There is a pleasure in the pathless woods

I recall one delightful autumn evening last year at Ravenna, sitting by the creek side with a beer and my pipe, weary from a day of clearing brush in the sun with my scythe and playing with my brand new broad axe.  If you could do anything right now, be anywhere, be anyone, what would you choose?  The water, framed on both sides by steeply forested hills, trickled by, bearing yellow and orange leaves south towards the Potomac.  The air was slightly crisp with an occasional gentle breeze.  The only other sound besides the creek was the distant yips of a coyote pack.  This, I felt.  This.

So Google Reader is dead.  In looking for alternative ways to read my subscriptions of personal blogs, I’d forgotten I had one myself.  Then I asked myself what the purpose of a blog is for someone who is not inclined to be the focus of attention.  Then I remembered.

A running chronicle helps the author remember and take stock of how much has been learned through trial, error and experience.

With my food production exploits in the garden, every year my “agricultural laboratory” has yielded more and more crops and required less toil.  Though, for the life of me, I still can’t get peas to thrive.

The Ravenna orchard has expanded.  The two apple trees have miraculously never been mauled by the deer, which are everywhere here until muzzleloader season starts in October.  Then, to the frustration of my friends who hunt, they disappear.  Completely.  Even from the neighboring state forest.  Amazing adaptive quality, like the cicadas which stay in the earth for a specific prime number of years in order to confuse their predators.  So this year, I planted a sour cherry, sweet cherry and a pear tree in the same area.  I have also been bringing up raspberry plants as they expand from the original shrub I bought for $20 something like seven years ago.

But there are new lessons to be learned, construction being the most immediate.  My current shelter, a rusting old trailer, is impossible to heat up in the dead of winter.  I’ve spent too many mornings unwilling to do anything because it required exiting the sleeping bag and all the blankets I could get my hands on in the dark.  I need a place where I can use a wood burning stove, with room for a bed and a table.

The plan is already in my head.  Like gardening, this will be a prolonged class taught by those two exacting professors: Nature and experience.

trellis: done

There ya go. One grape trellis (for two plants), and yes, the ground looked just as overgrown as what is behind it before I started. This is at the site of my grandparent's place. I've gotten pretty adept at clearing, but you probably don't want to see all the briar scratches on my arms. I fortunately managed to get this project done before it started raining up there. The posts are 3 ft into the ground, and I dug out the areas in the middle where the grapes will grow, put down pea gravel for draining, some mulch for food, and piled the dirt back in.

I also prepared spots for apples. I had to gas up the chainsaw and cut down a few locust trees so there will be enough sun for them as the trees up there start filling out with leaves. Looks like Grimes Golden didn't work out. They're getting me Granny Smith instead. Tartness. April 9 is delivery day. Memo to self: get a sh#tload of cayenne pepper to sprinkle around to keep deer away (till it washes away). I'll have chicken wire as well, but the more the deterrance, the better.

Barley plants are starting to materialize. No word on when the hop rhizomes will be in.

This weekend I'll be starting potatoes in a barrel back home. I've got a couple of russets that are sprouting.

Kicking and a' gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer

A couple of weeks ago, I was saying there was no way I could plant barley up at Ravenna with all this snow. Last week’s 60 degree temperatures changed that. But this weekend’s rains made me feel like one of the peasants stacking mud pies in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

I’d had a grandiose goal of clearing a 40 ft square barley field. But, you see, mud gets heavy and is hard to shake off of shovels, rakes, etc. More importantly, I did not have as much barley seed as I’d thought. So the result was these two trenches instead of a square field. I removed all the sod, tilled and raked the rows, and planted the seeds. There’s no time to order more barley seed for this year. I’m just going to see how this much goes, what it yields, and then decide whether to expand my operation. It was a much easier time clearing the spots for my apple and grape plants.



Saturday morning, I thought the flood was going to get into screen house in front of my parent’s place. Didn’t happen. I’m very glad of that, since I remember painstakingly scraping all the mud off the concrete stones after the 1996 flood.

fruiting the plain

It's good to be somewhat acquainted with local agricultural representatives when you're contemplating big crops. As I've said, I want to plant apples and grapes at Ravenna this year. But what are good varieties for Allegany County and what are the pitfalls? (Besides disease, apparently it's deer and wild turkeys which are now hungry from the winter and eating anything with a bud on it.)

Enter Ben Cooper, county soil conservation planner who has advised my family on planting and maintaining trees to prevent erosion and improve the water quality of Town Creek. The creek is a significant contributor to the Potomac, so to all my DC friends drinking city water, I'll just say "you're welcome."

I called Ben up and it turns out he sort of knows me. "Yeah, I saw you clearing brush off the main road one day," he said. Yes, George Bush and I apparently at least have brush clearing in common. But I'll bet I'm more of a badass with a machete than he is. Then again, I don't use fire. I only go after vines and thorns.

There are no good nurseries in the vicinity, but the soil conservation folks are taking orders by Friday for an April 8-9 delivery. Ben recommended Grimes Golden. I also wanted to plant a red variety and chose Spitzenburg (I like hard apples, as well as Jefferson in spite of his hypocricies. Also, how can you possibly resist something that improves "drastically" as it ages?). The only grape variety they have is concord blue. Not great for future wine making experiments, but I'm in. Put me down for two.

beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy

I'm temporarily skipping ahead to the present day. By way of another century.

People who know me well know that I have a lifelong love affair with beer. It started when I was four and an older cousin, as a joke, let me have a taste. Minutes later I was finishing off unclaimed beers at the family crab feast (we're all Marylanders on my dad's side). I don't think anyone realized this occurred until the ride home when my parents looked in the back seat and asked themselves "What's wrong with the boy?" My happiness was cut short by bewildered scolding and my many demands that we pull off the road so I could pee.

A few years ago, I began brewing my own, with good results. On a visit to my paternal ancestral town of Biedenkopf, Germany, I let slip over some Bosch that I was a brewer and was politely asked to restore the family presence there since the small town, which once boasted four breweries (like the one in the picture), was now utterly deprived. If someday there is a such a thing as a President Palin or President Cheney (what's Liz up to?), I'm going to have to keep that offer in mind.

I digress. This year, I obtained permission to plow up some land adjoining my trailer home at Ravenna to grow barley and hops. The do-it-yourselfer persona is excited with anticipation. OK, so I don't know how to actually malt barley ... yet. I've got a few months to figure that one out. But my first attempt to "grow my own beer" will serve as more blog fodder as the year progresses. I've already got the barley seed from Seeds of Change and I'm going to order the hop rhizomes today.