Paint my house

One of the major benefits I hope to get out of hobby farming is that I have to work my tushy off, which is definitely necessary because years of city living and desk work have made me feel like I'm no longer 20 years old.  No longer being 20 years old probably has something to do with it as well but still, I'd like to get a little bit of it back.

You know what? It just might work. Today it's just 12:45 but I've already mowed a couple of acres, split a chord of wood, and turned, well, a shitload of chicken shit into my tomato patch, removing an equal quantity of rocks in the process. The plants go out tomorrow. (It's been a cool wet spring.) I am now filthy and sweaty and my back aches. Perfect.

Now, since you evidently aren't going to do it for me, I have to get cracking on painting my house. All that other stuff was pretty much an excuse not to start doing it.

You know what? People need this. We need to do physical work and see the result. It's essential to body and soul. And missing from most American's lives these days.

People and plants

I had an open house or housewarming party yesterday, whatever you want to call it -- an official introduction to my homestead for family, friends and colleagues, most of whom had never seen it and were coming from an hour or more away. It was great, I'm glad I did it.

I told people not to give me anything but you know how much good that does. I wound up with two azaleas, two hydrangeas, and a lilac, along with about a year's supply of booze. So I planted the shrubs today and it got me to thinking. How can evolution explain our fondness for colorful flowers?

This is no minor feature of human psychology.  There is an enormous industry devoted to breeding, propagating, growing and selling cut flowers and flowering plants.  It's even profitable to fly cut flowers from Chile to New York.  Consider the importance of something so ephemeral to the weightiest of human affairs, from romance to mourning.

There is no shortage of plant life at my estate -- looking out the window I see a riot of green.  Our ancestors on the African savanna would have seen flowers occasionally, but seldom if ever anything as showy as the ornamentals we have developed through centuries of selective breeding.  So this isn't taking us back to some primal memory; nor are flowers particularly indicative of any related reward, at least not until fruit is ripe weeks or months later.  We just like them.

A house, even one sitting in the middle of the woods with lush vegetation all around, doesn't seem complete until we put in some of these useless plants, that we just happen to like.  We are mysterious.

Going Wild

Okay, after some research and looking at pictures, what I saw was indeed a pig. It was rather smaller than the animal that puts the B in your BLT, but it was female (no tusks), may have been a juvenile, and anyway feral pigs come in various sizes but are often small. They come in various colors but the gray coat is accepted style. The problem is that Connecticut is one of the few states in which they have not been reported. Either this one didn't get the memo, or it was somebody's pet that wandered off. Its indifference to my presence would argue for the latter. I hope so, because they can do a lot of damage.

I can think of three other Old World mammals that Europeans have unintentionally introduced to the wild in North America. Horses don't cause a lot of problems because they pretty much occupy the niche vacated by the slaughtered bison, and the federal government limits their numbers -- to the bizarre objections of some people.

Then there are rats. They seem to limit themselves to human cities, and so only bother humans. Their ancestors must have had some other niche, but whatever it was, they don't seem interested in it nowadays.

Finally, and this sad to say is the biggest problem of all, there are the feral cats. Cat lovers, and there are many, don't like to hear a word against them, but as Maryann Mott tells us in the linked article, it is estimated that feral cats kill hundreds of millions of birds, and more than a billion small mammals such as chipmunks, every year. They never existed in the Americas until Europeans started losing their pets. Domestic cats have not changed much since they started using cute fuzziness to freeload on humans, so they revert to the wild very easily.

Cat loving activists try to deal with the problem by sterilization, but that seems to me like sweeping the beach. There probably isn't much that can be done beyond targeting specific colonies that are readily accessible. This is one more reminder of the collateral damage we do with purely innocent intent.

The new photo in the banner recognizes the change of season.

What in tarnation?

I saw a critter yesterday morning that I've never seen before and still can't identify. I was standing in my field fairly early in the morning, around 8:30, when it came strolling along. It was pretty big -- let's say terrier sized, but with a much fatter body. Call it pig like. It had a ragged, unattractive gray coat, like a giant rat, and a bright pink nose. The snout had a flat end, also pig like.

It had absolutely no fear of me. As it drew even, about 30 feet away, it turned its head to regard me and sniffed two or three times. Then it continued on its leisurely way. It had small eyes and I had the impression, possibly incorrect, that it didn't see well.

I have checked out several guides to North American wildlife and I can find nothing like it.

In other news, I got a donation of a truckload of chicken shit from a local farmer. Unloading it was a chore, to say the least, not to mention cleaning up my truck and my person thereafter, but I'm looking forward to a jumping garden. Assuming the alien beast doesn't eat it.

Changes in the Land

Some of you city slickers who see this may figure I'm pretty well set for next winter. I wish. This is a decent start, but half of this still needs to be split and it all needs to be put away in the woodshed, which, oh yeah, doesn't even exist yet. (Click to enlarge; click twice for the really big view.)

The source of most of what you see here is my neighbor, who is selling off some building lots (alas). He knows about this blog now so he might even read this. (Yo, Henry!) I'm helping us both out by removing whatever of the debris from road and lot clearing is suitable to be consumed one day by a Vermont Castings Defiant Parlor Furnace. Ultimately, if I keep at it and work hard enough, there's enough there for me to get three or four years ahead, easily. And I still have at least three or four cords worth down on my own property.

Now's the time -- the voice of the chainsaw is heard throughout the land.

But ... Henry and I were talking with his logger yesterday, and it seems since the price of fossil fuels started in a general upward direction a few years ago the firewood market has taken off. It is now basically impossible to buy two-year wood; the sheds have been emptied. One year wood is all you can get. For those of you who don't know the art of wood burning, you can call wood "seasoned" that's only a year old but it takes two years for it to get optimally dry, and that used to be the standard.

So, what does this mean? Maybe it's not so good. As I have discussed here before, the Europeans cleared the New England forest not so much to make way for field and pasture, or for timber, but for fuel. In commercial quantities, that mostly means charcoal. It was the coming of the fossil fuel era that allowed the forest to grow back.

Firewood around here right now mostly comes from land that is cleared for other purposes, as in my current case; and from sustainable harvest in well-managed private holdings, public forests and private watersheds, (which I used to participate in with my father on New Haven Water Company property), often as a byproduct of logging. Land owners generally know enough not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

But right now, we're flat out. There is no more to be had. That means, presumably, that the price will be going up, and the temptation to fell more trees will grow. This is one more inconvenient truth about the Long Emergency we may have to confront.

gobble gobble

The other day I came downstairs for my morning coffee and whoa! There was a huge flock of turkeys in the yard. I couldn't begin to count them, there were at least two dozen. The toms were puffing themselves up and fanning their tails, which as I understand it means this was equivalent to a singles bar or the freshman mixer. They look pretty impressive when they do this, almost twice normal size. Unfortunately, the instant I stepped out to try to photograph them they bolted, so no pix to show you.

I understand that this kind of group courtship is typical, but not nearly in such a large group. According to the Wikipedia article, they commonly court in pairs.

Anyway, leaving aside this mysterious mass congregation, Ben Franklin famously proposed the turkey, rather than the eagle, as our national symbol. This probably seems strange to city slickers who think of the turkey as the moronic domestic mutant variety, of which it is said that if they happen to be looking up when it starts to rain, they will drown. Real turkeys obviously have to survive in a woodland filled with coyotes, bobcats, raccoons and foxes, not to mention human hunters, and they're nobody's fool. They can fly quite agilely although they prefer to run around on the ground. They sometimes sit in trees, and they can clamber around in the branches pretty well.

If we had adopted the turkey rather than the eagle, would our national character be less belligerent? The eagle was also the symbol of imperial Rome, and today it embodies our militancy and self-satisfaction with aggression and warmaking prowess. Turkeys, on the other hand, are big galoots, successful at making their own way but determined not to bother anyone else.

The Benevolent Universe

Of late, I had been more convinced than ever that nothing is easy and the universe is against us. (Objectively, it is, thanks to the second law of thermodynamics. But I speak in a more poetic vein.) But now with spring and all that, I'm thinking maybe not so much after all.

I went out to fire up the log splitter today, which hasn't operated since it was buried by snow on January 10. The gasoline is of even greater vintage. But much to my surprise, it fired right up and purred like a kitten. Yesterday, with the help of my brother, I got some large and jagged pieces of furniture up the stairs without gouging the drywall. I also dropped off my change of address at the post office and got my place in Boston ready for an open house today, which I am happy to say is happening 100 miles away from me.

After I've heard nothing but coyotes and owls for four months, other birds are now starting to join the chorus. The passive solar thing, with the help of the March sun and daily high temperatures in the 40s, is working beautifully. As I predicted, we did indeed have a hellacious mud season that at one point turned my driveway to quicksand, but it's dried up nicely and now I just have a lovely burbling brook keeping to its rightful place and flowing under the driveway through a culvert.

All is peaceful here, though really terrible things are happening elsewhere. It's a big planet.