Fence, flowers, mulch and scythes

Its been a busy and good couple of weeks for us.  Last weekend, the kids and I transplanted several perennials from in town - 65 raspberry canes, 3 clematises and an assortment of herbs.  We also moved the arbor from in town.  And, if that wasn't enough, I couldn't help but stop by a garden center (or two) and pick up a few other plants.  :D  This little corner of the garden is starting to fill in...

The kids planting raspberries

Arbor from the south west gate

Arbor (and Jacob) from inside the garden

Catherine planting flowers

During the week last week, Jeremy managed to get all the wire strung for the fence.  That's no small feat when you consier that there's about half a mile of wire required to do 3 pairs of strands!  Then, this past weekend we started weaving withey's into the fence to make a more significant barrier to the various critters (namely deer) that would like to eat our garden.  As of the end of the day Sunday, here's where we were:

Cedar withes woven into the fence

While we've been working on these projects, Catherine has taken it to heart to plant a flower garden.  She has now planted some hundreds of seeds, plants and bulbs along the north fence line of the garden as well as helped plant nasturtiums where our squash will be this year.  It's been a huge help.

Catherine planting flowers

On Saturday we also stumbled across someone selling 2 scythes!  They are in good condition - one needs a significant re-peening to be in good cutting shape and the other is like new - and even came with a snath that's about Jeremy's size.  Now we can both cut grass or brush and we have a back up snath for someone who wants to help (and is over 6' tall).  Sweet!

New scythe blades!

Lastly, Jeremy lucked out and had his boss from work get us in touch with a tree service.  They need somewhere to dump many dump truck loads of chipped mulch and logs and we happen to need a TON (actually several tons) of mulch for the garden and various other projects around the farm.  SCORE!!  No pictures of this yet, but they've already brought by 2 dump truck loads of wood for us with the promise of many more.  Now we just have to get all that spread...

What to do when a foundation falls from the sky…

Most of you are probably unaware, but we have been deeply embroiled in a debate about the foundation for our future house.  Both of us would like to have a stone foundation for a variety of reasons.  A stone foundation means we need A LOT of stone – many, many tons worth.  Buying that much stone would be completely out of the question for our budget which leaves us with the unappealing prospect of quarrying it out of our woodlot.  Digging and moving that much stone would take all winter when we need to be working timbers and means that we would need to clear a road into the woods to be able to get the stone out.  We would also have to dig up a large chunk of the ridge which would mean clearing several trees and figuring out how to get rock up the ledge to the top tier of the ridge.  Ugh.  Thus our debate – do we quarry on our property or do a traditional concrete foundation?  We’ve been going back and forth on this issue for several weeks.

Then, this past Sunday we saw the following ad in the Lawrence Journal World:  “Scythe - includes spare blade. Also barn stuff. All for $50.”

We’re always looking for good tools and even a cheaper, heavier scythe would be put to good use on the farm, so we called.  It took until Tuesday to make it out to look at the scythe. 

When Jeremy arrived, he met the current owner - a wonderful older lady named Peggy.  She took him into the barn to see the scythe and proceeded to tell him that the “barn stuff” listed in the ad included all of the following:  a small stock tank, a garden cart, a digging/pry bar, a cider press and a hand cultivator.  The scythe also turned out to be 2 scythes, 2 blades and a hand held brush cutter.  Wow!  Jeremy expressed his gratitude, put the scythes into the car and explained that he would have to come back with our truck or the hatchback to get the rest.

Fast forward a few hours.  I get home from work and Jeremy shows me the scythes.  They’re all a bit rusted, but in very salvageable condition.  All 3 blades are stamped blades, not forged blades which means we will either have to peen out the edge a fair bit or continue to sharpen them with a file (and much more often).  Jeremy rattled off the list of other things we needed to go pick up and my eyes kept getting bigger, and bigger and bigger.  The scythes by themselves were easily worth the $50.  I’m sure it was evident on my face that I couldn’t believe our luck.  After dinner, we got in the matrix and drove back down to pick up the rest of the “barn stuff”.

Everything miraculously fit into the back of the matrix with the seats folded down (we were surprised to – this is why we bought a hatchback).  After loading, we went to the house to tell Peggy thank you and so that I could meet her.  When we got there, she was rolling a small compost tumbler out of the garage which she said we were welcome to have as part of the “barn stuff” also.  We inquired about a set of scaffolding that was in the barn and she replied that she had bought it for $15 and would be happy to sell it to us for $15.  Sold! 

As we were saying goodbye and getting ready to drive home, we complimented her on the stone facing on her house.  She explained that the stones came from the foundation excavation.  Then she said that they had dug up a lot more stone when they recently re-did their water line and the stone was piled up at the end of a road into the woods (she pointed the road out).  If we could use some stone, we were welcome to it. 

At this point, I’m about to fall over in shock.  Did she really just say that she had free stone?  That all we needed to do was go pick it up?  I looked at Jeremy and could tell that he was thinking the same thing.  We calmly say that we’ll walk over and take a look.  What we found was 2 piles of newly dug rock.  The first was about 6 feet tall and 8 or 10 feet around.  The second was about 4 feet tall and 6 or 8 feet around.  There was also a 50 yard long, 2-3 foot tall windrow of older stone that had clearly been dumped there many years ago.  In total, we were looking at enough stone to do the bath house foundation, the house foundation and likely the root cellar and barn foundations.  It was all right there at the end of an easily drivable road, piled and waiting to be picked up.  We couldn’t believe it.

We walked back up to the house to talk to Peggy.  We asked if she was talking about just the new stone or all the stone.  She laughed, looked around the yard at all the stones growing out of the ground and said, “take all you want – we have no shortage here!”  Apparently the older stone came out of the foundation to the house when it was built in 1980.  We asked if we could please pay her something for it and she flatly refused.

From here the only possible sticking point would be if we needed to move stone right now.  We had planned to quarry stone in the winter after we finished the bath house.  Taking a few weeks (at least) to move stone now would mean delaying that project to the point that we could easily run out of non-freezing weather.  So we asked how long we had to pick up the rock.  She said they weren’t going to sell the house until next March and we were welcome to pick it up anytime between now and then. 

So, in short, we went looking for a scythe and found a foundation.  Unbelievable.  Absolutely unbelievable. 

In other news, we will be spending our winter ferrying many tons of rock from Peggy’s house to the farm where it will get sorted and stacked in preparation for building the foundation.  If any of you have some free time and want some good productive exercise – let us know! 

More groundwork for the greenhouse

Today we got up at the unpleasant hour of 5:00 so that we could work before the heat of the day today (predicted high 104).  We were around with breakfast, supplies and lunch and at the farm at 7:00AM.  Once there, we were joined by friends from church - Julie and her daughters Jessie and Ellie.  Their help was very much appreciated!

Catherine and Ellie helping remove rocks

First, Jeremy and Jacob measured how far out of level our existing pad was.  It turns out it was a bit more than we really wanted, so Jeremy started the tractor up and we did some more leveling.  We learned some key things during the process of taking the back, North edge down another foot or so.  Namely, sooner or later when you cut into a hill, you're going to hit rocks.  Big ones.  Rocks that don't really want to go anywhere.

Getting to be experts at switching implements on the tractor....

This rock took the tractor to dig it out and all 3 adults to lift it out of the greenhouse

Thankfully, between Julie and I working with the shovel and the tractor, we were able to remove the offending rocks. Someday perhaps they'll make their way into a foundation somewhere...

Julie and I surveying the newly staked corners

We also did a little bit of mowing with the scythe while the tractor was doing its work.  Julie got pretty proficient with the tool and we managed to clear out some more next to our drive.  I also got to peen the scythe for the first time!  It turned out to be pretty painless and it definitely improved the performance of the blade.  I suspect that I will need to get even better at it to effectively cut grass someday, but it was a good start.

After the pad was re-leveled, we had lunch together before moving on to the next thing on the list - staking out the true corners for the greenhouse.  This required much measuring and adjusting of stakes, but eventually we got it done.  Then we lined up the hoops for the greenhouse to get them ready to bolt together.  At this point it was 1:30 and getting HOT!  We decided to pack up and head home for some A/C.  Not a bad 5 or so hours work for the day.

Daisy decided that under the picnic table was the place to be

The newly re-leveled pad

Goats and Scythes part 2

We camped at the farm this past weekend and had the opportunity to do lots of things.  We also, finally, got to bring our 2 goats home to the farm!  On Saturday afternoon, our neighbor brought the goats over and put them in the enclosure we had built for them out of cattle panels.  They immediately started eating all the weedy bits which made us very happy.  The plan is to have 2 enclosures set up at all times – the one they’re in and the one they’ll go to next.  When they move out of one, we’ll move it to a new place so that they always have their next spot set up.  This way they can help us clear out the weeds from a large area (hopefully) of the farm.  Based on this first few days, it takes them about 2 days to eat down the weeds in a 16x16 square.

Over the course of Saturday evening and Sunday, we started to get to know the boys.  Hercules (the white one) is very people friendly.  He was a bottle baby and loves to be scratched around the ears and shoulders.  He’s the buck and is a cross between a La Mancha and a Nigerian Dwarf which means he has the very little cute ears of a La Mancha but is the much more manageable size of a Nigerian Dwarf.  He also has the gentle disposition of a Nigerian.  Rollins (the black one) is much more reserved and is a full blood Nigerian dwarf.  He will come up to investigate you if you’re still enough, but he doesn’t really seem to like lots of attention.  He may warm up over time or he may not.  For now, he’s eating weeds and that’s what we need!  Hercules is also the dominant goat – he pushes Rollins around a bit.  They’re very entertaining to watch.  We put a dog house and a large dog carrier in the pen for them to use as shelter and shade.  It only took about 5 minutes before one of them was on top of the dog carrier!  They jumped up and down and all around playing king of the hill.  Rollins is nimble enough to jump onto either structure, but Hercules can really only get on the dog carrier with the flat roof.  When we came out Sunday morning, they were each in a little house so apparently it worked out.

The other thing we did lots of this weekend (other than watching the goats play) was work with our scythes.  I have a favorite tool now!  On Saturday, we staked out where the first greenhouse is going to go and then mowed that area with the scythes.  It didn’t take very long and gave us a very good visual picture of how big the greenhouse really is.  I also mowed a path through our top field over to our neighbor’s so that we could stop walking through the tall grass to get there.  On Sunday, we staked out the second greenhouse and used the scythes again to clear out that area and the fence line on the south side.  It took about 2 hours to mow that quarter acre of dense weeds and small saplings.  I’m pretty positive that it would be much faster to mow just grass or even just grass and smaller weeds.  Even so, they say that the original acre was the area that one man could mow in a day and it looks like we could keep that pace up.  Not bad for nearly complete newbies.

Jeremy using the brush blade on the fenceline

Jeremy honing his blade while I mow

Mowing with the scythe is very meditative.  There is a rhythm to the work that you just don’t get with a string trimmer or a power mower.  The blade cuts through the grass/weeds in a swath about 3 inches deep and 4 feet wide and lays most of the cut material in a pile on your left.  The rhythm goes swing, step, return, swing, step, return.  The steps are tiny but steady.  The physical effort required for each swing is minute and spread over the whole body so that no one body part is overly worked.  At the end of using the blade for 2 hours straight, I felt completely….fine.  I wasn’t really tired and no parts of me were more tired than any others.  It was great!

First greenhouse site mown Saturday afternoon

The area we cut Sunday morning as I finish the last swath

There is a definite difference between the ditch blade and the brush blade though.  The extra weight and depth of the brush blade make it very difficult to use for open field mowing.  It really doesn’t cut grass well at all.  It excelled at clearing the fence line of years of accumulated saplings though.  The ditch blade, by comparison, cut the grass quite well and would go through very small saplings and woody weeds easily.  It won’t do year old saplings though.  The difference in the 2 tells me that if we’re going to use scythes to do our own hay or to keep larger areas weed free, we’ll be investing in either a longer ditch blade or a grass blade.  That will enable both of us to cut a larger area efficiently.

 

 

After mowing the area, we raked up all the cut weeds and grass and created our first compost pile on the farm – it was a surprising amount of material!  One day all the weeds will become awesome garden soil.  I have to admit that raking up all the cut material and building the compost pile was a job.  Luckily, Jacob was there and was a huge help.  Aside from taking most of pictures in this post, he also manned the wheel barrow ferrying weeds from the field to the compost pile.  He’s really getting to be quite strong and is a very hard worker.

Note the compost pile in the center of the picture - about a 4 foot cube

We started mowing at 8:00AM and we finished raking at about 12:30 (2 hours mowing and 2 hours-ish raking).  We were all hot and tired at that point so we headed for the RV to have lunch and rest.  Our plan was to have nap time/family time after we ate and then go on a short hike to a large (4 acre) pond in the woods just north of our farm.  A quiet afternoon spent enjoying the quiet and exploring the woods sounded fabulous after the morning’s work.  Then we’d pick Catherine up from her sleep over next door and go home in time for everyone to have dinner, shower and be in bed on time.  Since I used the word “plan” in this paragraph, you can guess that this isn’t how the afternoon/evening played out.  That will be a topic for our next post!

Tomatoes and cutting grass

I made a quick trip out to the last yesterday evening to water.  Since it takes about an hour to water everything (with soaker hoses), I did a few things while I waited.  First, I made a couple of alterations to the goat enclosure.  We are now just missing a shelter for the little guys.  It looks the same as the last picture, so nothing new to see on that. 

Then, I planted 12 tomatoes that we bought at the farmer's market last Saturday!  They are planted along the newly cleared fence.  Eventually, there will be grapes along this fenceline also.  With a lot of luck, this means we'll have some fresh tomatoes and maybe enough to make some salsa or spagetti sauce.  There are 6 cherokee purples, 2 amana oranges and 4 black krims.  We also have a rutgers and an arkansas traveler planted in the other bed bringing our total to 14 tomatoes planted.

Newly planted tomatoes

Last but not least, I got to play with the scythes!  I cleared out some brush around the water meter and continued clearing along the front fenceline.  You can see in the picture below that the 2 scythes did an awesome job of taking out the 5 foot tall clumps of grasses that had been in this spot.  Using the scythe was not physically demanding at all.  They were sharp enough to take out all of the weedy/grassy stuff on this part of the farm, although the brush blade did a much faster job on the really thick clumps of grass.  It also cut through this stuff much faster than a weed eater.  I'm excited to continue learning how to use this ancient tool!

Freshly cut grass (used to be 5 feet tall)

We also started the process of getting our tractor running again.  We ordered new brakes for it that should come in early next week.  We'll air up the front tires and see if the tubes inside them are  still good or not next.  Then it will just need a new battery to be in reasonable working order.  For those that don't know, our tractor is a 1949 Ford 8N.  Its a small tractor - not much bigger than a big riding lawn mower - and is very mechanically simple.  That makes it pretty perfect for what we're doing.

Goats and Scythes

Yesterday the chickens found their way to our new neighbors’ house.  Hopefully they will enjoy their new home and will provide their new owners with delicious eggs.  The chicken tractor will hopefully provide them shelter for now and a good brooder space for their future chicken endeavors. 

Chicken tractor loaded and ready

Here is the goat pen now set up in the top field.

You may notice something missing from the pen – the goats!  We didn’t quite have everything we needed to have a safe and healthy place for the boys.  We have to find/build a mobile shelter for them and because these are bucks with horns, we need something for them to rub their horns on.  We’ll work on that this week with the goal of bringing the boys over later in the week.  Fortunately, our neighbors are very kind to let us work on this as we’re out there.  With a little luck and a little work, we’ll have the goats home by the end of the week.

The scythe’s also arrived yesterday.  We fitted them to ourselves and set the grips and snath’s (the long handle).  We each have a snath fitted to us – the slightly bent one is cut and fit for me and the straight one is cut and fit for Jeremy.  The snath has to be sized so that when you hold it at rest, the blade hovers a couple of inches over the ground.  This makes it so that as you twist to mow, the blade should glide over the ground without digging in or flying up too high.  While I can hold Jeremy’s snath with a blade on it, it’s really a couple of inches too long – the blade touches the ground when my arms are at rest.  Likewise when Jeremy holds my snath, the blade hovers much too high off the ground.  Fortunately, it is an easy thing to switch blades between snaths, so we should each be able to use both blades with no problems.

Proper fit with blade held comfortably just above the ground

Fully assembled scythe

We have 2 different styles of scythe blade also – a ditch blade and a brush blade.  The ditch blade is the all-purpose blade that can cut grass and small weeds easily.  It is very lightweight (weighs about a pound) and is longer to be able to cut more material per stroke.  It will likely be the one we use the most to keep the place tidy.  The brush blade is shorter and stronger so that it can cut through small saplings (up to about ½ inch) and is what we’ll use for clearing out some of the more overgrown parts of the property.  There is a third kind of scythe blade – the grass blade.  It is longer and thinner than the ditch blade (comes in up to a 36” length vs. the 16-22” ditch blade) and is really only good for cutting grass/hay and grains.  Since we have very little pasture that is just grass at this point, we figured we would wait on getting a real haying/harvesting scythe.  The ditch blade should serve for any grass we need to cut right now.  These will get tested out this afternoon hopefully and we’ll let you know how they go!  If you want to learn more about scythes, please check out www.scythesupply.com.  These guys really know their stuff!

Brush blade on the left, ditch blade on the right.  The red is the blade cover - these guys are SHARP!