Category Archives: Homesteading

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Homesteading

Spring Time Busy

I have been so swamped with Spring garden chores lately that I have not had any time to post stories on my blog. Working on it. Had to get the new blueberries and strawberries planted yesterday. Been cleaning out the water garden for 2 days. Got a new pump and skimmer being delivered later this week and will be installing that.  Planted the new shrub bed 2 weekends ago. Perennials still need some cleanup. Corn needs to go in. Buckwheat to plant for the new bees, which are arriving the 28th. Might even clean the house someday soon…

Meanwhile, working my ass off at home is about a million times better than my “real” job, which steals all my hours.

 

Critters, Homesteading, ShepherdstownWV-1993-2017

Ice Cow 2000

Ice Cow 2000

In the middle of the night, I woke to the sound of something huge right outside my bedroom window, crashing and splintering the ice on the water garden. I struggled out of the covers, and peered out the window, attempting to adjust my sleep filled eyes to the stark moonlight, trying to focus. A humongous, white cow was just emerging from the icy water and clambering up the far bank.  This was a full grown Charolais cow! She had her heavy self and four very sharp hooves, digging around in my hand dug, rubber lined, fish pond. This was not good. I do not keep any cows these days, only a few sheep, horses and chickens. I let them wander around loose on the lawn sometimes to graze, and they will take an occasional drink from the pond, but they don’t ever step down into it. Well, I have seen a chicken or two get wetter than they planned, but they don’t weigh much. They don’t swim well and there is a lot of squawking involved. It is not normal for someone’s cow to be loose in my yard. I sure hope the stupid lummox hasn’t punctured the pond liner. It was designed to handle the weight of a deer hoof but a deer is about nine hundred pounds lighter than a cow. It won’t be possible to repair it until spring and the fish, plants and frogs, down under the mud, will die if the water leaks out now.

This winter has been unusually cold and the water buckets out in the barn keep freezing up solid- every single day lately. We don’t usually get temperatures below zero before January, but it has been down to minus four degrees Fahrenheit already, and has not gone above freezing during the day for three weeks now. I had to buy a plug in stock tank heater, and run an extension cord from the feed room, to try and keep the water open for drinking. There must have been something wrong with the electrical grounding, though, and now I can’t use it. The youngest horse, Cambriana, kept snagging the heater out of the tank with her teeth and throwing it out of the way before she would drink. It was bizarre. I couldn’t figure out why she was doing that. Finally, I put my fingers in the barely warmed water and felt the slightest electrical charge through my hand. Since I was wearing rubber barn boots, and horses are grounded directly through their hoofs, she probably felt more of a zap than I did. So, I’m back to flipping the buckets upside down, kicking the ice out, and hauling two five gallon buckets of water at a time from the house.

Barn path
Barn path

This is a real pain when the snow is deep and drifts across the path I shoveled the day before. I do appreciate having a clean, snowy barnyard instead of a sloppy, muddy one though, so the cold is good for something. When it finally thaws out this spring, I am bound and determined to finally dig a trench out to the barn and bury a water line and electric line out to the barn. Somehow it never seems like such a priority in the warmer weather, when I can easily run a hose out there, and I have been putting it off too long.

Cows can do an amazing amount of damage in a short period of time to shrubs, perennials and lawns, even with the ground frozen. I do not want her hanging around and wrecking more than she has already. My shrubs and fruit trees might look pretty tasty to an herbivore with a boring diet of dried up hay. Since it is way too early to call anybody, I go out to the mudroom, pull on my winter coveralls and snow boots over my flannel pajamas, and head outside to shoo the beast out of the yard. It is really cold outside, the kind of cold that instantly freezes your nose hairs, and I waste no time. I step out the basement door with my arms waving and give her a shout,

“ GIT! Get out of here you stupid cow! Git! You are going to freeze your butt off getting all wet like that. Get on out of here! Git! Git on home! Get out of here! Shoo! Go On!”

Finally, she goes lumbering off through the front woods and I quickly get back inside to warm up by the woodstove. Before heading upstairs to bed I stoke up the stove with some more locust logs and wait for it to take off. At least the house will be nice and warm in the morning.

After I climb back in bed I lay there hoping the pond is not starting to leak. I think up different ways to save my fish and plants if the water level drops drastically over night, mentally locating plastic tubs I can use as temporary aquariums. I listen for the sound of the water pump running dry, even as I drift back to sleep. The pump, which sits down in the water, under the ice, keeps a three- tiered, gurgling, waterfall running twenty four seven. It makes for a soothing sound, good to sleep to, and also quite effective at screening out my neighbors’ barking dogs. The water flows fast enough to keep it from freezing up, and will run through the coldest winter, creating wonderful ice sculptures down each fall. The sound changes according to how much ice forms, but it almost always keeps a small area at the base of the falls open and the wildlife takes full advantage of it. It is a great place to set up the deer camera and watch raccoons, skunks, deer, foxes, oppossums and birds drink.

When I woke up and had breakfast I followed the cows tracks out through the front woods. There were boot prints right behind them and a pick-up truck parked out on the opposite lane, so I figured her owner knew about her escape and was on top of it.  I did not think too much more about it until almost dark when I went out to do the evening chores, and there she was again, on the front lawn, just passing through. So I called all my neighbors with cattle and asked if they were missing one from their herd. No one would claim her. My nearest neighbor said,

“It couldn’t be mine. I’ve got American wire and it won’t get holes in it.”

Ha, Ha. So I called the guy further down the road whose fence actually has two huge holes in it, from when two different vehicles went through it the other day during the snow, and whose cows are known to be impossible to catch. He actually came over and took a look at her and announced,

“Nope, mine are all Hereford crosses. Don’t have any fancy Charolais ones. Pretty though, ain’t she? I could take her if you don’t find her people.”

The cow wandered off again, and I went to bed thinking that if she showed up again I would pen her up in my front paddock and start calling her my own personal freezer beef.

The next morning I heard the sound of men and tractors across the road and went to investigate and say howdy over the fence. The man with the “American wire” fence was loading a freshly killed Red Angus cow unto the back of a pickup. She had broken her leg on the slippery ground and had to be put down. When I asked him about the loose Charolais cow,  he said,

“She couldn’t be mine. We tried to get her in with the others yesterday and she would not cooperate. One of my cows would have been easy to get in.”

This reasoning did not make a lot of sense. Cows are notoriously stubborn and the grass is probably greener on this side, if you can just manage to find it under the snow. Later, however, his wife told me that they did manage to get her in with a bucket of grain, so she must be theirs after all. I guess they have no idea what their own cows look like. You’d think they would all have ear tags or tattoos or something. I mean, they are worth a lot of money when you go to sell them.

Meanwhile, there is no longer a cow cruising through the yard, and things have settled down. So far the pond is still holding water, so it looks like I will not need to repair it after all. However, my freezer still has some room left in it for the next unclaimed beef that wanders in.

 

Wendy lee Maddox, at Edgewisewoods.com

Homesteading, Ritchie CountyWV-1970s

Bunnels Run, Oil and Gas Wells

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Bunnels Run, Oil and Gas-1975

 

McDougal House and Gas Well
McDougal House and Gas Well

The leaves have all fallen so it is possible to see a ways into the woods now, and it’s not rifle season for deer yet, so I take a walk up the hill across the road from us. The two guys that pump the wells up and down the road on Saturdays have just finished shutting them all down so it is finally quiet. It is a beautiful fall day to take my sketchpad and park myself up from the well to draw it. Photographs cannot capture the details and feel of the place. You can barely see it from anywhere because everything metal is so rusty and all the wood is weathered grey and blends in with the tree bark.

When we first moved onto Bunnels Run, all we could smell was oil and gas, everywhere, all the time. It permeated the air, the soil, even the water. Now, after six months, we have gotten used to it and hardly notice the smell anymore. We are still breathing it though and I wonder if maybe it isn’t what’s making us so lazy and wanting to sit rocking all the time. It’s kind of hard to get anything done when you are rocking, kicking back on the porch, just watching things go by. We did get our garden planted and we weed it every morning while waiting for the mailman to come. Mail is darn right exciting when you don’t have a phone. Gives you something to look forward to. We get the  Mother Earth News, Organic Gardening, the Market bulletin and the local paper out of Harrisville so we have something to read. Plus seed catalogs, lots of seed catalogs, like Burpees, R.H. Shumways, lots of others. The Sears catalog is even entertaining and the non glossy pages will do in a pinch if you run out of toilet paper in the outhouse. You have to crumple them up and rub them between your hands first though, to make them more absorbent.

Although we have eighty acres, only five of it is flat bottomland, and it is situated right along the graveled county road. Everything we do down in the bottom is visible to folks going by on the road until the weeds get tall enough to screen us in late summer. We let the Joe Pye (Eupatorium purpureum) and Iron Weed (Vernonia) and Helianthus grow up along the creek so we have privacy down in the creek where we take out baths. The weeds grow way over our heads and the creek has five foot banks so we are well hidden down there. We use Dr Bronners Peppermint soap and rinse off using a bucket up on land in an attempt not to pollute the water too much. Someday maybe we’ll have a bathtub inside. It’s getting a little cold to be taking creek baths these days so we have started to heat water up in a bucket instead.  We pour cupfuls over us standing behind the shack on a rock and at the end dump the last over our heads. That last bit is the best part of a bucket bath.

It is kind of weird to be so far out from everything while at the same time being right on the road. When we get our house on the hill done it will be way different. It’s a long hard climb up there and I don’t expect we’ll get hardly any visitors. We had a new road cut by a guy using a D-5 Cat, but you first have to get across the creek, through a swampy bit on the far bottom, and then  about a half mile up a  really steep, turning road that gets real slick when it rains. We aren’t figuring on coming down much once we finally get up there. At the rate we’re going it will be awhile yet.

For now, we are busy hauling logs down one at a time with our pony, getting the square sills made at the sawmill, stockpiling rough cut lumber, and collecting windows and doors, an old iron bathtub and such.

New House Sills
New House Sills

And then we’ll be rocking awhile on the porch. And once in a while making the long, fifty mile trek to Marietta, Ohio to get better beer. The beer they sell in West Virginia is “near beer”, only three point two percent alcohol and tastes like water. Stroh’s -fire brewed, is the best we’ve got here and it is barely drinkable. Then there’s the visiting we have to do, while we are out that way, which takes the whole rest of the day, and then we get home late for milking and the goats are upset. And then it gets dark so early and all we have is kerosene light so we usually go to bed about two hours after dark. In the morning there is chores, milking, feeding and watering the goats and chickens, heating up water to wash the milk buckets, jars and breakfast dishes. Everything takes so much time, especially laundry. Haul water from the creek, heat it  up on the stove, haul it out to the washtubs, scrub the dirt out on the washboard, squeeze out the soap, rinse them in the other tub, wring out the water, shake the wrinkles out, hang and pin it all on the line, bring it back in before it rains. I don’t really get much time to sketch, or rock, or read, for that matter.

So, now I am sitting here looking down at the oil well. It surely smells stronger up here right by the well head. There is the thirty foot tall metal pole with all the guy wires holding it steady. I think it was originally used when they drilled the hole and now probably only needed if they have to pull something out for repairs. The most interesting part is the twelve foot wooden walking wheel, with the foot wide canvas belt going around it, connecting it to the pumping jack on one end, and the one cylinder natural gas engine on the other.

McGinnis Oil and Gas well
McGinnis Oil and Gas well

There is a thirty or forty foot long, dilapidated wooden shed with a tin roof over everything but the jack and a huge metal tank that the oil and water get pumped into. When they pump they don’t get oil at first. They pull up nothing but hot salty water for hours before oil starts coming up with it. It all gets stored together in the big tank and after awhile the oil rises up and the water settles down and then gets drained off. Eventually the tank will get full enough with oil for them to drain it into a truck down on the road. The wells around here don’t produce very much oil.  Nobody is getting much in the way of royalties, but the free gas is appreciated by everybody. We don’t own the Mineral Rights to our land, they were kept by some previous landowner, but we get free gas just the same. If there is a well on your land or within a hundred feet of your property line you get free gas and there are wells everywhere. When they are pumping, as they do every Saturday, you can hear all the old wooden wheels creaking and groaning with a long, slow rhythm and then you hear the huge one cylinder natural gas engines popping, loudly and slightly off beat, missing occasionally. There aren’t too many guys left who know how to maintain these dinosaurs and they are slowly being replaced with boring Briggs and Stratton gasoline engines. I like these old ones that put out a staccato beat resonating all down the holler that you can actually dance to. When there are five or more going at once it is awesome. Not quiet, like now.

My new little tri- color collie pup is sitting with me as I sketch. He is so

Ranza Puppy with a Pint Jar
Ranza Puppy with a Pint Jar

little that when he stands by the chickens they look bigger than he does. Even a pint jar looks big next to him. We named him Ranza from a name we saw on a mailbox and he is a good boy. He has been teaching himself to herd the goats and chickens and is doing pretty well at it. Climbing up here to the well has tuckered him all out and he is asleep next to me in the leaves. I put away my sketchbook and lean back looking up through the branches. Life is good.

©Wendy lee Maddox, Edgewisewoods.com, March 31st, 2014

Homesteading, Ritchie CountyWV-1970s

Alta’s Mincemeat Pie

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Working at the Midway Diner

It was really cold outside, somewhere in the low twenties, and I was shivering and trying to snuggle closer to the huge cast iron cook stove.  I was about frozen after riding the little Yamaha dirt bike into town wearing my cheap, white polyester waitress uniform. My fingers would not even unbend.

“Good morning, Alta. Is the oven cranked up? I’m freezing. How many pies do you think we’ll need?”

Alta worked the gloves off my hand and tried rubbing some heat into them with her own. It hurt. She fetched a pan of warm water from the back of the stove top and had me lay my hands in that instead. I was starting to thaw out when she handed me a hot cup of coffee, which finally did the trick.

We really did not have time to waste and needed to get cranking before  all the oil riggers and pipeliners showed up hungry at the door. We were the morning crew at the Midway Diner, midway  between Parkersburg and Clarksburg, West Virginia, on old Route 50.

The Pipeliner Guys

There was a whole bunch of guys, down from working on the new Alaskan pipeline, who had come into town these past few days, who started work real early in the morning, so we had to be ready. I had a little trouble gauging just how much food they were likely to eat on a given day.

Alta had a feel for this, though, as she’d been periodically feeding this group, or one similar to it, like the hunters, for the better part of going on forty years. She was a roundy,  plumpish,  good looking farm woman who had lost her husband quite a few years back to a tractor accident. Her kids were all grown and moved off somewhere else and she mothered me as much as I would let her. She still wore the old cotton calico, shirt waist dresses of the fifties and knee high, colored nylons with sneakers for everyday. Her homemade aprons had deep pockets and rick rack edging. I don’t think she ever got cold.

“Well, it’s bitter cold and damp out there”, she said. “I figure they’ll be eating and packing extra food today just to keep warmed up. You’d better figure on ten – twelve cream pies. Make sure there’s at least two peanut butter, one each of coconut cream and lemon meringue and five or six fruit. Better get the coffee started right away too as they’ll be needing to fill all their thermal jugs.”

After hanging up my jacket on the rack by the back door and washing up my hands, I headed out into the diner and bent down behind the long, red Formica counter to get the coffee makings out. That cup that Alta had given me was starting to kick in and before long I might be able to actually function something like a human. It was still only four thirty in the morning – not my best time. You might as well not even try and talk to me before I’ve had my coffee. You might get a grunt but the brain wouldn’t be in gear yet.

I was going to have to make- from scratch mind you- eighteen pies in the next what – two hours?  If I was lucky, and the other help actually showed up on time, I might actually get them done. Better make the coffee good and  strong.

At six thirty A.M I would unlock the front door to the horde of  ravenous beasts- Pipeliner men who smelled of oil and looked grubby enough to have been using crude oil to wash up in. They were always lined up and ready before opening time. We expected them to be working around here for six or eight weeks and they (almost all of them) left really good tips. Considering the usual five dollars a day I would get from the locals, the two dollars a plate I got from the pipeline guys would really help me out.

Pipeliners perked up the whole local economy by staying in our little run down motel, boarding in with some folks, eating at the local restaurants, and telling wild stories about well drilling and working on the Alaska pipeline. They were real friendly to me in the restaurant and sometimes, when the place just got too hectic to handle by myself, a couple of them would slip behind the counter to pitch in by making coffee and getting silverware set up.

They were on some kind of seasonal circuit and showed up every year in the late fall. I guess it got too cold up in Alaska to work outside about then. I enjoyed their company each year but I was also pretty glad to have them leave in the Spring so that I did not have to get up so darn early anymore. Places like the Diner got started later and moved a lot slower after they left.

Mincemeat and Scrapple

“You’d better get a move on girl, them pies aren’t going to make themselves and I am going to need help back here with this tater peeling before long”, Alta hollered in from the kitchen,  “Oh, and do you know anybody who’s planning on butchering hogs sometime soon? I am about out of mincemeat and really need to put up another big batch a’fore long.”

I finished getting six more pots of coffee going and headed back to the warm kitchen with two fresh cups.

“I’ll ask Chip about it when he comes in next time, should be soon. He’s got a whole mess of hogs about ready to go up there. Now the weather has turned seriously cold he is bound to start on killing some.”

Chip was a farmer two hills over from us that always gave me first dibs on the hog heads because he knew I would find some good use for them. His wife, Linda, wasn’t into dealing with that part after she had spent an entire two days cutting and wrapping all the rest of the hogs- they usually did three at a time and it was a big job. A messy, smelly, gross job, that when I helped them with,  left me unable to eat pork for about three weeks.

I usually made Scrapple (or Pon Hos) with my share of the heads- three heads will work up into about sixty pounds of Scrapple in the freezer -enough to last the two of us the whole year and have plenty to trade with friends. Some folks won’t eat it because they have heard it’s made of brains and eyes and such, but really, it is just good pork broth made with whatever meat there is, all ground up, with cornmeal, buckwheat flour and oatmeal, a little sage, salt and pepper.

You cook up a big pot of it just like cornmeal mush, until it gets gloppy-thick. Then you spoon it into bread pans or waxpaper lined shoe boxes and let it cool till it sets up. Then you turn the molds upside down and wrap the little loaves up with freezer paper. It only keeps about a week in the fridge so we have to freeze the rest. Since we don’t have electric at our house, we barter meat and Scrapple for freezer space at the neighbors. To cook it, you cut quarter inch slices, sprinkle some flour on both sides, and fry them brown and crispy in an oiled iron skillet.  Served  with fried eggs, it makes for a good filling meal- breakfast or dinner either one, and it’s cheap to make.

Alta wanted the hogsheads to make her mincemeat pie filling. I have no idea how she makes it-it is a secret recipe and she won’t tell anyone. Her mincemeat pies are by far the best around though. She always gets rave reviews at the church suppers and all her pies are the first to go. I have always made mine vegetarian style, out of green tomatoes and raisins. They are nothing like hers.

Hogsheads

Chip came by the diner for lunch later that day and told me he’d be butchering as soon as he brought in the last of his field corn which depended on it not raining for the next three days. He wanted to know if I could I help by driving the wagon?

“Sure, I’ll get done here about two o’clock. Just give me a holler.”

So we set it up to work on harvesting the last of the corn on Friday. Hog butchering would probably start the next day.  I told Alta  I’d have some hogs heads for her soon, but didn’t tell her exactly when I would have them. We worked steadily along the rest of the morning – we always worked well together.

The next Monday Chip stopped by my house on his way to the feed store with three big, lumpy black plastic bags for me. Inside were the three heads for Alta, all clean and scalded from the weekend butchering. I packed them into the old gas fridge we kept outside  under the eaves.

You couldn’t stand to have the gas fridge inside because it put out nasty fumes, We didn’t know how to get the burners adjusted right to prevent it. We usually kept the extra eggs and the goats milk out there too, and there wasn’t a lot of extra space, so I decided to deliver the heads to Alta’s first thing in the morning.

Three Pig Heads

I had the next day off but it was going to be really hectic. We were trying to build a house way up the hill at our place and we had a lot of work to do. It wasn’t Alta’s day off, though , so I figured  I had better get to her house before she left for work so she’d have time to find a cool place to put them.

When I got there at four the next morning, she was not downstairs yet, so I slipped into her kitchen and very quietly placed the heads, with their eyes and ears and snouts still intact, onto her kitchen counter. It was reminiscent of those monkeys doing “Hear no evil, See no evil, and Speak no evil” and they were all grinning grotesquely as dead pigs do.

Maybe setting the heads up on the counter like that was a bit much,  but it seemed funny at the time. I wanted to hear her reaction to this gruesome trio, so I sat down outside on the dark porch step, out of sight, and waited for her to come down. I did not have to wait long. I heard her slippers scuffing down the wooden stairs, the light switch click on and then,

“Aaaahhh! Aaaahhh!  Wendy! Where are you? You dirty rat! I am going to get you back for this!

I snuck away as fast as I could- she was a little too mad for me to want to risk her seeing me now. I would give her time to cool down. I knew she would, she always had a good sense of humor. It was just a little too early in the day to see it right now. I was  glad I had not caused her to have a heart attack or something.

Some other cooks I found with the same thought

Photo of some other cooks I found with the same thought!

Photo:http://www.freewebs.com/sulphurspringsseniorcenter/Hear_No_Evil,_Speak_No_Evil,_See_No_Evil.jpg  (Check out this site  for a funny video of seniors having fun as well.)

The next morning at work, Alta thanked me for bringing her the heads and told me she brought out the camera and got a picture of them all lined up on the counter like that. She was thinking she might have to send a copy to her kids along with her secret recipe for Mincemeat Pie.

She also said I would never see it coming when she finally figured out how to get me back and she was making it her mission in life. I reckon I deserve it. Sure is good pie though, and I still don’t have her recipe.

Wendy lee Maddox- https://www.edgewisewoods.com

March 29, 2014