This Farm Note is from the archives, before I began to regularly post on the blog. The Farm Notes began in 1999 and were shared for those years with a group of friends and family. Over the coming year I will post periodically from those archived “Notes.”
The first hint of fall shows in the valley with slightly cooler nighttime temperatures, lower humidity. The days have shortened and the leaves on the Tulip poplar begin to turn.
The rhythms of our day change to match the dying summer. The final beans are harvested and stored in buckets waiting on Cindy and me to find the time to shell. The wire trellis supporting the beans, cucumbers and squash are rolled up. When the vines dry we will burn the trellises free and store for next year. The tomatoes are past their peak productivity. If nursed along we should be able to glean a few stunted fruit well into early October.
The muscadine vines are ripening signaling wine and jam making ahead in our future. The pear tree is weighed down, each branch holding an impossible large weight on slender support.
I planted the first of the fall garden last week, white egg turnips. That will be followed by kale and mustard. Greens are what we will crave when the mercury heads towards the bottom of the glass.
The weather continues a dry pattern leaving the pastures dry and brittle, the dirt blooms powder puffs as the hoe hits the ground. Only sporadic rain this summer leaves uncertain about how many cattle to carry over the winter months. Hay prices will rise.
Our friends, Melanie and Sara, were over last night for dinner: we provided the country fried steak, mashed potatoes and gravy. They brought squash casserole, crowder peas and some delicious blueberry crepes. It is a tired theme of these notes but all four of us delighted in eating a meal largely produced from our two farms.
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Reading this weekend: A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm by Edwin Way Teale
Am glad you are recycling these – as I missed them earlier. And am also guessing this summer (’14) the weather has been significantly different from the year of the original post, no?
So today I have a pair of questions:
Do you notice tulip poplar turning before walnut?
Burning the wire trellis to clean it up… what are you using (for trellis), and how is it holding up over time?
Clem,
Thanks for checking in:
Tulip poplar: nope, but we have a poplar in front of the barn and the nearest walnuts are up in the back forty. I’d have to see ’em side by side.
Wire: Well, I use old fencing for my trellis. By the time it get’s to the bean and squash category it is pretty beat-up. So, I’m guessing the pieces usually last about four burnings before they are trashed?
Teale: I have slept since then, you know. It is of an ilk, that I like, of the back to the land screed. I recall it as a well-written fireside book.
BTW, I just noticed that my book on gourds was written by well known plant scientist Hyde Bailey. Pretty cool!
Oooops… also wanted to know what you thought of Teale’s book (A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm)… and as you reflect on the question, has your opinion of the book fermented with the passage of time since you read it?
Not sure I’ve ever seen a tulip tree next to a walnut either… and I’m not a tree expert by any means, but a nagging hunch makes me want to bet the walnut will trumpet arrival of the fall before the Liriodendran.
I took down an old woven wire fence many years ago back in Indiana. Have no idea how long it had been there. It had lots of grass and other ‘stuff’ grown into it and I rolled it up and burned the contents to repurpose the fence for garden support (sound familiar?)… So I managed to make up some tomato cages but they were awful and I wasn’t impressed. The fence may have been too weathered, I may have burned it too hot, or I’m just less patient (or some combination of all).
Teale’s book can be picked up for a song, and it sounds like something to set alongside Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold. So thanks for the mention.
Here’s a bit of trivia… L. Hyde Bailey died on Christmas Day in 1954. The last class I took in graduate school was Horticultural Crop Breeding. Those two unrelated facts need not imply that I knew the former tidbit… Wikipedia helped 🙂
If you collect farming memoirs or guidebooks the following two books should be added to your collection:
• Quest for Walden: the “country book” in American popular literature by Loren C. Owings
• The Simple Life: plain living and high thinking in American culture by David Shia
The first is a descriptive bibliography. The second is a survey of the literature and history surrounding the publication of the works.
Enjoy,