When I'm that age...

We have an older couple who lives down the road from us. They're in their late 80s or early 90s and are as active as anyone I've ever met. Bill, the husband, used to be a heavy-equipment operator and still is the go-to guy when anyone in the neighborhoods needs a load of gravel, a building pad bulldozed, a trench dug, or any other heavy-duty project.

Bill and his wife own the five-acre pasture directly across the road from us. They have one horse and two head of Angus cattle (cow and bull).

A couple months ago, the cow gave birth to the prettiest calf imaginable – pure white, with dark eyes and nose and hooves. Just darling.

Well, a few days ago the calf got out onto the road. We called Bill to let him know.

Mama and the bull were trotting along the fenceline in agitation, trying to figure out how to get reunited with Baby.

A few minutes later, Bill and his wife make it up to start rounding the calf back where she needs to go. Don and I grabbed a couple of push poles and began gently herding the calf down the road, to where Bill had opened a gate into the pasture. We're old hands at this and it was nothing unusual.

The calf finally saw the gate and dashed through it, reunited with her herd. And then – this was the funny part – Bill literally sprinted across the road to close the gate before the older animals escaped as well.

It was the way he sprinted to close that gate that impressed me. I'm not precisely sure how old Bill is, but I think I remember him mentioning a couple years ago that he was somewhere in the vicinity of 90 years old, which would put him at about 92 now. And he's still sprinting to get a job done.

That's exactly how I want to be when I'm his age. Go Bill.

Product Review Monday

(Below is Don's book review this week.)

My book suggestion for today is tiny...but oh so packed with information: The Pocket Ref.

At only 5.5 inches tall, this is truly a pocket book. I've had a copy of the Pocket Ref in my possession for years. If for some reason you were magically sent back in time to the 1800s and could only take one book that could fit in your pocket, this is that book.

The Amazon link has an astoundingly long list of the diverse kinds of critical information this volume contains. Much of the information that makes up our modern civilization is included in this tiny, dense book.

Frankly, this is the perfect "guy" stocking stuffer. Highly recommend.

___________

Today's product recommendation is something near and dear to my heart: A pressure canner.

The two most common types of (American) pressure canners are All American and Presto. The advantage of an All American is its heavy-duty quality, the lack of a gasket (it has a metal-to-metal seal), and its incredibly study build. The All American quality is such that it can be used for generations. The disadvantage is cost – depending on size, prices range from about $350 to $650 (the best-selling model #921 is about $450).

The advantage of a Presto canner is its cost (about $125). The disadvantage is the gasket on the lid – it must be checked and replaced every so often to ensure a proper seal. Additionally, the Presto is not as heavy-duty as the All American, and frankly is not built to last as long.

I've owned my All American (model #921) for 35 years and adore it. I have used a Presto once or twice (while teaching friends to can) and, while I didn't like it as much, a lot of that was due to my unfamiliarity with the product. However it should be noted that every canner becomes passionately attached to his or her particular brand and model, so go with whatever brand you prefer. Both brands have a long history of home-canning excellence. (It's worth noting, however,  that neither canner is recommended for use on a glass-top stove.)

I have no experience with Mirro canners and therefore cannot make a recommendation. Ditto for Presto's new electric canner – the National Center for Home Food Preservation has not approved the electric canner, though they stop short of saying it is unsafe (they just haven't tested it yet).

I'm a passionate canner and have canned literally thousands of jars of food in my All American pressure canner. A pressure canner is the ultimate tool for those interested in food preservation.

(Obligatory disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Affiliate, if you purchase through those links, we earn a small commission.)

Fruitful trees

Last year, if you recall, we were nonplussed that not one single wild plum or wild blackberry bush yielded any fruit.

Seriously, in late summer these two categories are usually astoundingly fruitful. The wild animals congregate toward this abundance in droves, as you can imagine. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of wild plum trees and untold acres of wild blackberries, and as far as we could tell not one single plum or blackberry ripened. The lack of this bonanza must have been as difficult for the wildlife as it was bewildering for us.

But this year ... this year the abundance has returned, perhaps all the heavier for its lack last year.

In spring, the hillsides were lit up with plum blossoms, like cotton candy.

These blooms are spectacularly beautiful.

Now that full summer is here, the blooms are translating into developing fruit. Take this venerable plum tree by the side of our road, for example.

The young plums are so thick, they almost look like clusters of grapes.

A couple weeks ago, the blackberries flowered, and all indications point to a similar level of production.

Now the petals are dropping and the tiny fruit is forming.

We never found out why there was no fruit last year. But at least this year, the wildlife are going to  feast.

The mystery bird, solved

Ever since moving here to our new home, I've heard the calls of a summer bird. It's a cheerful, chatty call, almost like laughter. For a while, sight unseen, I was calling it a yellow-breasted chat (I don't know why I christened it that except its call was decidedly "chatty"), but then I listened to the actual call of a yellow-breasted chat and realized it most certainly wasn't that. Back to square one. What is the mystery bird?

I mean seriously, this is our fourth summer here and I simply couldn't identify the bird, in large part because while its call was widespread, the bird itself was elusive and evaded all attempts to spot (and hopefully photograph it) for purposes of identification.

Then, a couple weeks ago, this mystery bird began "chatting" from the top of a willow tree in our driveway. I snatched up my camera and crept outside, trying to spot it.

I saw it all right, and took lots of photos. The trouble was, the bird was more or less silhouetted against the sky and I couldn't get into a better position to view it more clearly.

I took dozens of photos (literally, I took 51), just hoping to catch one that would be clear enough to identify the bird. At long last, I was able to catch a flash of bright orange. Aha! That's my clue!

The bird finally flew off to a more distant tree...

...at which point I retired indoors and consulted my bird identification books, looking at all the orange birds in our region.

Then I looked up YouTube videos of the calls for each orange bird. Mystery solved! What I've been hearing is a Bullock's Oriole.

And here's the funny thing: Once I had the bird identified, for the next couple of weeks I could hardly step foot outside without seeing it. Or rather, them. There were at least two males which suddenly started hanging around the yard, resulting in several hastily snatched and not-very-good photos.

After all this time, why did it start hanging around the yard now?

And then, boom. As rapidly as they appeared, they disappeared (from the yard), and now I just heard their chatty, cheery call from afar.

But that's okay. The mystery is solved. Apparently we have a lot of Bullock's Orioles in our area.

My indie book is making progress!

If you recall, a couple weeks ago I announced a new venture: An indie book.

Don and I have been getting a crash course in marketing, which of course is a Brave New World for both of us. Meanwhile I've been in near-constant communication with Jessie Denning, who is doing the formatting and layout. She sent a pdf of the book and I went through it in detail and sent back corrections. (In one spot, I actually misspelled "four" as "for." How...?)

Meanwhile Don designed the cover. Ladies and gentlemen, here's the big reveal:

Here's the back-cover blurb:

What happens when the producer of an historical reality-show company in Los Angeles is challenged to live by the rules she sets for her contestants? This is Rachel's folly: To spend four months living like a pioneer woman on Samuel Finn's primitive Idaho wilderness homestead in exchange for a hefty promotion and a coveted corner office.
 
The physical and mental challenges are staggering. Together Rachel and Samuel face the potentially devastating trials of 19th-century life. But they also are blessed with incredible benefits, including quiet evenings of conversation and music on the front porch with a million-dollar view of majestic mountain peaks.

Can Rachel complete the challenge? More importantly, can she complete the challenge without falling head over heels for the handsome, rugged man who bets she can't?

We're planning the release date sometime in mid-August. Whee, this has been a fun journey so far!

Stormy's growth

Some readers have asked how our little calf Stormy is doing. She's growing! The photograph below shows her drinking her breakfast moments after I finished milking Maggie and released Stormy from the calf pen.

Honestly, I've never a calf this leggy. She's nearly as tall as Romeo, who is three months older. Romeo is, of course, much beefier, since he's not only older, but a half-Angus, half-Dexter steer.

Stormy and Romeo are good friends.

It seems Stormy might be polled, too, which is interesting. We've never raised a polled calf before. Saves us the trouble of dehorning her!

She's also very sweet and affectionate. Originally we were thinking we would sell her (a woman from our church is interested), but now we're thinking we'll keep her as a possible second milker when she's older. With her half-Angus heritage, her calves will be beefier and will work as meat animals (especially since the only bulls around here are pure Angus, so we can keep the meat lineage going). Meanwhile we'll phase out our pure Angus animals, since we prefer the Jersey strain. Filet has a date with the butcher in August, and next year it will be Mignon's turn, followed by Romeo the year after that. Meanwhile we might keep our eyes peeled for a second purebred Jersey sometime next year.

So that's the update on Stormy.

Product Review Monday

For this week's book review, I'd like to highlight some books for very young (toddler) children I stumbled across. We don't own them for the simple reason we don't have anyone in that age bracket in our household, but take a gander at these titles and see if they don't look sweet:

Mommy and Me: Animals

 

Mommy and Me: Around the World

Animals Being Goofy!

There are additional titles by the same author available as well. If you have toddlers, consider these cuties.

________________

For our product of the week, here's Don's review of a stove-top fan:

Don says: "I've seen these small stovetop fans in stores, but I'd never seen one in action until last year, when my local hardware store had one on top of the big drum stove they used to heat the building. It was moving a lot of hot air. At the time I was feeling pretty flush cash-wise and for $23, I decided to get one of the smaller models, a VODA small four-blade model.

"I put it on the cook stove top in November of last year and it's been there ever since. For the entirety of last year's winter it spun, and it really did move the hot air away from the stove and out into the room. I expect that next winter it will be doing the same job again. Can't ask for more than that and I highly recommend it."

(Obligatory disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Affiliate, if you purchase through those links, we earn a small commission.) 

A book house

A friend sent me an article for a house for sale in Ohio. Designed as a two-unit short-term rental, it is notable for ... its books.

Yes, the seller amassed 7,000 hardcover volumes which presumably accompany the sale of the house.

Since the article mentions the seller purchased the books for about ten cents apiece, it's an easy conclusion that he got them from some sort of wholesale "books by the yard" source and hasn't actually read any of them.

Still, after seeing endless real estate listings or interior design photos touting sleek modern furnishings dominated by big-screen TVs, I must admit this listing is a refreshing alternative.

Garden update

Some of you may be wondering how our garden is doing. This is a long post, so grab a cup of tea and follow us as we finally get the raised-bed garden (mostly) installed.

Due to late-season construction efforts, I didn't get everything planted I wanted to plant. However – and this is the critical part – the fencing is done.

Before we get to that, however, let's back up to the point where Don and I finished laying the drip system for the final row of beds. This dates back to early May, when we uncoiled the three-quarter inch irrigation hose...

... and prepared to cut it to 11-foot lengths.

This was not an easy task, since the hose wanted to recoil on itself. So Don came up with a clever solution: He got a hollow metal pipe...

...and set a screw 11 feet in.

Then it was a simple matter of feeding the irrigation hose into the pipe until it bumped into the screw...

... and cutting the pipe to size using a cutter specialized to cut irrigation hose.

We cut nine such pipe lengths.

Then we cut nine two-foot risers.

Next step: Remove the 50-inch-high cattle panels from around the garden. Clearly these were useless for keeping out deer (which is why we had no garden to speak of last year), but were highly effective for keeping the cows out.

With the sides of the garden opened up, we pulled back the unanchored weed cloth and ran a line...

...and marked it with spray paint.

All it had to do was act as a guide.

Then Don hooked up the spade plow to the tractor to dig a trench for laying the irrigation pipe, following the spray-paint markers.

He ran over the trench twice.

Then we used shovels to clear the bottom of the trench.

Ready to lay the pipe.

Each 11-foot section was joined using a T-connector, with a riser sticking out at top. Each riser will come out right in front of a raised bed.

Because things still wanted to twist a bit, we staked each connector with U-stakes to make sure the risers stayed in the correct upright position.

Nine risers, nine raised beds (per row). Then we buried the pipe.

The above tasks were stretched out over several days. Then we got diverted with building the calf pen and milking stall after Maggie had her calf Stormy two weeks earlier than anticipated.

When we resumed work on the garden, it was early June. We repeated the same process we followed when laying out the other three rows of raised beds: Stretching out weed cloth, cutting holes in the fabric for the hose bibs to poke through, then bringing in gravel and raking it out.

Notice how we extended the weed cloth and gravel two feet beyond the fenceline boundary (delineated by the T-posts). This is due to a lesson learned from the garden at our old place: Don't give the cows any excuse to push against the fence in an effort to get to some tasty morsels juuuust on the inside of the fence.

Crucially, however, Don didn't have time to make more raised beds. We were racing the calendar. We needed to let the cows into the larger pasture adjacent to the garden, which clearly we couldn't do until at least the cattle-panel fence was reinstalled. We had two beds already made, which we put in place and filled with soil; but there's room for seven more beds in the last row. Those will have to wait until fall or early spring of next year.

Then it was time to install the pièce de résistance for our garden: Deer netting. We had plans to string this netting as high as we possibly could. Harsh experience has taught us that eight-foot fences are not an effective deterrent against a determined deer. Instead, we had plans to go higher. (Some readers have suggested double fences, but since our sloped garden space is stolen from the limited pasturage we have available for the cows, we opted to go for height rather than increase the garden footprint.)

To this end, we needed to fasten extensions to the existing T-posts. We used iron well rods for this purpose. These well rods come in 21-foot lengths, so we cut them in half to make 10.5-foot risers. To keep rain water from getting inside the pipes, we capped each one with PVC end caps with a small eye-bolt epoxied to the top.

Before strapping the pipes to the T-posts, we strung braided steel cable through the eye-bolts.

Then we placed each pipe against a T-post and used hose clamps to fasten them securely in place.

At first the steel cable drooped between poles.

But once the poles were secure, we pulled the cable taut...

...and strapped it in place using double hose clamps.

 

 

This gave us a fencing height of a dazzling ten and a half feet.

 

Then it was time to string the seven-and-a-half foot deer netting from the high wire. To make it easier to work, we cut the netting to lengths of about 30 feet at a time (enough to string between about three posts), borrowed a high stepladder from a neighbor, and started hanging. This was precarious business. The ground is both sloped and uneven, so climbing the ladder was a two-person job. I was the climber, and Don (who is stronger) was the ladder bracer.

Slowly we worked our way around the garden. At the top of each pole, I wired the deer netting in place...

...then clipped the netting to the high wire using hog rings every two or three feet.

We were working only in the early-morning hours during this stage, since it was too hot during the day. By this point, too, we had re-installed the cattle-panel fence and clipped the bottom of the netting to the tops of the cattle panels using hog rings. Then we let the cows into the pasture.

Here's the height of the fence compared to some of our cows (you can see a blackbird perched at the very top).

Ain't no deer can jump this!

With the garden effectively fenced against deer, I had the opportunity to do something I've been unable to do until this point: WEED.

Anything mulched with new straw (which included all the potatoes) was severely overgrown with wheat. (Since the straw is wheat straw, this isn't unexpected. If anyone wants to plant wheat, simply lay down some straw and water it. An amazing crop of wheat will result.) It seems counterintuitive, but I learned the hard way that the wheat grass tended to fake out the deer, and they were less likely to nibble down the potato plants if the bed was overgrown.

These are some of the overgrown potato beds. Yes, there are potatoes in there.

What a pleasure to be able to weed at last! It took a few days, but finally everything was cleaned up. I like weeding, so this was no hardship.

I was even finally able to transplant the tiny tomato and broccoli seedlings I've been nursing along. Some insects promptly ate them down, so I doubt we'll get any of either vegetable this year.

But that's okay. The deer netting is in place. Next year, the garden will be much more likely to succeed.

The final tally for beds in this garden space is 35 3x8-foot beds, seven of which still aren't built or installed. We've planned the location so the space can be doubled to 70+ beds should it become necessary. While the drip irrigation system isn't hooked up yet (and won't be this year), we have the infrastructure in place to get it operational next year.

At the moment, we have four beds of strawberries, one bed of spaghetti squash, two beds of onions, one bed of bunching onions, eight beds of potatoes, and five beds of garlic. I also have two beds of broccoli and three beds of tomatoes, but as mentioned, they're unlikely to succeed. We also have two empty beds with nothing planted. 

So that's our garden update. Progress progress.