Rites of Autumn

Aside from the retrieval of flannel sheets from the storage chest, we are seeing clear signs of the change of seasons. Some things that come along every year are pleasing just because they are such certain indications.

We separate the young ewes from their elders in preparation for breeding. Here is Ava on her way to her winter digs. She’ll join some half-sisters there.

Some shepherds breed ewes their first year. We think of them as youngsters at that age, and still call them lambs. Just because a teenager can breed, it doesn’t mean she might not be better off growing up.

The pace of knitting for winter picks up in autumn.

This little cap went home with one of the solar contractors working on the house.

The woods and fields are full of fungi. Among the pleasures of fall are these, Coprinus comatus, the Shaggy Mane mushroom. There are a scant 3, more or less, wild mushrooms I am comfortable to pick and eat. The Shaggy Mane is one of them.

It will never be a commercial commodity; it famously turns to black ink within hours of emerging.

This is a clever mechanism for dispersal of the spores. As it “rots” its way to old age, the edges of the egg-shaped young mushroom flare out, leaving the spores exposed to the elements. Shaggy Manes are a mess at this stage. The black liquid gives this type of mushroom another common name, Inky Cap, and the ink migrates everywhere once you touch it. But the liquid must be an effective means of carrying spore, because Coprinus can dot entire fields with its ghost-white caps. This year we’ve been lucky and have found them young and firm.  When you are lucky, they make a fine seasonal treat sauteed and served on toast.

We were thinking about the possibility of propagating Coprinus in our own pastures. They like disturbed ground, grassy areas under tree litter, and manure-y areas. We have some of that. So this year we sacrificed a mushroom to an experiment. We let it age to a fine state of liquefaction, tossed in some stem cuttings that seemed likely to have mycelia attached, mushed it all together in the food processor, and poured it into a jar with water to fill.

Nice, isn’t it? The farmhouse laboratory at work.

I took it down to the orchard and sprinkled the black liquor along the fence line. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, most of the mushrooms and other fungi in the woods are strangers to me. Right now they are erupting in the hundreds, and some of them are beautiful beyond any expectation.

The last of the apples wait to be collected.

These are Liberty, which is a fine disease-resistant fall apple, good eaten fresh when it’s young, good cooked when it’s mature.

Another ritual of the season is the planting of shrubs, trees and bulbs in the garden. Our garden is still the workplace of too many heavy-footed men to permit much gardening. The plants chosen to fill the beds around the new house will be far too valuable and vulnerable to risk next to the continued battering of cast-offs and short-cuts. But one place seems completed enough to permit a hopeful gesture. I really could not stand it one more minute, and I drove off to town one raining Saturday and bought a load of red-leaved shrubs for the northwest corner of the house.

It was a dim, grim day, with rain in sheets blowing across the roads. The cab of the pickup was a steam-bath inside; its old heater groaning against the window fog was barely up to the job. But I was glad of heart as I drove home with an assortment of blueberries, a maple tree, and 4 Euonymous in brilliant red. I would plant something.

By coincidence, my order of heritage garden bulbs arrived the same week, and I was forced to buy some stoneware pots to house them.

These bulbs came from Old House Gardens where they sell bulbs collected from generations of gardens, tenderly cultured and closely held by gardeners who value the lineages old varieties. These are the bulbs of our grandmothers, and older still. Go there to meet the blue Hyacinth orientalis, the Roman hyacinth known in gardens since 1562, or the English bluebell Hyacinthoides non-scripta, whose honey-scented blooms were known to Shakespeare, but were ancient in gardens even then. Who can set such a bulb in the earth without knowing some sense of the long time from then to now?

I chose pots I thought would keep them well,  these old bulbs grown new.

Meanwhile, back to the season coming on… We had our first frost this morning.

It makes me think again of those flannel sheets and of the down-filled comforter. It’s a fine season, this one, given to color and scent and temperature.

I like fall best.

Autumn Greeting

It’s the time of year a person cannot go outside without encountering a spider web. Webs across the coat sleeve. Webs across the face. Eeeack. That feeling of knowing a spider is somewhere down your collar or in your hair.

This one is beautiful. She is called Argiope aurantia, or the Black and Yellow Garden Spider.

Look at the imprint of the alien lady with the bouffant hair, in black on yellow. What could possibly speak more clearly of October than this gorgeous spider hanging in her house?

R. asked me the other day, “Except for pigs, what do you think spiders think about all day?”

My opinion?

Blood.

For all we know, that could be her succulent husband in the package.

October greetings to you.

Construction Update: Color and Light

Since last I wrote, the house has matured a little. I had reported on the installation of the solar panels. We’ve had them running through a billing cycle now.

In good, sunny September, we generated about 1,000 kW of electricity. With the brand-new reversing meter installed by Portland General Electric, any wattage over our own use is credited back to our account at, we are surprised to learn, a handsome retail rate, including transmission and distribution charges. We had earlier been given to expect a credit at wholesale prices. That was a nice surprise. In the last late summer blast of high temperatures, we found the inside to be comfortably resting at about 75F, even with its plastic windows and doors still substituting for real ones. The cold weather hasn’t come our way yet, so the performance of the house in the chill remains to be tested.

The next big, visible change was the application of the “render” coat, over the “parge” coat, over the construction blocks. See the post Construction Update: Captive Electrons about the earlier layer of waterproofing. The coat they call “render” is the final layer under color.

It’s too bad, in a way, to have to cover this up. It made me think we had a house on a far-away Greek island. Ricardo, one of the construction crew, whose arm must be tired of applying this stuff to the walls, liked it white, too. “It looks good,” he said. “Leave it.” Of course, in this land of red soil, it would be white for about a month. The first splatter of mud would transform it into… a muddy house.

So:

We thought something like the color of the native soil would be appropriate.

The choosing of colors is not a simple thing. Just when you think you’ve dealt with it, someone reminds you there are window frames and door frames and fascia boards to think of. And then you go back to the color chips, wondering how you’ll come up with something that will go with the rest of it, which you chose 6 months ago and which might not, or might, be a bit of a surprise when you actually see it on the wall. We don’t want it to look tentative… We don’t want it to look ordinary… We want it to be a statement, both to the site and to the sun, which are, together, the whole point of the design. But, you know, a house could come out looking like a cartoon, too.

Back to the color chips. It is astonishing how much difference there is in a color depending, on whether you see it in the light of the ceiling lamp or the light of the sun. Between rainstorms this weekend we’ve been running outside with pieces of colored and numbered paper, holding them to the walls, shaking our heads, negotiating, making lists of numbers, and then going about it all again. Of course, paint can be changed if you make a terrible mistake, but it’s expensive, and some of it is hard to reach. Better to get it right the first time. Results will be reported.

Meanwhile, inside, things that will never be seen again are winding through the walls

and overhead

in mysterious ways,

leading to very technical ends.

Enough of that.

Meanwhile, as they say, back on the farm, the hardy cyclamen are in bloom.

It pleases me to see them. They are about the last remnant of  garden that has survived construction of the house. These are from seed I started over 20 years ago, when I lived in Portland. They propagate themselves happily once they’re established, and before we left town I dug a good bucketful from their place under the maple tree. They settled in quite well in their new location beneath the Linden tree here. They are sturdy little things, liking the dry ground where tree roots suck the moisture from the soil. Though I dug some up again before construction started, and set them into pots, the building process has been much longer than we anticipated, and it’s been asking a lot to expect them to make it in holding pots. I wasn’t sure they would survive the passage of construction crews over their native site. So, I smiled the day I saw them show up this fall.

The grapes were coming along nicely

until, as so often seems to happen, the wild birds paused in their southward passage, took a look, and stopped for luncheon. We did get a few for a glass of juice. Once the house is finished, it’s on my list to provide some protection for the grapes. I recall visiting a vineyard a number of years ago and taking note of the intermittent blast of air cannons. Those explosions were intended to keep birds off the harvest. I don’t think we’re going to install cannons, but a bit of bird netting might be to the point.

The blackberries remaining on the vine are hard and sour. Although they look like they might, they will never ripen. Wasps will have them, or deer, but not we.

And fairies have been dancing in the woods again. It’s a sure sign of autumn:

Time is passing.

Here’s hoping we’ll be living in that house soon.

Weather Change

I told you in the last post to pay attention to summer while it was still with us.

Now click on the arrow in the orange circle to hear a report of the moment.

No complaints. We can use it. The woods have been tinder-dry. Or, at most, one small complaint. We’ve exchanged long-lingering dust for sudden mud. Of the two… ah, well, it’s hard to choose, isn’t it?

Timing could have been better (this is not a complaint, just an observation), as we are in the middle of excavation for drains.

These are long drains, extending from the floor of the greenhouse, the lowest level of the house, downhill to the edge of the wood. They’re so long because, though the land slopes down from the house, the greenhouse floor is below grade. The drain field has to “catch up” by running a long way to maintain a downward course. With the heavy rains of yesterday and today, and some more expected tomorrow, the excavators will have a thick time of it when they come back next week.

My friend Barbara and I found a remedy for cloudy skies yesterday. We drove off down the valley, as we do from time to time. This day we made for the small town of Canby and the annual Dahlia Festival at Swan Island Dahlias.

Oh. My. Even amid showers, this is an intoxicating experience. Acres of dahlias in bloom stand up to assault the eye. Row upon row upon row of colors, some subtle,

some bold

washed across the cone receptors of my eager eyes. Golly, my optic nerves jumped into action, and sent the spasm to my optic chiasm, where the nerves met and information crossed over from one side of my brain to the other. In a trice, it went on through the optic tracts, entered the thalamus, and synapsed at the lateral geniculate nucleus! Shazam! My visual cortex, back in the occipital lobe, was ready to receive this blast and got to work making it into vision. The human eye can distinguish about 10 million different colors. I think most of them were present in those fields, and all of them attempting to seduce the unwary gardener into rash, unplanned purchases.

The weather probably thinned the crowd, but those who came were the stalwarts who either don’t care much about the rain or came prepared to make their way through muddy fields. They wore a design sampler of weather wear:

.

Though I took mine along, it’s a good thing I didn’t choose to slip into my boots.  I could never have competed with the stylists in the gardens.

Homely though they are, these boots have their place. These boots are made for ditch-hoppin’. These are chicken yard boots. Sheep yard boots. Mud and hay boots. These are definitely not struttin’ boots. Not even, let’s admit it, not even faintly cute boots. They are, in the defining words of Merriam-Webster, homely: 3 a : unaffectedly natural.

I can’t seem to pull this week’s post together in any organized way. It’s raining. It’s muddy. The dahlias are bright anyway, and they put me in mind to have my garden in some kind of shape. That is, they put me in mind to wish I had any garden at all here, where we have construction dirt in ditches and heaps. I’m resisting the urge to fill out an order form, to fill the yet undefined beds with bulbs to be delivered next spring. I’ve learned in this year not to anticipate a finish date, not to believe in the possibility that items purchased now will find use or destination before they perish. I’ll stick with my mud boots for now.

One more song; click the arrow:

Summer Moving on…

We see clear signs the summer is coming ’round to an end. Weather is still warm and bright, but suddenly it is no longer light when the alarm goes off in the morning.

I found this in our woods. It’s a fragment of what had been a fairly large paper wasp nest.

Here’s a view of the interior, the living quarters.

Someone was bold enough to knock it from its location in the treetops, probably to harvest the larvae in the nest. You can be sure it was not me! I happily engage honeybees. Vespids are another story.

These were probably Bald-faced hornets:

This is not my magnificent photo. It comes from the Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of  PiccoloNamek. The Bald-faced hornet is not as fierce as she looks — I’ve encountered them many times with no sense of aggression from them. That doesn’t mean you want to walk up and mess with their nest in late summer! They will protect their home with every intention to drive you away.

The Yellow-jackets, on the other hand, have been fierce these late summer days. The other morning one of the men on the construction crew came hurtling up the slope, swatting and cursing. He’d found a nest under a pile of pipe and neither he nor the Yellow-jackets were one bit happy about it. He called them ‘bees,’ and I was stern in my insistence that those were not bees; they were wasps. He didn’t seem to appreciate the distinction. Bees take the rap for Yellow-jackets all the time.

Meanwhile, the gone-wild crab apples are hanging thick on their branches in waste areas.

Turkey Vultures (Cathartes aura) are molting their flight feathers, one by one. It must affect the rise and soar of the birds, but they stay up there anyway. I’ve seen several of them recently with serious gaps in their wings and tails, and a generous shedding of feathers onto the ground. These are big feathers — a foot or more in length.

Empty husks are appearing in the woods, a sign someone has been squirreling away nuts.

Crickets have begun to sing.

And the woods overall have a scent of rich balsam. The orchard has begun to exhale that perfume of slightly fermented, nearly rotting windfall fruit in the grass.

Everything is sighing at the end of the season, casting its seed, gathering itself for winter.

Here’s something new from WordPress: audio files embedded in the post. Click the Go arrow, and listen to Summertime while there is still summer in the season.

Construction Update: Captive Electrons

For some time progress on the house has been… invisible. Some things have been going on, but they’ve been difficult to present or to think of as progress.

There was a mishap in regard to the floor color that set things back for weeks while the concrete magician worked out an elixir that would fix it. This was nearly a tragedy. An assistant on the job passed the wrong stain color to the applicator, who conscientiously sprayed it on half the downstairs floor. It takes several minutes for the color to emerge in the applied acid etch stain. I can only imagine B.’s horror as he watched the colors change before his wondering eyes. In the end, after many  hours of “lab time” and  many samples and tests on floor spaces that will be concealed in the final house (under cabinets, in closets…), he came up with a treatment that has given us a lovely floor. It’s not exactly what we had in mind for the ground floor — we had wanted to reproduce something like the natural hues revealed in the soils in the excavation for the house: reddish clays, ochre layers, faint green smears… but it is a really beautiful floor. It looks like old leather. If you did not know where to look, you wouldn’t see the place where the disaster took place.

So, weeks later, the floors are finished and safely covered over so carpenters can come in and start on walls and windows.

We brought our color samples into the kitchen — It’s been a long time since we first made the selections for materials and colors, and, frankly, I had to be reminded. Oh, is that what the cabinets are to be? Good thing we still liked it! I wonder how often people change their  minds drastically after the months pass between choosing and finally seeing? Here is the color pallet, as much as you can tell from monitor pictures:

Stained concrete area floor, cork on the kitchen floor, 'Ceaser Stone' counters in sage and slate green, coffee-colored powder-coat stair railing, and stained 'Liptis' cabinet wood.

The guys took the black plastic off the window holes and replaced it with translucent plastic, and we are pleased to find that light pours into the rooms, and the colors are earth-like and good.

Two bold men spent a month applying what is called a parge coat to the exterior of the house.

Ricardo on the scaffold, applying the parge coat.

Parge, or parget, is a coat of waterproofing, traditionally plaster but in this case a material more like mortar. It is the undercoat of the exterior treatment.

Some plumbing has wormed its way out of the building:

This looks to me like some kind of Borg bio-mech entity escaping from the foundation.

Meanwhile, electricity has happened. Here, the electricians are installing panels onto the racks on the roof. Note the careful use of safety lines. It’s a long way down.

The ‘Phase One’ array of photo-voltaic panels is installed,  a little over 6 kW, and the attendant inverter is in the attic:

In the first test, on a cloudy day, the panels immediately began harvesting hurried electrons and providing them a way through the lines to the meter. The only problem with this was the meter. We still have the original meter in place, and it is not so smart as it thinks it is. All it knows is that electricity is flowing, not where it originated. Until PGE can replace it with a new, reversing, meter we won’t be running the PV system — no point paying the  utility company for electricity we generate. The change-out should happen next week.

On the passive side, we have a different kind of array on the north roof. These are solar tubes, small skylights with reflective tubes running from the underside of the lens into the attic. At its terminus, a tube is fitted with a Fresnel-type lens that distributes the light.

Solar tubes gather light through a skylight lens and carry it through reflective tubes into dark areas of the interior.

The Fresnel lens, first developed in the 19th Century by Augustin-Jean Fresnel , was the lens that made lighthouse lights visible over distances of 20 miles. These days they are made affordably of plastic and used to magnify images in overhead projectors, and small CRT screens; they are the lenses of traffic lights, theater light instruments, and auto headlamps; they correct vision disorders; aircraft carriers use Fresnel lenses in their optical landing systems; and they concentrate sunlight into solar cookers and forges. Solar tubes with plastic Fresnel lenses are available at common home-improvement stores.

There are five solar tubes on the roof. Three will light the attic. Two will penetrate the ceiling of the main living floor and light the dining area and one bathroom.

Here’s the view up a tube:

and here’s the light underneath:

In daytime, you don’t need electric lights in the attic! These are completely passive, clean, and… well, they are just so neat.

All the time excavation was going on for the house, we were laughing up our sleeves because just down the road from us the neighbors had had to blast boulders out of their backyard in order to install a septic system. Our hole had no rocks bigger than a melon, and not many of those. It hardly seemed fair, and the neighbors were unamused at our good fortune. But last week we found the boulder field. Just south of the house, where a drainage line is headed into the pasture, the excavator started pulling stones from the earth. In an entire day’s work he made about 20 feet of progress on a 2-foot wide ditch, and accumulated a nice pile of volcanic stones.

We’re hoping the field is short, because that drain line has a ways to go. It’s our punishment for glee.

On the other hand, those are fine landscape stones, and we’ll find a use for them.

Workshop Weekend

We are having sizzling temperatures here. Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s 106°F was a record-buster, and today promises to beat that. Ugh.

I made a weekend escape to cooler climes over the weekend, heading away to join friends at a 2-day ‘color in wool’ workshop.We drove downriver along the Columbia, and turned north at Westport, Oregon, to take a small ferry across to Puget Island. It was a glorious sunny afternoon by the time we lined up at the ferry landing. For $3 we made the short crossing along with a half dozen other cars. We ate cherries from a roadside stand while we waited at the landing.

Here’s the friendly ferryman who probably poses regularly for tourist photos:

And here is me, catching a knitting break during the transit:

The crossing is about 15 minutes. I barely had time to find my bag and get out my needles.

Puget Island is a small community in the Columbia River. As you approach, it has that unmistakable scent and feel of a waterine settlement. Often the Columbia is raucous in its windy progress toward the ocean. On this day, with a pleasant breeze, the river lapped gently at the beach.

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You drive briefly over the island, cross to the town of Cathlamet by bridge, and turn onto the highway headed downriver, to Skamokawa. (I had to put these in here: Cath-LAM-et, and (try it your own way first, then say…) Ska-MOK-a-way.)

We arrived enthusiastic, ate and slept well, and were ready to throw ourselves into class the next morning.  I was about to make yarns I would never have undertaken on my own, using the drum carder to blend colors into wool batts that were later drawn out into gaily colored rovings and spun into final yarns.

For readers who have no idea what I’m talking about, here is a quick course in the preparation of wool into yarn.

As it comes from the sheep, a fleece is messy, dirty, and clumpy. To be spun into yarn it must first be sorted and then cleaned (I mean washed, washed in hot water, with detergent), and then made into a fluffy form that can be attenuated into strands. Skipping over  the first business of sorting and washing (called scouring among the conoscenti), let’s move on, to the handling of the cleaned wool.

In this case, we were using small portions of wool already dyed into colors our instructor intended us to begin with.

We had a bag of brightly colored wool, a bag of medium-dark wool, a bag of darker dark wool, and a sack of natural whites, grays, and blacks. In addition, we were each given a paper bag of ‘goodies.’ The goodies were bits of flashy fiber, silk, mohair, wool, and, I must say it though it’s hard for me, holographic plastic.

All these bits and pieces are in a sort of rough jumble. To make them orderly, we first run the plain (dyed) wool though a carding machine like this one:

Below is a close-up view of the drums. The wires sticking from the cloth grab the wool as it passes between the two drums and pulls it open. Here you can see some bits of colored silk added to the wool batt.

The drum carder is a larger, faster version of the hand carders our grandmothers used to prepare wool for spinning.

You can imagine this woman never thought of getting together to card wool for fun.

The process separates the strands of wool, fluffs them up, gives them order and body. Actually, it may give them chaos, but it’s open and uniform chaos. The wool as it comes out of the carder is called a batt, and the texture of the batt is lofty. Here are four of them, well-carded:

You can see little pieces of colored material scattered through the batts. This is the goody stuff, which has been carded into the original wool.

Now, these delightful batts were about to be sundered.

We rolled them up like fat jelly rolls. Then, putting our arms and shoulders into it, we began pulling from the middles of the rolls, outward to the ends. This is our instructor, Janis Thompson, demonstrating how to pull the batts into a roving.

A roving, which looks here like a giant woolly worm, is an attenuated rope of carded wool, ready for spinning into yarn. Here’s one of mine, wound up after being pulled thin.

The next day we all assembled again to finish up our yarns. We spun the pretty rovings into strands that were gaily textured, thin in some places, thick in others, happily colored and unpredictable. We had, as we’d been instructed, flexed our ‘color muscles.’  We’d come up with some irreproducible results.

Two days of intensive, hands-on education can be a zonking experience. On Saturday morning we were fairly skipping into class. By Sunday afternoon, we were weary from learning. Dazzled by our results, but worn right out.

Class wasn’t all that captured our attention. That inner bell that heralds a nearby yarn store had been clanging in my breast. All day on Saturday, I knew something must be done about it. But there we were, tied to our carding machines, class running until 5 pm. I could hear the door of that yarn shop closing at 5, even at a yet unmeasured distance. What to do?

Over dinner that evening we discussed the problem. Oh, said our friend Rose, that’s no problem. They open at 7:30 because of the cafe serving breakfast.

What?

The yarn shop, you see, shares space with a cafe and the proprietors, being no fools, open the store about when morning coffee is served.

So we leapt from our own breakfast table on Sunday morning, and made a hasty sortie into the fragrant realms of the local yarn store.

It gave us a boost for the second day’s work over the carders.

All in all, it was a delightful weekend in which we enjoyed cooler temperatures, ate good food, found good company, and made yarn. A womanly pursuit all around, from which we came home again in good condition. I recommend such an outing every now and then.

As the World Turns

It was Clear-the-weeds-in-the-vegetable-patch Day on Sunday. Things were at such a point, unless you knew them as a mother does her children, you might not find the vegetables among the upstart thistles and other weeds. On my knees, rummaging among desired and undesired stems, I looked into the heart of the summer squash thicket and saw this beautiful spiral.

Who could find such a thing and not stop in their labor, sigh a sigh, and feel for a moment the perfection of being?

Here is another, the vine of the runner bean making its way up. It finds its own means of taking hold, reaching rightwards around any support it chances to find.

Compare its right-winding direction with the squash blossom above. The squash goes left. The bean goes right.

In the lyrics of Flanders and Swann ,

The fragrant honeysuckle spirals clockwise to the sun,
And many other creepers do the same.
But some climb anti-clockwise, the bindweed does, for one,
Or Convolvulus, to give her proper name.

In this song, the honeysuckle and the bindweed find themselves tragically star-crossed lovers who can never come together because they vine in opposite directions. Their plan is to,

“…run away for a honeymoon and hope that our luck’ll
Take a turn for the better” said the bindweed to the honeysuckle.

But

Together, they found them, the very next day,
They had pulled up their roots and just shrivelled away.
Deprived of that freedom for which we must fight,
To veer to the left or to veer to the right!

Here’s another right-ward spiral, though within it you can see a left-hand turn as well. This bi-partisan approach might have solved the problem for the bindweed and the honeysuckle, if they had had a composite flower like the daisy.

Much more is going on in this flower than its spiral. Those little spiraling ‘beads’ in the center of the flower are mathematical genius growing wild. If you were to take the flower apart, down to its center, called the Capitulum, and count the ‘beads,’ you’d find this sequence of numbers growing in the turns:

0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89…

It’s a series known as a Fibonacci sequence: each sequential number is the sum of the preceding two. I take it on faith. Enough other people have counted them.

Look here to see the wonder of this sequence.

Now I’m looking at the brow of our Mule, and wondering if William is more perfect than I might have thought.

Does he know what a miracle might lie between his ears?

In Which We Catch Up

It seems we have let things lapse here. We see patient readers have been checking in, perhaps only to sigh and move on as there is nothing new to look at. We’ll try to do better.

Summer has come roaring in, full of busy days. The annual rite of bringing in the hay commenced, in mercifully mild weather. Most usual haying temperatures reach the F90s or higher. This year we had extended spring rains to delay the process. For weeks, two days of brilliant sun would be bracketed by 3 of rain; and rain, for hay, is early death. As the stems rose in the fields waiting for a forecast of weather fair enough for cutting and drying, barn lofts grew emptier and emptier. Growers worried their grass might lodge over in the rain and refuse to stand upright again. Baling machines stood idle. Shepherds  watched the days pass on the calendar, through June, July coming up.

Haying requires a dry day to cut, a couple of dry days for the fallen grass to give up its dampness in the field, to be raked over and give up some more, and a day to bale and collect the bales out of the field. When it happens, the County roads are busy with trucks and trailers moving hay from one farm to another. Grass is life for livestock. If you are like us, with little field acreage, you buy your hay from someone who has lots of field and few animals. It is a time in which you push back plans because you cannot plan for the schedule of the field.  We assemble some strong arms and backs to help. They come with patient men who know they’ve committed to an uncertain date. Yes, they’ll help with haying. Just call. We borrow trailers and pickup trucks to go with the strong arms and backs. We hope they will all be available when the date finally comes. We wait on the weather.

In the meantime, I knit.

At last, almost a month later than last year, the call came.

A hayhook is a simple tool, so essential to the managing of bales most folks have several. This one is of wrought iron, cut from plain stock long ago and shaped to fit the job. Its handle is polished from long use. It's satisfying to pick up a tool that has served many hands.

We buy our hay straight from the open ground. Our friend, Lloyd, calls when the baler is making his rounds of the field. By evening of that day the hay will be dotting his acres in neat bundles waiting to be collected. They don’t stay there long. If you do not collect your hay promptly, someone else will get it before you. It is an exercise in urgency, this getting in the hay.

It’s far cheaper to buy hay this way, with our own labor in loading and unloading, than to get it from a grower who has stored it (his labor in lifting, lifting again, and stowing), or to have it delivered. We pay the strong arms and backs, certainly, but they are working for us, and it’s not nearly as dear as if we were paying a middle-man.

We ran into difficulties with the labor pool. We don’t need many hands, but we need more than just mine. This year R. has been laid up with a painfully infected leg wound, and found himself disabled in the days running up to, and through, and after, haying. That has been a long and frightening story of the vigor of small organisms. You are spared the details here. It seems all will come well at the end, but we were seriously concerned for quite a few days.

In any case, as haying goes, his was a pair of hands not on the job. I thought I had lined up two likely fellows from the construction crew, but when the call to the field came, they were reminded by their distaff side that it was apartment-moving weekend, and I could nearly hear the scolding they received clear from town. “You agreed to do what?” In the end, our friends Elton and Dan came over the horizon to help. They arrived at the field early on a Sunday morning, pickups and trailers at the ready. The three of us put away about 5 tons of hay in good time. Then Dan drove off to another field and another barn to fill. I think Elton went to find  a steam bath. A city man, he’s unaccustomed to these bursts of labor that come on a farm, and it was a gesture of fine character that he came out to help.

So: hay is in.

Since last I wrote, we found time to till and plant some garden.

Richard calls this my clown suit. They are hand-me-down overalls too small for other likely recipients, a little large on me, but too good to throw away. That anyone thought I might wear them does not speak well for my fashion image.

The garden is slight by our usual standard. The plot lay fallow the last two seasons, awaiting the installation of the new septic system (Two seasons because of… delays. When it was first supposed to come in, it didn’t. When it did, it fully missed the vegetable plot, and we could have planted anyway. Details elsewhere, and probably not worth looking up.), which meant breaking ground all anew this year.

This is the quality of soil we enjoy here. It’s officially called Jory Clay Loam, though the loam proportion is difficult to find. When I say “breaking ground,” I do not speak metaphorically.

But we have some garden, and next year’s will be better.

While the garden grew, I knitted some more.

The tomatoes are setting on.

The Runner Beans are blooming.

Baby squashes are appearing on the bush.

Since last I wrote, the cherries have come ripe.

Odd as it seems, the birds have let us have most of them this year. We have a riotous population of crows in residence, and the usual assortment of small brown birds. All of these happy to beat us to a good portion of the crop, and I can’t figure out what they are thinking, to have left all those beautiful, sweet gems hang there until I came for them. Most of the fruit has gone into the freezer, about 20 quarts. It’s a small tree still, and this seems a handsome harvest.

The wild strawberries are appearing in the woods.

And, oh, I knitted.

That’s our still unfinished house at my back. By the time we’re allowed to live in it, who knows, I may be tired, but I’ll probably still be knitting.

Look on Back

In this International Year of Astronomy, it is said orbital telescopes and with new cameras will let us look so far into space we may see the origins of the universe. We can see the past now.

These are Galileo's watercolor renderings of earth's moon as he saw it in 1610.

Naturally, I have a little trouble with this concept. No matter how hard I look, I have never been able to see past my memory, and sometimes even that does not serve as well as it might. It’s an intriguing notion, though.

How I would like a window looking onto the past of our farm.

The other day, the tax assessor came by. We are making a bit of a ruckus here, what with ripping the landscape apart and building a house. So we have the attention of the bureaucracy which, it turns out, is not always up-to-date on improvements.

The assessor had a sheaf of papers in hand showing what our farm ought to look like. For instance, he noted there was no demolition permit in the file for the barn. The barn? We look down the slope to our pole barn, which is standing and serving. Oh, the barn. You mean, perhaps, that rotting deck out there that supports beehives? That was once a barn. It wasn’t anymore when we came here. Even the pile of boards from its collapse had been cleared away, gone, perhaps, into someone’s upscale restaurant interior. Barn wood is much in demand for interiors.

He looked around some more and pointed out that, in 1937, there was a house in what is now our pasture. We shrug. What else can you do?  There is no house there now, and hasn’t been in recent times. 1937: Was that the last date an assessor came out? There is no humor in this man. He wants to know, what’s that shed down there?

They give the impression of a desperate quest for tax dollars around here. That loafing shed, in what might once have been the fore-yard of the old, gone barn, may have come from the 1930s. It’s been patched with later plywood on one end, and has a plastic gutter hanging off the front, and it teeters toward the promise of a collapse someday soon. It was teetering when we came here, propped up with plumbing pipe where its roof drooped toward the dirt floor. “Take a look at it,” we say, confident this shed will not add greatly to the value of our holdings.

But it puts a person in a wondering mind, to focus on 1937 for a moment. Who were they, and what they were doing, back then? We find traces, here and there, of those other folk. Walk in our pasture any day and you will find evidence coming up with the grass.

Why china and glass emerge from our pasture is open to speculation. Were they like Maggie and Jiggs, hurling dinnerware? Were they such slobs they tossed it out the window when it chipped or broke, or needed doing up? Or is the present pasture the site of an old dump still living somewhere underground?

Stuff gets left around on a farm, and vanishes for a time, and emerges again later on. I pick the small bits up and put them in jars. The archeologist in me (I was one once, and once thought I might be one, more) is less interested in the things they had than in what the people did with them. Some are obvious…

Some are mysterious…

Some are small things:

Some are large:

They give us clues to who those people were, but they don’t put faces on them.

Let me think: 1937.

Franklin D. Roosevelt began his second term as President. The first issue of Detective Comics hit the stands (Batman was still a little way down the road). In May the Hindenburg exploded. By July of 1937, Japan and China were at war in events that are now thought to have been the first acts of WWII in Asia. Amelia Earhart disappeared in July. Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and Martha Gellhorn were covering the Spanish Civil War. In December, Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first feature-length animated movie, opened at theaters in the United States.

And down on the farm? The Great Depression was still underway. I wonder if those people on our farm, had the money for tickets to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I wonder, even, how they might have gotten to town to see it. Some folks had cars, certainly. But this little farm could not have given back much. In 1937,  horse power was still common for transportation in rural areas. It was a long way to town, a whole day or more to go and come back.

Maybe they had a radio; and I imagine them gathered around it in the evening, tired from a day of hard work,  listening, perhaps, to Bing Crosby sing The Moon Got in My Eyes.

Bing Crosby in the 1930s

What was the farm wife wearing in 1937? Maybe this, the pattern available for a hard-won 15¢ from Simplicity:

Just because she lived on a farm, it doesn’t mean she didn’t want to look pretty. There was church to go to, and The Grange, and the County Fair in August. Maybe she took her preserves, or her knitting, as exhibits (I still dream of the day I complete a pair of socks with no errors, suitable for entry in the Fair!). Or maybe it was her best rooster.

This photo of Miss Dorrie Livingston with her prize-winner is from the Chicago History Museum. Its Library of Congress Digital ID number is n082119.

You can be sure there was a flock of chickens on the place. It’s hard to imagine a country household in the Depression without chickens muttering around the yard.

Maybe they kept some bees, like I do.

Find this image of a beekeeper in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Or it might be they raised pigs…

Nothing much about raising animals will have changed since 1937:

This photo of a farmer feeding his pigs is in the the Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration collection.

Because of the photo record we have, we forget the 1930s did take place in color.

In fact, it might be that not much has changed at all on a small farm. The weather is still unpredicatable, the return from your efforts is still uncertain, the rains fall, the garden grows, and the sun is hot in summer. Folks at the end of the day sit out in the evening this time of year, and look across the hills at the trees putting out their new set of growing ends. At the pace a tree grows, our little buzzing around from one year to another must seem trivial.

To the hog in the pen, what’s the difference from one decade to another? He’s here today. Maybe not next year. Some seasons are fat, some are slim.

Lib. of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Change? What are you people talking about?