From my paucity of apiary posts lately, you would be forgiven for thinking that when my bees absconded, my beekeeping enthusiasm left with them.  However, the truth is that the package we installed in our Warre hive has been bulking up nicely --- I've just been following the rules and leaving the hive closed.

Due to the wonders of modern technology, though, I can refrain from cracking open the hive and can still get an idea of what's going on inside.  Once a week, I snap a shot through the screened bottom board.  The photos are generally subpar in terms of quality, but do let me keep an eye on the bees' progress.

We installed the package on April 27, and the first photo in this post shows what the bees looked like two days later.  They were simply a tight cluster of bodies enclosing the queen, who was still trapped in her cage.

Eleven days after installation, my non-intrusive inspection showed a little bit of comb being built.  If I'd opened the hive, I would have been able to see whether the queen was laying, and on the off-chance she wasn't, could have ordered a replacement queen.  With a Warre hive, you have to simply hope for the best (and pay attention to the hive's mood, smell, and sound).

Sixteen days after installation, I could have discovered a lot by opening the hive.  The presence of eggs would tell me the queen was still alive and well, and now I could look at the capped brood to determine whether she had been properly inseminated.  (Lots of drone brood and little worker brood could be a sign of a queen who didn't have sex with enough drones during her mating flight.)  However, when I received an improperly mated queen three years ago, I chose to let the workers supersede her and turn one of the eggs into a queen of their choice, so the truth is I wouldn't have done anything if I'd seen too much drone brood in the two week old hive anyway.  Of course, since I was working with a Warre hive, I didn't even have this decision to make --- I could still see comb in my photos (too blurry to share), and the workers were definitely bringing pollen in, so I chose to assume all was well.

Twenty-three days after installation (this past Sunday), I finally saw something within my hive that required work on my part.  The bottom box was starting to look nearly full up!  Assuming the queen is laying well, this is about the time the first new workers should pop out of their cappings, which means the colony could grow even more quickly from here on out.

Since I started the hive with two boxes, I can't tell whether the bees have filled the top box as well, but there's no reason not to hoist the bees up and put another box underneath (known as nadiring).  This process preserves the hive scent and temperature, and is the least intrusive method of increasing a bee colony's living area.  Looks like it's time to build another box this week and take our first real peek inside the hive since we took out the queen cage!

The golf cart front wheel bearings started making an awful grinding sound that created a situation where the tire was rubbing against the corner of the steering thingamajig.

We really wanted to haul in some more lumber, so I came up with the above garden hose band aid to protect the tire.

It bought us about 2 miles worth of hauling before the bearing started giving out in a different spot.

Before I delve into chapters 5 and 6 of Walden, I want to get a head count to see who's still reading.  I don't mind at all having folks who haven't read the book comment, but sometimes I can't quite tell if anyone else is still reading or if we should switch books.  So, please leave a comment if you're still with me!  (And, if you're not, leave a comment to tell me whether you might rejoin the club if we switched over to something lighter.)

This sentence from near the beginning of chapter 6 sums up much of the gist of this pair of chapters.  The themes included being alone without being lonely, and at the same time making human interactions more meaningful.  I was especially struck by the first theme since it's one I've wrestled with throughout my life, and I feel is essential for a homesteader to conquer.

I hear these same words all the time, but I seldom come up with as good a reply as Thoreau's:

I think Thoreau and I have two character traits very much in common --- we're both introverts and neither of us takes friendship lightly.

Although most people don't have the luxury of acres of trees surrounding their homestead as a buffer, I wish everyone could live the way we do.  I feel like it's much easier to be genuine and kind to the people I do come in contact with when they're not breathing down my neck on a regular basis.

Again, I couldn't agree more.  We don't get trick-or-treaters, salesmen, or people trying to convert us to their religion due to our moat, and the mud definitely separates the wheat from the chaff.  In fact, our choice to keep employing Bradley after he built our porch was based largely on the fact that he wore quality waterproof boots and had no problem tromping through the mud.

So, what did you think of chapters 5 and 6?  Did different themes speak to you?  Did you find this chapter duo as enjoyable as I did?

Meanwhile, if you're new to the book club, you might want to check out the thought-provoking comments on chapter 1, chapter 2, and chapters 3 and 4.  I'll wait to post a "reading assignment" until tomorrow, at which point I should have an idea of whether we're all still getting something out of Walden or would like to move on.


Weekend Homesteader provides 48 fun and easy projects to guide you on the path to self-sufficiency.  Yes, that means I skip Thoreau-style projects like hewing logs for your cabin with an ax.

Anticipation is my worst way of being.
I plant impatiens in the ground.

A little more research helped to guide us towards a system that will allow the angle of the solar panel tower to change for different times of the year. More complex systems have a new position for each month, but we might settle for a new angle for each season to keep it simple.

What will be more challenging is changing the position during the day. We've considered using a heavy duty swivel so it can turn from the East to West.

Once it's all put together we can either move the swivel by hand at different times of the day or figure out a motorized option.

Typha they are called,
their Latin botanical taxonomy.

Corn-dog looking plants on long
dried out stalks.
They puff like white dandelions
in the heat.

I am an adult
so I can give myself
permission
to act like a child.

Walking past them,
I break a cattail off,
the seedy mass,
already beginning to send
it's cotton into the wind.

I will correct Wikipedia.
Wind is not the only seed disperser
of the Typha.
The plants co-evolved
in a symbiotic relationship with
childlike humans, young and old.

I carry my cattail up Estill Street
turning my neck sharply
as I watch my seedy friends
drift where they land
on lawns, ditches, sidewalks,
and on the clothes of me --
some in my nose and mouth.

Everything so transient,
of course wilderness is transient.
Typhas are transient because they
clear the usually fogged vision of people.
That and the fluff makes good moccasins.

I felt a call to duty
as I carried the cattail along.
To profligate a plant
that sucks toxins like arsenic out of the water.

A first try doesn't always do justice in poetry.
Often the second poem in a flux of poems is best.
At least that's what I've seen.

Sometimes the best poem of a series comes fourth or tenth.
Often it is the last poem in the group,
a poet's sigh – I have expressed.

The problem of thinking you have no poems in you to write
is regretfully cured in a painful process of
pouring out twin and triplet poems when the water breaks.

The problem with a writing drought
is I would have written every tiny detail each morning
and now I have to make up for it in one sweaty day.

Mom came over to inaugurate our new boardwalk (and to coo over the porch and eat chocolate strawberry shortcake).

While she was at it, she brought me a t-shirt response to my statement that "I'm simply a boring person."  The quote, attributed to an Amish farmer, goes:

Once upon a time 4 or 5 years ago a man or woman could buy a 13 amp entry level circular saw for 40 dollars.

Those days are over.

12 amp is now the best you can get at that entry level price.

We got this 40 dollar Skil circular saw last week and it seems to be just as strong as its 13 amp counter part, but it's sort of an unfair comparison seeing how the new saw had a fresh and sharp blade. Time will tell if the downgrade in motor capacity will have a noticeable effect. Our use will be low to medium, so we won't be the best gauge, but I plan to update this review in a year or two because power tools are beautiful and photogenic.

Even though the gargoyle was guarding the river, our stream monitoring session still turned up results in the Gray Zone.  That means our site on the Clinch River is neither good nor bad, probably due to upstream straight pipes and cows.  Splashing around in the water on a hot afternoon, on the other hand, was 100% good.

(Photo credits for the top and bottom right photos go to our movie star neighbor.)

Those green house tables were 10 feet long. We used 4 of the top sections along with some decking boards to make this new swamp bridge.

It's a huge improvement over the previous cinder block system.

Sometimes I feel like all I have to do is tell the farm that I need something, and it provides.  There's really nothing mystical about it --- you just have to focus on what you want and then keep an open mind so you notice the solution when it looks you in the face.

You'll recall that I posted earlier this week about being low on roma tomato transplants.  While weeding asparagus alley Thursday, what did I find but a big patch of healthy volunteer romas!

There are always lots of volunteer tomatoes in our garden, but it's usually tough to tell which variety they are until they fruit.  Since we fertilize our garden with horse manure to which kitchen scraps from someone else's household are added, volunteer tomatoes could be just about anything.  One year, I babied a volunteer tomato, only to find out that it was some kind of grocery store variety that won't get past the pink, hard stage before the fruits rot off.  So I swore off keeping volunteer tomatoes --- it's just too much of a gamble in our setting.

However, Thursday's volunteers were all growing from one spot which just happened to be where the yellow romas lived last year.  I'm 85% sure a fruit fell there and rotted in the midst of the summer garden frenzy, which would explain why there are so many tomato plants popping up out of the same spot but none on either side.  So I thanked the farm, then transplanted those yellow romas into my empty tomato beds.  I can taste those extra sun-dried tomatoes already!

I thought I was taking a vacation from vocation, and then it occurred to me.

For one moment, think of the absolute worst of your character, your most vile trait, your awfullest deed, your worst habit. Don't even say it. I will not send it away in New Age energy work or hypnotize it out of your system. But I will suggest to you that there is no better time to seize what you want to be than now.

I want to read more. I want to write. My secret dream is that someday I could share my love of writing, my inspiration for creative self expression. I don't care who I teach the love of writing. As long as they are people.

I could write a book on writing. I could go into the prisons and volunteer in a literacy program with writing as my twist. I could walk down the street to the nursing home and and help old folks get down their thoughts, past shaky hands and tiredness. I could lead a workshop in the bookstore across town.

And I will have chances, I will make these things happen. I will seize this moment. There is life after English Degree. I am living it.

Our new hired helper went a few extra miles today by bringing his utility trailer along for some emergency manure hauling.

"It won't be a problem" was his reply when we asked him.

I'm thinking it went a bit smoother loading buckets onto a trailer compared to the higher up truck bed which is still at the dealer.

Even though staking up plants seems absurdly simple, we've gone through a lot of trial and error before finding techniques that work for us.  But first --- why tie up plants at all?

We stake plants in our vegetable garden for their own good and to make our lives easier.  Staking tomatoes (combined with pruning) keeps the leaves drier, which holds off blight in hot, humid climates like ours.  After you stop picking your asparagus, the tall fronds can easily become top heavy and snap off during windy or wet weather, and I've found the same is true of plants like kale when you let them fruit in order to collect the seeds.  Then there's the fact that it's annoying to have to lift up those tall plants sprawling across the aisle every time you want to push a wheelbarrow or mower through.

We've tried lots of different materials and methods for staking plants, and my favorite by far uses light-weight metal fence posts.  (These are often called "U-posts" because they're shaped like a U in cross-section.)  Heavy T-posts are too hard to pound in (and to take back out when you need to move your stakes), while free materials like branches and bamboo have a tendency to rot and break at just the wrong moment.  Although fence posts are expensive when bought in large quantities, they also last a very long time if you're nice to them --- we expect ours to keep going for a decade or two.

If your soil's soft, you can push your posts in by jumping on the pegs at the bottom (imagine the fence post is a pogo stick).  Alternatively (especially in hard soil), you can pound the posts in with a mini sledge hammer.  I usually ask Mark to pound in the posts very solidly if they're going to be in place all summer, but I just push them in the easy way for more temporary applications.

I've written before about how to make a pea trellis --- we still make our trellises exactly the same way three years later because the method works so well.  (Well, we did invest in some taller U-posts so we don't have to add the stick extensions, and we often put the posts a bit closer together now.)  We use the same kind of trellis for cucumbers, and would use it for green beans too if we didn't grow bush varieties.

For asparagus or other plants that grow in a big mass, I generally put a post at each corner of the bed and tie a piece of wire, plastic baling twine, or rope all the way around the plants.  For my flowering kale, I cut corners a bit and just used two posts per bed --- I figure I can get away with this method since the kale will be done blooming and will be ready to harvest in a few weeks.

The only other thing we stake up regularly is tomatoes.  For my tall, indeterminate varieties, I slip an eight foot piece of rebar into the groove in the U-post, making sure the rebar extends at least a foot into the ground for stability.  Then I simply tie the tomato to the post (and then rebar) whenever the top of the plant starts wanting to bend down.  A tomato vine in late summer can be very heavy, so be sure to use heavy-duty ties --- like wire or plastic baling twine --- rather than organic baling twine, or you'll have a tomato collapse.

My final word of advice is --- stake early!  If you wait until your plants are starting to bend down into the aisle, you'll risk breaking them off and will take twice as long erecting stakes.  Nowadays, I simply put the the trellises and stakes in place before planting a single seed or set.

As if the beauty and maneuverability of a well-staked garden isn't enough, I've discovered that our fence posts have yet another advantage.  Bluebirds and phoebes love to perch on top of the posts, eating insects while depositing droppings right where I need the extra fertility.  Thanks, guys!

I went to bed at 10 and woke up screaming at 12:30. I woke up with a terrified shriek half way out of my lungs. My suite-mate, H, was standing over my bed. I told him soon after that I wasn't awake for the full scream and that my adrenalin was already running.

"There was somebody walking upstairs and opening squeaky doors," he told me in a voice much more anxious than his usual calm way. We decided to go upstairs and sweep the house. He kept my back and I his as we turned on all the lights of the expansive upstairs where the professors on sabbatical live. The house was empty of intruders, but I believe H. I am not certain who was in the house, but someone was.

And then there were the phone calls. He mentioned that someone leaves messages of a dial tone on the family phone at the same time every night. I didn't realize they called at the same time, but I was aware that they called repeatedly.

I took to heart the alcoholics motto about accepting things I cannot change. That one statement, even though I am not an alcoholic, leaves me a much more relaxed person than I would have otherwise been. H was regularly terrified when we returned to the basement. I cannot say my blood wasn't pumping. But I am not worried. We will figure it out tomorrow.

So I was on my way to get some horse manure this morning when the truck all of a sudden stopped and wouldn't start back up.

The local dealer was just a short hike down the road...Gulp.

It was only 50 dollars to have them go back and fetch our truck with the above bigger truck. They won't look at it till tomorrow.

Dealerships have always made me nervous. I think I might rather walk down a dangerous dark alley, but sometimes they're the best mechanical choice. I'll spare you the wallet munching stories that have helped me to form this opinion. So far today's experience is working out to change my mind at least a bit. This dealer is in Castlewood...city for us, but most people would consider it a country dealership, which feels like an advantage. Maybe that's why the people working there seem so much friendlier than the last dealer I was at?

I didn't contact Seed Savers Exchange about my potentially bad tomato seeds because I wasn't 100% sure the problem was their fault.  But one of their employee's --- Tom Wahlberg --- stumbled across my post and emailed me in concern.  He told me that, "like we state on each packet, we really do mean Satisfaction Guaranteed, and have credited your account for these two packets."

While the refund was appreciated, I was more intrigued to hear about how Seed Savers Exchange grows, processes, and tests seeds.  Wahlberg explained:

We had both of these varieties grown on contract, one Conventional (Amish Paste) and one Organic (Martino's Roma).  The Organic tomatoes will have been processed via fermentation technique, and will tend to retain more of the fruit's organic matter than the Conventional.

Depending on the length of time of fermentation it is possible the Organic would have a higher level of fungal activity, but also would retain more of the normal fuzzy exterior which could also be what you are seeing.  The Conventional by contrast will have been processed via acid extraction, which is not a seed treatment, but rather a method commercial growers use to break down the gelatinous membrane around the seed without the delay inherent with the fermentation process.  That would also explain the difference in the shade between the two varieties.

As for germination, we utilize Midwest Seed Services for independent analysis, and the most recent results are as follows:

I was going to title this post "Fruitless" and talk about how Blackberry Winter wiped out all of the tiny fruits on the peaches, apples, pears, cherries, gooseberries, and plums.  The tale wasn't going to be all doom and gloom since blueberries, raspberries, grapes, strawberries, and blackberries either missed the frost or bloomed over a long enough time frame that we should enjoy quite a lot of fruit this summer.  And yet, even that isn't the full picture.

The truth is that I tend to go in the opposite direction of most folks, telling you about all of our failures but only focussing on the biggest successes.  There are simply so many garden achievements every year, you'd be bored stiff if I regaled you with the first snap peas (Sunday), the first real meal of non-frost-nipped strawberries (last week), and so on ad infinitum.

It occured to me that you can't walk around our garden --- prettier this year than ever before --- and see it for yourselves.  So here it is in all of its mid May glory!

The photo above was taken in our front garden, the oldest vegetable patch on our farm, where the soil is the best, the sun the worst, and the aisles in need of streamlining.  I set out most of our garlic there last fall, along with a bed of Egyptian onions, some chives, and our experimental potato onions, so the area feels like one big mass of Amaryllidaceae.

The empty beds are filling up fast with summer crops, many of which have already popped up.  Once we put in our second planting of things like green beans, corn, and squash this week, the front garden will be pretty much full.

The back garden (shown below) is nearly all coated with annual ryegrass in an attempt to repair the waterlogged, topsoil-less ground.  Mark's been doing a great job of mowing the garden beds each time he cuts the aisles, which maximizes the grass's growth and means lots more organic matter works its way into the soil.  That one bare bed is coated with tiny basil seedlings, and you'll notice I snuck strawberries into the back garden despite this being its fallow year.

Meanwhile, the chick brooder is hidden behind our second oldest peach tree.  Even though we won't be enjoying luscious peaches this year, at least the tree provides some much-needed shade.

And, at the bottom of the back garden, our Chicago hardy fig only died partway back this past winter.  I pruned the bush to three stems, cut off the dead tops, and am hoping to taste figs for the first time this fall!

Moving on, I forgot to take a picture from afar of the forest garden, home to this year's tomatoes, but the photo below pretty much sums it up.

And then there's the mule garden, from whence most of our meals are coming at the moment.  I've been putting all of my energy into getting the front garden ready for summer crops lately, so the mule garden is looking a little ragged around the edges, but not so much that the crops are suffering.  This week, I'll be starting my next pass through, taking down the last quick hoops, weeding the seedlings who were too small to work around a month ago, and adding more mulch.

I'm already thinking ahead to fall since this sunny garden is the best spot for overwintering greens.  Soon, I'll plan where all the late summer and autumn crops will go, and will probably set aside a lot of the mule garden beds to be planted in wave after wave of buckwheat.  That will prevent me from sneaking summer crops into areas slated for the fall garden, and will build organic matter at the same time.

Another alternative is to let some of the spring crops go to seed.  Every year, I add one or two more vegetables to my list of easy to save seeds, and the new experiments this year are kale and Swiss chard (the latter of which is shown below on the left.)

I hope you enjoyed your garden tour!  If you were here in person, you would be snacking on a sugar snap pea and a juicy strawberry by now, but hopefully you'll get the gist photographically.  2012 is far from fruitless!

We started out with one of these bags leftover from Anna's year abroad with a Watson fellowship.

Now we've got 6 of the same oversized bags.

They mainly get used to carry out boxed up chicken waterers, but have several other uses including leaf gathering.

A few weeks ago, Everett asked us what we do during our weekends of non-work.  I always look a little shame-faced when people inquire about our leisure hours because the cultural norm is to fill that time with activities outside the home --- hiking, going to a movie, or whatever.

In contrast, a blissful day off in Anna-land starts with gathering a big jar of cicadas for the tweens, then morphs into a quiet morning reading on the porch while listening to a catbird singing from the walnut or watching the three week old chicks learning to forage in the lawn.  I'll probably spend a little extra time making something fancy for lunch, then will gravitate from non-fiction to novel-reading in the afternoon.  If I'm feeling crazy, I might have my mother over for tea.  I'm simply a boring person.

Which is all a long way of saying that chapter 4 of Walden really spoke to me.  Thoreau wrote:

I think that one of the major benefits of living in paradise is that you don't feel the need to spend much money on expensive leisure pursuits.  As Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin wrote in Your Money or Your Life, the goal of voluntary simplicity is to turn your life into a vacation so you don't need to take a vacation way from home.  It has taken several years for Mark to bring me around to this way of life, but I'm now eternally grateful that he invented weekends.

That said, Walden's chapter 3 went right over my head, and also made me wonder if my rants against TV sounded like Walden's rants against easy reading.  In this day and age, most people think they're feeding their minds if they crack open a bit of chick lit or flick on the History Channel, let alone "read Homer or Aeschylus in the Greek".

So, what did you think of this week's installment of Walden?  Unless I hear some "no!"s, I'll plan on us all reading chapters 5 and 6 (Solitude and Visitors) for next Monday.  If you're new to the book club, you might want to check out the thought-provoking comments on chapter 1 and chapter 2 as well.  I appreciate you all giving me the impetus to spend some time thinking about this classic!

Want more reading material?  You can peruse my revised rant against television in The Weekend Homesteader.

Welcome Abundant Alaska

When I found short bread,
molded from last bits of dough,
raw wabi sabi.

xo Maji

Recently we gave a neighbor a bag of extra lettuce and he turned around the next day and gave us a bag of fresh trout.

Anna is not a lover of seafood like myself, but she didn't hesitate to clean up these three trout for dinner the other day so I could have a treat.

It was delicious. Makes me wonder if raising trout in an aquaponic setting might be possible for us.

Once you start playing with cover crops, bare soil jumps right out at you and begs to be planted.  Last fall, we tore a bit more of the old house down, exposing a big patch of earth in which all plant life had been shaded out.  It was too late to plant anything else, so I just scattered a bunch of rye seeds on the ground and proceeded to ignore it.

The rye sprouted and turned into a lawn-like coating before winter hit.  Then, this spring, the grain shot up and started to bloom.

If I was ready to use that plot of earth, I'd cut the rye now and let the straw fall as mulch.  But there are still huge floor joists to be moved before the footprint of the old house can be turned into garden, and we have no time for projects like that at this time of year.

So I'm allowing the rye go to seed to give me some more time before I need to make a decision about that bit of earth.  Truly a do-nothing grain patch, I haven't tilled, fertilized, or done anything else to the rye.  We'll probably feed any grain we get to the chickens, but what I'm really salivating over is the hefty stalks for mulch.

Last year I was able to switch tasksel to using metapackages, instead of the weird non-package task things that had been used before Debian supported Recommends fields well.

An unanticipated result of the new task packages is that I have this nice popcon data available for them, so can get graphs like these.

For new installs of testing, KDE and Xfce are neck and neck. With Gnome being the default, it's hard to say which desktop users really prefer. My feeling is that it's probably nearly evenly split now.

(I installed Xfce on my sister's laptop last week, and anticipate moving all my family to it, rather than Gnome 3.)

The above graph also shows a surprisingly large number of ssh server task installs. In fact, it's the most often manually installed task. Probably many of those are server machines, and so I'm considering having tasksel automatically select ssh on systems where it doesn't automatically select a desktop.

Language data is also available. Taskel uses language tasks internally, without exposing an interface, so this will be almost entirely users who did an install of testing localised to their language.

Interesting data can be teased out of this too. For example there seem more installs in Catalan than Chinese ... and at least 10 Esperanto users. (As with any popcon number, this is a lower bound, to be multiplied by the scaling guesstimate of your choice.)

By the way, I've got a new vanity domain for my blog and wiki: http://joeyh.name/

The old http://kitenet.net/~joey/ will continue to work, like it has since 1997. But the new is easier to type. And it let me move my site to Branchable, at last.

Golf cart jousting is a modern twist on a 15th century popular past time that replaces the horse with a golf cart and the traditional lance with a couple of 4x4's bungee strapped together.

"Scythes are cool!" our readers admonish us every time we talk about our weedeater.  I used to be in love with the idea of scything once upon a time...and then I was given a scythe.

At the time, I didn't know much about the tool, so I wasn't wise enough to turn down the bulky American scythe and to save my pennies for a quality Austrian scythe instead.  I also trusted my father when he told me that one size scythe fits all.  That may be true if you're a normal-sized man, but as a short woman, I spent all of my energy just trying to keep the scythe blade from digging into the earth.  I gave up on the tool in disgust.

But then I stumbled across Harvey Ussery's scything page, and was tempted once more.  Ussery explained that Austrian scythes cut with blades curved in three dimensions, so they glide over the surface of the ground.  In contrast to the traditional American scythe blade --- which is stamped out by a drop-forge press and has to be heavy to keep from breaking --- Austrian blades are hand-forged by a blacksmith, so they are sharp, light, and dent rather than shatter if you hit a rock.  In fact, The Scythe Book explains that "over half the [Austrian scythe] blades which begin the twenty-six stages of manufacture are rejected along the way", which is why the blades are of such high quality (and cost so much).

Then there's the handle, known as a "snath" in scything circles.  Austrian snaths are typically very light, and both types of snath can be fitted to your unique body.  If you're an absolutely raw beginner like me, you can order a scythe from The Scythe Supply that's suited exactly to your proportions since you give them your height, your handedness, the number of inches from ground to hip, and your cubit (the distance from your elbow to your out-stretched middle finger).  The company will be sure the handles go in the right places so you're not straining anything as you mow.

While you're making your decision, you'll also need to choose a kind and length of blade.  Your main choices are between bush/brush blades, which are short and thick so they won't break when you whack at young saplings, and grass blades, which are lighter and won't wear you out when you're cutting softer plants.  (A ditch blade is a bit of a hybrid, halfway between the graceful grass blade and the hefty bush blade.)  Grass blades can be long or short, with longer blades being handy for harvesting vast fields of wheat and shorter blades being more useful when mowing small lawns with lots of edges.  I think the raw beginner could do worse than picking a middle of the road grass blade --- I chose the 24 inch grass blade pictured here.

With all of that in mind, I begged Mark to let me splurge on a hunk of wood and metal, and he did.  I'm here to tell you that the difference between an American scythe that doesn't fit an an Austrian scythe that does fit is like night and day.  But this post is already too long, so you'll have to wait to hear more about what scything feels like and how to maintain a quality scythe blade in later posts.  If you want to learn more now, I highly recommend this video my mom tracked down, which somehow manages to be inspiring and hilarious all in a two minute time frame.

The plan is to mount our solar cell panels on the top and build drying racks for curing garlic and sweet potatoes towards the middle area.

I like to save seeds from my own tomatoes, but last year I got the idea that perhaps saving seeds is one of the reasons blight always shows up in my plantings.  I think it's more likely that tomato blights simply thrive during our warm, humid summers, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to experiment by buying tomato seeds for 2012.

Now I wish I hadn't.  I'm struggling to fill my tomato beds with romas this year, despite planting two flats and a quick hoop full.  Before I complain about the seeds, though, I have to be fair and say that part of the problem was my own fault.

I put tomato seeds in the quick hoops too early since it was so warm in March, and they came up just before a serious cold spell.  The quick hoops weren't enough to repel frost when the outside temperature dropped into the teens, so the tomato seedlings got nipped.  I replanted the garden beds in early April, but by then it had gotten so hot that the soil was bone dry.  In retrospect, I should have waited to plant my tomato seeds in the quick hoops until April 1 no matter what the weather was doing, and I should have taken the covers off on a warm day to let the sprinklers hydrate the ground and get the tomatoes up and growing.

Good thing I decided to hedge my bets by starting some seedlings inside, right?  Unfortunately, this is where problematic seeds came into play.  I figured stock from Seed Savers Exchange would be as good or better than any seeds I could save on my own, but now I'm not so sure.  The seeds in one packet looked dusty gray when they arrived, almost as if the seeds were covered in mold, and I had a lot of germination issues that got worse with each planting (suggesting that the seeds were already near the end of their energy reserves when they reached our farm).  My second flat showed only 25% healthy seedlings, and many of the plants came up headless, with cotyledons seemingly pinched off by a hard seed coat.  (This is very different from damping off, which would have showed up as the stem withering at the base.)

Steve Solomon wrote that most seeds sold to home gardeners are of poor quality, but that we blame ourselves for seeds that don't sprout.  I can see his point --- I can't be confident this year's tomato dilemma is due to bad seeds and not to some issue on my end.  Regardless, I won't be planting as many tomatoes as I'd hoped (although still more than last year), and there will be more slicers and tommy-toes than usual since they sprouted better than the romas.

That said, it's hard to complain when the first few survivors are already nearly at the bloom stage.  And maybe at least the blight situation will be better this year?

DEAR BEREA: I want a meaningful job now and a place to stay starting August with minimal pay. I want to work as a social activist/volunteer for organizations and causes like the Fairness Coalition and KFTC and to garden as much as I can. I want to be as active in my Friends Meeting as I can, to spend time with my lovely friends, and to swim and walk until the cows come home. I want to do as much of my purchasing outside of walmart as possible and to limit my purchasing to the minimum. And this is not a lot to ask at all because I am a hard worker (especially now I feel refreshed) and I am a Berea graduate. And with that, my life dream of capital "L" Literature will come. Right?

Turns out some of the structural damage to our barn was due to poison ivy vines.

The vines were exposed to falling water, which got conducted to various spots for what I'm guessing is decades.

It wasn't a problem for our new hired hand. He's been immune to the effects of poison ivy since he was a kid.

Phillip Meeks, an extension agent in southeast Kentucky who works with a number of beekeepers, emailed me to share his experiences with packages of bees.  He wrote:

I'd be curious to hear from those of you who have had packages abscond.  Has the experience only begun in the last few years, or did you see the behavior previously?

We decided to consult our new porch builder for some advice on shoring up the water damage in the barn.

He's had some experience with barns like this and made short work of securing the above 4x4 with a couple well placed 2x6 scabs.

John Little is a regular reader who lives in Japan and shared the following fascinating data about differences between colony collapse disorder there and in the U.S.  I'll let him tell you the story in his own words.

On a different subject, bees and CCD [colony collapse disorder], I recently came across some local (Japanese) information which seems, on the face of it, to confirm the neonicotenoid connection.  At an apple growers meeting a couple of weeks back, one of the members brought along a pre-release version of a documentary on DVD called "A message from the bees".

Basically, there were two critical points which differentiate the experience of
CCD here in Japan from what is generally being seen in Europe and the U.S.  The first is
that beekeepers here are seeing different symptoms.  Instead of empty hives, they're finding piles of dead and incapacitated bees on the bottom boards and in front of the hives.  In the majority of cases, the deaths have been correlated to local spraying of neonicotenoid-based insecticides 60 days before.

The second piece of interesting information is that the spray dosage levels in Japan are
much, much higher than in most of the rest of the world.  For the common insecticides used by fruit growers, the allowable levels (in ppm) are 20 to 300 (yes, three hundred!) times those mandated in Europe or the U.S., leading researchers here to the conclusion that they have identified a "smoking gun".

As one old beekeeper from the coast of Nagasaki-ken (in southern Japan) put it, "The centre of Tokyo is now the safest place to raise bees.  The air there is cleaner than any part of the Japanese countryside".

Scary information (especially for those of us who are involved in agriculture).  And the "message" from the bees?  "You're not just killing us (bees), you're killing
yourselves, too".

Cornish Cross broilers are usually eaten at 8 weeks.  We give our heirlooms an extra month since they grow slower, but the deadline is still fast approaching.

We killed the rooster last week and have four of last year's broilers left in the freezer.  Looks like we'll be eating a lot of chicken dinners in May.

We left our beloved porch Sunday and Monday to see my favorite little sister graduate from Berea College.  Congratulations, Maggie!

I call the photo above "Three Mothers".  We were waiting for the first appearance of our graduate....




Here she comes!




The photo below depicts Mom's first sighting.

Walking across the stage....















Her rooters below.

Then cookies and punch in the quadrangle.

My favorite grand-nephew seemed more interested in the brownies than in the dry-roasted cicadas I brought just for him.  What are kids coming to these days?

We're so proud of you, Maggie!

Our chicken pasture/moat perimeter is coming close to completion.

Sometimes I like to recruit a tree to function as a fence post, like this small walnut.

It saves time and money, but it also looks more natural, which in my opinion increases the already high level of beauty around here.

I thoroughly enjoyed everyone's thoughts on chapter 1 of Walden, even though I didn't comment much, so I hope you all had time to read chapter 2 --- "Where I lived, and what I lived for".  I'm going to write about two themes that caught my eye in this chapter, but, as usual, feel free to comment on whatever you found the most interesting instead.


Buying land
What struck me first is how similar the beginnings of my and Thoreau's journeys were...and how different the endings.  "At a certain season of our life, we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house," Thoreau wrote, and went on to tell about all of the properties he toured, one of which he came within a hair's breadth of buying.

I also went through a land-yearning stage in which I drew maps of how I'd turn real and hypothetical properties into vibrant homesteads, and I ended up happily married to our plot of land.  On the other hand, Thoreau decided that the wiser course is to love and leave the land.  "As long as possible live free and uncommitted," he advises us.  "It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or to the county jail."  Similarly, in the first chapter, he wrote about "young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of."

This reminds me of Mike's comment on my previous Walden post in which he reminds us that no one can be free of the economy, even if you buy a plot of land outright, grow your own food, and need nothing else.  Thoreau was thinking more of the upkeep of a farm than he was about property taxes and a mortgage, but both points have merit.  So, my first discussion question is --- do you think voluntary simplicity can be achieved if you own land?


The news
The second thing that struck me in this chapter was more of a side note than a theme.  Mark and I have come to belief this over the last few years, but have had a hard time articulating the premise, so I'll let Thoreau do it for me:

I've had several people tell me that that it's somehow ethically imperative to stay up to date on the world's news, but I've come to consider it all a distraction.  Yes, I do my homework and figure out the issues when the time comes to vote, but I don't see any point in being emotionally involved in the day to day running of the world if I can't do anything about it.  Which brings me to my second discussion question --- do you consider all news gossip, or do you think we're morally obligated to stay up to date on current events?


Chapters 3 and 4
Unless I hear that it's a hardship for anyone, let's plan to talk about "Reading" and "Sounds" next Monday.  Now I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say about chapter 2!

(As a side note, I might not be able to pull your comments out of moderation until this evening, so don't despair if they don't show up as quickly as usual.  I promise I'm not weeding out comments I don't like --- everyone except clear spam always makes it through moderation.)


My new paperback includes fun and easy projects for every weekend of the year to help guide you onto the path to self-sufficiency.

The easy way to catch a chicken is to wait till it gets dark and pick them up off their roost.

We each got spelunking head lamps back when our power went out for 2 weeks, and quickly discovered how awesome a head mounted light source can be.

My advice is to pay a little extra for the higher end model that allows you to adjust the angle where the light shines.