Planting in the Rain

So its 27 April, we have had rain almost every day for a week or so and we had a hard frost two nights ago...its been a very cool and wet spring but its hard to complain after the hot dry mess of last year. Still....a little sun and some dry would be nice!!

But before we get to the planting, since this is a blog about our journey in trying to live a simple country life I thought I would talk about a couple things that have come up as questions from folks I correspond with. One recurring question that pops up is whether we ever feel isolated or get lonely and I can emphatically say no. We live in the country outside of a small community of 109 and have to travel half an hour just to get to a small basic grocery store but because of the small community and our isolation everyone knows you...good or bad. We fit in well, we get involved in our community, we have lots of friends and to be honest I felt more isolated living in the city.

The people in these small rural communities have learned to create their own entertainment and social structure and besides church there are various groups that mostly exist to get people together to do things, folks around here go "visiting", and there are always potlucks and the like to support this or that charity, the senior center etc. We also happen to enjoy home time and our own company so we don't feel the need to be entertained. We like to listen to NPR and various old time country stations, we get a few channels on TV with the rabbit ears including the Ozarks Public Television (looking forward to the new season of the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock Holmes and Doc Martin soon), and every Sunday our bachelor neighbor Roger comes to dinner and we usually play yard darts if its nice out or a dice game called 10,000 if its cold and rainy and then we watch a movie on DVD. Everything is over by about 2100 because Roger has to get up for work at 0330 and we rise early as well. One tip, there are sometimes elected leaders (we live in an unincorporated community so no elected leaders) but in almost every small rural community in fly over country there are the real leaders and it pays to recognize those people right away even if they are not elected. They may be local long time residents with a family historical connection, they may be business owners with influence, they may be religious leaders, or they may just be dynamic people who have risen to positions (unofficial) where their opinion is respected....these are the people who make these small communities so run a foul of them at your peril.

I personally would rather read than watch TV and we have hundreds (literally) of books at the house and keep gaining more because of the great used book store in a nearby town. There is a book mobile that comes to town once in awhile but lots of folks trade books around here and of course the magical Interwebs has greatly opened the literary world to more and more people but please understand something - WE DO NOT HAVE HIGH SPEED INTERNET AND ITS NOT UNIVERSAL IN THIS COUNTRY OUT HERE IN THE EXTREME RURAL AREAS- glad to dispel that misunderstanding. I just finished Farley Mowat's "And the Birds Never Sang" which was about his service in the Canadian Army during WWII and it was quite a departure from his usual humor but I enjoy everything from British crime novels to historical biographies and arctic exploration...in fact the only genres I don't read are science fiction or romance novels.

Hopefully that gives a bit of a picture of our social life on the farm, we like our peace and privacy but we are far from isolated and we enjoy a rich interaction with the community which is important to us. On to the joy of spring planting:

If you have never had the privilege (and I do mean privilege) of experiencing the feeling of turning dirt in the spring after a long winter you have missed out on one of life's simple pleasures. Its hard to describe but the smell of the earth and the feeling that your embarking on all that spring promises may just be the real 6th sense....it almost seems genetic.

We have spent the last three years carefully amending our soil and trying to create a viable truck garden out of not much more than rock and grit...it seems to be working.

Those who knew us in a prior life are often shocked by the path we have chosen ...but the signs were there all the time and we feel like this was our destiny.

"How do you know how or what to do on your farm?"...we get asked..."You Tube and lots of reading" we reply! Seriously, prior to buying this place we had a cat and grew some things on 1/5th of an acre so its not like we were raised on a farm or bred to this life. But we had a dream and a desire to go back in time if you will to when the world seemed to be just a little kinder and simpler. We are also baby boomers who came of age during the back to the land movement of the early 70s and I remember pouring over Mother Earth News issues in my teens.....in secret because it wasn't cool....kind of like looking at dirty magazines except it really was about dirt!!!

Look at those rear tires...if you have been following the blog your remember when we bought those and changed them out last year and I can tell you they have performed great. They are Rural Kings and made in India and to my friends in India "Dosti, Namaste, Vanakkam". This particular tractor tooling (IH 424) was mostly taken over and purchased under license by Mahindra and even though my tractor was built in 1966 you can still buy new parts for it...how cool is that.

A man around here (not slighting the women folk...its just how it is) is measured by the straight rows he plows...I am serious...its a stress inducer!

That is a happy old guy right there. This tractor has no power steering, it belches, it pops, it sounds old, I need to replace the tie rods and steering couplers....but its like the old base ball glove I have had since I played little league...it just fits.

Once we plow, disk, till etc we groom the planting rows and in the front of this picture we have placed the temp cattle panels to support the sweat peas we have planted.

The lower pond is doing better but I wonder if it would make more sense to fill it in ( or half of it) and extend our truck garden. Another thing we have learned is that what used to seem like a huge project or just not doable ...now is just a day or two away from reality.

I had to include this. I found some shade hybrid poplars for sale in the back of the Missouri Rural magazine which is a publication of the electrical cooperatives in the state and I ordered 11 for 14 bucks. Two months later we got 11 sticks...we planted them and they have really taken off..SO BOOOYA to all who doubted!!!

Our salad garden experiment in the gutters has started to ............work out well.

My French Canadian partner Holly (Je t'aime ma jolie femme) and Bandit at our upper pond...keep in mind its 27 April and still cold and rainy.

We have several of these nests in the trees of our wood lot and we aren't really sure what they are. They seem a little spindly for squirrel nests but????

One of the rights of spring is the constant battle with bag worms and we patrol our small farm with a vengeance and Neem Oil. If you don't keep on these pests they will strip a tree or bush of all leaves and leave you with dead twigs.

Ahhh the green...green is good. The orange stick is a cattle stick that is used to keep the cattle in line while feeding. We do not beat our cattle or hit them, the stick is used to place in their vision so they move where we want them but we do not hit them with it.  

 We are not grazing this pasture and this hasn't seen fertilizer in several years but its doing well. We will probably just fertilize and then hay this for the rest of the year. 

Picture taken towards the corn patch from the southern hay pasture

Holly in the new greenhouse with her new found garden frog friend.

Some of the candy sweet onions...doing well.

This time of year we enjoy our various asparagus beds...breakfast, lunch, dinner, and this year ...pickled!!!

Cabbage coming along.

 

To sum it up....we are a month behind last year because of the cool weather and the rain but thats okay...the ponds are full, the water table is back to normal and evrything is thriving. Cant get much better than that.

 

 

Spring Work has Started...Finally

This has been a relatively mild winter for us because we had such a long and warm fall but it has just seemed to linger a lot longer than we had hoped. We are still getting an occasional frosty night but spring has come to the Ozarks and the trees are budding, the daffodils have almost finished blooming and now we have Tulips and Irises starting to pop.

Of course spring is also the time when the real work starts and we have to mend our slacker ways. We have been back and forth to St Louis to pick up favorite daughter Jenny for a visit, I am now 2/3rds finished with the Emergency Medical Responder course, and we have been busy building raised beds, laying in gravel and prepping the market garden beds. We still don't have our new greenhouse (its supposed to be finished in a couple days) but we leveled the foundation for it and put in a couple inches of gravel so we are ready for it.

So on this day we spent the entire day tilling, picking rock, and doing various chores outside and it was so peaceful with the birds singing and the cows all around us making a ruckus (its calving season).....and then we came in side tonight to the news of the Boston bombings. More and more as I age I find myself rejecting much of what goes on in so called civilized society anymore and I just want to cut myself off from news and anything going on outside of about a 100 mile radius. We maintain this blog to share with family, friends and anyone interested in how we have escaped the rat race and tried to make a living and live simpler...but the outside world goes on and we have 5 kids living all over the place including one on active duty with the Air Force so we are not immune to the impacts of things like today's bombings. It just makes everyone feel a little less secure, it makes parents a little more fearful for their children and if you let it you can spend all day addicted to the latest news from North Korea, or terrorists, or the latest shameful conduct coming out of Washington DC. The best thing we ever did was to decide not to get cable (cant get it here anyway) or satellite TV and just capture what we can with rabbit ears on our $25.00 yard sale TV. I know so many people who watch Fox News, or MSNBC, or CNN almost constantly and all I can say is...turn it off and go outside..you will be better off for doing so.

 We have a sloping side yard and Holly had the idea to build some raised bed planters between the house and the greenhouses so we have started that project as you can see. We are using all pressure treated lumber (and the price of lumber is sure a shock) and there will be three separate 8' x 4' planters tiered down the slope. Holly is a true partner and we enjoy working together, she knows her way around tools and has many great ideas so we are a good team. Bandit of course is always around to make sure we get it right.

We added 2"x6" planks on either side to sit on which will not only add seating to the garden area, we are thinking more and more about our future mobility limitations and age. My spine continues its decline and Holly has hip issues which makes it difficult for us to weed so the seats will make that chore just a little easier and we refuse to give in to what we cant do. We may end up with a farm full of Rube Goldberg systems but I look at things from a "how are we going to get this done or make things easier" stand point. We are also trying to make sure that most of the things we put into place on the farm have maneuver area for those with handicap issues, including wheel chairs, so that mobility impaired customers who visit can have access to everything. It struck me when I was nearly incapacitated myself a couple years ago that few places like that exist in a rural area. 

There will be two more planter boxes of the same size tiered towards the outside boiler and there will be planted with Hibiscus and bulbs for flowers.

We have two completed and Judy and Rose the Farm Dog like them already. We are actually practicing a crude form of Hugelculture with these planters as we loaded them up with old rotting wood and brush before we put in the top soil and as the wood further rots and breaks down it adds nutrients to the soil. Right now the third planter will have to wait until we can afford to buy more wood.

Holly had the idea for the tiered planter boxes and this is my bright idea. I saw a YouTube video of a man who put gutters on a wooden fence and then drilled holes in the bottom, filled them with potting soil and planted his salad greens up and out of the way of rabbits.

So we sunk a couple of 4"x4"s and laid cross beams and did our own raised salad garden with 5" metal gutters. The gutters are dirt cheap and we just cut them to fit, added end caps and its worked out great. We will be adding a couple more gutters to these posts and also putting up a couple more of these. You can make them at any height you want to and is another good idea for those with mobility impairments. You could make them at wheel chair height or like these about 4 feet high where I can weed and thin out the salad greens without bending far over to weed. My neck vertebrae were fused a couple years ago so its difficult to bend much at the neck and this really works out great.

We are anxious for the new greenhouse, we have outgrown this one and are having to wait to plant seed starts and cuttings until we get more space.

We plow each garden area with a spade bit or middle buster plow then pick rocks out of the plowed up ground, then let it sit for a couple weeks to let the frost kill emerging grubs and then we use the 3 pt tiller on the back of the Kubota to prep the beds for planting. We will then use the IH 424 tractor to plow the rows and plant. We have been doing this for several years now and yet each year we seem to grow a new crop of rocks. But its getting better, as we glean the rocks and add organic matter to the soil it gets easier to till each year and this year the soil really looks good.

We have several planting areas and the roughly 1/2 acre tilled in this picture is for our market garden vegetables. It has received the most attention from us and the soil is really starting to become a rich and loamy planting area. It takes a lot of work and we incorporate no fertilizer or pesticide into the soil though we do side dress the rows with some organic or commercial fertilizer.

This is our pumpkin and gourd patch and the rock cairns in each corner are filled with rocks we picked from this bed. This will be our third year with this garden and its been a chore to get this up to par as it was a heavy compacted rocky mess when we started.

The orchard is just now starting to bloom (these are pear trees) and we will be doubling the size of the orchard this year.

The new green house will be to the right (and perpendicular to) of the existing greenhouse on the gravel area we have prepared. We also built this new raised bed for cucumbers (a couple more are planned) and we added a new frost free hydrant (what a pain).

Our existing herb garden is in the fore ground with the red bark mulch and we have one new herb bed in the back ground with two more to come.

The grass is still spotty, the leaves are just now starting to pop out and most of the flowers have yet to bloom but it was a nice sunny warm day and we felt satisfied with a good days work. We all already have a tan, our muscles are sore, and I can only wonder how people who work in an office everyday can do it....that was mean wasn't it?

One of the things I like about our piece of farmville is the elevation changes. I took this from back at the pasture fence (behind me would be the front pasture, the pole barn shop etc.) and you see the pumpkin patch by the water tank and then in the distance the greenhouse and market garden.

This newly planted area will be our corn patch this year. We rotate crops each year and never plant the same things in the same areas, not shown in this picture but to the right just out of the picture is another plowed area for our squash.

I took this picture of one of the new raised beds mainly to show the difference painting the wood shed and outside wood boiler made. If you look at the third picture in this blog entry you can see the wood shed was brown and the outside wood boiler was tan....the hunter green matches the house trim, chicken coop and greenhouse and we like it a lot better.

I had mentioned in a previous post about extending parking and turn around areas and laying in a different gravel to combat some of the mud and that project is almost complete. Over 1K in gravel but it really made a difference. 

This is only the first step towards some gravel paths to the garden and greenhouses but I came out nice and we aren't tracking mud everywhere now.

Besides the added parking and turn around areas....less grass to mow!

We gravelled all the way to the road including the sunken mud pit next to the drive.

The area behind the old Dodge is a parking/turn around area up front but it also extends to the road to the leased pasture so we don't have to go out onto the road to get to it or drive over the grass any longer.

So that is what we have been doing since the last post. It feels good to spend our days outside working the soil again and running the machinery. Life is good on the farm.

 

Wildlife, and Maintenance, and Planting Prep

This time of year I am often left wondering if our Simple Life tag might be a bit of a misnomer. Just in the last week I have continued my classes for Emergency Medical Responder, got re-certified in CPR and AED, we got the car fixed, finished the repair of the IH 424, got notification that a grant I wrote for the Fire Department was approved (which now means more work to satisfy the requirements of the grant), I was appointed as Training Officer for the Fire Department, I wrote another grant for the Lions Club, Holly has been busy putting together fund raising things for both the Fire Department and the Lions Club and she finished all of the spread sheets and documentation for our 2012 taxes and the books and tracking documents for our corporation. On top of all of that we did the initial plowing for spring planting (with the newly repaired IH 424), we got a load of top soil for the raised beds, prepped for the installation of one of the new greenhouses, used a bunch of old tires from the barn to make potato beds, and did some fencing.

Our days are long and physical this time of year and the weather has been interesting. Warm and sunny one day and the next its rainy and doesn't get out of the 40s but the rain is welcome after we had such a severe drought and we are fast getting back to normal precipitation. One of the things we enjoy is to take a break once a day and go for a walk just to take in the natural beauty of our area and hopefully see some wild life.

Of course our cattle aren't wild life but we certainly enjoy watching their antics and I find it is immensely satisfying watching them. Each one has a distinct personality and they provide a sense of security and well being for us that's hard to explain.

 

On this day in the back pasture, we found a lone wild turkey probably contemplating the upcoming April hunting season. We also saw a couple deer and a bunch of rabbits but the old camera didn't cooperate on getting pictures of them.

 

You can see the standing water in this picture, so far in March we have gotten over 7 inches of much needed rain and the pastures are starting to really perk up.

I am not sure if this is relevant but we live in a very sparsely populated area with a lot of open space interspersed with wood lots and it seems like the wild life is much more accessible. This small squirrel came right up to us in its quest for acorns and didn't seem at all bothered by our presence.

Its so quiet in our little patch of woods other than the sound of the wind and the birds and we like to sit for a while and let nature do its thing. I have found that after a life of constant stress and a career where violence was everywhere that I am in increasing need of the solace that nature gives me.

We have numerous bird feeders, bird houses and suet feeders all over the farm and I never get tired of them. And when we see a group of Starlings (an obnoxious European import), Grackles, or cow birds I still don't mind. We often enjoy the memory of my father who on his only visit to the farm was enjoying a warm afternoon on the back patio when a huge flock of Starlings flew over and I made the mistake of saying "Hey dad, look at that"...he looked up and immediately got nailed by a gooey dropping right on his glasses. He was a great sport about it and we all got a laugh out of that and I cant even look at a flock of Starlings now without that fond memory.

Like a lot of plans, my big project to paint the tractor and do a lot of other stuff was overcome by events (or OBE in military jargon). We ended up foregoing the painting of the front end and other repairs because we had a weather window pop up and we needed to get some plowing done.

I wont say it all went back together easy but in the end everything works great, the tractor is back in full function, and I am pretty pleased with the outcome.

One thing about an old piece of machinery, you just cant go down to the store and buy ready made repair items. When I was scraping the old gasket off the mounting plate I realized the mounting plate to the engine block was a separate piece (not shown in the shop manual) and so I took that off as well and found out where the big leak was coming from. The gasket between the block and the mounting plate was completely gone at the bottom and of course they don't make them anymore so I made a new one.

I also highly recommend Permatex (in this case #2) when mounting your gaskets. Trying to get a gasket to fit properly and adhere to a vertical surface while your holding a 15 pound fan assembly and trying to thread a bolt into the bolt hole without cross threading it is challenge enough. Using the Permatex allowed the gasket to stay on the assembly until it was mounted and it provides an extra insurance against leaking...you don't want to use too much but its a good product and after 8 hours of hard use of the tractor since the repair, no leaks.

This view from the barn shows the extent of the first plowing for the north market garden and Holly's potato planting scheme.

Right behind Rose the Farm dog and between where Judy is in the back left is the location for one of the new green houses. We have a load of gravel coming next week that will be used to level and prep the site.

The old Alis Chalmers WC is working its way up the ladder for its rotation in the shop and I hope to get it back into use by the end of summer. It needs new back tires, some seals replaced, fluids changed, etc. and I miss its distinctive sound but since it doesn't have hydraulics, its not as useful and has taken a back seat to other maintenance projects.

We also did the initial plowing of the gourd and pumpkin patch..

And started the plowing for the corn.

The back fencing has been making slow progress because our part time hired hand had to leave for a couple weeks but Holly and I concreted the last two posts (the one in this picture is surrounded by a cattle panel while it dries to keep the cows from rubbing against it). The old gates in the back in this picture will be replaced which will allow movement of livestock and fire brush trucks between our neighbors pasture and ours if the need arises.

And this will be where the big gate into the new pasture will go. If you talk to 5 farmers or ranchers they all will have very strong opinions on how to fence but we set our wooden fence posts in concrete, then we cross brace them, and we use 5 strands of 4 barbed 15.5 gage Gaucho high tensile wire. A lot of old timers think its too thin but it has a 1400 pound breaking strength, it has the highest level of zinc anti corrosion coating available, and it doesn't stretch like conventional wire. Its been around for about 30 years but some still see it as new...but we like it. I will also say that cattle seriously dislike the sharp barbs and they leave it alone.

Gaucho is however dangerous to install and you absolutely need to wear all personal protective equipment including eye protection, a heavy coat and leather gloves. Being high tensile steel it has a wicked coil and if it ever lets go you getter be on the post side of the fence or it will wrap you up in a nice bundle of sharp barbed wire that will require a rescue effort to save you. It also is bad to snap back at you when you cut it and there are plenty of one eyed farmers and ranchers around who lament not using protective eye wear. I highly recommend it but I have a few scars from it and you just have to use some common sense when installing it.

We are in year 3 of trying to build the soil tilth through the addition of compost and other soil amendments so we are still deep plowing and picking rocks. When the weeds die out from this plowing we then go over it with the 3 point tiller and then plow our rows but we plan on eventually switching to just using a sub soiler and a no till method. We are also experimenting with the use of plastic mulch row covers to cut down on weeding (we don't use chemical weed control in the vegetable plots).

Holly had this idea to use the old tires in the barn (and the rear tires from the IH 424 we replaced last year) to anchor the side of the mound we built for the raised beds (we used the excess dirt from the sewer project) and we have started that project.

We set the tires staggered into the side of the hill and they will get filled with top soil and then we will plant potatoes in them. We firmly believe in using and reusing what you have and re purposing things.

And finally for this post, we had a dump truck load of the most rich loamy soil we have found in the area and we are in the process of filling our raised beds with this excellent soil. All of this has been in the last week and next week is even busier...we love spring.