Stewie

and Stewie and me at 5am this morning

After 26 hours of hiding out under the bed in the computer room/guest room Stewie decided he had had enough isolation last night and came out from under the bed and decided Eugene and me were okay sat on us all evening while we watched a show about breaking the Maya code on PBS. I think Stewie will become a great cat, he's already quite nice.

the next step now that he's come out of hiding is to make an appointment at the vet and get his balls snipped. He's already sprayed parts of the house once (nothing like a pissed off cat, I'll tell ya). Fortunately it looks like everything he sprayed can easily be removed from the house (a cloth we had over a doorway to keep heat in during the winter, a cat bed) I am hoping I am not wrong about this.

Of Doctors, Archaeologists, Lettuce and Asparagus Trenches

It's been an interesting past 24 hours. Yesterday I went to a doctor (nurse practitioner actually) because I have an ear infection that in a normal person would be so painful they would be hitting the lortabs hard. But since I have this incredibly high pain threshold when it comes to my head (I have had cavities filled with no Novocain, painful but not too bad) I have felt very little pain. At any rate, I went to see a medical professional, she looked at my ear and sinuses and declared me clogged up and sent me away with a prescription for Keflex, a penicillin drug, which is making my ear feel A LOT better (I can hear out of it for the first time in days) but the drug is making the rest of me feel not so great. You see I am very allergic to Amoxocillin which is a close relative to penicillin (which I am not allergic to) and most doctors when they hear I am allergic to amoxocillin than refuse to give me any other meds in that class and than I am forced to go out and buy incredibly expensive meds. Not this time. This time the medical professional actually listened to me and when I said I can take penicillin she said okay try this antibiotic (Keflex) and call her if I get any adverse reaction to it. Other than feeling a bit depressed physically (like I have a cold) no reactions to it so far.

After the doctor visit we came back home and got beds ready for strawberries which meant burning holes every foot into the middle of the mulch before putting it down. So eugene and me did that for a while than it was time to put down the irrigation tapes (they go under the mulch) and finally we dragged the mulch over to the beds where it is going and put it down. This was supposed to be an easy task but one bed was too wide and the soil to wet to work with so Eugene ended up tacking down the fabric and hoped for a windless night (which we had) so the fabric would not be picked up by the wind and moved. The other two beds were drier and narrower so they were no problem. And now we have our strawberry beds ready to receive the strawberry plants that are in the barn in a box with the asparagus roots.

For dinner I picked some lettuce we had been growing on pots since November and at one point decided for some reason the stuff was too bitter to eat. But because the conventional lettuce at Kroger's is expensive, small and in bad shape I decided to see if the lettuce we had was really inedible. It was not, as a matter of fact it was the best salad I have had in months. Can't go wrong with rouge d'hiver and a some young dandelion greens.

Today we had an appointment for an archaeologist to come out and look at our place and he arrived around 3pm and liked what he saw, took a few chert samples with him and suggested we might have a paleo site (the land has a terminal moraine going through the middle and that means that yes, there probably were hunters around here 20,000PB). I wish we were independently wealthy and could take the time to do a complete dig to phase 4 but we have to farm to make a living...

Before he arrived I spent the morning making soil and soil blocks so the lettuces seeds that had germinated in small blocks could be transplanted into larger blocks. that took a couple of hours mainly because I could not find a bucket of premade soil and ended up having to make an entire batch of soil. About 3 minutes after I finished making the soil I found the bucket of premade soil mix (figures).

While I was farting around with soil mix and lettuce Eugene was screening compost and preparing the asparagus beds which need to be trenched about 18" deep. He stopped the trenching because of the archaeology visit and we all walked around the land for an hour or so. But after the visit was over he went back to work and about 5 minutes after that it started to hail and continued to do so for about 15 minutes.

Now it is dinner time and time for me to make some chili using tomato sauce I canned up last fall using our fantastic Opalka tomatoes, onions and garlic we grew as well as some frozen peppers from last season and hot peppers we grew too. I will also make a pan or corn bread and I think I will pick some more yummy lettuce for a salad.

First Spring Rains

This past weekend we had some pretty good flooding. Not enough to do any damage but the wall by the back of the barn was a beautiful waterfall for several hours Sunday Morning as it drained the water from US 127 and the neighboring fields. It seems we are the drainage for a lot of area.

The top field had a lot of real estate under water for about half a day. I'd say about half the beds were submerged or close to it but by the day's end most everything had drained except for a few beds to the north of the field. But despite the draining water the beds are still too wet to get into at all. This is a pity because our strawberry and asparagus plants arrived today and are in need of planting. Hopefully they can wait 48 hours so we can get the landscape fabric we will be using to mulch the berries prepared (need to cut or burn holes in the mulch every 24" so the berry plants can be planted through the mulch) and than laid down and dug in. We'd do the mulch today 'cept it is very windy and propane torches, plastic cloth and high winds do not mix well. The weather report sez we should have fair weather through tomorrow so maybe we can get them in the ground tomorrow.

But I doubt it because I have an ear infection (not painful but I am totally deaf in the left ear due to a lot of crap building up in the ear canal) and will be going into the doctor around 1pm and than at 3:30 or so Dr Ron Spielbaur, Miami U's archaeology person is coming out to scope out the place. So that pretty much blows the afternoon.

Nothing like several days of flooding rain to put a wrench in one's plans

It's Been a Busy Week...

It's been a busy week in Lake Wobegone...Oh wait that's Garrison Keillor's line from a A Prairie Home Companion which airs live Saturday evenings at 6pm on most public radio stations across the USA.

Lets start again. It's been a busy week here at Boulder Belt Farm. Spring is here (The whistlepig was wrong!) and we have stepped up the work load a bit (we are not in full swing yet but we are getting there. It has been a rainy but warmish week which has made working in the market garden a bit hard to do but we did have dry weather Sunday, Monday and Tuesday and so Eugene was able to get the beds we need for strawberries and asparagus tilled (plus a couple of more ready for spinach and lettuce) so now all that needs to be done is getting irrigation and landscape fabric mulch put down on the strawberry beds so they will be ready for the strawberries when they arrive on March 15th (The Ides of March what killed Julius Caesar. Okay Brutus Killed Caesar on the Ides of March).

We got many thing started this week. We planted a bed of spinach which should be ready for the last winter market in April. I finally got the second phase of my onion experiment started by direct seeding a cold frame with 3 kinds of onions and 2 kinds of leeks. Phase 1 of this experiment was planting onion seeds in deep pots rather than into flats filled with soil to see if we would get bigger seedlings (so far the answer seems to be YES). Now I want to see if the seeds planting into the garden will be stronger seedlings than those in pots.

I also planted in soil blocks to go under grow lights (I use plain old fluorescent lights as they work just as well as "gro lights™" at about 1/3 the cost), a second round of lettuce (Salad Bowl, Lollo Rossa, New Red Fire and Nancy) , 4 kinds of tomatoes (yellow Taxi, Moscovich, Early Big Red and Sunsugar) that will go into a hoophouse for an early harvest sometime in June. Two kinds of celery (Ventura and Red ventura), fennel and artichokes from really old seed that I will be very surprised if we get any germination out of.

Yesterday, Molly, a Miami Student and also the current Market master of the Oxford Farmers' Market Uptown (a market I worked on from its' inception and later was a board member until this past November), came out to help us for the afternoon. Despite intermittent heavy downpours (it is spring after all) we managed to get a lot done with her help. We moved an old hay wagon that had been sitting where sever beds need to go since we bought the place to a new location where it will not be in our way (but it has not been moved to it's permanent and yet to be decided location).

After moving that we went into the hoophouse and finished cleaning up the beds. It was surprisingly wet in the hoophouse and got wetter as we worked. Water was seeping in from the bottom and the more it rained the higher it got. This made raking the beds a bit diffract where they were drenched and or under water. but most of the soil was dry as a bone so we were able to rake the big clumps of weeds out, put down irrigation tape and landscaping fabric mulch over top and get the edges of that dug into the ground to the mulch is reasonably tight. In 2 weeks we ought have the crops that will be going into that house-Cucumbers and specialty zucchini ready to go into the house so we will have early cukes and zukes for market. We try to get these crop ready to go at least 6 weeks before anyone else has such items to offer at market.
It was fun working with Molly and she helped us get a lot done in a short amount of time (about 4 hours).

Today it is supposed to be sunny early and than rain some more this afternoon and evening. It will be too wet to any outside work but we plan to make a few flats of soil blocks and plant some cucumber and zucchini seeds. After we are done with that we will run some errands in town and perhaps look for ancient human artifacts (aka "arrowheads") in the garden beds since the heavy rains have washed the soil in the beds and things have been exposed.

On farm Archaeology

I have been interested in archaeology for about 23 years. It all started in my lost years hanging out with a guy named Geoff Georgiady who introduced me to the wonders of walking around in bare muddy farm fields looking for points while drinking cheap beer.

At the time I was not in school and Geoff encouraged me to enroll at Miami and take a class from Dr Ron Spielbauer and I did and that was my first step towards getting a degree in anthropology at Miami U.

This in turn was the move that later in life (15 years later) would enable me to apply for and get a contract archaeology job where I would meet my future husband and farming partner, Eugene. Much of our Honeymoon consisted of seeing great earthworks of Ohio.

Jump forward from 1983 to 2006 and out new farm that is situated on a really hot area for potential archaeological finds.

Within days of moving both Eugene and I noticed a lot of chert eroding out of a hill side. At first we thought it was all brought in from somewhere else but now we are both thinking we have an honest to goodness outcropping of chert that has obviously been mined for a lot of years. And it is as high quality as the cherts coming from Flint Ridge over by Columbus/Newark.

Than Eugene started finding broken points in the beds he has been digging up. So far he has found 2 one tip and one base. I would go and look for heads but was unsuccessful until yesterday afternoon when I was looking at a freshly dug bed that had been well washed by overnight heavy rains and after walking the beds and looking for a half hour there was a nice point sticking out of the mud. I grabbed it and found myself in the possession of the top 1/3 of a serrated spear point made from the same material that the two Eugene has found. makes me wonder if the same person made all the points. We will never know the answer to that question.

Now it is tempting to forget farming and start putting in some units. There is definitely a site here and it just may be a significant one but the problem is finding someone who is qualified to do a project here. Eugene knows how to do the work, the research and write the papers but he does not have the Ph.D. to qualify his work (not to mention this would be pro bono work and we cannot afford to do that at this point in time-have a mortgage to pay). I am thinking about contacting my alma mater and asking them if they need a place to do their field school and offer up our place for digging for 8 weeks every summer until it is done.

All I know is something should be done about this potential site.