Pruning Season

Spring must be on the way as the tempo of farm life is beginning to pick up after a long winter's rest.

Eugene has been pruning the apple trees. It does not appear that these trees have been properly pruned in decades, if ever. Nature has done some pruning on her own via high winds and periodic cicadas but nature tends to leave the detached limbs in the trees which is counter productive. we have 2 huge old trees that need pruning and it looks like Eugene will get about 50% of the work done this season that needs to be done to these trees. He would do all the work this year but one is not supposed to cut out more than 50% of the tree (and 1/3 is a much better figure) ever and these trees need about 75% of their branches removed to be healthy trees that let in enough air and light for the developing pommes.

Now I don't see the use of doing anything to these trees as long as there are mature eastern red cedars within 10' of the trees. Apples and Cedars do not get along at all. Cedars pass a disease call cedar apple rust to apple trees making the apple trees sick enough to not grow fruit and in extreme cases drop all their leaves by July. There is also the fact that we have no idea what kind of apples these trees produce (red of some sort for one and I don't remember what the other had on it last fall). for commercial purposes it would be nice to know what we are growing and selling.

The plan is to get disease resistant trees for our future tiny orchard (we plan on getting 7 to 10 trees total) so we do not have to resort to incredibly toxic sprays in order to get a decent looking crop (since people tend to buy with their eyes). our own trees will also have the advantage of not being neglected for decades and thus will be super simple to prune and care for compared to the trees already here.

We have already been through the experience where we had to rehab someone else's apple trees. It was a good learning experience and one of the things we learned is in order to make any money on apples (and there is a thin margin with this crop because a full orchard takes a lot of time grooming the trees-pruning, spraying, etc., and a lot of money for all the sprays used on conventional apples) one needs trees that do not need a lot of spraying and pruning. But if you take over neglected trees that is exactly what you will get into for years and years. After 11 years at the old farm we got the apple trees into really good healthy shape and did not have to do much to them in the spring as far as pruning went but in the early years it took weeks and weeks to get 8 trees pruned because they needed so much work and than just to get any apples we had to spray the trees (with organic sprays) weekly for a couple of years. After figuring out that apples did not make us much money for all the work involved we stopped spraying the trees more than a couple of times a years and found they apples were about the same and we made more money from them when we did less work. I mean one year we grossed about $300 from the apples but we probably put 250 hours in to the care of the apples so we ended up making well under a buck an hour when the inputs costs were subtracted from the gross.

So Eugene prunes the old apple trees and improves them. And this will mean we get some heirloom apples of unknown types while the new trees (which have yet to be selected or bought) grow to maturity over the next 3 to 5 years. They are some really nice old trees with a swell canopy of branches set behind the barns along an old fence line and towering over the possible chert outcropping. they have created a nice work space and possibly the place where the packing shed will be.

In This Evening's Email

With Spermamax you will have more sperm than there is water in the ocean.
You think you are not able to father, Spermamax will change your world.
You worry of not having descendants,
Spermamax can help you.


Now just how is this possible? Having more sperm than water in the oceans... I mean talk about blue balls. And what if the woman just ain't in the mood? I mean wouldn't the guy pop if he had that much sperm running around in his testicles? I would think this would make the chances of conception go down if for no other reason than these oceaned sized blue balls the poor chap would be sporting. That would be enuff to make most women run away fast.

And let us not forget the fact that I am not a male, I cannot produce sperm, no matter how much Spermamax I take and I am not planning on breeding decendants. They pretty much struck out on me, it seems.

Post groundhog day Musings

It's post Super Bowl party season and that means getting back to the grindstone.

Winter has made an appearance this week. Winter came back Saturday morning with wind and a lot of heavy melting snow (it was falling on warm surfaces). To celebrate the return of cold weather we went to an auction to look at a tractor. The weather was miserable at the auction and the tractor went for a bit more than we wanted to pay so we left right after the tractor sold but before the corvette and horses sold.

Went home, ate lunch and took a nap and was awoken by a small dark colored truck leaving the driveway. It appears they did not stop at Kayler Rd and jumped 127 and landed on our land, drove south towards the driveway entry and left going north. Don't know what to make of it-either rilly bad driving due to slick conditions or someone wanted to put ruts in our grass. Either way they left their hubcap behind.

Eugene welcomes the colder weather (we still cannot call this cold when it is just around freezing and February) because he does not get overheated working. he has been cutting up brush and trees while it is cold. And we don't even have a wood stove, old habits die hard. he also has leveled out the dirt where a greenhouse will be going behind the barn. Small jobs but progress towards the sustainable produce farm we will have up and running someday.

I have been kicking around the web trying to find a place to buy business cards. I found a site that allowed me to design a really nice looking card but it will cost about $50 to get 1000 cards which seems high. Than again this will be a write off, the cards will look nice and more importantly will have the correct contact information on them and the cards I designed (using a stock graphic) look very nice and are probably worth the money.

Okay I ordered the cards and should have them in 3 to 5 business days which I will take as Friday.

We are up to 25 beds opened. Eugene attached a moldboard plow to the BCS walking (2 wheeled) tractor and ripped up some soil in 3 beds with it before deciding that hand digging with a shovel did a far nicer job and was not taking a lot longer to do.

Got some onions and leeks planted in the past 5 days. Planted about 150 seeds per 4" pot and did nine pots of red, yellow and white onions plus two kinds of leeks. IIRC I planted Copra and Prince yellow onions, Superstar white onions, Mars and Mercury red onions, Lincoln and Kind Richard Leeks. In the past I planted these things in seedling flats but found they would quit growing about 4 weeks into things. I figured out this was because the poor roots were running out of room and so would go kind of dormant until they were giving more room. this meant small spindly seedlings and this is something I would like to avoid. instead we want to plant stocky, healthy seedlings in a couple of months. And the pots ought to do the trick. Of course the seeds have to germinate before I can pass any judgment.

Boulder Belt's Super Bowl Pick

We are not football fans here at the farm but this has been a special season and has gotten out attention. First of all the Bengal's had a winning season for the first time since 1982. being from SW Ohio/Cincinnati area I have a soft spot in my heart for the Bengal's. But they did not make it past their first playoff game. leaving the Steelers to cheer on.

I became a Steelers kinda fan last year when Ben Roethlisberger, Miami football phenom became the Steelers’ football phenom. The man is great at what he does and this is only his second season in the NFL, he will only get better.

So because we both went to the same university I have become a fan.

And this is good because I have a Superbowl party coming up on sunday where I will actually be into the game because I actually watched most of the post season games.

Most years I watch about 5 hours of NFL action (including the Superbowl) total.

So the Boulder Belt prediction is Pittsburgh by 14 points.

Sustainable Trash Meets Weekly Pick-up

This week we were forced to sign up for garbage pick-up. In the past we would go into New Paris to Tudor's and buy special trash bags for $2.50 each and would put our trash into those when we needed to and put them out for collection. For over 10 years this system has worked well for us.

You see, a part of our being sustainable is creating as little trash for the landfill as possible. So we recycle, we compost, we burn things that are not too toxic (no tires, plastics, combustible liquids etc.. mainly paper and trash wood). Our household garbage collection might be considered insane by those of us who do not care about sustainability.

There is an ad on TeeVee that shows a woman saving her zip lock bags and cleaning them after each use and she is called crazy, crazy like a fox, as she is saving both money and resources (along with time she does not spend driving and shopping to get more plastic bags). I do the same thing and have found I can get 10+ uses out of the old style zip lock bags but only about 3 uses out of the zipper lock bags (which I do not like for a variety of reasons). I save money, I save resources and I do not see what is crazy about doing so.

But I digress... This is an entry about signing up for trash pick-up.

Okay, when we moved here back in September we brought along our special trash bags we bought in New Paris and loaded them up with trash about every other week and put them out by the road Sunday night and early monday morning a Rumpke garbage truck would come by, stop and take the bags. This stopped 3 weeks ago. Eugene would put out the bags and they would still be there monday morning. This happened for 3 weeks and finally Eugene called Rumpke and see what was going on. It seems that as of Jan. 1 Rumpke stopped the individual trash bag service and now requires everyone to sign up for monthly curbside pick-up at $15.50 per month. Not that Rumpke told anyone (like us) about this major change

So we signed up and than realized that at $15.50 a month we will have to come up with a lot more trash to put in the landfill to make this service worth it to us. In the past we generally put out 2 bags a month because that is all the landfillable trash we generate in a month since we recycle, compost and burn most of it. And buying trash bags for $2.50 each to be used when we needed to landfill garbage was perfect for us.

But we do not want to put any more trash into the landfills than is absolutely necessary and over the past 10+ years we have done a pretty good job at keeping material from being landfilled. But by using the Rumpke (or any) curbside service we are being encouraged to throw out as much trash as we can (up to 6 bags a week!).

I believe what we will have to do is cancel curb-side service and pay the dump $10 every time we take trash to the Preble County Sanitary Landfill, which is about 9 miles due south of us (and we can recycle many things including hazardous items such as batteries and paint). This way we do not have to come up with a weekly bag of trash to feed the garbage mountain. I don't think we will be able to come up with that much garbage in a week. We simply do not consume enough, unless we quit our crazy sustainable ways with garbage and that ain't gonna happen folks... ain't gonna happen.

Happy Groundhog Day

Looks like Punxatawny Phil in PA saw his shadow and the whistlepig in Dayton saw her shadow so the prediction is for 6 more weeks of winter.

But we must ask if an area has not even had a winter yet this year does this mean we will have an actual winter for 6 weeks?

FYI the vernal equinox is 7 weeks away which means winter will be around until March 21st

Buy Into a Farm- Join a CSA

Erin Peterson

Eating healthy doesn't have to be expensive. In fact, it can also be fun and educational.

Everyone knows eating more fruits and vegetables is good for you -- the new Department of Agriculture, or USDA, food pyramid encourages it more than ever before -- but paying for all that produce can be costly.

Government studies show a family of four typically spends more than $850 on fruits and vegetables annually. And if you're trying to meet USDA nutrition guidelines or are buying organic, that number is likely to be much higher.

What's a shopper to do? After all, there aren't many places to buy produce -- either at the local supermarket or take a short drive to a farmer's market, right? Actually, however, there is a third -- and usually less-expensive -- option: a nearby community-supported agriculture, or CSA, farm.

CSA farms sell "shares" of the crop -- anywhere from six to more than 1,000 shares per farm -- which entitle you to an agreed-upon amount of whatever the farm produces through the growing season. It also gives the small farmer operating capital for the year's production. Every week during the growing season, typically 15 to 30 weeks, depending on the location, members receive a box or basket filled with the week's harvest of fruits and vegetables. The weekly share may also include items such as flowers, milk, eggs, honey and herbs.

Prices vary significantly. Starting at $300 per share and topping out at more than $1,000, the fee is usually paid in advance of the growing season. Each share is typically enough to feed a family of four, though half shares are sometimes available. Each farm has different options, so you'll want to check to make sure the food you get will be enough -- and not too much. Some offer different prices depending on whether the produce is delivered to your home, picked up at a central location or picked up at the farm itself. Some CSA farmers offer monthly payments....
read the rest here.

As an aside Boulder belt has a CSA program that serves SW Ohio/EC Indiana. And we charge by the week, the month or the season-we are just THAT flexable. More info here

Save cash and eat well: Buy into a farm

NAIS and the Chinese Chicken

It's a banner day for posting it seems. So much to talk about.

here is another item about NAIS and the USDA. This is truly shocking.

While the USDA foists NAIS on American consumers, farmers and livestock* the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is proposing importing chickens from China. Yes, that’s right. Is that crazy enough? They want to tag and track all animals in the USA to prevent disease’ and then import poultry from China where Avian Bird Flu (H5N1) has been killing millions of birds as well as some people. Wait a minute?!? Wasn’t one of the justifications for NAIS to stop the spread of Avian Bird Flu???

Not only that, but the USDA wants to ship poultry to China, have it slaughtered and canned and then shipped back to the USA for consumption! What!?!

Does this make sense? Wait… sense… cents… Ah, think dollars!...

read the rest at Ag Dept Wants to Import Chickens from China

Our government is insane. First they want to implement the NAIS in part to keep the US from getting avian flu outbreaks and now they want to import chicken from china where there have been numerous avian flu outbreaks. This is nuckin' futz.

Planting Time Nears

I made our first batch of potting soil, or is it soiless mix (the stuff has no soil in it though it is supposed to) for the soil blocks that will be made in which to plant seeds.

The mix is basically 2 parts peat moss, 1 part compost. 1 part perlite and than some wood ash (1 cup) to moderate the pH and some kelp, colloidal phosphate and green sand tossed in (about 2 cups).

In the past we had to do this job either in the basement or outside. It's not a bad outside job as long as the weather is decent (above 45F, calm and not raining/snowing) but considering the bulk of the mix is made and used in March and early April those nice conditions are rare (though not this year). We found we could not do this job in the house (other than the basement) because of the dust factor. peat makes a lot of dust, enough to cover most things in the house with 1/4" layer of peat dust.

You see, in order to make this mix, all ingredients must be screened (sifted) through a 1/8th inch screen so that the mix is fine and free of chunky/lumpy material. and the screening process makes a lot of dust. So much that you cannot do this job without breathing protection, even if you are in a well ventilated area. I tried this once, screening peat in the basement with no mask, and I was coughing up chunks of peat out of my lungs for a couple of weeks. Breathing was tough the first couple of days after that experience. Will not be doing that ever again.

And I don't have to because we now own a big barn that is well ventilated and out of the weather. It's great! it was so easy to screen ingredients and than mix them together. I got dirty as hell except for the white circle around my nose where the mask was. Now just have to find something to plant. I guess onions and leeks will be the first seeds to be planted and we will go from there.

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.

Spanning the Blogosphere

I am a member of Blog Explosion so I can increase traffic to my blog (and BE is a very effective tool to do this. To join click on the icon at the bottom of the sidebar to the right). I surf for credits most days via BE and often I find some really great blogs (in my opinion). And today is just such a day. 10 minutes surfing and I hit pay dirt starting with the Matian Anthropologist which lead me to a blog call Who Would Jesus Hate (if you are religious or still believe GW Bush is a good leader or do not have a sick sense of humor I would suggest NOT looking at this blog).

Another blog I found this morning while using Technorati's search engine is Towards a Bioregional State is all about changing our society from an unsustainable one to a sustainable state. I have only scanned 2 of the articles posted but I like the ideas I have read so far. One of the reasons I do what I do is guide our society in this direction. And for you Monsanto fans out there there is a really good article on the History of Monsanto and how the corp. got to be so evil

Making a Market Garden

We have been working on opening beds and making a market garden out of the 2.5 acres on the upper field and here is our progress thus far. 18 beds dugs, 6 beds planted with garlic and perennial herbs. A couple of beds are close to being ready for planting (they will likely be planted strawberries or lettuce) and Eugene is opening up more beds as I write this.

The beds looking south. The white things in the upper right of the photo are garlic under row covers


The beds looking north. This time the row covered garlic is on the left