One Man Watering Rig

It hasn't rained for weeks and weeks, and the Government (c) says that we're back into drought. Lack of water can stress the new trees, so we've been in the orchard every week giving them drinks of water we pump out of the pond.

At first, we placed 50 gallon plastic barrels in the bed of the pickup and dragged garden hoses from tree to tree. However, the small hose diameter under gravity and little head made this method slow going. Next, we found a used 250 gallon plastic tote which we placed in the red wagon and used a flexible 2" pump discharge hose to direct the flow. While this allowed us to carry and deposit more water, it was still clumsy and required two people to operate.

The third iteration mounts the 250 gallon tote to a fork lift attachment on the three point hitch. Using a stiff 2" pump intake hose, a short piece of PVC pipe, a segment of aluminum pipe salvaged from an old patio umbrella, a pulley, some rope, a little bit of string, and some miscellaneous hardware, we developed a one man rig. If you load it with too much water, the front tires lift off of the ground, but that's nothing a bucket full of aggregate can't resolve. The result, though, is that we've cut the number of manhours associated with this task by 50%, leaving us with more time to perform some other chore.

Accelerando Verdure

Now things are happening quickly. The forsythia is blossoming. I spent some time yesterday plucking dandelions, and today digging thistles. The grass seems to be growing before one's eyes and some places we'll have to mow in the next few days or the growth will become rank. Over the weekend we removed the mowing deck from the little tractor, got everything clean and sharp and greased, and put back together again. This is a finish mower for around the house and gardens; for the more remote areas we have the rotary brush mower to mount on the back of the big tractor. But we're resolved this year to mow less than last: the novelty has worn off, it uses a lot of fuel, and we've got lots of other work to do.

The kale is making a big comeback and will be featured at dinner tonight in a potato-kale soup.

Another good task accomplished over the weekend was laying out the grid to plant the 150 cider apple trees to be delivered in a few day. The flags are all labeled with the names of the fifteen varieties we'll be planting, and laid out according to early, middle, and late harvest season. Saturday is the big day.

We also made further good progress clearing and burning brush from the downstream dam embankment, though after nine inches (!) of rain over the past week, it took a lot of persistence to get the fire going. Yet to do is the area in the foreground of this image, surrounding the outlet structures, then seeding the embankment to a "waterway mix" of grasses.

Aside from the dam, over the past several months we did a lot of other clearing and trimming of brush and invasive species such as honeysuckle and wild grape, and yesterday got a lot of that gathered into this large windrow behind the barn. We'd prefer to process this stuff with a chipper-shredder but so far haven't found one for sale used or at auction, and they can't be rented, so this pile may fuel another bonfire. All of this came from along the lane and verges of the farmstead, where to leave it in place would have been unsightly (we're possibly a little too fastidious about appearances); the brush that gets cut in the wood and along the fence lines we've left in place to decompose and as wildlife habitat.

In addition to the cider apples, we're putting a lot of other trees in the ground, including black and Northstar cherries, black walnut, and red and burr oaks. And now Alan is home from his day job, so it's time to pull on my boots again and head back outside to get these hardwoods planted.

Fire Good

By small increments we prepare to put 150 cider apple trees in the northwest field at the end of April. Early on a calm Sunday morning three weeks ago we burned the large brush pile in the corner. This is what remained when I pulled all the metal and glass and every other damn thing from the burn-and-bury dump that had been there. And we'd added a lot of invasive mulberry and other matter that we'd cleared and trimmed elsewhere.

Cattle foraging on soybean stubble:

To the west and north of our northwest corner:

A diesel-soaked rag as a torch:

A few creatures, pheasant and rabbit and vole, abandoned homes in the brush pile, most before the fire but a couple rabbit not until the flames licked close.

These intriguing tracks, we finally concluded, represent the last steps of pheasant before their wingtips scrape the ground and they fly into the air:

It all went pretty quickly:

And that was that. But we've got a bunch of other brush piles...

Firewood and the Three-Point Hitch

Tractors were first called traction engines because traction, and draft, are the essential requirements for applying motive force to row crop operations. It's not a trivial problem, which continues to be studied in agricultural engineering departments at universities around the world. A great advance came with pioneering work in the 1920s by Harry Ferguson that led to his invention of the three-point hitch still used today. Prior to this, implements such as plows and cultivators simply trailed behind the tractor, like a camper behind a car, with no fixed positioning of the two components except at the single flexible point of connection. The three-point hitch makes the implement an extension of the tractor itself, allowing fine adjustment of working heights and angles, and directly applying the tractor's power to the soil operation. Three-point hitch implements don't have travel wheels; the hitch lifts them off the ground to be carried by the tractor.

If there's a disadvantage to the three-point hitch, it's the relative difficulty of on-off and swapping one implement for another. We had able-bodied guests a few weeks ago and took advantage to collect and cut firewood, but first things first. We'd left the blade on the big tractor in anticipation of snow removal, but we needed the wagon to haul wood. Here I'm lowering the blade to be supported by a couple concrete blocks.

The lower links are pulled wide and secured in that position, the top link removed, and the tractor can now drive away.

Next we install a drawbar attachment between the lower links, attach the wagon tongue with a hitch pin, and we're ready to pull a trailer.

While Alan took Frank down the creek to set more concrete chunks in the ford at the site of the ruined bridge, Debbie and I went to the top of the terraced observatory field where large branches had fallen from a snag, and got to work with the chainsaw.

We filled the wagon, pulled it to the house and stacked the contents, and returned for a second load.

If conditions were right, we intended to make a bonfire of the brush pile at the top of the orchard field, and there we left the second load of firewood. As it turned out, the evening was too breezy to torch the brush pile, and a few days later I added these logs to the stacks at the house.

Things look very different now. Next: blizzard!

Equinox, Harvest, and Well-Fed Coyotes

On Saturday, September 22 at about 9 o'clock in the morning local time, Old Sol crossed the celestial equator, marking the autumnal equinox ("equal night"), although not until Tuesday the 25th were day and night closest to equal length at our northerly latitude. Nevertheless, it being a matter only of minutes in difference, I chose the 22nd to set sunrise and sunset stakes on the perimeter of the observatory in the big terraced field. The stakes will be replaced by something when we eventually build our version of Stonehenge.

In this predawn image you can see the guywire-supported gnomon ("indicator", "that which discerns") in the center of the field that we use to line up the stakes with the rising and setting sun on significant dates.

Here it comes.

I set the stake and quickly walked down to the road, which runs east-west. At the equinox, the sun rises  precisely in the east and sets precisely in the west.

I am a gnomon.

In the evening I was back out with my sunset stake. The fall colors are coming on in the avenue of ornamental maples and Grandmother Cottonwood.

And there it goes. The observatory gnomon is barely discernable in this image.

As the earth rolled up in front of the solar disk, the clouds were illuminated from beneath.

When the drought broke in August, the garden responded with a burst of productivity in a race against time as the first frosts approached. Saturday and Sunday night there were spots of frost that knocked down the peppers, the tomatoes, and the sweet potatoes so the following days I hurried to harvest them.

Here are the last of the peppers.

Last night I made a first batch of pickled jalapenos – five-eighths of a peck of pickled peppers.

Sweet potatoes have to be cured for long-term storage, a week to ten days at about 85 degrees and 85 percent humidity. I'm doing this in the oven with a pan of water below and the oven light as the heat source.

In the garage I'm drying mustard and sunflowers for the seed.

I took my early morning walk today around the farm perimeter, hoping to observe a coyote, and I was not disappointed but still pleasantly surprised. Across the north fence where Kincaid Creek passes onto our place were three of these handsome creatures, about 50 yards distant. They noticed me but did not startle and I watched for about ten minutes until they trotted off into the woods. A most excellent beginning to the day.

Sun Dog at Dawn

Yesterday morning dawned with a sun dog near the horizon, and the early flights out of Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis, and Minneapolis leaving their condensation trails overhead.

Looking to the east at the sun dog:

A little later to the west:

And to the north:

On Monday afternoon, friend Tim repaired the mowing deck parts that connect to the little tractor, and beefed-up these welds with quite a bit more metal than was there previously. I used a bench grinding wheel, drill-powered cone grinder, and rattail hand file for about an hour and a half to shape these welds sufficiently for the connector to fit its receiver points, and then we were back in the mowing business. Everything is looking mighty nice now, and very green.

We've got some steep slopes that when I first attempted to cross them, in April when I arrived at the farm, produced terror. I felt certain the tractors, especially the big one upon which I felt I was sitting so high above the ground, were about to tip over. Now it feels quite routine, though I sometimes have to lean far to the side to maintain my balance and stay in the seat. They are amazingly powerful and versatile machines and a pleasure to operate.

A cold front moved through this morning in the predawn hours and I was out in the west garden nearly as soon as it was light to knock down more of the purslane with the tiller before things got wet. Now the rain falls in gentle showers and it's become an indoor day of study, correspondence, writing, and rest.

Catching Up

The drought broke here, after a fashion, on August 4 when during a large outdoor party in the afternoon we got a terrific thunderstorm and blow that dropped 1.5" of rain. Two hours later, though, one would never have known it had rained – there was no runoff nor even puddles. Since then we've had a couple storms that left about 0.7" each, and a couple at 0.1". None of this has restored the deficit and there's been no runoff so the pond continues to dry up and in the surrounding countryside the corn continues to die. Still, the grass has greened-up and everything looks a lot better. Temperatures moderated over the past couple weeks, 80s and 90s, and this makes for easier working outdoors.

In Seattleland, I always had the impression of the sky, and weather, being quite close to the ground. The skies here in Iowa are big, expansive, and layered into the stratosphere. On several recent days the cloud cover has primarily been composed of condensation trails from aircraft crisscrossing this piece of flyover country.

Today I met the farmer on the other side of this fence. He'd was looking for a four-year-old, 2500 pound bull that had gone missing, and I had to tell him I'd not seen it. It's a bit of a mystery because his pastures are well-fenced, but he told me that, without the addition of electric wire, a bull of that size can jump five strands of barbed wire. I rather hope I don't find the big thing.

The previous owners installed chain-link fencing around the house, presumably to contain their small children, and one of the first things Alan & Donna did when they arrived was to take down the mesh, but the posts were set in concrete – not just the corners but every one! – and proved quite difficult to remove. Alan and I gave it another go last weekend, using a technique derived from a 1909 book, Handy Farm Devices and How to Make Them. We had a tractor instead of a team of horses, but the principles were the same. Our first attempts failed, but after digging away the turf that had covered the top of the concrete bases, creating little moats, and soaking these for a while – success!

Now the collection of posts is stacked in our stockpiles area, awaiting repurposing. Perhaps we'll cut off the pipes above the concrete and make giant wind chimes in the woods.

On a recent evening the clouds boiled up then, as has usually been the case, parted and went around without producing rain. But such magnificent tableaux! As my hero Jack Vance might put it, allegories of battles between good and evil...

The rain caused a lot of the tomato crop to split on the vine, and these fruits require a lot of culling and trimming before we can use them, but the dehydration project continues and the next step will be to pack them in oil and herbs. There are still a lot more on the vines, and sauce to be made and preserved.

Donna harvested Concords from one of the grapevines and made jelly. A rip-roaring success for her first attempt at this – excellent color, consistency, and flavor.