David and Goliath

The Methodist Church in Elmer held the pumpkin chucking competition today. Our church entered for the first time. We had no idea what to expect from the other churches, we had tried to do some recon but got nowhere. So with no idea what anyone else was building, we designed ours to fit in a pick up truck and really worked hard to get the most power we could out of our design. We were pretty proud of our little catapult and pretty excited to show it off today.

Then we saw the competition for the first time. They were not built to fit in a pickup truck. Most came in on flat bed trailers. If you look real close at the middle catapult, the tiny little one in the middle of the picture, that's ours. Click the picture for a larger image and with a magnifying glass, you might see it.




Two were so big, the teams brought a front end loader to hang the counter weights.

Them(left) us(right)

We hung our counter weight by hand.

It was a little intimidating. Being the new guys, having all the other churches commenting about the little catapult. But we had done our homework. We knew the weight of the pumpkins would be between 5 and 7 lbs. We had calculated moment of inertia of our throwing arm, we knew how much energy we were transferring to the pumpkin. We even watched video of our catapult frame by frame and calculated throwing angles, kinetic energy, and some other things. We had a well designed catapult.

As these things were towering over us, I kept thinking how much energy it would require to get a throwing arm that size rotating and how much faster our little throwing arm would accelerate. But still, it was hard not to be overwhelmed by the size of these monstrous machines.

The other teams started doing a few practice throws and their catapults sure looked slow compared to ours. But slow on a 25' arm might still beat our little 12' throwing arm. My team wanted to do a couple of practice shots too. I suggested that we just wait and see what the others could do. We already know what ours can do and I was starting to believe that if we didn't win, at least we'd make a good showing and I wanted to surprise people. There were a few comments in the crowd about the church with the little catapult not throwing any pumpkins.

team Shiloh

We nervously walked around for two hours waiting for the competition to start. There was a lot to do. There was a live band, hot dogs and hamburgers, baked goods, several kids games to play, a pumpkin seed spitting contest (the winner was over 29'...wow), and a skillet throwing contest. There were two hay rides running continuously. You could even enter a scare crow making contest where participants scrambled to stuff scattered clothes with straw. The church that put this on did a really great job.

It was finally 4:00, pumpkin chucking time. Each team got three throws. To make things go faster, every other catapult would fire together. That meant catapults 1,3, and 5 would be launching at the same time. We were catapult #3. After a 10 count, we pulled the release cord. The giant machines to our right and left slowly slung around while ours whipped the pumpkin down range. Our pumpkin sailed past the other two. The second and third rounds went just about the same.

I was tending the catapult but lots of people I knew in the crowd told me later that everybody was talking about the little catapult and how it was beating all the big catapults. We hadn't seen the numbers, they had three men in the field who would run to the landing spots of the pumpkins. Someone with a rangefinder would then measure the distance to the men and write it all down on a chart. We hadn't seen the numbers but we thought we were out in front. It seemed like the guys marking the landing spots kept running toward us when everybody else would fire and away from us whenever we fired.

for a very big (9M) full size video click here

The second part of the competition was the accuracy contest. They stood a scarecrow 50' from the catapults and each team had 3 chances to hit the scarecrow. It might sound easy to hit a target 50' away but keep in mind, these catapults were designed to throw hundreds of feet with trajectories going over 100' high. Hitting a 6' tall scarecrow at ground height right in front of you was completely different. We really weren't prepared.

Not knowing what to do, we dropped most of the weight off our arm, and moved our sling release pin forward about 15 degrees. We figured this would be a shorter throw and would throw pretty flat to the ground. Our first throw was a record setter...7 feet...the wrong direction.

We added some weight and tried again. It was a hard throw and a straight, flat throw just above the ground. We were the first team in the competition's 4 year history to actually hit the scarecrow. We barely nicked it's glove. It counted. We were told that we could skip our 3rd throw if we wanted to since we had our successful hit. No, we wanted a real hit. No glove nicks for us.

Our third throw took off at 50 or 60 mph and hit the scarecrow square in the middle of the chest. The pumpkin exploded, the scarecrow's 2x4 spine snapped in two. The crowd went wild. We tried to act like we felt bad about the scarecrow. We didn't, we felt great.

In the end, the little catapult from Shiloh came in first place for distance at 96 yards, came in first place for accuracy, being the only team to hit the thing (and we did it twice), and won "best all around" for winning the other two. We walked away with two trophies, and the big "best all around" trophy is on it's way to us soon.

When the competition was done, the other teams started disassembling their catapults for the ride home. The front end loaders were moving weights, winches and come-alongs were lowering timbers. Flat bed trailers and dump trucks were pulling onto the field to load the catapults for transport. Four guys picked ours up, put it in the back of a pickup and we drove away.

I think I have a plan for next year that will have twice the punch in an even smaller package.

team Shiloh with one broken scarecrow.

Moving On

It's been almost a month since I've posted. That's because the garden's done for the year and this is a gardening blog. I still plan to sit down and make up a success and failure list of everything I grew this year but not today.

Today, I'm posting about a catapult.

I got a call from my friend's sister, and cousin's wife, Val. She wanted to know if I'd be interested in helping the teenagers at the church build a catapult to compete in a pumpkin throwing contest. What a ridiculous question. This was over the summer. I said sure as long as we have two things: 1) Enough time to build it, and 2) materials or a budget for materials.

I got a second call at the beginning of October, maybe it was the very end of September asking if I was still interested because the contest was in 4 weeks. So much for enough time to build it.

I went down to the church that evening and we all talked about catapults. We drew diagrams and by the end of the evening half a dozen high school and college kids and I had a pretty good working design on paper.

I put our sketches in Cad to let the computer do all the math and dimensions so I wouldn't have to.


We all spent the week trying to find materials. Everybody on the building team had a few scraps to bring, a couple of church members offered to let us look through their lumber piles, and Val's dad dropped off a load of everything we were missing from our materials list.

The following Sunday we started building. We got a lot done, had to make a lot of design changes as we went, and it really started looking like something. We did the same thing the next Sunday.





For the second build weekend, I had the flu. I showed up to help but really wasn't much help. I am really impressed with the group of guys who worked on this. They had good ideas, and really took charge. I offered advice and helped a little but these are country kids, they knew what they were doing.

It stands about 7' tall, has a 12' throwing arm with a 9' sling attached to the end of the arm. I borrowed 540 lbs of Olympic weights from work as a counterweight.

The third weekend was last Sunday and we got together to test it and make adjustments to the weights, release angle, sling, and anything else that needed adjusting to get maximum distance for the contest. A crowd from the church showed up and brought things to throw, mostly pumpkins. I still had the flu so I showed up late and mostly just watched. The best throw was 242 feet. That's not bad. I don't think it's enough to win but for our first year entering the contest, I'm satisfied.

If you want to see the full sized video and don't mind a 7M download,
it's temporarily available here.

The competition is this afternoon. We have no idea what to expect from the other churches that are competing and we have no idea what types of catapults they'll have. Later I'll post how we did.

Clean up weekend.

I did a lot of garden clean up this weekend. I rolled up the hoses I use to water everything and hung them. I pulled the posts for my climbing cucumber vines and the stakes for my garden sprinkler. I mowed down everything in the garden except for the corn and sugar sorghum. I tried to mow down the corn but my mower couldn't make it through so it still stands for the moment.

The only thing in the garden that was still producing was the two tomato plants. I always grow tomatoes in tomato cages to keep them growing up off the ground. This year, my first planting got a disease and died so I got my second planting in late, I never really got back to them to trellis them and they grew wild. I'm sure they were 10' across, and so dense you could barely see the tomatoes. In fact, when I ran the mower over them, there were so many ripe tomatoes down under the plants that I didn't know about, the mower got stuck in the slippery, slimy, smashed mound of tomatoes. I couldn't even get off the mower for fear of sinking in the goo. With some fancy mower driving, I was able to get out with clean shoes.

I turned my rain gauge over so it doesn't freeze and crack this winter and cut down all the string I was using to trellis my cucumbers, peas, and luffa sponges.

I de-headed all my sorghum and have the heads set aside to dry. I plan to remove the seeds, toast them and try millet porridge, something that's eaten as a staple in arid parts of the world.

I also cut a couple of sorghum stalks, stripped off the outer green layer to get to the white interior and chewed a piece. It is surprisingly sweet. It's not really edible because it's so course but it does contain a lot of sugar. Interesting.

I removed one more small and slightly green pumpkin from the mystery vine and mowed the vine down when I mowed the yard.

I pulled the last two pears off of the Bosc pear tree that did pretty good this summer and pulled the first apple off my 5-in-1 apple trees.



I'll probably end up with two dozen decent apples this year but most need a few more weeks.

I cut down my Bartlett pear tree that did not fair so well. I'll replace it with something else in the spring.

The luffa squash did well. I didn't know anything about these but we figured it out. If you let them dry on the vine they turn brown with a papery skin. Strip off the skin and you have luffa sponges. I don't really know why rubbing abrasive squash innards on your skin is good but my wife seems happy with the results.


I don't know what these stupid sponges sell for but they grow like weeds, in fact I have one that's sprouting in my burn pile right now from a rotten squash we threw in there over the summer. A half dozen vines will produce a hundred or more and other than needing lots of water, they're easy to grow.

I think I paid almost $5 for 15 seeds for this unusual plant. I might get into the luffa seed business. I could have easily had a hundred squash if I had wanted to go to the trouble to clean them all. Here's a picture of the seeds I got from one squash.




We opened a jar of pickles. I like them, wife thought they were too tart. We all thought they were a little soggy. I've got a big pressure canner and it took so long to get the canning jars and boiling water bath up to temperature that I ended up over cooking the pickles and now they're soggy. Still good to eat.

We also opened a jar of canned peaches. They were great. Much better than the ones that are picked early for commercial canning. Mine were much softer and tasted more like fresh peaches than what you'd buy in the store because they were canned ripe. If you want the "crunch" from canned fruit, this didn't have it.

The only thing left is apples. I hope I'll get a few a week into November but everything else is done.

I think I need to do a garden score card for each thing I tried to grow this year.

Almost done

The season's almost over. I plan to mow just about everything down tomorrow. The only thing still producing are the tomatoes and we stopped picking any a month ago. I planned on posting this stuff last week.. I took these pictures last week but I got busy so here's what everything looked like last week. I've probably got apples that are ready by now. I'll have to get out there and check. I didn't get many but the trees aren't very big yet.






The mystery vine is definately a pumpkin. It's been cut off the vine and now it's on our porch hoping it lasts until Halloween.






The sorghum is definately ready and I'll be cutting it tomorrow to see if it actually tastes sweet. I'll even be trying a bowl of sorghum porridge. I'll let you know how it tastes. Since we are lucky to live in a country where we have food options and we don't choose sorghum porridge, my expectations are low but I could be suprised.




And the fire blight is back. Bad this time. I'll be cutting down the bartlett pear tree tomorrow. We actually got 3 good pears from this tree but it's been infected all season. My bosc pear tree had some fire blight and even a couple of apple trees had a little but I think this tree is the source. Every time this tree shows a bad branch, something else has a bad branch a few days later. If I get rid of this tree, I might get rid of the problem all together. I'll plant something less prone to disease next year. I guess this is why nobody grows pears commercially around here.

Country Living

No gardening post today.

Friday, on the way home from work, I got a phone call from my brother. He had been cutting down some dead trees around his house. We were expecting the remnants of Hurricane Friday night and Saturday and he wanted to get these down before they were blown down onto his house.

When you cut down a tree, you can usually control the direction it falls by how you cut your cuts with the chainsaw. Unfortunately this tree was pretty rotten at the bottom and broke apart and fell the wrong way, toward his garage.

This tree was probably 60 feet high, 2 feet in diameter, and only 20 feet from the back of his garage. If it had fallen all the way, his 3 car garage and all it's contents would have been completely flat. Fortunately, it came to rest against another tree. But now he had a bigger problem than he had before.

We spent the evening trying to get a rope tied near the top of this 60' tree so we could pull it over the right way. We tried shooting an arrow through a notch in the tree with a fishing line attached. We then switched to a slingshot. My brother stood on the garage roof and I held the fishing pole from the ground. It took dozens of shots, but it worked. We used the fishing line to pull up some heavier string and then used that to pull up some rope. Everything takes longer in the rain when it's getting dark.

But we had the rope tied at the top of the tree right where we wanted it. My brother pulled his 4WD pickup out to the edge of the soybean field and with a few lengths of chain, we got the rope out to his truck and he pulled. The tree lifted about a foot and the rope snapped with a snap that sounded like a rifle discharge. The tree fell right at the end of the little branch that had been holding it before. It now looked like it would fall any second. We had not made it better.

We've got a friend in the tree cutting business. We called him. No answer. My brother drove to his house, not there. Stopped by his parents house, no body home. So it was just us.

We drove the 20 miles to Lowes to get a 150' foot length of heavier rope and some 500W flood lights. Drove 20 miles back to his house and worked until about 10:00 and gave up. We had run out of fishing line, masons line, and hitting the bullseye in the dark was not working very well.

The next morning, the tree was still standing, we started working at sun-up. It took us several hours to get the new rope in just the right spot. We had to weave it over and under several other branches of other trees , it kept getting tangled, We pulled up weights to get it over some branches and then let the weight fall, we shot string over others. It was kind of like knitting a sweater with a a slingshot from 50' away above the tree canopy, sometimes with binoculars. A friend of ours stopped by with a tractor do to the pulling this time but we took so long and he had to go.

It took us about 4 hours but we had the rope where we wanted it and tried to pull qwith my brother's truck again. It lifted off the other tree. He was out at the lane with the rope threaded around a couple of trees and couldn't see what was happening. I radioed my brother to keep moving, don't stop. The tree went over center and fell exactly where we wanted it to fall.

Done with the tree, I headed home. My grandmother passed away a week and a half ago and we were having the memorial service Saturday afternoon. I was pretty dirty and disgusting from the morning's work and despritely needed a shower before the service. When I got home, the wind and rain really started. My wife, thinking we might loose electric started to fill the bathtub with water. You can scoop a gallon of water out of the tub and at least you can flush the toilet when the electric's out. It's also nice to have some water for hand washing or other things. We don't have city water or sewer or gas. When the electric's out, everything is out.

She only got a few inches of water in the tub and we lost electric. I got a crappy sponge bath out of the 3" of water in the tub, got dressed and went to the service. The church didn't have any electric and it was hot and miserable in there. We got home hot, sticky, rain soaked, and with no shower. At dusk, I got out the oil lanterns and set one up in the living room, one in the dining room, one in the bathroom we couldn't flush (fortunately I'm a guy and I've got an acre and a half), and one in my daughter's room.

After the kids were down, my wife and I went to bed, in our clothes, her in a recliner chair and me on the couch. We were just too disgusting to get into bed.

The electric came back on about 3:00am and woke us up. We got up and took showers and went to bed for real.

This morning, when I woke up, I headed out the kitchen door. I stopped just before getting a face full of spider.




I now have it in a plastic container. I'll move it somewhere else or it'll build a web in exactly the same place every night. After I took a few flash photos, it started cutting down the web. I guess it thought the flash was morning.

Mystery Solved and Bumpy Pears

The mystery vine has another fruit. It grew fast after the last one was destroyed in an unsupervised toddler accident only 20 days ago. The new fruit is starting to turn orange so I'm officially going with pumpkin.




The dead leaves all around the pumpkin are from a wicked case of downy mildew. A fungus that grew on most of the leaves and made them dull, white and fuzzy. Now they're dead. There are new leaves so I think we'll make it until this pumpkin is ready.

As I was checking out the garden today, I squeezed a pear. It fell off the tree in my hand. I guess that means it's ready to be picked but it seems awfully firm. I'll leave the rest for a few more days at least.



It's the bumpiest pear I've ever seen.

Just a Boring August Update

My first batch of peaches in July were awful. The bugs had almost completely destroyed the fruit before it ever had a chance to get ripe. I got to eat a few but that was only because I was willing to eat around to cut out the damaged parts. I never would have bought any peaches that looked as bad as mine. I may have found the solution to my problem.





My other peach tree, the Belle of Georga, is starting to ripen now and there's no insect damage. It' s late enough in the season that there aren't as many bugs around now. I found a semi-soft peach yesterday and ate the softest half right off the tree just to see how they tasted. It was a little crunchier than I like but really sweet. White flesh instead of the yellow flesh on my Gala peach. The few I picked today will need a couple of days on the counter to ripen but they look great.




If these work out well, I might order a couple of more Bell of Georga peach trees in the spring.

As you can see, we've also got tomatoes, (on the bottom of the basket) and all the grapes are ripe now. 6 varieties. 3 seedless (one of which has seeds - I don't know why), and 3 with seeds. I prefer seedless grapes but had read that the seeded varieties produce bigger fruit so I tried both. I could fill this basket 10 times with just bunches of grapes but how many grapes can one family really eat? I've never heard of frozen or canned grapes so I guess the rest will go to waste.

The best in my opinion are the white Lakemont seedless (Just like the white grapes in the supermarket), the red Reliance seedless (same variety as the supermarket) and the dark purple Concord seeded grapes.

Concord are what's used to make grape juice and they taste just like grape juice. I also have a variety called Glenora that's dark purple. This tastes just like grape soda. I never realized that the grape flavor in grape juice was different than the grape flavor in grape soda until I tried these grapes.

The fire blight I haven't seen in a month or more has shown up again on a pear tree. Since the limb is dead all the way to the trunk, I had to cut several inches of the top of the trunk. This meant cutting off one of my 5 remaining pears. It's not ready yet but I took a bite anyway. Needs another month.





The sugar sorghum seed heads (say that 3 times fast) are starting to turn orange. I'm going to try to use the seedheads like any other variety of sorghum. Sorghum is grown in Africa and the Middle East as food for people and animals. My dad actually grew several acres of sorghum as a grain crop when I was a kid growing up on a farm. My parents had a bird seed store and mixed their own seed. Millet (sorghum seeds) was one of the ingredients in their mixed bird seed.




When this stuff is used as people food, they toast the seeds and then boil them with water to make a porage similar to oatmeal. Mixed with milk and sugar it's eaten in lots of places, just not here. I'll let you know how it turns out in a month or so.