Two Days

Thank heavens for our Good Friend who keeps things going while we are gone. I have been traveling a lot this Winter and Spring and that puts me in an odd position of "visitor" in my own life at the Homestead. I have not unpacked my suitcase in 14 weeks. Yes, I have done laundry, but I have not unpacked and I have more travel in the near future.

This puts me at the Homestead about 2 days a week. These two days basically consist of this:

Kiss Mr. B and Mrs. B one hundred times.

 

Throw the "chicken" 200 times.

Change into my grubbiest clothes.

Chug a large mocha pot of espresso. Eat a boiled egg and potato chips.

Proceed to move 20 wheel barrows of horse poop from here

 

to here.

Set/ clean mouse traps.

Assess and buy animal feed.

Tighten ropes holding tarp roofs over our leaky trailers.

Eat a strange soup made of: one can of un-drained green beans, one can of condensed chicken noodle soup and one can of chicken pieces. Eat from pan.

Take a shower outside but forget to bring a towel.

Play a couple games of solitaire.

Think about building a little campfire, 

 

but go to bed instead.

Sleep the sleep of the exhausted.

Wake up sore and stiff. Drink large cups of black tea and honey to wash down Advil and Benadryl.

Put on clothes that are now even grubbier.

Kiss Mr. B and Mrs. B one hundred times.

Look all over the farm for the "chicken".  Now, where did we walk yesterday?

Check what might still be edible in the garden.

Get the "Witches Knots" out of the horses manes and tails.

Consult about strange or bothersome chicken behaviors/ act accordingly.

Weed, weed, weed, mow.

Patrol the fence line. Chop/pull Scotch broom and Blackberries.

Start summer garden plans.

Get propane tanks filled.

Chug a large mocha pot of espresso. Eat a handful of cashews and an apple.

Spy on the bee hives from a distance (no close contact with the bees, as promised to my family). All seem fine.

Plan more weeding and mowing.

Change carburetor on mower, thereby removing most of that bothersome skin on my knuckles.

Eat rest of strange soup, hastily heated.

Shower as hail storm pelts me.

Fall into bed. Watch an episode of "Downton Abby" on the computer. Fall asleep before it ends.

Let dogs out in middle of night (they claim they need to pee, but just stand on the deck for 5 minutes and then come back in).

Sleep fitfully until sunrise.

Repeat tea and pill breakfast.

Dress in "town clothes" and repack bag.

Stand on the deck, breath deeply, listen to the birds sing their hearts out and the frogs croak like there is no tomorrow.

Say to Mr. and Mrs. B

"I wish I didn't have to leave... But I'll see you next week."

Spring Wood Work

We had a very mild winter here in the NW, which is easing into what feels like an early spring. I took advantage of some free time to tend to a few projects. I got my raspberries and grapes pruned and trained up for another year. 

My Marion Berries need a new trellis, so I go the pieces together to do that.

I pruned our Italian prunes, or at least cut back the suckers that grow like crazy from their bases each year. The trees are old and special, and I don't know what their life expectancy is, so I am encouraging a new trunk to come up from the roots, in case the old part of the tree looses its way. Not sure if a new trunk from the same roots will fare any better, but I figured I would give it a try.

And I did the lower half of two of the big apple trees. I will need to get the 17' orchard ladder out to get high enough to do the rest.

I have a row of espalier fruit trees, growing on about 40' of orchard wire. They are a 6 way apple graft, a Gravenstein apple, a Braeburn apple and a Bartlet pear. I really love them. It's fun to be so hands on with the trees, shaping and guiding them over the years. And they do need shaping; they are quite vigorous, and put on a lot of growth each year. This is the 6 way graft, looking down the line of trees.

I remove most of the new growth each year, letting the older branches get more sturdy. It is a little challenging for me a year later to remember exactly what my plan was, but the trees are getting old enough that I can kind of read them to see the shape I have been after.

After I clean them up, they have really nice silhouettes: Open and airy, so there is a lot of light getting inside them. No branches rubbing. Pretty slim, so no branch covers another and it is easy to mow right up to the base.

Last year we had really good crops on the apples, the best yet. I am hoping the same for this year.

My pear is another story. I bought the trees from a nursery when they were three years old, pretty well established for commercially grafted espaliers. The first and second year I had nice pear crops, not heavy, but good. The next few years, almost nothing. I got a tip from the Home Orchard Society that raising the ends of the branches so they don't droop might help. So when I pruned the tree this year I raised the limbs I could, attaching them to the wire above.

I am not convinced that will help, but it was worth a shot. It is possible that the polllinator, somewhere in the area, got cut down. If the branch raising does not do the trick, I may have to learn more about what it takes to pollinate these guys. My father-in-law suggested grafting a branch from  a pllinator onto the tree, which would be an elegant solution.

Soon, they trees will be in bloom. With the pears, it is a beautiful sight.

All of that pruning means the burn pile, which I took care of late in the fall, is already getting big.

 

Up at the homestead, it was wood work of a different sort. We lost two good size Doug Firs this winter, plus one half of a forked tree split off. Burn season started March 1, so Jake, Hank and I went up Sunday to get things going. One of the trees fell a ways off the road in a thicket that will be very difficult to get through. The other was kind enough to fall as close to the burn pile as it could without landing on top. Very convenient, especially because we can back the trailer right up to it. So while I cut up as much of the tree as my 18" saw could handle, the boys built a beautiful fire. (I call them boys, but they are both 31. Old habits...)

All the limbs went right on the fire, which was already a good size with all the fall trimming.

It was 50 degrees and sunny with no wind; about a good a day as you can have for hot, hard work. We got about 30' of the 100' tree cut and stacked. I will need to rent a big saw for the rest of it. I love my little saw, and would eventually like to buy one with a 28" bar, but have not been able to justify the cost. So now and then I rent one. If nature keeps providing big trees like this I may have to spring for one soon.

We got most of the split fork limbed up, and the branches burned. The boys were good sports about carrying these branches the 100 yards to the fire, but it made a big difference. We had such a hot fire going that it took no time to burn them up. If we waited and started another fire next month, it would take more effort to get the fire good and hot than it did to move the branches.

Finishing this tree is going to be a tricky one. As I said, it was a fork that split off. Well, just under the tree was an old shed. The trunk managed to fall right on the shed. 

As readers of the blog know, Phoebe can do amazing things with old sheds, so who knows what this might have turned in to. It may not be ruined, but until we get the tree of it we won't really know.

And getting the tree off it is kind of a big deal. It is actually sitting on the roof of the shed, angling down to the ground over a span of about 50'. I need to get it down to the ground, and I am not sure exactly how to do that. Other than to do it slowly. carefully, and with lots of eyes and brains around to help me figure out how it will work.

But that is a job for another day.

Annual Chores

We have been on the homestead for a couple of years now, long enough to start to feel the cycles of projects that come around every year.  

Every year, winter wind and snow bring down branches. We have a lot of Douglas Firs on the property. They are big and beautiful, and they loose branches pretty regularly.

They accumulate around the bottom of the trees. When I clean them up, the little limbs go into the burn pile, the rest make great firewood.

There are some old fruit trees around. This poor plum tree lost about half its limbs. I had to get the downed branches up off the ground so we could mow underneath, to keep the blackberries from growing up through it.

We will take another look at the tree when I get serious about fire wood. It is probably too damaged to keep, and is likely going to end up in the wood shed this fall.

In addition to the blackberries, the other scourge we have to deal with is Scotch Broom. It is invasive and grows quickly and thickly in open areas.

 

Every spring Phoebe pushes it a little further from the edge of the driveway. She lops it off at ground level, and I take load after load away in the trailer. I think we filled the trailer 9 times this year. 

All these bits end up on the burn pile. It makes for a full day of burning.

 

And of course, there is the mowing. Phoebe already cut this field a couple of times, and I was feeling like I needed to take a turn. In the distance behind me are the yellow blooms of the Scotch Broom, and the green brambles of blackberries. We would love to get those cleared, but that is for another spring.

 

Another spring ritual is to take a look at the old cherry tree, to see how she is doing this year. The tree looks dead, and would have been cut down if Phoebe had not spotted a couple of new branches on one side. Every year, they get a little bigger, and right now, they look beautiful.

 

And there are always surprises. 

 

Phoebe and I were having our morning tea in the Oasis trailer, when she looked out the window and noticed the green roof on the loafing shed in the paddock.

 

It is a thick, and probably structurally unhealthy, carpet of growth on the gently sloping roof. I am not sure how many different kinds of vegetation are up there, but it sure looks pretty.

As always, we enjoy hearing from you. Do you have any spring chores that you look forward to or want to run away from?