Wildlife

This morning, as I was pulling out of the driveway for work, I spotted something moving in the far corner of the property. The groundhog population has been on the rise and I've got holes in the ground all over the place so I first thought it was the groundhog I've been after for a few weeks.

I watched for a few seconds and it wasn't a groundhog. I wasn't sure what it was, I could only see the top half of it because the ground drops off right where it was standing. It didn't move quite like anything I was familiar with so I kept watching. A minute or so later I realized it was a raccoon. Odd to see a raccoon in the day time and this one wasn't acting very raccooney. Slow moving, almost staggering, didn't seem to notice the cat that was watching it from only 30 feet away, didn't seem to notice me. I called the house from the driveway and told my wife to keep the kids inside and call the cat in. We've had a few cases of rabies in our area in the past few months and I didn't want to take any chances.

I was trying to deciding if I had time to go back into the house and get a gun when the raccoon started across the field. By the time I got back it would have been gone so I just watched to make sure it kept moving. It did. I left for work.

Later, I got a call from home. Raccoon's back. Cat's in the house. Wife called the township to get in touch with animal control. Now we don't actually have animal control but there's an animal shelter not too far away and the guy that owns that will come out if the county calls him. Nobody at the township answered the phone so the next call was to me.

That's probably best, I called the guy a few years ago when I thought we might have a rabid skunk. He suggested calling the state police to shoot it. I told him I can shoot it, I just thought somebody might want to check to see if it's rabid once it's dead. He wasn't that interested so I just shot the skunk.

Animal control wasn't coming out and there wasn't much I could do about a sick raccoon from work so I suggested calling my dad to shoot it. I assume he did because my mom called and said that the crisis was over and I noticed a bunch of turkey vultures eating something in the back field this evening.

Which leads me to the real reason for today's post: We've got eagles. They've been a township over for 20 years but just started venturing out this far a couple of years ago. We see them more often every year and today there were two birds out at the carcass that didn't look like vultures. I got the camera and crept as close as I could get to get some pictures. I crept from tree to tree for cover and tried to hide behind a brush pile but eagles have good eyes and he spooked before I really got close enough to get a good picture but here they are.

Bald eagle in the field

spooked (by me)



perched in a dead tree waiting for me to leave



A slightly closer view of the tree

I Lost My Hidey Hole

Years ago, when my wife's sister was staying with us, we put up a wall in our very large living room to make a temporary bedroom for her.

In the 6 or 7 years since then, that temporary room has been my permanent office. All it had in it was a book shelf, desk, and the computer. We left the door open but had a gate across the door to keep the 2 year old from breaking the computer.

The time has come when he needs his own room. And the only available room in the house is my office. So we moved me out and moved him in. He's got a new room with a fire truck big-boy-bed. I've got a desk in the middle of the dining room. It's a big dining room so there' s room but there's also people. I used my office to get away from the noise and wildness of a house filled with wives and kids. Now that's gone.

My old quiet office

In fact, I'm typing this now with one kid trying to wedge himself between me and the desk and another telling me over and over in my ear that there's somebody on TV doing something. I don't know what because I'm trying to pay attention to my typing. If I say "okay" over and over, I'm hoping she'll be satisfied and go back to watching TV. I can't act like I don't enjoy the other one wedging himself between me and the desk because if he realizes it annoys me, he'll make it his mission for the day. Since this move, he's started proudly announcing several times a day that he's "pestering dad now". I have to just wait for him to give up on his own.

This sucks. I want my hidey hole back.

my new office (children removed for the picture)

Not This Year

I'm not going to garden this year. I did it for the past several years and I didn't like it. I did it to learn, not for fun or to eat. Like most projects I take on, I absorb all I can until I've reached the point of diminishing returns, the point where another year of trying it won't teach me enough more to make it worth the effort.

I could learn a lot more but I'm way too lazy. I only learn things during the steep part of the learning curve. I make up or guess at the rest.

scientific proof that gardening
is no longer worth the work

Even if I'm not putting in a garden, I've still got all of the fruit trees, grapes, blackberries, asparagus, strawberries, and rhubarb. This stuff will be around for a long time so I'll keep working at that. When the country eventually runs out of other people's money, I'll need to eat something.

The lone surviving pear tree has a lot of pear blossoms this year. I got 3 pears last year.

little pears

The peach trees are starting to drop flower petals.

peach blossoms

And we cut asparagus for the first time this morning.

asparagus and rhubarb in the background

A New Batch of Trees

I was at a conference in Baltimore Md this week. I was sitting at a table taking a break between classes and a walk through the exibit hall. A guy walking buy asked if I minded if he sat down. Of course I said "No, have a seat." He was also waiting for the exibit hall to open and we started chatting.

This was a trade conference so he and I had work in common, even though he worked in Austin TX and I work in NJ. We had almost an hour to kill so the conversation eventually made its way to the economy, politics, and lots of other stuff. At one point, he confessed that he had bought several acres in Pennsylvania with a plan to farm if the economy really went south. I was suprised. I've got lots of close friends who are making similar plans: buying wood stoves, stockpiling supplies, buying small farm equipment, and stashing cash. But this was the first time I heard someone I had just met say the same.

I told him that I started planting fruit trees, grapes, and lots of other stuff a few years ago. At the time, I told my wife that I was worried about the economy. I had a bad feeling that Americans were letting themselves get too far into debt and that eventually the bottom would fall out.

I also told him that I had been planting a big garden every year, even though I don't enjoy it because I was concerned that I might need the skill sometime soon.

I really thought I was the only survivalist nut around. It was a surprise to hear it from somebody else.

Well, it's rare that I'm right. But it looks like I was right about this one. You can be sure that I'll be bringing that up for the rest of my life. I've got a few more crazy predictions but I don't want to sound too crazy so I'll just write them down somewhere so I can get the book out later and say I told you so.

As a continuation of my paranoia, I placed an order for several more trees. I got the delivery this week. I was away at the conference when the boxes arrived so I didn't get to really deal with the boxes until today. They sat for a few days in the cool attic stairwell but seemed to be in good condition.

new fruit and nut trees in the box

Most of what I ordered was bare root plants wrapped in saturated newspaper for delivery. A couple of the nut trees had the roots wrapped in plastic bags filled with peat moss. We measured and marked out the locations of a couple of new fruit trees with mark-out paint and planted everything this afternoon.

I'm still waiting for one more peach tree that hasn't shipped yet but the total order included:

Two peach trees. I already have two semi-dwarf peach trees. One was a late ripener and did very well since the peaches came on last year after most of the insects were gone. The other ripened in the heat of the summer and the insects got just about everything. So I ordered two late ripening varieties this time. I also ordered standard size trees instead of the semi-dwarfs I already have hoping that I'll eventually have more fruit.

One full size apple tree and one semi-dwarf. I've got two dwarf odd ball 5-in-1 apple trees with several varieties grafted onto one tree. All I've ever gotten off of those is golden delicious. I also put in a semi-dwarf Fuji apple last year that I almost lost to fire blight disease. One of the new apples is a full sized Jonafree red apple variety and the other is a semi-dwarf Red Rome which I planted in place of the pear tree I lost to fire blight last year.

I also ordered two more walnut trees and two pecan trees. I've got two Walnuts that I planted a few years ago and have gotten a couple of hundred walnuts the last couple of years. I don't know much about the pecans but I know there are a few in this area so it's another experiment. As for nut trees, I've also got two chestnut trees that I planted two years ago. These have been very slow to take off and aren't much more than 3 feet tall now. It will be a long time before I have any nuts if they ever take off.

So, when the rest of my predictions come true, I'll have fruit and nuts. I figure if it gets really bad, I can grow, build, or kill just about whatever I need to survive until the war's over...oops, wasn't supposed to say that out loud.

March Snow

We got snow. It's not supposed to snow in March but it did.

I supervise a crew of guys that becomes the snow removal crew whenever it does snow so I'm not crazy about snow. I spend snow days handling phone complaints, welding broken plows, swapping parts, beating things with hammers and hacking together broken equipment to get it back on the road as quickly as possible, while checking road conditions, monitoring the weather, and managing minor disaster after minor disaster. Snow days are stressful days. I really love what I do but If we never had another snow day, I wouldn't complain. (Come on global warming!) At 5:30 in the afternoon, after 14-1/2 hours, it was all over and it was time to go home.

I live in a rural area about 20 miles from work, an area with open fields, high banks on the side of the road, minimal coverage by the county road department, and prone to high snow drifts. Really high snow drifts. I had to be back at work at 4:00am the next morning so I took on of our work plows home to make sure I could get in in the morning since I expected the 20mph winds to cover some of the roads with snow drifts overnight.

I had been so busy all day that I hadn't eaten anything since the apple I had on the way into work at 3:00 in the morning. I stopped and picked up a pizza on the way home. A few minutes later, I got off the highway and headed for my house. I reached my road okay and realized I couldn't turn right. There was a snow bank several feet high that was all the way across the road. The road was also drifted in to the left but not nearly as bad and looked passable as far as I could see. So I went left.

The road as it looked today, after the county got it cleared.

The snow was up to the truck frame in spots, I kept moving so I wouldn't loose momentum and was doing okay. Once in while, my raised snow plow blade would dive into a drift and send snow cascading over the hood and I'd travel a hundred feed completely blind but I was the only idiot on the road so that wasn't really a big problem. Then it happened. I spotted another truck facing my way.

According to my wife, who had been home all day, the last time our road had been plowed was 9:30 that morning and the county had only made one pass opening up only one lane. With show piled up on both sides 4' high and snow drifted in up to 2 feet high in the only open lane. There wasn't much chance of me and this other guy passing each other. So we stopped, bumper to bumper. Stopping was bad. Stopping meant I lost my momentum. I was stuck, he was stuck. I called home to say I would be a little later than I thought and then my phone battery died.

Fortunately, he had shovels. He was traveling down my road to rescue his son-in-law who was stuck on the other end of the road. Like me, he was going to have to find another way around, assuming we could get ourselves out. We made a plan and dug my truck out first...by hand. It was windy, cold, and we were being pelted with stinging drifting icy bits of snow. It sucked. I don't know how long we dug but we eventually got me free. Since I had a plow, I was able to push my way past him and clear a path for him to get free with a lot more shoveling, pushing, and spinning of tires.

Back on the road, with my now cold pizza, I looked for another way home. I had to drive around through the next county over to find a passable road to get me out to the other end of my road. If I couldn't get in from one end, I might be able to get in from the other. I stopped at the other end to survey the scene. I saw 3 vehicles stuck in the snow. This wasn't going to work either. I don't get 3 vehicles in a hour on my road at 8:00 at night, especially on a snowy night, so I know these had been there for some time and they were blocking the only lane.

I abandoned my mission to drive home and headed for my parents' farm instead. I can see my parents farm across the field from my house. I got to the the farm, offered my parents some very cold pizza and warmed up for a few minutes inside.

I then started the long walk home. Across the field, through snow drifts, in the cold wind, being pelted with ice chunks. I didn't bother to bring my cold weather gear home from work since I was so confident I wouldn't get stuck in my work truck. Poor planning meant I trudged along in just my light coat dead reckoning for the yard light in the distance.

The walk wasn't so bad, the white snow made it just bright enough to see where I was stepping, even at 8:00 at night. Once home, I got a few hours sleep and was up to make the 3:00am walk back across the field to get the truck to go back to work this morning. Surprisingly, it's a lot darker at 3:00am than it is at 8:00pm. This time I wasn't having as much luck avoiding drifts. As I would walk blindly in the dark the snow would start getting deeper, sometimes up to my knees and then would start getting shallower again. At a few spots, I was obviously getting into some drifts that were too much to handle so I'd turn around and head back to the last manageable spot and randomly pick a new direction to go. I was glad to finally make it to the truck.

Another day at work plowing, salting, and cursing at equipment and it was again time to head for home. A call home verified that the road was better today. The county had been out with heavy equipment and had things clear enough for me to make it this time. The driveway wasn't passable yet but the road was. This time, I could take the car. There was no point going right home. When our driveway gets drifted in, it can be 5' deep. It can be 5' deep the full width and length of the driveway. I headed right for my parents again and this time borrowed a front end loader to open up the driveway and see if I could find my mailbox.

there's that mailbox.

Tonight, I'm warm at home, I found the mailbox but gave up on actually getting it uncovered, even with a front end loader it isn't worth the hours it would take. I don't like the mail anyway so I'll just do without mail until this all melts. I did get the car in the driveway. And now, I'm going to bed.

the driveway, almost clear

Pruning Day

I checked the weather yesterday and it looked like it wasn't going to get really cold for the next several days. Fruit trees should be pruned in late winter, a few weeks from now but I'm not a patient person. And, I had a 3 day weekend and was looking for something to do. If it gets really cold soon after pruning, you can loose some flower buds but, like I said, the weather said it wasn't going to get real cold. So I did some pruning yesteday afternoon.

Of course it's 24º now, 16 wind chill, and it's supposed to get down to 20º overnight. Did I mention it wasn't supposed to get cold? This is my whole problem with the global warming thing. The same people that can't tell me if it's going to be cold tomorrow somehow know that the polar ice caps will be melted in 10 years. Of course it's not "global warming" anymore. Now it's "climate change". It's good to hedge your bets.

But I digress.

I pruned the peaches and apple trees.

The apples were the worst. I bought a couple of "5-in-1" apple trees a few years ago. Five different varieties are grafted onto one trunk and they're supposed to grow 5 varieties of apples. Not knowing which branch was which, I haven't ever pruned these the way they should be pruned. I was afraid of cutting off a whole variety. But I've only gotten golden delicious apples so this year I pruned. It will take a couple of years to get them right, if I ever do.

apple tree before and after

When trimming peach trees, the goals are to open up the middle to let sunlight in and allow air circulation, reduce the amount of fruit so the tree isn't overwhelmed, and keep everything at picking height. A wide, open, weird looking tree is what you're going for.

peach tree

The real trick is to just cut off almost everything that's growing upward. All of the branches pointing toward the sky were new growth last year. I'll cut the same off again next year.

another peach

I know the "after" picture looks worse than the "before" but that's how the experts do it and they must be right or they couldn't be experts...just like those weather guys.

Help Wanted

Completely unrelated to gardening. But is is January and 32º outside.

I've got a position available for a maintenance mechanic at work. I'm reviewing the roughly 80 applications we've received so far for this position and thought I'd share a few job hunting tips while they're fresh in my mind.

This batch of tips is about filling out the application:

Tip #1: Never say "None"
You know that line on the application that asks you to list your skills? Well you must know how to do something. I would like to have you write that you can troubleshoot something, preferably stuff with important sounding names but I may settle for less. I know you have some skill. Obviously you can write if you're filling this out so write "read and write English" or anything. Don't write in that you have no skills. Even if it's true, leave this line blank.

Tip #2: You may have to embellish a little.
If you've had 6 jobs in the past 3 years, and were fired from each one, find a creative way to say that. Don't lie, I'll call your references and find out but at least a creative answer may get your foot in the door. That little box that says "Reason for Leaving" can be the end of your chances if you write the word "Terminated" six consecutive times on the same page. Tip #2a. Writing "Terminated because I don't have a ride to work" is also a poor idea.

Tip #3: Color inside the lines
I have 80 applications to look at. Each application is three pages. That's more reading than I did in my entire education from Kindergarten through College. If you write more, I won't read it. We give you enough space to make your point, be conservative. Don't waste paper, it doesn't grow on trees. If you make your three page application 6 pages long by adding more stuff than fits, I will assume you have a problem following directions or that you might not do well working in an environment with rules. But mostly I'm going to think that you're an awful bore and I don't want to work with you.

Tip #4 Don't confuse me
Writing "I grew up learning everything I know" makes me think that your learning may have stopped early. Both because you say so and because I can tell so.

Tip #5 Anticipate my questions.
If you live in a different state, not even one that's within a full tank of gas from the job, why are you applying?

The Worst Purchase Ever

Not much gardening happening now. It's in the 30's on most days and 20's at night. We just came out of a few days in the teens so gardening is on hold. But I have something related to write about anyway. It may be a stretch but I'm going to write about a food chopper.

I bought this food chopper this evening at Walmart to chop vegetables so it is 's at least some what garden related; since my garden is where I fail to grow vegetables that I could, at least in theory, chop.

I've seen these on TV. You put an onion on the cutting board, slip this "handiest kitchen gadget you'll ever own" over the onion, hit the handle a few times and a matrix of blades turns the onion into minced onion in seconds. It's all done inside the chopper so there's no mess and I don't have to cry.




Well I got my $8 prize home and decided to give it a try. Had half an onion left over from dinner in the fridge, put it on the chopping board, and opened the box my new chopper came in. I spent the next 15 minutes trying to figure out where all these parts go. Me. I actually once attended college for engineering and I fix mechanical things for a living and I was practically beaten by a late night TV kitchen gadget.

After a couple of false starts, I figured out where all the parts went and started chopping. After the first chop, having spent 20 years fixing all sorts of things mechanical, I realized something wasn't right. My onion wasn't chopped, it was stuck in the blades going up and down with each press of the "soft grip" handle. A few more chops should free it I thought, it didn't. So I had to lift it up, spilling a few bits of onion that were no longer contained in the "easy to clean" container on the cutting board. A minute with a knife to free the stuck veggie from the blades and I was back in business, except the spilled pieces prevented me from getting it down where it belonged on the cutting board, but with the same skill it takes to get Rosie O'Donnell fitted at the Men's Warehouse, I tucked the loose pieces inside and chopped again.




Stuck again. And yet a third attempt: stuck again. What a piece of crap. Normally, when I buy something for $8 at Walmart, I know it might not be the Rolls Royce of kitchen gadgets. But this one makes me mad because it's so bad that it has to be on purpose. This thing is so awfully designed, in so many ways, that there is no way anybody at Farberware (oh yeah, I'm naming names) believed it was anything other than complete junk.

My list of complaints:

• The convoluted blade design has a narrow little uncleanable area at each bend. I can't even get the tiny nipple brush from my son's bottles in there.
  
• The blade falls off the shaft, both for cleaning and to frustrate the user.
• There's a worthless, plastic thing with a cut out the exact shape as the blade that the blade has to be inserted through. Not a problem if the blade was a circle or square, or some shape other than a zigzag.
• There are more parts than it needs, a lot more parts than it needs and when you "open for cleaning" it comes apart like a swiss watch.
• Oh, and there's the little detail with it not chopping anything.

Farberware (Farberware, Farberware, Farberware) must have gotten a cheap batch of laid off Chernobyl engineers to design this one.

Email me if you'd like to buy a slightly used food chopper...only $10.

UPDATE: Just be fair, we tried chopping some carrot. Still a piece of crap!

The War Goes On

I thought it was done, at least for a few months. It's been quiet. No insects and the diseases are dormant for the winter. except for the skunk and possum that I have to chase away from the cat's food dish every night, I thought my battle with nature was taking a break until Spring.

The whitest Skunk I've ever seen.

This morning I found two of my newest fruit trees rubbed by deer. They like to rub their antlers on small trees. I've heard that they do it to rub the velvet like fuzz off the antlers, I've heard they do it to mark their territory. I don't care why they do it but I want it to stop.

Fatally wounded Nectarine

They've gotten all the way around my only Nectarine and gotten half way around my Granny Smith apple tree. I 'm pretty sure the Nectarine's a goner. The apple might make it if the damage stops.

I had a couple of old signs in my workshop from a painting contractor we hired several years ago. One of those made a couple of field expedient tree guards this morning. With a thick band of duct tape to secure them, I hope at least one of these trees survives.



We've already had a couple of hard frosts.



Cold weather hit us early this year. I got out my mower this morning and cut down the few still standing corn stalks and cut down the Asparagus.

a tangle of asparagus before mowing

I'm home from work for a few days so I hope to get some winter work done in the Garden. The strawberries got a layer of straw mulch a few weeks ago from the majority of a bale left over from a scarecrow 4H project.

strawberries under straw

I've got grape vines that need to have all their vines removed down to just 4 short main branches. Once they're pruned, the vines are nothing more than 4 sticks with little barbs left along each one.



And the fruit trees will need a hard pruning. All of the branches growing up will be removed to help the tree grow spreading and as flat to the ground as possible. This keeps the fruit from overwhelming the roots and allows good sunlight and air penetration. 80% of the wood will be removed to grow back next year. I'll post before and after pictures when it's all done.

a peach tree that needs a hard pruning.

Hiding in my own house

Yesterday was my 9 year old daughter's birthday. Or maybe yesterday it was my 8 year old daughter's birthday. Either way, she's 9 now and was 8 a couple of day's ago.

Today, Saturday, we had her birthday party. Mostly family and 4 girls from her class. Very nice girls, friendly, smart, and all confident and very polite. This is the first time I've met these girls and I'm glad to know that my daughter has such nice friends. But the news is not all good.

They're sleeping over tonight. A slumber party of 4th graders, in my living room. And I'm trapped hiding in my office. I want to go to bed, but I know they won't so I can't. The ruler of the roost, master of all I see, hiding from 9 year olds. Nice 9 year olds, but scary at the same time.

Every time I walk through the room, one of them tries to show me some amazing talent. It's late and they've already passed the sillies. I was hoping the next phase was sleep but it's not. The next phase is showing off. I've seen how good one of the girls is at making spring sounds with her mouth. I've seen how good another can touch her elbows together behind her back. Not to be outdone, her twin sister can do the same. Another can really spread her toes wide, another can point her big toe in an opposite direction of the others. If could do any of these things, I'd keep it to myself. I try to be encouraging and kind with phrases like "Way to go...touching your elbows together....that'll get you far." and "Nice freaky toes...way to hustle". But they see through it. They see my deer in the headlights stare as I look around for a way out. I think they're just messing with me.

So, here I am hiding in my office, posting because I've already read the whole internet to pass the time and I've run out of things to do.

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.

No More Water

Yesterday afternoon, I turned on the water in the bathroom sink and I heard the sound of air being sucked into the faucet instead of the sound of water coming out of the faucet. I tried the kitchen sink...same thing.

I checked the expansion tank pressure gauge: zero pounds. I checked the circuit breaker: On. Something was wrong with the well pump.





I had 240V to the controller in the basement. Good so far. I dug up the top of the well head and checked the wires there...240V. I then tried to start the pump from the controller. The pump should draw about 6 or 7 amps when it's running. Mine drew close to 50. I measured the resistance of the motor windings by using the wires leading to the pump motor at the bottom of the well. Both pump motor windings tested fine. For some reason the motor was stalled. Could be bad bearings, sand in the impeller, a small stone, or anything that was preventing the motor from turning.

So I pulled the pump.





Wanting to get a shower before going to bed, I went to buy a pump yesterday afternoon. We went to Lowes, Home Depot, Sears, and Tractor Supply. All had some type of pump or had the pump I needed but didn't have the controller. We showered at my parent's house last night. It's Sunday. I'm sitting at home waiting for some place to open this morning so I can go pump hunting again.

Hoping the pump was still under warranty, my wife searched through her warranty file. The warranty file is now a huge box of paperwork filled with warranties that expired when I was cool in my hawaiian shirts and velor sweaters.





Warranty for the pump was for 18 months and it's been 3 years since I installed it. Of course. A residential pump should last a lot longer than 3 years. but of course, mine gets a lot of use. I run the pump for lots of hours and thousands of gallons more than most people because I have a ridiculously large garden.

When I add the $300 for a new pump into the cost of having said ridiculously large garden, I'm now convinced more than ever of gardening truism #1.

"Gardening is Stupid."