spilt honey and fried frogs

Attack of the 7 ft tall 600 lb black bear.... Or protecting yourself with a flashlight a running shoe and a loud voice.

2011-10-20T22:13:00.001-05:00

The attack of the seven foot tall, 600 pound black bear

or

Armed only with a flashlight, a pair of running shoes and a loud voice

How to protect your beehives from a large bear.

It was 3 in the morning when I finally woke up. I think the dog had been barking for a while but in my sleep I had been ignoring him.

However, for the past five minutes the barking had become more insistent and more terrified.

So I was awake now, and dressed and looking around for my boots. which , of course weren't there, so I put the nearest things on my feet and was walking up the hill carrying a flashlight.

I went past the beehives, turned over and partly dismantled. I could see bees flying around confused in the light and that's when I saw him.

Silhouetted by the flashlight.   A huge black bear.

Taller than I am. And heavy. A lot heavier. Maybe three times my weight.

A combination of the dog with is teeth bared and the shock of the flash light and the bear had run out of the apiary and was climbing an old oak tree --

I lost sight of him for a moment and was standing there, almost under the tree, shining the light up in the leaves and branches and for a moment, there he was, out on a limb, about 20 feet up in the air.

and then,

there was a crash and something falling

and standing their facing me, not ten feet away was the bear.

And how about I stop right there and talk about the farm news.

The first thing on the list is this weekend's gleaning.

Gleaning!   Starting at 10:30. This is for 2011 shareholders only (now, if you want to sign up for 2012 I think we'll let you in, write me).    If you haven't been out in the past this is just about as popular as the seedling give away. The gleaning is when shareholders can come out to the farm and roam through the fields and harvest the vegetables that are still out there.

How should you dress for gleaning? We had almost two inches of rain on Wednesday and just under three inches last week (more rain in the last ten days than we had for the previous four months). so wear shoes that can take walking in muddy fields.

What should you bring? something to put your gleanings in to. Maybe the farm tote bag. Maybe something larger.

Maybe a lunch. We'll keep the gleaning open until most of the vegetables are picked. That should be around one or two.

What vegetables are still in the field?

We have a lot of greens. Several types of lettuce as well as rows of mizuna, arugula and mustard

There are lots and lots of those blue string beans

All sorts of peppers.

Half a dozen varieties of eggplant.

a hoophouse with some tomatoes,

another hoophouse with young cucumbers.

a few okra, Thai basil, some Italian basil. parsley. I doubt if there are many sweet potatoes. And there might be a few other vegetables besides the horseradish and root crops that shouldn't be harvested until the first hard frost because they won't have any flavor until then.

Other news

Renewing for 2012- If you have renewed and sent in your check for half the amount but have not picked up your comb honey I will have it at the farm. Remember, right now and through the end of the month we will continue with the annual 'renew now and get the next year's share at this year's price.'

Details I've said this before but here it is again. The early sign up at 2011 prices works this way. Tell me you want in the program now and send me the first half payment by the end of the month. (I'll make that, like I usually do, the middle of November). The other half is due in May of 2012.

This year we have a bonus for the first 70 signing up early. A container of comb honey.

Right now it looks like I have 25 containers of comb honey left. this includes the people who have signed up but not sent their checks or not picked up the honey.   If you haven't got your honey yet, see me Saturday. (I will not be mailing or otherwise shipping the honey. To get it you have to get it from me).

If the early sign up isn't for you. If you haven't made up your mind about 2012 yet. or you might move, or have that large garden you've been promising yourself, I will also take renewals in the spring. Of course then they will be paying the 2012 prices, whatever they might be (I'll decide over the winter and post them in late January).

Eggs. We'll give out eggs this weekend to 2011 egg shareholders on a first come first serve basis. After the egg share people have taken their eggs then we'll give them to gleaners in general. If you want your kids (or the kid in you) to collect eggs from the chicken house we'll be doing that in the afternoon.

Extra share. If you missed a week or were eligible for the extra week's share and didn't get double vegetables last week we will pick a dozen shares and set them aside. See me for a share if you are eligible.

Apple cider - for the people signed up we'll start making cider at about 11:30 (give me enough time to get the gleaners on the right track) I still have to track down another half dozen bushels of cider apples but if you are signed up for cider making this weekend I will have a bushel of apples for you.

And now we can return to the bear.

The bear and I are staring at each other not ten feet apart.

Its dark,

and wet,

and windy

And before the bear could realize that he was three times my size and before I could think civilized type of thoughts, the sort of thoughts you think if people are standing around..

as in- 'I'm coming up out of the metro and up at the top of the escalator I run into a large black bear. What do I do?'

Since I wasn't near a metro or a cop or anyone else I reacted completely different than I would if I had.

I looked out for a weapon and not seeing anything I did the only thing I could.

I let out the loudest roar my lungs were capable of.

A sound that wasn't a scream, or a yell or a holler.

A roar. Something from way back when humans did run into bears or other large animals alone in the forest.

And sound that was something else.

And it must have been because the bear. did not reach over and give me a little tap on the head that would have sent me flying twenty yards down the hill.

Instead, without hesitating, he turned and took off...

and ran for everything he was worth,

ran as hard as it could, as fast as it could.

And was gone into the night.

Soon I heard it crashing into the back gate. I guess trying to knock it over. trying to knock over the gate it most likely had previously climbed over or slipped around.

And since the gate didn't give

It began to claw and rip at the double plastic fence that surrounds the farm.

Pulling at it and heaving up against it until it broke and he was through the inside fence and then tearing at the outside one.

and finally it was through that and for the next five minutes I could hear it running.   At first madly through the underbrush and trees and then softly, off in the distance until gradually the sound of it escaping disappearing further and further into the wet, and still dark,

early morning,

forest.

Other farm news. I did see the bear one more time. It was the next night.

I had spent most of Saturday putting an electric fence around the beehives so when the bear came back that night the fence must have worked because he left the beehives alone and instead went down to the van where I had several bushels of apples just sitting out.

Just after midnight the dogs started barking and when I went out there he was with a turned over bushel of apples. Stuffing apples in his mouth two bites per apple.

When he saw the flashlight, though, he got up and ran.

Not as fast as the night before.
But I watched him run around the side of the store house and disappear into the forest and (the fence hadn't been fixed yet) through the hole it had made the night before and disappeared into the forest that runs uninterrupted for three miles down to the mill and Interstate 66 at Thoroughfare Gap.

There's plenty of room down that way for him to have found a place to nap for the winter.

And I hope he has.

Since then I haven't heard from him and the beehives have been left alone. And hopefully, that's the way it will be out here on the farm for the rest of the winter.

Uneventful.

See you Saturday and then after that, in the spring. Thank you for sharing this last vegetable season with me.

Leigh

skunks in the eggs

2011-09-28T21:12:00.000-05:00

What would you do if a skunk was in your front yard and wouldn't leave?

Or, how about, you're coming home from work and you turn at your apartment building and sitting up there at the top of the steps, just resting, is a skunk.

Not a large skunk, but still, a skunk.

And as you watch, her tail looks like its rising just a little bit (of course you know, a skunk lets out her stream of spray when she fully extends her tail straight up).

Or how about this...

As you walk up the steps to your building, there it is, the skunk.

She's standing, facing the door, as though she's looking at her reflection in the glass, her tail fully extended and her rear aimed right in your direction.

Or its kind of like that 'what's worse than finding a worm in your apple?' joke.

Instead of watching where your feet are going, you are thinking about something else, maybe its something that didn't get turned in on time at work, and then, belatedly, you look down and there's that skunk, with her rear facing right at you and her tail high in the air.

That's how it was for our new dog, JC (John Calhoun), sort of like that youtube video that's been making the rounds.

A stream of spray shoots out, aimed right at his eyes.

But before I tell you how we stopped the skunk from chasing down the poor pullets and eating all of your eggs, let's go through a highlight of the farm news.But first let's go through the farm news.

End of the vegetable season.

The season ends in two weeks. Officially, the last week is October 14th.

However, for the people that missed the first week, and for a number of other number of other people we are going one more week.

I have a list of people getting that extra week and I'll send you out a notice, in fact I'm leaning towards letting everyone pick up that extra week.

I'll write more about that next week.

Early sign up for 2012 at 2011 price.

This is the time of year we start signing up people for the 2012 season.

If you sign up for 2012 now you get your share at the 2011 price plus, like signing up to be a member of public radio this year we're giving a premium.

For the first 70 people who sign up early we'll also throw in a free pound of local comb honey. (that's honey still in the honey comb).

Here's how it works.

E-mail me before the end of the season saying you are going to renew. for 2012. Say what size share you're signing up for:

a one person share for $440
a two person share for $587

Then pay me half of that by the end of the season. ($220 of a one person and $293.50 for the two person).

Renewing shareholders will get the 20th week of vegetables this year and the first 70 will get a pound of comb honey (the comb honey isn't coming from me, you have to put special honeycomb foundation in your beehives, but it is coming from another local bee keeper. I came up with the number 70 because right now that's what he has left).

Apple cider.

We'll be doing apple cider again this year, starting this Saturday. A couple years ago I bought a cider press and at the end of the season we've been having shareholders out to make their own apple cider.

If you are interested you need to sign up. (this is only open to our 2011 shareholders)

Five people this Saturday, October 1st, between 11 and 1. Ten next Saturday. (October 8th). October 15th. and the finally weekend October 22.

You can bring your own bushel of apples but I also will be providing them (I'm buying cider apples-- you reimburse me. depending on the apples either $10 or $15 a bushel.

A bushel of apples makes between 2 and 2.9 gallons of cider. You'll also need to bring your own containers. When you sign up I'll send you details.

Another premium for people who renew early, They get to jump to the front of the cider line.

Gleaning. (2011 shareholders only)

This year's gleanings and last shareholder get together will be on Saturday October 22. Gleaning is when shareholders come out and pick the vegetables still out in the fields. More information about that coming up in a couple weeks.

You pick raspberries.

If you remember back to the beginning of the season you might remember the raspberry patch I was planting. Well after all these months the plants are starting to produce. If you want to come out this weekend between 11 and 1 you can pick some.

Which brings us back to skunks.

Or in this case one skunk weighing in at about three pounds..

Now that the three pound skunk had removed the 150 pound guard dog from its path, it headed down the hill to the chicken pasture where several dozen chicken eggs were not unguarded.

So here's the picture.

A little three pound skunk waddling along the path, Followed, at a safe distance, by three grown men and one rather smelly dog.

And the question we were all thinking--

How do you stop a skunk without getting sprayed?

While we were trying to come up with an answer the skunk steadily made its way down the hill.

Came to the electric fence and instead of being stopped, gave the bottom electrified strand a look over and then without seeming to be bothered scooted down on the ground and was under the fence in a matter of moments.

Once inside the fence it turned to the nearest hen house and went inside.

And a few moments later came out, carrying an egg that it carefully placed on the ground, cracked and began to eat.

After finishing the first egg it got up and went back into the same hen house.

And came out with another egg.

All this time we hadn't dared go any closer. How were we going to stop it? Even if the skunk only ate half a dozen eggs this trip it would be back. And maybe bringing all of its relatives.

That's when Brian had the idea.

Waiting for me to run back up the hill and turn off the fence, he went inside the hen yard and picked up the large net we kept leaning up against one of the hen houses in case we needed to catch a run away bird.

He stood by the hen house where the skunk had recently disappeared and when it came out, carrying an egg he carefully took the net quickly threw it over the skunk.

Careful to pen the dangerous tail to the ground.

And then, still carefully, wrapped the skunk into the netting, and lifted it up.

From there it was a simple matter to carry our visitor up to the truck where we put the skunk and the net in the truck bed.

Drove out the gate, off the farm and several miles down the state road.

When we decided we were far enough away from houses, barns and any sign of people I stopped the truck. We took the net with its skunk out of the bed and slowly unwound the net.

Before the skunk had a chance to realize it was free we had run back to the cab, turned on the engine and I had hit the gas.

From fifty feet away we stopped and watched the skunk get up, look around and then run across the road and into the trees on the far side.

I hope the skunk finds a new home down the road and doesn't decide it's worth the walk back to our farm just for a meal of fresh eggs.

Leigh

Open CSA Shares!

2011-05-09T00:06:00.000-05:00

Yes, Its going on the second week of May and we still have shares available.

One person share, Two person share, four person, Fruit shares, Egg shares.

Where?

Alexandria, Washington, DC (Dupont Circle area, Capitol Hill}

Falls Church, Arlington, Centreville, Manassas, Gainesville

To sign up, go to our website. wwwbullrunfarm.com

Deer Defenses

2011-05-09T00:00:00.000-05:00

Here's a little farming history for you.

At least my history of farming right next to an over population of white-tail deer.

Or

How I went from feeding my neighbor's deer $15,000 worth of vegetable a year to making the deer find their summer feed somewhere else.

Like most things, it all started back in the good old days. My good old days consisted of looking out at any time of the day in any direction and seeing at least one deer munching away on our vegetables.

that's when I became an expert on what deer like to eat.

How they really love okra leaves, and sweet potato vines.

How deer have an hierarchy of desires when it comes to the varieties of mustard they'll eat. (southern curly is at the top of the list where giant red is down there at the bottom).

and how through trial and error I mostly tried every technique out there for keeping deer away and how I learned that when push comes to shove keeping deer out of your field of vegetables is a lot like keeping bank robbers out of bank vaults.

You can think of a lot of tricky schemes but in the end nothing works as well as an impenetrable safe.

What am I talking about? Well, here it is...

There was a time when I spent a good part of every week thinking of new ways to keep deer out of our vegetables.

This was, I guess, about ten years ago.

Back then if the deer weren’t eating the string beans they were eating they were in the sweet potatoes or the okra, the broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, mustard greens, kohlrabi...

I think there are a few vegetables out there that deer don’t eat but I can’t really recall any right now.

I remember one time I had harvested a pile of squash, its been a while now so I don’t remember if they were winter or summer squash, but I do remember we had them piled up.

A pile with about fifty in it.

And I went in for the night.

And when I came out in the morning the squash were gone.

Everyone of them.

It was as if someone had crept out into the field during the darkest part of the night and, making a half dozen trips, had hauled them all off.

I started looking at the ground for tracks. I couldn’t really believe that a human had stolen on to the farm and had hauled off over four dozen squash.

But how else would they have disappeared?

I went out in the field again and looked around.

I still couldn't find any sign of the pile of squash.

I was beginning to doubt my memory. Maybe I had only thought I had picked squash. Maybe it had been a dream.

That was when I saw the tracks. Deer tracks. it looked like maybe half a dozen deer had been in the field the night before.

And there, right where I had first thought I'd left the squash were seeds. Squash seeds. trampled in the deer tracks. Maybe a hundred seeds but no squash, and no parts of squash.

As much as it seemed impossible, it sure looked like that night deer had eaten up an entire pile of squash, and left nothing behind except for a few seeds they had spilled on the ground and stepped on.

And if that wasn't strange, a sure sign that deer will eat just about anything someone would want to grow, here's another one that happened about the first year of our CSA.

That year I had plenty of problems but growing large leafy pepper plants wasn't one of them.

Our pepper plants were huge, but the problem was that these huge plants were naked.

Tall plants with large leaves and no peppers.

It was late August and we still hadn't seen a single pepper to give to our shareholders.

And I didn't figure it out until one evening when I was standing out in the middle of the plants looking, trying to figure it out.

The dark was just coming on when I realized what was the problem.

The plants didn’t have flowers.

Someone was picking every flower off of every pepper plant.

And if there were no pepper flowers, there were no pepper buds. and if there were no pepper buds there were no pepper...

From there on I actively worked at keeping deer out of the fields.

I started doing research into what other growers were doing. I couldn't believe that farmers just stood idly by while deer ate up their crops. and how do you keep a thief out of your fields if it goes and robs you, like a deer does, while you are sound asleep. that robs you while you are sound asleep.

You wouldn’t believe the number of articles on the subject.

How to keep deer away with rotten eggs.

Collecting tiger manure from your local zoo.

Apples quartered and tied with baling wire to an electric fence.

Suspending cakes of soap (some writes insist the soap must be ‘Irish Spring’ ) from tree limbs.

And one of my favorites. A walkman (this was before the days of Ipods). set up with a timer to play a recording of a Rush Limbaugh show out in the middle of your broccoli plants.

Of course none of these worked for more than a day or possibly a week before the deer became wise and either out smarted or ignored the strategies.

And yes, I see your hand up. I know what you are going to say. 'shoot them.' And my answer to that is how are you going to shoot them when they keep on coming. Night after night after night.

One year I went to the game warden and he gave me a 'nuisance' permit.

"Here," he said handing me the permit. We were standing at the gate to that first field on the left, the cemetery field. "I'll put down that you can shot 35 of them. But its not going to help. You can shoot ten times that number and there will still be others out here to replace them. and be here the next day eating your vegetables. You'll have to think of something else."

and he was right, not that I shot any deer (I'm not one who wants to spend his nights, and that's when the deer come out to eat the vegetables, shooting deer after deer after deer). The idea is to keep the deer out of the fields. to stop the deer from eating the vegetables.

Shooting a deer here, and a deer there doesn't do it. It doesn't accomplish the goal of keeping deer out of the vegetables. As soon as one deer has been shot and the hunter has picked up his target and driven it off to the butcher another has popped up and is hungrily eating a row of mustard greens.

I remember back over a decade ago when I had decided the solution was to pasture half a dozen hogs right next to a field of vegetables that were being particularly ravaged by the deer in the hope that the strange smelling animals would keep the deer from crossing the pasture on the way to eating the vegetables.

It didn’t work for much more than a week before the deer decided that the risk of being eaten by a hog was only minimal, especially when balanced against the pleasure of eating our vegetables.

Finally, though, while leafing through a mail order catalogue with products aimed at farmers I saw it.

A fence.

And not just any fence. A fence that was at least ten feet tall.

this wasn’t just any fence. In fact over the years I had played with the idea of several different fences.

This fence was special.

It was one made out of woven plastic that I could nail to the trees surrounding our fields.

It came with metal hooks that could be hammered into the ground keeping the bottom tacked tightly down so deer couldn’t climb underneath. And the top was ten feet tall.

Tall enough that only the rarest of deer could jump over the top.

Maybe you have heard that saying about deer.

The one that goes deer: Deer can jump over something six feet tall if they are standing still.

Eight feet with a running start.

But the only time they can jump over ten feet is if they are really being motivation.

So if you haven’t noticed already, we have a ten foot fence surrounding about 25 acres of our farm.

And running free on the inside are our two Great Pyrenees.

A breed used to protect livestock from maundering critters. And while they do a good job of protecting our chickens they also are adverse to deer sneaking in and eating the vegetables.

All of this means that while ten years ago we were losing over $12,000 a year in deer damage to our vegetables, last year, and the year before and the year before that, our deer related loses were less than a hundred or two hundred dollars.

We do have losses due to ground hogs, pocket gophers, but that’s another story and one that we’re also working on.

So lets get on to this week's farm news.

Right now we are going as fast as we can, getting our crops into the ground.

So far we have planted over three thousand each of broccoli and cauliflower. We’ve planted a couple thousand cabbage. More Kohlrabi, fennel, beets, potatoes, mustard greens We’ve filled one large greenhouse with bell pepper and eggplants. Another smaller one with hot pepper plants.
Over 500 tomato plants in another green house.

In other words, we’re working as fast as we can and hopefully, if everything breaks our way, by the end of next week we’ll have the majority of our crops in the ground.

The bee packages we put into the hive boxes last week are doing fine. After work today Brian and I stood beside the hives watching worker bees come in from the fields loaded down with a pale yellow pollen. What flower do you think they would be working that would produce pollen that color? Next week I’m going to make a fast trip down to Georgia and pick up another ten hives, these, instead of being packages will be nucs, the difference, nucs are already established as hives, were the packages are a collection of three pounds of bees thrown in with a new queen.

Another point of interest for the week, today for the first time there were several small white chicken eggs in the hens’ laying boxes. This means that those chickens we raised over the winter, the White Leghorns, started laying today. By the time the season begins all of them should be producing eggs for the egg share. White eggs to go with the light brown, dark brown and bluish green eggs we’re already getting.

And I guess that’s this week’s round up. The 2011 shareholders received a separate notice about picking up salad mix, asparagus and eggs at the farm. This is our best year, I think, for early arugula and lettuce.

The red lettuce, I think, is exceptional this year.

Leigh

deluge.

2011-04-29T07:20:00.000-05:00

Wednesday night while I was sitting at the computer I saw lightning strike the top of the mountain.

There's a window facing the mountain just to the left of my computer screen and two long lightning bolts came from way up in the sky and struck the top of the mountain ridge.

One on top of the other.

I immediately started to count.

one thousand one.

One thousand two.

one th....

... and there was the thunder. A double explosion loud enough to shake the windows.

A little over two seconds. How far away does that make the storm? (the cliffs, according to my gps are 6/10ths of a mile from the house).

That put the lightning right up on top, on this side of the cliffs.

And the storm was moving this way. I stood at the window staringout into the storm waiting for the next lightning strike. I could hear the wind picking up. Where are farm is located, storms suddenly appear from the west as the clear the mountain and then come rushing down over the forest.

When it happens there's usually not even enough time to run for the house. one time, back when we first moved out here, I didn't realize how dangerous it was and instead of throwing down whatever I was doing and running, I had stayed repairing the goat fence at the edge of the forest.

A lightning bolt came down not twenty meters from where I stood and split a tall poplar.

One moment it was an entire tree. The next it was a splintered wreck. Pieces flying through the air and then the remains of the trunk, began, with a horrible sound, to crack, I remember it smoking and shattered, wavered back and forth, and then falling in my direction.

This isn't something where you can get up and run out of its way. Before I could even begin to react, the trunk split wide open and from a spot twenty feet up broke and fell in my direction.

Missing me, but not by much.

The splintered stump of the tree, maybe rising no more than ten or twenty meters in the air continued to stand for almost another decade and everytime I'd walk by it would remind me just how much violence is in one of those afternoon thunderstorms.

Last night, It couldn't have been more than a handful of seconds before another flash of lightning. I didn't see it strike but I'm sure it destroyed a tree half way down the mountain.

And another flash, this time the thunder booming almost on top of it instantly followed by the rain.

A loud drum roll began to beat on our metal roof. and I was up and running around the house making sure the windows were closed.

A major downpour. Within fifteen minutes my weather station was reporting more than half an inch had fallen.

It was too dark to see the fields but it made me worry about the crops we had planted Wednesday.

Ten thousand onion seedlings. 3000 leeks. Beets, kohlrabi, fennel and two hundred pounds of blue potatoes.

Even more vulnerable to such a downpour was the fields we had just recently plowed and tilled.

With the forecast of a coming rainstorm we had spent Wednesday hurrying to finish, preparing several acres of land for planting and then Wednesday afternoon we had hooked up the plastic mulch attachment to our smaller tractor (the larger one does the plowing and tilling) and had rolled out several thousand feet of plastic mulch and irrigation drip tape.

Rolling the mulch out so the rows followed the contours of the land., hoping to limit the amount of erosion caused by a downpour.

That was the thought, at least, but that much rain coming down so quickly?

Our weather station says Wednesday nights storm fell at a rate, at its heaviest, hit
six inches an hour.

But then, fifteen minutes after the storm started, and 8 tenths of an inch of rain later, the storm had passed.

Dropping more rain in a few minutes than fell in any one month during last summer's drought.

And then there was this morning.

Another cloudburst.

This one could have been the heaviest storm we've had in years. In less than ten minutes the weather station reported 82/100 of an inch.

Watching the field below the house I thought it was going to wash away the plastic mulch.

I know that without those long sheets of plastic to hold the soil in place it would have eroded a gully across our fields at least a foot deep.

We came out of those two abnormally heavy thunderstorms in amazingly lucky shape.

This seasons onions seem to be fine. Hilled with the contours of the land the onions protected the fields.

The kohlrabi, fennel and beets also look in good shape. And maybe, even, if we don't get any more rain and if it doesn't rain again by tomorrow we'll be able to pull our waterwheel planter down the rows of plastic mulch, poking holes through the mulch and planting the tens of thousands of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, pac choi, mustard, Swiss chard, arugula, and lettuce seedlings that are now ready to go into the ground.

Our planting season is ready to go.

Shareholders are invited to come out to the farm this weekend. (This is part of our CSA where paying members can come out and pick vegetables before the delivery part of the season. Right now we have greens (arugula, three different lettuces, a salad mustard and some stir fry a hot mustard called Giant Red), that grew in one of our greenhouses, plus asparagus, sorrel and herbs. Shareholders that come out to the farm also get free eggs. The details were sent out to shareholders in our newsletter.

What else happened on the farm this last week?

Honey bees.
Tuesday morning an e-mail came from a local beekeeper saying the ten packages of honey bees I'd ordered had arrived.

'Your bees are here. Come and get them.'

So I drove out to his apiary on the side of a mountain in Rappahannock County and got back to our farm just before dark. Not wanting the bees to sit in the cramped cages for another night I went to work on them in the dark (which it turned out is easier than doing it during the daylight).

We had set up the bees new homes several weeks before so it was simply a matter of opening up the packages, bees when being shipped like that are put into a wire cage with a queen in a queen cage plus a can full of sugar water.

I took the can out of the cage, along with the queen locked in her private cage, poured the bees into the hive, and, because I didn't want to traumatize all of the bees I, pulled out half a dozen frames of comb and put the cage with one side open into the hive,.

Then I pulled the cork from one end of the queen cage and put her into the hive too then closed up the hive.

In the morning I came back, opened up the hive, by now most of the bees were out of the cage and going about setting up house in the hive. I took the cage out and shook out any bees still inside, made sure the queen cage was in a good position. While I had pulled the cork there was still a thin barrier of candy keeping her inside. In a day or two the bees would have eaten the candy and released the queen.

I put the frames back into the hive.

I then put a feeder on top of the hive and poured in a mixture that is one part sugar and one part water. this gives the bees something to eat until they can go out and start collecting their own food. I also put a frame full of honey into each of the new hives so there would be plenty of food not only to feed the bees but to feed the baby bees as soon as the queen started laying eggs in a few days after she is released. by then we would have ten healthy hives building up for a season of pollinating our vegetables.

I noticed this morning the acre of red clover I planted last fall as a cover crop is beginning to flower. There should be plenty of food for our new bees to gather.

In two weeks I'm driving down to Georgia to pick up another ten bee hives. These, instead of coming in packages will be in nucs. I'll tell you more about that next week.

And that's it for the week.

Leigh

greenhouse

2011-03-30T03:28:00.001-05:00

today as we filled the last empty space in the greenhouse Brian, one of the guys working to make our shareholder's vegetables happen, said. 'its really something how the plants are growing, you should post a picture everyday so people can see it.'

In at least concept that was a good idea. Here's a snapshot taken with my phone. tomorrow I'll try one with my camera and see if I can do a better job of it.

I haven't gone out there and counted each flat but a good guess is that's between 50,000 and 60,000 seedlings growing in the greenhouse. The long tables on the outside are heated. The new trays with recently planted seeds go there where the soil stays at about 80 degrees.

Once the seedlings are up and growing we put the trays on the middle tables which are at room temperature (in the daytime with the solar heat of the greenhouse we try not to let it go over 90 degrees. At night it drops to about 50).

We started planting back in mid February.

How quick disaster strikes! March 21, 2011

2011-03-21T12:21:00.000-05:00

Today's story was actually written last week but wasn't posted, too busy farming, its title was How quick disaster strikes. and then a real disaster came around, the on going catastrophe that is the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown/radiation poisoning and I suddenly felt like my problems are absolutely nothing in comparison, however...)

However lets first give the farm news and then the story.

First, the shares. We have now passed the 250 mark, approaching 300 shares spoken for which leaves about 200 one and two person shares to go.

Which means, at the current rate, we will fill up around the second half of May.

When do we usually fill our shares? About a month earlier than that. Mid to late April.

Why are we later this year? I'll give you a short answer this week and a longer one next. Actually we are way up on the number of shareholder renewals. We have more people returning than ever before however we aren't attracting as many as usual new people at our Dupont and Falls Church spots.

Why? In the last year or two those areas have seen an increas of new CSA's offering vegeables.

Answer. We are keeping more and more of our old customers but when it comes to selling our CSA to new customers there are more CSA's out there for them to choose from. (how does someone buying a share for the first time pick their CSA?)
We need to do better at telling people to choose us.

But that's enough of that now. If you know anyone who wants to sign up.... we have shares.

Free Eggs.

Last time I announced free eggs people came out and took away about fifty dozen. Well, I have 50 dozen again and..... and last weekend has passed and not only did people take away the fifty dozen eggs we had already collected, they took the 20 dozen that were laid over the weekend.

We'll be doing this, giving away eggs to shareholders at the farm, for two more months.

Last weekend I also gave away o0ur extra horseradish (horseradish gets harvested after the first hard frost, if you take it out of the ground before that it doesn't have much of a horseradish taste) and garlic.

Other farm news.

Big thing for me is I saw a bobcat this week. It was young not much bigger than a house cat, and I was just finishing up my farm chores a little after midnight. I was up in the greenhouse starting a fire in the boiler. Checking the chickens to make sure the electric fences were on and guarding them.

When I decided to drive out to get the mail.

I got in the pickup truck and zoomed down the driveway and there she was, right where that big old Maple sits and he was going up the bank towards the baby c hicks.

The headlights scared him and he ran down the hill and along the driveway, right in front of the truck.

I chased him for a hundred yards until he took off the drive and up the bank into a thicket of greenbriar.

Bobcats, even if they are around you seldom see one. They travel at night and are very quiet and clean. Its funny though, not to far down the drive from where the youngster took off into the brush I saw some scat that looked a lot like a bobcat only a month ago.

What I saw was from a larger cat, so I imagine a mother raised a family last summer, probably on our chickens and eggs. What I saw was one of her children out on its own.

How about next I answer some of the most asked question I get from visiting kids and their parents.

The all around most asked question is....

What determines the color of the eggs?

The simple answer is -- if you mean the shell that is determined by the breed of the chicken. It's a genetic thing. Barred Rocks lay brown eggs. Leghorns lay white eggs.

(or if you go to a grocery store chain to get your eggs the white eggs come from a chicken created by Monsanto, The Delta. Brown eggs are probably coming from a chicken like a Production Red. Chickens that were specially bred to lay the most eggs for the least cost while living in a confined space.

I'll write more about chickens, and our chickens later in the season.

Second most asked question.

What is growing right now?

Simple answer. Right now none of our vegetables are growing outside.

Why?

The thing that controls most things on earth. Water.

Vegetables, like most plants are mostly water. And unlike humans (which are also mostly water) vegetables do not carry around thier own heating system. Whatever the outside temperature is, that's the temperature of the vegetables.

When it drops to 32 or below water freezes , turns to a solid and expands. When water expands the vegetable breaks from the inside out and dies.

When do you start growing vegetables?

After water stops freezing at night for the year.

Around this area the average last freezing is April 15th.

That's when we start planting. But since sometimes there might be a light frost after that date we start off with our frost tolerant vegetables

Plants like broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower and work up to our 'we like only warm weather' vegetables like tomatoes.

Ånd the third most asked question..

When am I going to get any tomatoes?

Tomato plants can live at a temperature above freezing but they don't like it and grow real slow until it warms up. Tomato plants like the soil temperature to be at least 70 degrees.

(an easy way to figure out soil temperature is to take the night's low temperature and the day's high temperature and average them. When it gets to be 70 or above for several days in a row the ground temperature is about 70.

Around here that's usually early May.

Then you have to add the number of days the type of tomato you are planting takes to grow from a seedling to a mature vegetable producing plant (this is usually printed on the side of the package.

Early tomatoes like Early girl take about 60 days. Those huge ugly but tasty large tomatoes like beefsteak take around 90 days.

So around here the first rather small tomato, if everything goes right, is ready to eat around July 1, the larger varieties ripen later in the month and in early August.

But I saw a tomato at the farmers market why don't you have one?

there are ways of beating the natural vegetable clock but they cost money. the first one is you can grow the tomato indoors. inside a heated greenhouse, or an unheated high tunnel. If I'm going to spend the money on fuel and lighting there is no limit to when you can have a tomato. heat up the potting soil to over 70's and turn on the lights so the plant gets the same amount of light as it would be getting during the long days of summer. One other factor, either find an insect that will live inside that likes to pollinate tomatoes or breed a tomato that will self pollinate without wind.

That brings up our hoophouses. These are unheated greenhouses. over the past half dozen years we've been putting a lot of our spare money into buying hoophouses. We now have six 96 X1 7 ft hightunnels

one 96 X28 ft and one 96 X34 ft hightunnel.

This year we plan on putting tomatoes in the 28 ft wide one, and in two of the 17 ft wide ones.

We'll put peppers in the 34 ft wide one, eggplants in one or two of the 17 ft wide, which leaves us two 17 ft wide ones to plant vegetables that take less time to grow. Vegetables like lettuce, squash and cucumbers.

I just spend $3500 on roll up sides for the 17 ft hoops, This will allow me to use them in the heat of the summer, otherwise it gets well over 100 degrees inside for most of the summer, hot enough to kill anything growing inside. If I can roll up the side it doesn't get hot.

Besides the hoophouse we have one heated greenhouse. And that's what the newsletter story is about.

How quickly disaster strikes.

Sunday evening, several weeks ago, I was bored so I went to the movies. (no movie reviews here).

I left the farm at a little after 7 with the rain still falling and the temperature just below 50 degrees and came out of the theatre around 9:30 and it was still raining, Not as hard. and the temperature, well, I don't have a thermometer in the van, but it didn't seem that cold.

Or at least it didn't seem that cold until I started approaching the mountains, and our farm.

I could build up the suspense telling about how dangerous the interstate seemed with a nasty cross wind that made the van want to jump lanes and the pools of water on the road and the 18 wheel tractor trailers hauling down the highway at much to fast a speed.

But the real problem was when I pulled off in Haymarket.

Sitting at the light at the top of the ramp it seemed like we were going to have another deluge again like the inch of rain that dropped in less than an hour around noon.

It was coming down that hard.

Earlier in the day the creek rose up enough to go over the top of our driveway. One to two feet were up over the top down at the culvert. and for a while I was afraid the road was going to wash away, however it survived. When I built it all the rock and clay, boulders, gravel and even a layer of logs all of that capped with asphalt seemed to make in stable enough to hold back the several hundred thousand gallons of water that backed up at our driveway during a major rain storm.

And now it was pouring again.

As I turned on to Antioch, that's the road that turns in front of the Bull Run Mountains, the rain was turning to sleet.

And then snow.

And by the time I got to the boy scout camp it was all snow and sticking to the road.

That's when I started to worry.

Not about rain, or snow, but about the temperature.

Snow sticking on the road means freezing temperatures. and If it was cold enough down here for snow to stick to the ground what about up at the farm?

How cold was it up there? and more importantly, what was the temperature inside the greenhouse with a month's worth of seedlings growing inside?

I could just picture 25,000 baby plants dead from a frost.

I felt like speeding up but with the icy, narrow, curvy road...

I did up the speed just a little.

When I left home it was warm out. It had been a warm day and I hadn't been paying particular attention to the forecast and the thought of freezing temperatures was not on my mind.

I hadn't started up the greenhouse boiler.

But what about now?

I gave the van a little more gas but there was only so much time I could save by driving faster and with the curvy road I could only go so fast. Especially with the pavement already covered with snow.

Down around the vineyard someone had put up a set of those temporary Caution! High Water signs.

I slowed down and sure enough, right around the first bend the road was under water.

It was just over a foot deep and I waded the van through it and up the other side.

Now I was going up over Hopewell Pass.

This is where people slide off the road. Where vehicles like vans with the rear wheel drive get stuck with the wheels just spinning.

I was thinking what could I do if we lost the seedlings?

There was time to replace the tomatoes, the peppers and eggplant. but the early season crops.

I didn't want to think about it.

And now I was going up the steep side of the pass and trying to figure out how much time it would take if I had to park the van and walk in.

Forty minutes? 45? maybe more.

The tires started spinning and I let off the accelerator and got traction again.

And then I was up over the top and at the turn off to our gravel driveway. One mile to go.

The first part is down to where their once was a beaver pond until someone came by and shot them and left the bodies laying by the pond. That was ten years ago and now its been a meadow with a stream running through it and the remains of the old beaver dam.

I then the road goes up. First one short steep hill then the long part. The place where people get stuck and go off into the ditch.

While there was almost an inch of snow, I was the first one down the driveway and it hadn't been compacted into ice.

I make it up over top without any difficulties.

Now it was downhill until I turned to cross the creek. This is where it was flooded earlier in the day. My thoughts now were worrying about whether somehow the road had washed away. Its only half a mile to the house from there. Shorter to the greenhouse.

Water was still coming over the road but only a few inches. I drove right across and went up the driveway on the other side. In the distance I could see the lights from the greenhouse. I had left the florescent light on.

And then I was stopping the van right in the driveway below the greenhouse and running up the hill, along the path.

I opened the greenhouse door and...

It was still warmer inside than out, but not by much. I could shiver. I stuck my fingers into the soil of the nearest flat.

It didn't feel like ice.

Into the next, and the next and the next.

I didn't feel any ice but it was cold inside.

So I opened the door to the boiler and started putting in kindling, then some wadded up paper and then I lit it, closed the door and turned on the boiler fan.

It was only then that I took the time to look at the greenhouse thermometer. It wasn't real accurate but the gauge was hanging there right around 32. Maybe a little above.

I could still lose seedlings unless that boiler put heat on the seedlings soon. I didn't dare go down to the house and leave the seedlings alone.

I stood there in front of the boiler watching the gauge.

The water temperature was below 50.

I opened the door to take a look inside and smoke gushed out into my face and I closed it again.

It was another twenty minutes until the water temperature started to rise. 60, 70. 80 I turned on the water circulatory pump to send the heat out to the seedlings..

When the hot water in the 300 foot loops (there are six of them), came back from making its trip across the tables still warm I felt I was safe.

We weren't going to lose anything.

I still stayed up in the greenhouse for another half an hour, moving flats around and cleaning up but a disaster had been averted. No lost seedlings this time and next time I would think twice before leaving the seedlings home unattended.

Leigh

a farm fight

2010-05-06T23:27:00.004-05:00

Here I am at the farm. Upstairs in my office and, looking out the window, right there, in front of the house, I see two grown ups in a fight.

Not, unlike two pre-teen boys, they’ve been circling each other for a while now, and then suddenly one of them makes a quick move and strikes out at the other. And this is not like the pre-teens who aren't serious about fighting.

Both of these characters are serious, and quick. I see the movement, but I can't tell what was accomplished.

Was one of the two struck, hard. or was it just a feint. A maneuver to intimidate the other.

It was so quick. I can’t really tell what went on but for a second they are on the ground and then up on their feet again and circling.

I can’t believe it.

This might be something you see in the city, living in an apartment in maybe not the nicest neighborhood in a place with a lot of people walking up and down the sidewalk.

I know, I've seen this sort of thing before. Way back when, when, after I came home from Vietnam and got out of the army, I worked for part of a year as a medical tech up at Johns Hopkins and lived down in a less than nice part of the city. Baltimore.

Back then I saw things like this out my apartment window.

Or maybe out in the suburbs with pre-teen age boys. I saw some of that a couple decades back when I did my time teaching middle school.

But this is a farm and you can spend the day sitting on a boulder down where our road forks by the creek and not see a single person come walking by.

But before we give the who, what, where when and why of the fight lets go over the farm news first.

Farm News.

Egg shares are available. Susannah wrote back saying she does have thirty dozen eggs for us. If you do not have an egg share yet but want one send me an e-mail and I'll sign you up.

Weather.

Last year it started raining on April 15th and for all practical purposes it didn’t stop until June 15th (45 days of rain out of 60 days) Then we went into drought mode.

This year the rain isn’t particularly remarkable. For April we had just over an inch where for growing vegetables four inches a month is a desirable rainfall.

However, this year it’s the temperature that is out of whack.

This year we had more days of frost in the second half of April (April, 18th, 28th and 29th) than we had total in the preceding twelve years.

And we also set a record for the earliest 90 degree days (It hit 92 on April 6th and 90 on April 7th).

The number one rule of growing vegetables. You can not grow vegetables when the temperature drops below freezing.

Finally, this last week, the weather settled down enough to plant.

We now have the onions, potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, pac choi, cabbage and an interesting type of cauliflower, a Romanesco, in the ground.

Friday we hope to plant the tomatillos, ground cherries, Italian and Thai basil and celery.

And next week, as long as there’s no rain we hope to empty out the greenhouse and fill up the fields.

Another sign of spring. As you walk by the beehives you can smell the honey flow is on. You can smell the nectar being evaporated down into honey.

And I guess that’s enough about the farm and we can get back to the fight.

This was another case of running to get the camera.

This time I knew where the camera was.

Out on the driveway was our peacock and a stranger. Another male, fighting it out.

Two peacocks circling each other, their heads close down to the ground and then suddenly both birds up in the air, wings flapping talons reaching.

But we don’t have two peacocks.

And none of our neighbors have peacocks.

So where did the stranger come from?

We have one peahen. And one peacock.

And the peahen has not been seen for almost three weeks now. During the day she is not roaming the farm. And at night I don’t see her up in one of her usual trees, roosting.

She could have come to harm, however, I suspect, she is somewhere, off in the woods, sitting on a nest of two or possibly three eggs.

She’s done’ this before.

Four years ago she was gone for over a month and came back with a pair of young peafowl.

One of the pair disappeared during the first month but the other followed his mother around all summer long.

We really had no idea what sex the young bird might be but the next spring he blossomed into a young, immature peacock. And while his tail wasn’t anywhere near the length, or beauty of his father’s it was clear what he would grow into, given the time.

That second summer he kept close to his mother. Following her from one end of the farm to the other. At night sleeping high in a tree on a limb next to her. Always, it seemed, keeping her in sight.

The next year was different.

The next year his tail grew into that of a grown up. Still not as magestic as his father, but he didn’t seem to realize that and in the spring, with his newly grown out fan of feathers he spent his time trying to entice his mother (seeing that she was the only other female peafowl on the farm.

Of course she was not interested. Even though she had been a devoted mother and had taught him what she had to teach about the world, this year her interest in his development waned.

And not only that, but his father suddenly ‘changed his attitude towards his son from bland indifference to cold hostility.

And then one day the young male was gone.

And hadn’t been seen again... until Today?

Now, I don’t know who that other peacock is, I don’t know if it is, in fact, the missing son. or if it is just another rambling peacock, kicked out of his home territory, looking for a new home.

Actually, our first peacock, the one we had well over ten years ago came to us in just that way.

One day we were up on our mountain, hiking with some friends from the city, when one of the women looked up and said. “There’s a peacock.”

Where upon I immediately told her. ‘Where? You must be imagining it. There aren’t any peacocks around here.’

The next month we were out walking on our driveway when we heard that sound. The one, if you’ve ever heard it, you’ll know, means there’s a peacock around. A sort of cross between a strangled goose and an air raid siren.

It was our friends peacock.

Shortly after that we started feeding him. Grain left in a pan a hundred feet back into the forest.

And after he got accustomed to eating that. The pan was moved to 80 feet. Then 60. Forty. Twenty and finally at the edge of the forest underneath that old maple tree. up by the hoophouse.

That’s as close as we could get him down to our house.

No matter if we stopped feeding him in the woods but left a pan of feed on our driveway halfway down to the house he wouldn’t venture out of the forest.

A traumatic experience?

So how were we going to do it? How were we going to get a male peafowl to move down to our house?

Wenonah came up with the idea. “It’s simple. Let’s get him a girl. or two.”

And I did. I kept my eyes open for just such a thing in the classified ads and finally I found a park that wanted to get rid of its unruly peafowl.

They wouldn’t stay inside the park boundaries but insisted on roosting on the roofs of the neighboring houses.

So we acquired two tamed peahens and let them go in our chicken yard. Plenty of food, a sheltered henhouse if they wanted to go in out of the weather at night.

And no sooner had I let them out of the cage I used to transport them home from the park then our peacock came waltzing down to our house. Displaying his feathers just like he had always lived there.

And after a day or two, after he had thoroughly impressed the two peahens with his full set of tail feathers he attempted to move his new found love interest back into the woods.

And they followed. and stayed for a night. But the second night they were back in the chicken yard. these weren’t wild peahens. They were peahens accustomed to all the amenities of civilized existence.

Rouging it was fine for a night. but after that they preferred grain available on demand and a structure to keep the rain away at night.

It didn’t take the peacock long until he surrendered and followed the peahens down to the farm where he lived, spending the night on our roof until one afternoon a thunderstorm came over the mountain and he flew, followed by one peahen for the shelter of our roof.

Only that was the day the storms lightning choose to strike our house, blowing all the fuses in the box and burning the circuit in our phone.

We found the peahen and peacock behind the house. Lifeless. Their feathers scorched.

Tonight, as I was finishing up the newsletter, the last I saw of the peacocks, several hours ago, both peacocks are still at the farm.

One is up the hill roosting on top of the new hoophouse.

The other is up on a limb of the old locust tree by the herb garden. Roosting for the night.

What do you think?

Will both peacocks still be here when shareholders come out this Sunday for the farm open house?

What do you think?

Leigh

Bears in the Trees

2010-04-15T08:13:00.009-05:00

The other morning, out here on the farm, we had quite a show.

Not only did it get me and the dogs and a trio of bears running in all directions, it violated all sorts of truisms about mother bears and their cubs.

It started a little before 7:30 when a mother bear and her two cubs strolled out of the forest and down the road to our house.

Three bears probably looking for a healthy steak and potatoes type meal. Something like bee larva, fresh chicken, and a side of chicken feed (16% protein, according to the label).

(Not withstanding what Winny the Pooh might say, high protein bee larva ranks way above honey as a bears' preferred meal.

Bears, especially growing bears, have a real penchant for that high protein meal to be found in beehives.

Bee larva! A food even sensitive bears will risk the pain of bee stings for.

And everyone likes chicken. Even bears

So, it was with a filling spring meal in mind that a new mother bear took her cubs down the road to visit our farm house, only to be waylaid by our pair of gardian dogs Two Great Pyrenees who long ago were hired on for just such an eventuality.

Andorra and Marcus, our duo of working dogs, whose normal duties consists of keeping the deer out of the vegetables saw the bears at the electric fence surrounding the chicken pasture and came running and barking and the bears, rather than standing and fighting, turned, and ran up the nearest tree. A very tall and very wide Tulip Poplar.

The first I saw were three bears up a tree, treed, and our two dogs, at the foot of the trees barking and jumping as if trying to climb.

And my first thought was not for the dogs safety. Or the bears, or the chickens, or even mine.

My first thought was, 'Where's the camera?'

And I went running back into the house.

Over the past several years bears have become an ordinary event on our farm. For the forty-five years before that bears were seldom if ever seen in our valley. Wenonah, whose family were the only people living in our valley back in 1962, never saw a bear back here. And until recently the only sightings were of young males, kicked out of the area they'd grown up in, passing through on the way to someplace better.

But that has all changed.

The fifteen or so miles of abandoned farmland, woodlots and pastures to the east of us, over the past decade, has been turned into houses, lawns and 7-11's.

Our valley is now just about on the outside fringe of DC's suburbs.

To the east there is no longer bear habitat. Meaning?

We're it.

Since the bears can't go to the east, they stop here.

Leaving the trio, a young mother and her pair of hundred or so pound cubs, up a tree. They must have come down to the farm looking for food. Possibly, the mother was one of the cubs, a few years back, when another mother, she was much larger than this one, and her pair of cubs took apart seven of our beehives. One night devouring something like 400 pounds of honey between the three of them.

When I came running out of the house, camera in hand, the mother bear made up her mind and decided it was time to run.

Leaving her cubs behind, she jumped, landing on the far side of the tree from both Andorra and Marcus, and took off, full tilt, across the field, through the orchard, and to that stand of Poplars on the other side.

Leaving her cubs behind.

On her heels, though, was Marcus, he didn't hesitate, but barking and snapping, he followed at her heels.

And then she was up another tree.

And behind Marcus, one of the cubs, dropped out of the tree and followed.

And me, with my camera, followed all three, Mother, dog, cub, running with camera in hand only slowing occasionally to snap a picture, mostly of my feet, or the sky.

The other cub stayed up in the tree for a few minutes more, took that opportunity to drop to the ground and run. In the opposite direction.

Andorra, our ferocious female Great Pyrenees also took that opportunity and ran, not after the cub, or the mother, but ran in the other direction, down to the house and up the kitchen steps where she bravely defended the kitchen door.

And this is a good time to take a break for the farm news.

Spring Planting. we usually start planting after April 15th, which traditionally is the last frost for our area. Is it the last frost? Tuesday it was up in the 90's but Friday night the temperature dropped to 35. The weather forecast for the up-coming week has a couple nights with temperatures in the 30's. Whether the springs are getting warmer or not it still seems prudent to wait at least until the second half of April to start planting.

Planting What? The first vegetables in the ground are the cold weather plants. Broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, pac choi, and greens. We have two hoophouses already full of broccoli and greenhouse cucumbers. the cucumber vines are looking good. This coming week we'll be putting greenhouse tomatoes (tomatoes that don't need pollinating), and probably peppers and eggplants in the new hoophouses.

Hoophouses The new hoophouses are coming along fine. The 26 foot wide house has been up for a couple weeks, the 34 foot wide house has the hoops up but needs the cross supports connected. Hopefully, I'll finish those in the next day or two so we can put up the plastic by mid week.

Chicken tractors. Alan, a friend and great carpenter just rebuilt our chicken tractor on wheels. This morning I was up until almost 4 am catching chickens that had been living in the new hoophouse and putting them into the chicken tractor. The chickens hadn't volunteered to move so I was out doing a little relocation work. Grabbing roosting chickens from the hoophouse's cross supports and carrying them, two in each hand, over to the chicken tractor and putting them in the back door. 150 birds and not all going willingly. While I wasn't pecked, often, I don't recommend being clobbered by flapping wings as a recreational activity.

This morning, after minding my nicks and scratches I drove the chicken tractor to the field in front of the house which is covered with a strong stand of winter rye, surrounded the house with a portable chicken fence and opened the door.

It took coaxing to get the chickens to leave their new home.

Go figure.

Shares. We are approaching 90% full.

Share payments. It's time to start getting them in. yes. I gave out different dates. The people that recently signed up, not until later. However, I need to know that everyone who has signed up is actually getting a share. Please get in your payment so I don't have to worry about it.

Asparagus. this warm weather has confused it. We had a large batch for dinner last night. We have moved the geese and turkeys off the main asparagus bed so maybe next week, if the weather stays reasonably warm we'll invite people out to get asparagus.

And I'll stop there and get back to the bear, which we left up a tall popular.

I saw the mother scale the first large poplar she came to, scaling it like she was running up steps.

No hesitation, no bother.

And the cub, taking the mothers cue, ran up another large trunk, running up just like ti was nothing. No hesitation, it didn't even slow down. reached the trunk and went straight up without a bit of trouble.

This confused Marcus.

He stood in between the two trees, running back and forth barking. When he turned and ran at the arriving baby, the cub scaled up higher on the trunk and the mother started coming down.

And when he turned and ran barking toward the mother, the cub switched directions and dropped down the trunk and the mother went up, sort of like that contest you see at country carnivals. The one where mostly young men line up to show how strong they are. Paying to swing a mallet and knock a ball up the pole, trying to ring the bell at the top.

Instead of young men, we had Marcus at the bottom. But even without a hammer he was getting the bears going up and down so high I half expected to hear a bell ringing.

It was something to see, despite their size, the bears looked a lot surer footed on the trees than a squirrel.

And a whole lot faster.

Marcus turned toward the baby and the mother didn't just climbed down the tree. She dropped. With Marcus' back turned she landed on the ground and started running.

Running away from both of her cubs

It didn't take but a few moments before Marcus turned and seeing what was happening, forgetting the treed cub, took off after the disappearing mother.

This is when my camera aiming improved. Instead of half a dozen snapshots of my boots, I started aimed the camera at the mother and Marcus, barking and biting at her heals disappearing into the forest. .

In fact, I was standing there, almost under the tree occupied by the baby, trying to find dog and mother bear in the viewfinder, when right there, less than a dozen feet away, the cub dropped to the ground.

The cub must not have realized I was there because when it hit the ground and looked up, the look on its face was one of shock.

Just like mine.

It could have been a minute, or less than a second, but we stood staring at each other, I don't know what the cub was thinking, but me, I was thinking, 'That's a bigger bear than I thought. Is it going to think its bigger than I am and act accordingly?"

I don't know what happened to the pictures, but when I downloaded the disk from my camera the half a dozen or so photos I took while the two of us were transfixed weren't on the disk. It was like I hadn't taken them at all.

And the cub turned and ran.

Not in the direction its mother had taken, or in the direction its sibling had run off in. But in a third way. It it ran up the hill, and across our driveway, across that field and into the forest behind.

That's when I realized I was alone. All the barking and the running, and confusion. It was all over. Both cubs gone. Andorra hiding. and Marcus' barks quickly disappearing into the distance.

After that I went walking around the farm, looking to see if I could make sense out of what happened. that's when I found Andorra hiding behind the house.Marcus? In about half an hour I found him on the outside of the gate across our driveway, filthy and panting.

There was no sign of the cubs, the chickens seemed to be safe and sound, and the pictures?

When I finally got back into the house and downloaded the disk in the camera there were half a dozen shots of my feet, and my boots. A couple of the sky and tops of trees. A couple of Marcus panting on the outside of the gate and half a dozen of bears in the distance, climbing trees, dropping out of trees and running under trees being chased by a large white dog.

Leigh Hauter

Procrastination

2010-04-04T12:15:00.000-05:00

This afternoon I'm procrastinating. (I procrastinated in sending this out -- it was written Friday afternoon)

It's not that I haven't already put a day's worth of work. We started this morning up in the greenhouse around 7 am. The tables were full with about 50,000 seedlings so if we were going to get anything else in we had to reorganize.

The first thing we did was set up another six tables, each one holding 45 trays of seedlings (our trays hold 50 seedlings each) and then moved the seedlings that were up and growing from where they were (they were on heated tables) to the new ones (unheated).

This way we have room to start another 270 trays where the seeds will have an ideal environment for germination and early growth (we keep the new flat temperature at about 80 degrees).

And then there was collecting eggs (half a dozen dozen this early in the day), followed by a couple hours of putting together the pieces on the new 34 by 96 foot hoophouse. then laying out and connecting new pipe for the water system and finally sitting up here in the office doing some paperwork (which turned in to writing a newsletter).

And I foregot the 1500 pound pond/reservoir liner that just arrived along with its traveling mate, the smaller (500 pounds) goose pond liner.

Lifting a roll of rubber matting weighing almost a ton and moving it from the far end of a truck trailer out the back door is an interesting project. The driver said it was loaded with a forklift that drove into the trailer and deposited it.

We don't have a forklift, or a loading ramp designed for driving into the back of truck trailers. In fact the truck can't navigate the road to our farm so we ended up meeting him at the end of our road, backing the truck up to the door, putting one end of a chain around the roll of liner and the other to the tow bar on our truck and driving off.

Sort of...

Actually we pulled the liner out so it was hanging half way out the door of the trailer, then we backed the truck up underneath the liner and pushing and pulling managed to get it the rest of the way out the door and on to the truck (where it hung over the tailgate.

by now several of our neighbors were lined up (probably cursing under their breath) waiting for us to get out of their way.

Right now the roll of liner is on the ground beside the reservoir waiting for enough people to come out to help roll it out and put it in the pond.

The lighter goose pond liner, (when the bulldozer was here last week flattening a site for the new hoophouse (this is 4 feet wider than our large greenhouse) we finally gave in to our guilt of our weeder geese bathing in a Toys R US kiddy pool and had the operator dig out a real pond.

But so much for that. I was talking about was procrastinating which means putting off dealing with the thirty pounds of honey bees.

The story is that yesterday, an e-mail arrived with the message "come pick up your bees."

A beekeeper friend of mine had just returned from Georgia. He'd driven his empty flatbed truck down there several days ago.

And had returned with it full of bees. Packages of bees. Three pound packages of bees, each package with one queen.

For those of you who don't keep bees, or don't have a family member who keeps bees. Or hasn't ever helped out introducing a new package to its new home, a bee package, is a wire and plywood cage.

Sort of a box with the top and bottom made out of screen wire.

Cut into one of the plywood sides is a round hole that a quart can has been inserted into. The can is full of sugar water and the other end. The end surrounded by bees, has several holes poked in it. Holes big enough for the sugar water to slowly leak out and for the bees to hungrily drink it up.

And inside this cage, or package, are three pounds of bees (honey bees are sold by the pound). And one queen bee separated from the other bees by in her own little cage (a small version of the 3 pound cage).

So yesterday afternoon, we're talking Thursday afternoon, I took Wenonah's commuting car, a Prius and drove the 40 miles to pick up the bees, and putting down the back seat, loaded 30 pounds of bees divided in ten packages into the back.

And then drove back to the farm.

It was already six when I got back to the farm and I would have left the bees right there until the morning only I was thinking about Wenonah wanting to take the car to work in the morning and her thoughts on sharing the car with 30 pounds of bees.

I quickly got into my bee suit (white shirt and vail), rolled down the car windows, (onthe way some several hundred bees had escaped from their cages) opened the hatchback, the doors and started taking the packages of bees out of the car and hurriedly carrying them across the herb garden to their waiting hive boxes (sort of a house before someone moves into it and makes it a home).

And once there, pulling out the can of sugar water and queen cage and pouring the bees from each package into their new home.

Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to complete the job.

While the sun officially sets at something like 7:30 I was still out there running back and forth in the twilight at around eight.

I didn't pull the cork on the queen cage (for those of you not in the know, a queen cage comes with two corks. One cork leads directly into the queens cell where her and a half dozen hand maidens are imprisoned and the other opens to a plug of soft sugar candy).

When releasing the queen you pull the plug on the candy. This way the three pounds of bees on the outside slowly free the queen by eating the candy.

And the other thing I didn't have time to do was feed the bees.

Remember, this package of bees are being put into an empty hive. Sort of like 10,000 people being dropped off into an empty town.

The buildings are there but the shelves are bare.

There aren't any groceries on the grocery store selves. No CSA's coming in from the country with van's full of produce. And while the restaurants have their cooks, waiters and dishwashers, there is nothing for them to cook.

The truth is, if someone doesn't do something and soon people are going to get hungry. There's a need for an emergency feeding program. A bread line until the town can get up on its feet and running.

That's where I come in.

A sugar water bread line (one part sugar to one part water) and through one of several types of bee feeders put this concoction inside the new bee town/hive.

Last night I ran out of daylight. And while around midnight I did mix up the sugar water (using buckets in the bathtub) I still need to go back through the ten new hives, uncork the queens and feed the bees.

And I should have done that at first light this morning.

But I didn't.

So that's what I mean by procrastinating. And here I am writing a newsletter instead.

And while we're at it, here's the farm news.

Greetings to all of the new shareholders. We are approaching the 85% full mark. Our shareholder list should be filling up in the next several weeks. If you want to sign up and haven't yet its time.

Questions Answered. This section of the webpage has been recently rewritten with an idea of being brutally honest about the true nature of a CSA. Going with our new motto, 'A CSA is not for everyone'. we try to make it clear to those whose sole motivation for joining a CSA is to find a bargain or to get a better type of supermarket vegetable section they will be disappointed.

By reading this section before they join up we are hoping to weed out the people that are not going to be happy with a CSA before they join one.

We also make it clear that a CSA (and particularly our CSA) provides the freshest vegetables anyone can get outside of growing them in their own garden. But that's a lot different than going into the store and buying a tomato that was harvested three weeks ago in a greenhouse 2000 miles away. Or a orange bell pepper that grew in Sicily. Or strawberries from Mexico.

Eggs. We will have free eggs for subscribers all through April. Not this weekend (my weekend is full of family visits, dinners and whatnots) but next weekend we'll have an open house -- I'll send out details during the middle of next week - expect the details about April 6th or 7th. I'll even give out free eggs to non members who come out and help with the pondliner.

Asparagus. Two weekend's from now the asparagus should start appearing and we'll do a sort of asparagus pick your own, Or maybe Asparagus in exchange for picking up rocks. (anyone who has been out knows we do a great job of growing rocks)

Greens. And then the weekend after that hopefully, the greens will start to ripen in one of the hoophouses. (yes, salad greens in exchange for rock picking).

Seedling give away. We haven't set a date yet but it will be in the newsletters.

Growing Season. Up here on the side of the mountain we're about a week behind you down on the flat, but our last frost is generally around mid April and we plan to start planting the broccoli and cauliflower then. Right now our seedlings are doing very well.

(last year we lost most of our broccoli and cauliflower seedlings that night in early March when the temperature dropped into the single digits and the water feeding the greenhouse boiler froze).

This year all of our seedlings are coming along just fine. Many of them have never looked so fine. (we switched our fertilizer to a fish and seaweed mix)

Helping out. If there is anyone out there that wants to help put up a hoophouse, play with the bees, collect eggs, check anti deer fence and a hundred and one other chores and has free time during the week, I would love your help.

But right now I need to stop procrastinating. Those bees our hungry and the queens are anxious to get down to work (laying eggs).

Leigh

peeps and hoos

2010-03-24T22:58:00.001-05:00

One of my neighbors believes you can tell winter is over and we've seen the last frost when the whippoorwills start singing.

For my part, back when the stone ringed pond was still in our front yard, I said you could tell the last frost had passed when you heard the toads, sometimes hundreds of them, had come out of the forest and were at the pond singing and swimming and having a great old time.

I said you could also tell just how warm it was going to be by how many tadpole eggs they left behind the next day.

But that pond has been gone for a few years now, filled in and covered with grass.

And the new pond, built by my stone mason brother-in-law, is in another place, out by the old pear tree, and instead of being ringed by a single layer of mountain stone is surrounded by a two foot stone battlement that toads could only breach with siege engines and battering rams.

No longer is there a spring toad ta-do. (at least, not one going on in our front yard).

Now, I have to rely on the less reliable but noisier peeps to tell me if the last frost has come and gone.

So that said, Sunday night I was out back on the deck when I heard the voices, or is that, 'the sound' of something like ten thousands of those tiny frogs coming from several hundred yards below the house.

After listening for a while, I decided the singing was coming from off in the direction of the old spring house.

It's since fallen down, but, when Wenonah was a little girl, she had the chore of going down with her buckets and filling them with the spring water that came out pipe from the spring house.

Now, the stone spring house has fallen down, the pipes gone and the water has returned to just coming out of the ground and forming a pool surrounded by among other plants; ferns, ginseng, skunk cabbages, lady slippers and Virginia creeper.

On the deck, I listened to the loud sound of the tiny frogs singing and dancing and doing whatever it is that little frogs do in the spring.

This is a place now, where, on spring evenings, if you quietly walk up the trail you will hear a wild chorus of hundreds of peeps.

Along with a deep throated bullfrog or two..

And in the pond, some years you can see hundreds of goldfish in the dark shallows.

Earlier that evening, Wenonah and I had been out walking and as we approached the pond a brown tailed hawk with its feet almost in the water looked up, and in alarm flew off.

With the beating of his wings the peeps stopped singing.

Everything had gone from chaotic to quite. Silent.

We stood there on the bank at almost the same spot where the hawk had been and looking into the shallows counted maybe two or three dozen goldfish.

I never heard of hawks fishing for gold fish. Maybe it was a mouse or a vole he was after. Anyway, I figured this winter's storms, the runoff from the three foot snow and the heavy rain that followed had washed most of the goldfish downstream where if they were lucky, they found a deep hole (or a shallow pond).

But, more likely, had become part of a meal for a fishing raccoon, a possum, or one those wayward herons we see occasionally along the stream bed.

And speaking of raccoons. Remember last week, with the eyes staring out of the dark at the chickens?

It couldn't have been much more than the next day that the fence was left off one night and in the morning, there were three dead chickens. Two mostly eaten and one still warm, near the fence.

Whichever culprit was guilty of the murders knew that the fence was off and used the event to knock down enough fence to get inside and do its dirty work.

Later, I found a hole dug under the fence, deep enough for something like a skunk to crawl on its belly and escape touching the lowest electric wire.

I filled in the hole with rocks and we plan on moving the chickens off of the asparagus bed this week.

Its time, anyway, for the asparagus to start coming up. We should be having shareholders out for an asparagus picking event soon.

Other farm news..

Shares? We are getting closer. At the current rate we will have openings for several more weeks and then will be putting people on a waiting list.

Seedlings. We have just about filled up the greenhouse with seedlings. That's close to 70,000. A new seeding device/machine came last week that makes seeding flats a lot faster. Instead of taking several minutes to put seeds into one flat, with the new seeder we can seed 3 trays a minute. It has sure taken a lot of tedium out of starting seeds.

Hoophouses. one of the two new hoophouses (the 26 ft wide by 96 ft long) is up. We put the plastic on today.

Next week we'll start putting up the other new hoop (34 X 96). If you have time and want to help you are invited out. E-mail me first.

Planting in the hoops. And in the next several days we'll be planting cucumbers in one of the smaller 16 x 96) of the hoops. We have started lettuce in the greenhouse and will be transplanting it soon. This means there will be early cucumbers and lettuce for shareholders who want to come out and pick their own in, probably, May .

And the four hoops that were taken down under the snow? How about a barn raising? I was thinking about asking people to come out, not this week, or Easter, but the weekend after that, how about people coming out to take apart the damaged hoophouses so I can bend back the pipes the way they should and put it back together again. That will probably be when the asparagus starts ripening and we'll give asparagus to all helpers.

And I wanted to tell you about the owls. particularly the owls that go hoo - hoo but we've run out of space. Maybe next week.

Leigh

signing up for 2010

2010-02-03T11:56:00.002-05:00

Just in case you live in the Washington DC area and are interested in joining our CSA for the 2010 season.

we are now taking new members.

For information on how to sign up go to our webpage ---www.bullrunfarm.com.

From there you will get more information than you probably want, but it also has a page on how to sign up

Thanks,

Leigh

Bear in the Winter

2010-02-03T11:54:00.001-05:00

Last Saturday evening here on the farm it was 12 degrees and snowing.

And just two days before it was warm enough, in the mid-50's, that while I was at the upper spring, cleaning out the in-take to the water pipe that diverts water down to the greenhouse, a large black bear came along, at first inelegantly making a racket as it stomped through the brush and leaves and then stopped just a few paces from stepping on me.

What happened was this. Being a warm day, I decided to get the water flowing from the upper spring while the water wasn't frozen.

I spent the morning following the pipe up the mountain from the greenhouse, through the woods, moving limbs and trees that had fallen on the pipe during the winter, and finally working my way up to the spring where I was busy cleaning out the water catch basin where spring water was diverted to the pipe.

That's when I heard it. Something coming through the woods. Something making a lot of noise.

My first thought, its a human. Maybe someone hiking along the trail on the ridge and had decided, for whatever reason, to bushwhack off the trail, and make their way down to the valley.

That's when I stood up.

Down in the spring I didn't have much of view around me. And I couldn't tell which direction the sound had been coming from. Anyway, the stomping, by then, had stopped.

If you have taken the trail up from our house, the trail that starts behind the greenhouse, it goes that way.

I looked along the trail as it meanders its way up towards the mountain top.

Nothing.

Then I looked down the trail. From there you can't see it, the forest is too thick, but the greenhouse is only a couple thousand feet away.

Nothing.

And then I had a feeling something was looking at me and I looked up above me, on the mound of rocks and fallen trees where the spring bubbled out of the ground.

And standing there, on top of the mound, above the spring, not ten feet away, was a large, gaunt, black bear.

I don't know if it was looking at me or not.

Which reminds me of why I was up there..

Near disasters.

Or maybe it was a middling size one, what ever way you judge disasters, like occurred last year almost this time -- March 3rd I think it was--- when the outside temperature quickly dropped into the single digits and the water coming from the uppper spring stopped flowing and the pipe froze solid causing the greenhouse boiler to shut down. That disaster cost us thousands of cabbage, broccoli, pac choi, cauliflower a lot of our sweet peppers and many other seedlings. Which was one of half a dozen unforeseens causing us a really stressful June.

But let's go back to the bear.

I know from experience that bears periodically break their winter hibernation

One winter I was hiking a trail in the mountains above Charlottesville, and several miles into the hike, I was by myself, I turned a bend and came up on a ford over a creek.

With a bear on the other side.

We stared at each other for a dozen seconds and for a moment I thought she was about to jump across the creek and chase me back down the mountain.

Fortunately, instead, she turned and, leaving the trail, follow the water upstream.
I waited until I could no longer hear her and then quickly splashed across the water and hurried up the trail. Several hours, on the way back down from Skyline Drive the only sign of the bear were her tracks in the snow).

(I just looked bear hibernation up in Wikapedia and read that bears actually don't officially hibernate, but they go for what sounds like a really long nap).

Anyway, if what bears do is anything like honey bees (during cold months honeybees hunker down into a tight ball, the ones on the outside moving towards the middle to get warm and the ones nice and toasty in the middle getting shoved to the outside). However, on warm days (over 50 degrees) they break the ball up, take the trash and garbage out, haul in water and take a look see if there's any food about. Obviously, the more warm days in a winter the more stored food it takes to keep a beehive hive alive.

Bears must be sort of like that too.

Last week it was warm and the bear decided for whatever reason to climb out of its hollow tree (I just had a horrible thought, I've been up in the woods cutting down dead trees for firewood. Dozens of dead trees. Some of them, turning out to be hollow on the inside. Change of subject).

or wherever it was staying for the winter. And was acting sort of like I do when I wake up, stomping around, making a lot of noise, and came up on that mound getting ready to slide down the other side.

Only I was standing there.

It stopped and looked down at me. Both of us staring at each other. Until, like that bear in Charlottesville, it decided it had better things to do than to worry me.

It took me a few tens of seconds to move. I could hear the bear moving off, doing more stomping through the leaves, breaking dead fallen limbs, and then covering more and more distance until there was silence.

I climbed up on the mound but there was nothing to see. An empty forest that was quiet, almost completely silent.

And then a squirrel, running lightly through the leaves jumped up the side of a tree, scurried up the trunk and then around to the far side. Disappearing from sight.

Off in the distance, four miles away, I could hear the traffic on the interstate.

I looked around for a while before climbing back down to the spring and began hooking up the pipe to the intake. Thinking about where the bear was spending the winter before climbing back up the mound again. Looking around and then climbing back down and getting back to work one more time.

Leigh

forty-one years ago

2009-09-08T20:57:00.002-05:00

Forty-one years ago today, I was sitting up on a hillside looking down on a village of thatched huts and rice fields. Several buffalo were being worked out in the rice by a pair of pre-teenage boys.

A cart loaded down with hay being pulled by a donkey came down the road just below the outpost.

I know this because back then I was 18 years old, a medic on a five soldier advisory team living with a couple dozen Vietnamese popular force soldiers (sort of like national guard) , and my job, besides doing those things that you might expect a combat medic to do, was writing down in a journal what happened to the advisory team. I had been stuck with keeping the team log by the team's leader, a twenty-four year old Lieutenant, and I wasn't at all happy about it.

The reason why I was sitting up on the hillside, actually on the berm that surrounded our little outpost, was I was a week behind with entrees in the log and as punishment, the Lieutenant had left me behind to catch up while the other team members drove off to the nearest American base camp for a warm Sunday midday meal.

That's sort of like the farm newsletter.

I'm at least a week (or is it a month) behind and I need to catch up on reporting what's been going on out here on the farm. And what's been going on here is what reminded me of that time forty-one years ago.

What's been happening here is a whole string of early morning attacks. Small attacks, sort of like hit and run affairs. a prime example is what happened just last night.

It must have been about two AM. (for the past several thousand years, I understand, that's when those sort of things most often happen, just as most everyone has fallen into a deep sleep.

They came from the south.

From where the forest is closest to the wire that protects the chicken pasture. No one saw them coming, they (or was it a she) just sort of crept up, and some how, got through the wire and before you knew it, there was screams and howls. The dogs had been up around the greenhouse, A bear has been, lately, knocking down the fence and climbing into the berry patch, and they must have thought he was lurking around, waiting for a chance to break in, again, and finish off the remains of the black berries.

But when the hens started screaming they came running and barking.

I had just gone to bed and hadn't really settled into a deep sleep and with the first scream was out of bed and downstairs, spotlight in hand.

Outside the window the dogs came tearing by, turning the corner of the house and heading toward the chicken pasture.

I jumped into my boots and was out the door.

But, of course, it was too late.

I didn't find the body until this morning, mostly eaten with feathers spread across one end of the chicken pasture to the other.

It wasn't until this morning that I found the body, the remains of a barred rock rooster. Whoever got him had managed to eat most of him, The breasts, legs and thighs were gone.

Sort of like after a family dinner.

I can only speculate what it was that managed to break in but after this happened twice last week I moved a camera down by the woods.

When I check the disc we'll know.

A fox? (or bobcat or coyote or even a owl). Something large enough to eat an entire chicken in just a few minutes.

Something steely minded enough to go through an electric fence.

But before we think about it, lets go through some farm news.

Tomatoes . After I wrote the last newsletter proclaiming the tomato blight had not affected most of our tomato crop it spread to our main crop and began to kill the plants. Late blight does not effect tomatoes but it does quickly kill tomato plants. This means that our tomato crop will be winding down shortly.

Drought. We're really behind on the rain again. I know all of you living in the city have been getting storms but they've almost all missed us out on the farm. For August we got a grand total of 2.06 inches and most of that fell in the first week of the month. Meaning? Less than an inch of rain has fallen out here in the last 30 days.

Spring. And to make matters worst someone visited our spring, the one up in the woods, and dismantled it.

Over the past week I was wondering why the amount of water that was coming down from the spring had dropped, almost in half. Instead of twenty gallons a minute we were getting somewhere around ten.

My first thought was the cause was the drought. It's been so dry I was afraid the spring was drying up. Maybe all of the development to the east of us was effecting the ground water.

So, finally, Friday, I walked up to the spring and found a mess.

My guess is, it was either a rather malicious bear or some simple human was hiking through the woods and came across the spring, wondering what this was with a four inch pipe coming from under a heavy rubber sheet they pulled the rubber off and threw it aside and then, finding large flat stones stacked up in a structure, pulled these away to find out what was under neath.

And then seeing the spring, they decided to pull up some of the stone that went into making the dam that collected the water that went into the pipe.

Oh well. if its not one thing its another. It's time, if you know one, to dust off your dancing shoes and give your favorite rain dance a working out.

Leigh

Rules for Vine Ripened Tomatoes

2009-08-13T00:47:00.003-05:00

Here's a once upon a time story about tomatoes.

As in:

Once upon a time, many, many years ago, I delivered vegetables to offices. Environmental organizations, lobby shops, law firms, public interest groups, government offices, even a real estate outfit or two.

The first year I did this it only took five shareholders to rate a delivery. However, by the time I stopped, still a long time ago, the requirement was twenty shareholders at an office to get a delivery.

How it would work is this: I would drive the farm truck up to the alley next to, say, a K Street law firm. (this is before the delivery van). People, mostly paralegals and legal secretaries dressed to the nines would descend the elevator from the firm's suite and converge on the alley where I carefully arrayed the vegetable boxes.

Everyone would quickly collect their (and their boss's) share and then, after five or ten minutes, I would get back into the truck and drive off to the next office.

Sometimes I would deliver to six or maybe eight offices in an afternoon.

But I've strayed somewhat off the topic. What I wanted to talk about is tomatoes.

Hundreds, if not thousands of tomatoes.

I remember the last year of delivering to offices, this is when it took twenty people signing up to get an office delivery. That year I was delivering to another law firm.

Not your regular law firm. This one was a spin off from and environmental organization. I had been delivering to them for two years. The first year we had a super abundant tomato crop.

The next, a scarcity.

The first year I would set up and during August put out 200 tomatoes for the 20 staff and attorneys shareholders.

The tomatoes that year, I remember, were beautiful. Large and plump and just brimming with juicy tomato meat. Yum!

I would put out four boxes of brandywines, big beef, Early Girls, Celebrities, Mortgage Lifters and another dozen or so varieties.

And the shareholders would go through the boxes and pick their selection for the day.

There was this one attorney. I remember her clearly because she was the only attorney that came down to select her own share (all the other attorneys sent someone in their stead.

She was also the one who felt it her duty to squeeze and pinch just about each and every tomato.

When she started the tomatoes were beautiful, perfect, tasty.

I think mouthwatering is the word.

And when she finished selecting her share, there would be an entire box of tomato soup.

Tomato juice seeping on the ground.

Wet tomatoes with ruptures.

Sticky tomatoes with splits, Bruises. Gashes.

Ugly tomatoes that no one would want to eat. (except for the pigs).

Did I mention the pigs? That year, the first thing I'd do when I got back to the farm from vegetable deliveries is stop by the hog pasture.

Back then we kept a couple of pigs and when I got home from vegetable deliveries the pigs would come running across their pasture. It was a game of who could get to the feeding trough first.

I'd pour the damaged vegetables into the trough and the first pig there would climb into the trough. Actually climb on top of the vegetables and lay down. Spreading out its body to keep the tomatoes all to itself. (and you might wonder how the name pig acquired the connotations its come to have)?

But I've got off the subject again. We were talking about tomatoes.

Squished tomatoes.

That's when I started picking 25% more tomatoes than I intended to give out. Meaning? out of every 100 beautiful tomatoes picked in the morning, the selfish pig would be laying on 25 of them in the evening.

Which was doable in years of abundance.

But in years of scarcity it wasn't acceptable.

And the next year was one of those years.

The next year, because of the weather, the damage from deer, tomato blights, turtles (have I told you about the turtle prison? The prison we set up for felonious turtles?)

The next year we couldn't afford to throw away a fourth of our meager tomato crop.

The next year I had to make every tomato count, so instead of letting shareholders pick through the boxes, I handed out the tomatoes.

And what did I discover?

Well, while you give that some thought, here's some bits and pieces to dwell on.

First, an important book.

Let's see hands on this one. How many of you have read An Omnivore's Dilemma? Here's one just as important if not more so. David Kessler's The End of Overeating. Kessler does an excellent job of looking at our commercial food system.

And since we're reading, here's a New York Times op-ed piece on tomatoes

'You Say Tomato I say Agricultural Disaster'
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/opinion/09barber.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

He's not just whistling in the dark either. One of the orchards I get the fruit share from grows tomatoes to supplement the things in his stand. Last week when I went out and picked up a dozen bushels 400 or so of his tomato plants were showing signs of blight.

When I went by yesterday, those plants were dead. The leaves were brown and crispy. The plants were dead with sorry looking tomatoes fallen on the ground.

And speaking of tomatoes here's a fact for you. Depending on the season, something like 10% of our countries summer tomatoes are grown out on the Delmava Peninsula.
Particularly the Va part.

If it wasn't for late blight this is about the time of year if you make the drive south from Salisbury towards the Bay Bridge/Tunnel that you would see trailer loads of tomatoes going up and down highway 13.

These are the same sort of trailers used to haul gravel. Only, instead of rocks on the bottom of the load these have tomatoes.

Green tomatoes.

Green tomatoes with a dozen tons of other green tomatoes on top of it.

The question is, How do they do that, haul tomatoes like they were gravel without the bottom ones turning to tomato soup?

The answer is really pretty simple.

Tomatoes picked green are pretty much like rocks. They don't have to be treated much different than gravel. And that's just fine for the corporate food system when itws confronted with the problem of shipping a tomato half way around the world.

Vine ripened tomatoes pretty much can't stand being picked and carried in from the back yard without bruising.

Green tomatoes don't bruise.

They can bounce and bump and take all sorts of abuse but for several weeks they will just sit there gradually turning from green to red until after about two weeks they have turned red and look absolutely beautiful.

Only they aren't.

These tomatoes that are picked green will never be like the one that's grown in the back yard.

That's why when you see them on your grocery store shelf looking all red and delicous, that's why you can pick them up and pinch and squeeze them. It's not going to do them any harm.

In there heart of hearts they are still going to be that rock of a tomato. And when you pinch it and detect that glimmer of softness what you're feeling isn't ripeness but the first signs that the thing is starting to rot.

It's turning mushy inside.

There's an easy test.

How do you tell the diffence between a tomato that's vine ripened and one that was picked green and allowed to turn red in a shipping box.

Take a knife to both of them. When you cut into your average vine ripened slicer its going to drip juice.

One picked green isn't going to have much juice inside. That's because it was picked before it took on much water. Before it started getting tasty.

But, of course, that's what the commercial food system needs. Not taste, who cares about taste? That's way down on the list of desired characteristics. What they need is a tomato that can be shipped long distances and when they get there, they need tomatoes that are going to look good when they finally get to wherever they are going.

And the magic trade off is taste. Its and either/or. Either taste or the ability to ship. You can't have both.

It can be shipped, but it will never be tasty.

And that's really what's going on with our environmental lawyer.

She's wanting to have them both. Somewhere along the line she thought she could get it to and being dedicated with our tomatoes she was only carrying out what she practiced at the grocery store tomato bin.

Squeeze and squeeze and hope against hope that somewhere in all of those tomatoes ios going to be one that's soft and, maybe, tasty.

Only, she was wasting her time. and ruining our tomatoes Maybe that store bought tomato can turn soft, but it can never ever turn tasty.

Tomatoes picked green haven't yet taken on enough water to ever turn tasty.

You can squeeze them to your hearts content and the only thing you are going to find out is whether or not the tomato has turned soft.

That, though, isn't the issue, with vine ripened tomatoes. With vine ripened, if they are red, they are, of course, soft. They are full of juice. And if you squeeze it what you are doing is ruining it.

Its as simple as that.

If you squeeze a vine ripened tomato you damage it. Unlike what you run in to in a grocery store vegetables picked fresh, particularly tomatoes but in fact most vegetables, are delicate objects. The more they are touched, the more they are damaged.

So That's why I get so upset with people riffling through the tomato bins, (tomatillo, ground cherry, peach, plum and another dozen vegetables) Each time a piece of ripened fruit is touched it is harmed. its damaged. Its diminished.

So, the simple solution is touch vegetables as little as possible.

If you need to squeeze something, squeeze a rock, or a tomato that was picked green (one of those things found in grocery stores).

That's why we have that rule. No handling the tomatoes. You aren't going to learn anything by doing it. I wouldn't have picked the tomato and offered it in the share if it wasn't ripe, or close to it If you handle it, you damage it. No one wants to eat damaged vegetables).

So our CSA rule is simple. Look, don't touch.

If you pick it up, its yours.

If after picking it up you find that its damaged, put it in the squished box. If its not that squished, in fact if its still edible, or part of it is. keep it. Eat the good part, just don't count it against the number of tomatoes in your share.

The rule is simple, even if it does go against the grocery store way of thinking.

The same rule applies to all fresh, delicate fruit. And even some that aren't so delicate. treating vegetables like they are rocks or baseballs. pens, paperclips, ping pong balls, damages them. Makes them so no one else wants to eat them either.

Which brings us, of course, back around to our favorite lawyer of example and the year of scarcity.

What happened is I started personally distributing the tomatoes. Instead of letting people pick through the boxes I would hand out the tomatoes.

Less handling meant less damage. Less damage meant more tomatoes for everyone (except the pigs).

And the pigs? Well, when I got back to the farm I'd reach into the back of the truck, and instead of several hundred squished tomatoes there would be half a dozen.

Hardly enough to pour into the trough.

So what I'd do is wait for both pigs to get up to the fence and I'd throw out one tomato to the really piggish pig and then one to the less of a pig, pig.

Then, before the pig, pig could swallow hers and run over and take the one the other was eating, I'd throw her another tomato. In the end, pretty much dividing equally the limited supply of tomatoes.

And as I think about it it seems there's a moral hidden in there somewhere, or at least a saying, an epigram maybe?

Maybe a slogan that could have gone on one of those world war two posters.

What do you think?

Leigh

looking out the window

2009-04-22T23:09:00.001-05:00

Out my window is a bluebird box and this morning there are bluebirds.

Flying back and forth.

Into the box.…

and then out again.

And then less than a minute passes and she’s (he?) is back again.

And only spending dozens of seconds inside before leaving once again.

I was wondering, ‘isn’t it early for chicks (if that is what baby bluebirds are called). And not only early. How is she managing to capture a steady supply of food so quickly.

I mean, I know that bluebirds aren’t much interested in grains.

Is there some place where she is digging up something like a mealy bug.? Some place right around the bird house?

And that’s when I saw, she wasn’t carrying food at all. It wasn’t hungry chicks she was so busy feeding.

It was building her nest.

She was flying back and forth, just as quick as she could, from a pile of straw that I had left at the base of a lilac.

Flying from the straw to the nest box and back to the lilac bush and the straw once again.

Picking up several pieces of straw and flying back to the box.

And now that I’m writing about it, she’s stopped building the nest, for the time being, and instead, perched up on the tree, a pecan I planted in the front yard the first year I started farming our CSA, is a blue jay.

I only have bad thoughts for blue jays.

Another story and another nest. It was outside of a side door. What? a cat bird, I think, (whatever sort of bird it is that will attack your cat in defense of its babies), had built the nest and not only would it dive bomb our cats when they went outside but occasionally would swoop down on people pecking them on the top of the head and then quickly flying away.

I remember that nest clearly though it was decades ago. And I remember watching it one day when the parents were away gathering food for the babies when a blue jay suddenly appeared, landed on the edge of the nest, grabbed one of the young and in seconds killed it and flew off with the body, possibly to feed its own young, hanging from its beak.

Right now the sun is shinning but its been raining off and on for almost four days now. We’re desperately waiting for it to dry up enough to continue planting.

Those almost 20,000 onion and leek seedlings we have waiting to go in the ground won’t wait much longer. Already they are starting to dry out. Even if we put them in our two storage refrigerators this sitting around isn't good for them.

Let’s hope the rain stops and the ground dries enough for us to get back to planting.

Other Farm news?

Asparagus. The Asparagus is coming up. In the past it has been first come first help yourself. this year we’ll do it differently. If you want to come out and cut your own asparagus first come out and help weed the asparagus bed. Besides the asparagus coming up the weeds are also growing. That and picking up the new rocks. (rocks also grow very well on our farm) if you want asparagus first half an hour of laboring in the asparagus bed. then we’ll divide up the asparagus.

Eggs. We are floating in eggs. For the next month these are still free to shareholders. Also, for the next month I’m going to be giving the excess eggs to a local food bank. If you want to contact your food bank and arrange dropping off our eggs, that works too.

Seedling day at the farm. For the past several years we have given our excess seedlings to the shareholders. That will be the case again this year only I’m not sure yet which week. It depends on how soon the ground dries out and how soon we can plant. Hopefully the weekend of May 9th or maybe the 16th. I will let you know.

Open Shares? We now have some openings. Also we’re adding several dozen more egg shares, if you are interested e-mail me.

Right now I’m in the process of finding tote bags for this year. The ones we have given out for the past several years (a real nice heavy duty reinforced cotton canvas bag with pockets) is no longer being manufactured. I've been shopping for a new one however it is amazing how many really cheap totes are out there. My motto though is cheap is, well, cheap. I’ve found that cheap not only means cheap in tote bags but it definitely means that for farm equipment. The number of times I've tried to save a few hundred (or thousand) dollars, only to be stuck with a piece of twisted metal after using it a few times.

attack chicken

2009-04-22T23:06:00.002-05:00

I'm really late with this newsletter but its probably because of the attack I suffered from a ferocious farm animal.

An attack chicken!

How about this for the week's headline. Mad Mother Hen attack's Farmer!

And, yes, it was upsetting. And yes, it did hurt, and yes, if she hadn't had a little chick looking up to her with rapt admiration and attention she might very well have earned herself a future as the centerpiece in a formal dinner.

And it might still have happened, only, only I don't much like to pluck chickens (and Wenonah is generally pretty small about it when it comes to plucking fowl.

Not only did the hen in question jump out of no where, wings flapping and beak pecking, but when I stepped back in shock. Yes with blood dripping from the wound she inflicted on my hand, but when I stood back in shock she came at me again, wings flapping, and this time aiming her vicious beck at my eyes.

I side stepped the second attack and, standing there there in utter amazement thought. "Is this what motherhood does to you? Turns a, by all indications, rational female into a raving lunatic."

All in the defense of a lone child (or in this case a chick).

And remember. I was innocent. This was all a misunderstanding. An unprovoked, uninitiated chicken attack.

But before we get more involved in the story let's cover the farm news.

Planting
Today was an important day. Today we started planting (Yes, a gamble. A gamble that the year's last frost is a thing of the past for 2009.

This morning, starting at 7:30 we planted something like 6000 seedlings. Broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, Chinese cabbage, pac choi, Brussels sprouts. We filled up the far section of the lower field (if you've been out to the farm that's the field to the right you can see from our deck).

Then this afternoon we started on onions. We first had to do some field prep but once we got started we planted almost 4000. About 16000 still to go.

So let's go back to the story of the violent mother.

It was Wednesday, the evening with all that rain.

I had gone out to the barn. The chickens in the field were in need of food and I store the chicken mash just inside the barn door. Several tons of chicken feed in 50 pound bags.

On the left was a short stack of maybe five bags.

I reached down to pick up a bag. Grabbed it, picked up the fifty pound bag, and just as I was throwing it up over my shoulder it happened.

I was attacked.

Mother hen was hiding behind the sacks of feed. She had already lost one of her chicks somewhere teh day before. One moment it was following her. The next it was gone.

But apparently she wasn't going to let it happen to this one.

I picked up the bag. The baby chick let out a squeak.

And momma chicken jumped into action.

Fluffed out her wings, screamed once, and attacked. Grabbing ahold of my hand with her beak.

Blood.

I jumped back in shock, looking around for the assailant. Thinking, wild animal. alligator (did I ever tell you the time a momma alligator almost got my leg all because her babies started squeeling in dismay? It must be in a newsletter or blog somewhere) eagle, hawk,, porcupine?

And then seeing it was a chicken.

I was prepared to give her a good, swift, kick. let her go flying across the barn yard. Imagine a chicken having the gall to attack a human?

And here she came again.

This time flapping her wings, up off the ground and aiming right for my face.

Fortunately I side stepped. Instead of hitting me in the face, she crashed into a stack of twenty feed bags.

Instantly she was back in the corner, Cawing and guarding her chick..

We stood there for a moment. Staring. How dare her. And then... And then I turned and walked out of the barn.

Maybe she would be the rare mother chicken that raised her chick to adulthood.

Later that night there was another predator out by the chicken yard. Around 2 am I was up and looking around. The weather forecast was calling for a late frost. (it didn't happen).

I was up, though, looking at the thermometer and walking around the fields, making sure nothing untold was happening.

And then that's when I saw the eyes.

It was one of those dark nights. A night where you needed a flashlight so you wouldn't trip over your own feet.. A heavy drizzle and a wet fog hanging over the fields almost like a wet felt blackout curtain.

That's when I saw it. I was flashing the light back and forth across the field. Trying to slice open the darkness.

It was over by the chicken yard. In the glow of the flashlight, two of the largest, bluest eyes staring back at me.

What sort of animal's eyes reflects bright blue eyes? Not just blue but bright, almost iridescent blue.

Predator? Grass-eater? Omnivore?

I started to close the distance between me and the eyes. Trying to keep the light aimed right at the eyes. (if you keep a light on a deer's eyes, my experience is, she won't look away. You can walk almost all the way up on her. Slowly, slowly, until you are right next to her).

This animal, though, wasn't a deer, as I walked closer it blinked once, then again, then took off and disappeared into the drizzle.

One moment it was there and the next it had just disappeared. Vanished. Swallowed up by the darkness.

There I stood, swinging the light back and forth. The only thing was the sound of the light rain.

The chickens seemed unconcerned so I went back to the house.

toad time of year

2009-04-11T22:56:00.001-05:00

How will we know when its spring without a toad pond?

Or, at least a goldfish pond that the toad can use?

You know about toads, of course? How, in the spring, they are the ones that tell us when the last frost has come and gone?

(for more on last frosts and farming see my latest non-newsletter blog entry)

But, back to the toads. Each year toads come out of the forest, hop, hop hopping from, I guess, miles and miles away. Fording rivers, climbing mountains, crossing highways, risking electric fences (for more information try the Saturday, April 15, 2006 blog), until they finally, all of them, hundreds and hundreds of toads, on the same day converge on the same pond, the same pond being the one we had in our front yard.

Notice the word HAD. As in no longer there. Having been but not now. Kaput. Disappeared. As in, unfortunately, the pond in our front yard has been, alas, filled in. No longer a pool of water, Now, just a memory and grass.

What happened is...

Well, some time last fall we upgraded.

We captured the twenty some koi and goldfish swimming about in the pond put these two dozen fishy creatures in one of those large 500 gallon black livestock troughs and filled in their home.

Sort of an urban renewal project. As in: ‘That wasn’t a real koi pond. What you had was just a hole in the ground filled with water and with a bunch of stones thrown around its edge.‘

(those people, the people that say that, have a hard time differentiating between a loving home and urban blight).

But, be that as it may.

We filled in the old hole with a combination of clay, potting soil and manure and when it was filled in planted grass seed.

And the koi? Well, they were upgraded. Instead of the ghetto they were moved out to the burbs and into a brand spanking new community ‘executive homes for those with taste and income.‘ (the sign out front might have said).

That is, we dug another hole. This one deeper, larger, and with straighter sides.

Then, instead of just a piece of waterproof pool plastic on the bottom and sides, we poured concrete ( yes, very tasteful and expensive), and stoned, (yes using real organic stones), the sides.

And the new Koi pond didn’t end with the surface of the land but no, it rose several fish stories above the surrounding landscape.

The sides of the stone pond stood almost two feet (very handsome) above the ground.

When construction ended and the artisans went home we began to fill the new pond with water. Filling it all the way to the top of the stone walls.

And when it was all done, we took the Koi and goldfish out of their temporary housing and introduced them to their new, executive home.

And of course, they lived happily ever after.

Except there was a little bitty problem.

Just think of those fancy Frank Lloyd Wright designed houses with the elaborate skylights that would never stop leaking. We sort of have the same problem with our pond.

A few design glitches. A difference between concept and practice.

Our problem isn’t leaky skylights. No. Instead its leaky stone walls. And while we have drained and filled the pond five times, each time putting more patching material on the inside, looking for that one leak. Well, it still doesn’t fill up to the top. Water still leaks out.

But that’s not what I set out to write about.

What I meant to write about was the toads and how the new koi pond is not toad compatible (or, at least not very toad compatible).

Two foot stone walls are, you can imagine, difficult to scale, especially when you are a toad. and while the other night almost twenty toads showed up and were seen hopping around the outside of the new pond, and while I leaned boards up against the wall for them to hop up, no one made it into the pond on their own.

In other words, this year’s toad orgy seems as though it will be stifled by modern architecture.

Which leaves me here wondering, and thinking: Maybe I should go back out and quickly, with a shovel, dig up that new grass and dirt in our front yard.

Maybe I should dig a hole in the front yard and fill it up with water. Maybe I should make a pond just for the toads. One where they can congregate (or is the word conjugate?) on that special night so I will know that it is now safe to start planting. That we will know that the last frost is finally a thing of the past.

What do you think?

Farm news

Open house again this Saturday. Let’s make it 11-12:30 I’ll give tours, again, of the farm. Also you can come out and collect eggs or go for a hike. Hopefully I have time to get up the mountain this evening to make sure the trails are marked.

And at 12:30 until 2 Saturday lets have ‘help around the farm.’ Last week we picked up the rocks around the cemetery. Thank you very much. This week we will pick up the remains of that old stone wall that was between the fields below the house. If we get those rocks up we can plant there next week.

Shares are mostly sold out I’m collecting names for a waiting list and shortly I’ll have a sense of who signed up but changed their mind and didn’t send in a check and I’ll fill those spots from the waiting list.

We are still, though, taking shares at the Manassas pick up.

Hoop houses. This last week I got carried away and bought another 100 feet of hoophouse. That means we now have 500 feet erected and another 100 feet coming. The new plastic is on 400 feet of it.

Hoop house vegetables. The 100 feet of salad greens in hp1 have sprouted and are growing. When they are ready, in about a month, we will have the shareholders out for salad greens.

Hoophouse tomatoes, eggplant and bell peppers. We’ll be putting the plants in the ground just as soon as the seedlings are old enough. I’ve never had particular luck with greenhouse cucumbers but ‘they’ say cucumbers grow well under plastic so we will try again. Maybe this will be the year.

Asparagus. Some asparagus is up but its not ready for picking yet. Maybe next week we’ll invite shareholders out to cut asparagus.

Planting onions. 20,000 onion and leek seedlings are supposed to be shipped this way next Monday and should be here by Wednesday. If all does as planned we’ll have them in the ground by the end of next week.

Honey bees. Yesterday was bee day for me. Six Russian/Yugoslavian queens had arrived the day before and I went into six hives of Italian bees and killed the queen and inserted the cage with the R/Y queen. Let’s home the Italian workers and drones accept a new Russian queen.

Then, yesterday evening at 4 pm the woman at my post office called to say that five cages full of honey bees had just arrived in the mail truck and if I wanted them come around and knock on the back door. I did, and back at the farm took these Buckfast bees (originally from Buckfast abbey) and their Buckfast queens and put them into bee boxes. This morning I went back and checked each hive to make sure all was going well and fed them each a gallon of sugar water. All seems to be well.

This afternoon, after I go to the store and buy another 100 pounds of sugar I’ll mix that up with water and feed last week’s hives again.

Baby chicks. This one is so cute I should give it its own story. Maybe I will next week. Remember that lone chicken, the lone hen I talked about over a month ago? Well, she had disappeared. I thought she had given up and was living with the other chickens. Yesterday I found out this was not the case. Yesterday, there she was, in front of the house, and following her were two adorable baby chicks. Somewhere, over the last month, momma had found a quiet place to lay eggs and for the past three weeks she has been sitting on them.

My experience is that baby chicks on the farm never (or at least seldom) live to maturity. Just think: black snakes, raccoons, possums, hawks and if I put them in with the grown up chickens, other chickens all work double time to make sure they don’t see adulthood. What should I do? Catch momma and her babies and lock them up in a cage?

Blue birds. Over the years I’ve put up about ten blue bird nest boxes. I did a survey yesterday and they all have bluebirds building nesting inside. Some of them have already layed eggs.

And that’s it for this week. Isn’t spring wonderful?

Leigh

Patterns in the seasons

2009-04-08T23:37:00.001-05:00

Have you ever sat up on a beach, up by the dunes, and watched the waves come in off of the Atlantic, rolling in one wave after the next?

Or how about walking down the beach, maybe wearing tennis shoes, walking just above the waterline, where the sand is still firm but your feet stay dry?

One moment you are watching the horizon your feet dry and the next moment a huge wave breaks and you are standing in water up to your knees.

Many, many, many years ago I lived near Chincoteague, Virginia and would spend much of my free time walking the beaches of the barrier islands. Assateague, Wallops (when I could finagle a pass), Cobb, Cedar, Parramore and Hog when I could get a boat ride out.

But before we take a trip to the beach let's stop for breakfast in the kitchen of my house near Wallops Island.

Let's sit down at the small table and look out the double wide east facing window.

It's not important that out the window we could look across an empty potato field or the fact they hadn't bothered to plant a cover crop for the winter.

What was important is that as the sun came up, and I had to get up at the same time every morning the sun hardly came in the window, not in December. The only sunlight in the room at the winter solstice was just a tad over there on the north wall.

Meaning? Well I didn't realize what it meant in December, but as the winter passed, as it turned into January and then February that tad of light on the north wall grew. First from a sliver to a board and then a tree.

Maybe we should think about it instead as a vine, growing across the wall until finally in the morning it dominated the entire room.

Meaning? Well, with each day the sun was moving further north and the more north it came the more direct the angle into my kitchen.

A pattern or should I say a rhythm.

As the summer finally arrived and then passed the pattern turned the other way. the light that had once filled the room started growing smaller with each passing day until back to December when the room was barely lit.

Until the room was dark again when the sun came up in the morning

The same sort of thing I noticed was happened out at the beach (of course caused by different forces).

Sitting up on the dunes and doing nothing but watching the waves break on the beach I would try to figure out the pattern.

A huge wave would break higher on the beach than any before, then a number of smaller waves would break. Followed by several larger waves, the largest coming up higher on the beach than the large one of the last set.

And this would go on and on, the ocean, or tide, gradually climbing up the beach until it reached its highest and then it would turn and slowly go back down the beach.

This is the sort of thing, I guess, those of you that surf sit out freezing on your boards notice.

Noticing the order of the breaking waves form a pattern.

You know, A big wave followed by a little wave, and then another little wave, another even small followed by that large wave again, a set of large waves, followed by a small wave, a set of small waves. Followed by that large wave once again.

All the while the water climbing higher and higher up the beach until it almost reaches, once again, the place you have been sitting.

Last night we had a frost. It dropped below 30 degrees out here on the farm.

Fortunately I knew it was coming and I was up in the greenhouse at 2 am refilling the boiler with wood.

2 am it was 35 degrees and stayed that way until 4 when it dropped quickly to where it was 29.6 when the sun rose.

When, if I was still living on the Eastern Shore, the sun would just be peaking in my kitchen window.

Other patterns.

If you look back, sort of like the waves on the beach, the last ‘cold’ night was on March 31st, over a week ago, where it didn’t quite drop down as cold. 35 degrees. And the time before that, on the 24th, it went down to below 25.

And we could go back all winter long and see a pattern, of sorts. Each week, going back to last fall, actually to last September, it gets just a little bit colder until the cycle turns again, around the end of January when it starts heading in the other direction.

Right now we are just about to that point that is really important to farmers.

The last frost of the season.

This date around here used to be predictable, year in and year out. It was the middle of April.

However, in the past decade the last frost has become much harder to predict.

Last year, 2008, our last frost (up here on the mountain) was March 30th, (and the first frost was October 30th.
2007, the last frost was April 10th and the first one in early November.
2006 April 10th again but a first frost about October 10th.
05 about March 25th and the first one in the middle of November.
2004 we almost had a frost in early May and the first one in mid-November
2003 late April and early October.

What does this mean for us?

For me it means I’m doing something I don’t like to do, Gamble.

Gamble with our seedlings. With our crop.

When should I put the first ones out? When should I start planting?

What if I count on the weather being stable, sort of like it used to be, and began putting plants out in mid April, that’s next week, and what if we get a May frost? Two weeks of work, and thousands of plants wasted. That would mean the broccoli and cauliflower, the pac choi and cabbage Most of the plants I intend to put in the shares in June would be dead.

Or, what if I played it conservatively. What if I held off in planting until May.

The plants wouldn’t be dead but they wouldn’t be ripe for the first week of the season. We wouldn’t get them until July.

And all the other plants that I would be planting right behind them, they would be either pushed back in the season, or dead. depending.

Depending on weather that has been increasingly harder to predict.

Oh well.

Regardless.

Here is this year’s game plan.

This year I played it safe with the onions and leeks. Instead of planting in late March, like I sometimes do, this year I scheduled them to arrive next week.

Do you want to help? not help in planting, but we need more help in getting the field ready.

Over the past two months we’ve spent a lot of time picking up rocks down there and until the last rain it looked like we had done a good job.

Clean, rockless soil.

That was until the last rain.

After the rain the field, again was full of stones. Hundreds of them. Either rocks are like plants and grow well with a gentle spring shower, Either that or what happened is the soil settled and the rocks bubbled to the top.

Either way we have more rocks to pick up.

Rock picking party. This weekend. Saturday 12:30 to 2. If you want to help with the onion crop come on out. right now there is a 50/50 chance of showers but if its not raining I’d be glad to have your help.

Visit the farm and collect eggs. This Saturday 11-12:30

Other farm news?

Shares. We are sold out except for people wanting to sign up at the Manassas, pick up site.

Payments.

If you signed up before the beginning of March you should have your payment in by now. If you signed up after that, your payment is due either April 15th or 30 days after you signed up, which ever is later.

Late payment? If you are late with your payment get it in to me as soon as possible. I haven’t started going through the list yet to see who has or hasn’t paid but I will soon and then, after writing and saying ‘where’s your payment?’ I’ll start contacting people on the waiting list.

egg shares. I had announced they were full however, like last year, we will be taking some of Susannah’s eggs. So if you wanted an egg share and didn’t get one you can sign up. If you want a whole dozen each week, lets wait. I’ll look at the egg supply closer to the first week of delivery and decide if we’ll sell whole dozen shares then.

Fruit shares. Since the fruit comes from a number of orchards I can always add more fruit.

Apple cider. I have ordered a hand made apple press so this fall we’ll have apple cider making parties. You don’t have to have a fruit share to be part of this. In the fall, I’ll buy bushels of apples for people who want to come out and make their own.

Honey bees and queens

A couple hours ago I got a call from the local post office saying half a dozen queen bees had arrived in the mail and I should come down and pick them up.

These queens are a Russian/Yugoslavian cross. I bought them from a bee breeder out west because they are somewhat tolerant to Varroa mites.

Why do I care?

Several decades ago Varroa mites were accidentally imported into North America and quickly spread throughout the honey bee population wiping out honey bees like a plague.

Today, if you do not put a poison, a miteacide into your beehives the chances are with in two years they will be dead.

However, USDA researchers discovered a honey been living in Russia and the former Yugoslavia that was resistant.

What I will be doing is going into some of my old established hives, hives populated with Italian bees and I will kill the queen and replace her with the Russian.

The reason why?

Russian bees are more tolerant of Varroa mites. There is something the Russians do (or don’t do) that the Italian bees don’t (or do) that causes the mites to kill Italian honey bees.

What I’m hoping for is a bee that isn’t killed by the Vorroa mites.

Tomorrow, hopefully, I will get another call from the post office. This time announcing that 15 pounds of bees have arrived.

These will be Buckfast bees, Honeybees that were bred at the Buckfast abbey over in England for a number of good (by human thinking) characteristics one of them is resistance to Tracheal mites (this is another mite that was also accidentally imported into North America and has been also causing devastation).

The theory is, along with the surviver hives I have (bees that have survived attacks by the mites) my honeybees eventually will not be killed off by the mites.

and that’s it for the week. Oh, and before I close out what local animal sucks out the bodily fluids of its victims? Several animals do it but the one most common in our area is the Opossum. Most of the signs of last week’s attack on our chicken points to a possum or two getting into the fence. One thing that points in another direction, though, is the fact that so many birds were killed I n one night. Another animal that sucks out its victims fluids and also goes on a mad killing spree, killing more chickens than it can eat, is a weasel.

Except for the fact that weasels aren’t very common around here I would think its was a weasel. So my guess? An Opossum.
Leigh Hauter

pullet eggs

2009-04-03T22:04:00.000-05:00

Before we start talking about the farm, here's a survey (and this does concern food). Last night I watched a 1943 Betty Davis/Millie Drake flick, Old Acquaintances. Early in the movie, Drake's put upon husband answers her nagging question that 'I couldn't get the hen eggs you wanted so I had to buy pullet eggs.'

Without going to a dictionary, what do you think? Poor writing? That's too bad? Cute?

My suspicion is the humor would have worked somewhat better on its 1943, just off the farm, audience than with today's mostly urban viewers.

What is your take on pullet eggs?

Anyway, I only brought it up because I was going to talk about pullets as an aside to last night.

Or was that this morning at 5 am.

Either way with daylight savings time it was dark as I made my way up the hill toward the greenhouse.

I flashed my light over at the pullets in their field to the right.

It was so early that rather than out and about, scratching, laying eggs, socializing they were still up roosting as tight as they could get. Wing to wing, thigh to thigh along the narrow roosting boards 6 feet up off the hen house floor.

(last weekend a shareholder came out and was so concerned about the amount of space provided the chickens for sleeping that she asked me about it three times.

"Isn't it crowded at night?"

Which I answered: "Have you ever seen chickens roosting? One of the leading causes of death for chickens not locked up in cages is called 'piling'. As in piling on top of each other."

At night chickens scrunch up as close as they can get to each other for... well I guess for warmth and security - though they will do it even when it is even hot at night. Leaving plenty of space completely unoccupied.

And if they are so young they haven't started roosting, well, the ones on the bottom of the pile. I guess I don't have to describe that.

Anyway, when they are older and can fly up to roost they will perch wing to wing all along their perches, choosing an occupied perch before they will deem to spent the night on an empty one all by themselves).

But, so much for that. Let's get down to the action.

It's dark. I have this powerful flashlight. I'm walking up the drive toward the greenhouse.

I flash the light over at the pullets (and a couple roosters). They are all up on their roosts. Wing to wing.

No sign of a predator.

My real concern is not predators, after all we have the Great Pyrenees (GP) for farm animal protection.

I flash the light up the driveway and there's Marcus our head GP. Snoring. (He's been up, no doubt, the last five hours, running from one end of the farm to the other barking at suspected farm terrorists. Foxes, coyotes, and the biggest terrorist of them all, especially for all of us vegetable eaters. Deer!)

That's when I see her. Rapunzel. one of our three ex-barn cats turned house cats. Coming out of the rye.

You can take the cat out of the barn but you can't take the barn out of the cat.

From Rapunzel's teeth dangles a rodent.

A baby rabbit, I think. Dead. Blood dripping.

Caught in my spotlight she hesitates for just a moment before continuing on her way, across the drive and around the large poplar where we load the vegetables in the summer.

Of our three cats, Rapunzel is the one that roams the farthest a-field.

If we go for a walk at night we have to watch that she doesn't follow us. Getting tired over a mile from the house were our dogs aren't around to protect her could mean she turns in to a meal.

Especially when she has no fear of Coyotes.

There has been many a night when I'm out patrolling the fields and chicken pastures making sure all is cop-acetic I'll run across Rapunzel, out hunting.

Sometimes, down in the hoophouses in between the tomatoes.

Sometimes coming out of the woods, hunting on the edge of our various fields.

One season, when we were having a specially bad ground hog problem, literally hundreds of cabbages and broccoli disappearing every night, I set out half a dozen have-a-heart traps on the edge of the field half a mile away from the house.

In the morning, instead of a ground hog there was Rapunzel. her nose bloody from repeatedly trying and failing to lift the steel door that had slamming down behind her.

Once she disappeared for several weeks and when she returned there was a large wound on her side. Only partially healed. (we thought she was going to die).

No telling what animal she had encountered on one of her nightly strolls and whether it has attacked her, she it, or the encounter had been mutual.

The vital statistic, though, is she survived, with the fur on her side growing back a sort of silver-white rather than the normal deep grey.

Which brings us all the way around to the farm news.

And I guess we can start with the pullet eggs. All 100 dozen a week are now accounted for. SOLD OUT!

However, A number of people want an egg share larger than half a dozen eggs a week. 'Is this possible?', I'm asked. 'Can we get more eggs?'

The answer -- Well, yes, but not our pullet eggs. Last year half the eggs came from a local certified organic egg raiser. This year all of the eggs come from our chickens. However, we could change this. Do you want more eggs coming from other local chickens than ours? If so, e-mail me. If there's enough demand, I'll contact the local egg raiser and see what I can do about price and quantities.

Other farm news?
The 16th and P as well as the East Falls Church location are now full.

Several people have asked the question. 'How do I know which pick up place I'm signed up for?' The answer-- Unless I have told you otherwise, you are signed up for the spot you asked for when you signed up.

Next question -- How do I know if I'm signed up? If you asked for a share and I sent you back a confirmation e-mail telling you what you signed up for (ie two person vegetable and an egg share or whatever it was you requested), you are signed up. Of course the share isn't yours until you pay for it, but...

When and how do I pay for my share? Again look at your confirmation e-mail. The date the payment is due, the farm mailing address, and how you make the check out (to me) is all there.

'I want to visit the farm, when can I come?' Next visiting time is this Saturday, March 14th, 11-1.

And for all of you people who want to come out and work. (I've received almost a dozen requests) How about coming out Saturday after that, say 1 until maybe 2. We could pick up rocks from the bottom field, or maybe rehab the cemetery wall.

The hoophouse arrives next week, as do several dozen fruit trees. So next weekend there is plenty of work for volunteers.

Until next week.

bear breaks hibernation

2009-04-03T21:59:00.002-05:00

I think one of our bears has broken hibernation.

At least the other night the starved war orphan looking creature that caused such a ruckus on the back hill sure looked a lot like that bear I caught eating our vegetables out of the delivery van last fall.

Only. Only he looked a couple hundred pounds lighter.

The dogs saw him first. Or maybe they smelled him (what do you think a bear smells like after spending a winter all cooped up in a cave?)

It was a little after midnight and I was at my desk doing paperwork, when the dogs started up a storm behind the house.

At first I didn't pay it much attention.

A raccoon? Moonbeams racing through the forest?

And then the barking became serious. The terrified bark just before a dog bites.

Serious!

Not teenage boys pushing each other back and forth in a parking lot. Throwing names and insults but not throwing punches and kicks.

This sounded like... I don't know. The sound of townspeople picking up their hammers and hoes as barbarians breached their walls and beat in their gates (I was going to say, the sound of the fighting on that dock in the old Neil Young song if the boat had landed before the kid telling the story was shot).

I quickly got up, grabbed a flashlight and went out the back door.

And there they were. The bear on one side of the deer fence and the dogs on the other side.

They were moving back and forth along the fence. I recognized the bear right off. I have a picture of him when he climbed up in the tree last October. Only this time he looked like he was wearing a suit four or five sizes too big for him.

The dogs, Andorra and Marcus, with their teeth bared. Screaming out barks and then suddenly jumping in to bite.

Fortunately the fence kept both sides from getting hurt. The bear, even in his anorexia state looked just about as large as the two of them together.

If he got a hold of one of them....

I don't know what brought the bear was coming up the hill. This time of year it couldn't have been the bees. After a winter of fasting all of my remaining hives were living on subsistence and bare welfare. Most of their stores are depleted.

Probably the chickens.

I imagine if I was a hungry bear the sound of all our chickens clucking and a crowing would be enough to get me up from my winter's fast. I imagine a bear, if he could catch them, could chomp down on a dozen or so laying hens in a matter of minutes, Feathers, bones and all.

The fight went on for another3 minute.

I didn't go down the hill and intervene. I thought, 'it'll no doubt work its self out.'

And anyway, that's what the dogs are paid for. That's what Great Pyrenees are breed for.

That's why we have them.

And they're much better equipped to scare off a bear than I am.

At the end of another minute, or two, the bear disappeared back into the woods. The dogs switched from fighting off barbarians at the town gate tp the bark teenage boys in a parking lot.

And finally even that stopped. The dogs adrenaline rush fades as did their barks and finally they turned and with an occasional bark over their shoulders turned and came back toward the house.

Oh well. Another sign of spring.

We're still several weeks, maybe a month away from the last frost. It's still too early for that bear to find much food, (unless, of course, unless it means eating our chickens.

It's even too early for the honeybees.

This last week I spent time out feeding our bees.

Honey bees, around here, need to start building up their hives right about now. They need to start raising children. Increasing the hive population so when the nectar starts flowing there are enough workers to fly out and collect it.

That means making babies.

Which means having food to feed them.

And since there is hardly any nectar out there bring in and only a little bit of pollen from early bloomers like the skunk cabbage it means I have to get out there and give them food.

(another problem our honey bees are having, that is besides the new diseases and parasites they've been subjected to as a result of a side-effect of global trade, is the stress caused by the warming climate.

It wasn't too long ago that honeybees would go into winter with a store of honey and come out in the spring with plenty of honey still saved to raise an overflowing hive full bees.

Now, with the warmer winters, instead of hibernating, all balled up for warmth in the deep recesses of the hive now there are many days were the temperature rises enough for the bees to leave their hibernation and to go out, to take out the trash, to carry out the bodies of their sisters who died over the winter. To go out to collect water. To look for food.

Only in January there isn't any food and instead of conserving energy and supplies the warm weather causes the bees metabolism to go up, to need more food.

Which means if I want my bees to survive the winter I now have to feeding them.

Which means mixing up sugar water. 1 part sugar to 1 part water. Mixing it up. Putting it into gallon glass jars with a few holes punched in the metal top. And putting the jar, upside down, inside the beehive.

This way the bees, on those warm days, can collect the sugar water and the queen can start laying eggs.

Not only that, but this past week a friend drove down to Georgia and came back with a truck load of bees.

I don't know how many he brought, the truck was full, but I bought 30 pounds from him. Thirty pounds of bees, separated into ten 3 pound packages, each package with its own queen.

The packages I opened and along with the queen, put into bee boxes. Creating ten new beehives.

Another 5 packages will be coming in the mail from Texas in about two weeks to make 15 new hives I'm adding this year to make up for the ones killed by the bears, killed by the accidentally imported mites, and ones that died from unknown causes, Maybe virus', maybe pesticides, maybe, I don't know.

Other farm news

Eggs. I talked to Susannah, the organic egg and chicken woman from the southern part of the county, and decided she would privide us with 50 dozen eggs a week. That means we have more egg shares available. If you want one, E-mail me, I might, also, sell some whole dozen egg shares but I haven't decided yet. I'll let you know, if I do, in about a month.

Vegetable shares. We are down to the last ten shares. I'll sell a few more to the Alexandria pick up and the rest to be picked up in Manassas or at the farm.

Payments. I misspoke in last week's newsletter. I forgot to mention those of you who signed up early last fall. If you renewed under the early sign up program your final payment should be sent within the next month. The people that signed up this year should look at their confirmation e-mail for the payment due date.

Free eggs/ Farm visits. It's supposed to rain this weekend but if you want to come out --- come out 11 to 1 on Saturday. We are flooded with eggs. the chickens are getting in shape for this summer's egg share so come out prepared to bring a dozen or two home with you.

Seedlings. the greenhouse is close to full with seedlings.. Almost all of our spring and summer plants are right now growing in the greenhouse. I think we're up to almost 60,000 seedlings.

Other plants -- suddenly we have too much work to do. 600 asparagus roots came this week and need putting in the ground. 300 raspberry brambles arrived. 100 horseradish roots.

Hoophouses. Our new hoop houses have arrived and needs erecting. Pipes hammered into the ground. The old hoophouses are without plastic. We took off the old and its time to put on the new.

Not this Saturday, its not fun to work with a cold drizzle falling, but next Saturday we might invite people to come out and help get the hoophouses ready for planting. Let's see, first, how much work we get done in that direction next week. I'll announce it in next week's newsletter.

Thanks to the people that stayed around last Saturday and helped. We sure picked up a lot of rocks and the help I got with the bees gave me enough free time to go for a hike down the valley.

And speaking of hikes, with spring coming on, think about coming out for a hike. I don't have one yet, but I'll make up a map marking the various trails.

Leigh Hauter

VAMPIRES STRIKE LOCAL FARM!

2009-04-03T16:35:00.001-05:00

Instead of starting right away with a story of this week's farm happenings I was thinking that I'd just give a farm summary. A sort of vegetable/chicken Headline News .

Something like---

Vampire attack kills six in chicken yard!

Eerie glow continues to light up eastern night sky.

Wrens squat in blue bird house

New source discovered for rotten cow manure

Hoophouse expansion well under way.

Early Lettuce, Arugula, Spinach planted for pick your own 45 days from now!

Buzzards roosting over lower field.

There's a Blue Bird Right Out my Window!

And that’s just the front page. Besides that I could add a business section. (when I taught tenth grade English, back when there was a section in the curriculum on figuring out newspapers, I always said the important news, the stuff that explained what was really happening, was often hidden back in the business section).

Things like--

Share Payment Due Date Passes.

Also, in the business section I think there would be a column. A sort of ‘what if’ piece.

What if you miss your payment due date?

The ‘what if’ would say I’m not going to immediately drop you from the shareholder list and resell your share to someone on the waiting list. But I do want to hear from you. Either a check or, lacking that, a note telling me what's going on.

If you missed the due date send in your check soon. (within the week). Or, if you can’t, write me and tell me why and that you intend to do.

Then, after business there is always the entertainment section.

That’s where things like farm outings get mentioned. As in --

Open House/farm tour/ get some eggs

The farm outing is where we walk up the hill to the greenhouse. Look inside at the almost 70,000 seedlings. Along the way I usually tell an embarrassing (not to me) story or two about Wenonah growing up on the farm (stories she would usually prefer I refrained from retelling).

Answer questions about the farm. Point out the farm equipment. Tell how (briefly) it works.

Then we walk down to where the chickens are pastured and that's where people (and kids) go about collecting eggs. Which, with Easter rapidly approaching, is pretty appropriate.

And for those who just want to come out and skip the tour, who have done it before,there are eggs. And hikes. Directions are on the webpage.

Also under entertainment, I think, is the helping on the farm section. If you want to do some work, we can always use help.

This week, I was going to have people pick up rocks, fix the stone walls. Walls, sort of like that one in that poem. ( I can still hear my 8th grade English teacher reading it. She sure liked Frost) ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,‘

Our walls, all except for the one around the house, have decades of abuse.

And maybe, if the fields are too wet and we can't get out to pick up the rocks without making a muddy mess, we could put plastic up over one of the new hoophouses. If its not too windy (trying to unfurl a 100 foot by 30 foot piece of plastic on a windy day is always challenging. Sort of like being a passenger on a human sized kite. On occasions I've been lifted up as high as a dozen feet in the air.).

But that's enough for the entertainment section. Let's get back to the front page and that banner headline.

VAMPIRES STRIKE LOCAL FARM!

The time was a week ago. Last Friday night. A night where the weather works in well with a 1930's movie of Transylvania. (or maybe Poe and the House of Ushers).

Dark!

Overcast.

Deep fog. Your legs are lost in it. This, interlaced with sudden downpours.

And thunder.

I didn't go out that evening. And the dogs? Well, the storm was so loud, they didn't hear anything. I didn't hear them barking.

Actually, I had fallen asleep on the sofa with a mystery by the fire and stiffly woke in the early morning with the memory of a vivid dream.

A dream where I was standing at the door of the hen house. There was a heavy fog. I could barely see down to the ground but I was counting the chickens as they scurried in and out of the hen house.

I was standing there watching them, trying to count and every once in a while, instea of a hen there would be a raccoon, or a bob cat. An opossum.

I didn't remember the dream clearly until I was on my way up the stairs.

I stopped and could see them again.

The chickens scurrying back and forth with all of those predators at my feet..

I stopped and almost turned around. Almost went back downstairs and put on my boots. Grabbed a flashlight and went out into the rain.

Instead I stood there on the stairs for a moment, thinking. thinking about the dream and then turning and continuing up the stairs and off to bed.,

It was the next morning when I saw the corpses (do you refer to dead chickens as corpses?). I had gone out with the first bunch of Saturday visitors. We were down in the hen yard when I saw the fence down.

The storm must have knocked it over.

And as you probably know, when an electric fence touches the ground, it stops working. Its grounded. It no longer gives a shock. The charge, instead of going through the hand, or nose or claws of the creature that is touching it.

The charge instead goes on to the ground. harmlessly making up a complete circuit.

To the ground and back to the charger.

And the predator can easily step over the fence and do as it may with the chickens.

In this case it was six hens. All of the chickens were dispatched in the same manner.

Their bodies were whole. Only, something had bitten them in the neck and, from that wound had sucked out all of their bodily fluids.

The thighs, the breasts, the legs, they were all there, laying in the mud. What all of these chickens had in common was a bite on the neck and the missing bodily fluids.

VAMPIRES!

Or, in this case, another animal.

What animal eats its victim in this manner? From the inside out?

The next night, Saturday night. Instead of just picking up the fence and making sure it wasn't grounded, I took Andorra down to the chicken pasture and put her in with the chickens.

She has much to much fur around her neck, I reasoned, to be bit by a vampire. Or whatever. A vampire wouldn't have much luck in biting through all that fur.

That was at ten in the evening.

And the next morning, I came downstairs. Put on some music.

Thought of the chickens, Andorra. and opened the back door, the one that goes out on the deck, taking my binoculars. From there I could see the chickens. I could look out and see what had happened.

Had Andorra caught the culprit?

Was the fence still standing?

Or were their chicken bodies laying everywhere?

I opened the door and, before I could step out, there was Andorra, wagging her tail. Smelling like a wet dog..

She had apparently escaped during the night. Had left the chickens unguarded. And had come up to the house to greet us.

I quickly put on my boots. Rushed down to the chicken pasture.

There was the fence where Andorra had escaped. She had jumped it, knocking it askew.

And the chickens? they all seemed to be fine. No new dead bodies. No bite marks in the throat.

And the vampire? What creature eats its victims in that manner? That's a research question for you. I'll give the answer to the people that come out Saturday. That come out for the farm visit. And the others? I'll put it up on the blog sometime next week.

I'll put it up by Wednesday. Give you time to find out on your own.

Leigh Hauter

Late hard freeze (who takes care of the wild animals?)

2009-03-11T06:35:00.003-05:00

It's been a hard week. So far a very hard week out in the bitter cold pulling water pipes up and down the side of the mountain in a desperate attempt to keep water flowing to the greenhouse, and our seedlings, and most importantly, the wood fired boiler that's the main defense between the bitter wind and single digit temperatures that were raging outside the thin uninsulated greenhouse plastic and the delicately warm world inside.

But before I go into describing me running around in circles for two, almost three days, let me bring up one of my grandmother's long time concerns.

My grandmother, who died a few years back but lived into her 100's would ask me when I visited her during a snow storm --

'How are the animals staying warm. What are you doing to keep the animals warm?

The first couple of times she said this I would think she meant the farm animals and start telling her about the goats or pigs.

'I have a goat shed that keeps out the wind and the rain and the ground is covered in hay and.'

"Not those,' She would say. 'I mean the ones that lived out in the forest. What are you doing for them? The birds and the wild animals?'

This became a ritual. She wouldn't let me get away with saying that they looked out for themselves. She'd just shake her head and give me that look, 'You mean you're not doing anything?'

There was a time this Monday night, it might have been after midnight, where I stopped for a moment to try and warm my frozen hands.

I was up in the woods and had been struggling along the snow covered trail that goes from the greenhouse along the side of the mountain up to the upper spring, pulling a three hundred foot long section of inch and a quarter well pipe behind me when the wind rushed down through the trees in a 20 plus mile an hour gust.

It blew off my hat and nearly froze my bare hands. (My gloves had long since been soaked through and stiffened up with ice) .

That's when I stopped, picked up my hat and with my chaffed hands inside my coat pockets looked out into the snow covered woods and thought of my grandmother in her nursing home bed harassing me about not taking care of the animals that lived in the forest.

Where do all the critters go when it is so miserable out that the only way I could face it is wearing twenty pounds of winter clothing.

"How are the animals staying warm?'

Farm news.

We sort of survived the unexpected cold snap from earlier this week. It wasn't the snow that was a problem it was the below ten degree temperatures.

And the water that decided nature dictated that in those conditions it turn into a rock.

Wenonah reports that this is already the coldest March in over 20 years.

The boiler, because of the lack of water Monday night, didn't keep the entire greenhouse above freezing and we lost several dozen trays of seedlings.

Tuesday morning I was on the phone to a greenhouse in Indiana and after charging almost two thousand dollars to my credit card where replacement seedlings would be shipped in time to plant.

When it comes to vegetables, you won't know the difference, but this season, because of Mondays unexpected cold snap, is almost two thousand dollars more expensive.

Oh well.

Eggs and visiting the farm.
As I said last week, the chickens have started laying. If you want to visit the farm and/or collect some free eggs come on out between 11 and 1 this Saturday. You don't have to e-mail me to confirm.

Farm visiting hours this week are on Saturday between 11-1. There should be enough eggs for shareholders.

Hoophouse.
Last week's offer of volunteer help to put it up was overwhelming. Thanks. I will take everyone that volunteered up on the offer just as soon as the hoophouse parts arrives. Probably in a couple more weeks. I'll put the time for the hoophouse raising in the newsletter.

Other news?
This time of year we are generally fixing equipment, ordering supplies, growing seedlings and getting things ready for the growing season. I will be talking new shareholders through the pick up process as we get closer to the time. Don't worry. You will have all the information necessary when the time comes.

Planting schedule
The unusual fruit trees I mentioned in last week's newsletter are going to start arriving late next week and we'll be putting them in the ground shortly after that. Quinces, paw-paws, persimmons and figs. I did find a couple small pomegranates that I can put in large pots and move them in and our of our high ceilinged room with the seasons.

We will be planting onions and leaks in three weeks and will start transplanting the cold hardy seedlings (like the ones that survived Monday night in the greenhouse) around April 15th.

Early green seeds will be going into the ground a week or two after that. Most of those take about 40 days from germination to maturity so count back 40 days from the first vegetable delivery.

You pick it.
there was a lot of response to the idea of U-pick, mostly for u-pick berries. As I didn't say in last week's newsletter, like fruit trees it takes a berry bush three plus years from planting to getting the first substantial harvest. So if I buy 500 or 1000 raspberry bushes this year we won't be seeing any u-pick for another three years.

The same with most fruit trees.

and let's hope that's the last bitter cold snap we suffer this year. After all I'm not sure you are doing enough to keep the animals warm.

Leigh Hauter

the lone chicken

2009-02-26T15:44:00.001-05:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about the lone chicken.

That's the chicken I see hanging out by herself on the railing around the deck. Walking, quietly, across the front yard. On top of the stone wall by the barn, eyeing the dog food bowl.

One lone pullet.

She's sort of like the Lone Ranger.

When I catch her and put her in the pasture with the other chickens she doesn't even wait until my backs turned but runs across the pasture like a fat airliner, flapping her wings until she takes to the air and gets up just high enough to clear the top of electric, anti predator fence that surrounds her. leaving safety and her sisters far behind and back to her lonely life as the Lone Chicken once again

But before we spend more time thinking about chickens, let's do this week's farm news.

Farm news!

Shares
A new vegetable season has officially started. We started signing up 2009 shareholders last week. Right now we are 80% full. I'm about to cut off new subscriptions to both the Dupont Circle and East Falls Church spots and only take subscriptions for the less full Alexandria, Manassas and the farm pick up locations.

Seeds
We have mostly finished ordering the seeds for this season, spending almost ten thousand dollars (seed prices increased dramatically this year) , ordering seeds from half a dozen different companies. E&R, Johnny's, Wetsels, Harris, Steigers and Territorial. I try to order from a number of company's rather than just give my business to one company, low prices isn't often our concern.. And there are still a number of good companies I haven't ordered from.

After spending 15 years of farming (and just about 60 years of living) price is far from my first consideration. Cheap often does mean just that. Cheap. But enough of that.

Mud!
It's a beautiful day out here on the farm. Still muddy, the trees and plants haven't yet woken up from their winter sleep and aren't drawing the moisture out of the soil that they do during the summer. And, even now, with almost a week of above freezing temperatures, there is still a layer of frozen soil a few inches down from the surface preventing water from soaking in, making the fields and trails a layer of mud.

Greenhouse
Anyway, this is the time of year for working in the greenhouse. We have been filling flats with potting soil and hopefully this afternoon, if everything goes right we will begin to put seeds in the flats.

Seedlings
It's time to start broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, peppers and even some tomatoes in the greenhouse. Seeds that take eight weeks or more to grow into seedlings before they can be planted outdoors.

Planting
The last average frost for this area is April 15th. That's the date we start taking the cold hearty seedlings out of the greenhouse and put them into the fields.

Visiting the farm
Shareholders, of course, are invited to come out and visit the farm. E-mail me first though, so we can set aside time. I'm more than happy to give you a tour, or have you help us around the farm. However...

A working farm.
We're not always set up for visitors. The only bathroom is the one in our home which means mud being tracked into our home.
And there is a sort of joke about farm equipment. When I buy a new piece of equipment there is usually a warning label that comes as close as possible to saying "Very Dangerous Equipment. Do not use !"

My heart always skips a beat when we have visitors and I am talking to parents and suddenly turn around to see a child has climbed up on a tractor and has managed, to my horror, to turn it on and put it in gear.

Dogs
We have a pair of really sweet dogs, Andorra and Marcus, who would never dream of hurting a human. I have seen visiting children hitting them with sticks and throwing rocks at them and while Marcus weighs in at over 150 pounds he would never hurt a human.

That said, though, Andorra and Marcus are first and foremost working dogs. Great Pyrenees (GP). And, while, to look at them, you wouldn't know it, but they are not pets. They are here on our farm to do extremely important work. To protect the farm animals from predators, to guard your vegetables from eaters, and to attempt to keep the bears away from the beehives, corn and fruit trees. All in all, Andorra and Marcus do an extremely professional job of their assignment (much better than any human I know would. They take their work very seriously).

Rules for visiting!
Number one.
Please leave your dogs back at home. I know this sounds cruel. Your dog would enjoy an outing as much as the next critter, however Andorra and Marcus and, for that matter, almost all farm GP's put all dogs in the category with coyotes, bobcats, raccoons, skunks, possum, crows -yes they absolutely detests crows, bears, deer and any other non human or non farm animal.

GP's absolutely know all dogs have evil designs on their farm, and their farm animals. And no matter how sweet your dog is, a GP knows that given the chance she would love nothing better than to chase and probably eat a chicken, or goose or turkey. Without asking questions GP's will attempt to dispatch all canine trespasser. So, No dogs allowed and no exceptions to the rule.

Another rule.
Please, please, please watch your children. Being out on a farm is a really fun place for a lot of kids (me included). But its a place for supervised fun. A farm, while being full of fun is also full of danger. Farm equipment, ponds, electric fences, plants that are irreparable damaged if stepped on and loads of animals that do not want to be chased or caught or in any other way being treated as objects.

And now that I've completely turned you off with rules I really do want you to come out and visit. We will be planning several organized events at the farm this spring. hikes and pot luck meals. Free flower, herb and vegetable seedlings for shareholders. And by all means plan a trip on your own, but check with me first.

And that probably does it for this week's farm news. Over the next couple of months I will be slowly giving you a better sense on how our CSA works so that by the time the vegetable season starts you will know what to expect.

Which brings us back to the Lone Chicken. (or is that the Lone Hen! Lone Pullet! The Lone Fowl!

While I have been writing I've seen the lonely chicken through my office window several times.

Once, walking along the top of the stone wall in front of our house, no doubt searching every nook and cranny for a tasty morsel.

The next time crossing the front yard, stopping several times to scratch and peck. Looking, no doubt, for that special weed seed..

The lone chicken is one of roughly three hundred chickens we have on the farm. Only she refuses to live with the other chickens.

In the day time she walks the fields by herself.

This morning I saw her sitting on the railing around the back porch with a pair of peacocks.

And at night, when the peacocks fly up in a tree as a safe place to spend the night, there she is, roosting deep in the middle forsythia bush. Deep enough inside that she has plenty of time to take alarm and fly off into the night if you (or me, or any other animal) try to get at her.

And if I do happen to catch her (and I have caught her half a dozen times) and clutching her under my arm taken her to the pasture with the other chickens.

And release her inside the chicken proof electric fence that surrounds the pasture.

I hardly get my backed turned before there she goes. Running across the pasture sort of like a fat, overloaded airliner caterwauling down a runway, flapping her wings to beat the band and then, just before she reaches the end, with the white electric bird netting rapidly approaching, she takes to the air, barely clearing the top strand and then, over the top and out, once again, to freedom. (which for a chicken can also mean being turned into a sudden meal for any passing predator or pet dog).

Later on in the day I'll see her again, maybe out in the middle of the field of winter rye, scratching for weed seeds. Not another animal with in a hundred yards of her.

She'll stop and look up as I get closer. Thinking.. Thinking what?

This is a complaint I have with just about all of the farm animals.

She doesn't speak English (or, as far as I can tell, any other human language).

And since I have never bothered to learn whatever language it is that she does speak, we have a decided communications problem.

In the evening when I find her sleeping all by herself inside that forsythia bush, and occasionally catch her and take her to the chicken house she doesn't understand I'm doing it for her best interest and safety and instead just get a lot of kicking and screaming and struggling.

And when I put her safely inside, the next day there she is, back out in the middle of the rye, all by herself, scratching, and pecking, and scratching again.

The Lone Chicken rides again.

pigeons

2009-02-26T15:37:00.002-05:00

I was going to write about pigeons.

Not those street wise ones you find in the city, but homing pigeons.

Every ten or twenty years I get an urge to build a loft, you know, a pigeon house, up on the roof, then go out and find some full fledged homing pigeons, and start raising pigeons that home.

I suspect I can blame this, the urge, on television.

It must have been a television show back in the 1950’s. Someone, maybe it was Disney, must have had a show about a couple boys sending secret messages back and forth, half way around the world, or is that on the other side of the county?, top secret boy messages attached to the legs of their special pigeons.

(there was never a discussion on how more than a word or two could be written on any note that a pigeon could possibly carry).

I say Disney because I have evidence that it had, in other ways, a malicious influence on my early life.

I think I was in third grade over at Janney Elementary when I convinced my father I really did want him to cut my hair just like the Disney actor playing a Mohawk, or was it some other Native American.

And then there was that alleged beaver skin hat I just had to have. I think it was Disney's Daniel Boone this time.

So the pigeons must have been the results of another equally influential Disney show (I just can't remember which one).

Fortunately, the older I get the weaker these cravings and I had almost completely forgotten the recent desire for a pigeon loft when the UPS guy drove up with half a dozen book.

Homing pigeon books.

(I must have ordered them while under the influence).

Anyway, this got me thinking, not about pigeons, but about another problem we've been having out here on the farm.

Predators!

Hawks and Owls.

I could see half a dozen brown tailed hawks surrounding my pigeon loft, perched on every tree. Waiting. just waiting for that brave pigeon, homing in on my loft carrying her top secret message.

When suddenly...

I don't even want to think about it

How many predators out here on the farm enjoy a squab meal?

I know they have a taste for gosling.

Last fall it was the screech owls.

Last summer, just as it turned dark what sounded like a dozen would start serenading the farm house. singing their distinctive chorus from the surrounding forest.

It was weird, sort of pleasant and spooky at the same time.

but why had they moved so close to the house?

This was the time when I was raising the dozen Giant Chinese geese (so cute, about a foot, foot and a half tall. pure white. running around the yard in a group as if the dozen of them had only one mind. One would turn left, they all would turn left. One would run across the yard, they all would run across the yard. Stop, turn, bark. All together now.

And then I moved them away from the house and the protective oversight of our guardian dogs.

I moved the geese up to the asparagus bed, just behind the greenhouse, so they could eat the weeds.

And it only took one night. One night the geese were there and the next there were only feathers.

Huge piles of fluffy white feathers.

Down drifting in the summer breeze.

And no geese.

So last night, I thought of my geese again. it was about midnight when I walked up the hill to look in on our seedlings (we are up to almost 20,000 seedlings now. The first planting of broccoli popped up out of the soil this afternoon).

As I loaded the boiler with wood I could hear them. A pair. Hooting just behind the greenhouse.

They must have heard that I was thinking about raising pigeons and were eagerly anticipating a meal.

And while I might try again with the geese I don't think I'll try pigeons.

Other farm news?

Pick your own eggs?
The nights are getting shorter (you would hardly know it) and the days are getting longer. Which means? The chickens are again laying eggs We are getting several dozen eggs a day. Which means, 2009 shareholders, are invited out to get free eggs. I have about a dozen dozens sitting in our spare refrigerator. Tell me first, but come out and collect your own.

Shares?
We are down to the last few dozen shares. If you want a 2009 share of our harvest and haven’t signed up yet, you better do it soon. Check the webpage for instructions on signing up.

Egg shares?
We still have 40 egg shares left.

Fruit shares?
And plenty of fruit share (I can always expand the number of fruit shares since the fruit comes from several different orchards).

Our own orchard?
We have eighty fruit trees, mostly apples with a few pears and cherries mixed in. I am considering doubling the size of the orchard this year. So far I've bought figs, persimmons, quinces, pomegranates and pawpaws.

Berries?
We have a smallish berry patch but its strictly for family use. I guess I could buy several hundred more berry bushes and have a shareholder pick your own area, but that’s a lot of upkeep. And last year, while some people availed themselves of the pick your own flowers, mostly people didn't.

Pick your own?
What do you think about us adding more pick your own as part of the shares? These would be things that are too labor intensive to pick to make it economical putting in the shares. Berries, flowers and more than a few string beans, lima beans and peas. (Beans are in the shares, only there are less of them than there would be if we could pick them faster).

To put more labor intensive things like raspberries in the shares would mean hiring more help which would mean raising the price of the share. We could grow them for u-pick if we thought shareholders would actually come out and pick.

Seeds?
All of our seed orders are completed.

Hoophouse?
We bought a new 200 by 14 feet hoophouse that is due to arrive in two weeks. It will take about a week to assemble it. Any volunteers out there wanting to drive posts into the ground?

Chicken tractor?
and we are in the process of building a new chicken tractor to house this years' additional pullets. This one, instead of being built on a trailer, is built on skids. (I didn’t have an old trailer around and didn’t want to spend the thousand plus dollars a new one would cost.

More predators
I recently put up a wildlife camera down by the gate and got five shots of, I think, the same fox coming and going. A picture of her should appear soon on our website. I hope that beautiful glossy coat she has isn't the product of eating our chickens.

coyotes in the night

2009-01-14T03:48:00.001-05:00

It’s four in the morning and the coyotes are howling.

It sounds like they are right outside our bedroom window.

An entire choir.

Maybe, on closer listening, a barbershop quartet.

it’s more than one, though.

And as I sit at the window listening (and shining the flashlight out in the yard) I can tell that they aren’t right by the house either.

Probably, they are somewhere on the other side of the valley. As the crow flies, and especially as sound carries. not very far away. But much longer by foot.

Maybe they are somewhere in the rocks and forest going up the other side of the valley.

Either that, or they are singing between the Mercedes' parked in front of those half dozen brick fortresses (excuse me, those large houses) they built up on the ridge on the DC side of us.

But I meant to talk about coyotes and not real estate.

If you are from out west I’m sure coyotes aren’t all that unusual, but around here, coyotes are something new. Something of the past decade.

Around here, in our valley, we’ve only heard one or two over the past year. No longer than that.

Last year one of my wildlife cameras twice snapped an image of one walking down our driveway.

But running into a coyote in person?

I remember hiking up near Dinosaur when I worked the oil fields on the Utah/Colorado border. Mostly rocks and cactus. And coming around a rock outcropping there was a coyote. The two of us stopped and stared.

Neither moving.

Until the coyote turned and, it must have been while I blinked, disappear.

But back to our coyotes.

It’s four in the morning and I’m awake because our dogs. Our two great Pyrenees, Andorra and Marcus.

They are both upset.

And worried.

And on the hill over looking our chickens.

Barking. Barking, I assume, at the coyotes on the other side of the valley. Warning them to stay away. Don’t come around for the chickens. Or the geese. Leave the turkeys alone. Or for that matter, I guess, the dogs are worried the coyotes will bother the two of us, asleep upstairs in the farm house.

That’s what they are for. Great Pyrenees. Working dogs. Not pets Assigned the task of guarding the farm, our animals, vegetables and beehives at night.

Keeping the predators away from the farm fowl.

And not just the coyote either.

Foxes, bobcats, raccoons, even possum and skunks.
And they do a pretty good job of it. We don’t lose farm birds

But not only that, they also, protect our vegetables.

Back when we first started our CSA. I can’t believe it, a dozen years ago, now. Before we knew just how evil deer were, Bambi and all of her brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles. Cousins and grandparents.

Every night her entire family would sneak out into our fields and when the season was over they had devoured as much as $15,000 worth of vegetables.

Did you know a deer would like to eat something like 15 pounds of greens each and every night of her life.

That’s a lot of vegetables for Bambi to steal out of the mouths of our poor, hungry shareholders.

Now, with Andorra and Marcus on the job (as well as a ten foot tall anti-deer fence surrounding 15 acres of fields) the deer damage is kept to a minimum.

And Marcus not only keeps away the deer, he also dislikes crows (have you ever seen what a crow will do to a field of baby corn? Just as the sprouts are coming up he will walk from plant to plant, hundreds of them, pulling them up to eat the little barely germinated seed underneath.

Marcus, though, whenever he sees a crow turns livid and runs into the field. Barking.

And then there are the bears.

This time of the year the bears are mostly sleeping, hibernating, I guess. I haven’t seen one since around the middle of October. September and October of this year, however, were real bear months.

From what I could tell there were seven bears, including, cubs, working our valley.

Coming on the farm, knocking down the fences, breaking the branches off fruit trees, occasionally sneaking into the unloaded vegetable van.

But mostly the bears were after our beehives.

For those of you who have been out here you probably know we have almost three dozen hives.

Honey is part of our share.

But this last year the bears knocked over and robbed, destroyed, really, seven of our beehives.

And while the dogs are good at telling me there is something out there in the middle of the night, even a 150 pound dog isn’t much good at scaring away a bear.

And my anti-deer fence doesn’t work either. A momma bear, if she’s interested in finding her children something to eat will go right through our anti-deer fence.

And when they get to the hives. A real mess. (I think there are several pictures on our webpage).

I was going to tell the story of surprising a bear as it was eating the contents of the hive in front of our house but I see I’ve already written about it. (http://bullrunfarm.blogspot.com/2008/10/bear-and-me-wednesday-night.html)

However, as I recall, we were talking about coyotes.

and chickens.

and the 2009 season!

Let’s talk about the 2009 season.

Right now I am busy ordering seeds and other spring farm supplies.

This means we will be starting up in the greenhouse in just four weeks. Starting all of those seedlings that go into the ground from late April to early June.

By April first we’ll have over 70,000 seedlings growing in our greenhouse.

We start taking new 2009 subscriptions at the same time. Around February 10th.

What I’ll do is, around that time , I’ll send you an e-mail with all the details about becoming a 2009 shareholder.

Here’s an important piece of information to be aware of, especially if you are thinking about being a member this year. Right now, if we were to go by the number of people on the waiting list, our shares, this year, will fill up quickly. If you are planning on being a member of a CSA for the 2009 season the safe thing to do now is to do the research on which CSA you are going to join right now.

I believe most local CSA’s are listed on Local Harvest’s webpage (localharvest.org). Last year most CSA’s in our area filled up earlier than they had in years gone by. I know our subscription list was full two months earlier than it usually had in the past.

I’m sure the same thing goes for the other established CSA’s.

Visiting our farm? I love to have people come out and we’ll have several planned events later on in the year. Right now it isn’t the most pleasant time of year. Grey, bleak and muddy, though I must say our growing fields are rather bright green due to our cover crop of winter rye. If you want to come out and see the farm, talk about our CSA, maybe go for a hike, the thing to do is e-mail me to set up a time.

So, I hope you are having a warm winter. I hope the hard frost that they are predicting for later this week doesn't freeze your pipes or stall your car.

And I hope so far, you are having a bodacious winter.

Leigh Hauter

dirty chickens

2008-12-18T16:08:00.005-05:00

Well, the Europeans don't want to eat them, and, you know, I can't much blame them either. The idea, once you sit down and think about it is, well, its not very appetizing. In fact its sort of repugnant, repellent, maybe even nauseating.

However, I think there's a saying that covers it. Maybe its 'out of sight, out of mind' or is that, the less I know, the better it seems.' or maybe. 'to the ignorant all things are good.' (you know I'm just making these up). but apparently someone in our government (or is that our food industry?), must think this is the best policy because there's not much discussion going on.

Do you know what I'm talking about?

I'm talking about, of course, chickens.

The chickens we eat. We're talking about dirty chickens. Filthy chickens.

And anyone that's been around a chicken knows that chickens aren’t real big on personal hygiene. In fact, it takes special effort to keep this bird with its long time symbiotic relationship with people, clean.

As someone who has several hundred chickens on his farm, I know. Chickens aren’t concerned about keeping their living quarters clean. To them their is no difference between were they eat, sleep, drink or use the facilities. To them, the facilities are just whereever they might be standing when the urge strikes.

And from there they will reach down and peck and scratch and eat some more. Walking from one end of their available space to the other. Stomping through the 'chicken litter’ (that’s what the industry calls it). They don’t seem to notice if they are knee deep in it. If its encrusted on their feet, their legs. From one end of their what are considered delicious bodies to the other.

This means, if you haven't figured it out by now, that its up to the human part of the chicken/human partnership to do the cleaning.

And if they don’t, if people don't worry about cleaning chicken houses or for that matter, the chickens as they are being butchered in preparation to being made in to food. Well, well it just isn't very nice.

In other words if the humans fall down on their end cut back on the cleaning there is quickly a sanitation problem. A problem of sloth and neglect.

Dirty chickens.

And in a corporate setting, where ultimately everything is decided by the bottom line.

Where hiring extra help to wash and clean means more costs.

Meaning less profits.

Where the concern is eliminating human labor, not adding it. Well, I'm sure you get the idea.

And that’s where we came in.

It seems the American food industry has a solution that the European public doesn't much approve of.

The American food industry has decided that, instead of keeping the chickens we're going to eat really, really clean (which means hiring more help, which means spending more money, which means raising costs, which means reducing profits) they’ve decided its ok, its hunkydory to slack on the cleaning end of the equation if they are willing to come in on the chemical end

In other words, its just fine if the birds are dirty if we soak them in chemicals or nuke them with irradiation and by doing so, kill off the disease causing organisms.

Another way of saying this, Instead of keeping our friends and companions and meal ticket the chickens very clean. Instead of scrubbing the chickens down and removing the chicken feces that can't help but naturally get between their toes, Instead of hiring people to clean up these birds that we're getting ready to eat what we do is

after taking the chickens out of their tightly filled cages once we ship them to the killing factory where they are quickly killed, and the feathers ripped off the body, and once the carcass has been cut opened and butchered.

Then, that's when their bodies are dumped in a vat of chlorine solution.

And left to sit there until the bacteria and germs have been killed (and in the process the chicken flesh has absorbed this cleaning, sanitizing chemical).

Then the chickens are removed from this vat of poison and the chicken is turned into those famous nuggets or cut into parts or packaged whole and shipped off to your neighborhood grocery store.

And that’s where the American public comes in. They get their chicken maybe a little contaminated by puss and feces. but its safe puss and feces. Because of the Chloride the pathogens are dead.

And that’s where the Europeans come in.

Our chicken raising corporations would like to sell their chickens to Europe. But the Europeans don’t want to buy it.

They don't like their food soaking in chlorine. In fact, they have decided that serving chicken soaked chlorine is illegal.

If you want to sell chickens in Europe, they say, you have to raise them in a clean habitat. And when they are butchered there has to be an inspector to make sure the meat is clean. No puss, no disease, no feces.

Their answer:, keep the chickens clean, and keeping the butcher shop clean. And have inspectors there to make sure the public doesn’t get tainted meat.

Simple enough?

Well, the American chicken industry says ‘not really.’

It means instead of huge, huge, food producing factories (let's don't call those things farms). where the eggs are hatched in monster incubators and the day old chicks are trucked out to massive chicken raising houses. And fed a antibiotic laced formula (when you stuff chickens in tight together without there mothers or enough living space where they get regular exercise they need a regular dose of antibiotics just to make it through their short lives.

And here's a side fact. Just how short are the lives of those chickens that go into making the chicken pieces (very few chickens are cooked whole these days) you see in the grocery store?

I bet you don't believe the answer!

Four weeks. From the time the chick hatches from her egg until the time she is being quickly run though the conveyor belt at some chicken processing factory is four weeks.

From hatched egg to almost full grown in just four weeks.

So, naturally our food industry doesn't want you to come down with some horrible disease from eating their dirty product.

And their answer?

Dunk it in Chlorine.

And the Europeans?

They say "We don't want to eat dirty chickens, we don't want to eat chicken feces even if the germs in it have been killed.

'Our solution." they say. "let's don't raise dirty chickens. Let's keep our chickens clean. Let's keep the places we kill and butcher our food clean.

"Let's hire people to inspect the farms and butchers and slaughter yards.

"Yes, we know this means that we can run our farms like factories. And we have to slow down the process of killing and cutting up the birds.

"but our food is worth it."

And you know, I think my food is worth it too.

In fact, I do mind.

I don't like the idea of eating puss and feces even if the bacteria in it has been killed by dunking it in a cleaning agent. the idea of eating dirty (but safe) food is repugnant.

jeeez! you'd think that would be just common sense.

And you know, the same goes for irradiating my food.

Why don't we just solve this problem, not with some alleged scientific quick fix. Why don't we just go for the common sense solution.

slow down and keep our chickens clean, keep the places we raise our chickens clean. And when it comes time to take the chicken's life so we can eat their bodies, lets do it in a clean, sanitary place.

And let's hire some inspectors to make sure all of this happens.

I vote for clean food.

Here we go again.

2008-11-21T22:42:00.000-05:00

Here we go.

We went on vacation a couple weeks ago and when we left the leaves were all gold and red. The temperature was mild. It was a very memorable fall out here on the farm.

And now, I get home and the most I can say is the winter rye has come up on all of our fields and the rye is bright green.

As for everything else, if it wasn't for the memory that spring does eventually return, I would begin to believe in some mythological world where vengeful creatures punish and torture the world for some unmentionable wrong.

Winter is coming.

The trees are bare, the plants are dead. The birds that stayed behind are hiding and shivering.

Even the weeds have frosted over and turned death brown.

Last night just so we would know winter had firmly overtaken us, the temperature dropped all the way down to 19 degrees.

This morning we were out in the cold cutting down the asparagus stalks and the dead banana trees (the one Chinese banana we bought four years ago has proliferated, each spring it emerges from the roots of last years stalk as not one but three or four new trees. At this rate it will be just a few years and I might be giving a banana tree out in the spring shares).

I had until now postponed winterizing the 200 foot long hoop house hoping that if not summer at least a civilized fall would remain around a little longer and the eggplants growing inside would continue to bear fruit.

Not so after last night. Now everything is dead and we’re heading out to pull of the dead eggplants and roll up the plastic mulch.

Other farm news?

Early sign up for 2009 shares.

Each year we let the previous year's shareholders sign up early. This year the number of early sign ups almost doubled the number of those signing up early in the past.

Our 2009 subscription sign up will begin in February. If you received this newsletter, you will be contacted then.

Eggs
The day old chicks that were shipped to us in September have almost reached the size of full grown chickens ( and while those chickens you see in the grocery store all gutted, plucked, sliced and wrapped in plastic aren't any older than these chicks, ours are egg laying birds. And egg layers don't reach maturity until over 5 months.

That means, first, you won't see us out in the back yard plucking the feathers off our chickens and second, they won't be old enough to lay eggs for another three months.

Again, if you were an 08 shareholder and want eggs just come on out. Even if you weren't an 08 shareholder I might have extra eggs. It's best to contact me first.

Cows/beef. There are still two of my neighbors cows available for meat come January. If you are a meat eater with a freezer this is a good deal. Pasture raised, hormone and antibiotic free (they are fed extra grain the last several months to up the taste of the meat). I bought a quarter cow last year and those were the yummiest steaks I have ever eaten. Contact me and I'll send you details.

On top of that another 25 chickens, this time those green and blue egg laying Ameraucanas chickens, are supposed to arrive within the week (they arrived this morning and I just put them in their special place in the barn with their own heat lamp. They seem healthy and judging from the chirps, happy).

Bears
Since I hadn’t seen a bear in well over a month I thought they might have given up and gone off to hibernate. However, a neighbor reported seeing that mother bear with her two cubs down by the lower beehives. The neighbor reported they were standing just outside the electric fence with eyes on the honey (one of those hives has so far this year escaped being looted by either me or the bears and probably has close to a hundred pounds of honey on it).

So, there I was last night, walking through the woods with a flashlight fully prepared to find a vandalized mess.

Honey boxes thrown in all directions. Frames of wax torn apart and huge bear paw prints left where the honey once was.

Those beehives are down the hill from house with a steep bank maybe a hundred feet high to their back.

I slid down through the leaves, jumping from boulder to boulder, and then climbed out through the trees with my light in hand.

I turned on the light and there were the hives.

The hives were all intact. I flashed the light back and forth.

No bears.

Apparently the new battery I hooked to the electric fence charger worked. .

Either Momma or her babies or maybe all three of the marauders stepped up to the hives, touched the wire...

And got a shock strong enough to make them reconsider sitting down to a hundred pound honey meal.

There’s a picture of the mother and babies raiding these hives earlier in the season on our webpage. This is before I repaired the electric fence.

And speaking of pictures.

I need to change the pictures on our webpage. That one of me standing on top of the mountain is now out of date. As of this week the top of the mountain is no longer part of our farm.

It's been 40 years now that we've been hassling with the state over property lines and how to divide up a jointly owned piece of property (meaning we owned 75% the state 25% without any sort of a division on who owned what). This week, however, we signed the papers, went to court and the state of Virginia now owns the top of Highpoint Mountain (and we own the 75% lower down on the mountain).

Which would be just fine if the state, meaning us, you and me and the woman next door, were able to enjoy this beautiful piece of outdoors. (for all of you that have hiked up there you know what I mean about how beautiful it is, and if you haven't look at the pictures on our webpage). It would be nice if the top of the mountain was connected with other state owned property in the Bull Run Mountains and made into a trail. A park.

The far side of the mountain.

Unfortunately, this might not happen. In the past VOF, that's Virginia Outdoors Foundation, a public/private agency of the commonwealth that accepts private donations, which is the one who controlled the 25% and a lot of other land in the Bull Run Mountains, hasn't always had the publics interest at heart. About a dozen years ago Virginia was left the neighboring farm, a Dupont estate, to be turned into public land. This is the hundreds of acres of wooded land right below the cliffs in the picture.

Instead of turning this resource into public land, into a park, VOF quietly sold it at a below market price, without taking other bids and it sold this farm to a family member of one of its wealthiest funders So the estate instead of being turned into a park was quietly sold to a family member of one of its long-time high funders.

There are a number of people that worry that the same thing will be done to the top of the mountain.

(this is more than a run of the mill 'worry'. VOF attempted to sell the top of the mountain to the sister of their benefactress several years ago, only at the time they didn't own the property. (remember 75/25%). Now that Virginia has a clear title to all 100% we're afraid that instead of letting the public have access they will use the fact that they once sold it as an excuse to now sell it again).

What to do?

I don't know. In the past it was our issue. This was our land. Now its a public issue and our concern in this is that of any one else, particularly people that enjoy the outdoors and that have an interest in open trails and public land. When we owned the top of the mountain (well, 75% of it) we let people hike up there. Virginia should continue to let people to continue to hike up there. If it's sold (which it shouldn't be) it should be sold with a public trail easement. This land and the view on top is way too beautiful to go into private hands and the public kept out.

But that's just my opinion. Now, though, whether people are allowed to continue to hike along the top of the mountain to those magnificent cliffs is a public issue. An issue between the public and their government.

Leigh

a kite

2008-10-31T18:02:00.003-05:00

They should know that the fence/wire/net they're using to protect their pansies won't work.

I mean, after all, they are supposed to be professionals and they should know by now that what they are doing won’t work.

If they had asked me I could have told them and they wouldn't have had to waste all that money.

Not that there is really an alternative.

I remember being desperate and trying everything, just like they must have done. I even did something like they’ve done. It must have been, maybe a decade or so ago.

It didn't work then and I don’t suppose it will work now.

I mean, after all, no matter what people think, deer might be a lot of thiinks but one thing they aren’t is dumb.

Or maybe what it is, is that hunger makes every creature reach down to the bottom of their intelligence barrel and dig up their best ideas.

In my case (and I guess that means my deers’ case) is that one year I had a big planting of sweet potatoes out in that field where the barn is now and the deer would come out with the dusk and start eating.

It turns out they really have a taste for sweet potato vines and leaves.

So, after trying just about everything and none of it working I had this really bright idea.

I would take row cover, that's this white fabric you use to protect your crops from insects and light frosts, its very thin, light weight, but sturdy and you take a roll of it and unfurl it over your plants.

Think of a roll of white material 16 feet wide and as long as the field. In that fields case, 300 feet.

You would think that it would work. A huge white piece of material laid out on top of all those sweet potato vines.

HOWEVER.... the deer would get in the field, just like they did before I put down the row cover. And they could smell those tasty vines. At first they would go around the edges and with their noses lift it up, push it back. Until the edge of the sweet potatoes were exposed.

And they would start eating.

After I saw what they were doing I started taking rocks and putting boulders over the edge of the material, surrounding the sweet potato patch, holding the material down.

That didn’t work for long.

It didn’t take the deer long to realize they could rip the row cover. They would walk out into the middle of the field and start pawing the material until they'd ripped it and then they would eat the leaves underneath. then when the leaves and vines were eaten in that spot they would move on, rip another hole and do the same thing.

After a while my sheets of row cover were starting to look rather frayed and bedraggled. Instead of one long piece of material, really long strands of rags.

And then early one morning a large buck went in the field and was eating the leaves using this maneuver, only his antlers got stuck in the row cover. We are talking about a piece of material 300 feet long and 16 feet wide.

He's got his head through the hole and the material stuck on his antlers.

He freaks!

And starts running, pulling up all of that material. Shaking it loose from all those rocks.

Did I mention the weather?

It's a frosty windy morning. I mean the wind is blowing something like 20 miles an hour. So here is this huge buck running from one end of the field to the other with this 300 foot long piece of white material (its real light weight) flying in the air like a kite, like a kite tail.

this is back when I had woven wire fences around the fields because I had goats. Woven wire with a strand of barbed wire on top.

He runs from one end of the field to the other. Reaches teh next fence and turns, looks around and runs back toward the other end, the material way up in the air, just like a kite ( I remember back when I was a teenager, we would attach half a dozen kites to the same string. Each kite used to hoist the string higher for the one before it. So finally, the first kite would be, maybe, a mile up in the air) this is like the deer.

So after making several rounds with this huge kite chasing him he decides he has to do something. He has to escape.

He turns a corner of the field, sees the distant fence and begins to charge it.

At first it's maybe 150 yards away. He's getting up steam. Going faster. Straight for the fence.

Getting up more speed. Actually he can't see all that well, what with the material wrapped around his head.

But he charges.

150 yards.

100.

He's getting up speed. Going faster and faster. Closing on the fence. 70 yards. 40 20 10.

and he jumps.

Flies through the air.

And some how the row cover, his long white kite, catches on the fence, around his legs. over his head.

He flies through the air.

And suddenly...

He lands just on the other side of the fence.

Crash!

Here's this big old buck all wrapped up in white material. And up in the air more of this white stuff, flying like some sort of a Chinese kite.

Long, dramatic. 20 mile per hour winds. Way up in the air.

Waving field, the far end of the material catching on a tree branch.

Maybe a hundred feet up in the air.

And on the ground, there's the buck, struggling, struggling to get to his feet.

To see out of the material.

Finally he does stand up, shakes his head, Gets his head free. Pulls away from the fence. Rips the material more. A long gash. Some of it hanging from his antlers, some hanging from the barbed wire.

And the buck turns, More ripping, and runs away, trailing a ten foot piece of row cover.

The remainder caught on one end on the barbed wire, the rest flowing, flying through the air from the fence up higher and higher until the far end is stuck on that branch a hundred feet up.

The deer runs up the hill. Gets to the driveway and springs down the driveway until he turns again, into the forest and up the mountain.

And leaving the material behind, Material, like a kite.

And even today, a decade later, if you look, there are pieces of row cover fluttering from a branch way up on the tree.

And if you ever ask yourself. "How did that get there?" you now know.

Leigh Hauter

Brown-tailed Hawk (and a sweet little rabbit)

2008-10-29T14:59:00.000-05:00

Today, as I was driving over the creek, a brown-tailed hawk swept by just missing my windshield.

Dangling from the hawk’s talons was a rabbit. Its cute little feet kicking desperately in the air.

Right here, in my first several drafts of this blog, for some reason I got off subject, and instead of giving you the picture of the hawk, holding on to that rabbit, flying off into the woods until it disappeared from sight, I instead slipped off topic and hurriedly began running down the road that compares that rabbit to the chicken that we take on faith is the meat part of a Chicken McNugget.

Apparently the connection in my mind was the thought, the comparison, between eating rabbit and eating the contents of an order of Chicken McNuggets.

Particularly, chicken McNuggets bought at the Union Station McDonalds.

This isn’t the McDonalds downstairs in the food court (if there is one downstairs in the food court) This is the McDonalds up by the trains because, I think it was about a year ago when I was waiting for Wenonah to come in on a train from NYC, it was late at night and the other shops were closing so I walked down past the trains to that dead end corner and stood in line.

And there, past the cash register, was this guy dressed in whites, opening a package of frozen hamburger paddies and I got to thinking that those things were probably from the same factory as the ones being thrown on the grease in McDonalds located all over the world.

Any of the ones in Winchester, Culpeper, Glenwood Springs, Barstow (is there one in Barstow?).

Or maybe even the one located down by the ferry landing in Hong Kong. (I was once desperate enough for something that approximated an American breakfast after traveling in Asia for a month that I bought and ate two egg McMuffins while waiting for the ferry).

But really, the idea here is not food as a living, breathing animal that we (or the hawk) kills and eats to keep our bodies alive, but instead food as just something made in a factory like a ball point pen, sock or tennis ball.

Sort of food as a manufactured product. Manufactured at a factory that could be located just about anywhere from material that could come from just about anything.

I could go on and describe the little piece of rabbit fur Wenonah and I found down in the corner of the hoophouse (sort of like a greenhouse, only with a hoophouse you grow your crops directly in to the dirt).

We had been in the hoophouse picking eggplant. Italian eggplant we intended to slice and cook on the grill that night.

And we had come across the rabbit coat and a little bit of its innards and we stood there for a moment, looking and wondering what had caught the rabbit and rested here to make a meal of it.

So, I think the point here, the one that was sort of bubbling up from somewhere was about the nature of food.

Whether food is a relationship, sometimes a brutal one like that one between the hawk and that rabbit. or, I guess the relationship between those bears and our bees’ honey. Even the eggplant that we so carefully started in the spring, putting one seed into a little tiny dab of dirt where it was watered and protected from the cold, given water and nutrients and finally taken out and carefully put in the ground.
Again protected from the elements, watered, fed, defended from various predators, (potato bugs, flea beetles, deer, ground hogs) and finally harvested the fruit ( and I’ve often wondered what that relationship was, symbiotic or ruthless exploitation) until finally the seasons change and the earth’s natural cycle turns the ground cold and bleak.

Whether food is a relationship between two beings. One being eaten (the rabbit) and the one doing the eating (the hawk).

Or is food just another product like tennis balls. Another piece of a commercial enterprise.

Or does it even matter.

Leigh Hauter

bluebirds

2008-10-26T14:08:00.000-05:00

What’s that song about blue birds?

(I’ll give you a moment here to remember it, if possible you are given permission to sing a line or two before continuing... How does it go... ‘there’s a...”)

Anyway, we have a lot of bluebirds out here. During the summer you can look at that electric line that crosses the field over by the barn and at any one time there are going to be four or so blue birds perched on it looking down for a tasty morsel.

And then I do have, I don’t know, half a dozen or so blue bird houses. But really, these were an after thought.

I put up my first blue bird house after I fixed the hole in the side of our house, the place under the eve in the kitchen I added on to the house twenty-five years ago. The place where with my expert English teacher carpentry I had left a hole big enough for a pair of bluebirds to claim as the site for a nest.

And they, or is it their descendants had been nesting there year after year ever since.

Or at least until we built a new kitchen

So when it came time for us to build a new kitchen the nesting spot was closed up, the kitchen turned into a utility room and the bluebirds forced to move on.

Which means I felt pretty guilty.

And I had come to enjoy watching the bluebirds comeback each spring, discover the hole in the house each year. Clean it out, collect new nesting material and begin the process anew of raising the next generation.

I don’t know how this thing works with bluebirds, whether it’s the same couple that returns each year and uses the same nesting site or whether the old couple has died from a fatal encounter with some neighborhood cat or out here a hawk or owl or clever bobcat.

But I was left to wonder if it is now the children raising a family, sort of like the couple in a small town growing old and eventually willing their home to their children who move in raise a family, grow old, etc, etc.

So what I did is planted a locust post out from the house right at the corner where the stone wall turns and after shopping around for bluebird houses nailed one on the post facing my office window.

(yes, I know, the book says the nest should face the open field. ‘Bluebirds like their nest boxes to face the field.’ They like to get up in the morning and look out across a field, sort of like humans that like to build their houses on the edge of lakes, or the ocean, so they can get up in the morning and look out across that expanse of water).

But I put the box facing the house so I coulde watch them, watch the male land on top of the post and then drop down into the nest box, at firs carrying a twig or leaf and then, once the babies had hatched with meal for the young ones.

But, I’m sorry this isn’t what I intended to write about at all. My intention when I first sat down had nothing to do with bluebird houses and nests.

Instead, what I wanted to tell you about was the fairly remarkable sight I saw this week.

This last week I was looking out my office window, taking a brake from my intention of catching up on my paper work when right there, just past my collection of bird feeders and the daytime population of finches and tit mice must have been 50, maybe 60 blue birds.

Blue birds up on top of the empty swallow house.

Blue birds bouncing up and down on the short wave antenna, actually a wire that runs from the house out to the old black walnut tree.

Blue birds on the ground.

Flying in short circles around the field.

A regular party of blue birds.

Which made me scramble for my copy of Sibley’ Guide to Bird Life and  Behavior, thinking, Hmm-mm. this is a group of birds migrating south.

Only, when I finally found the applicable paragraph it said that blue birds aren’t much interested in migrating., especially in such a rather southerly location at Northern Virginia.

And then it occurred to me.

These aren’t my bluebirds. These aren’t the couple dozen birds that summer in our fields and winter here.

This is a group of snowbirds.

Blue birds from Western Pennsylvania and New York. These are a bunch of Canadians that are heading south looking for a more pleasant climate to spend the cruel winter months.

Now, here it is a week after the passing of the great bluebird flight and I haven’t noticed any bluebirds out on the wire. Did our local birds join the passing flight and following the mountain range south toward a warmer climate?

We’ll see. Unlike most winters I’ll keep an eye out for bluebirds. I’ll look to see if there are bluebirds around during the winter months (the map in Peterson Field Guide says were on the northern fringe of the ‘year round’ range).

Let’s see if that’s true.

one more (or so) bears

2008-10-25T13:11:00.002-05:00

No bear sightings since last weekend when a mother and her two year cub tore up the hive on the hill on the right just as you come in the gate. They had turned it over a couple nights before but when I drove up on the tractor around 4 pm there they were.

They quickly ran to the gate. the mother climbed over it and her cub scooted on the ground and under.

From there, they quickly disappeared in to the forest where I could hear them noisily climb the hillside.

So, right then I spent almost an hour putting the hive back together and stacking it up. The idea was that I would put it on the tractor bucket after dark when the bees had stopped flying and move it down to the hives along the bottom road.

My intention was to put it somewhere where I could better defend it. A lone hive standing by itself is harder to put an electric fence around than ten hives sitting in a row.

So I finished it up, left the tractor sitting there and walked back to the house to get some more bee equipment, a bottom board, inside top and a new outer top.

I was gone no more than a half an hour but when I got back the hive had been torn apart again. This time another super full of honey had been grabbed and hauled up into the woods leaving one emptied frame after another.

A sort of honey trail.

In the escape the bears had knocked down the deer fence just above the hive. Throwing the box into the woods and taking a couple more frames up higher, licking them clean and then too throwing them off into the brush.

I followed picking up the mess. When I got to the fence and attempted to put it back up my hands got sticky. In other words, whoever had knocked down the fence (momma bear?) had sticky paws when she did it.

It took me an hour this time to pick up the mess and put everything back together. This time I put the hive on the tractor bucket, leaving only one box behind for the 'lost' bees to gather in and immediately drove the hive down the road and to its new home.

All went well, no sign of bears.

When I returned however, going through the gate, I flashed my light up at the 'pick up' box.

The box was no longer on its stand. While I had been gone someone had returned. Taken the box and scattered the pieces. The frames had been broken and thrown in all directions. And, what honey I had left behind for the poor traumatized bees and been eaten, with long bear paw scratches left in the wax.

Since then no sign of bears. I think a new berry has ripened. These aren't berries that humans even try to eat but then a bear's fall digestive tract is no doubt a lot hardier, needing to quickly put on a lot more winter weight, than ours.

Leigh Hauter

Breeding bear resistant honeybees

2008-10-22T20:19:00.003-05:00

Should I keep on telling bear stories? (I sure have enough of them).

The other night a mother bear and her 150 pound cub knocked over a lone hive that sits by itself on a little knoll.

(The reason why I have these lone beehives sitting all by themselves around the farm is a convoluted story that in part is due to... parasitic mites.

Particularly varroa mites.

Varroa mites are rather new and particularly deadly to the honey bees that, for the most part, populate North America. These mites were introduced, by accident of course, only two decades ago. Sailing to our continent in the hold of a ship. A boat, I understand, that first docked somewhere in Florida.

And within months of this event had prospered greatly, quickly spreading to most of the honey bees all the way across the United States of America

Back then, back when my bees first came in contact with mites I had almost 100 beehives. The next spring only 48 of those hives were alive. (normally, back then, I would have expected no more than 5 to have died over the winter). The next year my losses put us down to 24. Then 14. 6. And finally the last two died.

Commercial beekeepers, and we are talking about people that have hundreds if not thousands of hives, people that predominately make their living from driving tractor trailers loaded with beehives from one corner of our country to the other, getting paid for renting out their hives to the owners of orchards, apples, peaches, almonds. Farmers of vegetables and flowers.

The commercial beekeepers went into a panic. They couldn’t afford to stand by while their hives died (at the time I made my living by teaching school).

So quickly the pharmaceutical industry came up with a mitacide that didn’t out and out kill the bees and wasn’t supposed to contaminate the honey.

To worked to kill only the mites, sort of.

Until after a few years the mites became resistant to the drug, however, by then there was another mitacide. (which of course the mites soon became resistant too)

I never made the chemical plunge. Never treated my bees with chemicals.

(Do you think for a moment that if you put a chemical in a beehive with tens of thousands of insects walking around from one end of the hive to the other that the chemical won't sooner or later get in to the honey? I didn't).

What I did do, though, was replenishing my missing empty bee boxes with bees that were thought to be somewhat tolerant to the mites.

During this time the US Department of Agriculture had sent out researchers far and wide looking for bees that could coexist with the mites. After all, such a thing must exist. It stood to reason, with natural selection, bees adapt to the mites. Instead of waiting for it to happen with our bees, why not find that bee and bring it to us.

And, after looking, several bees were found. One of them, the Russia honey bee had been living with mites for little ill effect for decades, if not centuries.

The researchers brought them back to the US and after a few years rthey became available.

When they did, I bought some.

And then there was a professor out in, I believe, Ohio. who bred for a mite tolerant bee.

I bought some of those.

And there’s others.

Besides the store bought bees I found a swarm of honey bees living up in the forest.

And that’s where the bees on the hill come about.

When I got a batch of mite resistant bees I would put them somewhere on the farm, away from other bees. Instead of having one large apiary I had a dozen.

Not all of these 'mite resistant' bees lived. or where good for producing honey. Some of them were very hot (they poured out of their hives and attempted to sting you in mass).

And a number of them eventually died off. But after a while I was collecting a number of mite resistants bees.

That was until the year of the bear.

2008.

Now, though, here in our valley bears are becoming just as deadly to the bees as the mite was.

What do you think I should do to protect the bees? Should I set out, as some have suggested, to kill off the bears?

Or, should I follow the same path I followed with the mites. Should I work to breed a bear resistant bee? And if I do. what characteristics would you suppose those bees would have?

2008-10-16T09:42:00.000-05:00

2008-10-16T09:35:00.000-05:00

The bear and I, (continued)

2008-10-16T07:21:00.002-05:00

Just checked. (will try to clean one up and then post it) They aren't great pictures but its definitely a bear. Up the tree. About the size of one of my dogs. Maybe a little larger. 150 pounds. Maybe 200.

In the picture he's looking at me from about 10, twenty yards away.

I'm yelling at him. Telling him to go home. "I'm tired." "leave me alone."
"Leave my beehives alone.'

He doesn't listen, but it does look like he's coming down the tree. Is he going to chase after me. this is dumb I should go back to the house. I start back and he comes down all the way and is at the base of the tree.

There's a bushel of those hard winter apples. Ozark Blacks. So I pick up a couple and throw one.

I don't hit the bear (I don't think). But I hit the tree.

splat. and I turn around and start back toward the bear. What else am I going to do?

And I flash the light and instead of chasing me, the bear turns off and runs.

runs down the driveway. So I follow. In the dark. But not too far. There he is, Maybe another twenty yards away.

And I'm following with the torch and my apples as weapons. And I'm yelling at the top of my voice (my throat still hurts).

And he sees me and grudgingly turns and trots another twenty yards down the driveway. And stops. And I follow.

It's obvious he isn't going to take off running in fear. I think it is obvious he isn't afraid of me. Not much. But he stops and I keep on shinning my light and calling him names. Telling him to go home. Leave my vegetables alone. "The same goes for my bees." Its a felony to destroy a hive. You know that?"

Apparently he doesn't. Or doesn't care. He trots another twenty yards and I follow, and another twenty. Another. We're slowly moving down the driveway, toward the gate, a quarter mile away.

nd the dogs? The brave Great Pyrenees? They haven't followed. They aren't barking. It's just me and my light and the bear in the night.

Finally we get to the gate and the b ear slides on under and then disappears up the hill into the forest. I can hear him go. Not running. Not going far, just backtracking around me along the outside of the fence.

I think then that its probably a good idea to go back to the house. I probably would have been wise to bring the shotgun along with me. Even with bird shot to give3 the bear something to think about.
--

the bear and I -- Wednesday night

2008-10-16T07:18:00.005-05:00

Well, so here's what happened.

I put on my boots, and a shirt (still wearing shorts) and got the powerful torch and went out side.

One dog is panting and barking outside the door.

The other dog is halfway up the driveway, Maybe a hundred feet from the house. And barking, but not going any further.

So, I do. I walk up the hill. I know somethings there. I'm making all sorts of noise, afraid that I'm going to walk in between a mother and her cubs. That's what the books always talk about as the time you get eaten by momma as she protects her babies.

So I walk up, flashing the light this way and that. The beehives in front of the house aren't touched.

And then I hear it. Or I hear something.

Its further up the driveway. A sort of scratching. Loud. Is it behind me. I turn around.

And walk back toward the house.

And for a second flick off the light

And its loud. The hiss and its up a tree.

The poplar on the hill.

I quickly turn around. Flash the light.

And there he is.

A bear.

Not large.

200 pounds.

The trees large so he's having a hard time. maybe 8 feet up. Hanging on at a crook in the tree.

So I grabbed that little camera and in the confusion try to take a picture. Let me see.

(next installment coming up)

Leigh Hauter

Oil Shale

2008-10-09T13:46:00.002-05:00

Since it looks like oil shale is in the news again I might as well tell my oil shale story.

In case you have missed this one, out west, actually mostly on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies and going over into Utah there is a lot of what is called oil shale. It’s actually a formation of shale that’s heavy with oil.

Not the sort of oil that you see in the movies. You know, somewhere in Oklahoma or Texas where the wildcatter drives well pipe down in the ground And suddenly strikes a huge pool of liquid oil under so much pressure that it comes gushing up through the pipe and soars up into the air, then dramatically gushing down to land all over the ecstatic oil man. Promising him and all of his descendants great wealth for ever and ever, amen.

This shale contains a sort of oil but its not in the liquid form. You could drill all year long and it would never come spouting out of the ground.

What it is, is a oil that’s tied in with the shale, a sort of rock like sand. So, to get this oil away from the sandy rock you are going to have to do something. The current technology mandates that heat it and wash it and eventually the two, the sand and the oil will be separated.

Only there is a problem and its not just the fuel that will be necessary to heat the rocks. You will also need water.

Water!

So here’s my story.

Once upon a time I graduated from college. I got my undergraduate literature degree out in Colorado. This was 1975.

Now a literature degree offers great possibilities, I’m sure you know. But most of them aren’t in the job area.

Actually my academic advisor told me, as I graduated, that I had just wasted four years of my life (actually it was three, I was going to school on the GI bill and rather than not have money in the summer I would go to school all year round, so I graduated in three years). And that my possibilities, my adviser informed me were number one, to go to graduate school, number 2. to go back to school and get a teaching degree, Number three. Move back to DC and try to get a job with the government.

He missed out on several possibilities, but you get the idea. He thought my future didn’t look all that hot. However, I should note that in his wisdom he missed one noteworthy career possibility.

He didn’t suggest that I pack up my belongings and drive my VW Beetle over the mountains to Colorado’s western slope and find a job on an oil rig.

But that’s what I did. I went out west to be a roughneck.

At that time I had several friends that had followed the same career path. These were Colorado boys and after getting their liberal arts degrees (on the GI Bill, they had moved home and were working the oil rigs.

Now working as a roughneck (that’s what a guy on a oil rig is called) is not the easiest (I think occupationally its one of the more dangerous jobs) or the cleanest (the local laundry mats have large signs saying DO NOT WASH YOUR GREASERS IN OUR MACHINES!) but it had one benefit. It paid well with lots of overtime.

So I loaded up my car and drove west and ended up renting an old movie theatre (but that’s another story) and got a job at first working the oil rigs and then putting in the pipelines that connected up the natural gas wells they were sinking up in the Book Cliff Mountains.

Beautiful countryside. Plenty of outdoor air. The only problem being finding a place to live. Rangely, this was the town where most of the rigs worked out of, really couldn’t house all the people that were moving into town with the oil industry.

The problem wasn’t the housing. New houses could always be built. Or if not stick built structures, trailers could be hauled in and rented out.

Or the Jobs.

The mid 70's was right after one of the Mideast wars. There was an oil crisis. Gas prices had jumped from below 30 cents a gallon to almost a dollar and everyone was screaming for something to be done. (Ms. Palin’s current chant is nothing new, many people were singing the same thing back then, over 30 years ago). The government was spending money like mad in the perennial cry to be 'energy self-sufficient.' or as the current Governor of Alaska so quaintly calls it, "Drill, Baby, Drill.'

And it wasn't just drilling for oil, or gas it was other energy sources. Potential energy like oil shale.

Only. Only,there was a small problem with western Colorado and Wyoming taking in all of the people that would be necessary to extra all of this oil and oil shale.

The problem was water.

Or the lack of it.

I'm not sure the people back east or up in Alaska had bothered to look, but Colorado, Wyoming and Utah are semi-arid.

There isn't much water.

And a case in point was the water supply for Rangely.

Rangely, back then, and I suspect today, got all of its water from the Rio Blanco River. (And yes the river did run white. Or at least there were white deposits from something the river ran through along its banks and the glasses you chose to drink it from.

But that wasn’t the only problem. the other problem was that there just wasn’t enough of this nasty tasting liquid.

When I moved to Rangely it had a population of, I recall, 1500 people. And I think with the oil boom of the 70’s the population jumped another thousand.

And the water? well what water there was in the Rio Blanco and there wasn’t much of it flowed into town and when it got to town and to the mouth of the intake pipe for the water system they built an earthen dam to collect it.

And all the water from the river went into the pipe.

And leaving the town the Rio Blanco was only an imaginary river. Banks and a bed but no water.

one day that we weren’t working some of us had the bright idea that we would go tubing down the river, so we got our tubes and drove a couple of trucks up the valley. Leaving one about ten miles above town and driving the other twenty miles up where we proceded to unload and dressed in our swim trunks and old tennis shoes walk down to the river. Only, there wasn’t any water. Or at least there wasn’t enough water to float a tube in.

Sure, we would find a pool every once in a while, and maybe it would be deep enough for the tube to float 25, 50 even a couple hundred feet down stream. but it turned out we ended up walking with our inner tubes as much as we floated. A rather educational experience).

Now, as I said, we were located on the edge of the oil shale land. Back then the government had decided that the factory for extracting the oil shale would be a town called Rifle. Rifle was located on the Colorado river but before the idea of extracting oil from the shale it was a town not as large as Rangely. Getting its water from streams flowing out of the Rockies.

(you know, of course, that all the water in the Colorado River is spoken for. Every gallon of that river is owned by someone somewhere down the line. Out west, in the western states, going to law school, you were just as likely to specialize in water rights as family Law. The answer here is no one was gong to take any of the water out of the Colorado that they didn’t own without decades of law suits first being filed, argued and settled).

Which brings us back to Rifle.

Anxious to do something about the energy crisis congress passed legislation and the president signed it mandating that thee oil shale be developed so Rifle went from a small cow town to a huge (by western slope standards) housing development in months.

A demonstration extraction plant was built. Workers started flowing into town. Houses were built. Roughneck bars were opened. Stores built. In fact, like the old westerns, it was almost time for the churches to be built.

And then an important fact was discovered.

There wasn’t enough water within hundreds, really thousands of miles to extract the oil shale.

Oil was there. But the water wasn't. In fact even back then the western slopes extra water had been bought up and piped over to the Eastern slope to water Denver and Colorado Springs and Boulder.

So, the workers were laid off, The houses were left empty. The stores closed. The bars went out of business and the churches. Well the churches were mostly left on the drawing board until another time and another president.

And that’s where we are now.

Yes, there is oil out there in the Western Colorado shale, but it isn’t going anywhere until technology or the basic laws of resources change.

Where are all the bears coming from?

2008-10-09T13:25:00.000-05:00

Where are all the bears coming from?

Well, let’s see. On the way in the driveway yesterday I passed one of my neighbors and he stopped me to say, “Your beehives are sure taking a beating. this month.”

Of course he was talking about the beehive that someone took off its stand and threw out into the driveway twice this week.

Then, another neighbor sent me an e-mail about what happened when she went out walking her dog last week.

“We came to the top of a rise and I ducked to go under a fallen tree, and saw a black bear in the middle of the clearing ... It was probably the one John saw going through our trash can a couple of weeks ago.”

Then, this week, as I was in my bee suit picking up that hive in the driveway, the one that had been scattered in several directions, another neighbor stopped her car and rolled down the window. “I saw her do it. You would think she would be out at night but no, it was eleven in the morning. A big momma bear and her three cubs.”

And this isn’t counting the damage being inflicted on the hive up on the hill as you drive in to our farm. This is the location of the several year old picture on the webpage. The picture of the destroyed beehive and the snapshot taken by a hidden wildlife camera of a bear strolling down the road.

I thought I had cured the bears from attacking these hives by erecting an electric fence hooked up to a car battery. At least there hadn’t been any damage for several years.

Unfortunately, though, sometime over the last week some stalwart soul braved the electric fence, reached in through the electrified wire and grabbed a hive. Turned it over and then bravely absconded with the top box. (do you think that's what motherhood will do to you, make you strong willed enough to confront a nasty electric shock in order to feed your babies?)

I say bravely because this hive is loaded down with bees. Tens of thousands of angry workers. Every time I’ve tried to put the hive back together I’ve been assaulted in mass by battalions of bee warriors. Literally, inside the bee suit the sky turns black from the workers that fly out of their overturned hive to anxiously defend their home.

The marauding bear knocked over the entire hive and then stole off with only the top bee box. This one apparently containing few bees but as much as fifty pounds of honey.

She took it off into the woods where she methodically took it apart, gouging out the honey and eating it frame by frame.

After last week's newsletter where I commented on the open ice and pollution up on the north pole I was asked by several people why I didn't come out and state what they said was obvious. 'Global Warming!'

Well, I think a number of our shareholders know much more about just about everything than I do but since I was asked to draw conclusions I think I should make some about the bears.

Why are there more bears in your valley, Leigh, than ever before? And why are they sticking around later in the season? Usually, by now they have decided your valley doesn't provide enough habitat to winter in and they move on so what makes things different this year?

Well, my answer to this is, where are they going to move? You might not have noticed, not living out here, but what habitat there was in this direction is rapidly disappearing.

Our farm and valley is now on the edge of the DC suburbs. Just a couple years back there was a large block of wooded land to the east of us.

But that was then. Now its gone.

Today, it seems like just the day before yesterday when the huge development corporation began moving its equipment into the woods to the east of us. First the pairs of huge bulldozers connected by massive logging chains moving through the forest. The trees being uprooted by the chain as they passed.

Fifteen square miles of trees were leveled in a few short weeks.

The now dead trees were then pushed into huge chippers creating unbelievably large mountains of wood chip mulch.

Next came the survey teams, marking off sewers, roads and house lots. Followed by the landscapers which, with their heavy equipment pushed up hills and rerouted streams. Draining marsh land and putting in place a massive drainage system to keep the bogs and lowlands dry.

After that, in quick secession came the paving crews, and framers, the roofers, bricklayers, plumbers, electricians, drywallers, finishing carpenters, painters, carpet layers, landscapers, and another dozen or so tradespeople.

And now what was wild critter habitat is a massive development of paved streets, chemicalized lawns and houses built using the same blue prints over and over and over again.

( and yes I know, a lot of us, the shareholders of our CSA, live in those houses, and it sure makes selling shares in our CSA easier with our customer base that much closer, however...)

However, when you ask why do we have bears hanging out in our valley, the answer is because there isn't anywhere else to go. Us humans seem to be trying to redefine habitat as fast as bacteria growing in a petri dish.

(which reminds me of another sad story about being a boy and finding the woods didn't go on forever and ever. However, rather than sticking it in the newsletter, as asked by that other group that wrote, the ones that didn't want to hear about pollution or global warming or anything else not strictly related to the vegetables, 'don't waste my valuable time except with information about the vegetables.' I'll put it on the blog.

Which does, though, brings us around to some other sad news.

We are coming up on our last week of vegetables.

Our last week will be October 12th through the 17th.

So sad.

However, to sweeten it up a little bit how about honey?

1. Next week the share will contain honey. Your share will be about a pound. However, to get your share of honey you need to bring a container. (Preferably a glass container with a top). A pound of honey fills 2/3 of a pint so if you bring a jar about the size of a pint canning jar that would work out fine. Of course you can bring a larger jar but I will still pour about a pound of honey into it.

2. Comb Honey. And speaking of honey if you want honey in the comb? I have a friend, a full time beekeeper who produces and sells comb honey. That’s honey still in the comb. Yummy stuff. If you want to buy some I’ll bring some with me for the last week of vegetable deliveries.

3. Pure beeswax candles. In addition to comb honey, his family also takes the excess bees wax and makes candles. Really high quality pure beeswax candles. A pair of ten inch long candles is $10. That’s a real deal. E-mail me if you want the candles or comb honey and I will pick them up before next week’s share.

4. Beef and pork. I already sent out the fact sheet on this year’s meat prices and dates to those who have expressed interest. The local pigs go to the butcher in November and the cows in January. One cow will be ready by the end of this month. If you are interested in a quarter cow or half hog and haven’t got the information e-mail me and I’ll send it your way.

5. Waiting list. If you are interested in a 2009 share but not in the early sign up I will be contacting you in February when I open up our subscriptions. If you do it that way you will pay next year’s price.

6. Gleanings. At the end of every season we invite shareholders to come out and glean our fields. Shareholders can come out then and search the fields looking for that forgotten pumpkin, or those still growing peppers. A sort of vegetable easter egg hunt.

7. Sweet Potatoes and eggs. I am leaving a couple rows of sweet potatoes in the ground so the more industrious can dig potatoes. And, by then, the egg share will be over so people can come out and collect eggs. Though, unfortunately, each day, with the shortening days, the chickens are laying fewer and fewer eggs. By Christmas the chickens usually stop laying all together (commercial egg operations put lights on their chickens to confuse their biological clock and keep them laying eggs just like it was mid summer).

8. Pumpkin pick. We still have a few large pumpkins out in the field, which I will leave for gleaning. In all fairness, those will go one to a share.

And that’s about this week’s (and this seasons) news.

Except, except just as I was finishing this up a huge hawk came swooping down and made a grab at one of those misbehaving chickens that spend their days pecking and scratching in our front yard rather than in their hen pasture.

He grabbed her, feathers flying, and tried to lift off with her in his talons, only the other hens started making such a racket the Great Pyrenees jumped up from their afternoon nap, started running, barking and the hawk sensing her attempt at an early supper might end in disaster, flew off, right past my office window.

I have to go deliver todays vegetables before anything else happens.

Leigh

North pole, Korean herbs and China.

2008-09-30T22:39:00.003-05:00

It was day light on the north pole.

I had been sleeping but Wenonah woke me. “Look at that,” she said, pointing at something out the window.

I leaned over her seat and looked down below.

Except for a bank of clouds off on the horizon, the sky was clear, so I could easily see the ocean 38,000 feet below. Large circles of snow covered ice broken by bands of blue water.

But that was not what Wenonah wanted me to see. Instead, she was pointing to that bank of clouds almost directly above where I reckoned the North Pole to be.

It was a layer very similar to the ones I often see during the summer while driving home from delivering vegetables.

A thick layer of oily looking clouds.

A band of clouds looking more like concentrated smoke out of a coal fired power plant than anything else.

Pollution.

Around here I assume such things are caused by all the cars sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic along I-66, I-95 and the beltway.

But greasy looking clouds all the way up on the north pole?

“Do you see that?” Wenonah asked. “What’s it doing up this far north? There aren't any automobiles or power plants anywhere close.”

I stared at it, at that unbelievable sight, as the plane approached and then passed the north pole.

As we passed the bank of greasy looking clouds down below the snow covered ice gave way to more stretches of clear ocean then again, more ice. This time broad stretches that, instead of being snow white, had a unmistakable blue tinge to it. As though it was ice without snow.

Clear ice covering blue ocean.

Anyway, I’m back after a week in Asia. I mostly spent my time visiting my brother and his family in Korea but I did spend a couple days being a tourist in Beijing.

In Beijing we walked half a dozen miles along a less touristed part of the Great Wall. Then back to town and through the Forbidden City, across Tiananmen Square.

Rambling through the narrow streets of the Hutong neighborhoods. Walking miles through the Temple of Heaven park and then around the lake at Beihai Park where we rested at a kiosk and listened to a group singing and playing folk instruments.

Several of the woman from the group came over and sat by us and started practicing their English. They said they were a group celebrating their 40th reunion and the songs they were singing were from the 60’s and 70’s . One woman had lived and worked in Crystal City a few years back.

After a while we said our good by's and went on. It was a little while after that when my pedometer died at 25 miles for the day.

I didn’t get to see much in the way of vegetables in Beijing but the air was amazingly clear and pollution free the first day. In fact cleaner than most day’s here in DC. (it had rained the day before). Unfortunately, each day after the rain the air got progressively dirtier.

In Korea, where I spent most of my time, my brother and I ate a lot of Korean food. and I saw how important shiso (that herb we had in our shares a few weeks back) is in the Korean diet.

Instead of being a herb that the Koreans cook, the leaves are used to eat with. Whether its raw fish, grilled pork or beef a plate of shiso leaves are on the table.

You take one of the leaves and place your grilled beef (or pork or fish) on the leaf along with vegetables and hot peppers (Koreans eat a lot of hot peppers) and sauce and Kim-chi and then you fold up the leaf and put it in your mouth and eat.

The gardens and vegetable plots all have shiso growing. (Over on my blog there’s a description of the Korean vegetables I saw).

Besides the shiso, the Korean vegetable farms and gardens all have just about the same vegetables. Asian eggplant, Chinese cabbage (for Kim-chi?), hot peppers, sweet potatoes, and a type of winter squash.

Korean gardens were all immaculate. Hardly a weed to be seen. It made me envious as well as tired thinking of all the weeding that’s being done.

In China, the gardens were not as homogeneous and they weren’t near as well taken care of. I was surprised.

And now on to farm news.

Right now we are having early sign up for 2009 for those who are shareholders in 2008. It is open for only a couple weeks.

Our normal sign up period starts in February. 2009. Right now I don’t know what the 2009 shares will cost and probably won't until February.

Waiting list for 2009 season. Beginning October 1 we will start the waiting list for 2009 shares. To get on this list you simple need to send me your name, e-mail address, size of share you think you will sign up for and which pick up spot. This holds you to no responsibility. To be on the waiting list simply means that you are interested and when the shares open I will send you an e-mail announcing the fact.

Two weeks of vegetable deliveries left. The growing season is rapidly ending.

Temperatures are supposed to drop into the 40’s at night later on this week. I wouldn’t be surprised to see nights drop into the mid or low 30’s by the end of the season. When we first started our CSA over a decade ago we usually had an October frost that would kill our more tender vegetables (peppers and basil only have to think 32 degrees and they die). One year I recall we had a hard frost killing most of our vegetables in the first half of October.

Other farm news--

Last Friday 175 day old chicks arrived in the mail. These chicks will be laying eggs by spring.

Garlic. We’ll be planting next year’s garlic next week. Planting 400 pounds of garlic if all goes well, turns in to about 2000 pounds of garlic next June.

Breaking news. A neighbor just contacted me. Last night a bear broke into several of our out laying apiaries knocking over two hives. More on that later.

Leigh

Korean vegetables

2008-09-23T19:32:00.007-05:00

Perilla, sweet potatoes, cayenne hot peppers, Chinese cabbage (my sister-in-law, if I refer to anything as Chinese, Japanese or Asian, is quick to correct me and say that it is actually Korean, as in Korean chestnuts, Korean eggplant, Korean mustard and of course Korean bitter melons (though the later, she informed me, are not bitter at all but sweet melons. The Japanese, she reports 'no doubt grow a bitter melon but we don't.')

I also saw various mustards including 'Korean' giant red mustard, Korean onions and a short oblong orange winter squash that looks a lot like an orange delicata.

One point of confusion about the perilla or shiso, in Korean it is called deulkkae which translates as wild sesame, however it is actually not at all related to sesame.

Additionally, I can't help but pointing out are the weeds, or lack there of. Most gardens, small and large, are nearly weed free. Very similar to Australian gardens (in Australia though, the weed shortage, I'm told is because of the weak soils that make it difficult for many native 'weeds' to thrive). Here in Korea, its obviously because of the care given most gardens.

And then there are the chestnut trees. Yes, I know its off topic but I couldn't help but notice the 'Korean', if you will, chestnuts. The trees were growing native. with the nuts literally covering the forest floor.

The chestnuts started me think of what our forests must have been like before the blight that destroyed the American chestnut a century ago, (I'm sure my sister-in-law would allow the blight to be from the Chinese chestnut). The American chestnut when they were the dominate tree in our eastern forests must have dramatically changed the dynamics of our forest with the forest floor being covered with its fruit.

As my brother and I walked through the young forests everywhere you looked people would be out with bags harvesting the wild chestnuts.

One other point of interest is the use of the Korean herb that I gave out several weeks ago without really knowing its uses. In Korea it appears to be a staple in restaurants. There has been a plate of the leaves carefully put out in raw fish, shell fish, grilled beef and grilled pork restaurants. Its used as a wrap for the meal. You take one of the leaves in hand and place the fish (or grilled beef or grilled pork) on it along with the various side dishes and carefully fold it up and put the entire package into your mouth.

Tasty.

Fall tomatoes

2008-09-08T21:53:00.002-05:00

Here's some of the tomato facts of life.

There's a section in Mark Twain's novel Roughing it where he talks about the beauty of the Mississippi before becoming a river boat captain and how the river changed once he became one.

Before knowing much about the river he could look at it and think "my, how beautiful the water ripples as it flows down stream.' After he was 'experienced' he could look at the same view and instead of seeing it as beautiful might see it as treacherous or difficult as in 'there's a submerged tree that could rip the bottom of my boat out.'

That's sort of like tomatoes and growing vegetables.

Looking at a beautiful tomato loses something when you know the facts of life are lined up against that tomato being local and in season. Or even knowing that a September tomato is probably a different variety growing on a different plant than an August tomato.

So when I see a beautiful tomato in September in Washington DC there are some facts that make me stop and give pause.

Sure you can grow a tomato around here this time of year but usually you have to do a lot of finessing to get it to ripen up and look beautiful.

Here's some of the facts of life.

Tomatoes usually need more warmth for best growth and quality fruit than we usually get around here in September . (look at Knox's vegetable handbook for temperature range).

For Best growth and quality a tomato on average needs an optimum temperature around 70-75 with the minimum temperature of 60 and the maximum at 80. In other words temperatures down in the 50's aren't very good if you are going to get a good tomato crop.

The problem is that our September temperatures generally fall at the low range. In other words, most varieties of tomatoes slow down or even stop growing in our September weather. (one of the reason that so many home gardeners couldn't get their tomatoes to ripen up this year is that we had a cool August with the temperature dropping into the 50's about a dozen times).

Another factor is the amount of daylight. As you’ve probably noticed the days are getting shorter. Much shorter. Tomatoes like nice long days. In September they just aren't getting it anymore. Which doesn't stop them from growing, it just slows them down.

Also, one way of classifying tomatoes is whether they are determinite or indeterminite. Meaning some of them grow to a certain size, put out fruit and then die and others, indeterminate, grow, put out fruit, grow some more and put out some more fruit.

This means that determinate plants that produced back in early August are mostly dead now. To get determinate tomatoes that produce in September you had to plant them to do so. They were planted later than those that produced in August.

And if you are growing a indeterminate plant it might continue to produce this late, but only if its range of ideal temperatures is broad enough.

There are tomatoes that like fall temperatures. We have an indeterminate heirloom tomato that is doing well now. It's the same tomato that did well back in June before the temperatures got really hot. That little Siberian is a nice tomato but it certainly isn't a big beautiful tomato like the ones that came ripe in August.

So, in short to get tomatoes to grow and produce in the fall you have to pick a variety that doesn't mind cool weather and you have to plant this tomato specifically to ripen in the fall.

In other words, those tomatoes you ate in July and August were different tomatoes than the ones you eat in September. September is a different season with a different tomato than those tomatoes you ate back during the hot summer days.

So like that log under the water in the river, that tomato in your share in September is a different creature than the one that was grown to ripen during those long, easy hot summer days of bountiful summer vegetables.

smashing watermelons

2008-09-08T21:37:00.003-05:00

I imagine you’ve heard of or even seen the picture of the guy who was out cutting fire wood and dropped a huge tree right on his brand new pick up truck.

Squishing the cab all the way down to the tires.
http://chainsaw.funnypart.com/

Well, this week I cut down a large tree, maybe not quite as large as the one in the picture, but still big, and the only thing I can say about what happened is “At least I didn’t drop the tree on my truck.”

Though some people might be more upset by where I did drop it than if it had.

The maple that fell was that big one right next to where we stack our vegetables after picking them each day.

This is a tree that died last winter and this summer, started dropping limbs.

Occasionally dead limbs would blow off and land on the vegetables.

Sometimes they'd land on the van.

And sometimes they came close to landing on me (once while I was carrying a box of squash out of the field).

So it was my idea to finally bring out the chain saw and cut it down.

Since we have used wood to heat our house and water for over two decades now cutting down dead trees is something I spend a lot of time doing.

In the forest, you can pick out which direction you are going to drop a dead tree and mostly it will land there.

First, you cut a wedge out of the tree in the direction you want it to go.

Then you walk around to the back side of the tree and cutting flat across the trunk. And nine times out of ten, more or less, it drops right where you want it.

The operative phrase here is ‘more or less.’

Out in the forest the only real concern is that when its time for the tree to come crashing down you’ve made sure no one is standing under it.

And your second concern is having a place to run if the tree decides to fall in an unintended direction.

If it misses where you were aiming by ten or so yards, its no real big deal. It still came down in the forest.

The problem with the maple wasn’t quite as simple.

The maple had obstacles that had to be avoided.

On one side was a power line.

If the maple fell over the power line the electric company and everyone living back down the valley would get a little upset when their electricity abruptly went off.

On the west of the tree is that old Allis Chalmers tractor of mine. It hasn’t run in almost ten years but it has sort of been elevated to ‘field art’ status. I once had a picture of it with snow falling on our webpage. Recently someone offered a thousand dollars for it. I would sure hate to see it get flattened.

And to the south, besides being where we stack up the vegetables for loading is an old house we now use as a storehouse.

A tree on top of the days vegetables might prove interesting but I don’t think shareholders would appreciate a week without vegetables.

And while I intend at some future date to knock down the storehouse and build a brand new barn, today isn’t that day. A tree across the storehouse’s roof might very well cause the entire structure to come tumbling down.

Which leaves a narrow slot to the south, a spot along the driveway where the tree could safely be dropped.

Tricky, but doable.

So what I did is I hooked a logging chain around the maple maybe eight feet up off the ground.

And I hooked that chain to another chain. And that one to another, and another and another.

Until I had almost 80 feet of chain running down the driveway to the south. And then I drove my pickup truck to the end of the chain, hooked it up to the back of the truck, put the truck into low range.

And gave it a little gas.

The maple wasn’t prepared to fall yet but it did shimmy a little and the limbs giving a little shake.

I put the truck into park. Pulled the parking brake and went back to the tree.

That’s when I started up the chain saw and started cutting.

First I cut a wedge out of the south side of the tree.

Then I went around to the north side, sighted the tree so I would be cutting directly toward the pick up.

And cut into the tree several inches before stopping to look. The maple was about 30 inches across. My chain saw bar only 18. It’s really important that you don’t leave a hunk of wood to either side. Especially when the tree is wider than your saw. If, when the tree starts to fall, if it isn’t cut equally on both sides, if one side has more uncut wood than the other, then the tree will fall in that side's direction.

I looked and everything was just fine.

Another thing that will go wrong when cutting down a tree, (and did you know, along with commercial fishing and working oil rigs - both occupations I’ve done a little of at one time or another - dropping trees is one of the most dangerous jobs out there).

But what I was saying, another thing that can go wrong when dropping a tree, and one its hard to account for, is if there's a hollow space inside the tree.

What if termites had been eating at the tree, or what if there had been a forest fire when the tree was younger. Both can cause hollow spaces. Rotten wood on the inside that you can’t see on the outside of the tree. And when you start cutting suddenly you hit rotten wood and the tree, without warning, starts toppling

It might suddenly come crashing down in any direction.

Maybe right where you are standing.

How many tons do you think an 80 foot tall maple with a trunk diameter of two and a half feet weighs?

When a tree that size falls it pretty much squishes whatever is in its path.

So I again started up the chain saw, cut into the tree a few more inches and stopped.

Usually when I’m cutting firewood up in the forest I don’t’ give it as much care. I look where I want it to fall. Cut a wedge. Aim again. And then start cutting on the far side. Most times it falls, more or less, right where I want it.

But this time I was being extra careful. There was too much around to make a small mistake into a major accident.

So I stopped cutting. Walked down to the pick up. Started the engine. Gave it a little more gas. Tightened the tension on the chain. Saw the tree shake just a little bit. Then put the truck in park, Tightened the parking brake.

And walked back to the tree.

Two more inches. I had to cut some on the left, then because the tree was so much wider than my bar, some more on the right. And that’s when, just as I was pulling the saw out to cut on the left again, it started cracking. This is the time they yell out ‘Timber’ in the movies.

The tree stood there for a moment, shaking back and forth and then giving out a loud crack, the tree started to fall.

I ran back a dozen yards. You can never be too sure that the butt of a tree is not going to kick up and maybe catch you right on the jaw (that’s usually pretty fatal).

The tree stopping shaking and started crashing. Crashing down right towards the pick up truck.

And that’s when I saw my mistake.

And if you are still with me, still reading along, this seems like a good time to take a break and do the farm news.

1. the changing of the seasons. As you’ve probably noticed the days are getting shorter. Much shorter. And if us humans have noticed you can be sure all of those vegetables out in the fields that are pretty dependent on sunlight have taken notice and have started to change accordingly.

It’s now time for fall crops. The summer crops are coming to an end. Dispite what you might read in some food sections out there September around Washington DC is not tomato season. Those delicious summer tomatoes are just about gone. Tomato plants that were put in the ground back in May are dying. If they were determinates they are now mostly dead. Also, most and the indeterminate varieties have given up and have stopped producing much fruit (not all though, we have one heirloom indeterminate, which is showing an extra jump. Those little Siberian tomatoes that beat all of the others back in June). However, for most tomatoes the days are now too short and too chilly to produce fruit. (Note in Knox's Vegetable Handbook a sort of vegetable growers bible that tomatoes don't grow at temperatures below 60 degrees. From my experience this isn't quite true. There are varieties, like the Siberian, that set fruit at lower temperatures but generally Knox's is right, the majority of tomato varieties don't produce very well at the temperatures we get here in September).

Fortunately (for tomato lovers) this year we planted a later crop. We put about 500 chill tolerant tomato plants in the ground in late June and early July and hopefully they will start turning red soon.

2. There are a number of plants out there that like days that are constantly getting shorter. Fall crops like mustards, lettuces and radishes.

3. You will also see vegetables that take a long time to grow. Vegetables that have been out there slowly growing all summer long. Winter squash and sweet potatoes to name a couple. Even the peppers, which are actually a perennial in warmer climates, start producing more fruit about now.

Which I guess brings us back to that tree falling.

You know most of the time from when the tree starts to fall to when it strikes the ground is only a fraction of a second. Once the tree starts falling it drops. And when I saw that limb of that maple hanging out to the south it was too late.

The tree came down so fast there was nothing I could do.

The larger part of the tree crashed into the driveway between the stump and the truck (no, it didn’t hit the truck) but there was a limb that I didn’t calculate on. I guess from the ground I didn’t see how far out it would go.

But it came down to. And landed right on a pile of watermelons.

20 watermelons.

I think the sound track to that part of the accident went something like this:

Thunk! Crash! Splash.

And it was over. At first I wasn’t sure of the damage. There were broken limbs everywhere.

But then we started pulling the mess away and I saw the black sticky seeds,the smashed bright red fruit and the broken rinds.

A soup of twenty watermelons to pick up and feed to the farm critters that don't mind eating less than perfect fruits and vegetables.

When I threw the broken watermelons over the fence into the chicken pasture close to 200 hens came sprinting over to be the first one to take part in the feast.

black bear sighting

2008-08-21T18:48:00.000-05:00

Black bear sighting.

This last weekend, a couple of shareholders came over and we went on a hike down the valley and almost walked right into a black bear (or is it the black bear almost walked into us).

I’ll post a couple pictures of him on the web.

This is the first time Wenonah has had the pleasure of seeing a bear in our valley since she moved here as a teenager (of course she's seen many bears in other places including the one that climbed in her kitchen window when she lived in that house at the base of Old Rag)

But more on wild animal sightings later. The important news around here is the weather, and especially about weather that hasn't happened.

We're talking about weather that now hasn't happened in just about a month.

And you know what they say about vegetables?

It’s not how much rain that’s fallen in the last year, or, for that matter, in the last month. (Our last rainfall was 46/100ths of an inch back on July 23rd).

With vegetables, its ‘how much rain has fallen in the last week.’ And for the last week we’ve had nothing but clear blue skies (and twinkling stars at night). Which is starting to seem like one of those desert movies with a lot of camera shots of hot, dry, parched lake beds and distant mirages.

So, its past time, if you know a rain dance, to bring on a rainstorm.

Actually, we need a good gentle rain to start now and last for at least several days! Our gardens are turning dusty and even the weeds are drying up (fortunately, this year, we put down drip tape so the water goes right to the plants and not to most of the weeds).

In the meantime we are irrigating. All the water we have is going on our vegetable plants.

As you probably remember, our water comes from an artisan spring several hundred feet above us on the mountain. In year’s gone by the spring has put out 20 to 25 gallons a minute but it seems to be slowing down somewhat since last year's drought and now I think we’re only getting about 15 gallons a minute.

And all of that goes to your vegetables.

In fact, during the night I switch a valve and the water that is normally available to the house is sent out to the fields.

No water in the house does, though, upset Wenonah just a bit when she gets up in the morning and starts to get ready for work.

To turn on a faucet and not get even a drop of water is somewhat upsetting. This morning she woke me at 6 am so I could go out and turn the valves so water heads toward the house instead of the vegetables.

Tomorrow, if I have enough time in between picking vegetables and going on delivery I'm climbing the mountain carrying several bags of concrete.

I'm going up to the spring and repair the spring house.

When I was up there last week I noticed that the spring house wasn’t capturing all of the water. Maybe as much as five gallons a minute was seeping past the catch basin and being soaked into the ground.

That's 5 gallons a minute that's not going to our vegetables. Which, with a little math translates into 300 gallons an hour. Which means a little over 7000 gallons a day.

That’s something like 50,000 gallons a week more water we could be giving to our vegetables.

Then there’s the other spring. This is the one down below the house that Wenonah claims she had to walk back and forth to each and every day as a teenager. She would carry empty buckets down to the spring, and bring full bucket of water back up to the house.

Can you imagine that as a chore that has to be done every day just to drink and bath? To wash clothes and dishes? Imagine no indoor faucet with plenty of clean, safe water. But instead having to carry by hand every bit of water that is used in your house?

If you think about it there are a heck of a lot of people around the world that don't have access to safe, free water.

Our public water system that provides clean, safe water to just about every home in our country is sure something we take for granite.

Anyway, enough of that. Back to thinking about that lower spring. I’ve never measured its output but I think its something like 30 gallons a minute. I’ve already bought a 2500 gallon water tank. to store it in.

If I can just pipe the water to the tank I could then take my water pump and move the water up to the fields.

That might just protect us from a drought.

Which brings us back to the bear.

Here's what happened. Last weekend we went out hiking with Shane and Adria. Our destination was the old Dawson family cemetery. About two miles through the forest toward Chapman’s Mill. In the Dawson cemetery there’s a huge white oak (must be over 30 inches in diameter) growing out of a grave marked 1853. The tree, close to the largest one in the valley, must have been planted on the grave and sits up on a quite hill surrounded by several dozen unmarked graves.

That was our destination, but following my directions, we had made a wrong turn and were standing on the edge of a flagstone quarry, The quarry is the site of a civil war skirmish (the Battle of Thoroughfare Gap) that happened during this time of the year in 1862.

We were standing there looking at the quarry and trying to imagine where the soldiers had been when Adria looked up and said. 'See the bear?'

A large black bear was just then meandering up the side of the hill, through the forest, toward us.

As you can see from the picture he passed not much more than 20 yards away.

At one point he stood up on his hind legs and sniffed the air. He stood maybe another foot taller than I am.

And then he got down and kept going, up the trail in the direction of the cemetery. I don’t think he ever saw us.

We followed, though, down the trail in the direction he was heading. And after a while we found the cemetery.

But we didn't find the bear, again.

Leigh Hauter

Italian peaches (and tomatoes)

2008-07-18T13:18:00.004-05:00

(this is my annual tomato rant. It's sort of a mandatory read for peach and tomato eaters. But could also apply to everyone who has an uncontrollable urge to pick up a squash, a cucumber, plum, apple, eggplant or any other delicate fruit or vegetable and give it a squeeze.

A quiz will follow.

The previous rant which had got itself reprinted in cook books, magazines and blogs seemed, to me, as though it was getting a tad clunky. This one has the same themes but with some more information and a few different images. This week's farm news is at the end of the rant).

I wonder how many of our shareholders have been to Europe? Raise your hands please. (there’s a point to this, so please bear with me).

Have you been to a farmers’ market in, let’s say, France or maybe Italy?

As in, its November and you’re in Rome (work trip?). After drinking a morning expresso and eating several pastries in one of the sidewalk cafes on the Piazza Farnese (save the receipt so you can get reimbursed), you decide to cruise through the farmers’ market that takes up most of the plaza in the daytime.

In one of the produce stands there’s a basket of particularly nice looking tomatoes.

In front of the basket, beside the sign telling how many Euros the tomatoes are going to cost you, is another sign. In the case of the November tomatoes, this sign says, in Italian, of course, ‘Produce of Morocco’.

And those clams. the ones in the other stand. The stand that just does seafood. The sign says the clams come from Spain.

In Europe, and really, I can only speak for Switzerland, France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, there must be country of origin labeling laws.

Everywhere you look there is a label or sign telling where produce was grown.

A nice law. (I understand something like that is written into the current version of the farm bill).

Can you imagine going into your local discount grocery chain store and seeing a sign that reports which state, or for that matter even, which country the fresh food came from. Having a country of origin law for the processed stuff is probably too much to hope for.

But, while that's an interesting subject, it’s not the answer I’m looking for.

There’s something else that happens at an European farmers’ market and it has nothing to do with signs, or for that matter, the lousy exchange rate the dollar is getting these days.

The answer I'm looking for has to do with the way the customers act and why they act so much differently than Americans do when confronted with fruits and vegetables.

In Europe you don’t see the customers squeezing the tomatoes,

Or pinching the peaches,

Or ripping the corn husks to see what's inside.

In European markets customers do not touch the produce. In fact Europeans don’t even consider squeezing tomatoes or peaches is a way of finding out anything worthwhile about their produce. When they want to know how about the condition of the tomatoes they ask. 'Is this ripe?' 'When was it picked?' 'Anything I should know about this?'

So why do Americans think they must maul produce to detect if its fit to eat and Europeans don't?

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and the answer is really pretty simple.

But before I give away the 'pretty simple' answer, lets look at one of the ways the two produce systems differ.

First, let's look at the American corporate food system. The system that most of us have grown up with. The one that provides all of that beautiful fruit and vegetables we see in our grocery stores.

In America we, at least the more affluent of us, live in a world where our grocery stores are full of colorfully pleasing, visually beautiful vegetables and fruits. Bright red tomatoes without a blemish. Mounds of unbelievably beautiful apples, again without even the hint of a worm hole. Startling orange peaches with absolutely no fruit fly damage.

And all of it, all of that beautiful produce, is all right on the edge of being inedible.

Cardboard tomatoes.

Baseball peaches.

Dead apples ( Have you ever eaten an apple right off the tree, and noticed that live, sparkling feeling in your mouth as though its still alive and moving)?

It's obvious something is going on to produce this paradox of gorgeously beautiful fruit and vegetables with the taste of something that is only marginally edible.

What is it?

We have a food system where the norm is for vegetables to be picked hard and green, where most of our food travels several thousand miles to get to the store.

But first, before I criticize it any more, let's concede -- commercial produce growing, harvesting and marketing in our country, is a science.

A science primarily aimed at attempting to convert a farm into a factory (in the trade a tomato isn’t called a tomato it is called a ‘product’ As in ‘I have ten boxes of product’),

And creating a ‘product’ that is not only beautiful, blemish free, colorful (in other words something that should be easy to sell on looks alone). But, and this is the kicker, one that can be stored for as long a time as possible.

In other words, this industry is constantly working to extending the shelf-life of its food products.

Fresh food products as well as processed one.

It works to create a vegetable 'product' that has shelf-life in the same way a tool 'product (hammers and nails, etc) has shelf-life.

Fruits and vegetables that will still look pretty and appealing after its been bounced and pinched and trucked, sorted, weighed and forced to sit around in boxes and shelves for weeks and weeks after being taken out of a chemical saturated field.

This is an industry that is only in passing concerned about taste.

Remember, once a product is sold it is really no longer of much concern to the industry. (Last time I walked into a grocery store I didn't see any taste warrantees in the produce section).

I mean, what do you think the idea of irradiating food is all about. Is an irradiated mango going to taste better, or is it going to have a longer shelf life?

And that’s why commercial tomatoes and peaches and many other fruits and vegetables are picked while they are stone hard.

If a tomato or peach is picked ripe they have no shelf life. They are easily damaged. They have to be treated like newborn babies.

However, this same fruit if picked earlier, while it is still baseball hard, it is going to be able to take abuse.

Instead it can be thrown into a large hopper, dumped into a 18-wheel trailer, hauled across dirt and gravel roads to a packing house where it is treated like gravel and poured off of the truck, onto a conveyor built and eventually sorted by size and dumped into a box.

A real educational trip is to go on a road trip in August out to the Eastern Shore and turn south along US 13 into the Virginia part of the Delmarva peninsula.

This is when the huge corporate tomato farms are harvesting.

In August, when you drive down US 13 you will pass tractor trailers overflowing with tomatoes.

Green tomatoes.

And not just green tomatoes. Stone hard tomatoes. Tomatoes as hard as a baseball.

These tomatoes are picked when they are mostly flesh (or bone) and very little water.

The Eastern Shore tomato (and Florida, Mexico, California, Arizona greenhouse and half a dozen other places where industrial tomatoes are ‘grown’) are picked several weeks before they begin to get a hint of color.

Just ask yourself how can a tomato travel on the bottom of a tractor trailer with literally tons of other tomatoes on top of it, how can it do that without squishing? To do that it doesn’t act anything like a field ripened vegetable.

From there these hard green tomatoes are driven to the packing house, graded, sorted, separated, boxed and shipped out across the country and world.

A couple years ago we were in Chincoteague sitting at a bar in a restaurant waiting for our table when I started talking to the two guys next to me.

Tomato salesmen.

These guys were migratory. They traveled with the tomato crop. But, instead of working out in the fields they worked in air conditioned offices surrounded by telephones and their contact rolodexes.

All day long these guys would sit with a headset making phone calls to produce buyers for grocery chains, restaurants, distributors, cafeterias, warehouses, brokers, schools, hospitals and anywhere else that dealt with the industry of feeding people.

They would be on the phone all day making sales pitches for tomatoes.

I asked them about it. "Are you selling all of those trailers full of green tomatoes I see being hauled up and down 13?"

"We're selling mostly slicers."

I asked them what their customers were most concerned about. "I mean, what is the biggest objection you have to overcome?"

And the answer?

Shelf life. "They want to know when its going to get to them and how long it will be in top shape for them."

And finally, when I asked the salesmen about taste. "does anyone ever ask about how they are going to taste?

They laughed. Really I didn't have a sense they knew what I was talking about. A slicer is a slicer. Who worries about taste? The concerns are size, shape and shelf-life. Everyone in the industry knows that we're talking about something, out of industrial necessity was picked green. Taste is what it is.

It's just a fact of life that a 'product' which is picked green and hard is never ever going to be ripe or flavorful like one grown in your backyard. And anyway, the customers don't seem to mind. They want pretty, they want blemish free, they want a low price.

So there's your grocery store model. Picked green and hard. Transported to market just in time for it to turn colors, to look beautiful and the customer squeezing the produce trying to find the one that might actually taste like something you want to eat. (but doomed not to find it because it just doesn't exist).

Now lets think about the difference between that tomato and the tomato you are going to get from me.,or that is available in those European markets and produce stands, or for that matter, the one you can grow yourself if you have a place to grow tomatoes.

First off, for us, our concern is not shelf-life. I pick my produce in the morning and give it to you in the afternoon. the morning of the pick up.

I don't pick tomatoes green and set them aside to turn red. Each day I go out and pick ripe vegetables, ones that are at their peak taste wise.

And why is the difference between the green picked tomato and mine important?

During that month, the month when the commercial tomato is picked and the time when I pick my tomatoes, a lot happens to a tomato on the vine that doesn't happen to it in a box.

This is the period when the fruit become delicate. The plant begins to put a lot of juice into the fruit. This is when the fruit acquires that flavor and texture you want in a tomato. The riper the more delicate. And, unfortunately, the longer we wait to harvest it, besides the better the taste, the more susceptible it is to damage.

So, its really that simple. Tomatoes picked green have a long shelf-life can take the harsh treatment they are going to get in our mult-state, multi-country food industry. they can be squeezed and pinched and handled and nothing is going to happen to it. It is going to continue to be just as beautiful and just as tasteless.

On the other hand, a tomato or peach or other delicate vegetable (let's really count squash and cucumbers, tomatillos and eggplant as well as most of the peppers into this category) can not take much handling.

When you squeeze it you rupture the fruits water soaked flesh. Trust me on this one. It can not take it. No matter how 'gentle' squeezing and handling causes at least some damage. The more handling, the more damage.

So here's our rule. It is the same one you'll find in that Italian market on the Piazza Farnese.

Don't touch that tomatoes and peaches until you own it.

Let's have no squeezing or pinching. No picking up a peach, holding it in your hand, testing it and then putting it back down with the others. No shuffling the delicate fruit like it was a box of golf balls and you were trying to find the one with the right color.

If you have a question about the ripeness of the vegetables, ask me

But once you touch it, its yours.

(and of course, if you pick up a beautiful looking peach only to find the bottom is damaged, keep it but don't count it against the number in your share. A peach that looks good enough to pick up is good enough to salvage as an addition to your share).

And if you need more convincing that handling vine ripened vegetables is bad behavior here's a good story from my hard learned experience.

Several years ago, when I used to deliver to offices if ten or more people signed up one of my stops was the law firm for a prominent national environmental organization.

I would pull up to the back door to their offices, put out my vegetables and the secretaries (and sometimes the attorneys themselves) would come out to pick up their vegetables.

This was before the no squeezing rule.

Back then, I discovered, I had to pick 20% more tomatoes than people were going to take.

If I needed 80 tomatoes to give to the shareholders, I needed to pick 100. Because at the end of the day I would drive back home with 20 hopelessly damaged tomatoes that would end of being fed to our pigs.

(I had pigs then, I don't now).

Each day 20% of the tomatoes that went into the city fresh ripe and undamaged would come home, squashed, bruised and leaking tomato juice.

My thoughts at the time were that it must mean that 20% of all tomatoes picked are damaged by picking them, putting them into boxes, driving them into the city and then driving them home at night.

A high number, but that seemed to be just part of doing business.

That was until the year of the environmental lawyers. Or particularly, one specific environmental lawyer.

One afternoon I pulled up to her office, put down the vegetables and watched.

I watched her pick up each tomato, give it a little squeeze and then put it back down. She was a meticulous woman.

She would pick up and squeeze ten, fifteen tomatoes for each one she took.

And when she had finished, picked up her tote back and went back up to her law office I looked at the damage she had left behind.

Two of those yellow boxes almost completely full of now damaged tomatoes. Tomatoes I couldn't give to any other shareholder. Tomatoes that looked like they were destined to be hog food.

The next week, though, I changed my practice.

I put out all the other vegetables but I kept the tomatoes on the tail gate of my pick up. People had to file by me to get their tomatoes. They pointed at the tomatoes they wanted and I would pick it up and place in their bag.

No pinching or squeezing but at the same time I didn’t give anyone damaged fruit. Or green fruit, or unripened fruit.

Only tomatoes that they approved of.

And at the end of the day I went home and the poor pigs, instead of getting 20 tomatoes, were only fed two.

Transportation damage dropped form 20% to 2% just by stopping the squeezing.

And since during the height of tomato season we're picking close to 800 tomatoes a day that is a difference of about 150 tomatoes a day. 150 good, tasty, undamaged tomatoes that our shareholders get to take home and eat rather than 150 squeeze damaged tomatoes that I take home and toss into the pig pen.

Leigh Hauter

vagrants

2008-07-16T00:53:00.000-05:00

What should I do with them? I mean the dozen and a half vagrant chicks found squatting up in the loft of our barn?

No one invited them, I mean the chicks, or for that matter, there mothers to live in our loft.

This wasn’t a planned hatching.

(I'm sorry, I'm not in the business of raising baby chicks).

No one invited anyone to be up there. They weren’t given permission. No rent was paid.

The eggs the chicks hatched from, in my mind, would have been much better served if, three weeks earlier, (and egg go from freshly laid to baby chick, if I remember correctly, in just about twenty-one days). they had been found and put in an egg carton and sent out with the egg shares.

But, now, there they are. Vagrants. Squatters. And really, really innocent, cute, little defenseless creatures.

What should I do with them?

Should I take them down, the chicks and their misbehaving mothers (two hens had been surreptitiously laying and sitting on eggs up in the attic) and put them out in the hen yard?

Are the chicks old enough to go out into the world of hens, roosters and pecking orders?

NOT TO MENTION PREDATORS!

Just last week I moved the half a dozen geese we had been raising in the barn up to the asparagus bed.

The next morning the young geese were gone.

Disappeared. (Except for a few feathers and a wing). And these weren't little birds either. While they weren't full grown geese yet they were already standing almost twenty some inches tall.

In other words. it’s a cruel, cruel world out there. A mammal eat bird, or is that bird eat bird world.

And birds too small to defend themselves (and I think most chicks are) often end up as the main course in someone’s meal.

But we haven’t, as far as I can tell, been losing that many chickens, or guineas, or turkeys just as long as they stay where they should. In other words, as long as they stay inside the electric, anti-predator fence that's surrounds the pasture the mobile chicken house (you know the chicken house built up on a large trailer) sits in.

For the summer the mobile chicken house is parked under the tall poplar trees below our house.

With the chicken house surrounded by the mobile electric fence along with our Great Pyrenees close by seems to be keeping the predators at bay.

The geese, though,while surrounded by an electric fence were up on the hill in the asparagus bed and much further from the house and gp's

What do you suppose it was that came in and dispatched half a dozen birds in one night?

The critter, the one that got the geese, most have found its way through the double row of deer fencing (this is woven plastic with holes only an inch or so in diameter) that stands almost ten feet tall.

Did it climb over, fly over? dig under or tear a whole in it?

And once in side, what did it do about the electric fence? Jump it or just tough it out and get a rather unsettling shock?

This is someone that also took its meal home with it because it left very few feathers behind.

Hmmm.

Leigh Hauter

roosters, chicks,

2008-06-13T01:20:00.002-05:00

Several things this week.

First, I’ve come to realize that roosters are real slave drivers. No mercy at all.

I know because for the summer we’ve moved the chicken tractor on the hill right behind the house. I’ve put the fence for their pasture on the hill right up under our deck, right below the house.

That means the chicken’s ‘four seasons’ on wheels or is that the ‘four seasons trailer park’ is almost right under our bedroom window.

(I did this to get the chickens off our fields for the season, away from our vegetables).

That’s just fine, the chickens keep the weeds down and I don’t have to mow that rocky hill.

Except. Except at 4:30 in the morning (or whenever time it is that the ridges up above our valley start to vaguely lighten.

This isn’t the morning, its really late, late night.

No one in their right mind calls this sunrise.

I mean sunrise down here in our valley is still several hours away.

But not to those roosters.

They start crowing there hearts out.

And its not just a cock-a-doodle-doo here and cock-a-doodle-doo there.

This is a serious wake up call.

Just as soon as the night breaks just a smidgen those roosters are out there demanding the hens get up out of bed (or, if you will, off their roosts).

They are marching back and forth from one end of the chicken yard demanding the hens get up and get at it.

Unfortunately, once they’ve got the hens out of bed, and let me point out, this is not morning yet, anyone in their right mind knows its still the middle of the night,

Once the roosters have got the hens up and pecking and scratching around the pasture looking for that proverbial early worm or whatever, the hens start complaining.

And then the guineas start screeching which is shortly followed by the turkeys.

And no one can sleep through the sound of a peacock.

And all of this goes on at a time in the morning that no one would consider a civilized time to be up and awake.

So that’s my first complain. Chickens demanding the world get up and at it when its still so dark outside that no one can yet see enough to get any work done.

Then there are the baby chicks I mentioned in the last newsletter.

We left off with one chick peeking its head out of an egg.

As you no doubt remember,this was a communal nest. It wasn’t just one hen sitting on half a dozen eggs in one nest. Instead, it was four hens sitting close together on something like fifty eggs in what looked like one large nest.

I don’t think anyone says this is the best way to incubate eggs. It sure wasn’t my idea, in fact I didn’t know about it until we were about halfway through with the process, back in a corner of the barn.

Well, three of these hens now think they have finished with their laying obligations and along with 5 little baby chicks are now exploring the barn, making a mess on the barn floor and eating the dogs food.

Leaving behind one hen and something like four dozen eggs.

Now, half those eggs have been pushed out on their own. The remaining hen isn’t sitting on them so we can assume they are worst for the wear and I’ve now thrown them out.

but the other two dozen are under the one remaining hen. who knows for how long.

And the three hens are running around acting like they the sole mother to five chicks.

I don’t know how this is going to work out. Do the hens think they are the mothers of a specific chick or is it some sort of a communal thing.

And how do the chicks feel about i?

And then there’s the swamp.

And the beaver.
Since the young beaver made its appearance last week Wenonah and I’ve been on the lookout to see if we now have a mating pair.

And while there are signs that a beaver is around. There are plenty of floating sticks with the bark gnawed off, we hadn’t actually seen a pair.

And then, this weekend, way over on the far side of the swamp, something was kicking up water and mud.

From where we stood it was pretty hard to see what was making all the brouhaha, so I took off around the edge jumping from one clump of relatively dry mud to the next until I had worked my way around to the far side and climbed out on a fallen tree to get a better look.

And that’s when I saw them.

Down there in the mud and swamp water. A pair of wrestling snapping turtles.

Each turtle had a shell with the diameter of what I guess was a 15 inch computer screen.

Not small turtles these.

And as I watched I realized that while they were wrestling, they weren’t what you would call fighting.

In fact it looked like they were sort of enjoying themselves flipping back and forth together in the water and mud.

I watched for a while longer and then becoming a little self-conscious (I have a neighbor, a retired marine and now retired lawyer who is always giving me a hard time when I tell him about making similar sightings of birds and animals in similar situations).

I therefore retraced my steps back down the log (without falling in the mud) and back around to dry land and out of the swamp and over to where Wenonah was waiting for a report.

“It’s two snapping turtles caught in the act,” I told her.

She said , “It must be the season.”

She said that because just the day before we’d been walking in the shade behind our store house when there in front of us were a pair of black snakes all intertwined in the tall grass and shade.

While Wenonah stayed and watched I ran back to the house to get a camera that I snapped a dozen pictures with that I haven’t yet put on the webpage.

And now for the strictly vegetable news:

Our first week of deliveries are just finishing up and we survived two days of 100 degree weather and then another down pour and hail storm.

The heat caused a lot of our spring crops to go into panic mode and to begin bolting (prematurely doing the same thing those turtles and snakes were up to).

Because of that we lost most of the first growth of our broccoli. the broccoli instead of growing large beautiful heads went into panic mode and tried to turn into small yellow flowers.

Hopefully, we snapped most of the flowering buds off and will get plenty of secondary growth, meaning hopefully the plants will produce plenty of smaller broccoli heads in he next couple weeks.

Then there’s the pac choi which also began bolting in the heat.

With pac choi you can’t snap off the flowers and get healthy plants so what we did with the first sign of bolting we harvested the entire plants before they were ruined. The result was a lot of pac choi that edible but not particularly pretty.

Other crops that are ruined by the heat are lettuces and mustards. I think with these we were mostly lucky. Did you notice the little yellow flowers in the lettuce? That’s due to the excessive heat. I think it was harvested without much damage.

As long as the temperature stays below 90 for the rest of June we’ll be OK.

During our first week of vegetable deliveries I was asked when such and such a vegetable would be in the share.

Good questions.

The easy way to find out is to look on our webpage under ‘Share History’ .

There you will find a record of what was in the share each week for the past 9 years. All the way back to 1999.

So, if you want to know when you are likely to see your first tomato of the season look through our share history and you will see when they started appearing.

Speaking of tomatoes, this year I am growing a really early tomato (‘Siberian’) that brags it will ripen 52 days after planting. If they are telling the truth we should see a ripe tomato next Saturday. Any bets on that?

Finally, put July 12th on your calendar.

That’s the date for the annual shortly after summer solstice farm party and pot luck meal .

This is a chance to come out to the farm, meet the other shareholders, share a meal with them, tour the farm and have a pleasant afternoon.

More details will follow.

beaver pond?

2008-06-11T00:33:00.002-05:00

By the way, I apologize for the late newsletter but it really wasn't my fault. Our electricity was out from Wednesday afternoon until late last night.

Actually that was nice. Most people complain about the electricity going out because no electricity means no water which means no flushing the toilet.

Out here on our farm our water is electricity free. The water comes to us by gravity, flowing down the mountain from an artisan spring up near the mountain top.

This means when the electricity is out, unlike our neighbors, we still have water.

And our hot water?

We heat water (and our house) with wood.

We have a wood 'gasification' boiler that during the summer I fire up once a week for all the hot water we need.

The only things we need now is for me to finally get around to hooking up that micro-hydro generator so we have enough electricity for things like freezers and the computer to send out newsletters.

But then, not having electricity has its advantages. yesterday, for lunch I had the excuse to slurp on a quart of lemon sorbet that had started to turn into a sort of slurpy.

It was so tasty that when I had finished I was kind of wishing there was more sorbet in the freezer, maybe some peach or strawberry.

Oh well.

Without electricity it was enjoyably quiet. No motors humming. no stereo, no fans.

The only sound besides the chickens, geese and the dozens of birds flying in and out of the forest was my neighbors generator.

When the electricity went out their generator kicked on.

These neighbors are, by road, a good mile away from us. But by crow, they are half that distance.

As I heard the generators rumble I had two thoughts. The first one was of a gas pump clicking off dollar after dollar after dollar.

The other one is a generator in my distant past that was just as noisy.

It was part of the permanent equipment of this advisory team I was the medic with in Vietnam. I have a short story about that generator I wrote a couple decades ago that I might freshen up this week and put on the blog.

But, let's get back to the world of background motors, stereos and computers, tractors and greenhouse fans for long enough to hear the story that was originally going into he newsletter.

It took place on our evening walk.
Wednesday just as it started turning dark.

We were coming back up the bottom road.

Down by the 'swamp'

We had walked the mile on the quiet road back to the log house with the generator and were on our way back when we stopped and were listening to the bullfrogs croak and looking out in the pond to see if any goldfish survived the rainstorm.

How many goldfish stayed in the pond, and how many washed down stream?

"Maybe we could walk down the creek with a bucket this weekend and bring back the goldfish that washed through the drain?' I said.

Wenonah gave me one of those looks. This one plainly saying: "That sounds like the pre-teenage boy in you, and not something grown women do."

I know that look well. Even with me being almost 60 years old, pre-teenage boy activities still sound like fun.

"I wonder how far down stream the goldfish went?" I added.

Wenonah just shook her head and didn't bother to engage my thoughts.

While this was going on we were both standing there at the water's edge looking far out in the pond. Back to that place where the old tree has fallen in the water. This time of evening that's where the goldfish usually hang out.

And that's why we didn't see it.

We didn't see the animal that was almost at our feet.

A large rodent sitting in the water, actually, standing on a partially submerged tree. It's body also half submerged.

It couldn't have been more than three or four feet away.

A young beaver.

One that had apparently struck out on its own (adult beaver, the book says, Keep their young in the home pond for the first two years. babying and feeding and loving them. Showing them the ways of the world.

And then..

And then they are kicked out of the nest (or should we say pond) Forced to go out on their own and make a living without any parental support.

Either that, or starve (there's no asking mom and dad for money to go back to school. No graduate school for these beaver and cheap government loans and grants have mostly disappeared with the 60's. And we're not even talking about housing or preserved habitat).

So that's what I think we have. probably, if the books are correct, at first a young male. working on the pond to show that he has potential. That he has the makings of a real family man

A few years ago we had a young male in the same pond. He kept on stopping up the drain pipe where the water went under the road rather than having the water go over the road as I'm sure the beaver wanted.

And after a couple weeks, I guess the improvements showed promise (he had built a lodge and cut down a couple trees) there was a couple. He had apparently attracted a wife (beaver, the book says, mate for life). And the couple worked at making the lodge stronger, and had started preparing for winter (if you look down in the water of an active beaver pond there are sticks with the bark still attached stuck into the mud of the bottom of the pond.

That was about the time that our Great Pyrenees realized wild animals had set up housekeeping on land that they were guarding. (this was back before the deer fence and before we limited the area we let our gp's patrolled).

I don't know what happened, but I did see the gp's digging on top of the lodge (it was built close enough to the bank that the dogs could jump to it) and then one day there were no beavers.

they were gone. (I think I have a neighbor farther down the valley who has a thing against beaver on the creek, but... I'm pretty sure they moved out or it was the gp's doing their perceived duty).

That was ten years ago.

So if you come out this weekend, when you cross the creek take a look over into the swamp. do you see any beaver activity? (sticks with the bark chewed off, gnawed down trees, mud and stick dams, a lodge, a beaver swimming around).

Oh, and I forgot, we grow flowers for shareholders that visit the farm. They've started to flower. Not too many and stems that are still short, but if you are coming out, bring a pair of scissors and cut 20 stems. The zinnias and calendula are flowering. The stems won't be long enough for a nice vase for another month, but still, they need cutting and if you don't mind a 4 or 5 inch stem. This is for vegetable shareholders only.

Bill Bates

2008-05-25T15:01:00.001-05:00

I had a shareholder way back in the beginning, she was a shareholder for a number of years and each year she would put in a special request.

Do not discuss certain subjects in the newsletter. And if you must, do not sent the newsletter to my address.

The subjects?

Snakes!
Spiders!
and
Bees!

This is a bee newsletter.

But it is also a wedding present newsletter. and a honey newsletter (no its not about the time I spilt 600 gallons of honey on the sun room floor). And maybe a newsletter about growing older and wiser. I don't know for sure about the last one, though.

Regardless, since we’re thinking about honey and good things coming (the vegetable season starts in just over two weeks and things, despite all of this rain, including the vegetables, are really looking pretty good.

The rain didn’t seem to hurt the plants growing through the plastic mulch. If anything, they seem more healthy and robust than normal.

And while the downpour did manage to wash away a few thousand dollars worth of lettuce, mustard, chard and other seeds of our future spring greens, other seed miraculously took root and managed to survived the onslaught.

And while I was worried for a while there, it looks like our first share should be just fine, torrential downpour and all.

In the next week I will send shareholders an e-mail confirming which site they are getting their vegetables from along with instructions explaining how the pick up process works.

Yesterday, I went out and put supers on our beehives. A super is an extra box of frames, of honey comb, that the bees use to store honey in.

Right now the nectar flow in Virginia is on and the bees need extra room to store their nectar and pollen harvest.

The day started out to be much nicer than the predictors predicted. Sunny and fairly warm. and at first, around noon, the pleasant day must have effected the bees attitude on life because I didn’t even need a veil to work the hives, the bees were that gentle.

I would take the top off the hive, give them a little smoke, then take off the inner cover, give them a little more smoke,maybe take a frame out to see how life in that particular hive was progressing, put the frame back, then pick up the empty super and carefully place it on top of the hive body before putting the covers back on.

The bees were so gentle and calm there was hardly a bee that bothered to get up and fly in circles around my head.

It was a nice clear warm, sunny day in bee land and everyone seemed happy and content.

But the day dragged on.

We have just under 30 bee hives. That’s 30 hives in all sorts of conditions.

Think of a bee hive as a city-state. Some small, some large. Some peaceful. Others more industrious than usual. Hardworking. Focused.

And then some of the other sort.

The extremely warlike. The disorganized. The demoralized. the angry.

It was several hours later when I did something that all of the ‘how to keep bee’ books tell you not to do.

Don’t get careless.

Don’t drop a honey frame loaded with hundreds of bees down on top of a box full of bees.

I guess I was getting tired because I dropped something, and up until that time, it wouldn’t have mattered.

But something had changed.

The day had turned colder. There were clouds. It looked like it was getting ready to rain.

And the bees rather than seriously working, flying in and out, bringing in nectar and pollen were now upset.

Each time I opened a hive a number of bees would fly out and circle around my head, bouncing off my veil with an angry hum.

And then I did what I shouldn't have done. I dropped a frame full of bees and honey right on top of an open hive. A hive full to overflowing with honey, larva and of course, bees.

Which is about time to stop and jump back a few years to how I got into beekeeping.

Beekeeping isn’t something I’ve always done. In fact, up until I was in my mid 30’s, we’re talking about a couple decades ago, I had no interest in bees.

I didn't like bees.

In fact, I couldn’t tell a honey bee from a wasp. And a wasp from a yellow jacket.

I was one of those people that so irritate me now. A person that sees a wasp, or a yellow jacket, or even a peaceful bumblebee and goes into defense mode, as if they are about to be suddenly attacked by a marauding gang, and he yells out. ‘Look out, there’s a bee.”

First off, I want to say to them, 'It’s not a bee. It's a wasp.' or 'It's a yellow jacket.' or 'that sort of bumble bee doesn't even sting.' And then, and secondly, I want to say (if my chance it is actually a honey bee). 'Why do you think that bee would want to end its life and sting you of all people? What have you done to upset it?'

I remember what its like to be bee ignorant, so I don't.

Instead, I think back when I was a high school teacher. One afternoon several of us were meeting at another teacher's back yard.

He kept a couple bee hives in his back yard.

We were sitting there talking shop when a honey bee flew by, obviously checking out the scene, looking to see, possibly, if there was a flower around.

I saw it and went into panic mode. Picking up a newspaper and swatting.

I still remember the look on my friends face. And I hope that’s not the way I look at people today when they do something very similar.

Anyway, it was about then that Wenonah and I got married. We were living in a one time pre-civil war mansion outside of Charlottesville. A mansion that had fallen on hard times and was now a group house with several dozen down on their heels rooms, extensive flower gardens, now overtaken with poison ivy, a massive wisteria trellis with one end collapsing, and hundreds of boxwoods that hadn’t seen a clipper in at least thirty years there were now starting to look like misshapen trees rather than aristocratic hedges.

That’s when Wenonah’s father drove up.

Pulled his car on the grass.

Opened the trunk.

Pulled out several white boxes (remember, this man was wearing a coat and tie. No white beekeeper overalls, no veil, no gloves).

He took a couple white boxes out of his trunk. Set them down in the yard. made sure the top that fit over the boxes was firmly in place. And then turned around to me.

By this time I was just beginning to realize those things flying in circles around us were...

BEES!

Bees with stingers.

Against my better judgment I didn’t take off and run, (though that was my first impulse).

Instead I stood quietly by and listened to my new father-in-law talk.

“I decided to give you something useful for a wedding present. Something that will produce a gift every year.

A beehive.”

I wasn't carefully listening to his words. Instead I was watching the insects. the bees. They sure looked like they were getting ready to attack.

But Wenonah's father, Bill, didn't seem to be all that worried. After he presented me with the gift he walked back in his car and was now rifling through the back seat.

“And here’s a book on beekeeping.

“And a bee veil.

“And here’s a hive tool, and a smoker.

“And these are a pair of gloves, They are made special so you can work the hive with them on.. Though, I expect, once you get used to it, to keeping bees, you won’t want to use them.

“And finally, when you've done it for a while. When you get the hang of keeping the bees, When you're ready, I have a hundred more hives up on the farm that you can have.

“That is if the two of you want want me to give you the farm.”

It took me about a year to convince Wenonah that moving to the farm was a good idea, and another half year to get our affairs in order.

I got a job teaching at a local high school during the winter. But during the summer I kept the bees, and Wenonah’s father helped. Which meant I did the work and he told me what he thought I should be doing.

I remember us taking off the honey together. The two of us. I would be fully decked out in my bee protection gear. White coveralls, a quality veil, tightly secured around my head. Long leather gloves with long sleeves attached that went up past my elbows where they were secured with elastic garters.

And I remember Bill wearing his work clothes, an old veil sort of draped over his head, and no gloves on his hands. Sometimes, even, he'd be wearing a short sleeve shirt.

I also remember every time I'd get stung. Every time some bee managed to sneak its way inside my protective armor and managed to give me a sting. I remember yelling and cussing, jumping up and down, cussing some more and then, when the pain died down, I'd finally get back to work.

And I remember the end of the day and looking at Bill’s ungloved hands and realizing that he had probably been stung twenty or thirty times during the day and not once had I heard him complain. I hadn’t even been aware that he'd been stung once, let alone several dozen times. He had just never let out a sound, Didn’t jump up and down. Didn't stop work. In fact had never even remarked that he'd been stung.

Every time some worker bee decided that she didn’t very much trust this human, that it looked like he was taking liberties with the very heart of her city state and she gave his naked hand a sting.

And Bill. He just kept on working.

So yesterday, when I was working the bees. I had started out not wearing gloves. It’s hard to do what you have to do if you are wearing thick gloves.

But about the time the sky had clouded over and I dropped that frame about a dozen of the working girls decided that they needed to sacrifice themselves for the good of the family and they gave my hands a dozen good stings.

I’d like to think that when I got those stings I just continued on my way. Carefully picking up the frame I’d dropped. Maybe giving the hive another puff of smoke, and without a comment going about my business .

But I didn’t.

Instead words came out of my mouth similar to what I might have used many years ago in the army. I jumped up and down and cussed a little more for good measure and then finally, finally when the real hurt from the sting had died down some. I went to my truck and there on the front seat were my pair of bee gloves. Just like the ones Bill had given me all those years ago.

My hands still hurt as I slipped the gloves on and I cussed one more time and thought back to when I asked him if the reason why he didn't wear gloves was because the stings didn't hurt him.

“No, ” he said. They still hurt. they hurt bad. But its something you just learn to live with.”

Leigh Hauter

Singin' in the Rain

2008-05-24T20:41:00.003-05:00

While we were getting that seven inches of rain last weekend I was out in my rain suit walking first up to the greenhouse then down to the hoop houses to see what damage was going on.

It was coming down so heavy it was hard to see. And while at first I was listening to music on my ipod but as the rain really started coming down it became impossible to hear Springsteen’s Born in the USA through those little earphones so I just turned it off and instead listened to the rain fall.

Rain beating down like it was the end of the world.

Which of course reminds me of forty years ago when Jim and Mike, a guy named Paisley and I were standing in the rain.

It had been raining all night.

In fact it had really been raining hard with no let up for most of the past week.

Only the last night we got hit with the proverbial cats and dogs and since it was Asia, elephants and leopards.

It was the rainy season along the Saigon River out by Cambodia and for the last 24 hours the rain had been coming straight down in bucket loads only without the buckets.

That’s when the wall of the bunker I slept in, probably the best bunker in the little hillside outpost we’d lived in for the past month, a child’s fort with airfield tarmac reinforcing the bunker roof and someone’s French name scratched in the concrete floor.

That’s when, just as it was getting dark the outside wall of the bunker, part of the berm surrounding the triangle shaped fort, turned to mud and disintegrated.

One moment the wall was solid sandbags. The next it was mud.

And the wall, no longer solid, turned into a liquid gunk and poured across the bunker.

Luckily, at the time, I was in my hammock reading by flashlight, rocking back and forth in the hammock, reading I don’t know what, some science fiction I imagine, that I’d fished out of the box of books that occasionally came from some women’s clubs back in the states.

The only place I could find to hang my hammock was fortunately up near the bunker’s ceiling, tying the rope through holes in the metal tarmac holding the roof up. This fortunately put my hammock four plus feet off of the floor. Fortunately because when the mud slide came it filled up the bunker from bottom to several inches below my hammock.

Everything below the hammock disappeared in to the goo. My rifle, my boots, my aid bag. My foot locker full of medicines and bandages.

I had to swim and struggled through that mess over to the opening with the ladder that I climbed up to find the outside world.

Once above ground I wasn’t greeted with anything cheerful. Just more rain and my other team members huddled together.

Their bunkers, which weren’t as well built as mine had filled with water earlier in the day and I was forced to join them for a night spent hovering under a make shift shelter of roofing tin on an improvised frame made out of two by fours recently scavenged from the nearest American base camp.

The four of us were the enlisted members of a small advisory team that would move from Vietnamese outpost to outpost around the rural countryside, allegedly giving the local regional force and popular force (sort of like Vietnamese national guard) units advise on how to fight the war against their neighbors and other Viet Cong warriors .

There were two other members of our team. Two officers, but earlier in the week, when the rain threatened to wash out the road connecting us to what passed for civilization in that part of the world, and a dry bed and hot meal, had taken the team jeep and skiddadled to the district teams headquarters in the former French mansion up the road in the provincial capital.

The official explanation was they were away attending a mandated meeting on strategy or training or some such nonsense, but we knew, the four of us huddled under the too small pieces of tin, that they had really abandoned us in search of a dry bed and a warm meal.

Under the tin with us we had a radio. The captain’s expensive short wave radio he had forbidden us to use in his absence. Fortunately, though, it too had been hanging from my bunker roof. the bunker I shared with him, so we were able to salvage it.

And there we stood, with the rain pounding on the tin shelter, listening to rock and roll on radio Beijing’s short wave station until the music show ended and a history of World War ll in the Pacific according to the Chinese came on. Being a early history buff, I tried to listen, but while the facts seemed to jive with what I’d been taught in an Arlington County High School, they were somehow weighed and put together differently until finally my head started to ache and I turned it off and started listening to what the others were saying.

They, of course, were talking about the weather.

I still remember Jim speaking. “If I get out of this,” he said. “If I make it back to the world I’m never ever standing out in the rain for the rest of my life.”

To that Paisley chimed in. “That’s two of us. No more rain for me. I’m moving to somewhere where it hardly ever rains and the only time I’m going to look at it is from inside a car with my windshield wipers slapping back and forth.”

To that Mike added “No rain for me either. When I get back to the world I’ll look out the window at it but never will I willingly stand in the rain for ever again for anymore.”

He said it one more time.

“When I get back to the world...” and at that his voice trailed off.

We all knew what Mike was thinking. He was the one that was pretty sure that he wasn’t ever making it back to the world. He had had one of those premonitions, I think they’re called. One that told him that something, somewhere, at sometime before he got on that airplane for the states was going to get him.

At that we all stopped talking and just stood there listening to the rain come down. Some times harder and sometimes a little bit lighter. All of us thinking our thoughts. All of us standing on the wet ground. The water filling the bottoms of jungle boots or in my case, since my boots were under the muddy goo, a pair of flip flops I’d left outside the bunker door.

I didn’t take part in the condemnation of rain conversation. Since it was only a month until I was due to go home my day dreaming drifted sort of towards walking in the rain with a girl. I hadn’t yet seen that Gene Kelly musical Singin' in the Rain but my day dream went something like the dance scene, only, only without the dancing and probably without the singing.

“How about you?” Mike asked. “what will you do back in the states when it rains like this?”

“I don’t know,” I answered,

I sure wasn’t going to give him a hint about the thoughts I was thinking. I could imagine the next half hour of ribbing.

“But I do know, if I tried to tell anyone about this, anyone back in the world that we spent the war standing out in the rain soaked to the skin under a little piece of tin I don’t think they’d believe me.

“This stuff here, If I wasn’t here right now, but instead if I was reading it, or maybe watching it on television, I’d think it was a joke. a comedy. Four guys standing out in the rain in VC country talking about staying dry back home.

“I wouldn’t believe it.”

They were silent for a little bit, I don’t know, trying to imagine what I was saying, what it would be like trying to explain this to someone that hadn’t been there.

Finally, after a bit, Paisley turned the captains radio back on and started turning the dial, trying to find some music, or maybe a talk show in English.

Marshall and Louise

2008-05-09T20:04:00.002-05:00

I feel under siege.

I mean, I feel like I'm waiting for that, awful, that fateful attack. The one that overruns our defences. The attack that destroys everything.

When is this 'attack' going to happen? I don’t know when. (but don't sneak attacks and raids always come in the middle of the night. In the early morning, hours before the sun lights the sky)

Where? I don't know. It could be anywhere along our borders with the forest. Last year we had bears that ripped holes in the fence so they could get in and eat from the bee hives, to snap off the limbs of the fruit trees looking for apples and pears.

Why? That's an easy one. Why? Simple. Someone, or something out there is hungry. And this hungry someone, or something wants to eat what is growing, and living in our fields.

They want to eat our vegetables. And they definitely want to eat our chickens. And, of course, everyone wants an egg meal whenever they have that empty feeling.

Who? It could be just about anyone of that class of critters I call the eaters. And an eater is just about anyone. Back when I first started doing this sort of thing for the food bank and we would be donated land inside the city the eaters we were most worried about where the human kind. I remember spending time worrying about what was the least costly way of protecting tomatoes.

Out here in the country (well, what once was the country and has now turned into the front edge of the city's suburbs). It's a little different. The eaters have changed but the goal is still the same.

Here's an example.

Earlier this week Wenonah and I were going on our evening walk. Every evening is mostly the same walk. We leave the house and head up the gravel lane toward the greenhouse, follow the drive around the curve, past the cemetery, and down to the creek.

That's half a mile.

Until a few years ago you had to ford the creek. In a car that meant splashing through water half a foot deep.

On foot it meant either getting your feet wet, jumping ( it was maybe six feet across) or chancing it to the stepping stones I had set out in the water.

A few years back, though, I finally listened to Wenonah and put a pipe down for the creek to flow through and then built up the road with clay and gravel, so instead of getting wet we could drive or walk over the creek (the creek's official name is Catlett's Branch).

In doing away with the ford I sort of messed with the environment something that a shareholder over at the EPA called me to task on.

Instead of the creek flowing through some boggy land and then over the rocks and gravel the ford was made of, there is now a sort of pond (what Wenonah refers to as 'Leigh's swamp').

Back when I created the swamp I also bought a bag of goldfish and tossed them in the water. And this is what John called me to task on .

This week when we went for our walk I counted 150 gold fish. 150 goldfish means the gold fish are thrived and reproduced faster than the ducks, heron, snapping turtles and whatever else can gobble them up. In other words, a nonindigenous species has been successfully introduced. Fortunately it was only goldfish and not something like (fill in the blank with a fish with an evil sounding name).

Anyway, we turn right at the swamp with the goldfish and staying on the gravel road follow the creek for another half mile to where at one time there was a bridge and as many as a dozen houses including one that was reputed to be a house of ill-repute.

(Someday I’ll tell you the story about Marshall, his sister Louise, their mother, the sister’s lover, and, of course the voices that spoke to Marshall in the night. telling him, among other things, that it was his duty to get his sister to mend her evil ways (managing the house of ill repute) or, or he was to shoot her.

But be that as it may, We walked past where the bridge used to be ( I think it was a Sunday morning in the early 30's when Louise and her lover, stood in the water under the bridge hiding from Marshall as he came down the road calling out her name and telling her 'its too late now. You're going to have to be punished.' In each of Marshall's hands was a six shooter.

Marshall, it seems, had already had an encounter with Louise up at our house, their mother's house. That's where he had first pulled out his guns Pulled out his six shooters and speaking to Louise who was standing in the doorway told her, "You are a sinful woman." He lifted up one gun, aimed, and pulled the trigger.

And that's when Marshall and Louise's mother stepped in between them.

The bullet struck her and not Louise, and she fell down and died right there.

Louise didn't hesitate a moment. Instead of trying to reason with her brother, she grabbed her lover's hand and the two of them turned and ran out the back door, climbed dowm the hill, ran across the corn field (we're growing tomatoes, peppers and eggplant there now), and on the other side plowed right into the briars and thorns and ran as fast as they could down to the bridge..

Which was were Wenonah and I were walking. I was talking about the growing season and commenting on what a different year its been so far. And wondering if the morel season was still on.

You might not know it but this has been a fine year for our local edible mushrooms, morels.

I think I was saying to Wenonah, "How about some morels to go with the asparagus for dinner?"

And that's when I walked off the drive and into the brush around the old bridge foundation, hoping to see some mushrooms.

Instead of mushrooms, that's were I saw the egg shells.

Chicken egg shells.

In fact they were blue chicken egg shells just like the shells of eggs from our Aracuna chickens.

So the question is. How did they get there? This is 3/4 of a mile away by road from the chickens.

Or 300 hundred yards through the woods and poison ivy the way Louise had traveled almost 80 years ago.

Not the sort of path a human would normally take, but just the route a rabbit, or fox, or raccoon, bobcat would take after it had stolen some eggs from the hen house.

And that’s just eggs.

What about the chickens?

What if something was sneaking in and eating our chickens?

Just the other night there was a sound that I hoped never, ever to hear around here.

A sound I heard the first time in the early 1970’s way back in no-where Wyoming.

Back in Wyoming it was getting dark and we had been traveling all day, not really sure where we were except that our Volkswagon bug was going places I don’t think a four wheel truck was supposed to go.

But with dark coming on we decided to stop for the night. Anyway, the gas gauge was getting real close to the empty mark and while our Mobil highway map didn’t show the road we were on there was a possibility that we might come out on a highway sooner rather than later.

Since we hadn’t see another car all day there didn’t seem to be any need to find a camping place. We just stopped the bug right there in the middle of the dirt road in what was a narrowish canyon along side a stream.

And opening up the hood (remember with beetles the trunk was in the front) pulled out our canvas pup tent and preceded to collect fire wood.

I don’t remember what we had for dinner but I think our choice of wines back then came with the fine label of Boone's Farm (or something equivalent).

So we ate, enjoyed the wine, pulled out our army surplus mummy bags, climbed in and went to sleep.

Only to wake up in the pitch dark with gangs of animals laughing from the rock cliffs above our heads.

On our right, over on the other side of the creek, up above, one gang of these creatures would let out a scream, maybe a bark, a howl, laughter.

And then on the other side. The side of the creek we were on. Up above us what must have been four or five hundred feet, another gang would answer.

Crying, laughing, barking.

Only to be answered, again, from across the creek.

I think I had seen the movie about this but I couldn’t remember whether it was safer to stay in the sleeping bag inside the tent, or to make the mad dash for the vehicle. where you could quickly roll up the windows before the creature lunged at you.

I know we whispered back and forth.

“Do you hear that?”

“What do you suppose it is?”

“Do they know we’re here?”

How far away are they?”

“How many of them are there?”

“What are they?”

“In the movies they throw some wood on the fire, get the fire really blazing, and that way they’re safe.”

“Until the firewood’s gone.”

“Yes, but that’s in the movies. If I climb out and start a fire and they’ll know we’re here.”

“Besides, its cold.”

Well, I heard the same crying, howling, laughing the other night. Only I was upstairs in bed and I don’t’ think they could have got in the house. The doors were closed. The windows locked (I think). And I have that shotgun locked up in the gun cabinet.

Only there are all of those chickens out there just waiting to be eaten.

And Wenonah says, “What about my cats? They are not going to be safe.”

Fortunately Marcus our trusty guardian dog heard the sound too and immediately started barking and running through the night. and finally headed across the fields, through the onions and up toward the greenhouse.

Andorra, who is large and ferocious looking and as sweet as can be even followed Marcus, both of them barking.

And behind the house the turkeys started gobbling or whatever you want to call what a turkey does when they’re making a racket.

The roosters. Crowing.

The geese. (what is it geese do?)

Needless to say a racket.

And the coyotes. I guess we now have a family of coyotes living up on our mountain side. Since when did we have coyotes running around Virginia like it was out back Wyoming?

And next week we can talk about the vegetable eaters and our success, so far, in protecting your vegetables.

Farm News.

Delivery time is getting closer by the day. We start the week of June 9th. Next week I will start reviewing what an average pick up day looks like. I will also confirm which pick up location I have you down for.

Planting is underway. Our fields are filling up with vegetables. In fact, I'm worried about last night's rain. My rain gauge says 3.26 inches has fallen in the last 24 hours.

Damage? Our road took a big hit. I hadn't been all the way out yet but what I've seen is gullied and/or washed away.

More important than the road are the plants. Thursday we planted something like 15,000 seedlings. The field they're in is too wet to go wading around in. Hopefully they didn't wash away.

And then on Monday and Tuesday we planted seeds. Lots and lots of seeds. Our first couple weeks of greens.

Lettuces like black seeded simpson, green and red oakleaf, salad bowl, iceburg, romaine, and bibb. Mustards like giant red, southern, curley, suehlihung. Other salad greens like arugula, mizuna, tatsoi. tokyo bekana, and yukina savoy. And finally kale and collards.

Let's hope our contour planting kept them from washing away.

Otherwise? I guess we'll spend next week out replanting. Quickly buying more seeds and replanting.

We'll see.

Fortunately radishes take only three weeks,so they don't get put in the ground next week.

Last Saturday we had our first seedling give away. Shareholders took home between 2000 and 3000 seedlings.

We'll have another seedling give away tomorrow. Sorry but this is only for shareholders. Last week the peppers weren't ready. This week they are.

Leigh Hauter

willful fowl

2008-05-03T00:40:00.001-05:00

I’m being over run by willful fowl.

They won’t let me plant grass seed, they stomp on the flowers in the flower beds . Dig holes under the bushes. and of course leave a fine coating of high quality manure everywhere (including decks and steps) they go.

Just the other day I was walking out the back steps and … And... Well anyway. there seems to be strategic piles placed just about everywhere to ambush everyone's comings and goings. (you should have seen the look on the face of the neighbor's elementary school age daughter as she showed me the bottom of her shoe as though I was personally responsible).

And then, its not just the mess they make, it’s the birds themselves.

Example - Just the other night. The night it was raining so hard, I stepped out the kitchen door. It must have been going on two am, and I was up giving the farm, the gardens, the greenhouse and of course the birds one last look to see if everything was safe and sound when....

When I stepped on a rooster.

Right there on the steps to the porch.

There he was. A large red and black rooster, under better conditions you would have said a beautiful creature, all huddled up, soaking wet on the top step. His normally beautiful plumage damp and soggy. Looking like he had been in a fight with a fox and somehow managed to steal away instead being turned into a meal.

I don’t know what he was doing there. Our kitchen step is several hundred yards away from where the chicken’s mobile home is current parked.

Why did it decide to camp for the night on my steps, instead of its nice warm chicken house?

And that wasn’t all.

There were two hens sitting on the railing around the back deck. And right there below the chicken behinds. Down on the deck, were two large mounds of chicken droppings.

Fairly large piles sitting behind them on the deck.

And then out on the stone wall, in front of the house...

Four more hens, sleeping (or whatever it is that birds do at night) side by side.

And, showing a little bit more intelligence, in the barn, on the steps going up to the loft, two more.

And finally, in the barn's side room, the room I’ve taken to storing ‘stuff’ in. There on top of the old, it must be an antique by now, cook stove was another hen. For some reason the willful ones really like the cook stove, (it must be the warming shelf above the stove top) that I’ve given up on keeping it clean and have instead covered the top with grain sacks.

Why is it? Why won’t the chickens stay in their pasture? Why do they insist on flying over the electric fence and climbing the hill up to the house where they are obviously not wanted (my new strategy is to throw a rock in their direction each time I see one scratching for grass seed in the year).

But enough about poorly behaved chickens, unless, of course, you want to come out and try your hand at catching wayward birds and returning them to their pasture. Not that catching them much matters.

Each time I catch a bird in the yard I’ve taken to clipping the feathers on one wing back a few inches under the theory that with one wing shorter than the other its harder to fly.

However, I’ve noticed recently a number of repeat offenders. Chickens caught with clipped feathers.

Upon being caught for the second offense I clip the feathers back a little further. Maybe I hadn't cut enough the first time.

And the third time? Should we institute a repeat offenders program. Three strikes and she's out. Or is that three strikes and she's chicken soup?

The problem with that, though, besides the fact that we'd start coming up short on eggs is that I’d have to pluck and gut the offenders myself and to tell the truth, I’m not much when it comes to chicken plucking.

Let's go to the Farm News

This rain is slowing our planting down. We filled the fields in front of the house plus the one by the greenhouse by last week but we haven’t been able to do any planting so far this week. (which is probably just as well, it dropped into the 30’s last night and is expected to do it again tonight. That’s awfully chilly soil for plants like tomatoes, basil and peppers.

Asparagus picking and egg give way. Over 50 dozen eggs were taken by shareholders last Saturday. In fact some of the late arrivers didn’t get any eggs. (sorry). And there were about 15 cars here at ten on the dot to cut asparagus. the 15-20 shares worth of asparagus was gone in the first twenty minutes.

Ground hogs and deer. This year I’m determined to not lose vegetables to our local fauna. We are putting up a second deer fence outside (and some places inside) the original deer fence. meaning that if a deer wants to get in and eat our vegetables she has to go through two fences with a five foot space in between. That's a pretty serious jump.

Our other big vegetable eater, and at this time of your just as bad if not worse than the deer is the ground hog. Ground hogs are close to impossible to catch with a live trap. The standard method for getting rid of groundhogs is to sit still, usually for several hours, with your varmint gun waiting for the victim to venture out of her burrow.

Me? I’m not much of a shot and you only get one shot before the groundhog retreats back underground, but over the past several years half a dozen shareholders have spend days out sitting and waiting. Sure seems to be a poor cure to me.

What I’m doing this year in a big way is installing anti-ground hog electric fences. This is on the expensive side but groundhogs are an expensive varmint to have around and the fences work.

So if you come out to the farm and see that short 18 inch tall white fence, DO NOT TOUCH! The fence’s are attached to some rather strong energizers and they are capable of giving quite a shock that is capable of deterring even a vegetable hungry groundhog.

Bees. The last of the 20 packages of bees arrived yesterday. Each package is three pounds of worker bees and one queen bee. Enough to give a good start to a new beehive.

Unlike the previous 15, the packages that arrived this week were in very poor condition. The apiary that raised them had driven them by truck and stopped in Roanoke to mail the ones that were destined for apiaries, farms and back yards in Virginia.

Apparently, though, the mail delivery from Roanoke to The Plains isn’t all that fast and many of the bees starving in route after they consumed the quart of sugar water included in the bee cage. (I think the truck driver would have done better to wait until he was up in New York before dropping ours in the mail. Have you noticed that it often takes less than a day for a letter or package to travel from NYC to DC ).

First vegetable delivery - that will be the week of June 9th. Specific details on our webpage.

Years as a CSA. - I just looked back at my records and realized that this is the 12th year that I've been a professional farmer. This is Bull Run Mountain Farm CSA's 12th year. Not its eleventh as I somehow recollected.

the mind of a chicken

2008-05-03T00:37:00.000-05:00

I meant to start off by telling you how I don't understand what goes on in a mind of a chicken.

This is because last week we moved the chickens from one pasture to the next.

And the chickens, rather than going along for the ride, and calmly and peacefully moving into their new field, rebelled. resisted. fought back. gummed up the works.

I mean, here we are, we successfully move the chicken tractor, (we really do need a better name for that, too. Something with a little more pizzazz than 'chicken house on wheels') . Hooked it up behind the farm truck and like someone with a vacation mobile home, we moved it from one camp space to the next.

And around the new camp site, we put up the fence. The electric 'keep the predators out, keep the chickens in' fence.

And the chickens? We moved them too. After years of doing this we've learnedk. We set the new fence in place before opening up a hole in the old fence and then slowly, gradually shooed the chickens across the space between until they found themselves fenced in to the new location.

The move was successful. the move was complete. The mobile chicken home in its new location. the electric fence put up around the new pasture (camp site, if you will).

And the occupants? the chickens? They were there too. All enclosed with the electric fence.

Only...

However....

However I forgot to turn the current on that runs through the fence, at least I forgot to turn it on right away.

And when I did go out to the fence charger, several hours later, just before dark, something had knocked a corner of the newly placed fence down.

And over in the old pasture. The empty pasture. The one without a fence, with only my tractor still sitting were I'd parked it, right in the middle of the field.

Up on the roof of the tractor.

50 daffy chickens getting ready for the night. Roosting, side by side.

(have you ever tried to heard chickens after dark?)

Anyway, you know, of course what that means?

Sometimes I feel that at any one time there are dozens of eyes peering out of the woods at the chickens. Predator eyes. Waiting..

Waiting for the chance at a chicken dinner.

Foxes, bobcats, coyotes, raccoons or even a skunk.

And speaking of skunks. The other night, early morning, really, around two, I was out and about checking to make sure everything was safe, warm and sound when I walked down to the chicken pasture and the air was filled with the hint of a skunk.

I flashed the light back and forth. shinning it into the woods, Under the trailer, up on the roosts but I didn't see her (the skunk),

Which was fine with me, I didn't want to find a skunk in the henhouse. (By the way, how do you get a skunk out of the henhouse?

Several years ago a family of skunks moved under the storehouse, no doubt attracted by our chickens and their eggs.

I knew the skunks were there before I ever saw one. There was always that vague aroma in the air. And then when I first saw one, it was in the evening, I saw her come out form under that old building and nonchalantly strolled up to the chicken fence, that electrified fence I put around the chicken pasture to keep the chickens in and animals like the skunk out.

Well she got up next to that fence, looked around and then carefully using her front paws just as we would our hands, lifted up the bottom strand, the non electric strand of the electrified fence, and lifting it over her head squeezed underneath and into the chicken yard.

It's about then I started hollering and the dogs started barking and the skunk, not before eating several eggs and taking another one with her as though she had been grocery shopping, and repeated the process in reverse, getting herself out of the pasture.

It was right then that our dogs, the two huge Great Pyrenees caught up with her, surrounded her, double teaming her like I've seen them do to other animals.

One in front snapping and growling, right in its victims face while the other gp sneaks up behind and with a quick lunge.

Well I don't need to go into details. Only let it suffice to say that the gp's while they are sweet as can be around people and children are serious livestock guardians. They have been breed for hundreds, if not thousands of years to be very competent at protecting chickens and sheep, goats and cattle, pigs and geese from that class of hungry animals we so blithely classify as predators.

Only, only this time the instinctual plan of attack didn't work.

While the one dog was busy barking in ms. skunk's face, and while the other one was sneaking up from behind. Ms. skunk casually lifted her tail and quickly let fly with a stream of perfume.

Andorra, Andorra was coming up from behind, got a squirt right in the eyes. ,

It was a sad sight to see. She stopped her attack instantly and shook her head trying to clear her vision..

Apparently in shock.

Right then, though, the other dog. This was Mark Twain, Marcus's predecessor, he saw his chance and closed in on the skunk.

Only she spun around and let go with another stream. This time catching MT in the mouth.

And let's stop right there and think...

It's two oclock. Maybe two thirty in the morning and you are out by the hen house on wheels because you think that something's astray and there's that smell in the air.

What do you do?

While you think about that, let's do the farm news.

FARM NEWS

I'm obviously running late getting this out. Suddenly the amount of farm work has jumped. I'm switching the newsletter to early in the week rather than on Friday's.

Last week, putting me behind with the newsletter, we finished planting the onions. 20,000 onions and leeks.

We also planted the first week's worth of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and pac choi. That's a 1000 of each.

And on Friday morning at 6 am the woman from the post office gave me a call to tell me that fifteen pounds of bees were making a racket in post office and would I (she didn't say please) would I get over there right away.

When I did, around 10, there were five packages, with queens, three pounds of buzzing bees and a queen in each of five screen cages. I told the woman at the post office that the bees were nice and she didn't have anything to worry about.

I don't think she believed me.

Then on Saturday I counted about 40 shareholders (I sent out a notice to just shareholders on Friday night) came out to get eggs and cut asparagus. The Asparagus is up and growing and while there's not enough to gothe first 20 people, I think, went home with enough asparagus for a meal or two.

I will send out another notice later this week reminding shareholders of the time I will be around the farm over the weekend. If you want to come out during the week, e-mail me so we can coordinate times.

Finally, It looks like our shareholder list is firmed up for the season. For all the new people, I will be sending out information over the next month on what to expect and how the details work. Our first delivery of the season is on June 9th, the second week of June.

Leigh Hauter

The march of the toads, again

2008-04-11T21:22:00.001-05:00

Picture this--

It's just after dark, That period where the sun has gone down and the after glow of the day has now disappeared from the sky. It is dark out.

We are in our front yard. On three sides are fields. Empty fields. The fourth side is our house. It's to our back.

Coming from the direction of the mountain straight out from our house is the driveway.

But in the dark it doesn't matter. You can't see it.

Out there you know, in our yard, is a gold fish pond. A rectangle. Something like 25 feet long by 5 feet wide. Swimming in the water are a couple dozen goldfish and a half dozen koi of various colors and sizes.

For this -- that's the center of attraction. The gold fish pond and its year round pool of water.

Now look out in the fields.

You can hear them coming. There must be hundreds of them.

Croaking.

Moving.

One hop at a time. Each jump a few inches closer to the pond.

Who knows where they came from. When it was daylight they weren't there. You could have walked through all of the fields without seeing a single one.

But not now, if you go out there in the dark. Go out with a flashlight and look at the ground, its difficult not to step on one.

But why tonight. Why not last night? There weren't any toads last night. Or how about tomorrow night? Why now? Why here? Who decided?

Who put out the word? Tonight is the night. Over there.

Here they come. They're all coming, hoping, marching, if you will, toward the front yard. Toward the goldfish pond.

In fact if you look in several dozen have already arrived. They are in the water swimming. On the rocks around the edge, croaking.

It's that time of year. This happens every year. Time for the annual toad party and mating event. It's going to go on all night, just like it does every year this time. Just as the last frost has come and gone, its more regular than the calendar.

This year it was Wednesday night around ten, just before the wind brought in all of that cold air. It was still nice, still close to being 70 degrees out and everywhere you went, there were the toads.

Dozens. Dozens of dozens. Hundreds.

Hopping.

Hopping in the same direction. All of them heading toward the one destination.

Other news?

Well, if you haven't sent in your check you need to do it right now. Either that or e-mail me with a plan. By the end of next week if I haven't received a check or a payment plan from those who signed up over a month ago, I will start giving those shares to the people on the waiting list.

Then, Of course, there are the eggs. The hens are now laying almost 8 dozen a day. That's around 60 a week. Again, if you want a free dozen come on out Saturday between 11 and 1 pm. I've been giving a lot away over the week but I still have 20 dozen in the barn and I haven't collected todays and, of course there will be tomorrows. (no egg pick up on Sunday, I won't be around).

Onion seedlings are supposed to arrive Monday and we will get busy planting shortly after. Ten cases of onions. Red, Yellow, and White onions. And three cases of leeks. A case contains 30 bunches and a bunch holds 60 plants. 18,000 onions to plant with about 5400 leeks. Let's hope all goes well.

And then the week after that, after I hope the last frost has finally come and gone, we start planting seedlings. We'll start with the broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower. We have about 4000 of each in the greenhouse and we'll plant a thousand of each every week, hopefully giving you enough for the first month.

Then comes the pac choi. Followed by other plants that like the cool. sorrel, various flowers (I bought a thousand glad bulbs not for the shares but for the vases in the house. If I succession plant them just right the house should be full of glads all summer long.

But back to the vegetables. After that, I imagine will come a few thousand basil (we are growing as much Italian as we usually do, enough for all you can eat almost every week). A little lemon basil, Enough Thai basil and this year something I swore off half a dozen years ago, a purple basil.

Besides thinking about planting, we have also been tilling the fields. Most of the fields have now been turned over a second time. We're trying to destroy many of the potential weeds. I also looked out where I had planted those peas back in February and decided they wouldn't be ripe anytime soon (I had hoped they would start off immediately growing when we planted them, it having been so warm, but they didn't. They were still a number of weeks away from fruit and we needed the room, so we will not be having pick your own peas this year).

Pick your own asparagus looks like a possibility. Hopefully we will have enough asparagus up and ready to pick that I can ask people out in a week to pick their own. We'll see. Some of the asparagus in our yard is up an inch or two.

The picture that I said I would post last week, the suspected coyote, go to 'the bear and the damage done'. It got put in that folder.
--

Leigh Hauter

male grouse, blue birds and other dumb behavior

2008-04-11T21:19:00.000-05:00

Outside my window I see our car parked under the pear tree. And there’s a blue bird on a lower limb of the tree.

A male blue bird with its bright shiny blue and rusty red feathers.

And every few minutes, there he goes, up in the air, hovers outside the car window. And then...

He attacks.

Attacking what? I don't know. I'm not a bird, not a male bluebird. I can only make a human guess.

Maybe that bluebird reflection in the window?

All's I can say is, with any confidence, he's nuts,

Male bird nuts.

But then, that's nothing new. this is the season, the time of year for nutty bird behavior.

Back several decades ago, when I was teaching at a local high school, most days I would have to leave the farm around seven in the morning. except though for the nutty bird time of year.

Then, I would have to account for the grouse delay.

Have you ever seen the local grouse? I think it’s called a ruffed grouse (though we always called it a wood grouse). Usually not a very descript bird. (because usually you don’t see it for more than a second or two after you have stumbled across one out in the woods and it has decided to take off, running and flying, just as fast as it can).

From my memory kind of a round bird maybe a foot or two high with whitish specks on his mostly brown feathers.

But it’s a completely different bird I would see on the driveway. This would be a male ruffed grouse in mating season. And a male grouse in mating season, is like our bluebird or for that matter most male birds in mating season.

They have no sense.

Instead of worrying about personal survival they are doing what we always hear big named politicians are worried about. They are thinking about posterity.

So, here I am, late as usual (well I can make it over to the high school on time if I catch all the lights just right and remember, this was before the area’s perpetual gridlock) and as I turn the corner, right where that old maple tree is, right out in front of me is this dumber than dumb bird.

The 'male ruffed grouse in mating season'.

Standing right in the middle of the driveway.

But he doesn’t looked like your usual grouse. This one is beautiful..

He has this large red tail all fanned out.

The feathers around his neck puff up,

for some reason he looks larger and more beautiful than any grouse I have ever seen. His feathers just glistened, his posture was immaculate.

And he’s doing a dance.

Right there in the driveway.

I stopped the truck five feet, maybe ten feet away and he doesn’t see I’m there (back then I was driving one of those little toyota four wheel drives).

Something that should make a wild bird get out of the driveway.

Instead, he doesn't seem to know I'm there. Instead he’s doing, what looks like, an elaborate dance step. Two steps forward, one to the left, two to the right, turn and repeat yourself (or something like that).

He would dip and bow but he wouldn’t get out of the road.

I sat there in the truck watching. This is something to see. But at the same time I need to get to work. It’s time for him to get out of the road.

I honk the horn.

No movement.

The dance continues.

Now, I’m thinking, he’s not doing all this for himself, is he? I mean, there must be an audience.

So I look around. Let’s say this is Monday.

I don’t’ see anything.

Finally, I get out of the truck and walk up to him, forcing him to move off of the dance floor and back into the woods.

Only...

Only the next day as I’m rushing to school again. I was on time the day before. (I’m always on time, even if I cut it short) and there again is the grouse. Looking just as beautiful, if not more so, than the day before.

He’s doing the same steps, in the same place at the same time. (heck, maybe the dance steps are more complicated than the day before. I'm no judge of that sort of thing).

And there’s still no audience that I can see.

I get out and run him off.

And the next day. Only this time when I get out of the truck I see something, someone off in the woods. I think its another grouse, only not like the beautiful male. This one is plain like the ones you see out hiking.

It’s a female and she’s apparently watching this dance from 20 some yards away.

But I only get a glimpse of her before she disappears.

And while I do hate to interrupt true love, my principal comes from the city and wouldn’t understand this as an excuse for being late. I scoot the grouse out of the road and leave.

The next day I leave earlier, this time just for the show, and not only is he doing his dance but she has come to the edge of the woods to watch. She is right there. Not taking part at all but apparently being entertained.

And he’s doing his steps, back and forth, back and forth, turning a circle, dipping standing up tall. And his audience, I think, took a couple steps closer and just as she does, the dancer stops dancing and in a flash is was over and he took off running toward her

And she...

The best I could figure out was she wasn’t ready for the dance to be over yet, or maybe, which is more likely, I don’t understand birds, because she turned and ran. In fact they both took off running, him right behind her, off into the woods.

And was it last year that we were harvesting the garlic and one of the guys picked up four baby grouse and put them in a bucket?

When I saw I tried to let them go. Putting them back out in the garlic, but they were still there the next day. Apparently the mother had deserted them.

We raised them first in a box in the back room and then out with the chickens. Two of them grew up to be almost adult size and then one day, without notice, they were gone. No longer in the chicken yard.

I wonder what happened? Was there some call, sort of like the spring male bird notice, that told them it was time to go off, make a home in the woods? or what?

Anyway, here on the farm its’ that time of year. Work has suddenly blossomed. We could now work 24/7 only for most of this week the ground was too wet to do anything.

We couldn’t even go out and plow.

Finally yesterday one of the fields was dry enough to drive the small tractor over it so we started planting onions. Can you imagine what it is like to put 20,000 spring onions in the ground one at a time? Well, that’s sort of what we are doing, only the onion seedlings are much smaller than the spring onions you’ll find in the store.

And while once we planted them by by hand, first digging a little trench by hand, then placing each seedling in the ground, by hand, one after the other after the other. Then taking a hoe and covering the roots one after the other. and then going back with a hose and watering each one.

We now have a piece of equipment that is pulled behind the tractor. And one part digs a trench, then there is a wheel with a dozen clamps that open and close. Two guys sit on the back of the machine taking the seedlings, one at a time, putting them in the clamps.

The wheel turns and the seedlings are put down in the trench.

On the equipment there is a tank for water and under the tank is a hose that drips water in the trench, watering the seedlings.

And at the end there is another blade that fills in the trench leaving the onions standing tall and proud. Their roots in the soil, water on their roots, and the hole they were planted in all filled in.

In other words, its still a lot of work, but instead of making four passes like we did before. Now with the seeder (I think it originally costs $5000) we do the same thing, only better, and in only one pass. Which I guess means doing it better and four times faster.

But even if its faster it still takes an awfully long time. We worked for 8 hours planting onions yesterday and only planted 40% of them. Right after lunch, and as soon as I get this newsletter finished. We’ll spend another 5 hours planting.

This morning we were hooking up the irrigation system for the onions. Drip tape. Which puts the water right on the onions and not on the weeds growing between the rows.

We also have been planting several hundred rosemary, lavender and French tarragon seedlings that we bought from a plant grower. I never have luck starting rosemary from seed and the plants I do start usually don’t over winter. This year should be different.

And while we have Russian Tarragon, which we start from a seed, French Tarragon must be started from a plant. This will be relatively new for us. We haven’t had Rosemarie or French Tarragon since our old herb garden which was destroyed by construction trucks about half a dozen years ago when we started rebuilding the house.

Eggs? Please come out. (Saturday 11-1 or by arrangement). I think the chickens are up to ten dozen a day.

Asparagus? Not ready. Asparagus, I’ve observed, really hates cold damp soil and just doesn’t come up until the grounds at least dried up some. We moved the geese off the asparagus bed earlier this week and cultivated but there was not a sign of a spear in the large asparagus bed yet.

Payments and waiting list? It looks to me like there might be three dozen openings. Probably I will have time this weekend to go through my database and look to see who hasn’t paid, compare that with who has worked out a payment plan and then I will send out a notice (no one will be dropped just because they spaced it out). So, the people on the waiting list, I will get back to you by the middle of next week telling you if there is an opening or not. And everyone that’s a 2008 shareholder, there is no problem with your share unless I send you a notice this coming week.

I usually start putting seedlings in the ground on April 15th. That’s what I’ve come to think of as the ‘last frost of the season’ Looking at the weather forecast that looks close. They are forecasting a low of 34 degrees Monday and Tuesday nights. That’s a little too close to freezing for comfort.

Which means next week we’ll probably start planting on Wednesday.

And now, let me run out and start planting onions.

coyotes, fires and the state of the vegetables

2008-04-03T00:27:00.002-05:00

What should we talk about this week?

1, The mysterious animal that was photographed on two different days sneaking down the driveway at 3 in the morning?

2. The forest fire?

3. Payments for the shares coming due the first week of April?

4. Farm visits and free eggs?

5. Or the state of your vegetables?

Well, let’s deal with them in order starting with the unnamed animal caught by one of our wildlife cameras. What is it? (the picture is up on our website in the same folder with the bear picture) .

I have been telling everyone that it’s a coyote. But then Liz, our amateur animal sleuth says there’s no way to tell. “It’s too dark to make a call,’ ’ she says.

Her husband, though, is pretty sure it’s a bobcat. “just look at it?”

And Wenonah doesn’t know either. It could be a fox. She says. A large gray fox. “I just don’t want it to be a coyote. Coyotes eat cats, and that means we’ll have to keep the cat door closed all the time so ours don’t get eaten.”

Which brings us to the fire and the fire truck that came storming down our road earlier this week. I only heard the siren. My neighbor called to ask if the fire was over this way.

He said two trucks came full blast down the driveway past his house. Stayed for half an hour and then came blasting back with their sirens still blaring.”

And that’s all we heard until yesterday morning when I got another call saying they heard the fire was up on top of the mountain.

(which to me meant right up above our farm, fields and home).

I put on my boots right then. My boots and my rain jacket. It was raining.

A fire? Up on top of the mountain? Right above us on top of the mountain? Maybe half a mile from our greenhouse, where all are seedlings, our plants for the year were growing? (more on that later. You might as well know, though, the seedlings are doing just fine).

I finished with my boots and started up the trail to the mountain top.

For those of you who have gone up with us, we have two trails cut through the woods. One along the water line to the upper spring and then weaving through the forest until we reach the cliffs.

That's the one I took up. There wasn't a sign of anything on the way up and on top, it was quiet.

No people. no noise, no smoke and none of the sound of a raging fire.

Up there there was no sign of anything. Not even a vehicle.

I might as well tell you there’s a jeep trail up on top. I'm not very happy with this jeep trail. It's been the source of a lot of four wheelers and motorcycles over the year. Campfires and trash. (which brand of beer do beer can litters prefer to drink? one brand of beer more often finds its cans thrown out in the woods than any other. Why?)

The jeep trail was made by a bulldozer something like fifteen years ago.

This, also, was the last time there was a fire up on the mountain.

That fire was in August. What used to be thunderstorm season around here.

The time of the fire I remember it hadn’t rained all month. There had been lightning storms but no rain. I remember the storm three days before the fire well. I had stood out in the field in front of the house watching it. Quite a show!

Lightning came in bolts all the way to the ground maybe a dozen times. Moving up and down the ridge. Back and forth. Before the storm finally decided to move over the mountain and down in the valley toward us.

I deserted the field then, and ran into the house for shelter.

After the lightning, there was only a few trickles, hardly enough to dampen the soil. I remembered moving a couple of sprinklers to new locations.

And then about three days later there was smoke. Someone on the other side of the mountain, on the cliff side, saw smoke rising up over the cliffs. I got a call asking it it was down here.

“Nothing down here, but I’ll climb up and take a look.” The fire wasn’t on our side of the mountain at all. It was down below the cliffs..

The precipice of High Point is lined with pine trees. Pine trees and then a rock precipice dropping straight down for several hundred feet. and on the bottom boulders and rock crevices and caves. The caves Wenonah when she was a girl used to climb up and explore. The same shallow caves our goats, the wild ones on the herd, would climb in and hide.

And this entire area would be covered with pine needles. Dry, oily pine needless sometimes several feet thick.

And that’s where the lightning had struck. Where the fire had started. Where the smoke and flames were rising.

Back then the fire was fought by hand.

Volunteer fire departments from far and wide came. Men and what mostly seemed like high school kids carrying packs with containers holding five gallons of water on their backs would climbed up the same trail I had gone up.

They walked up the mountain with their load of water and poured it on the fire. one after another after another.

Five gallons at a time.

They did that for three days until the fire was out.

And that’s when the bulldozer arrived.

Someone working at Vint Hill volunteered a military unit with a bulldozer and it started three miles away over by the mill. Started widening what had been a foot trail making it wide enough to drive vehicles down

Three miles of foot trail from the mill to the top of the mountain widened into a road for jeeps and trucks.

And the bulldozer completed its road to the top of the mountain just as the fire was put out.

That’s where I was standing yesterday morning. Where the bulldozed road ends near the cliffs.

No one was there yesterday and as I stood in the rain looking out off the cliffs. there wasn’t a fire either.

Not on top of the mountain. But I could smell smoke. Wet, distant smoke so I looked around, walked back and forth along the cliffs for an hour. Peered down off the cliff into the crevices with their new layer of pine needles.

Looked down at the remains of the plane wreck. Where a little two passenger plane crashed twenty years ago and where one of the wings still sits and then finally turned around and returned home on another trail I had cut through the woods.

(It turns out the fire was the forest three miles away, right where Thoroughfare Gap cuts through the Bull Run Mountains. Where, now, Interstate 66 does through the mountains. It burned along the ridge and this time, instead of hundreds of young men, and a few woman, each carrying five gallons of water, one person at a time, a helicopter flew over the fire and dumped hundreds of gallons at a shot.

Putting out the fire.

And which brings us around to eggs and farm visits.

The chickens are now laying almost 5 dozen a day (by the beginning of vegetable season they will be up to nine or ten dozen a day).

If you are a shareholder and want free eggs come on out this Saturday between 11 and one pm. If you want to visit at other times you should e-mail first. Often we’ll be out working or, on the weekend, taking some time off.

Which brings us around to the vegetables.

Our greenhouse is now full. That means about 70,000 seedlings. Things are looking good.

We’ve started turning over the fields and have been spreading compost and where it needs it, lime.

We’ve spend a number of hours fixing our anti-deer fence. Besides the usual tree damage and just the normal flukes of nature a couple places have suffered human damage. Someone, for some unknown reason has cut large holes in the plastic anti-deer fence. I can’t figure that one out, but we’ve repaired it and moved on.

We’ve moved the chicken tractor again. it’s getting close to its summer resting place down along the field in front of the house.

We actually did spend most of a day picking up rocks (and had, much to my surprise) some volunteers come out to help.

One of our tractors is at the shop (a tree feel on it) as is one of our walk behind tractor/tillers.

And bees. A friend, a beekeeper called and asked if I wanted to buy a dozen 3 pound packages of bees which I did. These are Italians and I set them up near the herb garden

I’ll have another dozen packages, this time Buckfast out of Texas, arrive in a week.

And that’s about the time our onion and leek seedlings come. Hopefully this will be a good year. I’ve bought something like 20,000.

And that’s it.

Leigh Hauter