Winter Harvest

We live in Christmas Tree Country. The crop of over 2 million holiday trees shipped from over 300 growers here makes Clackamas County the major contributor to Oregon’s 7 million tree harvest. This is big business. I’ve heard folks say they’re going to plant a bunch of little trees, wait 5 years, and clean up with a fat paycheck. It isn’t quite that easy. If you watch the fields of trees all year, you’ll see crews out there in every month and all weathers, planting trees, minding weeds, looking for infestations, shaping trees, and directing the harvest. Managing the market is no easy matter, either. There is a stand of handsome firs on our place, topping out above 40 feet now, that was originally planted as Christmas trees. When we arrived, they were far too big for livingrooms, and still spaced at the 5 foot intervals usual for a plantation of holiday trees. If not for that close spacing, we wouldn’t have guessed their original purpose. What happened, to cause the abandonment of this acre of firs? Only that Christmas tree culture turned out to be more work than the owners anticipated, and the hiring of crews to do it for them too costly. And, when the trees matured at 5 years of age, the market wasn’t ready for them. By the time the market loosened up again, the trees were too advanced for Boy Scout lots and supermarket garden centers. They make a nice timber lot now that they’re widened to 10-foot strides, but they’d be more advanced as timber had they been managed for that purpose in the beginning.

In any case, the hills around us have been humming with business the last two months. The harvest starts early, because many of these little trees go overseas for sale. Lots of them go East in the United States, too. There is a very good chance that the tree you pay $100 for in New York City came from a farm in Oregon.

Here’s a view of a lot down the road from us where the harvest is partly completed.

You can see the ground where this year’s allotment has been cut. It’s not quite a clear-cut because some trees lag behind, some are fillers put in where a tree failed to thrive. In the background is an acre or so that will be cut next year. The trees are shaped by shearing with razor sharp machetes during the year. It causes them to put out little branches of new growth at the outside of the tree, giving them that bottle-brush look so admired these days. (Personally, I prefer a tree with spaces between the branches so ornaments can hang down, but I am obviously not at the center of the demographic on this). To the right are some trees that have been cut and bundled up with string to make them travel well: no damage to branches sticking out, and they can be packed tight in containers for shipping.

Here’s a closer look at one of the tree baling machines that ties them up.

Click it to make it a little wider.

Here’s a crew at another location, prepping trees for transportation.

There is a helicopter in the background there, though it’s hard to see. All I could get from my roadside stop where I was standing in a ditch to avoid traffic was the rotor sticking out above the pile of trees. When I say the hills are humming with activity, I’m not speaking metaphorically. They are literally a-buzz with the sound of choppers moving trees from muddy lots to waiting trucks. It’s hard physical work these men do, in bad weather and for long hours.

If you have felt it’s a waste to bring that chopped-down tree into the house for a month, or if you’ve shuddered at the cost of it, give a thought now to the labor that went into producing it, and the numbers of families supported by the culture of that Christmas tree. It was a 5-year investment in agriculture in my neighborhood. (Enough now, with the 6th-Grade lesson in regional production.)

Garish Time Almost Gone

There isn’t much left of the colors of fall. A few jewels remain in the woods.

And a few elsewhere on the farm.

We think of it as the plants dying for the winter, but you know it isn’t really that. They have the gift of putting on their flashiest garb just before their quieting time.

They’ll be back in the spring.

Unseasonably Mild

But for a few gloomy days and a couple of lightly frosted mornings, we have had the mildest of autumns so far. This is a La Niña year for which the meteorologists predict dampness and easy temperatures. So far, we’ve had just some rains, and just a touch of seasonal frost, but some truly magnificent fall days. It smells like dying leaves and fallen fruit. It’s my favorite season. When the sun burns off the morning fog, there we are under a cerulean sky bounded by flashes of orange foliage, a combination of colors that would be a horror in fashion but is exquisite in nature. The lady bugs are finding their way inside. They gather by the thousands on the south walls of the house every fall.

Once they have made their way into the cracks in the siding, and probably into the under-roof crawl areas, they will settle into their winter slumber and not be heard from until spring. Along about March, they’ll start dropping onto the breakfast table from their upstairs quarters. How endearing. It was quite a shock to me to learn a couple of things about ladybugs. The first was that, when one lands in your oatmeal and vanishes beneath the surface while you are looking at the morning news, and you find it in your spoon, it will be really unpleasantly bitter. Ptah. The second was that ladybugs bite. I suppose, if she is contemplating being my breakfast she has an excuse for it, but it violated my nursery book image of the ladybug.

I am told the term ladybug is a deplorable Americanization of the more elegant British ladybird. Sorry. All my childhood they were ladybugs. I do know they are beetles (Coleoptera) and not properly bugs (Hemiptera) at all, but they’re not birds, either. And then, dragonflies are not flies, so maybe we shouldn’t be too fussy about the subject. I have no idea what kind of them we have in our attic, and I’m not going to dig too deeply to figure it out, so you go without genus and species names for this one.

Anyway, this was one of those mild November afternoons. We had some rains overnight, but it all cleared off soon enough and the wasps were batting themselves on the windows as they do when the temperatures are up. I think they’re confused by the reflection of sky and themselves on the glass. And the lady beetles were on the house. And a few honeybees ventured out into the sun. We do not see much of them in November. They cluster in their hives keeping things warm by the energetic movement of their wings, and dine on honey. Occasionally they will venture out on fine days, for what we delicately call “cleansing flights.” They won’t find much in the garden to draw them just now. I did spot a stray, late sunflower in the warmth of the south wall. And, obviously pleased to have found this remnant of summer, its attendant honeybee.

Things Don’t Always Go As Planned

Some of you may remember Morgan our Jacob ram, father of the flock.

Morgan came to us handsome with his kissy lips, slightly crimpy fleece, broad horn set, nice leg and face markings, and generous temperament. Most sheep have a fault somewhere, and his was that he was overly dark-fleeced for a Jacob sheep. But I like dark wool, and he threw lambs with a good balance of dark and light in their patterns. He learned to walk on a lead almost the first time we haltered him. He came happily to the fence to be led by hand to graze on the lawn. I don’t think Morgan ever challenged me, though I do try not to give a ram the chance to make me prove I am the bigger sheep.

You will have noticed I am writing a kind of eulogy here. Maybe I will let a guest writer in at this point, and quote Richard’s recent letter to his friends.

“Richard is feeling a little guilty. We had a terrific windstorm about a week ago. Fall leaves whipped everywhere, including, we think, a place that wasn’t good. Cherry leaves are toxic to sheep in the fall. We think Morgan, our flock ram, ate some and got sick. [ed. note: there is no reason for Richard to feel guilty about this. He could not have stopped the wind. ]

Susan had led him down to the ewes for his annual romp, but he showed no interest in them whatever. Over the next several hours, he lost control of his legs and sat down. [ed. note: this was at a time when he normally would have been showing his most charming self. Morgan was always a gentleman with his ewes. He courted them graciously before asking permission to give them his seed. On this day, I saw him lying in front of the shed in the breeding paddock, and my heart hit the bottoms of my boots. Something was very much not right. He was gnashing his teeth (since sheep have only lower teeth, maybe it would be more appropriate to say he was gnashing his jaws), a sign that an animal is in pain, and breathing a little roughly. When I tried to look in his eyes, he just rolled his big old head off to the side. Foam dribbled out the side of his mouth. This was very acute and very disabling.]

We fed him activated charcoal and Pepto Bismol [ed. note: not really Pepto Bismol at this stage, but kaolin and charcoal in suspension. I borrowed this from a more prepared friend. Later, we did give him drugstore Pepto as a follow-up.], consulted with the vet who would have done the same thing except he might have pumped the stuff into Morgan, even though Morgan cheerfully took these offerings by mouth. We fed him warm water laced with molasses, fed him hay and, for him, the rare treat of the ewes’ ration. Later we gave him B-complex shots because the Vet called back to suggest that he might have developed a condition akin to polio as a result of a reaction to the toxic cherry leaves. [ed. note: Polioencephalomalacia is not the same condition as human poliomyelitis. I’m not sure he had polioencephalomalacia anyway, because he should have had trouble seeing, too, if that was it. But it was hard to tell, since he wasn’t even rising. We were at a loss how to treat him, and the B-complex injections were certainly not going to harm him. If it was polio, it probably wasn’t cherry leaves, but some other toxin. There are plenty of those in plants in the fall. The notion that animals know what is good for them to eat, and what not, is clearly false. Put a plant in front of a sheep, and he will most likely eat it.]

We considered putting him down almost from the first day but postponed it because, in spite of his condition, he seemed cheerful, eager to see us, and always enthusiastic about hay and grain. Over the week, though, he began to develop sores on his legs which were folded under him. Yesterday, reasoning that he might now be suffering from that tingly, “my foot’s asleep” condition that plagues all of us who lie awkwardly on them, we contrived a sling that supported his trunk but let his legs hang down to touch the ground. Indeed, he showed signs late last night, of lunging forward to get at his hay. He drank water, even though it was an indignity to be slung up by ropes to the rafters. [ed. note: But he was so good about it all! He broke my heart, watching him be sick and cheerful, honestly cheerful, to see us.]

This morning, Susan found him deceased. It took a decision we didn’t really want to make out of our hands, but it’s still sad – he was a gentleman, as Rams go. It also leaves us without the seed we need at this time of year. Breeders no longer loan livestock for fear of disease. Under the circumstances, I don’t think we’d try, even if we could find a willing shepherd.

So our choice is to go lambless next year or to use one of the less than perfect culls that we’ve accumulated. I’ll let Susan make that decision – the sheep are really her project.”

Well, so, we are indeed without our breeding ram at exactly the moment in the year I planned to write a panegyrical piece about the wonders of the fall urge to mate and reproduce.

You normally choose your flock ram with a considered eye. You want to use him for a number of seasons, and he is going to be the father of all your lambs. While you can reasonably accept quite a lot of compromise in your ewe flock, you do want to bring them a ram with some high-end qualities. I’m not going shopping for a ram at this point along the calendar. I’m not happy, either, about using a ram that we found to be not good enough to sell to someone else as a breeder. But it’s fortunate we don’t castrate our male lambs. It’s a trauma I’d just as soon not bring to the flock if I don’t have to, and we don’t have so many sheep we have to create wethers in order to house them. For you city folk, a wether is a castrato in the sheep world.

So I cast my eye over the boys out there, and decide that Ninja Throwing Star might get a chance.

He’s kind of little, but he has his father’s smile.

 

Hunting the Wild Bivalves

I’m a little behind on my posting schedule. I abandoned the farm last weekend and answered the siren call of “Clamming Weekend!” at the coast. On Friday evening after work, my friend Barbara and I piled our stuff in my car and drove off to the Long Beach Peninsula of Washington State. We arrived at something like 10:30 in the evening, and barged into our other friend Linda’s warm log home, expecting chocolate (provided) and beds (also at hand). “If you want to,” said Linda, “it’s a good oyster tide tomorrow morning, too.” At that hour, post-chocolate and pre-pillows, I wasn’t sure oystering was the first thing I was going to want to do in the morning. But one rises to the moment. I woke fresh and in time for the a.m. tide on the bay. A cup of coffee, a brownie for the road, and another girlfriend, Gretchen and I headed out to the flats with a pair of empty buckets. It’s hard to dismiss the urge to forage.

Here is a look at what comes back from the bay. We remembered that a 5-gallon bucket full of oysters in the shell is like a 5-gallon bucket of rocks, and forced ourselves to stop at something like half to two-thirds full. I have learned from experience how far it is from the bay to the house: about 3 times the distance from the house to the bay with empty buckets. You’ll notice the heavy gloves. The oyster shells are rough and sharp, intended, I suppose, to keep predators out. They are covered with bay bottom, barnacles, little worms and assorted algae when you pick them up, and are often clumped together in a rough nosegay of three or five oysters firmly welded to one another. The task is to hose them off and force them apart into singles, then mete them out among the number of oyster eaters on hand.

That done, we peeled off our hunting clothes and went inside for breakfast. Very nice it was, with a pan of oven-made French toast with cranberries, sausages, orange juice, and good coffee. Then Barbara and I drove into town to buy our clamming licenses, so to be ready for the evening tide and its promise of wild bivalves.

All this travel, hunting and feeding was exhausting. Here is Barbara in the afternoon, productive even in the glow of relaxation: And here she is a few minutes later:

That’s Buddy taking up most of the space on her chair. One of the great pleasures of a weekend away is, you do the thing you can never make time for at home: you simply nap.

And you enjoy the wildlife:

I think this may be a Townsend’s chipmunk (Tamias townsendi), but since I’m told I’d have to look at its genital bones to be sure, I’ll settle for imprecision.

And this is Tamiasciurus douglasii, the chickaree or Douglas squirrel.

Wildlife is almost a euphemism in this case, as the woods creatures who come to the deck are so accustomed to room service they become quite quarrelsome when the supply runs low.

At last the evening tidetime arrived, and the bunch of us piled into a car and drove to the western shore of the Peninsula, where the ocean comes onto the sand. Linda’s husband Harry, who was banned from the house for the weekend (and would probably have accumulated toxic levels of estrogen exposure if he had stayed) was kind enough to come get us for the drive to the shore where we joined the numberless horde seeking a limit of razor clams.

It may look like the clams don’t stand a chance. But remember that they are down in the sand, and we are on top. Also, the State of Washington is efficiently vigilant about the harvest of razor clams. Clam weekends are few in the year, the number of licenses is jealously controlled, enforcement officers are on duty on the beaches, and the bag limit is 15 clams.

Here is the technique for capture:

That’s Gretchen in the foreground, Harry (profile reversed) and Linda in the back. And here is the prize:

And here is what you do with them when you get back to the kitchen! That was the makings of Sunday’s breakfast.

So, well-fed, well-rested, and with our predatory instincts satisfied, we all gathered for a last photo of ourselves before heading home on a splendid Sunday afternoon in autumn. One last shot. The chocolate held out for lunch provisions.

Back row: Barbara, me, Linda, Rose. Middle: Gretchen. Front: Buddy.