Bonafide Farm

The watcher

August 6th, 2014 § 0

It took me a long time to get used to having a dog that constantly keeps his eye on me, even when pretending to relax. At best it is intense, at worst somewhat creepy. But now after three and a half years of living with my “English shadow” I am having a hard time imagining Tuck not having my back at all times.

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Last night he watched me as I prowled about the woods, photographing the surprise lilies. He came right to the edge of his invisible fence line, as I walked beyond it, and didn’t budge.

Sometimes Tuck is silly, often he is playful and excitable just like a typical puppy. Sometimes he is the purest expression of wild joy that I have ever seen, flying at full speed across the field first thing on a cool morning. But ever since I have known him he’s also had a serious, contemplative side, and that’s the Tucker I saw last night—his old-soul face. I wonder what he knows.

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Naked lady, surprise lily

August 5th, 2014 § 1

As I drove into town this evening, I kept noticing naked lady lilies (Lycoris squamigera) blooming in the yards of some of the oldest houses. These fascinating members of the Amaryllis family are bulbs that first appear in spring with strappy leaf growth, looking like beefier daffodils that never flower. The leaves die back and then, suddenly, in late July or early August tall stalks shoot from the ground and unfurl translucent pink flowers that do indeed have the luminescent glow of bare flesh. Because of this disappearing/reappearing trick, they’re also known as surprise or resurrection lilies.

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Because of their ephemeral nature, it took me a few years to realize I had a clump of these lilies growing in my woods near the previous owner’s junk pile. I hurried out there tonight and caught my own naked ladies on their first day of bloom. Like many lilies, these have a strong, sweet scent. They really are pretty magical, holding court in the old oak grove.

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I associate surprise lilies with old homesteads as they are amazingly long-lived. I wonder how mine got in the middle of the woods. I have several mysterious patches of cultivated plants in my woods, including groups of irises and other spring-flowering bulbs. Were they planted to mark a grave, perhaps of a beloved pet, or were they chucked into the woods during garden cleanup, as I’ve done with some of my own iris rhizomes?

I suppose I will never know, but I enjoy them just the same.

The missing piece

August 2nd, 2014 § 0

Sound the bells of celebration! More than four years after moving into my new house, I finally have every single gaping hole in the wall filled and every missing piece of baseboard and trim completed! This is huge progress! The last piece went in upstairs in the little room at the top of the stairs between the bed and bathrooms. I had left this open as a possible access panel to underneath the bathtub on the other side of the wall, in case I needed to add a supplemental heater to keep the bathwater warm in my six-foot bathtub. It turned out that I didn’t need the heater, but I never got around to fixing the hole.

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Until a few weeks ago. My dad rightfully thought I needed to learn another home construction skill—drywall—so we used this as a training project. We removed the OSB panel that had been “temporarily” screwed into place over the hole.

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Dad cut the drywall to size and screwed it in, then did the first couple of coats of mud. I picked up from there with the finish work, sanding, smoothing with a wet sponge, and trying to feather the edge of the mud gracefully into the existing wall.

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I didn’t do the most awesome of jobs, but I just had to move on. We nailed in the base trim, then I was back to caulking, filling, sanding and painting. Just last night I got the final coat of paint on, and I am calling this project complete. Yea!

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Genesis: A ten-year dream

July 29th, 2014 § 0

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I was going through some old books when this water-stained scrap of paper fell out, exactly ten years to the day that I scribbled down the beginnings of a dream. I remember it like it just happened. I was living in a third-floor, one-bedroom apartment near Washington, D.C. A friend was visiting, and we were up late drinking beer and goofing off when the name of my farm popped into my head in such a flash of inspiration that I immediately ripped off a piece of paper and wrote it down. I can still feel myself forming those letters in scratchy black pen.

I knew that piece of paper meant the beginning of something big. The next day I bought this domain name and five years later I bought the actual Bonafide Farm and started writing about my project. But what you’re seeing is where it all started. With this little scrap of paper, I conjured into being the biggest challenge and accomplishment of my life.

Beautiful borage

July 27th, 2014 § 0

I stuck a spring of borage into one of my homegrown bouquets and have fallen even more in love with this most-beautiful herb. In the indirect light of my foyer the zillion tiny hairs along each stem appear to glow. It is a magical-looking plant, and one I connect with deeply.

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I grew this borage from seed, direct-sown this spring. It definitely needs a lot of sun—the seed I sowed in the shadow of some other plants failed to thrive, but the plants in the sun grew huge and vigorous and are covered with blooms. I didn’t expect it to do well as a cut flower—many herbs wilt in the house—but it’s proven to be a tremendous asset to my flower arrangements. And it’s a timely discovery, as one of my gardening goals this year was to expand my palette of cut flowers.

Swimming with snakes

July 25th, 2014 § 0

Monday I was on the mountain again, hiking with three dogs. My companion and I stopped into a swimming hole and were tossing sticks in the water for the dogs to fetch when we realized we were directing them right toward a dark snake sunning itself on a rock in the river. I took this photo before we spotted the snake:

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When we called the dogs back and went to investigate, the snake slipped into the water and swam away to rest in some brush downstream.

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I think it was a northern watersnake (Nerodia sipedon). This is neat—it’s name is derived from the Greek neros meaning “flowing” or “liquid” and dia meaning “through.” Sipedon is derived from the Greek word sepedon which means “a serpent whose bite causes mortification.” Apparently these buggers have a mean bite and will use it if provoked. In fact, my Guide to the Snakes of Virginia lists the northern watersnake’s name translation as “nasty bite water snake.” I am glad we called the dogs away before they found it and even more glad to not be in the water when the snake swam by!

I was also happy it wasn’t one of the two poisonous snakes that live in my backyard mountains: the copperhead and the timber rattlesnake, both of which I have encountered while hiking these trails—sometimes by stepping over them whilst hiking!

Trying again

July 24th, 2014 § 0

The year’s first wren nesting didn’t work out too well. But the wrens are back, this time having set up a much more concealed nest in one of my planters on the front porch. I am doing my part, this time, by surrounding the planter with a fortress of porch chairs and ladders, all positioned to keep Tucker away. Thus far it’s working. I’ve got four baby wrens growing up on the porch. Their nest is so deep in the planter that it took a flashlight to get this shot.

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Tomatoes!

July 23rd, 2014 § 0

Monday night, before the rain had even stopped, I was out in the garden harvesting tomatoes. I knew that with so much rain, so quickly, any tomato that was even remotely near ripe would be split by morning if I didn’t get it off the vine. The year’s first Beefmaster and Brandwine were ripe, and I didn’t want to lose these massive and beautiful fruits, ironically, to too much moisture in a drought.

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I picked all the tomatoes I could, with a few squash and cukes for good measure. It baffles me that the squash are still standing, but several readers have written that they’ve seen the same pattern in their gardens. Lots of Japanese beetles, not many squash bugs. Amazing. If this is an effect of the polar vortex, I’ll take one every winter!

As calculated by my kountry rain gauge, I got just shy of two inches of rain from the storm. Pretty amazing for about an hour’s worth of rain.

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And then, it rained

July 22nd, 2014 § 2

I had just finished an hour of weed wacking in about 99% humidity—a good way to get toned and lose weight!—and was messing around with the chickens. I heard a strange noise approaching from the south. It sounded like the drone of machinery, and as a big truck had just gone by I figured that was what I was hearing. But then the noise grew louder, rolling in waves up the road, across the bridge, and finally over the cedars that mark my property line. By then it was upon me, and within half a second I was drenched with a sudden downpour.

The chickens were out, and I sprang into action trying to call them all into the coop. Half responded, and the other half, along with the two young pullets, huddled outside or tried to jam themselves through the netting to get under the coop. It was chaos, and a scene I would have happily run away from. But I knew that if all the birds got into the coop together there was a good chance that the bigger birds would attack the two pullets, and getting soaked to my underwear seemed like a lesser evil than returning after the rain to patch up bloody birds.

So through the driving rain I grabbed at tail feathers, the water sheeting off the roof of the coop and straight down my pants, into my boots. Ungracefully but efficiently I got everyone caught and tossed through the pop-door of the coop, and then closed it up. Then I ran around to the human door to sort the two young pullets out from the flock and lock them up in their dog crate inside the larger room.

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I grabbed the day’s eggs, and my dog and I ran splashing though the instant puddles to the house. In just these few minutes Tuck had already gotten so wet that he couldn’t come inside, so I left him out to meet his fate while I stripped off my streaming, grass-caked clothes right in the foyer.

And then I realized that all the windows were open upstairs. So commenced a naked, slippery dash for towels to mop up the water that was everywhere inside. Some people maybe would have run to close their windows before securing their livestock, but the storm came up so fast that I prioritized on instinct, and the house lost. I just can’t be in two places at once, holding down this while that springs up over there.

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Amazingly, it continued to rain as I regrouped in a hot bath, read through a couple New Yorker articles and drank half an Indian Brown Ale. When I came out of the bath I heard a sound I’d been missing for at least a month, the low mechanical hum of the sump pump in the crawlspace kicking on. I’d begun to think my pump was malfunctioning, I hadn’t heard it in so long. But now it was back with its entirely reassuring noise, and so was rain the likes of which I haven’t had here in many weeks.

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Big deal, you think. It rained. But this rain was needed. In fact, I was about to publish a post about how everything is browned out and we’re running a rain deficit for these last two months. Just last night I was e-mailing with my dad, both of us bemoaning the water stress we were seeing in our trees. The grass in the lawn is about totally dead, and last week the drought got so bad that I ran my well way down applying emergency water to the completely wilted gardens—something I only do in dire straights. Whenever I run the water down so far it kicks up tons of red clay and silt, which clogs my water filter and reduces water pressure in the house to a trickle until I remember that this happens and replace the filter. At $30 a pop.

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It’s about an hour after it begun and still raining. This pop-up storm mushroomed right over my house and seems to have stalled, thank goodness. The water is coming so fast and furious that it’s ponded everywhere. The compost is floating off the garden, my driveway is running down the road, and I can sense the relief of every growing thing, myself included, as its washed clean, cells plumped and replenished.

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I never thought much about water until I had a farm. In fact, I hated rainy days. But now I know that water is everything and I hope for it, year-round. Tonight I, and every living thing around me, got lucky. Even if we also got soaked.

Filling holes, finishing cubbies

July 21st, 2014 § 1

Remember back when I posted the photo of this spring’s major construction project? Well just because I failed to follow up doesn’t mean the construction stopped. Indeed, I spent most of the spring, when I wasn’t in the garden, working to install, trim, finish and paint seventeen custom cabinet doors.

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When I built my house I had the brilliant idea to leave all the under-eave spaces on the second floor open, with the idea being that they would provide valuable storage space in a house with no attic nor basement. My dad offered to build custom doors, so when the builders signed off on the job it meant that I was left with giant holes in the walls of every room upstairs and long stretches of missing baseboard around all these openings. For four years I stared at pieces of cardboard that I hastily nailed over the openings on the day I moved in, after my cat decided to try to commit suicide by wedging herself between an exposed rafter and some insulation.

Obviously I hated these holes, as they were a blight on a brand-new house. I also hated that because they were so exposed inside, they let in a lot of cold air, wind, and, yes, mice. So last fall when I had the crawlspace properly conditioned I had a crew spray the inside of all the cubbies with foam insulation. That went a long way toward cutting down on heat loss and together with the foam in the crawlspace seems to have really helped the mouse problem. IMG_5949Web

This spring my dad finished building the doors, and he installed them and trimmed them out, even cutting custom plinth blocks that were a slightly scaled down version of the blocks I used around my human doors. Install was no picnic as we discovered less-than-perfectly plumb walls that necessitated some creative carpentry work. IMG_5947Web

Then it was up to me to fill nail holes, sand all the trim smooth, caulk for what felt like miles, and finally paint two coats of oil-based paint on everything, sanding between coats. It felt like it took me forever, but the end result is totally worth it.

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The two cubbies in the master bedroom, above, and one of the two on either side of the dormer in the master bath, below:

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We also took care of what had been another hole, open the the HVAC ducting, right off the kitchen. This was meant to be a pantry, and now it finally is. In addition to making the door, Dad built an insert backed with beadboard and made beautiful little shelves out of a red oak tree harvested on his farm.

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It doesn’t look like much space, but again I was trying to maximize storage in this small house. And this little niche fits a surprising amount of food. Dad also made some access panels to cover the hole in the laundry room open to all the structured wiring for the house and another access hole behind the master bath shower.

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One point of frustration on this project was learning that oil-painted surfaces yellow over time. All my trim was done in Benjamin Moore’s White Dove when the house was built, and I loved it. But over just the past four years I suspected my trim was yellowing. This was confirmed when I went to paint all the new cubby doors and trim in brand-new White Dove. The new paint was no where near the color of the four-year-old paint. I was pretty darn disappointed that paint that cost $100/gallon didn’t retain its color. I had to get new paint matched to the yellowed trim, and it’s not perfect. Plus, I detest yellow-toned trim, and that’s what I am stuck with now. Lesson learned: Use latex to paint anything that you don’t want to yellow. That’s what I will be doing the next time I need the trim painted.

But all in all, this was a huge project with one pantry, eight cubbies, and two access panels complete. Thanks for your help and beautiful work, Dad! The cubbies are a massive upgrade and add tons of custom charm to this little cottage.

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