Category: Uncategorized

[Guest post by R.]

When I wake up on Friday, the start of my four-day weekend, I do not stretch luxuriously or snooze a bit more. Instead I quickly glance to see if Shayok is asleep. Thankfully he is. The past three days have been rough. Shayok has a sharp shooting pain that randomly travels between the spot under his left hip bone to his left butt. The pain is constant, making walking difficult and sleep impossible.  A visit to Urgent Care has not cleared up anything – not the pain, not the cause, or the treatment. I quietly slip out of bed.  

I first go to feed the Supremes, our ducklings. We have four of them. They came by mail on May 6th, and have now been with us for three weeks. I only started feeding them three days ago because Shayok couldn’t. They are still not used to me, and I am not very confident of dealing with them. I pick up a ruler, and cautiously open the door to Duckingham Palace. The Supremes are mad. “Cheep cheep cheep”, “cheep cheep cheep?” they complain. I think that’s Duckspeak for “What’s up with the food service over here?” I wave the ruler at them and they scoot back to the far wall of their palace. I then take out their water container, and place their food inside. The Supremes attack their food greedily, while I take that time to change their water. I set their water inside, and close the door. 

The ducklings have grown at an amazing (alarming?) rate. Shayok had been giving them free choice for the first two weeks – which had meant a constant supply of food inside their house. Now we are cutting their food down to 3 feedings of store bought duck feed a day, each feeding lasting no more than 15 minutes. In addition, they get to eat grass and slugs for an afternoon snack or dessert. When I go back after 15 minutes, I ask them “How was everything? May I take your plate away?” Sonia, the leader, gives me a withering look. The others ignore me. 

Shayok is in pain, but he manages to hobble about and we sit down for breakfast. I take my blood pressure. It is at my baseline.  I ask Shayok for a list of farm tasks that need doing. Feed the ducks. Clean out the duck house. Hunt for Slugs. Manage the pepper plants. Mow different areas. There are many more, and my mood darkens. 

I tell myself I need to delight in the plants and not focus on the animals. The animals take work, and I am out of my depth with them. Plants I love, especially the free ones, nature’s gifts! So, I tell Shayok “Let me take a walk and see what’s new first”, and I set out. 

The day is cloudy and gray. A light rain is falling. The grasses and weeds appear lusher, the pastel blooms of the autumn olives are even more striking than usual. Bird calls are plentiful. I make my way to Orchard Hill where we have planted a couple of hazelnut trees, a peach tree, two mulberries, three apples and an asian pear. I pay a visit to the edible fiddlehead ferns that our friends Jean and Jim gave us to plant. A fiddlehead waves its proud head at me in greeting. I smile. I am feeling better, Next I go to see the strawberries we have planted in a circle around an apple tree. 

On my way to the strawberries, I catch a movement from the corner of my eye. I turn around and see a rabbit has been caught in our trap! I walk towards the trap. The rabbit averts its eye, tries to make itself into a tiny little ball facing away from me. I walk away from it and it unwraps itself to stare in my direction. We do this dance a couple of times. 

Shayok had set this trap nearly a month ago but it is only now we managed to catch anything. What timing, I think! I text Shayok a photo of the trapped animal. “Omg” he replies. I am dismayed, because here is another animal task that I will have to deal with today. “It has to be done”, I tell myself. “YOU have to do it. There is no other way.”  The fiddlehead is forgotten. I am not feeling good. 

I decide I need protective gear to deal with the feral rabbit. I opt for a thick pair of gloves. I go back to pick up the cage. As soon as I try to pick it up, the rabbit jumps and tries to butt its nose against the top of the cage. I drop the cage and it lands on its side. The rabbit is still jumping about. My heart is beating so fast I think it will explode out of my chest. I let the rabbit calm down, and then right the cage. The rabbit jumps again. I walk back to the house. 

I think I should put a dark towel on the cage so that the rabbit cannot see my face. I also think if I could just pick up the cage once more, I can place the caged rabbit in a wheelbarrow and wheel it towards our truck. I give up on the towel idea, and decide to go for the wheelbarrow. I spend a few minutes locating the wheelbarrow. It is full of rainwater. I empty it and roll it towards Orchard Hill. The rabbit sees me approaching and goes crazy again. It keeps butting against the cage. I use my teacher’s voice and say to the rabbit, “Listen, we don’t have a gun. You are going to get out of this alive. Calm yourself”. This rabbit doesn’t give a damn. 

I begin counting to ten in my head. I take deep breaths for the first 5 counts. On 6, I pick up the cage and the rabbit jumps. On 7, I place the cage in the wheelbarrow at an angle. The rabbit’s face is pointing in my direction. I start pushing the wheelbarrow down the hill. The rabbit is desperately trying to use force to free itself from the cage. I make the mistake of looking at the rabbit. I see its nose is busted and bloody. I am defeated. I cannot go through with this anymore. I stop moving, avert my eyes and take shaky breaths. 

Shayok is watching from the kitchen window. He sees my distress and tells me he will walk there to help. I don’t want that either. So, I take hold of the wheelbarrow again but this time I change my grip so that I can pull it behind me down the hill. This way I don’t have to see the bloody rabbit. I can still hear its frantic attempts to free itself, and my mind supplies sufficiently gory visuals. 

I shed a few tears along the way but I finally make it to our truck, which is parked in front of the house. Shayok is waiting there. Without any fuss he lifts the cage from the wheelbarrow and places it on the truck bed. He insists on accompanying me to a nearby state forest where we can release the rabbit. I don’t think he is in any condition to set foot outside the house. “I don’t want you to do this by yourself” he says. I object half-heartedly. 

We drive to Triangle State Forest.  Shayok is at the wheel. He says he can drive without feeling any pain. He drives the truck into the forest along an unpaved path. We turn off the engine and get the cage out. It is raining steadily. Shayok walks up a slippery slope and sets the cage down. It takes him a few minutes to figure out how to open the cage door. I have the camera pointed at him the whole time. Finally the trap door opens, and the rabbit takes off!! There are hundreds of fiddlehead ferns right next to where the rabbit was released. But we don’t linger.

As we get into the car, Shayok says “I think the rabbit took off in the direction of our house”. On the drive back, we joke. “Imagine if we pulled into our driveway and the rabbit was already there waiting for us”, I say.  “What if it had a bandage on its nose after a quick stop at the ER?” Shayok supplies.

We get back and I clean the cage. There is blood from the rabbit’s nose on two sides of the cage. I put another apple into the cage, set the trap and place it in the exact same spot on Orchard Hill. As I walk back to the house, I notice a baby rabbit near the fiddleheads. “Watch out” I say loudly. Once in the house, I sit on a chair with my feet firmly planted on the floor and my back against a cushion. I breathe for 2 minutes and take my blood pressure again. It is still at my baseline. I am surprised!

I used to be squeamish about slugs. To separate them from the tender seedlings they were eating through, I’d use garden scissors as tweezers, or the point of a knife (both of which could subsequently be used to terminate the offender). Initially, I used dishes of beer to trap them. This was very effective, if you measured effectiveness by the number of slugs and snails trapped, but if your metric was the survival rate of your seedlings – not so much. Slughelp.com, written and run by I’m guessing an Extinction Rebellion activist from Germany, says slugs love beer so much that I was actually drawing them in from the entire neighborhood. I started visiting my garden in the dark to catch them eating cucumber bait under pieces of wood or munching on my stalks of onion. Slughelp recommended I drive the arrestees a mile to release them in the wild, but this is tall order even for a fellow Extinction Rebel. His stated rationale was not so much humaneness as a claim that slugs are cannibals that are attracted by the smell of dead slugs. This is too macabre to be credible even for a slug.

But something inside me broke when I found them climbing over each other to get to the peanut butter bait in mouse traps set up to catch voles.

I lost my squeamishness. I thought nothing of picking up the slimy mollusks between my thumb and forefinger and drowning them in a tub of soap water. I could do this all day and night. And I would have to unless I took other measures. I put copper rings and plastic collars with downturned rims around the seedlings. Apparently, copper gives them an electrical shock and slugs have trouble climbing around the rims. These are expensive and laborious solutions that work, but not 100% of the time. Rainy days activate the slug army. Where do they hide on other days? Speculating on this requires some background.

Permaculture is a form of agriculture that recognizes, respects, and benefits from interactions among the various natural and man-made entities present on a farm, be they ponds, plants, prey, predators, prevailing wind, walls, rocks, mulch. Mulch is any material – straw, woodchips, compost – used to cover bare soil. Mulch occupies a nearly talismanic position in the world of permaculture. It keeps the soil moist, thwarts weeds, shelters friendly creatures like earthworms and spiders. And even unfriendly creatures like slugs, the minority English were saying on permaculture forums. Permaculture was formalized in the dry climate of Australia, these residents of a famously moist island were pointing out. Do not fetishize mulch, they were pleading.

So far, I had loved mulch. I rarely needed to water my garden last year. The straw slows evaporation from soil on hot days and holds on to extra moisture on rainy days. When I sowed cloves of garlic last fall, I covered the bed with dry maple leaves (another form of mulch). The garlic came up through the mulch in early spring; the soil stays forever moist under the dry leaves. I never water that bed. But the slugs broke me.

I took the mulch off all the beds but garlic. We had a string of warm, dry days. I put the mulch back on the tomato beds, which slugs don’t seem to frequent. We had a rainy day. Some slugs came back. I killed those I found. Then again warm and dry. Slugs retreated. They returned with the next rain, but in diminished numbers. As we enter hotter months, the mulch will go back. It will come off for the fall when – per slughelp.com – the eggs of next spring’s destruction are laid under mulch. This might also discourage the Devil’s Coach Horse beetle, a slug predator, but ah well, in the ying and yang of the elements that you tweak and tilt to yield human sustenance, you make choices and take chances.

I had dropped by the home of my neighbor (the one with the hand-painted Trump sign on his farm) to pick up a pint of maple syrup. I’d noticed mud clumped around my beets, so I asked if it had been raining when I was away. “Three inches in a single storm!” The Chenango River licks at the foundations of houses by the bridge in Greene when that happens. “I have no sympathy for them!” he bellowed. “If you build on a floodplain, you’re going to get flooded. And then they expect taxpayers to bail them out.” I felt he was itching for a big-government fight. “Floodplains,” I said, invoking the Nile and Egypt, “are for farming, not building on. And then these idiots build dams that stop the floods so the soil never gets fertilized.” I was itching for the big-development fight.

But apparently we’d hit a point of accord, so he took me to lunch.

In his F-150, I bragged about my recent success – thanks to many hours on YouTube – in repairing my backup generator, a class of machinery that had not been in my life a year ago. This brought up his sawmill, powered by an engine no longer allowed by his nemesis, the EPA. “Just imagine! Every day, dozens of trucks take trash out of New York City, to Seneca Meadows, in the pristine Finger Lakes, and they worry about my little engine?” NYC takes care to dump its trash far from the Catskills that supplies its drinking water. “Yep, they should be composting their organics,” I suggested hesitantly, hoping not to trigger him. “They oughtta stop buying all that goddamn stuff and throwing them away after six months. And every truck oughtta be made of the same parts so you can repair them anywhere.”

So my Trump-voting neighbor is a right-to-repair fanatic who hates landfills and is open to questioning mega dams.

The hand-dug four-foot by seven-foot micro-pond is probably my favorite feature of the garden. I can tell if it was raining while I’ve been away by how full it is: quietly catching all the run-off on wet days and letting it slowly go on dry ones. There’s always enough water in it to wash the mud off my carrots and radishes before I take them inside. But the best part was the appearance of amphibians.

My daughter named him Mr. Jumps. Shortly, there was a Mrs. Jumps. (All guesswork, we have to admit.) Soon there was a pond full of the Jumpses who would catapult themselves from the edge into the water at our approach but didn’t seem to mind beets being rinsed right next to them. I suppose they feel more confident in water.

Then, one day in early fall, they were nowhere to be seen. Did Mr. Slithers get them all? I preferred to conclude that the hint of frost sent them into hibernation. The weather warmed unseasonably and a few reappeared. It’s the middle of October and they seem gone for the year. But where do they go? Is there a frog dorm hidden among those grasses?

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The little holes on the leaves don’t bother me, and since I’m not trying to sell my vegetables, there are no buyers to bother either. The leaves were likely visited by snails and slugs which have descended on my garden in hordes. I don’t mind sharing these giant leaves of chard which are growing way beyond our ability to eat them. I felt less generous when they exterminated my broccoli and spinach seedlings, lovingly raised indoors on our window sill in early spring. A week after I transplanted them into the garden, it was as if they had never existed. Now this was rather stupid of the slugs. There is less for them, and nothing for me. It drives me towards getting ducks, which will spare far fewer of them than I do with my scissors and boots.

If only they were like the scouting bandits in the opening scene of Seven Samurai. Watched by two quaking, hiding peasants, the bandits see that the crop hasn’t ripened yet and decide to return later in the year. This is what I figured the deer were doing in spring when the motion-activated lights around the house were going off while I lay insomniac in bed. Now, in the middle of summer, we see a white tail skipping into the goldenrods here, a fawn and mother there. How long will the 6+ foot fence deter them? Depends on how hungry they get.

Finally, we seemed to get the greenhouse right. We figured how to sew zippers onto plastic sheets so they wouldn’t rip. Yes, there is more than a foot of snow on the ground, but in the middle of February the days are already getting longer, and any weakness of the southerly sun is generously forgiven by the bright snow, so we’re in a soft white all-encompassing light even on a cloudy day, of which the Southern Tier of New York has many. We could look forward to getting some early greens in the ground under the protection of the greenhouse.

But March is crazy. And I had been lazy, and was punished for it.

The power company had sent out an email warning of high winds on the first of March. I hadn’t read it as meant for people who neglect to plant greenhouse posts a foot into the ground.

But today the snow is melting, the wind doesn’t bite, and a walk on the land cures many ills. Water has come alive everywhere, telling me of gentle grades of land imperceptible to the naked eye. At the back of the property, the impromptu stream flowing down the ATV track to otherwise landlocked parcels suddenly takes a westward turn to become wetland, still flowing, gently, inevitably into the stream that my neighbor uses down the hill to clean his maple sap lines. The entire logic of the land here seems to feed the stream, a trickle here, a gush there. Its own little watershed. But what could become of the wetland? Deepened a little to encourage waterfowl to linger to be shot? Or deepened yet more to make a pond to feed the rest of the land? Could I nudge it somehow to my advantage?

It’s too early for such dreams. It’s even too early for spring. It’s not even the equinox yet; we could get a foot of snow in April; and a frost in May could kill any early greens bereft of a greenhouse.

It must be the biggest irony of my life that I should inherit a coal stove. Coal emits 40% more greenhouse gases per unit of heat than even oil (which we use too). We set the thermostat at fifty Fahrenheit when we go away so the pipes don’t freeze; if we burn coal on the first night back, we can bring the main room into the middle sixties in a few hours (as opposed to a day).

Trouble is I also love that coal warmth by the table. I think it’s the sense of direction, that feeling of heat coming from somewhere. Your face is warm, your back not as much. You move away from the stove if you’re hot; you hover your hands over it when you come in from the cold. It is heating as human beings have known it since we tamed fire (and till we invented baseboard heating). Compare that to the stultifying uniformity, the lack of choice, the corporate tyranny, the competing demands of the frustrated citizenry of anonymous central heating.

The most pleasant surprise so far in the garden has been the micropond. Hand-dug 4’x7′, probably a foot and a half deep at the deepest. The stones to stabilize its walls came from the neighbor’s creek who expressly forbade me to spend money on stones. He calls this a nanopond, at best a puddle. Standard procedure is to line the pond with an impermeable liner so it holds water. Under the liner goes a felt-like sheet to protect the liner from snags and tears. Looked like this puddle might be a couple of hundred dollars.

When I came back after a couple of rainy weeks, it was holding a respectable amount of water. I was elated. My neighbor was like yeah we got hardpan here. Overnight frost made a thin layer of ice on it. I saw a tiny, possibly a millimeter or two long, black insect scribbling across the surface. I wondered if it was in fact swimming under the ice. I put a finger in its path to test my hypothesis. The ice cracked; the insect sank all eighteen inches to the bottom of the micropond.

Our neighboring property has a large, hand-painted TRUMP sign on it. Its angle and location, though, makes it easy to miss as we drive by. We wonder if this reflects the owner’s ambivalent politics. There isn’t a dwelling on the property, so it is easy to not dwell on the people behind the sign. The area sports fewer Trump/Pence signs than rural communities within second-home distance of New York City. Familiarity breeds contempt is my theory.

The owner of the TRUMP sign comes up our rutted driveway on his ATV one morning to introduce himself. We discuss our shared relationship with the hunter-farmer who goes 50-50 with him on the corn grown on his land. We discuss the stream that starts from two springs in our property and enters his through an impressive ravine. He volunteers that he collects the water at the bottom of the hill to clean his maple sap lines. We agree that in future we’ll fight over that water. You know how many gallons of sap it takes to make a gallon of syrup? Forty, I say. Huh, you’re smarter than you look, he says. Forty-three. He sees the garden beds I’m making and comments this used to be a corn-growing farm. But did they take care of the land? I ask. Did they grow cover crops? Or did they extract the fertility and give up when it was no longer easy? Yes, that’s what they did, he concedes. What was the corn for anyway? Soda? That’s right, he says, and ethanol, the biggest scam ever foisted on the American public. I agree.

We are invited to dinner at his family’s house, which doesn’t have a Trump/Pence sign.

He graduated high school next to last in his class. Farm work awaited him: forty dollars a month, 4:30 am to 7 pm daily except third Sunday. No wonder US citizens don’t want to be exploited on farms anymore. His father rescued him after a year and sent him to college. He became a high school metalwork instructor. His students got good jobs, started businesses. When Title IX passed and girls entered his class, it doubled his class-size and halved the weeks he could devote to each student. He and I agree on the frustration; we disagree on the fix.

Dinner is delicious.