Wild Life

Now that the bunnies are pretty effectively excluded from the kitchen gardens, and their numbers greatly reduced from a year ago, they are cute again. The collapse of the rabbit population last fall through winter coincided with the residence of a gang of coyotes. Late in the winter only a few large rabbits remained in evidence on the whole 40 acres, and the coyotes were heard and their tracks seen less and less. A month after the dogs left we began to see little rabbits and now there are some third-generation individuals.

Just this morning, though, I found scat on the lane from something large that was full of fur... It was also full of coarse grass and looked like an attempt to purge. To hear tell, old rabbits mostly die from parasites.

But when they gather four or five at a time in the lane on the dam and take dust baths (fleas?), or graze on grass seed at the verge of the lawn and waterfront, or chase each other around one or another of the large trees, they're pretty cute.

Good old Squeaky Tree, one of the bull bur oaks. The undergrowth in the woods, the unmanaged everywheres on the farm, are overgrown, rank and impenetrable. Most of the game trails that autumn's die down revealed are lost again. Even keeping to the extreme center of the groomed trails is no guarantee against finding a tick later.

It's a bass! Caught and photographed and released by Donna.

It's a rare day this spring and so far into summer that clouds of gnats are not a serious nuisance. A stiff breeze helps keep them from lighting, and Absorbine, Jr., but it's often so bad that they still get into the eyes and ears and nose and mouth and hair. Our expectation — ok, hope, really — is that drier weather less favorable to the gnats will predominate as summer progresses and we have more favorable outdoor work and recreation conditions.

First Planting of the Cider Apples

On April 27, our team of twelve planted the first 150 trees in our first cider apple orchard in the northwest field above the farmstead. Procured from a seller in New York, there are 10 individuals of 15 varieties, each dominantly expressing one of the three major components of Wessex style cider: acid, bitter, and sweet. In the Wessex style, ciders are made from each variety of apple and three or more of these blended to produce the commercial product. The varieties were selected not only for flavor but for flowering and harvest season, roughly a third each of early, middle, and late. This should help ensure against crop loss due to vagaries of weather, reduce labor requirements in a given period, and facilitate the production of "seasonal" ciders.

This was a remarkable day. The team quickly bonded, and self-organized into groups responsible for digging the holes, distributing supplies, placing the trees and replacing the soil, watering, and installing the stakes and protective geotextile mulch and translucent tree guards. The work groups cross-trained one another, and traded tasks to prevent burnout. We'd estimated the whole job would take ten to twelve hours but together we got it done in less than five. Yay team!

Here's a little video that Debbie made of Derith & Dave digging a hole with the big tractor and PTO-driven auger.

All of the photos that follow were made by Derith Vogt at D&G Photography in Anamosa, Iowa.

Here are some of the big tractor's hydraulic and mechanical controls. Grr.

Here's the whole operation in one shot. We began at the top of the hill and worked our way down. In the bed of the truck were water barrels we filled from the pond with a sump pump. The little tractor pulled the utility trailer loaded with the bare-root trees and supplies.

Debbie prepares to water just-planted trees.

Derith & Gary strike an American Gothic pose.

After the trees were planted, difficult as it was to do, we pruned away all the side branches, and cut back the central leader to a height of three feet. Eventually the trees, which are on dwarfing rootstock, will be trained to trellises and kept to a maximum height of eight feet. Here, Jeff assists Alan while Mary looks on.

Gary does the initial half-fill of soil. Water was applied next to consolidate the soil and ensure good contact with the roots, then the rest of the soil, and more water.

Scot and Donna complete a planting.

Your faithful, if erratic, correspondent, ready to set a stake and secure the sleeve with zip ties. The fabric mulch is primarily to keep the base of the tree free of other vegetation that would compete for water, sunlight, and soil nutrients.

Team portrait at the end of the job.

From these trees we should be able to clone as many others as we like, by cultivating shoots from the rootstock, harvesting scion wood from the top growth, and grafting the two together. It's a long-term project.

In the Merry Wet Month of May

In high contrast to last year's drought and heat wave, which was well underway in May, this spring has been long, cool, and wet. Perhaps at least partially due to the different weather, we notice many other differences in how the plant and animal populations are expressed. The later onset of warmer temperatures meant that I saw lots of flowering plants and trees that last year I missed by not arriving here on the farm until mid-April.

Whether through the action of squirrels or the whimsy of previous residents, there are patches of tame flowers in unexpected places away from the farmstead, for instance the bearded iris near Eye Chair, the day lilies along the dam and in the road ditch, and these daffodils on the far side of the pond.

This crabapple was festooned with blossoms, though a bit past its prime and beginning to leaf out by the time I made this photograph.

I'm not a skilled botanical taxonomist and so can only say that these looked up close like tiny bleeding heart flowers.

Here are some trillium amidst the dandelions in a sunny spot in the woods.

And – oh dear, that telephone camera doesn't work very well – a wild variety of violet.

The machine shed is flanked on each side by large forsythia bushes, brilliantly golden for about a week. This poor plant grew rapidly afterward, became top-heavy, and suffered a lot of damage in one of the fierce thunderstorms we've had in the past two months. We'll cut it back, and thin it out, and it should be all right again in a year or two. To the right is one of the red raspberry trellises, and in the background you can see the cider apple orchard.

More flowering trees.

At several locations throughout the woods appeared colonies of May apples like these. Once Frank B. identified them for me, I began to see them everywhere. At this time one could still walk easily through the woods but the undergrowth has become rank and impenetrable. Any excursion off the paths is now a steamy, sweaty, scratchy affair with a guarantee of discovering wood ticks afterward.

Lyme disease, carried by deer ticks and other kinds of ticks, is not a great concern in this area, unlike, say, many parts of Wisconsin. Deer ticks are tiny, pinhead-sized creatures, and I've yet to find anything to identify as such, but the wood ticks are very evident, visually and by their movements on one's skin. Squeamishness is pointless, but one does become hypersensitive to, for instance, the feel of arm hairs on sleeves: Was that something moving? The ticks don't settle down for about a day so we almost always find them before they've bitten, and then it's important to not let them escape or they'll climb the furniture and jump on you again!

The second and third week of May are when morel mushrooms tend to emerge, and I had luck enough to find a nice patch of these delicious fungi. Sautéed and in a cream sauce, served over small grilled steaks – oh, so good. Those we didn't eat fresh went into the dehydrator. Some people around here go crazy for morels and we saw classified ads from restauranteurs and others offering up to $60 a pound.

Diligent readers may recall that last fall we recovered a large corrugated metal pipe (CMP) culvert from the creek. It had evidently been placed as a creek crossing but being considerably undersized had washed out. We dragged it with the tractor to the other side of the farm where a tributary flows from The Narrows at the lane and the terraces in the observatory field above.

Re-establishing a crossing here is part of the larger plan to have tractor access to the entire farm without having to use the county road. We found some 6-inch diameter flexible plastic drain pipe just downstream, washed out like the CMP, and again obviously grossly undersized for the application. Good rule of thumb: the pipe area should be about the same as the stream cross-section!

This little stream is ephemeral, that is, it doesn't flow all the time. During a relatively dry spell, Alan used a spade to square and level the channel, then placed a load of gravel as bedding. He set two stout poles at an angle in the channel, then rolled the CMP over the edge where it rested against the poles. He then eased the poles out, lowering the culvert into place.

Next, more gravel to fill the gaps on either side, and the excavated soil on top. Et voilà.

It's barely wide enough for the tractor but didn't have to be. It's smoothed out since this photo was made and now looks a pretty darn professional installation.

The hillside that descends from the lane to the culvert crosses a line of seeps and we had to build a bit of roadway before we could complete the project.

Alan's first attempt to work in the project area was timed a little prematurely, before we realized we needed the roadway, and the tractor just slipped in the mud as he tried to ascend. Donna pulled him out with the pickup. Motive force!

Well, my goodness – I should have separated this post into chapters. Thank you for your forbearance, dear readers. Also in May, we spent an interesting Saturday morning in historic Kalona, about an hour away, at the annual exotic animal sale, alternating between the small and large animal auctions. Based on so-far-limited research at the auction cafes where we've eaten, it appears that the Methodist women make tastier pies than the Amish women (I know this will be controversial – please keep your comments civil).

And then, finally, the weather was warm enough and the ground dry enough to get into the gardens. This next photo shows the soil manufactory, which is to say the compost pile. We collected plenty of raw material over the past year but I was not diligent in the layering and turning operations. A lot of the material broke down pretty well and when screened produced a beautiful topsoil-like compost, just the kind of high organic content stuff we need to improve the tilth and fertility of the garden soil. But it hadn't been cooked (by microbial action) to a high enough temperature to kill the seeds it contained.

Everything I planted using this compost as bedding for seed came up with lots of cucurbits (melon, squash, etc.) and tomatoes, and I've been paying the price since, weeding on my hands and knees. Not to mention the purslane, as overwhelming as last year. More on the gardens in future posts...

Oh yes, the cider apples. Next post.

And the gnats. Ye gods, the gnats.

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.

After the Storm, Our Attention Pivots

The storm has passed but floodwaters gather, the ditches and gullies into receiving creeks and rivers, and on to the Mississippi, which will continue to rise in the Iowa-Illinois-Missouri region for the next week. At home, runoff into the pond turned the relatively clear water brown with silt and clay. The water surface continued to rise and we awoke yesterday morning to find the Bass Tender, despite being half-filled with rainwater, had opportunistically tried to escape (a yearning for independence, one suspects, and new horizons).

As an engineer who has designed and built earthen dams, I have a pretty good understanding of the forces at work, so I've been fascinated by the rising level of the pond, its implications for the area of land draining into it and how that area generates runoff, and the testing of structures: the dam embankment itself, the principal spillway, and the emergency spillway. Is everything stable and balanced? Will the pipe connections hold? Did we survey the spillway elevations correctly? Are we creating any downstream hazard?

Naturally, as the rains eased, the pond is filling more slowly as the rate of runoff slows, but also because the banks spread out, so that every next cubic foot of water entering the pond has less effect on raising the level.

And this is how it looks this morning – I think we can call it full. The emergency spillway is an earthen weir six inches higher than the pipe lip, and the top of the dam embankment is another two feet higher.

So, now: next Thursday the first cider apple trees are scheduled to arrive, our work team will assemble on Friday, and we'll plant those trees on Saturday. Ideally, we'll have quite dry weather between now and then so the planting tasks won't be so sloppy and muddy. Digging around in too-wet conditions destroys soil structure and this can take many years to recover. Once we have our own nursery established, timing won't be so crucial, but when the trees are being shipped from upstate New York, we've got to get them in the ground shortly after arrival.

We've accumulated some new kit recently. This is a PTO-driven generator, sufficient to power the farmstead in the case of outages. Overhead lines plus the history of ice storms in the area (not a good combination) drove the motivation for getting a generator, but also the need to operate power tools remotely.

This is a 3-point hitch-connected, hydraulically-driven post driver. The cider apples (on dwarfing rootstock) will be trellised, and the orchard protected from deer by electric fence. This implies a lot of post driving. We'll have to convert it from a Category 2 hitch (for tractors larger than ours) to a Category 1, and modify the tractor's hydraulic system to supply power to the driver.

And we're feeling quite official as a farm with the cleanup, painting, and installation of this diesel fuel tank. Because fuel taxes primarily fund road construction and maintenance, on-farm use of fuel is exempt from the taxes, so we can get a good discount by purchasing in volume for farm delivery, rather than fetching five gallons at a time from a gas station in town.

Behind the tank is one of our collections of stuff we've found around the place, much of this uncovered while tilling the east garden. Some of it will always be junk, but other bits we expect will find a use in art projects. The Fred Smith Memorial Sculpture Garden awaits its first installations and, by the way, we're accepting applications for exhibition of others' work, and even for artists-in-residence.

Fingers Crossed

A day after installing the new principal spillway for the dam that creates the pond, rains fell and there was nothing to do but wait for the water to rise and see if the repairs held. In this image you can see the old shoreline, just about dividing the beach into halves.

Here is the contraption: a five-inch diameter PVC pipe inserted about eight feet into the old CMP, with an elbow and a riser. The top of the riser is cut at a 45-degree angle for vortex prevention. If, when the spillway is in operation, a vortex or whirlpool forms on the water surface, the pipe flow will be decreased by the volume of air sucked down. We're all about efficiency around here – at least the two-thirds of us that are engineers.

The cage is intended to protect the spillway against impacts from floating debris and ice damage. We salvaged the chunk of hog panel from elsewhere on the property and fastened it to the small-diameter pipes, which in turn rest on steel posts driven into the pond bottom. The riser tips backward a bit because the CMP runs through the embankment at a slant and we used a 90-degree elbow joint.

As we inserted the long end of the PVC pipe into the CMP, we applied an expansive adhesive/sealant, the final bead of which you can see in the next image as the black-grey donut at the joint.

Early results were promising. Water rose up to the joint then over it and, putting my ear to the riser opening, I could hear nothing to indicate leakage. Water began to creep into the Isthmus, which had been dry since early last summer.

With some good help by Frank and Debbie, we took the next step in dam maintenance, moving the trees and brush we had felled on the downstream embankment into a pile and burning what we could not harvest as poles and logs. This image is looking north; the trees remaining on the slope are in the vicinity of the spillway outlet, so we're taking more care in felling the big ones, particularly so the valve stem of the drain won't be damaged.

We still have a fair amount to do, but considering the entire slope used to be covered with woody vegetation, as shown here looking the other direction, we made a good beginning.

Through the tangle of cut brush – the smaller stuff – is the drain valve stem adjacent to the principal spillway outlet. There's no shortage of work to do here!