Archives for posts with tag: humor

Furry Ground Blight

August 26, 2012 //

Furry Ground-Blight

A.V. Walters

We do the garden walk everyday. It’s a way to check how things are doing, see what’s ripe and do a little weeding along the way. Admittedly, after last year’s debacle, I’m constantly checking the tomatoes for any sign of (I’m afraid to even say it) blight. By August, you expect a little bit of yellowing or leaf curl, but a true blight is a sight to behold. It can wipe out whole patches in a matter of days. The best you can do is to quickly dig out the affected plants and dispose of them—far away. Do not compost a blighted plant, especially towards the end of the summer season. It can infect your compost pile, which, if it doesn’t get hot enough thereafter, will spread the disease with every innocent looking shovel full of black gold. (By this time of year I don’t have enough high nitrogen materials to keep the compost cooking—especially this year when it’s so dry that even the weeds are gray.) Bottom line: Don’t ever risk composting blighted plants. ‘Taint worth it!

So, it was with some angst that yesterday’s walk revealed a tomato plant in full wilt. A Black Crim, too, one of my favorites. Blight? Too early to tell and it didn’t really have the signs. Was its drip emitter plugged? No. And then, the big question, any sign of gopher? We’ve never had a gopher problem with tomatoes. Last year, a friend of ours said gophers were going after his tomatoes, big time, and we could only wonder if different gophers might have different food preferences. Gophers—picky eaters?) In fact, some of the tomatoes are planted in bottomless buckets—ones that were cut in the early days of bucket farming, before I was aware of the dangers of that Furry Ground-Blight.

Our tomato plants are not small. Most of them are taller than me. They’re held up by our super sturdy, tomato cages but, by this time of the year, they’ve extended well beyond the perimeter of the cage. Rick has had to stake some of them because the weight of the plants has even the super-sturdy cages listing. And, it’s tough to find the cage in that jungle, let alone the bucket. There’ve been no major gopher signs in the immediate environs. So, yesterday afternoon, we did a triage watering to see if it had any effect. Sure enough, by evening the patient had perked up considerably. That’s a good sign.

First thing this morning I went back out to check. I’d left my morning schedule open, just in case I needed to quarantine that wilted tomato. Sadly, it had wilted again. I pushed my way through the foliage to get a look at the bucket and the drip emitter. And, AHA! There it was. The evidence. The loose pile of loamy soil was directly in the bucket. Damn gopher!!!

It is a relief that it’s not a viral problem. But, I don’t remember if this particular tomato plant is in a bottomless bucket. That’s a big issue. Following this morning’s revelation, we resolved to retire all of the bottomless buckets, next season. But, if this was a drilled-out bucket, we’ll need to worry about gophers that have learned to go in from the top!

Next season, we could have a serious problem. Don’s little, field-farming venture (the squash and pumpkin plot) has failed. Undone by gophers, is the official reason. And it is true that his “crop” has been hit hard by gophers. We include his pumpkin patch on our garden walks, and the ground is perforated with gopher holes. Every week we could count more and more of his plants, succumbing. There’s more to it, though. Don wasn’t really ready, or geared up, to harvest and market the produce. That may be okay for the pumpkins—we still have time before the Halloween, pumpkin season, and I’m sure he’ll harvest what pumpkins he has left. Pumpkins will endure enormous levels of neglect, but the other things, zucchinis, crooknecks and cucumbers, require attention and harvesting. Don never stepped up to the plate on this. There are zucchini’s over there the size of Buicks! And the crooknecks look like ancient gourds. He’s given up, and the field is now, Gopherland. He’s got a major case of the Furry Ground-Blight.

From our perspective, this is a debacle. He’s essentially breeding gophers over there and, next season, there will be more of them fur balls and they’ll be my problem. (Thank God for buckets.) So we’ll need to determine whether our poor Black Crim was the victim of a subterranean attack, or whether we need to worry about gophers mounting the ramparts of our defenses. I watered the patient again this morning. With extra water, it may be able to limp to the finish line. It’s a shame, that plant must have a bushel of tomatoes on it—beautiful green ones. During my inspection this morning I got the first two and hopefully, not the last, ripe tomatoes from that plant. We shall see. And, as usual, in Two Rock, we have a late season for tomatoes.

Rick is fuming. (Well, as fuming as Rick gets.) He’s determined to get this varmint, though he’s had limited luck with his trapping efforts in the past. Last I saw, he was muttering under his breath, “Rodenator.”

As I mentioned in a previous blog, the Rodenator is an expensive, propane fed device that explodes, frying underground varmints in their burrows. (“Hold my beer… watch this!”)

Tags agriculture, bucket farming, buckets, compost pile, farm life, frustrations, gardening, gopher problem, gophers, humor, rural living, tomato cages, tomato plants

Categories agriculture, Buckets, farm life, humor

I’ve been tapped……

August 9, 2012 //

A.V. Walters

I’ve been tapped…

I’ve been blogging away, quietly, for months now and, suddenly, I’ve been tapped for a bloggers’ award. (A Bloggie?) I’m a little surprised, since my blogging efforts have been, well, quiet. It is very sweet to have someone you’ve never met (but yet, have come to know) reach out and give you the nod to let you know that your efforts are appreciated. Thank you Sarah—half a world away and still a part of this strange, new kind of community.

I understand that there are rules about these things—which has delayed my response, a little. So, for those people that I will, in turn, nominate, the summary of those rules is:

a) You must thank the individual who has nominated you;

b) You have to turn around and tap ten others, to recognize them with the same award;

c) You need to tell seven things about yourself that you haven’t already revealed in your blog, and;

d) You must post the award symbol somewhere in your blog.

For me, the most difficult will be the seven revelations. Blogging was a challenge, for me, from the start because I so jealously guard my online privacy. I don’t do Facebook or the kind of personal, social media that is readily available. Some years ago I had an unfortunate experience with a stalker and I learned how cautiously one had to guard one’s sense of privacy. All the writers and self-publishing folks said I had to Facebook, and tweet, and blog (oh my!) There was no way I would do Facebook (or, the pictorial kinds of “sharing.” I hate to break it to the Facebook folks, but those aren’t real friends. It took me almost a year to agree to do an author photo and, even then, I did it as a spoof. So, I decided to try blogging instead.

In the spirit of shameless self-promotion, I was dragged into it—but you wouldn’t know it once I started. I’ve found that I really enjoy sharing that one little corner of my life—a rural/gardening perspective. It’s an important sliver of who I am. I find solace and warmth and humor in the everyday of rural life. It has almost nothing to do with my more formal writing, so far there’s not even a gardener in any of my books. (What’s up with that, eh?)

I’m not a very good blogger. I am forever getting notices that tell me I need to “optimize my online presence.” I just shudder. I’m not technical, can’t even figure out how to post photos—there’s no way I could do all that technical stuff to “reach out to a wider audience.” I can’t even get the Twitter feed thing going. I have no idea how the people who did find me, did so. I laugh when I read the word searches that brought people to my blog—usually about gophers, or bucket farming, or some poor soul desperate for a solution to those damned noisy mourning doves. (And I have no remedies to offer that don’t come from the end of a double-barrel. Sorry.) But blogging seems to have stuck and, whether it sells books or not, I seem to be here, to stay.

Thank you

As for this award, I’m touched to have been recognized. (“I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”) So, thank you, Sarah the Gardener. I’ve loved watching and hearing about your garden, in its Down Under oppositeness. I’ve learned from you just as I hope others may have picked up a tidbit or two from me. (For example, until your last entry I didn’t know pepper and eggplants were so temperature fussy for germination. I thought I had bad seeds! One of this year’s eggplants seedlings came up after eight weeks, and there was Sarah, explaining to me just why.) So thank you, thank you, thank you (and the seedlings thank you, too.)

There are others…

I have come to enjoy many other bloggers. I’ll nominate the ten, but there are more. These ones are special because they showed me that there are others who take the garden pleasures seriously. I am not the only one whose very favorite thing is to go out to the garden to see what’s for dinner. There are some blogs that I follow just because they make me laugh, sometimes uncomfortably so. And finally there are blogs from whom I learn and enjoy a little different perspective, even wickedly so. They are, in no particular order:

1) Soulsby Farm, A Very Small Farm—for giving me faith that there are younger people out there reaching back into our agricultural heritage. http://soulsbyfarm.wordpress.com/

2) Planthoarder—for a glimpse of gardening and what’s in the weather back home and totally luscious photos. http://planthoarder.wordpress.com/

3) A Stay at-home Scientist—for a touch of gardening and a spoonful of science that speaks directly to the heart of this wonk. http://stayathomescientist.com/

4) Cristian, because he’s very, very, young, and yet runs full tilt at writing what matters to him, and because he has his own aesthetic. http://cristianmihai.net/

5) Catherine Caffeinated because she gives out pep talks and dispenses the self-publishing scoop (at least her version) unselfishly and with a dollop of humor. (Though the pink is a little much.) http://catherineryanhoward.com/

6) All the fearless contributors at Fresh Ink, for their bravery and for providing and using a platform to showcase new writers. http://fresh1nk.wordpress.com/

7) For the chronicler of Joe’s Shitty Ideas, because you make me laugh and sometimes wince. http://joesshittyideas.com/

8) Clotilda Jamcracker, because she gardens, she has a wild perspective, she’s a hoot and makes me think. http://www.clotildajamcracker.com/

9) Dianne Gray, because she writes, and writes about writing and takes her characters as seriously as other people. http://diannegray.wordpress.com/

10) A French Garden, because she has lovely photos, she gardens with sincerity and she’s so brave to have picked up and followed a dream. http://afrenchgarden.wordpress.com/

And now the damnable revelations……

1. I have a cat named Kilo (No, not that! Because when I rescued him he weighed 2.2 pounds) and my cat has a cat, named Bob.

2. I’ve known all about the Hispano-Suiza since was about four because my dad thought it was important and loved to hear us little kids say it. Excellence at all cost!

3. I just learned that you can eat pumpkin greens! (Not that I’ve tried them, yet.)It’s a good use for those creeping vines once you know that you’ve got all the pumpkins you need (and, then a little, in case the gophers get them.) One year we went to harvest a lovely pumpkin, only to find the gophers had hollowed it out and eaten the interior then, stuffed it full of dirt! (It was actually, pretty impressive.)

4. I am a news junkie and a policy wonk. Moving to the farm helped a lot because it made me cut back on my news sources. Of course, you could keep busy full-time, just on the net… At least I got rid of the television.

5. I am not a technical person. I can’t even put a photo in the blog! (I don’t have a camera, and couldn’t transfer the photos if I did. (There’s only so much begging one can do… Rick?) I almost rejected this award because of the requirement that you post the award logo on your blog. I’ll have to figure it out.

6. I just sent two pounds of Manzanita ash to my mother in Michigan.

7. In 1974, I was an E.C.S.S.A. cross-country running champion. (Yeah, go a ahead, figure that one out.)

And, that’s it. I addressed all the responsibilities of this awesome honor and I can now go back to regular blogging… once I figure out how to post that darn picture. (Rick?)

Tags gardening, humor, language, publishing, writing

Categories Blogging, farm life, writing

Water Wars

July 31, 2012 //

Water Wars

A.V. Walters

Have you ever noticed how folks are at their very best in times of scarcity? I don’t mean hard times generally, but true (or perceived) commodity scarcity, just warms their little hearts. It’s good to watch it on a small scale because it gives you a better understanding of it on a global level—“Worry globally, obsess locally.” So, I’ll tell this tale, but you must remember that I, too, have a dog in this fight. I can rationalize that my bucket garden is already a water-saver, and that the produce I’m growing is for the benefit of everyone on the farm—it’s all true, but I’m sure that everyone who’s got a pony in this show, has good reasons, too.

So, I’ve said, several times, that it’s been a dry year and that we’ve all been concerned about the wells running dry. It hasn’t happened yet, and we’re all trying to avoid that, but it’s in the air. We’ve all seen the news—the record temperatures and drought back east, the fires in Colorado.

I remember when I lived in the city during one of California’s recurring droughts. We were on water restrictions and it became almost a point of pride to drive a dirty car. Everyone was eager to show that they were conserving water. The lawns on our block were dead and our yards all looked like hell. When things start to get really tight though, it degenerates quickly to backbiting and finger-pointing. I had a little flower garden in my front yard then, mostly santolina, rosemary and lavender (all drought resistant), which I watered exclusively from the cold water that ran in the shower before the hot water arrived. I collected it in a bucket and used it judiciously in the garden. One woman, whose peonies didn’t survive the watering restrictions, rebuked me for having my lovely, little garden. It didn’t matter that it was already a Xeriscape, or that it was watered with gray water, what mattered was that my garden had survived and hers had not. So, I come to this with some history. It’s why I started bucket gardening in the first place.

The landlord has been cautioning us to conserve. One neighbor has a nice garden—not a thirsty one, but she keeps it up. Elmer has complained to me several times (and to her) that she waters too much. She doesn’t really—she chose good plants and now they’re well established and deep rooted. Those comments have left her feeling defensive, so much so that if there’s any interruption in the water—she makes the point, to me, that “It wasn’t me!” By comparison, my yard looks parched. I water a couple of hydrangeas at my front gate, but I let the “lawn” die every summer and only the truly determined yard plants survive the neglect. I stated from the start that my landscaping water goes to the vegetable garden. Since last year there was produce that went to waste, this year we cut back the size the garden. The garden’s total, water consumption runs about 200 gallons per week. So far, I’ve avoided Elmer’s evil eye. In the house, we’ve always tried to conserve water—such as, fewer showers, fewer flushes. We live in California and that has, for some of us, become a permanent, lifestyle adjustment.

Don, with his field of pumpkins and squashes, keeps telling me I water too much. He says he’s keeping an eye on me. Right, like my little bucket garden compares, in any way, with a field full of water-loving squash! His is watered with drip-irrigation but, even then, just one of his waterings drops the level in the big tank by 8 to 12 inches. (He told me so, I didn’t check.) He asked me not to water on weekends, because that’s when most of the tenants are home—using water. I agreed, but said that I’d still have to water new seedlings or transplants. He wagged his finger at me. Last weekend I transplanted the last of the corn—and of course I watered it. Monday morning he commented, revealing that he knew I’d watered. (I’m not sure if he’s got spies or was bluffing!) I felt I had to defend myself—“Only the transplants!” Really, scout’s honor.

Added to the drought-anxiety is that they’ve been working on the water system (again.) Ever since this spring’s debacle with the pop-up tank, Elmer has been working to “upgrade” and add extra storage to the system. This past week, they took one of the older, concrete tanks (it’s more like a cistern) out of service to repair and upgrade it. As tenants, we never know what’s up with the water. (There have been more interruptions to water service this year than in the previous five that I’ve been here.) We are nervous every time the pressure drops—is this it? Did we run the system dry?

Invariably, the problem is with the switching system. It’s supposed to be an automatic changeover—when one tank gets low it should seamlessly switch to another tank. More often, something fails and, because my house is highest on the property, I’m the first to turn on the tap and… nothing! Then, I get to call and report that there’s no water, which only gets everybody started again—finger-pointing and defensive. We’ve offered, but nobody will teach us, (or permit us) to step in and pinch-hit when the system goes down, so we’re always having to call Elmer, or Don, at a family picnic or dinner out. Of course, they grumble and ask, “Well, you been watering today… was So-and-So…?” It makes us all feel a little guilty. (Which is probably the point of it.) The fact is, we’re in better shape than in earlier years because of the added storage. Don tells me that there’s an extra 10,000 gallons, but damned if he can figure out how to get it fed into my system. Only Don and Elmer understand the system and, more often than they’d like to admit, not even them. The system goes back to Elmer’s dad, parts of it at least seventy years old.

It grates on tenants that Elmer harps about conservation and then pressure-washes everything in sight. Spotless trucks and tractors shine, parked next to the shop, while tenants’ gardens wither. Well, that is the landlord’s prerogative, but I don’t think it’s wise social policy. So, the sniping goes in all directions. (Unlike the water!)

I watered Friday night—everything—all three gardens, because I’d committed not to water on the weekend. The pressure was low (don’t ask), so it took longer than usual—hours actually. Rick finally came out looking for me, wondering where I’d got to. (He doesn’t much like the water-sniping and chafes a little with the scheduling requests and unannounced shut-downs, for repairs. We don’t use that much water!) Saturday morning the pressure was still low but there’s little we could do—Elmer was called away to a family funeral and Don’s on vacation.

Rick and I did “the garden walk” just to see how things were doing. (The garden looks great, except something’s messing with the beet greens—looks like a virus, probably carried by those little light green beetles with the dark spots.) We walked over to check on Don’s squash field. We do that from time to time—mostly because he’s got quite a gopher problem there, and we’re watching to see what, if anything, in his anti-gopher arsenal, might be working. Sometimes we just go and pull weeds there. Lo and behold, Don’s zucchinis have taken off. He has baseball bat sized squash. Don, who last year scolded me for letting the zucchinis get too big, has a field full of them. Apparently eight inches is the commercial standard (insert your own joke, here)—or so he chided me last summer. All of these squash will have to become animal feed. Partly, this is because Don’s on vacation, but it’s also because he planted a crop for which he didn’t secure a market. (I can see Rick’s blood pressure rising.) We’ve been conserving water so that Don could plant a crop that he’s now letting go to waste. (Insert your own profanities, here.)

Well, that night, the taps ran dry. Of course, nobody who knew the system (you know, the members of the secret, Only We Know the Water System Club) could be summoned—I called Don on the cell phone, cutting into his vacation, and he walked me through a manual switching to a reserve tank. As you know, I’m not supposed to know how this is done, and Don commented that he’d catch hell for letting out water secrets. (He may have to kill me.) What’s goofy is that there’s all this secrecy and water paranoia. There’s no shortage. We have an extra 10,000 gallons more than in previous years—we’re just working out the bugs on delivery. Still, there’s a perceived shortage and it’s bringing out the worst in everyone. Tenants bridle because they think Elmer is cowing them into a ridiculous level of water conservation (one man invited Elmer to live with his wife when she hadn’t showered in days.) We’ve come to the conclusion that the bee in Elmer’s bonnet is probably not the amount water being used, but the amount of electricity he’s paying, to pump it.

What’s really worrisome is how badly people behave when there’s a shortage—even when it’s not a real shortage. What happens if the wells really do run dry? Not just here, but everywhere. We really need to look at water issues in this country—nothing is more important, to keeping our world safe and sane, as a sound water policy. (So, why on earth are they permitting “fracking” without safeguards for critical, aquifer protection? We can survive without oil for a lot longer than we can live on poisoned water.)

Anyway, not everyone behaves badly. Sunday morning, Rick got up and installed drip irrigation in the long garden. Smart use of resources is half the battle.

Tags agriculture, bucket farming, buckets, farm life, gardening, humor, water-saving

Categories agriculture, Buckets, farm life, humor

Food Fight!

July 6, 2012 //

Food Fight!

A.V. Walters

We share this house with two cats. Both are rescue cats—one urban, one farm. They get along famously; indeed, the fact that they were already friends figured into Bob’s being invited to stay when his own home options dried up. Kilo is still king of the roost, but he is a benevolent ruler and the two get along like littermates, even though they met as adults with very different backgrounds. When I first moved here, Kilo was a sheltered, city cat. Bob, already a farm resident, would come down to visit, both me, and Kilo. Soon, Bob started teaching Kilo how to hunt gophers. Clearly, Bob won a place in my heart that way.

One thing they have in common is food issues. Kilo is allergic to most cat foods. It’s one of the reasons I kept him, after rescuing him. I, too, have many food allergies, so I stuck with him until we found a brand he could tolerate. I suppose, if I’d had to, I’d still be making him chicken & brown rice mush. I’m a softy that way. I also had to recognize the marketing limitations of a cat who could only eat one brand of kibble. Kilo took to his limited diet with gusto—maybe too much so. After a scrawny kittenhood, he’s developed into a cat that Rick calls Butterball.

Bob loves to hunt and eat gophers. It’s an honorable farm cat tradition. The only problem is that gophers don’t agree with Bob. Poor Bob can’t keep a gopher down; he’s a gopher-barfer. If I see Bob with a gopher in his mouth, I run to close the cat door. If he insists on repeating the gopher-in/gopher-out performance, he has to do it outside.

Probably half the country could learn a lesson from Bob’s plight. The problem, from Bob’s perspective, is that the consequences of his eating habits are not immediate enough for him to make the connection. Just like most of the rest of us. It took me years to discover my food issues. But we do have the advantage of science, education and news. We can learn from the collective knowledge of the health and medical professions. Still, we don’t do so well.

We’re told that obesity is epidemic. Yet, most Americans fail to change their eating habits even when their health and waistlines are screaming the obvious. A new study shows that our biggest adversary in this may be the food industry. Processed foods are killers. They’ve been saying for over a century that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. According to the makers of highly refined, junk-filled foods, the obesity problem is an individual problem—it’s how much people eat, not what they eat. I call that a blame-the-victim defense. Just recently, science has stepped in to prove that processed foods are a big part of the problem.

The Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a clinical trial by Dr. David Ludwig. On its face, it looked like yet another analysis of weight loss/maintenance diet regimes. The study’s post-weight-loss subjects were divided into three groups. Each group represented a different theory of weight-loss maintenance—a high protein, Atkins-type diet, a standard low-fat diet (the one we’re all advised to eat, whole grains, fruits, vegies and lean proteins) and a low-glycemic diet—lower carbohydrates in total, and those were “slow carbs,” the kinds of carbohydrates that digest slower and convert to blood sugar levels at a slower rate. This diet reduced the available processed foods. Each group rotated through each of the diet regimes and each individual was kept to a set caloric intake for the duration, regardless of the diet at any particular time. The rotation through the various regimes was designed, in part, to determine whether there was a metabolic adaptation to the weight loss, or, put more simply did what the participants ate, post-weight loss, change how they metabolized those calories?

The results were notable. Clearly, regardless of caloric intake (because all the diets maintained the same calorie count), the fewer carbohydrates consumed the more energy the subjects expended—as measured by weight maintenance. The Atkins-style, high protein diet was most efficient at both weight loss and weight maintenance—it produced more energy on the given caloric intake. But this diet also produced adverse health effects, and that made it a poor, long-term choice for a healthy life-style. The low-fat diet was the worst for weight maintenance—belying decades of weight and health expert advice! The best bet for health and weight maintenance was the low glycemic diet. Its low blood sugar carbohydrate approach prevented the insulin-endocrine response that tells the body to store fat. The really interesting thing about this diet is that it completely limits highly refined and processed foods because, regardless of calorie counts, these high-glycemic foods trigger the body’s response to store fats. Processed Junk Foods Kill.

Knowing this, we can still eat well—especially lean meats, some whole grains, and our fresh from the garden vegetables cooked at home without additives—and maintain a healthy weight and metabolism. It makes perfect sense, the “obesity epidemic” has compounded since our culture abandoned fresh foods for the convenience of highly refined, packaged foods. Even more deadly are the “super sugars” —high fructose corn syrups that are abundant in processed foods and beverages. Fifty years of corporate food tinkering have brought us an epidemic of obesity, and all its attendant health woes. These high glycemic foods tap into our innate drives—it was one thing as a hunter-gatherer to crave sweets and calories, another entirely in the land of plenty, a cornucopia of processed sugars and treats.

You won’t see much of this study, out in the light of day. It’s likely to be buried in the boring science files. You see, it flies in the face of the farm-food industry. There’s no money in selling ingredients—only in the “value-added” convenience products, those same refined products loaded in high-glycemic, refined carbohydrates. Big Food is out to make you fat. And, when you get fat, they’ll tell you it’s your fault—that you eat too much. They won’t cop to the fact that their products actually disrupt your endocrine system, tricking your body into becoming a fat producing machine. (They’ve known this for years!)

Knowing this, we are armed with the solution to the Bob problem. We can determine what is good for us and change our habits so that we don’t suffer from our foods. After all, Bob is a cat. I don’t expect him to reflect deeply on his food choices. Faced with a boring bowl of kibble and a warm, fresh, wriggling gopher, Bob is making a hardwired, cat choice. The other part of the problem, the personal discipline part, is tough for everyone. We don’t want to completely eliminate desserts, or fun foods. But we do need a way to keep them in their ‘occasional’ corner. They are designed to tap into our tastes in a way that speaks to irresistible. Food scientists have carefully tinkered with the balance of sweet, salt and fat to create Frankensteins of satisfaction. Most of the time, we must resist.

A doctor friend once told me that genetics was largely responsible for choosing our life spans, that eating right and moderate exercise would only buy us a few months to a year at the end. “Then why do you harp on it so?” I demanded. He smiled, “Oh, you’ll live almost as long, you’ll just wish you hadn’t.” So we are left with the challenge of choice—the result of which will be decades away.

The other day, I was chatting about gopher garden strategies with two of the women who live on the farm. One of them, in the medical profession, paused and then asked, “Do you think you could get sick from eating a bad onion?”

“A bad onion?” I said, startled by the abrupt about face.

“Well, yesterday when I was cooking, I took the last onion. It was a little black and soft at one end, so I cut that part off and used it anyway. Then, later, I got pretty sick.”

The other woman leaned forward, “The part you ate, was it firm and looked good?”

“Yeah, looked fine, smelled fine.”

We kicked it around, but the general consensus was that the onion didn’t seem a likely suspect for her stomach upset. Who hasn’t pruned off the mushy bit of an onion from time to time?

“I guess, then, it must have been the huge piece of chocolate cake and ice cream that made me sick.”

We were quiet for a minute and then, simultaneously the other woman and I said, “Naw, must have been the onion.”

Tags agriculture, gardening, glycemic index, healthy-living, humor, priorities, vegetables, weight loss

Categories agriculture, farm life, Healthy Food

Tomatoes in Bondage

June 17, 2012 //

Tomatoes in Bondage

A.V. Walters

There’s a debate, heated sometimes, about whether tomatoes should be allowed to sprawl or whether they should be restrained in cages. This is a true measure of the farmer-gardener divide. Obviously, tomatoes grown in the field couldn’t be effectively caged. (It would interfere with all that mechanized equipment.) Here, on our farm, there’s no question. Elmer likes a tidy garden. When I came, I decided to solve that with a few cages, and now he’s a convert. (Well, an armchair convert, since it’s us doing the work.)

The garden stores offer a wide, and wild, variety of vegetable restraints. I’ve tried most of them. Any such restraint system must be analyzed in terms of ease of use, strength, durability (season to season), visual impact (yes, it matters), accessibility (if you can’t get your hand in, nothing’s coming out) and cost. Since it’s an investment, the repeat gardener wants something that will give years of use. Back in the city, over the years I tried those wooden stacking cages, standard wire cages, lattice fencing, and these lovely, but expensive, aluminum spiral stakes. Part of the consideration is just how many tomatoes do you have? With just a couple of pampered urban vines you can afford the high end stylish systems. These days, though, with thirty-three bucketed tomatoes, we have to go with industrial strength cages

We made the investment last year. We’d been monkeying around with “tomato-cage-lite” for a couple of years and they kept collapsing under the weight of the plants. So last year, we bit the bullet and bought thirty, heavy-duty, welded-wire, 54 inch cages. (That’s the gardener part of me.) They were on sale, and since I was buying so many of them, I negotiated an even better price. There was no way I’d have paid the original sticker price of over nine bucks a cage. (That’s the farmer part of me.)

Our cages are the envy of the farm. I’m not sure why, because it’s a community garden—so everyone enjoys the tomatoes. But both years that we’ve had them, they’ve elicited comments of admiration and envy. I don’t think it’s a come on—Hey honey, them’s fine restraints you got there—this is real equipment admiration, with just a touch of covetousness. They just are nice sturdy industrial strength cages and everyone who sees them, notices.

I suppose you could put in the cages when the tomatoes were just little sprites. But, that would be too easy. It’s not just that, though, in the early garden, when you’re digging in, there’s so much to do to catch the early season. You do what’s needed so you can get it all done. Then, when there’s a breather between establishing the garden and the onset of weeds, you can worry about the extras, cages, structures for pole beans and cucumbers, etc. Some years I’ve been caught short, wrestling undisciplined, sprawling, teenage tomatoes into cages. It can take up to three people to do it if you wait too long. This year was just right. I needed to sterilize the cages in bleach-water after last year’s blight, so that caused a little delay, but otherwise the timing was perfect. For the most part, the tomato plants were less than a foot tall, so the cages slid over them easily

The installation of the cages brought out the neighbors. It’s a sign; the garden is in. (Hopefully it’s also a sign that there’s no room for any more tomatoes.) We all stood out in the early evening rays, enjoying beers and garden talk. One of the neighbors nodded at how good they look and added, “You know, I’ve got a bunch of beans started…” She doesn’t know if they’re bush beans or pole beans. More buckets to dig in….beans, fit to be tied.

Tags agriculture, bucket farming, gardening, humor, rural living, vegetables

Categories agriculture, chores, farm life, humor

Orphan Tomatoes

June 15, 2012 //

Orphan Tomatoes

A.V. Walters

Well, we’re behind schedule but things are finally falling into place. You know that the garden is “in,” when the stragglers begin to arrive. I have a reputation for an open door policy to wayward vegetables. I can’t help it; there is nothing so sad as a homeless vegetable-start, without a garden. They have roots, after all, and need someplace to call home and put them down.

And every spring, tomatoes are the best example. This year we put a limit on tomato plants. (Not that we don’t every year, to no avail.) We dug in twenty buckets, in the long garden, and six in our backyard (for the exiled Romas.) That was it! Right.

The buckets we dug in were supposed to accommodate the ten or twelve tomatoes I had in my sights, six Romas, and then room for the inevitable tomato contributions of my farm neighbors. On our return from vacation, we planted the Romas and eight heirloom tomato starts and put the call out. One neighbor had three, another two. I planted them in short order. I’d thought there would be more, but I was certainly game to pick up a few more for vacant buckets. I even checked with Elmer, because his cousin has a habit of late tomato start donations. No, No, he says, she would only have a couple, and those he wanted to give to his girlfriend for her garden. So the coast was clear and I could pick up enough heirlooms for the remaining buckets. That was ten days ago—I thought the tomato question was finally closed.

But, there are always tomato stragglers. The main garden sprouted it’s own volunteer, so we honored it with a bucket. This week the neighbor who’d had three late arrivals, popped up with four more! I eyed the patch. We’re starting to get heirloom duplicates. Two black cherry tomatoes, two brandywines, two black crims. The new prospects looked healthy and not too leggy. Well, okay, we can squeeze them in without crowding—but no more—I looked right into her eyes. She avoided my gaze. Digging in new buckets this late is a bitch. She held them out and I took them. Our famous hardpan is a challenge if you don’t get the buckets in early. I huffed and puffed and then dropped them into place in their new buckets. It’s been warm this week.

Yesterday, three more showed up in half gallon pots. Nobody claimed them; they just appeared out of nowhere, in amongst the established tomatoes. They seemed harmless enough and, clearly, well tended. Sigh. So, in they went. This weekend we’ll be doing the cages. I can only hope that that sends the message that we are done.

Today another neighbor—this time with two tomatillos! “They’re not tomatoes, really!” (I jammed both the little buggers in one bucket.) We’re up to thirty-three. And, just for good measure, she brought along another lemon cucumber. This is how the garden grows. I’m just glad they’re not kittens.

Tags agriculture, bucket farming, buckets, gardening, humor, plants, rural living, vegetables

Categories agriculture, farm life, humor, Uncategorized

Trot Out Your Crazies for the Young Folk

June 6, 2012 //

A.V. Walters

Trot out your crazies for the young folk,

The looney uncles or grandma with her spells.

Empty the closets of skeletons and bottles.

Raise up them kids to recognize peculiarities,

without obsessing on deviants,

To accept eccentricity with humanity,

without succumbing to the mutual degradation

of appeasement.

Gently divulge your family ghosts and bastards,

so they’ll recognize ghosts elsewhere.

Share the humor and history

and spare them from embracing some sitcom gestalt,

leaving them longing for Ike.

Trot out your crazies for the young folk,

so their stories are woven into the fabric of regular living

like the time when Geri went out on the roof.

Discuss diagnoses at dinner, and options. . .

intervention, therapy or fluoxetine

So they’ll speak the language

when they move

to California.

Tags good-enough, humor, irony, poetry, writing

Categories humor, poetry

Presbyopia

April 22, 2012 //

A.V.Walters

Presbyopia

(Where the heck is that?)

I am a person full of theories, and I think that I just naturally look for the patterns of order in the universe. I’m not saying my theories always make sense–they’re certainly never subjected to the challenges of science, or peer review. I look for meaning in the little details. This has always been true of me, I’m given to rumination and to trying to make sense of things. I believe in developmental phases, both hard-wired and those triggered by a combination of chronology and circumstance. We all know of the “terrible twos”, and the agony of adolescence. (For kids and parents.) We know that there are acquisitional phases and times to consolidate our gains–those things that we’ve learned and are now solidly under our belts. I know that there are new and different phases continuing through the whole continuum of human existence that are not yet recognized. Indeed they could not have been, because too few lived long enough for any such phenomena to be observed, tested, catalogued and acknowledged.

Now with life expectancies stretching easily into the eighties and nineties, there are new paths to chart, even as we’re only just beginning to get a handle on the fifties and sixties. (I think we did the forties back in the sixties, if you know what I mean—the recognition of the mid-life-crisis seems deeply cemented in the movies of my youth.) I’m a trailing boomer, so I’m following in the footsteps of the developmental stages of the largest demographic bulge ever studied. If they’d just get it figured out, aging will be a veritable yellow brick road for me. However, while some things are obvious, the connection to meaning that I’m seeking, is less understood. In the crevices of this process I’m looking, maybe in vain, for reasons. What rhyme or reason is there to this process that, on some days, just feels like an inexorable death spiral? Still, if you hit your fifties and things aren’t starting to fall into place, in terms of world-view…ya gotta wonder.

That brings me to vision. As a kid I had incredible acuity. My brother and I were the eagle-eyed of my family, taking after our mother. She told us that this kind of vision was a special gift, and nobody could take it away. She was only in her early thirties at the time, with eyes like a hawk and nary a glimmer that it wouldn’t always be the case. So, in our forties, my brother and I took our failing vision as some kind of personal insult. I suppose we could have, and should have, taken note of our dear mum’s progression of ever-thickening specs, but we didn’t. In my mid-forties I just flat-out refused to believe that my vision was failing. (Hey, my mom said that nobody could take it away!) That came at a high price because as time went by, I failed to notice that I was reading less and less. Sewing and weaving fell by the wayside—too busy, I told myself. But, I still obsessed in the garden, its open-air setting fit my advancing presbyopia quite nicely.

When I came to Two Rock the fireplace in my lovely, rented house had been painted over so many times that you could hardly tell it was tile. The outermost layer was metallic gold–and that had to go. So, I asked Elmer if I could strip it down. Of course he quizzed my on my intended method and, when it sounded like I knew what I was doing, he gave the okay. I cranked-up the hot air gun, grabbed a putty knife and slowly, peeling off about eighteen layers of paint, revealed an incredible Arts and Crafts era, tile fireplace. It’s a gem. Elmer was thrilled with it. Not long after that, I found myself struggling to read regular-sized print. For some time I’d been squinting at labels in the grocery store–even started to carry around a pair of dime-store “cheaters” in my purse, and I just cursed the world for using such ridiculously small type. But finally, I had to face it–there I was, middle-aged, newly on my own after a long-term, failed marriage and suddenly (okay, not so suddenly), blind as a bat.

Digging-in my heels, every inch of the way, I finally made the dreaded appointment to get my eyes checked, where it was confirmed. Biology had turned on me and bit me in the ass–I was no longer the super-hero of vision I had once been. I ordered the eyeglasses, progressives, but I was surly about it. Elmer’s almost two decades my senior but he doesn’t wear glasses. (But his friends make jokes about it and it’s common knowledge that he’s a terrible hunter because he can’t see to shoot.) I railed. My parents laughed. My brother commiserated. Then, (with a dirge, rather than fanfare) my new specs arrived.

And what a shock. I could actually read, again. I could see the instruments on the dashboard. (I wondered how long that light had been on!) Who knew it was so bad? And, oh my god, the work on the fireplace really sucked! It turned out that I hadn’t done a very good job removing all of the paint, after all. Sure, you could see the tile, but it had a shabby-chic look that hadn’t been my intention. So, I went over the whole thing, using a dental pick, no less. (Apparently Elmer never noticed how bad a job it was, confirming that he can’s see either!) Now, the fireplace looks really good. But, it made me wonder–what else had I missed before I finally broke down and got those glasses? How much of my life had been out of focus? Maybe it explained a lot. How lucky I am that that kind of blindness brought me here.

And just what purpose does losing one’s vision serve? I’m looking for the deeper meaning, here. I mean, I’m a far shot from being pushed out to sea on an ice-floe. There’s still plenty of tread on these tires. Nonetheless, a century ago, most of the women my age didn’t make it this far. This aging business is largely uncharted territory. So, exactly how are we served by failing eyesight? I’d hate to believe that it’s just a senseless result of decline. Of course, being who I am, I have a theory about that. I think that far-sightedness forces us to teach the younger generation the skills they’ll need, that we mastered earlier, but can no longer do. It’s not lost on me that, uncorrected, my current comfortable focal distance is just right for looking over someone’s shoulder–to watch and check their work. I’ve gone from the age of super-vision to the age of supervision. Where it not for this decline, we’d all just go on doing everything ourselves, and not pass on the know-how. Still, eyeglasses are a godsend, even though they may put a wrinkle in the natural order of things.

Well, that’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it! I feel it’s so much more comforting than the only other rationale that occurs to me–I don’t want to face that not being able to see close, up may have been symbolic of my life’s circumstance, that I could see everything at a distance, perfectly–outside my own sphere–but not the important things that were right under my nose. Maybe, like the fireplace, things had been falling apart for some time, but I just couldn’t see it. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not so pessimistic that I’d want to countenance that as a phase of living. I’m just saying…

Tags frustrations, gardening, good-enough, humor, irony, presbyopia, priorities

Categories humor

Gift Exchange

April 11, 2012 //

Gift Exchange–From April 2009

A. V. Walters

The other day Elmer and I had an impromptu, unofficial gift exchange. In a conversation one evening about wine, I mentioned that I had a gizmo that pumped the air out of leftover wine to slow the oxidation process. (In Sonoma County, even farmers have regular conversations about wine.) He was intrigued. We both like good wines. This was a solution to a problem for him–he’d noticed the deterioration in a bottle of wine over the few days it took him to finish one off. We joked that it was an excuse to chug it down, but that takes its toll, too. So I told him about the pump.

The next day I was in town and happened by a kitchen store. I knew Elmer wouldn’t follow through on the “Vaccu-vin” tip, so I picked one up for him. When I pulled into the farm I saw him in the parking lot. I tossed it to him, told him it was a present. He wanted to pay for it, but that wasn’t the point. It wasn’t expensive, just something I knew he’d like. He thanked me.

Then he laughed and looked at his feet. He said, “There’s something for you, too, up in the garden.” And, that’s all he’d say.

I walked up to the garden, and there, next to the potato bins were four, five-gallon buckets of sheep manure. I laughed so loudly that they could hear me down in the parking lot. I thought it was a fair exchange. I spent a good part of the next weekend digging it in where needed. From me and my city world to Elmer, from him and his farm world to me. I know why he laughed and looked at his feet; we’re both laughing. It is how the world levels out though, evenly and gently in the end.

Tags buckets, gardening, humor, manure, rural living, sheep, wine

Categories agriculture, farm life, humor

Gopher Control, Revisited

April 8, 2012 //

Gopher Control, Revisited

A. V. Walters

Today was a day to catch up in the yard. The lawn was entirely out of hand. I had to use the weed whacker to get it down to a level where the lawn mower could be used. (We’re talking push-mower, here.) Calling it a ‘lawn’ is laughable, anyways. Really, it’s just an assortment of weeds, kept shorn. I tell Elmer, it’s not mowing, it’s “weed control”–sounds more agricultural that way. But when you keep on top of it, it looks downright passable. I’d planted the back corner, and suddenly the rest of the yard screamed for attention. Thus the Weed-Whacking-Extravaganza. (Good seats are still available!)

Once trimmed down to a tidy “level,” it became apparent that the gophers have really gone to town. The lawn is riddled with gopher holes (and valleys). Really, what’s up with that cat? He stayed out of sight for the noisy, weed wacking part but came out to investigate when I’d raked up and gone back to gardening. Now, he was peering down a gopher hole and looking pretty smug.

“Hey you, cat, what’s up with all these darn gophers? I thought we had an understanding here–you’re in charge of gopher control.” He smiled and yawned. “Really, look at this, there’s more gophers than ever!”

“Yes,” he nodded and began washing his face.

“Well, what are you going to do about it?”

“Do about it, what’s to do? These gophers are under control. I’m supervising.”

My jaw dropped. “Gopher control, butterball, means you’re supposed to hunt and kill these pesky gophers!”

The cat sat up and stared. “Excuse me? You never said that. You just said gopher control. Your instructions weren’t very specific, so I handled it my way.” He turned his attention back to the hole.

Damn cat. “I’m glad we’ve finally had a chance to clear up this little misunderstanding. Perhaps with this clarification, you can now do something about all these gophers.”

“Not so fast,” the cat looked up, “You can’t just go changing the rules, willy-nilly.”

“And why not? What’s the problem? Now that you know what’s expected, you could just get rid of the gophers, right?”

“It’s not as simple as that.” He stood up and turned his back to me. “It’s a question of trust. I’ve formed relationships.”

Tags farm life, frustrations, gardening, gophers, humor, rural living, the cat

Categories agriculture, chores, farm life, humor

Henrietta

March 29, 2012 //

A.V. Walters

Henrietta

When I first moved to the farm I’d been in the city for 29 years. I was viewed with gentle humor as a kind of exotic transplant. You know, Big-City professional with a ‘tude. It took the garden as a way for me to earn my chops. In the meantime, I was an avid observer of the dynamics of this small farm. I have come to believe that everything in life is personal.

Shortly after I arrived, the farm took in thousands of “used” chickens. (“That’s right, folks, these babies have had only one owner and only laid on Sundays!”) Elmer had a chicken-farmer friend who was retiring. These days that usually means that a small farm is going out of production. The college-educated children of farmers have little interest in farming. More and more, farming is being relegated to agribusiness, by default.

So, the chickens were transferred to one of our empty chicken houses. More often than not, I don’t understand the movements of livestock around farms. Cows, sheep and chickens are on the move all the time around here and, aside from the obvious management of grass length, I understand little of it. But this chicken transfer was a simple move; as a recent transferee to the farm myself, I understood it very well. It was a busy day, trucks with trailers stuffed with chickens in cages, rolling up the lane for most of the day, then deadheading back down the road to the retiree’s farm, empty cages bouncing and clattering, to collect more chickens. As I’ve since learned is often the case with a big transfer, a number of chickens usually escape. It takes a few days to round them up and get them back into cages.

That same day I was having a water problem. I didn’t want to bother Elmer in the middle of so big an operation, so I laid low until after the trucks had made their last run. Things go from full speed to dead pretty quick on a farm. When the work is done, the day is pretty much done. By the time I went looking for Elmer, the place was deserted. I checked the house, several of the chicken barns, even Number Four—but no Elmer.

Finally, I peeked into the chicken barn where the new chickens should have been settling in. Hardly. Chickens don’t like changes to their habitat and the barn was a cacophony of poultry, with feathers flying as chickens reestablished the pecking-order in their new digs. The cages in the chicken house hang about hip-height, and another tier above that. Now, below that, scores of the escaped chickens were roaming the floor, clucking up at their caged compatriots. Some jumped, wings flapping, in vain attempts to get back into the cages! I stood in the opening of the barn’s rolling door, flummoxed. If ever I thought chickens were smart—this cured me of that notion. Other than the escapees, there was not a soul in sight. I watched those loose chickens in their desperate antics, crestfallen. It flew in the face of my own recent flight to the country. Those dumb chickens wanted back into their familiar confines! (And let me tell you, the familiar for an egg-producing chicken is not a pretty thing.) Still, there is that old saying, “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.” I recoiled from any message that might lurk there, for me.

Peering into the darkening expanse of feathers and dust, I yelled out, “Run Chickens! Now’s your chance, make a break for it while you can!” It fell on deaf ears. Mostly.

Out from behind a rack of tall cages, stepped Elmer, his eyebrows knitted quizzically. “What are you telling my chickens?” he laughed. I blushed, relieved that the cool, dark of the barn kept this secret. Elmer shook his head, still chuckling. I decided to pretend that the only words I spoke in that chicken barn were about my water problem. He nodded and said he’d get up to the tank-house to fix it.

Most of the chickens were retrieved and repatriated over the next few days. All but one—a feisty little hen that eluded capture. Apparently, she’d taken heed of my message, made a run for it and wouldn’t let anyone near her. On a farm that houses tens of thousands of chickens, no one is going to waste a lot of time and effort pursuing just the one. Over the following weeks she grew fat and bold, feeding on spilled chickenfeed and bugs. Over time, her feathers filled out. She preened in the sun on the apron of the barn. We saw her frequently as she made her rounds. She became the talk of the farm, as one tenant after another alerted Elmer, or the farmhands, that there was a chicken on the loose. They’d nod, “Yup.” A loose chicken will usually fall prey to any number of hazards. There are dogs, foxes, hawks and coyotes around here, any one of which will gladly make a meal of a fugitive chicken. Still, she survived.

After about a month, this hen settled in the garden area around Elmer’s house. It became sport to spot and collect her eggs. Emboldened by freedom and the realization that no one was after her, she started hanging around the farm shop, especially when the farmhands took their breaks. They fed her treats from their lunches. They took a poll to name her. Some of the suggested names were getting crazy. Well, after debate, Elmer took the farm-owner’s prerogative and put his foot down on the matter. The chicken would be Henrietta.

I watched this unfold with some measure of mirth. Here this one chicken had, by force of stubborn personality, managed to elevate her status from escapee to pet. She made it personal. One of the farm hands brought her raw sunflower seeds. They argued such things at break-time like whether it would be okay to feed her popcorn—you know, because of the salt. They were teaching her to catch treats tossed in the air. The best of it was that everyone saw the humor (not to mention the irony) in it—a chicken farm with a pet chicken.

One day Henrietta mysteriously disappeared. Not a trace, no evidence of “foul” play. Folks would ask each other if they’d seen Henrietta. Everyone kept an eye out. This really shouldn’t have been a surprise; we all knew the risks. But still, nary a feather to be found. And it did seem odd, since she generally stayed so close to where people were. As you would expect, her absence sounded louder than her presence ever had. Break-time talk lapsed back into the work at hand and any funny story of the day. (Farmers are such gossips!)

We have a guy on the farm, Bill, who works the chicken houses. He mostly keeps to himself and doesn’t come down and hang with the other hands at break-time. He’s developmentally disabled and is more comfortable taking his breaks in his quarters, or out wherever he’s working that day. He’s nice enough, but shy, and uncomfortable trying to keep up with the ribald conversations in and around the shop. Well, about a week after Henrietta’s disappearance Elmer mentioned it to Bill. He nodded, “That loose chicken? Yeah, I finally got her.”

“What? You caught her? What did you do with her?” Maybe Elmer’s tone was a little too strident. Bill, who thought he was just doing what he was supposed to, got defensive and flustered. “I put her back in the cages.” “Which cage?”

“I dunno—over in Number Six, somewhere.”

Elmer couldn’t exactly be angry. A farm hand had put a loose chicken into a chicken cage. It’s what’s supposed to happen. How was Bill to know that this was no ordinary chicken? It had never been explained to him that Henrietta was now a pet chicken. I know that Elmer spent some time looking, walking the aisles between the cages in Number Six. I think most of us did. You’d think she would have been easy to spot, but it’s difficult to tell one brown hen from all the other brown hens, in a barn with thousands of other chickens. Whatever it was that was special about her, she didn’t stand out when you were peering through the wire.

Tags chickens, farm life, hired hands, humor, irony, rural living

Categories agriculture, chores, farm life, humor, Uncategorized

Farmer/Gardener?

March 25, 2012 //

A.V. Walters

Farmer/Gardener?

I’m a gardener. Still, it’s an interesting question and not one so easily answered. I don’t think that it’s just a question of quantity. Measured by quantity alone, I border on farmer. Last season, the first where I had any meaningful and steady help, we produced (and gave away) at a rate that compared favorably to any farmer’s-market vender. One stellar week I distributed grocery bags of vegetables every day, at a rate that would have easily filled any market booth to overflowing. Indeed, an appraisal of the garden by visitors frequently elicited comments about how we could “do the market.” I like it the way it is. I know that some of our garden’s recipients would not have eaten so well without the garden’s bounty. With the economy flailing last year a good many hard working folks found themselves out of work. Here, we had plenty to share. Sharing food, quality food that I’ve grown, is one of the most satisfying and meaningful parts of rural living.

And then there’s the exchange of produce between folks who themselves have gardens or orchards. I call it the Petaluma Salute. I once met a woman from a craigslist ad, in a parking lot in town, where we stood talking politics and gardening as we exchanged zucchinis for pears, tomatoes for eggplants from the trunks of our respective cars. We haven’t seen each other since, but the experience of complete understanding remains a solid memory, as she bemoaned a recent infestation of white flies and I offered her my full repertoire of organic solutions. This summer we were walking down to the mailbox when our closest neighbor came up on a mule with boxes full of zucchini and peppers. He stopped and said he was on his way over to give Elmer some vegetables. We looked at each other and laughed. “It’s coals to Newcastle,” I said. “We’re full to our ears with these and more.” He nodded, and turned the mule around, calling out behind him, “I’ll just have to go find other homes for these.” I live in a world where neighbors leave bags of produce on your back porch, and I respond in kind.

Still, I am just a gardener. Farming is honest work, but it is work for pay, or at least the hope and expectation that the season will pay at the end. It is food as commodity. So far, I’m in it for the very real and sensory gratification I get from working with the soil and season. I note some other subtle differences between farmers and gardeners—which I find akin to the differences between the idea of livestock and pets. We gardeners sweat over the lives of our individual plants. It’s personal. We worry and try different solutions to plant troubles. We water and weed and coax. Dinner conversation can include concerns about what’s up with that last row of peppers. Bugs? Gophers? Or perhaps the long reach of the shadow of the tree-line. (Indeed, this season one whole garden will be repurposed because trees have grown and early afternoon shade dictates that that area will become the home of leafy greens.) Our gardens speak to our hearts.

One gardener/farmer test is how well one handles culling the excess plants that seed-starts yield. Farmers plant the best and dump the rest. It’s a healthy approach but one that eludes many gardeners. Every year I vow to keep the tomato crop down to no more than 24 plants. But there are always extra seedlings—what is one to do? And then there’s the problem of orphan seedlings. Elmer’s cousin starts a plethora of tomatoes every year. Come planting time she gives him the culls—leggy, pale babies. Whether or not I’ve kept to my own limits, these orphan tomatoes always manage to find homes in one of my garden plots. So I am doubly challenged; I have my own difficulties dispatching the less than hardy and I adopt the culls of other gardeners (who themselves cannot bear to waste even the most bedraggled of seedlings.) I have garden space. I take them. I give them their own buckets and water and even manure tea, until they are robust and productive. In my five seasons here I’ve never ended up with less than 36 tomato plants. Good thing for canning, eh? Now, it’s March and we’re still eating tomato sauce and whole, canned romas from the garden.

Farmers, out of necessity, have to deal in numbers. Plants are crops. It’s not the eggplants next to the potatoes–it’s the cornfield, it’s acres. They suffer the same indignities of weather and drought, of predation, but without the personal relationship. They do so on a huge scale, and with the highest of stakes. Still, the financial rewards are often slim and success is never guaranteed, regardless of how much you put into it. Nothing is guaranteed, until the crop is in, or the herd sold—and even then there are the unpredictable vagaries of price. A farmer requires some measure of armor. He cannot afford a personal relationship with his plants or animals. Sometimes, and especially with livestock, this comes off as callous. I have a little trouble with it at times–I bristle at the chickens in their crowded cages. Yet that scale and approach is what’s needed to feeds us all.

And so, I remain a gardener. I enjoy the bounty, but, beyond my pride, I don’t have skin in the game in the end result. I joke at the distinction, but my hat is off in respect to the farmer.

Elmer, my favorite farmer, has chickens and sheep. When it comes to plants, he’s no more farmer than me. When it comes to garden-starts, he has the opposite problem. He goes to the nursery and picks the largest starts he can find. You know the ones, nursery fed on fertilizers, the junkies of agriculture; these baby vegies are literally climbing out of their four-inch pots. They’re bushy, precocious, already sporting blossoms, or even small fruit. They boast of success and productivity. It’s too good a deal to be true! And so it is. These spoiled, root-bound prima-donnas don’t transplant so well. They, too, get their own buckets but the damage has been done; their growth is invariably stunted by their over-ambitious early beginnings. We coddle them, but as yet I don’t know the cure for root bound. It shows that once we’re out of our fields of specialty, we are all gardeners. It’s always personal. For the root-bound, I carefully separate and spread the roots out at replanting time. For the scrawny ones, there’s always the hope of recovery. I think of this as a lesson, in and out of the garden. I was myself (and remain) a late bloomer.

Tags bucket farming, buckets, food, gardening, gophers, humor, plants, rural living, small town, vegetables

Categories agriculture, chores, farm life

Good People Behaving Badly

March 17, 2012 //

A.V. Walters

Good People, Behaving Badly

It’s tough, the worst of all situations. We can all be pleased when somebody who needs to step up to the plate, behaves better than we expect. But when people we know and love seem petty or mean spirited, well, that’s a tough one. Often circumstances dictate–illness, a death in the family, tragedies of luck or finance. These things can test us. I’ve seen some of it lately and I shake my head. There’s little I can do. But it reminds me of something I did a decade ago when I lived in a big city. I wrote it up several years later, mostly because I didn’t want to forget. So, I’ll offer it up to you now and then I can stop shaking my head, and remember….remember to shake my head and then forgive.

The Car Alarm

Some years ago I had a neighbor with a defective (or just overly sensitive) car alarm. I was repeatedly made aware of it, and had complained several times to him about how annoying it was. The alarm would chirp, then announce, “You are standing too close to the vehicle, step away from the vehicle.” Then it would go into a twenty minute cycle of alarm noises–an assorted selection of them. It would chirp randomly without provocation and would, several times a day, go through its entire litany, of course, at ear-splitting volume. For some reason, my neighbor couldn’t hear it when he was inside his house. I don’t know why, I certainly could in mine. (Or perhaps it gave him a false sense of security, periodically, throughout the day.)

Then I came down with a really monstrous case of the flu. I was home all day, trying desperately to sleep-off the symptoms. Of course, with annoying regularity that alarm would go off, eliminating any chance of relief and annoying me to the ends of my limits. It reached the point where I would wake up in sweats, even if the alarm had only chirped. Finally, in desperation (and floridly drenched in a feverish sweat) I threw on my robe and went next door to make the neighbor as fully aware as I was, how disruptive his alarm had become. My neighbor did not answer the bell so I started beating on the door with my fists. I knew he was home because I could hear the damn music. Hell, I could feel the vibrations through my feet on the front porch. Then I picked up a stick and beat on the door–still no response. I walked around to the living room side of his house and beat on the window with my stick. I even screamed at the window. But, still no response. I returned to the front porch and rifled through his mailbox for something to write on. With a pencil from my robe pocket, I sat on his steps and began writing a livid note on the back of a piece of mail. At this point, when my attention was fully on the missive I was composing, the music stopped and the neighbor stepped out onto the porch, standing above me. There I was, in total disarray, sweaty and flushed, seated on his front steps in my bathrobe, writing on his mail.

He had not come to the door in response to my efforts to get his attention–he was going out somewhere and he was in a hurry. Surprised to see me sitting on his porch, he asked if there was a problem? What was I doing with his mail? Well, I let him have it about the alarm. He made a few apologetic noises, but acted completely unaware of the affront of his car alarm and was taken aback by the intensity of my reproach. In an effort to explain, I approached his car. My hope was to trigger the damn thing so that he could fully experience the impact of the alarm’s blast. I touched the car, but it did not make a peep. Then I pushed hard against the fender–still nothing. This alarm, that had kept me up in my sickbed for the previous four hours, simply refused to perform on my command. By now my neighbor was looking at me oddly. With keys in hand, he approached the driver’s side of his vehicle, ready to go about his day, indifferent to my plight.

It was clear to me that the only way to make him really understand was to trigger that stupid alarm. I tightened the belt of my robe and, in bare feet, stepped up onto the bumper of his car. Still, nothing. So, I began jumping up and down on the bumper of his precious, goddamn car (do I even have to say it?) to no avail. I stepped up onto the trunk of the car and jumped up and down, but … (It never occurred to me that he’d probably disarmed the alarm when he came out of his house.)

Though the alarm stayed silent, my neighbor didn’t–“What the hell are you doing? Get the fuck off my car!” he shook his keys at me. I’m sure I made quite a sight. Only in that moment did I stop to examine how I must look, under the circumstances. Sheepishly, I stepped down from the vehicle, blurting, ” You’ve got to do something about that damn alarm.” He shook his head, climbed into the car, muttering, and drove away. I looked up to see that my scene had attracted the attention of the other neighbors. They peered down the block in my direction. One waved. It was now very quiet on the street. I sheepishly returned to my house and climbed back into bed. Well, at least it was quiet.

The neighbor must have had the alarm fixed shortly after that. In any event the problem stopped. No one ever said anything to me about my little street performance. All I can say is that it really did seem like a good idea at the time. Now, I try to be more understanding when I hear stories about bizarre behavior.

Tags frustrations, humor, priorities

Categories humor

Better Living Through Chemistry

March 3, 2012 //

A. V. Walters

Better Living Through Chemistry

The other day I woke to the sound of gas-fired weed whackers. It was a relief. We’ve had strange weather this winter. No rain. We rely on seasonal rains to recharge the wells and this season has been dry. Here in Two Rock it’s green; we get a lot of fog coming in from the ocean. The fog (and in this year’s weather, frost) provides enough moisture to keep the ground green, especially in the low-lying areas where the fog settles. Looking across the landscape you can see the contours of where the fog flows by the trail of green it leaves on the hills. But that moisture doesn’t go deep. If you dig, it’s damp down only a few inches. It’s green, but it’s not growing and that makes the farmers nervous. I know on our farm they’re working to keep the sheep moving, rotating from field to field so the sheep don’t damage the grass down to the roots. Sheep can do that. Usually in the winter I have to mow my lawn every week—or at least every ten days. This season I think we’ve mowed only three times.

And then there’s the cold. It’s been really cold here at night, for months now. Really cold for us is low thirties and high twenties. With nights like that the sheep need extra nourishment to keep warm. The days are lovely, with temperatures climbing sometimes well into the sixties. Even with those warm days though, the cold nights and low moisture keeps the plant growth rate down.

There’s a funny thing I learned about cows (and even some sheep) when I moved here. They sometimes suffer from a “the grass is greener on the other side” syndrome. Even if a cow is surrounded by lush pasture, it will lean out through a fence if there’s greenery on the other side. You need to keep grass at the edge of the fence-line short and groomed. If you don’t, the cows will cut their necks on the barb-wire fences trying to lean out for the grass on the outside of the fence. I live next to a dairy, so even though we don’t do cows here, we get to observe what is done in the world of cows. We share an access road and some fences.

A year ago last autumn, somebody decided not to mow (or more correctly, weed-whack) the fence lines along the dairy side of our single lane driveway. I guess someone figured it was faster and cheaper to spray with herbicides. They were certainly effective. Late that autumn they sprayed and everything green along the lane shriveled and died. Stripped of its protective vegetation, the shoulder of the lane soon began to crumble. The seasonal rains fell on that naked dirt and what little roots remained were not enough to hold the soil. Freed up from roots, the gophers made the little gully along the lane their alley and churned the soil mercilessly. More soil eroded into the gully and washed away with every rain. By mid-winter, our undermined road began to crumble at the edges. To save the lane, they dug the gully deeper to funnel the water away. The gophers dug deeper, too. The edge was hardpan, barren, clay; its organic matter had flushed away so no new grasses would grow there. Grasses have a fine and broad stabilizing root system. Weeds grew there though, but their long tap roots did little to hold our road edges.

Through our long dry summer the grasses did not return along the lane. A few weeds sprouted, but not many. Last fall they chopped down the weeds. The farmers had to dig another ditch, inboard fifteen feet or so from the fence, to divert the water away from the lane’s edge. The gully along the road edge was eroded and jagged. It could no longer carry excess water along the side of our lane, without causing further road damage. Like I said, it’s been a dry winter and so far the new diverter ditches have not been tested. Here and there, along the lane there are some patches of fog-fed green. We’re hoping they’ll spread, their roots working through the soil to rebuild that mat of living material that holds all that’s good in the soil.

So, in this case the annoying drone of weed-whackers is a relief. It means somebody’s learned a lesson and we won’t be spraying anytime soon. With any luck, the rains expected next week will be gentle and will nurture the right kind of growth to re-stabilize the soil and return our lane to its former secure state.

Tags gophers, hired hands, humor, priorities, rural living, weeding

Categories agriculture, chores, farm life

Rural Living

February 11, 2012 //

A. V. Walters

Rural Living

(from August 7, 2009)

Mostly I love living here. There are a few drawbacks. Occasionally, if the wind is wrong (and especially if its damp) the smell of cows from the dairy next door can be cloying. My dad says I’m being polite–it’s not the smell of cows, it’s the smell of cow shit. Those are days when you don’t hang the laundry out, because if you do, folks in town will sniff and then look at you funny when you visit. From my end of the farm, I never smell chickens. We have a running debate as to what smells worse, cows or chickens. Those of us near the cows, think cows; those of them near the chickens, think chickens. What can I say, it’s part of rural living. Did I mention the views are incredible?

Sometimes, the people around the farm are amazingly clueless. Like earlier today when the feed truck leaving the dairy snagged the phone line and dragged it the better part of the half mile long driveway, popping it off the poles in line like tearing a perforated form. I guess he didn’t notice that he had the 20th century dragging along behind him. More curious still were the reactions of the farm hands who witnessed the event. They laughed their asses off, but it never occurred to them to call it in to The Phone Company. Despite the knowledge of what happened, nobody did, until I did it, many hours later (cause the phones were just too damn quiet so I checked, sure enough no dial tone. Which is how I found out about all this in the first place.) By then it was too late to get the service restored today. Actually, they say it could be up to a week–it’s a big repair and it affects only the residents of two farms. We’re not high on their priority list. I complained about it all and Elmer responded, “Yup, they’ll do that.” Apparently, the hands did tell Elmer, but he didn’t call it in either because he’s at the County Fair in Santa Rosa. Today’s the day his grandsons show their cows and sheep. We all have our priorities. It’s why I’ve been elected (in a manner of speaking) to call PG& E when the power goes out after a tree limb falls or a power pole wanders out onto the road and gets hit. The others don’t seem to think it’s their job. I breathe deep and try to remember the view. I’m going out to get some blackberries. I might just as well. Jam and tart will go nicely with telephone silence.

Tags frustrations, hired hands, humor, rural living

Categories farm life, humor

Crows

February 11, 2012 //

A.V. Walters

Crows

(from June 2008)

Elmer is killing crows. I heard the first blast early this morning and wondered if that might be the case. It was confirmed when, minutes later, the phone rang and Elmer said, “Humans 1, crows 0.” I laughed and he hung up. A while later, another report but no call. Not too surprising, given Elmer’s reputation as a marksman.

This is my doing. Yesterday, Elmer, Dorothy and I were discussing the garden and I complained about the crows eating my sprouting beans. Had they just made off with them, I wouldn’t have been so offended. What they’re doing though, is pulling them up, eating the bean parts and then tossing the ravaged seedling back on the soil. We get to count the victims. Elmer laughed and said he’d noticed that the crows had relocated from the crow tree on the dairy, over to his birches. They’re a noisy lot, so when their pattern changes, we notice. We discussed the possibility of a scarecrow, which didn’t impress Elmer. I suggested we make one out of Don’s clothes and give it a coffee cup before he gets back from Oregon, so as to offend both the crows and Don. Elmer liked that. Elmer said with crows you had to teach them a lesson, to which I only laughed.

Later there was another blast, and another call. Our score (Humans) is improving. I asked Elmer whether I was supposed to dress in black for the burial. He laughed and said no, we needed to leave the crow corpse out in the garden, to teach the lesson. I asked if he was making stew tonight and he really laughed. Elmer loves to walk into a straight line, “No, I try not to eat crow.”

It’s been funny, we’ll see if there’s any learning going on here. In any event, I’ll be more careful now about complaining about the neighbors.

Tags gardening, humor, rural living, vegetables

Categories farm life, humor

Snobs

February 3, 2012 //

A. V. Walters

Snobs

Like many out here in West County, we burn wood to stay warm. Within legal limits, we try to meet our heating needs with a small wood stove and a sense of grit. It makes for a different rhythm of the day; first thing on waking, even before coffee, is seeing to the fire. Ours is a small stove, so, especially on a very cold night, the fire often doesn’t make it to morning. I’m the early riser around here, so I’m the one who breaks the still of the morning with fetching wood and lighting the stove. If lucky, I start the day with embers; it’s just a question of feeding a hot stove and nursing it into flames. If I sleep in, or if the night was particularly chilly, I can count on having to do a cold start—shoveling out the ashes and starting-up with a little paper, kindling, etc.

We’re wood scrounges. I watch craigslist and when a tree falls in a storm, or somebody is felling one, I try to be quick on the draw. This past fall we scored two walnut trees for a song. Granted it was several weekends, cutting them into manageable sized chunks and hauling them back to the farm for splitting. It came in at just over two full cords. Next winter I’ll be curious to see how the walnut burns. (We’re hoping the two cords will carry us through most, if not all, the season.) This year we’re mostly burning almond and apple. The almond is incredible firewood. It burns hot and long, with lovely flames tinged with blue. And it smells good, with minimal ash. Almond is the exception to the scrounge rule—it’s so good I pay top dollar for it. Then I mix it with whatever I’ve got available. The apple smells good, too. But it burns fast with little in the way of lasting embers and leaves a ton of fluffy ashes. It was cheap though—fifty bucks for a truckload when we do all the cutting and loading ourselves.

I grew up in a wood-burning family. Back east the wood of choice is oak—or hornbeam, if you can find it. So I’m familiar with waking up to the slightly acrid bite of oak in the air. When I first came to the farm I scrounged for anything I could pick up free after a storm. There was a lot of bay, manzanita and oak. The varieties of oak we here in sunny California are not all as good as the ones back home. Some has a low BTU value—about the same as apple—better than pine, but not the good, all night burn I remember as a kid. But the smell is still the same—a distinctive edge to the smoke and the ash. You can tell when you walk into the house that there is oak in the woodstove. For that weirdly nostalgic smell, I try to pick the harder, longer burning oak. After all, if you must endure its oakyness, you should get the BTUs of good oak. But in the wet of a rainstorm (when trees fall they’re often offered free to anyone with a chainsaw who’ll haul them away,) I can’t tell what kind of oak is what—and free does not give one the opportunity to be picky. So oak it was, until somebody offered me a sample of almond.

Hot, sweet, long-burning almond. Renewable too, because almond growers in the Central Valley are always cycling out old trees to make way for new. I quickly became an almond snob. Then last fall we had the opportunity to pick up apple, cheap. Apple doesn’t have the heating value of almond (or a good oak) but it starts easy and burns hot. Mixed with almond, it’s a perfect fire. Right now I’m burning exactly that mix, with some oak late at night (when we keep the stove closed up and damped down.) My sister back home laughs. They stick with what grows local there, mostly oak, some maple and hornbeam. To hear me extol the virtues of fruitwood and nut-woods, well, she thinks it’s like Californians and their wine. You know, a little grassy with a hint of blackberry and a smooth finish. She and her husband are simultaneously intrigued and appalled that next season I’ll be burning walnut!

Walnut! That’s for furniture! I felt funny about it, too but by the time we arrived on the scene the tree-fellers had already cut it into 12 to 24 inch rounds, so my guilt was assuaged. At least I didn’t cut it that way. Cutting and hauling the walnut was some of the hardest work I’ve ever done. (A good test for my new partner, who was game all the way.) He split most of it, too. (A neighbor joked that when you split your own wood, by hand, it warms you twice.) In true Michigan fashion, we were cutting wood for next year—to allow ample seasoning time. But here on the farm they don’t always plan out that far. Our growing woodpile became the talk of the farm. Finally, Elmer asked whether there was something about the upcoming winter that I knew, that maybe I should tell him. The relief was clear on his face when I said that much of it was for next year. It’s turned out to be a long and particularly cold winter here. And we were ready with our almond and apple. Even after months of nights in the 20s and 30s (I hope they’re not laughing back home—but that’s really cold for here) it looks as though we’ll just make it through—without having to dip into the walnut. (Though we have burned a few of the smaller scraps, mostly just to see how it performs. But you’ll have to wait until next year for that report.)

I guess my family is right. We’ve become wood snobs. We hew to the rituals and rhythms of ‘making wood’ but we’ve embellished it with a particularly Californian aesthetic, not just the heat, but the bouquet, the color of the flame and quality of ash. Okay, maybe they have something on us there. Burn appétit!

Tags humor, rural living, wood burning, wood heat

Categories farm life, Uncategorized

Weed-Wacky

February 1, 2012 //

Rick Edwards

Weed-Wacky

As a kid, my primary job on weekends was to get on my bike and put as much distance between myself and home as possible. I’d be out the door, after a hearty breakfast of Froot Loops, and wouldn’t return until sunset. (All without parental notification, or an approved safety helmet.)

It wasn’t just about the open road, the call of vacant lots or feeling the wind blowing through my crew-cut. There was a penalty on weekends for not getting out early and under the radar—unpaid over-time. Beyond the daily chores and the generous compensation package, “Froot Loops don’t grow on trees, ya know.” (Amazingly, when I was growing up, nothing grew on trees, according to my mother), one of the more dreaded weekend employment opportunities to broaden one’s skill-set, was pulling weeds.

Some call it a chain-gang or a forced-labor camp but on the inside, we called it, “The Backyard.” Though the word is thrown around a lot these days (mostly for comic effect and as the ultimate exclamation point), my dad really was a weed-Nazi. To his credit, he never used weed-killers (other than his children), which may be why my kids were born with the desired number of fingers and toes. A friend of mine I call Agent Orange, thinks weed control comes from a container, the contents of which are “only to be used in a manner consistent with its labeling.” (Preferably wearing a Haz-Mat suit and a respirator.)

When it came to weeding, there was only one rule in The Yard (besides, “Stop whining!”) and it was, (if you like you can use a German accent) “You must remove all of the root!” Even as a child I, begrudgingly, understood the importance of that rule. I understood that a weed could grow back, even if only a tiny piece of its root was left behind. I really got that! And what kid doesn’t want to make the old-man proud. But looking back, I can’t help but wonder if it was all just a cruel joke or one of the ways parents like to remind us of who is really in charge. Let’s look at the facts: Weed season means it’s hot, the ground is hard, I’m just a little kid and I don’t even remember getting any kind of gardening tools or gloves. I mean, I’m living off Froot Loops and riding around who-knows-where without a helmet―what the hell do I care whether the weeds grow back, or not? I’m lucky to be alive! Needless to say, I “dutifully” removed the tops of the weeds, even when I tried to get all the root. But, I figured if I kept my nose clean, and didn’t fight with the other detainees, I’d get time-off for good behavior.

I’m living on a chicken farm now, (of course there’s a story of how this came about, but that’s not why I asked you all here) and last spring my partner and I put in what’s called the community garden. It’s actually three gardens, covering over 4,000 square feet and as you can imagine, that’s a lot of weeds. Given my history, you’d be right to guess that I had a visceral response when the late rains brought forth a bumper-crop of weeds. But I didn’t run, screaming, in the opposite direction. I’d swear that, off in the distance, I heard a bugle playing a call to arms. I didn’t sow those weeds but, by God, I’m certainly reaping them now, roots and all! Given that watering is usually done by others on the farm and there’s little else that needs tending to, except weeding, it has become my obsession.

I guess when it comes to weeds, after all that’s said and done; I am my father’s son. Most of the weeds here, live (briefly) in fear of me, and those that choose to remain are learning to stay on the outside of the garden, looking in. (Under the radar, you might say.) I think my dad would be proud if he saw the gardens and even more so because he was the kind of parent who hoped that his children learned more than he did. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned (that he didn’t), it’s that you never, ever ask your kids to pull weeds. (Oh, and don’t let them eat Froot Loops!)

Tags gardening, humor, weeding

Categories chores

Errata

February 1, 2012 //

A. V. Walters

Errata

This business of editing is a full time occupation. Just when you think it’s finished, something else comes along. The Emma Caites Way was edited a number of times, by me, and by others and finally by Rick Edwards (a number of times). Each time I was shocked by how many errors had slipped past our notice. Worse, sometimes editing actually added errors in a terrible dance of sentences mangled in the word processing mill.

Along the way of creating the story, some things changed. One of the characters, not a major one but certainly an identifiable person in the story, was originally named Rick. He wasn’t exactly a warm and fuzzy individual, so Rick (the editor) edited Rick (the character) out of existence and the character Rick, became Tom, a not exactly warm and fuzzy individual. Except… one of our readers contacted us and pointed out that there’s a place in the book where Rick (the character, not the editor) is still peeking out between the lines! (Well, actually, in a line.) Whatever happened to global changes through Word!?? Sigh.

When the print version of The Emma Caites Way came out, I (the author) almost immediately found two punctuation errors. Then Rick (the editor) found a mangled sentence. Then our reader found The Ghost of Rick, the character (not Rick, the very warm and fuzzy but not perfect editor.) To our readers: I’m really sorry, we keep working at it and we will correct the errors. Feel free to keep pointing them out. We’re compiling a list for our first (and, with any luck, the only) revision.

Thanks for your support, your patience, and your keen powers of observation

Tags "The Emma Caites Way", apologies, editing, humor, writing

Categories "The Emma Caites Way", Uncategorized

Ah, Monday. . .

January 23, 2012 //

Ah, Monday…

A.V. Walters

This weekend was a cavalcade of problems on the farm. Our long dry winter has finally decided to normalize. The storms are welcome; we really need the water. Naturally though, the change brings its own set of issues.

Indirectly the weather change brought on a well emergency. The farm straddles a major road, with the old section on the west side and the newer part on the east. Our side, the old part, is mostly devoted to chickens (and tenants), and some sheep. The other side, about 60 acres, is all about sheep. It’s also where Elmer keeps the emus. (Yes, emus. A long story, for another day.) So, Saturday in a sunny break between squalls, we walked over to visit Mr. and Mrs. Emu. They’ve become quite attached to us, in their ‘big-bird-feed-us’ kind of way. Yesterday when they spotted us coming up the hill, they headed our way at a full trot. It’s quite a sight to see, 120 pound birds running at you; it warms our hearts, even if it is just about apples. So, while there, we noticed that the big water tank at the wellhead, was sitting kind of catawampus at its moorings. While we were walking back down the hill, Elmer flew past us at a full gallop on one of the mules (mechanical, not hoofed ) with his cell phone pressed to his ear. Once home I heard an odd, water-running kind of noise under the house — all the water in our pipes was being sucked back into the system as the pressure failed. Apparently a temperamental switch failed and the tank didn’t fill. That would not usually be a big deal, but with all the recent rain, the hydrostatic pressure in the soil was pretty high and that tank, sans water, was too light to hold its semi-buried place. In an unfortunate “Rube Goldberg” scenario, the tank literally popped up out of the soil like a wet bar of soap from a firm grip, snapping the attached pipes as it went. It must have happened just minutes before we got there. Well, Poor Elmer was in a state–it wiped out our whole water system. There he was as night fell, storm rolling in, jerry-rigging a connection to his daughter’s neighboring well. We’re limping along on a severe conservation alert so I quickly rinsed the dishes, but left them sitting in the sink.

Last night, while the storm was blowing, Bob brought in a mouse. It’s one of the little known secret about cats–not only will they hunt mice in your house, if they perceive a shortage they’ll bring some in for entertainment (and to show us that they’re on the job, rain or shine.) Bob wouldn’t give it up. I was chasing him but he’s quick. He growled every time I came near. Finally I just chased him outside and closed the cat door. Kilo stood by complaining that he didn’t have a mouse. I hated to leave Bob out in the pouring rain, but rules are rules. It was really raining, too. In a really hard downpour the internet cuts out. It’s satellite service. I don’t understand it, but in the paper-scissors-rock game of the powers of the universe, rain-beats-satellite-signal. Finally I gave up and went to bed, but it was raining hard enough to wake me repeatedly from a deep sleep. Finally, in the middle of the night, in a guilty funk, I got up and reopened the cat door.

This morning I woke up to the sound of a cat retching. Yup, Bob was back and apparently the mouse didn’t agree with him. Bob’s a farm cat with a sensitive stomach. Not one to be sick alone, Bob was in from the rain and throwing up on the kitchen floor. Oh yeah, and there were ants. Thousands of them. Ants are not unusual here, they make a run at it a couple of times a year and are held at bay by good housekeeping and Grant’s Ant Stakes. (They’re the only relatively benign thing that works. “That’s right folks, ask for them by name.”) The rains have flooded the ants out and they’re looking to take up residence in the house. Of course, the ants have found the sink full of dirty dishes. The house is cold; the fire is out. It’s Monday. I have work to do, but in the heavy rains the internet keeps cutting out. I really need coffee. Did I mention that there’s no water?

These, too, are the joys of rural living.

Tags humor, rural living, water-saving

Categories farm life, humor