since early August. Ideas for a new post included Matilda's first birthday party, Matilda learns to walk & Matilda does P90x. It is amazing how quickly this turned from a blog about farm life into a scrapbook on our daughter's development. The focus on MatildaBeast coincided with the least productive, most dissapointing growing season since we moved to Cardinal Ridge. The apples never appeared on the apple trees. This time of year it usually is impossible to get any traction with the riding mower on the orchard hill. With so many fallen apples laying in the grass, it's a bit like driving over fermenting, green marbles. No trouble at all this year, nary a single rotting apple amidst the drying grass and leaves. Same story with the peach trees, I remember walking back to the peach orchard in early June and smelling the sweet perfume of the young fruits ripening on the trees, nearing delicious maturity. The peaches were set heavy on the branches this year and I had no time to thin them to allow the most promising fruits more time to develop. When I went back to check on them the very next weekend, an assault force of beetles, wasps & flies had ravaged every tree. I gingerly plucked bitten and oozing peaches off the trees and ate around the wound, but the joy of biting into a ripe peach and tasting the explosion of juice and flavor that runs down your face was just not to be found this year. Our incredibly mild winter last year never allowed the trees to really go dormant, the mercury never dipped down below freezing long enough to kill off the legion of insects waiting to consume everything we cultivate either. The warm winter was a fickle mistress, in March not longer after the fruit trees had set their blossom flowers we had a bitter freeze that killed off much of the new growth. Each bud only can produce one blossom, so that set the season off to a poor start we never recovered from.
Up in the raised beds we had cut down on the varieties of tomatoes we grow, replacing some of the finnicky heirloom types like Cherokee Purple with low-maintenance varieties like Roma and Yellow Sunshine. We ended up with blossom end rot for the first time in our tomato patch, brought on by heavy rains followed by hot dry weather. We lost nearly all of the first crop of tomatoes. April finally cured the rot with a generous application of calcium, using the oyster shell pieces we add to the chicken feed to make their egg shells tougher. The persian eggplants I was so excited for never showed up on their vines. Only a single pear hung from the droopy limbs of our pear tree. I plucked it too early, while it was still hard and it tasted of tofu-esque nothingness, devoid of any of the sweet goodess that had once inspired preserve flavors like Caramel Apple Pear & Lemon Ginger Pear. Japanese Beetles set up shop in the grape vines and munched through untold numbers of leaves like an irridescent green buzzsaw. No amount of neem oil or pyrethrum could halt their orgy of devastation. Then black rot moved in for the win, shrivelling the succulent orbs of ripe grapes into wrinkled black raisins overnight. It was an agricultural apocalypse, a total farming fiasco.
One of the few bright spots were the bullet-proof, goliath carrots that produced all summer long. They stayed ripe in the ground until we finally pulled the last few out of the raised bed last week. The blackberries and raspberries were prolific, nearly every delicious berry met its end in the maw of the MatildaBeast. 24 of our 27 baby chicks survived to see young adulthood. Due to their late hatch in May none has started laying yet and with the start of cold weather I don't think we will be seeing any eggs from them until next spring. It has been a much less deadly year for our birds with regards to predators, knock on wood. I have been able to free range the flock without any losses in over 3 months. I'm not sure if Clyde has stepped up his game or if I have just been real lucky. Our Blue Heeler will let the deers frolic in the front pasture for hours without doing a thing but he is pretty good about streaking out towards the coop barking like a madman without any provocation. I guess I have to give that chubby bastard a little credit. The older gals have started to molt and egg production is way down, we barely have enough eggs for ourselves let alone enough to sell. As the girls have gotten older their egg shells have gotten flimsier and we have to take special care now washing them so they don't break. One of the biggest sucesses this year has been our automatic chicken watering system comprised of a 50 gallon rain barrel set up on a stump that feeds a water bowl with a gravity valve. We still keep some 5 and 7 gallon waterers in the coop as a backup but it has cut down the number of times we have to refill those from daily to once a week. Once we are looking at a good freeze, I will need to drain the rain barrel so it doesn't crack and bring in the hose as well. I thought of putting an electric coil heater in the rain barrel but I don't like the idea of having electric wire exposed to the winter elements and a hot coil in a plastic barrel. So it looks like it will be back to filling the waterers the old fashioned way, trying not to splash the ice cold water on my flannel pajama bottoms. I am looking at going to an automated coop door opener as well, which would allow us to take overnight trips without worrying about a raccon or possum getting into the coop. It isn't cheap but I've learned from the automatic waterer that dollars spent making chores easier are dollars well spent. The farmer' almanac is calling for a colder than average winter with much more snow than we had last year so I am also considering putting in a few more lights up since the ladies may be cooped up for extended periods.
The never ending to do list has entered its winter preperation phase which includes such favorites as stacking firewood on the front porch, cleaning the gutters, mulching up leaves on the riding mower, cutting down some dead trees and covering the berries and asparagus with hay. I always look forward to the fall because I think there will be so much less to do, but I suppose it's just doing different things that I am looking forward to. It may be trite but I really enjoy experiencing the changing seasons and knowing what time of year it is just by looking at the leaves or by what chores I am doing. With April and I both working again, we have been dreaming of some rennovations on our old brick pirate ship of a house. First on the list would be a bathroom remodel, then we'd like to paint the brick exterior white and replace the windows, trim & gutters, eventually we will replace the ceiling tiles with drywall and maybe put in some built in bookshelves and cabinets for our ever growing collection of books & stuff. All in good time.
That's the current state of affairs up on Cardinal Ridge. We'll surely make some time to go for a hike or two with the dogs and to rake up a big leaf pile for Matilda to play in. There will hopefully be some apples to pick and hot donuts to eat out at the Apple Hill Orchard & Cider Mill outside of Morganton. We'll be rooting for South Caldwell High School's football team to stay undefeated and make some noise in the playoffs this year. And we'll probably go back to annoying our friends by posting way too many pictures and stories about the MatildaBeast on Facebook and this blog. Happy Halloween!
