Category Archives: Homesteading

homestead building, canning, drying, log hauling, hay making, creek flooding

Homesteading, Ritchie CountyWV-1970s

Creek Crossing

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West Virginia is mostly hills with some flatter, rich bottom land in between each ridge. There are what we call actual mountains in the 3000-4000+ foot range on the eastern side of the state and there are also some gently rolling open fields in the Eastern Panhandle and along the bigger rivers. In Ritchie County, located in the NW Central part of the state, what we have is waves of wooded hills with narrow troughs of bottom land in between. Usually there is a sizable creek meandering through the red clay, silt and loam of these valleys, and often times no bridges to get from the road to the other side. The creeks flood on a regular basis and will cover any low water cement bridge, so many folks keep their vehicles on the road side of the bridge during rainy spells and rely on a footbridge to get themselves across to their house during high water.

Our creek crossing was just a  tractor-wide track cut into the creek bank, angled in an upside down V shape, so flowing water did not wash it out too much. Bedrock lined the creek bottom and normally most of the mud washed away, leaving a fairly stable roadbed in shallow water. We could drive the pickup or the tractor through just fine when the ground was dry, but it could get tricky climbing out after some long rains.

We were building a house across the creek, way up on top of the hill, and needed to haul our stack of sawmill lumber up, a little at a time. The Ford 9N tractor was old, the hill was steep and the trailer small. It had been raining off and on for a week but the ground seemed thirsty enough to handle it. We hitched the trailer to the tractor, loaded a stack of lumber, and drove down into the crossing. The load was heavy and the trailer sunk into the mud more than expected. We had to rock the tractor back and forth some, which churned up the mud and made it even gummier.

Meanwhile, heavy clouds started rolling in over the ridge. We never could see weather until it was right on top of us, with the hill blocking the view to the west.

It started to rain. The tires dug in a little deeper. The clay on the steep bank got slicker and slicker. The tractor was going nowhere with this heavy load behind it.

 We started tossing the boards up on the far bank to lighten the load. It rained harder.

Bunnels Run is part of a huge watershed and upstream about 4 miles it runs through the little town of Pennsboro, where plenty of roofs and concrete contribute to massive amount of fast runoff. Our little creek can grow from 12 feet wide to 200 feet wide in the space of 45 minutes if the ground is already saturated from previous rains, and it rains hard enough. Being stuck in the creek when it starts to rising is a scary thing.

I am on the tractor, driving, and Eck gets in the creek with a heavy pole wedged against the draw bar, trying to help push the 9n up the slope. He shoved some brush in front of the tires for traction. It continues to rain. It rains harder. The wheels spin and the creek slowly starts to rise.

The neighbors see we are having trouble and send their two teenage boys, who climb down into the creek to help push. Somebody hands them each a pole and now three of them are wedging the poles into the muck and trying to lever the tractor up the hill. In low gear, I am trying to crawl up the hill without spinning. The creek continues to rise as we inch ever so slowly forward.

The guys are in water up to their thighs and the engine is still clear of the rising water. I wish we had a tree or something we could chain a come along around to help, but there is nothing but elderberry and small black willow bushes growing nearby.

The rain keeps coming down and the creek keeps on rising. The guys are up to their waists now and we are all getting panicky. We can not afford to lose this tractor. We can also not have anyone get swept away. Another neighbor hooks up a rope and pulls from the front. That seems to be the tipping point. The tractor is slowly, steadily, climbing out. Whew!

We quickly reload the lumber after reaching flat ground again and park the tractor on the old railway berm, away from the creek. We are able to cross back over the creek to our side using the neighbors single pole foot bridge. The rain keeps coming. The creek rises a couple of more feet before it spreads out all over the bottom. We got out just in time.

We are so glad to have neighbors who go above and beyond when we need them. We will be ready and willing whenever they need help in return.

South Jersey Pine BarrensNJ-1960-73

Muckwalking

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As a Kid in South Jersey -1960’s

I grew up on a small lake gouged out of an old and shallower cranberry bog. There was a whole string of these lakes in South Jersey, with earthen dams and small swamps and creeks between them . Every spring, each of the lakes would be let down so people could access the shoreline and clean up beaches or build and repair their docks. One lake at a time would be lowered for a week or two each spring.As the upper lake would drain, it would refill the lake below it. There were wooden and concrete boxes built out in the water above the culvert pipes under each dam. The water level was regulated by either adding a 2 X 6 board, to raise it, or removing one from to lower it. It was easy to do but no one except the President of each lake association was allowed to do it. I remember my dad being in charge the years I was growing up there on Mimosa Lake.

Even though we knew we would be expected to help with all the springtime chores involving lake clean up, all us kids always looked forward to the lake coming down. It meant it was time for muckwalking all around the perimeter, finding small treasures dropped from boats and rescuing stranded fish from shallow pools. It was fun and everything looked different from that perspective, down in the muck.

My family kept a whole bunch of 20 gallon tanks in the basement to put rescued fish in as temporary holding pens and as entertainment while the lake filled back up. We found pickerel, and sunnies mostly, but also newts and snakes and turtles. The lake was never drained totally dry but sometimes higher sections were left pretty exposed. One year in particular, the lake was held down for longer than usual and much lower too. The channel was clearly exposed. I think they must have been doing some major dam repairs that year, or maybe it was because of the severe lakeweed problem the year before. Some people did not seem to understand that you should not fertilize grass right down to the waters edge because it ran off into the lake and caused severe over growth of what we called seaweed. It was so bad one year that I nearly drowned when I swam the length of the lake and got tangled in the long strands.

Originally, we kids all walked in the muck barefoot but after one kid got bit by a snapping turtle buried in the muck and several of us cut our feet on glass, we graduated to old sneakers. Sometime the mud was so sucky that it would pull our shoes off as we tried to extricate ourselves from the deeper spots.I am sure our mothers made us take our stinky clothes off outside before coming in to take a bath. There is nothing quite like the smell of lake muck and it took more than a few baths to wear off.

Some parents made use of their kids liking to explore in the muck. My dad would send us down with buckets to fill with heavy, goopy muck to use as fertilizer for his lawn. He had one of the thickest, greenest lawns around, with a thick, muck, topsoil layer above the white sand for the grass to grow in. He also ran plastic pipes down to a water pump in the cove below our house and irrigated the whole lawn with rich lake water. We had all these switches on the kitchen wall where he could turn on each zone as needed. During fire season, when the Pine Barrens were burning, he would aim a few at the roof to keep flying embers from catching the roof on fire.

One year we found a pure white clay bank exposed along the lake edge and we made pinch pots from it, firing them in a bonfire. We found bicycles, boats, fishing rods and lures, and once, the remains of a neighbors missing dog who had disappeared that winter when the ice was too thin to walk on. There was a reward for finding poor Max and Robert got a new bicycle for bringing him home. There were lots of turtles, both King and Snapper hiding in the muck. The turtles were always bad about eating the baby ducks so each spring we rounded up the mothers and ducklings and kept them in protective pens until they got bigger. There were quite a few kids living on each lake and we would wander in groups to muck-walk, traveling from lake to lake as the water levels changed. It would have been too dangerous to go alone as some of the mud was like quicksand and you needed help getting out of it. If you were gone all day and not bothering your parents you could get out of some boring chores, so we were pretty darn good at staying gone. We all had to be back home shortly after the 6 pm fire whistle though, or we could end up grounded the next day.

I have fond memories of exploring all the nooks and crannies of the shorelines with the other kids.  Sometimes I still enjoy squishing mud between my toes, but I am a lot more careful of putting my feet where I can’t see the bottom these days. I was braver back then.

-Edgewise Wendy

Fruits and Veggies, Homesteading

Raised Beds From Round Bale Feeders

A Round, Raised Strawberry Bed

Every year I try something new in the garden. This year I am growing strawberries in a raised bed, something I have wanted to do for awhile now. I dreaded having to get down on my hands and knees to pick them all again this year. Not to mention the weeding. I can never keep up with the weeding of the strawberry bed.

For the last few years my strawberry patch shared space with my blueberry bushes, which also made it hard to pick the blueberries without stepping all over the plants. I did not want to spend a lot of money on building raised beds  and have been trying to come up with an idea for years.

I tried growing them in straw bales , but when the bales rotted, as they must do eventually, the poor strawberry plants ended up back down at ground level again. I had to rescue them and put them in a hilled up bed in the veggie garden. They did fine there last season, supplying us with enough berries for both eating fresh and stocking the freezer, but they took up too much space in the garden and I still had to squat down  to weed and pick.

I think I have finally found a workable solution. Time will tell.  I am going to re-purpose the old galvanized, round bale feeder, from years back when we had 4 horses to feed. It has been sitting unused out in the woods. It is 8 feet across and 30 inches deep. Perfect.

Of course, water is something we have had way too much of for the past year, breaking all the previous annual rainfall records, with 68 inches in 2018. Just  in the last 24 hours we have had 5.6 inches and as of May 5th we are already at 19.8 inches of rainfall for the year. Watering has not been an issue yet.

I bought 9 yards of topsoil mixed with mushroom compost to fill my new round bale bed, which has turned out to be way too much. It would have been much cheaper and probably better to use composted barn manure but I did not have any finished compost sitting around. I will be cleaning out the barn soon, if the barnyard ever dries out, and then it will need to be turned and aged. I will have plenty of compost later in the season.

We rolled the bale feeder out of the woods, through the pasture and onto the back lawn in full sun. I will walk by it at least twice a day on the way to the barn to feed the horse and chickens.

Leveling the round bale feeder

Just before I left to visit my mother for a week, I ordered the topsoil delivery and built a ramp up to the new bed with the 2×6’s I normally use to load the push mower into the truck. Since the yard is not level (it IS West Virginia) I recycled an old rubber truck mat to fill the gap on the bottom side. I like to leave Jeff with a list of things he could possibly do while I am away and wanted to make it as easy as possible for him.

Seeing that it was going to be a little hard for us to reach four feet into the middle, I installed an old plastic water conditioner tank  in the center as a water reservoir before the soil arrived. I can run capillary ropes from it into the bed to slowly water the bed as needed.

Jeff pushed 46 wheelbarrow loads of soil up there while I was gone.  It was like magic. I only needed to add another 6 loads before I planted. Mine were not full loads as soil is heavy and I could only manage about 24 shovel fulls to a load. I only toppled the wheelbarrow once going up the ramp.

Ramp to roll wheelbarrow loads of soil into raised bed

The 50 bare root strawberry plants(25 Cavendish, 25 Flavorfest    ) from  Nourse Farms arrived the second week in April and I planted them the same day. They grew leaves quickly and I mulched them after a couple of weeks. I was hoping to collect some pine straw from a neighbors yard but ended up using a couple of bags of shredded hardwood instead.  They seem happy.

Round Bale Raised bed, newly planted, with water reservoir

 

 

 

Update: Strawberries-Fall 2019

Nicely grown strawberry plants

The first planting of strawberries in the round bale feeder did so well that i installed another right beside it, planting the runners that grew from the first batch. There was enough soil leftover from filling the first bed to fill the second one as well. I used some old roof tin to fill the lower level gaps on the second bed and raked up pine needles from a neighbors yard for more mulch. Next spring we should have a great strawberry crop. I walk by on the way to the barn and pick out the few weeds without even hardly bending over. The capilary ropes worked great when I left for a week right after transplanting. The whole system is working  is great!

Capilary ropes for self watering

Elderberries and Blueberries

While I was ordering the strawberries, I also bought two more elderberry plants (Samdal and Samyl)   and 6 more highbush blueberries to fill out my 24 plant block. This will be way too many blueberries for us, so I will be trading berries for other things next year.

I added 10 pounds of pelletized sulfur to make the soil Ph more acidic for the blueberries and will be laying down cardboard and mulching over top of it to keep the weeds down. The tree pruners for the power company dropped off three dump truck loads of wood chips  this summer and I forked a thick layer of those over the cardboard around the blueberries in November. We have had plenty of rain and all the plants look healthy. I put hardware cloth around the babies to deter rabbits.

Crabapples and Dwarfing Apple Roostocks

I also talked to a friend who grows cider apples about what kind of rootstock I would need to graft the town crabapple to. I want to try and keep some part of this favorite tree alive since it will not live forever. I decided on a Cummins G-11 dwarfing rootstock for disease resistance and will  try my hand at grafting cuttings onto them. I ordered 10 bare rootstock for that project and then got 2 already grafted cider apple varieties ( Roxbury Russet  G-11   and Harrison G-11 ) so I can maybe make my own cider, later on down the road.

Cummins G-11 Rootstocks freshly potted

I planted the two trees and potted up the ten rootstocks, and so far, they all are growing their first leaves and looking good.

I will prune some cuttings from the town crabapple tree in a few weeks and graft some while attempting to root others. I am excited to finally be doing this. I have been meaning to for years, now.

Update: My cider apples grew well over the summer. The rootstocks I potted up for grafting the crabapple on are fine but the grafts did not take. I will try again this spring.

There are always so many possibilities and projects as a gardener that I will never run out of things to try.

Edgewise Wendy

Thanks for reading,

-Edgewise Wendy

writing at Edgewisewoods,

Edgewise Travels and Edgewise Wendy, once again. Winter allows me more time and our internet is finally working again.

 

 

Critters, Homesteading

Do Chickens Need Heat?

Some people near me are worried that their chickens cannot handle the frigid cold we are experiencing at the moment. For starters, it only got down to 0.9F here last night and there was no wind. Chickens can handle this just fine as long as they have shelter from the wind, unfrozen water and dry bedding.
I have kept chickens since 1974 and we did not have electricity back then. The chickens insisted on sleeping on what amounted to a windowless window sill in our tiny goat barn. The only time they had issues was when it went down to minus 25 for three days. Some of them got frostbite on their combs. They healed quickly and got on with being chickens.
These days, my chickens have a fort Knox kind of coop to protect them from our marauding foxes, coons, possums, weasels and coyotes. There are three rooms. The inner roosting and laying room has windows to the south and a partial concrete floor, the adjoining wired and roofed coop has a skylight and is open on the east side and joins the horse stall on the south side. The third room is inside the horse barn and is where I raise chicks, when we have them. It is kind of dark unless the brood lamps are on and the hens don’t spend much time there.
When we got the (Polar Vortex!) wind advisory, I stapled plastic on the open east side of the chicken coop and the horse stall, which snugged things up. I have heated water buckets for the chickens and the horse, so they have water. I also scattered dry hay in the chicken pen and the horse stall. I use the deep litter method in my barn, meaning that as the manure piles up, more bedding goes on and it sits there, fairly dry and composting all winter. It is warmer than bare ground and the chickens love to scratch around in it. I turn them into the horse stall every couple of weeks to clean up and they help to break down the horse manure. The second horse stall, where I feed and keep the water, is kept as dry hard ground.
My 26 chickens and horse were all fine this morning. Animals get used to cold. Chickens have built in down jackets. Even if their combs freeze, they will be fine. Mara had ice in her whiskers, the same way I had my nose hairs freeze on the way out to the barn. We are all OK.
Maybe if we were to get an extended spell of minus zero temps, I would break down and plug in a couple of brooder lamps. I certainly would if we had young chicks, but the older hens are hardy and seem just fine without supplemental heat.

-Wendy lee