Fire on the Farm!!!

I was gone Thursday afternoon, singing at a nursing home with a friend, and when I came home I noticed smoke coming from the far back corner of the property. "Adam," I said, "There's a fire next door!" Adam had called our one-and-only neighbor, who was on his way lickety-split from work.

Still, a fire is an exciting thing, and even though Adam had checked it moments ago, I decided to traipse across the field to see the fire in the neighbor's yard ... only it was no longer in the neighbor's yard. The wind had blown it into our field!

Adam called the fire department because it was spreading quite quickly. I dashed back to the barn for some shovels, and Adam and I got the fire's edges under control by smothering it with shovels. The photos below are after the shoveling had conquered the fire. I don't take photos when a fire is spreading on the farm :)

 It took only a few minutes for the fire to jump through the fence and across this area. We were so, so thankful that this field had recently been mown quite short. Otherwise, the fire would have been quite out-of-hand.

 The farm dogs were quite interested in the fire and insisted on walking across the smokey area. I was worried about their paw pads, but they were unfazed by it.

 Adam doused the fence posts, which kept smoldering.

 Adam may be on this side of 50, but he can still climb over a fence if needed!

 In the end, it was not a big deal, and I'm thankful we were home. And the nice guys on the fire engine said it counted as a little bit of training.

 

Still a few tomatoes from one bush.

My two silkie chickens are getting so plump! My chicken-lady-friend said she thinks the larger of the two is a roo. (It's very difficult to tell sex with silkie chickens.) But from above, you can certainly see the difference in size.

 

And one of them has started laying! Hooray! Now I'm getting two eggs a day ... phew!

I put my onions to bed.

 I stripped lots of dry basil blooms from their stalks and sprinkled them in an empty bed, covering it with straw. 

Will they come up in the spring? Earlier? I have lots of them left, see? And I'm keeping some inside too. Since basil grows so well here, and lettuces have been a challenge, we're thinking of having more basil salads next summer.

Buttercups and Clover

We haven't been able to bring ourselves to cut it all ... just yet. Yesterday when temperatures reached 80 degrees, the whole field smelled of flowers.

Plus, of course, it's lovely for the bees. Adam's swarm appears to be doing well. He moved it into the place of one of his strong hives, allowing for wind drift too, and the tiny swarm in the brown nuc box has received thousands of new bees.

And then there's Ned, sweet boy:

Softest ears ever

That pic was taken yesterday morning when Adam was cutting down the dead fruit trees in the orchard.

Now we have FOUR burn piles that we must get rid of, one some day when the wind is low and it's recently rained some but not too much.
Speaking of the orchard, the large apple tree is doing this:

                         
And the mysterious tree that we hope is a peach is doing this:

I that an itty-bitty peach? It's fuzzier than the others. You tell me! But I hope so.

It's Catch-Up Time!

Hello, all. Sorry I've been absent on the farm blog. I visited my family in West Virginia, including a brother with a wonderful pick-your-own blueberry farm they've run for about 20 years, and a brother just starting into an apple orchard enterprise.
But Adam has been quite busy on the farm in my absence.
He's been raking up leaves all over and putting those leaves on the compost piles.

 The potatoes in the bucket are coming along.

He started work on our chicken coop and yard. The yard will be a long rectangle along the orchard fence.

 He's using what he can find on the farm for the posts. Here's he's cut two cedar trees and used their slender trunks for posts. They don't rot quickly.

 Here's another post he found.

 And for the four corner posts of the chicken coop, he's using the stands for the telescope lens grinding class he taught a couple of years ago. The stands already each have a 5-gallon bucket full of concrete. Seemed a shame to have them sitting around. They make good footers, so he buried them in the ground.

Here's a view of the proposed site from the other end.

 One of the cedar trees is here behind the barn, on the very rear of the property. It's laid down over the back fence. Adam's already cut away a lot of it, to clear the back of the barn, but there's more to be removed.

 It's quite a large trunk. He only used the top end of it for that post.

 Some other trees he's only trimming the lower branches of, like this one along the back fence.

These two cedar trees grew right in the fence that separates the house yard from the pasture. He'll cut them away to the ground.

 This awful tree grew in the overgrown area next to Anna's little house. It was leaned far over. I'm so glad to see it gone!

 And here we have a pathetic fig bush, dominated for years by a weed tree. Adam cut it away. I want our figs to prosper so I can make preserves next summer.

 The most significant tree he removed was a good-sized maple that grew in front of Anna's house, right between two huge pecans. It was a lovely tree, and I'm sorry it's gone, but it was in a horrible location, under those pecans. A tree in a bad location is worse than no tree at all.

 At least ... that's our philosophy of trees here in the Southeast. In Iowa years ago, we found the attitude toward trees quite different; they love any tree they can get to grow -- weedy, ugly, broken by ice, it doesn't matter. Trees there are valued as a wind break, and they do have wind!
This was a dead crape myrtle right by the road:

Alright, you're probably tired of seeing tree stumps! He hauled it all to our burn pile. We plan to roast a fair share of marshmallows over Thanksgiving, haha!

Pecan picking-up has continued apace. Adam wore his back out with bending over, so I bought a little contraption at the local hardware store.

 I've seen the kind that roll around. And I've seen the metal-box kind with the grate on the bottom. Both are more metal, and I worried that this one would be flimsy and not work well. The fellow sold it to me, asking that I bring it back if it didn't work. He clearly had his doubts too. But it worked great! You just press the slinky-thing onto the pecan. It holds them well up to the top, and then you dump them all into a box.

Ignore the saw. In fact, ignore a lot of random things you might see lying around our farm. It's a work in progress! Anyway, Adam has picked up many pecans. That big box is just a fraction. I took three bags to West Virginia.

On to the next topic: our sewer.

We have a septic tank in the side yard that connects to the city sewer. The grass there grows thick and particularly green:

I noticed during our heaviest rains that the yard there was quite soupy and smelly. Adam told me it was nothing to worry about. We do have a pump (below) that is supposed to engage when the septic tank might get full and pump it into the city sewer.

 The tank has this little thing ...

 And this cap, which was askew and open until a few days ago, when Adam investigated.

The pump was turned off -- we didn't know this. That's why we had the soupy smelly yard. Hopefully it will behave better now.
And speaking of green -- the wheat and barley are doing very well! They're tall, and not too yellowed from all the rain. We're having delightful, dry, cool autumn weather now.

barley on the left, wheat on the right

 The winter garden has survived, but it's slow going. Some greens are looking good, but small still.

 We had some on our sandwiches last night.

 See? It's green and growing, but still quite short. Time will tell if we get a hearty garden this winter.

That's it from the farm! Adam's doing a beekeeping presentation today for a group, and next week we have company for Thanksgiving, so we continue to be quite busy. Enjoy your lovely autumn day!