Category Archives: Homesteading

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

Bees, Critters, Homesteading, Nelson CountyVA-1980s

Honeybees and Flying Squirrels in the Walls

1 Comment

Honeybees  and Flying Squirrels in the Walls

For about a year and a half, in the eighties, I lived down the road from my place, in Owl Hollow. It was the cutest little house in the back of the Thackers farm. I had to get out and open and close the gate each time I came through the lane, to keep the cows in. The drive was about a third of a mile long and in the winter, my VW bus tended to be parked out by the road, and we walked in. There was only one bedroom, up in the attic, and the three girls shared that. I divided it up with a fabric and two by four wall so my older daughter could have a modicum of privacy from the two little ones. I slept out on the screened in porch on a futon on the floor. When it got cold, I installed insulation and plastic to keep it warmer. The woodstove was in the tiny living room and I kept the window into that room open for the heat. I don’t know how I managed to fit it all in, but I had my weaving loom, treadle sewing machine, and an armchair in there. The kitchen held a sink with gravity fed cold water, an old fifties style refrigerator, a gas cookstove and the kitchen table. I also had my big shelf of canning jars and the China cabinet (turned sideboard) I helped my Dad build when I was a kid in there too. It was pretty tight but homey. There were two tiny little sheds coming off the kitchen. One had a short iron bath tub in it and we kept a pee pot in there. The other was the mudroom entrance with the chest freezer in it and a flap cut into the screend door for the dogs to come and go through. I’ ll bet the whole house measured less than 500 square feet. It was simple and really cheap. Rent was $65.00 a month, electric was maybe $30 dollars and the phone was like $25. I was able to work off the rent by helping the landlord with chores sometimes. I painted the walls up at his house on the hill, mucked out the barn, repaired fence, chased cows, cut firewood. I finally managed to convince them to let me install a hot water heater. They were sure it wouldn’t work on a gravity fed line and the cows got first dibs on the water. It was esy to set up though and I sure enjoyed being able to use that bathtub inside the house. We still had an outhouse for a toilet but we were used to that. There were two large Sugar Maple trees in the yard and the kids had two tire swings hanging from them in the shade. I had a job as a cook at a conference center about 15 miles away and things were starting to look up. I was hoping to build a house on my land nearby as soon as I could swing it but this little house was a fine place for us in the meantime.

The critters who lived in the hollow with us shared the space freely. Cows would wander right up to the door. Skunks and raccoons came in the dog door into the mudroom. Something lived in the walls and I was hoping it was not rats.

One night, while asleep out on my futon, I felt something run right up the covers on top of me. I was not really thinking, being asleep, and I just grabbed at it, fast like. It was warm and furry and definitely alive. I jumped up, grabbed the empty water glass, pushed it inside, and turned on the light to check it out. I had never seen one before, but I was pretty sure it was a flying squirrel! The poor thing was as startled as I was. He didn’t bite me though. I got a half gallon wide mouth jar from the kitchen, rigged up a screen lid for it and went to wake up the kids. I was so relieved we didn’t have rats. I hate rats. Flying squirrels, on the other hand , are cool. He had the biggest round eyes, although he was smallish in size. The kids were good sports about being woke up and after we all had a good look at him, they went back to bed. I took him outside and asked him,

“Please to not come inside again. Living inside the walls is OK, but running across my bed is not. OK?”

He was quiet but I think he got it. It never happened again and when I heard them in the walls at night, it no longer bothered me. Now that I knew who it was.

I was woken on another night by a scritching sound on my pillow. I could not imagine what it was but it was constant and it seemed loud to me. I got up turned on the light, and looked back at my pillow. There were hundreds of honeybees walking across my pillow! Not flying. Not buzzing. Hundreds of tiny feet, walking across my pillow. They were all headed in the same direction and seemed to not notice what was in their way. I st down cross legged on my bed and watched them for awhile. It was very strange for them to be up at night I thought. And strange to be walking, not flying. Quiet too. I decided to have a conversation with them in the same quiet way. I sent my thoughts to them. I asked them ,

“Please, do not walk across my pillow or come inside the house anymore. I don’t mind sharing the house with you, but you need to stay in the walls and use an entrance on the outside. Please don’t sting the kids or scare them and you can stay right where you live now. I don’t want to hurt you. I can’t have you walking around on my pillow though. Please?”

The bees kept marching. I opened the door to the outside for them and they left. I closed the door , went back to bed, a little nervous about noises on my pillow. In the morning, I put my ear against the wall and could hear them working inside, but they never came inside the house after that. I appreciated their cooperation. Bees are usually fairly calm and docile if you treat them right. They have work to do and like to be left alone to do it. I think of them fondly these days while I tend to my bees at home.

-Wendy lee

Writing at https://www.edgewisewoods.com

November 16, 2014

Critters, Homesteading, Nelson CountyVA-1980s

Swimming with Beavers

1 Comment

Swimming with Beavers

Coming home one day, while living up in Freshwater Cove, I crossed the low water bridge and saw a critter in the creek. I stopped and watched as a beaver played around in the water. Hmmm.

“Wonder where he’s headed?”

Two days later there were two up at the pond. They started cutting down trees and dropping them in the water. It took them only two days to gnaw through a Tulip popular that was probably 24 inches in diameter. We started to worry about all the trees on the North slope of the pond. A lodge was built pretty fast and then the tree cutting slowed up. Winter came and went. In Spring, cutting began again and baby beavers emerged. It drove the dogs crazy, seeing those beavers swimming around out there in the middle of their pond. Geshen attempted to outswim them a couple of times, but a dog is no match for a beaver in the water. They would circle around the dogs, making them turn and turn, and eventually exhausting them. I had to go out in the canoe and bring Gesh in before she drowned. She would not give up. When I got her back to shore she lay heaving and gasping on the shore for a good while afterwards.

When the water got warm enough for us to go swimming , the beavers were still there. I could get within about three feet of them if I swam quiet with my eyes right at water level. It was kind of cool to swim with the beavers. Then they started expanding their universe. They built a dam right next to the driveway where the feeder creek came in. The water rose and then started swamping the road out. It was getting really mushy and muddy to drive through. Jimi tore the dam down numerous times but they kept building it right back where it was. He even had a backhoe come in a dredge the creek back out to clear it. We would find him down there , waiting with a gun, daring them to rebuild it. They just waited until he went to bed.

I went down and had a little talk with the beavers.

“If you all want to live, you should try heading on down towards my barn and build a little dam on the creek down there. I could use a little drinking pond for the horses.”

They seemed to understand that and they walked over in that direction directly.

“Wow. That was cool. Didn’t know I could talk beaver.”

Unfortunately, the dogs didn’t get the same message, or not in the right way. Before the beavers had managed to get their new dam finished, and a protective pool around them in the process, Gesh and Poss had ganged up on them and taken them out. They were trying to be good dogs. I felt bad for the beavers but at least the trees were safe again. The rest of the beaver family moved on out shortly thereafter. We didn’t see them again.

Wendy lee,

Writing at https://www.edgewisewoods.com

November 16, 2014

Critters, Homesteading

Resuscitation

5 Comments

Resuscitation

It was such a long way up the hill from the pond, and it took her all morning to finally reach the shady dogwood up on the lawn. There had been a drought going on for weeks now and she knew the ground was going to be really hard to dig in. It couldn’t be put off though. She was not in control of the weather or her body. The sharp edged rocks scattered all over the slope had scraped her belly and probably removed an entire layer of skin. She lay gasping, trying to get up enough energy to dig a proper hole. It mattered, if her family was to survive. The dirt was so hard and dry though, that she had to pee on it just to be able to loosen it enough to claw away a shallow depression. Water would have been nice, but of course, it was now six hundred feet back the way she had come. She tried again. Rested. Scraped some more, using her legs, her nails, all her energy. It would have to do. She felt movement in her innards, a sliding, heaving mass, oozing out of her. One, two, three, rest. Four, five. She collapsed in relief. Started digging again, covering them up as best she could. Not deep enough. She knew that, but it was all she could do. As the hot June sun sank lower behind the hills, she turned and started crawling back down to the pond.

The lawn got mowed once a week by guys on fast, zero-turn mowers. They rolled efficiently over the acreage kicking up dust clouds wherever the grass was thin. Their noise was overpowering on such a quiet day. They had not seen her digging out there and would probably drive right over the spot without realizing anything was there. I stood up, stretching my hunched over back, and walked over to get a closer look. Two of them were not even fully covered. There was no way they would make it through a mowing pass. Grabbing an old flower pot and some fresh soil from the truck, I carefully lifted the two outliers,  and shoveled a little extra dirt on the rest, leaving the other three to their fate of either a mower or a skunk.

The pot sat by the water garden at home all summer long, getting watered by an occasional rain or a passing garden hose. It never looked any different. I finally tipped the pot upside down to check on them in late September, figuring they had died. Two quarter sized baby turtles spilled onto my hand and slowly started to move their legs. They were alive! There was no sign they had ever emerged but there they were. photo credit: http://www.hiltonpond.org/images/TurtlePaintedJuv01.jpg

Now I had to do some quick research on what to do next. When I Googled “caring for Eastern Painted Turtles”,  I got a ton of information. It turns out they had hatched and then hibernated without ever coming out of the soil. I hadn’t known that was a possibility. When they hit my warm hand and started moving, they had broken hibernation. Not a good thing. So now I needed to put together a terrarium for them and care for them until spring, when they would be able to feed themselves.

I had a twenty gallon aquarium in the basement and started to get creative, while they scritched and scratched around in a cardboard box lined with grass clippings on the kitchen counter. Half the space I decided to make a swimming area and half a gravel bed with a miniature stream with plants. I went to the local pet store and got a little water pump, heater and filter, some turtle food, and a fluorescent light with a timer. It was fun to put together and Wallace and Grommet (after the English clay-mation characters) moved right in. They quickly learned to paw at the glass when they saw me come down the stairs in the mornings and I would feed them. They basked under the light, swam in the pool and even floated down the stream over the waterfall. It was nice having them in the house all winter and they grew from the size of a quarter to about two inches across by Spring.

When the water outside in the water garden seemed like it was finally warm enough, I took them outside and set them on a rock near the edge. Our pond is about thirty inches deep, twenty feet long and six

Water Garden
Water Garden

to eight feet wide with a waterfall at the shallow end. There are frogs and plants and a goldfish living in the water and trees and plants all around. It is a fine place for turtles to live. After a bit, one turtle slid into the water and started paddling around, checking it the new home. The second one ( I could not tell them apart) slid in and then sank right down to the bottom of the deep end and did not move. At all. No bubbles. He was dead. He must have gone into shock when he hit the slightly cooler water temperature. I had to reach in and grab him back out. Luckily, during my research on the internet , when I had first discovered them hatched, I had read about how to resuscitate a turtle. Not something you would ever think might actually be necessary to do. But here we were. The poor thing had drowned. I held him on my knee and got hold of his tiny front legs with my fingers and proceeded to gently pump his arms forward and back. Water started coming out his nose and mouth. I held him in my cupped hands to warm him up some and repeated the procedure. He sneezed and shook his head and then started moving his feet. I warmed him up a little more then set him on a flat rock in the sun near the water. He was breathing and looking around and then walked over and got back in the water. This time he swam over to his brother and was fine. Who knew? I was so happy he made it. And so glad I had read how to do that in advance of needing it.

Wallace and Grommet lived happily all year round in the pond and we saw them on a regular basis during the warmer months when we would sit relax there. We did not feed them. They found their own food and were not tame. They went back to being wild as soon as they moved outside.They and the frogs hibernated in the mud in the

Green Frogs
Green Frogs

winter and emerged each spring to grow some more. For four years all was well and they grew to about 4 inches across. Then, one night, a raccoon came in and fished them out, leaving me the shells as evidence. I have since tried putting other turtles I have found in there, but they are never seen for long. I don’t know if they walk away or something comes along and eats them. It is sad. I love turtles and I miss Wallace and Grommet, but at least they had a few good years and were not run over by a mower.

-Wendy lee, writing at https://www.edgewisewoods.com

November 15, 2015

Homesteading, Nelson CountyVA-1980s

The Pond

3 Comments

The Pond

The Pond
The Pond

Living up Freshwater Cove in the eighties we were lucky enough to have great neighbors who let us use their pond. We swam in it, played horeshoes, set up a sauna, ice skated, fished, and just watched it. It was only a couple of acres in size and was installed as part of the flood control after Hurricane Camille ravaged Nelson County in 1969. At is deepest it was probably only about 12 feet but there was a dock and we kept a tiny area to the side of it clean enough to get out on. The springs feeding the pond were small and the turnover of fresh water was kind of limited in late summer when it was hot and dry.

This made for some serious scum of algae and pollen that had to be cleared away before you could jump in. This was a job for the “Scum Busters!”, otherwise known as the kids. We’d send them out to stir it up and clear all the yucky stuff out of the way for the rest of us. They didn’t seem to mind too much. Swimming time is fun time regardless of the quality of the water. One thing we were careful not to do though was touch the bottom any more than was absolutely necessary. Snapping turtles and muck are best avoided. Usually we climbed out on the dock rather than walking in or out along the bank.
Sometimes folks from the city, friends of J and J, would be visiting, and would not know how to act. They would set themselves out in inner tubes and remain still for long periods of time, napping even. This is an invite for the bluegills to nosch on anything interesting on your body, like a mole, or any kind of protuberance really. We were always careful to keep moving. Did I mention we were usually naked? Enough said. One dozing woman actually woke up and yelled “RAPE!

Horseshoes
Horseshoes

 

Something’s getting me!” and came up out of the water pretty darn fast. Some of us found this funny.

We had horse shoe stobs set up on the dam and would play teams. Skins vs. Shorts was one moniker. You had to be careful of yellow jacket nests though. I do not recommend sitting down on a pond bank in August until you have thoroughly checked out the area. They can keep on stinging even after you’ve jumped underwater. Believe me, I know.

There for awhile we had a sauna we built out of saplings cut and bent down in a circle over a fire pit. We found an old green, mildewy smelling, canvas tarp up in the barn and covered it over like a tent. Then we heated up rocks in a fire outside of it and brought them in with a shovel and poured water on them while we all sat around inside. It was a great sauna and we got a lot of use out of it until the pony pushed it down one day while he was mowing the grass.

Some of us thought it would be a good idea to drip irrigate our five acres of organic veggies using the pond water but that did not go over so well in the end. It pays to get permission for that kind of endeavor and it did lower the water level in the pond. It was a gravity fed system, very low key. Just ½ inch black plastic pipe that we drilled holes in run down the length of the rows. It made a big difference that one year during the drought. We had green beans when nobody else did and they went as high as $15.00 a bushel, from $3 the year before. The following year, everybody had irrigated beans and the market dropped back down though. There is no way to win in farming for very long.

One year we raised a bunch of ducks, thinking that would be a good

Ducks
Ducks

idea for the pond. I love ducks, but they are messy and seem to have an innate desire to leave their droppings right where you don’t want them. Like all over the dock. They are also very fond of tomatoes and can devastate a huge patch of ready for market ones in the space of time it takes for you to go to the post office and back. Foxes managed to get any that decided it was a good idea to sit on eggs down at the pond. The only successful mama was the one who kept her nest right under the rabbit hutch. She would hiss at you like a snake if you came near.
A couple of years we were able to ice skate on the pond. It was probably around 1983-84. We built bonfires to warm up with and had a blast. People dug up skates that hadn’t been used in many years. I don’t think I have used mine since either. I kind of miss ice skating. We used to have winters where you could play ice hockey for about 6 weeks but that all stopped back about 1972.

One time, coming up the driveway, I saw a couple of beavers down by the low water bridge. They found their way up to the pond about two days later and started gnawing down trees on the North side. They were cutting through Tulip poplars too big to get your arms around in one night. Dropping them right in the water. They built a lodge and started raising a family. You could swim around out there in the water with them and get pretty close, which was kind of neat. Then they started attracting the attention of the dogs. We had a couple of

Geshen and Possum
Geshen and Possum

border collie type dogs and Geshen, the female, was bound and determined to catch herself a beaver. She would swim out and try to get behind them the same way she got behind groundhogs on land. Beavers can swim forever though and they did their best to exhaust her and get her to drown. I had to go out in the boat and haul her in. Then the beavers started building a dam just upstream of the pond right where the road up to J and J’s crossed, causing it to go all swampy. J had to keep tearing the dam down and they kept building it back. Guns were going to be next. I decided to have a little discussion with the beavers, and told them they needed to move on. I suggested they head down stream towards where my barn was and build a little dam there in the creek. I could use a deeper watering hole for the horses. They actually did! However, before they got it all built, the dogs got their revenge and that was the end of that.

These days the pond has silted in so much that nobody wants to swim in it anymore, except the snappers. I loved having it there though and seriously miss living in a place where you can just peel off your clothes and jump in whenever you like. Someday, I hope to live near water again.

-Wendy lee,

writing at edgewisewoods.com