Tag: Country living

Maintenance and Preparation
We live in rural SW Virginia on a gravel road and a gravel driveway. The gravel road is about 8/10 of a mile long from the paved road to the end of state maintenance, we are about 2/10 of a mile from the paved road, all downhill. Our driveway is another 2/10 of a mile from the state road to the house, also downhill. About twice a year, the 4 houses beyond us call in VDOT because heavy rain, tractor use, and the steep hill between them and us cause the road to deteriorate to a rutted mess. From the paved road to our driveway generally fairs better, but when VDOT comes, they start at the paved road and work to the end, many, many passes with this…

As you can see, this road isn’t very wide, a car coming in the opposite direction requires one of the vehicles to back up to a wide spot or driveway. This guy doesn’t go anywhere in a hurry and I got home from helping daughter this morning, just as he was starting another pass down. He was here just beginning to work as I left 4 hours earlier. I inched down behind him, giving him plenty of room. Our driveway is still ahead of him. They always do the swale in the wrong direction, all the ditches are on the left, the road is highest on the left. Bet they leave our ditch and culvert blocked again and I will have to call them back to come clear it. I’m not going out there with a shovel to do it.

Our couple of beautiful warm springlike days are about to come to an abrupt end. A front is coming through, the temperature is already starting a sudden drop with a wind advisory and rain and snow flurries expected to begin within the next half hour or so. The next few days will be seasonably cold. Tomorrow’s high is 30 degrees f colder than today’s high. The wind has already begun.

Since our property slopes downhill from the top of the driveway to the bottom of the hay field, there is no natural level spot on the farm. As a result, my chicken run and garden slope downhill too. The garden isn’t too much of a problem because I have boxed raised beds and just the aisles are sloped with the gate about halfway down the slope. The chicken run is another issue. The coop is raised about 18″ off the ground on the uphill side and an extra cinder block higher on the downhill side. The uphill side has the large clean out door, the downhill side has the pop door. The gate to the fence is on the uphill side. The chickens have scratched every blade of green from their run when they are confined. They get a lot of free range time, but not when the dogs are out or when the Red Tailed Hawks are active. Because of their scratching and this winter’s rain, going from the gate to the pop door is taking your safety in your hands as your slip and slide down the side of the coop. When I know it is going to rain or snow, I try to toss down a thick layer of spoiled hay from the gate to the pop door. This provide endless entertainment for the hens as they scratch through it looking for bugs and seeds and in the process, making great compost as they scratch it downhill. I beat the rain with about a foot or so of old hay and the chickens are working at moving it away from our safe path.

With winter drawing to a close and with the longer days, all 9 of the hens are laying again. On my way back to the house from forking hay, I gathered 7 beautiful eggs. That is the second time this late winter I have gotten so many. There are plenty of eggs to eat now.

Earlier in my spinning adventures, I subscribed to a monthly fiber club. Each month I received 4 ounces of the fiber/color of the month. When daughter and her family were living with us, each time a skein that I spun was green or had green in it, she would oooh and aaah over it and she was just learning to knit, so several of those skeins ended up in her stash. But she is a working mom of elementary and middle school children, a Taekwondo instructor and youth soccer coach on the side, so she doesn’t have much time to knit. I struck a deal with her to reclaim a couple of those skeins. She gets a scarf and a hat, I get to make a second hat for my shop from the larger skein. The colors are gorgeous, my spinning I see has improved significantly, but they are clearly doable for the projects in queue.
The spindles are to show how much finer and more consistent my spinning is now, both on spindles and on the wheel.

My car is packed with my wheel and fiber, my suitcase is awaiting the dryer to finish. Everything that won’t freeze if it gets as cold as predicted tonight is in the car. A final tote and my purse will leave with me in the morning to go to Tennessee for a weekend of fiber fun with friends, leaving hubby in charge of the house, the critters, and to fend for himself. I love him in general, but really appreciate being given the freedom to go away a couple times each year for these retreats.
February 26, 2020
Let Us Preserve

Tis the season to start putting by for the long cold, unproductive months of winter. We have cousins in Georgia and he has a son in college in Pennsylvania. We are slightly more than half way in between for them and love to have them for the overnight visit as they drive up and back. Yesterday afternoon they arrived bearing gifts of fresh Georgia peaches, pecans, and a loaf of a wonderful Artisan bread. Some of the peaches are at a stage of ripeness where we can enjoy them fresh out of hand or as breakfast fruit, some needed quick attention. Since our peach trees still are young and not really producing fruit, they are a treasure to enjoy.

This morning they left to complete their trip north with a southbound return tomorrow and another night with us, so I pulled out the jam making supplies and set to work peeling, deseeding, chopping, measuring and making a batch of peach jam. That is one jam I have never made before and not wanting to make too much, I first bought the ebook, The Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving. As I started collecting jars, I realized that most of my jelly jars have been given away full of jams and jellies and my stock was low. The recipe said it made 6 cups, I had 5 1/2 cups worth of smaller jars, but figured that any surplus would go in a jar in the refrigerator to be used first.

Enough made to get us through the winter and still send a couple of jars home with them Sunday morning. My taste test is that it is sweeter than the berry, plum and pomegranate jams I have made in the past, but a bit on toast or stirred into yogurt or oatmeal will be nice. The black cherry tree at the top of our road is ripe and my raspberries are ripening enough to sample a couple when in the garden, but if I’m going to do anything with them, I need more jam jars.

Jim’s comment when he came through the kitchen was that I sure was industrious. I smiled and said it kept me out of trouble.

I love this time of year with new good things to eat appearing nearly daily from the garden or in this case, as a gift.

Next up is to try one or all three of the fermented mustard recipes from the current issue of taproot Issue 10::Seed magazine. But wait, I don’t have jars!

June 13, 2014
Native or not

This is haying season and the grass surrounding our “yard,” the acre or so that we regularly mow around the house, garden, chickens and orchard, is quite tall and thick. One neighbor mows, rakes and bales all of the fields around us including ours for a split of the hay. In our case, he takes all but what I need for the chickens and the gardens and in exchange he grades our driveway, plows us out in the snow and provides occasional emergency help like the day I got a 30 foot piece of black plastic conduit wrapped so tightly around the bush hog blade that Jim and I couldn’t free it. That is another story from another day.

Watching the uncut hay blow in waves in the wind reminds me of the song “America The Beautiful,” with the line amber waves of grain.

Jim is tall and his beast, the mastiff is in that grass, standing.

The yard is cut in three levels right now, the area closest to the house is mowed with a lawnmower, from there to the edge of the fields around the trees that we have planted was bush hogged a couple of weeks ago and the fields are awaiting their first seasonal mowing as it is cut into hay. Each level has its own display of wildflowers and as I look them up, I realize that almost none of them are native plants. Some more invasive than others such as the multiflora rose, autumn olive, Ailanthus altissima (Tree of Heaven), kudzu (fortunately we aren’t dealing with this one on our land) and stickweed. The Autumn Olive was actually introduced and encouraged by the Department of Agriculture as a yard ornamental and though we have never planted one, we spend our time pulling and mowing them to keep them from taking over. Tree of Heaven is one of those you see in Parade Magazine as a quick growing tree for your yard, “buy it now for shade in 3 years” spiels. They also are invasive, though I have recently seen an article that it may be dying out on it’s own, we can only hope.

This is Moth Mullein, not native Mullein and though pretty, it is also an import and is so prevalent in some states that it is considered a noxious weed.

Daisies like the yellow ones above and these from the edge of the driveway were introduced from Europe and are now found in most states.

Red and white clover are also European imports and it is difficult to buy pasture grass seed that doesn’t contain one or the other, they are good nitrogen fixers along with Hairy Vetch which is used as fodder and is also European.

As we look at our trees on the mountain, few are native species. Nearly all of the native grasses have been replaced by grasses from other countries. It isn’t just the flora that has been affected, also the fauna. We live with invasions of Nutria, stink bugs, gypsy moths, ladybugs, Hemlock wooly adelgid that is killing the hemlocks. Insects killing the ash trees, blights that killed off and nearly made the American Chestnut extinct. At the time of the European settlers, the American Chestnut was a predominate species in these mountains. Many of the old farm houses are built with Chestnut wood beams and if you have ever had the pleasure to stay at Big Meadows Lodge on the Skyline Drive, it is built of American Chestnut. The woods we see now would look alien to the settlers and the Native Americans that lived and roamed these mountains.

Some of these species have been deliberately introduced for a specific purpose and it has back fired. Others have crept in; in or on the hulls of ships or in their water ballast, carried by migratory birds, accidentally brought in imported produce and plants or released from research facilities.

The prairies of the west have suffered similar fate and few if any stands of native prairie grass still exist, grasses that were taller than the men that cut it. The wetlands are host to non native grasses such as Phragmites australis that is choking out the native marsh grasses and the oyster beds, changing the ecosystem; and snakehead, zebra mussels and catfish overwhelming the animal populations.

The environment has changed, but we don’t have to continue to contribute to the destruction of it. Research landscaping and flowering plants before you use them. Buy from nurseries that specialize in native species. Pull and destroy non native invasive plants before they choke out the native ones. Support efforts to restore some of the majestic native species such as Chestnuts and Hemlocks. We each need to do our part. We can’t return to the past, but we can each do our part to halt further degradation of the ecosystem.

June 8, 2014