Here’s another Farm Fashion Photo: Rocky in his resplendent Peacock Sheet. Rocky needs to be clipped because he overheats easily. That means he has to wear sheets and blankets when the weather turns cold. Pony sheets usually come in rather dull colors, so it was a treat when my daughter found this one. Makes it easy to find Rocky, even in the far corner of the pasture!
October on the pony farm. Rain. Hail. And hay. Those are three items that don’t go well together. Hay has been a challenge this year because hay is a scarce commodity. In previous years, we would get a call from our hay dealer, asking us how much hay we wanted for the year. “You need 2 ton? 3 tons? I’ve got it! Ready to deliver.”
This year we are calling our hay dealer, asking anxiously, “Second cutting orchard grass? Is it in yet?”
“Not yet,” the patient voice answers, “But we are working down the list, you’ll get it. Not sure when, but you’ll get it.”
Good to hear, but we’re running short now. So we call all the feed stores and hay dealers, trying to track down some orchard grass or timothy or teff. Not looking good, then Bingo! A friend tells us that Wilco in Bremerton has teff hay. Quick, we order the hay, clean out the truck, drive to Bremerton, load up 10 bales, drive home, keeping an eye on the dark sky. Trying to remember when the rain was supposed to start. ‘Huh, look at that dark cloud, the cloud over home. 4:00, didn’t the weather report predict rain at 4? What time is it? 3:45? Oops. Is there room for the truck in a carport? Do we have a tarp? Are those rain drops on the windshield?’
We made it – just made it. Got the truck backed into the carport 5 minutes before the rain and the hail hit. We got a half inch of rain in a half hour. We watched the deluge from the porch, sipping a cup of tea, feeling grateful for empty carports and dry bales of hay.
Mother’s Day is a time for flowers and brunches and manure spreaders! Manure spreaders? Well, yes – my Mother’s Day present this year is a manure spreader. It’s a lovey shiny device that we fill with composted manure. I pull it with the lawn tractor and the spreader does a good job of placing a thin layer of compost onto the pasture. It’s a great improvement over tossing compost out of a wheel barrow with a shovel!
We decided to replant a couple of our horse pastures this year. Used to be, you would go to your local feed store and ask them who they recommended for tilling and replanting a pasture. Used to be, there were always a couple older guys around who did this. They would bring over a small tractor with all the needed implements and do the job. But ‘used to be’ isn’t now. Nobody is doing this sort of work for hire around here. We had to become the old guys who put in pasture. We acquired a tiller and used it hour after hour, tilling up the clover and weeds that were taking over the grass. We filled in the holes and the dips in the field. We spent hours picking up rocks. We tracked down horse pasture seed – this was tricky because there is a shortage of pasture seed. We searched all the local feed stores and found just enough seed. Then we needed to get the manure spreader. We found a place in Washougal that sold the spreader, and after a long day of driving we made it home with the device.
It took a few weeks of work, but now the seed is sprouting. A mist of green covers the soil. We’ll let this new grass grow and thicken for months before we put the ponies on it. It has been a lot of work, but it is worthwhile. Now we have to get back all the other projects that we set aside. There’s a lot of mowing and weeding to do. And I know I have a vegie garden somewhere. I saw it before this project began…
Rosie, the Gardener
This is planting season here in the PNW. Peas have been in the ground since Feb. Lettuce starts are in and it’s a good time to plant onions. Planting has been a bit haphazard this year due to Rosie, being as she thinks it is her responsibility to help. When I dig in a garden bed, she tries to dig next to me. When I shoo her away, she just finds another place to excavate. I think some of those lettuce starts have been planted and dug up 2 or three times.
Last Saturday, I got half the onions planted. I put the remaining onion starts back in the basket and set them on a table outside the back door. I figured they would be fine there overnight. But I forgot about the Gale Warning. Round about midnight, the wind kicked up to 30 knots or so and anything not hammered down went flying. This included my onion starts. They were still tied up with rubber bands into neat little bundles, but those bundles were rolling around the back porch.
When the dogs went out in the morning, Rosie spotted the bundled onion starts and knew instantly that these were the best, new play toys. I walked out a few minutes later and wondered what she was tossing into the air, then I saw the overturned basket and I knew that my future onion crop was in the jaws of my puppy. I did what any panicked gardener would do, I ran towards Rosie yelling, “No, not my onions!”
Rosie reacted like any playful puppy, she flung the little plants skyward with zest. This time the rubber band failed and the bundle broke up. Folks, it was raining Walla Wallas! But not all of them were reaching the ground. Remember that 30 knot wind? It was still blowing. Some of smaller onion starts stayed airborne. Last I saw them they were heading for the daffodil bed or beyond to the neighbor’s place.
Most of the onions hit the ground and Rosie and I scrambled to pick them up. I got most of them, but she grabbed a few and headed for the blackberry bramble around the old stump. Rosie played with her pilfered plants, flinging them around and pretty much burying some of them in the dead leaves and dirt. She wasn’t eating them, so I didn’t barge my way into the sticker bushes. I just let her be and she came out in a few minutes.
Later in the day, we got a good soaking rain, so any onions the pup accidentally planted ought to do just fine. I don’t know, I may clear that bramble out next summer and find a few lovely Walla Walla Sweet onions. Maybe Rosie is going to be a good garden helper…
Winter roses are the unexpected survivors of summer. They are solitary, perched at the end of a twig without benefit of leaves or other blossoms to keep them company. They survive ice and wind and rain, showing that sometimes delicate flowers have great strength. I never pick them to take inside. I take pictures of them and admire them. And, later in the year, when the forsythia blooms, we prune the roses. But that time, even the winter roses are tattered and ready to go. As spring advances, the new buds come out and the rose bushes start their season of growing, culminating the the vivid show of summer.
But for now, there is one blossom, just one. I will check on it every day to see how it fares through the next few weeks. Sometimes, a single blossom is enough.
The deer snuck into the garden last night. They poodled the beans, yep, they gave the bean plants a poodle cut by eating all the leaves in easy range and leaving the poof of leaves at the top of the plant. This is not a style that you want to see in your garden, not at all. Once I saw the damage, I prowled the deer fence, looking for the vulnerable spot, the place where the enemy had breached the defensive wall. Did the miscreants jump over the sagging top of the deer fence? Did the 4 legged marauders sneak between the rails of the gate? Had the deer tunneled under the plum tree and emerged next to the greenhouse, stopping to shake the dirt off their backs before they munched the pole beans and chewed up the strawberries? I do not underestimate these deer!
I looked high and low for evidence and I found it about 2 feet off the ground. I found one hair, stuck to the chain that held the gate closed. Using my best CSI technique honed by hours misspent watching mysteries, I collected the bit of evidence and examined it under my lens of my microscope. It was a sturdy hair, short, brown, but tipped with white. It could have rubbed off the back of a deer as it slid under the chain. We do have some brown horses on the farm, so I went out to the barn and collected a few horse hairs. None had the distinctive white tip and, though a pony will rub up against anything (preferably a human in clean clothes), the ponies are all a bit too chubby to fit through the gap by the gate. The suspect hair was not a dog hair, the dogs have longer hair. It wasn’t a cat hair, the cats were not going to force their way into the garden when they could simply pester the gardener by meowing at the garden gate. No, this was a deer hair and it gave me the clue. It told me where they were entering into my vegie garden so that they could break my plants.
The solution was easy. I planted a steel post in the middle of the gap between the gate and the post. ‘Mind the gap,’ I thought to myself with a chuckle. I also put extra deer fencing over the gate rails and secured the whole structure with two chains. I set the critter cam on a post that faced the gate. I want to see the deer when they find out that their late night picnics are over. I hope all of this works. I hope I solved the crime and that my garden is safe, my plants protected from things that go bump in the night. I will check in the morning and see if I have any beans left…
We fixed the fence to the veggie garden, which kept out the deer. But that also kept the dogs out of the garden. An absence of dogs gave the local rodents a chance to move in. Here is one of our Mashed Potato squash. Apparently it tastes quite good. The rodents had hollowed out 9 of the squash, leaving only one for me to harvest. Next summer, we will have a doggie door on the deer fence to give the dogs access to the garden. And we will cut back the blackberry that shelter the rodents. And we will grow the squash on trellises. We will win over the rodents! Next year, anyway…
Canning SeasonFall is the season of fruit, lots of fruit. And most fruit doesn’t keep well on its own (except for Melrose apples, folk say that only a rock keeps better than a Melrose). Plums and pears and early apples need to be dried or crushed for cider or made into pies or canned as sauces and butters.
This weekend it was time to deal with the plum crop, time to make plum butter and Autumn butter – a blend of plum, apples and pear. Problem is, butters need to be in jars and I was low on jars. This pretty much happens every year. You see, I give away some of the jam I make. Every time a jar is handed to a friend or the UPS man or the mail delivery lady – that means a canning jar goes out of circulation. After a while, I need to buy some new jars. Normally this is not a problem. I just mosey down to our local jar emporium, also known as the hardware store, and I pick up what I need.
But not this year, not in 2020. All those folks who discovered gardening last spring and summer seem to have discovered canning this fall. And they bought jars. The shelves are bare of the standard jars. I hunted for pint jars and ended up getting fancy ones, packaged in a four pack for the same price of a dozen of the plain ones. But I wasn’t complaining. I was glad to find any jars and at least new jars come with the lid and the rim. I didn’t see boxes of lids or rims anywhere.
I thought I had enough jars, but the plum crop was a big one and I cooked up a vat of plum butter. As I started canning, I realized I was short about four jars. I started hunting the shelves in the kitchen and pantry. I found one, then two. I searched my office and discovered a collection of pencils residing in a pint jar. I dumped the pencils into a mug and liberated the jar. One more, I just needed one more. Somewhere in this house, there had to be a pint jar. Back to the kitchen, rummaging through the pantry drawers. There it was, a pint jar halfway full of a golden crab apple liquor. I’m not one to toss out an elixir like that, so I poured the lovely apple scented alcohol into a leftover bottle, washed out the jar and put it in the hot water canner to sterilize.
Today’s canning project is done. The jars are cooling on the counter. I am finished for now. But, If you see pint jars at a local hardware store, let me know. After all there will be boiled cider to can in October. Harvest season isn’t near over yet…
Yes, this could be a still life picture titled – Barn Repair with Pony. It’s a classic moment that every horse owner knows. Horses are tough on barns. They chew on the walls and doorways, they push down fences, they bend metal gates. Barns may be their shelter, but horses (particularly ponies) are always nibbling and fiddling with whatever they can reach.
So, every few years, we get to repair and rebuild. This year, we are installing Dutch doors between the stalls and the paddocks. When the weather turns truly awful, we can close the doors and keep wind blown snow out of the stalls. But before we can mount the new doors, we had to rebuild the door frame. And Cloudy, our oldest mini is helping out by supervising and picking up any tools that are left on the ground. This morning we plan to finish mounting the new door while Cloudy is out to pasture. We don’t need his curious little nose poking into bags of screws or nails.
In the Pacific Northwest, Blackberries are a weed, a scourge, a thorny enemy, and – briefly, in the fall when the berries are ripe – a delight. We have way too many blackberries. The vines stretch through the fences. They blanket old stumps. They sneak into the vegetable garden and fling themselves into the pumpkin patch and try to barricade the corn. We cut them back, dig them up, try to destroy them. This doesn’t work, blackberries are tough, they come back year after year.
But in the fall, we have a truce. The thorny vines dangle their lovely ripe berries over the fences and I -carefully- pick them. I pick a couple colanders full every day. Some of the berries I process right away into cordials or bake into cakes or simple eat fresh by the handful. Most of the berries go into the freezer to be made into jams and syrups during a less busy time of the year. I try to remove the seeds from most of the berries. The seeds are just the right size to get stuck in molars or between teeth. That distracts from the lovely, summery flavors of the jams.
Usually a friend brings over her vintage Squeezo Strainer and we process bags of thawed berries. It is a day of jam making and conversation. But she moved away and I had to come up with another solution. I tried a Norpro SauceMaster with a berry screen. It did remove the seeds, but it had a habit of splurting out the resulting pulp. I moved the whole operation outdoors where I could rinse off my work area with a hose afterwards. Despite the mess, the jam turned out to be wonderful.