Done and Done

I've finally finished with the clearing, had just barely enough time to do rent a chipper for a weekend and then over the past two weekends have planted over 85 trees. I am weary. But, I've got no time for that complaining crap. The pigs also showed up a couple of weeks ago, along with a new friend who I am still trying to decided whether to call Rex, Zeke, or Soup. I've also been trying to whip my garden into shape, between the weather and the water I haven't been able to set foot in the greenhouse so it got overrun with grass. Drastic measures were necessary, sheet mulching was in order and the dirt guy was called. luckily I had a bunch of wood chips from clearing to make everything look sharp. Now on to the pictures!

The finished cleared almost acre

The pigs digs, high on the hill

The chipper team hard at work

Lesson of that day: no use in crying over a tipped chipper

The second brush pile

My tree order from Fedco, a good 38 trees or so.  All went into the ground in an afternoon.

All the trees are planted!  hard to tell though mostly they look like sticks sticking out of the ground.  This one front and center is a plum.

This one is a pear

The view that I got from the top of my clearing.  It's also the view that the pigs get.

My grass problem

Wet cardboard and compost can fix this.

And a little mulch makes it pleasant to be in, hopefully encouraging me to weed a bit more

My little friend, he came free with the pigs.  I was going to call him Rex or maybe Zeke, because for the first few days he followed me around.  Then started crowing all the time and picking fights with me. He needs some chickens to occupy his time, but that's not going to happen anytime soon, so his name is slowly turning to Soup...

And now, a video of the pigs!

Their names are: Southern Pacific Railroad, Adam Smith, and the "Invisible Hand"

if you can't tell this years theme is Capitalist Pigs.

43,500 square feet

My brain has this problem where in the depths of winter I forget what is a reasonable amount of work for a person accomplish in a set amount of time.  Clear an acre of land? no problem.  Set up a similarly sized pig pen and plant 60 trees? you got it.  And do it all before the end of April? at least I'll sleep good.  Actually I caught a a bit of luck in that the snow has been gone for almost a month.  At this point I'm 2/3rds through with clearing and on schedule to finish just in time for my fruit trees to arrive.  On the way are plums, pears, peaches, persimmons, quinces, Paw paws, walnuts, buartnuts, etc, etc... basically anything in a medium to large tree that will grow in this zone.  Time for the pictures... more when I finish clearing.

on being a Cobbler

My Chucks of two years finally died.  Being a rather crappily made shoes of rubber and canvas, I was proud of them for lasting as long as they did.  Since winter was in fully swing and there is all that much else to do around the farmstead, I figured I'd try my luck at making a pair of DIY Chucks.  There is much of anything helpful on the internet about making shoes and this is probably more exciting than a bunch of pictures of snow.  So I present to you my DIY Chuck Picventure:

Starting with a used tire, cut both sidewalls off.  if you find a big enough tire you can use the sidewalls as the soles and save your self a lot of trouble dealing with the steal in radial tires.  Another option is to find a pre-radial tire.

I found that the easiest way to cut through the tread is to use a good pair of tin snips.  Power tools tend to make a lot of toxic smoke.  after you have foot length pieces trace your sole on to the inside.  you want it only slightly bigger than your feet.  Use the tin snips again to cut out the shape, it help if you have a sturdy spot to clamp the tire to.  clean up the cut sides with a dremel or a metal blade on a circular saw as there are a lot of little point wire sticking out, or leave them if self defence is a concern.

On to the Uppers:

I basically just took one of my chucks apart and used that as a guide.  but there's a lot of room to be creative here... if you've got more than one pair of shoes to wear.

Traced on paper and added 3/4" to all sides so that there is material to sew on the the sole and for the grommets to grip.

Canvas, just like chucks!

Basically just a case of folding and sewing and matching it up to see if its the same size...

This is a good illustration of just how much of the old chick had worn away.

Sew the three pieces together and then the back and you have a completed upper....

This is a good time to see if is its going to fit and make any changes.

between bad lighting and getting wrapped up in project completion I don't have too many more pictures...

So, using a fairly large gauge needle, a pair of pliers, and some good quality string (I used a thick linen string) coated in beeswax, start sewing the upper to the sole.  make sure you sew all of the toe on first because it's hard to get in there if everything else is done.  I sewed from the top at a 45 angle so that the thread exited the side of the sole, and then up and through the canvas.

I glued a piece of canvas down to the sole to make everything look clean.

and added grommets from the fabric store

and finished with the requisite old school "ladder" lacing...

Pigs in need of a blanket

At the request of some of my readers I've made it so that if you click the link below it will take you to the slaughter-day pictures,  for those of you not interested in that here is a picture of three pigs cuddling.

Home Slaughtering Pictures

November

The hoop-house is done! I started this in July with bending metal pipes into half circles, and then had to set it aside until the first week in November because of work. Luckily in September I had just enough time to plant a little something, beet, carrots, leeks, lettuce, parsnips, etc. so that I'll have fresh greens to harvest through the winter. The design is based off of Elliot Coleman's in four seasons gardening. I used 1 inch conduit and a set of "rails" made of 2x6 so that the hoop-house has two plots it can cover. In the spring I will add folding benches to the north side for seedlings and replace cold-loving greens with tomatoes, cukes, melon, ect. I'll move the hoop-house in Oct and repeat.

Slaughter time is almost here. If you're in the area and interested in being apart of it send me an e-mail. I've mentioned this to a lot of people and tend to get a faces that are an odd mix of sympathy and disgust. So I feel I should explain.. I don't take an pleasure in the act of slaughtering the pigs. In fact from everything I've heard I think it may be quite hard to do. But I eat meat, and I feel that obliges me to take responsibility for that animals life. These pigs have enjoyed free range of a wooded lot, been well fed (to the point of overfeeding), and most importantly been allowed to rut and wallow and otherwise be pigs. They've had good lives, free of hardship. I guess at this point I don't feel all that sorry for them. I'm happy to be taking control over the production of my own food, and to be taking away from those who would do it irresponsibly (CAFO farms). I think that by doing it myself It can be done more humanly than anywhere else. Learning how to do this and opening it to the community is an empowering act. This is knowledge that is almost totally lost, but it connects us in a very basic way to realize this was a life and I am taking it in order to live. It's something that some anonymous person does for us everyday so we won't think about, but I think we lose out for having it locked "safely" behind factory doors. 

anyway Dec 19th is the day, and a forewarning I'm probably going to put some pictures up for those who can't make it but want to see how it's done.

Pigs, Bees, and Garden are all  doing great... Thought I might doing something a little different and stand on my soapbox this month.

To start, a picture of the blueberry field

 on the right the field that was burned 3 months a go 
next to a field (the left) that has not been touched for 4 years

(it's more noticeable if you look at the full sized picture)

What jumps out at me is the number of ragweed, This picture was taken at the beginning of the summer and now the field has gone through a series of changes mostly with large numbers of one plant species or another seeming to take hold. The left side suggests the direction that the field would go without intervention, sapling starting to crowd out the blueberries and under shrubs, the mean hight of the plant life around 2ft. Within another 5 years the right field would be filled with saplings, and the edges would have been moved in, and overall be as grown in as the left. The point is that nature tends to abhor a vacuum. A lot of weeds and invasive species, while interfering with human goals, also seem to be trying to recover bare, disturbed land or filling in empty niches (there are notable exceptions to this where a plant or animal is carving its own new niche, but throwing poison in the waterways hardly seems an acceptable option and is another story altogether). I like to think of flora as a battery. If you start by imagining a cleared to the ground lot, bare earth, and picture how it would look time lapse 20, 60, and 100 years from now. I see small weedy plants giving way to bushes and shrub giving way to sapling to larger trees that soak up the light changing the diversity of the species on the ground. Each new round of plant and companion insect and animal life adding to the life, and potential for life, inherent in the earth. 100 years later we would hope to find a forest with a 60ft canopy using every ray of sunlight available to it. 

In the garden I've planted clusters of vegetable, both to try shade out the weeds and to take every advantage of the sunlight that I have, in crude imitation of shading out, natural competition. It worked better for some vegetables than others. My carrots have so far been the best working example, I allowed them to self-thin and the carrot patch has been weed/work free, I believe that what I suffer in individual size of the carrots or total yield, I will more than make up for in the ratio of effort expanded to yield. Not a method for those perfectionist gardeners who demand neat rows, but it works for me.

This summer has been my first real experience with gardening and with horticulture in general, but has only served to reaffirm my own observations and those of some pretty wise people before me. The more that people try to improve on, take short cuts to, or dissect the natural world; the more humanity just ends up fucking it up.  

August Farm Update

The day job finally slowed down enough to take a few pictures... I havn't done much around the ole' homestead other than cut lots of firewod.  I got a little scared when we had a few, dare I say, fallish nights in the begining of August.  Firewood jumped to the top of the priority list (i didn't have any cut), now it's looking like I should be done chopping by the 1st of sept.

The pigs on a rainy day, 

they're hard to photograph when they're hungry

The bees have had a population explosion

And filled the top box with comb

and built a cool piece of display comb,

filled with honey

The Garden, doing all the better for being totaly ignored

My first Zuke

And my first Cuke

I'm so proud of them both