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Rest and crafting

Yesterday was a rainy damp day, still warm, but too wet to do much outdoors. In the late morning we drove over to the Blue Ridge Parkway and south to Meadows of Dan. The outing had two purposes, one to see the renovation progress on Mabry Mill, where they have done some repair on the holding pond, rebuilt the old mill wheel and are repairing the sluiceway to the mill. This is a favorite spot for us to take visitors, the mill is scenic, in fact, several communities throughout the USA use the picture on their postcards which is amusing. There is a blacksmith, a carpenter that makes ladderback chairs and other objects, a tiny cabin filled with looms and spinning wheels, walking paths along the creek through Rhododendron thickets and other native plants. The grandchildren love to drive over for part of a day. The visitor center displays local crafts and sells buckwheat flour, corn meal, and corn grits in commemorative cloth bags. Each fall, we drive over before they close for the winter and I supply our pantry with these products, sold very reasonably and milled locally.

This is a prior trip much later in the summer and with a grand helping to do a Flat Stanley shoot.

The other reason for our venture was to take a small supply of my handspun yarn to Greenberry House, a delightful yarn and gift shop in Meadows of Dan to be sold with her other handspun yarn. She will be selling some of my yarn in her shop. She sells mostly local handspun yarn, fleeces and rovings, with just a bit of superwash or acrylic commercial yarn for local charity knitters. The gift shop has local handthrown pottery, canned jams and preserves, jewelry, handmade glasses cases and other fabric items, and a few old collectibles. The shop is convenient to pop off of the parkway. The town also has the Poor Farmer’s Market with more gifts, fresh produce, local cheese and butter, and the biggest display of Lodge Cast Iron cookware I have ever seen as well as a deli counter where you can get sandwiches and cold drinks. There are a couple of restaurants and several other shops as well. It is a good stopping place if you are traveling the Parkway.

The adventure got my creative juices flowing and when we arrived back home, I spun almost a full bobbin of a very fine single of Shetland wool, natural white. Once I have two bobbins of it, I will ply it, measure and decide if it is going to stay natural white of dye it. Perhaps it will be knit into a gift or set aside to be taken to Greenberry House for sale.

My car knitting and break from spinning knitting is a shawl. The edge pattern is from Lola Shawl by Carrie Bostick Hoge in Issue 9 of “taproot” magazine, one of my favorites and one of only two to which I subscribe. Her shawl pattern is a triangle and out of worsted weight yarn, I don’t like the way it ripples around the neck and shoulders, so I am modifying it to make a squared shawl using 6 stitch increase every other row and will use her leaf pattern border at the bottom. I prefer a shawl/scarf that does not have to be pinned or held to keep it on. The yarn is Quince and Co., Lark, the color is Cypress.

Today is sunny and a bit cooler. There are a few things to be done outside, but at least a couple of hours will be spent with friends at Green Dragon Yarns, knitting and socializing and maybe buying some more fiber to spin.

April 5, 2014
A Moment from the Week

The real harbinger of spring in the mountains, Forsythia and greening grass.

April 4, 2014
Sore Muscles, Stink buds, Silly puppies and Showers

Our beautiful 3 days are over and rain is expected for the next two days followed by cooler weather for a week, maybe winter cold weather. It is probably good that it is too wet to work outdoors today, my sore achy muscles need a recovery period. Though we have a treadmill and hand weights in the basement rec room, I am much too sedentary during the cold months, enjoying walks in the snow or on a crisp clear day, but certainly not getting the exercise that I get during the growing season.

We have had the chickens for just over a year now and it has been about a year since we put the coop in place, unleveled and poorly fenced. Late last spring, eldest son came to do some work with us and he helped me level the coop the best we could using car jacks and a 6 foot pry bar to raise it up on blocks. The fencing has evolved from a small square of poorly erected garden fence to the present design of a much larger rectangle with 4 foot wide runs that extend down two sides of the garden, forming a large L at the end of the rectangle, welded wire fence on heavy T posts. After the coop was in place, I saw a design that ran a 3 foot wide run all the way around a garden with the coop and the compost bins at one edge. Unfortunately, the coop couldn’t be placed where that would work at the time and now that the area is leveled near the bins, the coop can’t be moved, so it will have to be as it is, though that design also serves to keep deer out of the garden.

Every fall we are invaded by these nasty pests and a few wasps. They manage to get inside in spite of the windows being shut and locked and all winter I capture and destroy them until I think that most are gone, then April arrives and they crawl out from under window sills, behind baseboards and who know where else and again we are over run. They are a major pest in SW Virginia and seem to be getting worse. You can’t squash them and vacuuming them can only be done with a vacuum with a disposable bag as they live up to their name, Stink bug. Last night I must have captured at least 20 and several more this morning. They don’t fare well in soapy water and can easily be knocked into a paper cup of it to be flushed away. They are an invasive species and seem to have no natural predators here.

This is our 210 pound puppy’s favorite position. His breeder says that his father does the same thing. Such a silly dog. Surprisingly, the German Shepherd in the background chose to gnaw on a bone instead of attacking him as she usually does when he rolls over like this and she can get the upper hand.

Today is going to be a quiet day of rest and recovery. The dog hair needs to be vacuumed, but other than that I am going to read, go to my spinning group and fix dinner. After 3 long days of hard labor, I think that is enough.

April 3, 2014
Spring productivity

A record, 3 days in a row of sunshine and temperatures that are late springlike and it is showing around the farm. The grass is greening and by August I will wish it weren’t as I mow and mow, but it is a welcome sight. The lilac leaves are bursting forth and the forsythia has a yellowish hint of flowers soon to come. The peach trees have swelling buds as do the Asian pears.

The beautiful weather has sparked the energy that the winter sapped and much as been accomplished. The garage clean-up is about half done, the chicken run is complete except for the two wooden posts for the gate and I need the neighbor’s post driver for that, Jim and I hauled the chicken tractor over in front of the unused side of the compost bins and I erected fencing to create a pen for the cull birds this spring and the meat birds this fall.

Between the coop and the compost bins there used to be two more compost bins that eldest son and I took down when we put the coop in place. There was plenty of good compost still there so a tractor bucket full was moved to the garden and spread around. My 4 x 4 wooden boxes in the garden are rotting away, so I pulled several of them out and will just revert to long 4′ wide rows. After the scoop of compost was removed, I realized that the spot would be a perfect potato bed, so some raking to smooth the surface and try to level it some was done, then weeding and planting of peas. The garden has a good healthy crop of garlic up, the grapes and all but one berry bush are leafing out and the peas are finally in the ground. There is more weeding to do in preparation for planting in a few weeks, but after three days of work, I’m spent.

I’m cleaned up, vegging out until time to go pick up my car from the shop and go socialize and knit with my friends.

Life is an adventure on our mountain farm.

April 2, 2014
Spring Cleaning Day 2

On a farm, raising animals, spring cleaning doesn’t just include the house. The house will wait for a rainy day. Today, the babychicks had their first”outing” while I cleaned their brooder bin.

They seemed to enjoy some time in the sun. Since the daytime temperatures reached 78ºf and the bin is black, they were plenty warm.

The big chickens got their digs cleaned too.

Forking out the old hay down to the composted layer below and adding it to the garden compost bin.

A different use for the snow shovel, clearing the composted layer off the vinyl floor.

And finally adding a thick layer of clean new hay to the coop and nesting boxes. This is a guarantee that at least one chicken will lay her egg outside of the nesting boxes tomorrow by scooping out a hollow in one of the corners beneath the perches. While the coop was empty, I evaluated how I am going to put a temporary wire and frame barrier inside to separate the chicks from the 3 hens that will be left in the coop once they are ready to be put outside.

The chicken tractor was dragged out of the garage, but not put in place yet, I need help to do that, and the deck furniture was returned to the deck, hoping that we will have more nice days to eat our dinner out there and no more white stuff to decorate the deck. That was the extent of the cleaning today, but prior to those tasks, we went out and purchased a 100 foot roll of welded wire fencing, more posts and a gate. The remainder of the day was spent replacing the cheap garden wire fence that I reused two weeks ago when I realized that 100 feet of welded wire fence was not enough to finish the job. The pen is now much sturdier and will have a real gate as soon as our neighbor can come over with the post driver and set a wooden post upon which the gate will be hung. It will be great to have a real gate into their pen.

I didn’t get the peas planted. Tomorrow is supposed to be another gorgeous day so I will get the peas in the ground and with hubby’s help, move the chicken tractor to the location where the culls will be kept for a few weeks and I will erect a temporary pen with the garden fencing to contain them until freezer camp day. The rest of the week is going to be wet, so perhaps I will finish the garage and start on the house. I have to admit that deep cleaning the house is a task of frustration with two big dogs who reside inside.

Because Jim didn’t get home from his motorcycle ride until nearly 6 p.m. and I still wasn’t quite finished with the fence when he got home and since I had 3 chickens still on the outside of the newly completed run, I finished up, left two of the chicken out, hoping they would settle near the coop at dark and went out for dinner. When we got home, both hens had flown over the fence and were safely cooped up with their buddies.

Life is an adventure on our mountain farm.

April 1, 2014
Spring cleaning has commenced

Yesterday, after my sleepless night and waking to hurricane force winds and blowing snow, we took the pups to doggie camp for 24 hours and drove 2 hours north east of here to meet some friends from Virginia Beach. The goal was for the guys to test ride a motorcycle or two at Demo Days at a Harley Davidson dealer. As we trekked, we drove out of the snow on our ridge and then about 45 minutes from our destination, drove into a blizzard with rapidly accumulating snow and wondering what on earth we were doing out in it. At a rest stop, there were 4 inches wet snow on the ground. When we reached our destination, there were flurries, but nothing on the ground but it was cold and wet. It looked like the ride wouldn’t happen, but the roads dried off and indeed they left with a group of about a dozen riders on a 12 mile test run and came back in like popcicles. After a delightful, late lunch with our friends, we each headed off in opposite directions to return to our homes.

This morning, we retrieved the pups and treated them to a car ride and their favorite hamburgers while we waited to see how warm it would really get today as they were predicting mid 60’s. Once home, Jim took off on his motorcycle and I set about on spring cleaning, starting with the garage. This winter, it has housed the motorcycle, the chicken tractor, a lawn mower, the back deck furniture, the huge black animal water trough that held firewood until the chicks needed it as a larger brooder and the random tools, scrap wood, etc. It was a disaster and there is no way to work on the workbench much less park a car inside.

I started by selling a couple of weeks ago, the Husky workbench that had been in our Virginia Beach house before our move to the mountains. As eldest son had built in two very beefy workbenches at different heights, the other one was not only not needed, but added to the clutter as it became a place to set more things.

That is the only time since it moved to the mountains that it was empty. Today I started on the lower built in as it had all the tools and boxes of items removed from the workbench I had sold. Our garage is a log structure that has logs that match the house in appearance on the outside, but have a flat interior surface. Son took advantage of that and added many hand made hangers, hefty shelves, and nails for tools that didn’t go on the workbench or have cases. I added a few more nails, moved 4 wooden crates of scrap wood off the beefy shelf and started organizing.

The scrap wood is now on the floor pushed up against the wall where it can actually be reached for small projects or fire starter wood. The boxed tools were put up on the shelf, labeled on the end so I can tell at a glance which DeWalt box is which and a plastic tub was placed up there with all of the loose sandpaper in it. It a tool didn’t go into my tool kit, it got hung on the wall, stone masonry tools and painting tools were put in plastic totes and pushed under the workbench along with the compressor. The longer scrap wood was neatly arranged up against a huge wooden platform that son built for his artist wife but doesn’t have room for at his present apartment, the dog cages were folded and placed hard up against the same wall. The chicks who were making a mess of the basement in the wire dog cage were put in the huge animal trough with their food, water, a couple of perches and their heat lamp. They can’t get out, the tub holds the heat well and they seem happier, I know I am. Chicken feed was moved out from the space in front of the workbench and I can actually access a surface, my vice and my handtools.

Tomorrow is supposed to be another great day, so I plan to purchase a couple more rolls of fence and a few more fence posts and finish the chicken run as they can get out of the less secure part that I did not complete two weeks ago, try to install a gate and move the chicken tractor out of the garage for the cull birds, giving me enough space to try to clean up the taller workbench as well as organizing the garden tools that are hung on the side wall where the build in shelf unit and tall workbench are located. I currently have all of my garden tools and all of eldest son’s. I may separate them and put his in a big plastic garbage bin and put them in the back of the barn to store them and see if I can get some other unused items out of the garage. It would be nice to be able to park at least one car in there with the motorcycle.

Somewhere during these efforts, I need to plant my peas in the garden.

March 31, 2014
Sleepless in …

The wind has howled like a freight train plowing through the house all night. I don’t sleep well when it does for fear of it toppling the shed roof over the heatpump and taking out our heat. It woke me at 2 a.m. and that ended my night.

This is what we awoke to find

yes, snow blowing sideways. Note the small flag next to the post.

I went out to put food in the coop and open the pop door and because of the direction, there is a small snowdrift in the coop. Their water bucket is frozen solid. I left if outside as it is supposed to get up to the mid 40s later, so hopefully it will thaw.

I don’t know when the wind is supposed to die down, but the weather gods are telling us we are expecting 2 to 4 inches of white stuff before it does. Not what I expected this morn.

March 30, 2014
A Moment from the week

The chicks are now 3 weeks old and the 50 gallon plastic tote no longer large enough for them. They were starting to escape, requiring more than the pint waterer and the gallon one took up too much of their dwindling space. A piece of screen was put on the top to keep them in, but there was no way to expand the floor space. We have a large wire dog cage and an extra large one. The large one isn’t too difficult to erect, so it was moved to the basement, set up and set inside the larger plastic tray from the extra large one. I know that there will be more mess to clean, but the chicks are getting big. After putting it all together, I threaded two sticks from pruning fruit trees at two heights as perches and the chicks learning to use them is comedic as they tip and rock learning their balance. I think I need to make the perches with 1 x 1″ wood scraps or larger branches to give them more to grasp. We have a warmer week ahead and that hopefully is signalling an end of the cold weather. In another week, I may move them back to the garage and I need to start planning how to divide the coop for their introduction later this spring. That also means that the chicken tractor needs to be moved back outside and a nesting box or two added to it as 6 of the hens will be moved to it until sometime in the summer. My coop was built for 14 and I will have 14 in there when the chicks are moved. The size of the coop is fine during the spring, summer, and fall, but a bit over estimated when they are all inside on a snowy day. We will see how it goes and the flock may have to be reduced back to 10 or 12 after this year.

March 28, 2014
Finished Objects and UFO’s

I didn’t think it possible to finish Estelle before the cold spring ended, but since we keep getting blocks of frigid days, even some light snow, indeed I did. I really wasn’t too pleased with it right after I finished it, but a good blocking helped immensely. It feels softer and drapier, the sleeves are long enough and I didn’t stretch them, the band up the fronts and around the neckline lay much better. I am glad it doesn’t button, because yet again, I knit up 2 full sizes larger than my bust size and it would pull if it had buttons. Yes, I did a gauge swatch, several actually since I couldn’t get gauge with the recommended needle so I fiddled with several size needles before getting gauge. Estelle is a Quince and Co. pattern, made of Quince and Co. Lark in Delft color.

Yesterday while it was blocking, I sat and moved buttons on the last cardigan I made, the V necked cardi from Ann Budd that also seemed small when complete. I had purchased some very fine Raku fired clay buttons for it and managed to lose one when I took the train to Northern Virginia to babysit during semester break. After carefully moving the top one down to the missing space and putting retaining buttons on the backs, I broke one putting my coat over it last evening. Now instead of 5, I have 3, the broken one can be reglued, but I fear they just aren’t sturdy enough for the sweater. I purchased some different buttons on my way to knitting last night, so I think I will reblock that sweater after I take the pottery buttons off and then put the new ones on tomorrow.

Sorry for the fuzzy shot, I can’t find the original and copied it from my projects folder on Ravelry.

The Honey Cowl has been repaired and I have almost used one skein of the yarn for it. I think using half of the second, which would make it the yardage for which the pattern requires will make it too wide for the circumference. I’m not a fan of bunchy garments around my neck, so I may bind off at the end of this skein in another row or two and use the remaining skein for mitts or a hat.

My Addi Sock Rocket needles came and I went back to work on the never ending socks, Socks for the Plane is the pattern and I can only knit about two rows with the size 1 needle before my hands ache. I think they really will be never ending. I only need a few more inches of cuff to be done with them and I will have completed my first toe up pair, though I have enough yarn left to make them knee hi socks.

I am adjusting to my new spinning wheel and have been spinning the undyed Shetland wool. I’m thinking about folding her up into her backpack and going to the spinning group today, I haven’t been in several weeks.

The only other UFO is a reknit of a shawl that I adored when it was finished, but I carelessly left it on my chair one day when our German Shepherd was younger and she chewed a half dollar size hole right in the middle. I frogged it and started over knowing it will be somewhat smaller due to the loss of the short strands on each side of the hole. I’ll post it when it is finished again, but it is a throw in my bag and take in the car project and we have no trips planned, so it may be a while.

March 27, 2014
A Spring? Morning

The morning sight. Yesterday we awoke to it snowing and quickly providing ground cover, but not so much on the roads. The temperature hovering right around the freezing mark, thick gray clouds and we were driving an hour east to take my Dad who had been visiting for a few days, back to meet my step mom and her cousin who had been in a hotel there for a Garden Club conference. By afternoon, the sun was breaking out, the snow melted, but we continued to have bands of heavier snow that really weren’t accumulating. It was still near freezing at bed time and the mountain wind had picked up. Apparently it decided winter wasn’t quite over yet in spite of the calendar, because this morning we awoke to the snow cover and this

It is supposed to be springlike again by week end with rain and thunderstorms, but today is a winter day. Yesterday the chickens would not come out of their coop until they could see the ground and then they fled back in when it started snowing to come out back out with the sun.

This morning, they were confused and again did not want to leave the coop. I kicked around the straw so they could see it and since their ramp was clear, most of them came out to get food and water. When checking for eggs, I found this

The Delaware on the bottom, trying to lay her egg and a huge Buff Orpington trying to move her over so they could share the box. Maybe she thought they would be warmer that way. There are 5 other boxes, but interestingly, the 9 hens often all use the same box or the one at the opposite end of the row, rarely is there an egg in one of the middle 4. Crazy chickens.

Life is always an adventure on our mountain farm.

March 26, 2014