New Arrivals

Charles the land beaver is, evidently, Charlize.

Diversion

On Thursday we drove up to Elkader in Clayton County. "They named the new village Elkader after Abd el-Kader, a young Algerian hero who led his people in a resistance to French colonialism between 1830 and 1847." This is in the driftless or unglaciated region that extends across the common corners of Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and which has a pre-Ice Age geology and topography. To visit these landscapes is to go back in time. At the Motor Mill Historic Site on the Turkey River we met up with about 75 others for a grand weekend of canoeing and carrying on. This was the 43rd annual M-Day gathering, the fourth that A&D have attended, and my first.

Friday we canoed a gorgeous stretch of the nearby trout-bearing Yellow River, a pool and drop series of Class I/II rapids. We made dozens of bald eagle sightings along the way, many as close as 50-100 feet when we paddled beneath branches where they were roosting. We saw a mid-flight mating ritual of aerobatic prowess.

Friday night and into Saturday morning there was a storm of nearly continuous lightning and thunder, with a big blow at the end that eventually collapsed my tent and others and damaged some of the tarps and shelters over the dining stations. But it was warm and everyone good natured and within a couple hours the camp was back to normal (a relative term for this group).

Fireflies and bonfires, and away from the fire very dark skies with myriad stars.

We canoed the Turkey on Saturday and Sunday, and made our way home today past rural and small town cemeteries decorated and well-visited on this Memorial Day.

Challenges for Brain and Brawn

This farming enterprise is nearly as much a philosophical and intellectual undertaking as a practical one.

To wit, is this cottontail rabbit a varmint? Yes, when it's in the garden, eating the little shoots and sprouts before the plants can establish, long before they produce any food for our household. This is not a hobby – we intend to support ourselves on this bit of land to the extent possible. Fences are expensive, .22 shells are not. So far we are trying to talk the rabbits out of eating from the gardens. Blood meal spread around the perimeter is sometimes effective, so perhaps we'll try that. (Ah, but where did the blood meal come from? It's a fractal pattern of consequences and responsibilities.)

The professional advice is unambiguous and unsentimental – the most effective control of rabbits is by hunting and trapping. Alan's research indicates that cottontails live only about a year before succumbing to the many diseases and predators that threaten them, so is being shot any different from an adult rabbit's perspective than being eaten by a coyote or owl? But there are lots of them. Say we determined the rabbits in the gardens had to be killed. If we talk ourselves into eating those varmints with food value, we might be eating rabbit every fortnight, maybe every week. Only one way to find out...

Update from BenSyl via Facebook: "Maybe the rabbits in your area are smarter, stronger or more persistent than those here, but we find that a simple, cheap fence of 12" chicken wire suffices to keep them out almost entirely. Of course, it does nothing to discourage the deer!"

Yes, the deer may be facing electricity.

Soil erosion has been a serious problem on this farm historically, and some major civil engineering works have been installed across the decades to control it, but there are still some significant problem areas. This photo shows the head of a gully that has advanced right up to the property line, and the overgrazed cattle pasture on the other side that is contributing to the problem. Water exerts an inexorable force and about the only way to deal with it in a situation like this is to spread it, infiltrate it, expend its energy, or install very expensive hardened structures. It's a difficult, long-term situation.

After many hours of shoveling over several days, we've moved those 16 tons of beach sand down the slope. The algae shown here is far less evident this morning after spraying yesterday.

The west vegetable garden consisted of garden rows between wide strips of turf, but the turf spreads, requires mowing, and consumes a lot of water. We have a large supply of moving boxes that I'm recycling as mulch to kill the grass. The cardboard is weighted with compost and this fall or next spring when it's all sufficiently disintegrated we'll till it under. The garden soil has been neglected in recent years, is heavy with clay, and needs a lot of help to improve its tilth.

An old concord grape vine frames cattle grazing in a neighbor's wooded pasture just across the north fence line.

Derith visited last evening and on our walk after dinner we surprised a coyote as it emerged from the woods onto the lane about a hundred feet ahead of us. It looked sleek and well-fed.

Flickers and woodpeckers! Fireflies! Strawberries! Bats!

Solar Eclipse from the Northwest Corner

Savagery

After several days of no sightings, this morning Otto the muskrat is again swimming back and forth across the pond, conveying small branches of green leaves to his den. Or maybe this is Otterlee – I suppose we have to assume there is at least a pair. A week ago or so Alan saw one jump ten feet into the pond from on shore when an ermine snuck up on it, so I was beginning to think the muskrat were goners.

Something met its end on the lane last night, nothing left but a mess of feathers. To hazard a guess, a young turkey or pheasant. Perhaps the responsible party is one of the coyotes that regularly leave their, um, calling cards in the center of the lane.

I saw a baby rabbit in the yard and wondered, "Am I going to eat you when you grow up?"

• • •

Looking up the terraces toward the west fenceline, with a red wing blackbird on the wire:

This morning we got 16 tons of sand to augment the beach. Some assembly required.

Tuesday Morning Walk

This first is the Year of Observation as we plan for good development and management of the farm by paying attention as best we can to the succession of seasons across the various landscapes and biomes, and learn what we can of the plants' and animals' habits of growth and behavior, the energy fluxes of sun, wind, and rain. We're guided in our thinking by the principles of permaculture, which include minimizing external inputs, exploiting self-managing biological systems, and designing for the waste of one process to be the input of another process. It's a fantastically creative opportunity, with no one set of right answers.

We're similarly guided by good humor, and it's been great fun to discover the acts of whimsy perpetrated by previous residents here, for instance the Eye Chair in the woods.

Also deep in the woods, this unexpected sight.

The raspberries have set lots of fruit, and the several patches around the place are much more lush than anything I've grown in gardens.

My walk eventually took me down to the ruined bridge near the culvert where Kincaid Creek leaves the property. The county road we're on is relatively new and this bridge and its predecessors used to be the only way to get from the west to the east side of the farm. The planks and perhaps the rails are salvageable and it will be a good project to eventually build a new bridge.

More Hands, Lighter Work

On Friday morning we finished the first picnic table and built the second from start to finish.

Frank & Debbie arrived later in the day, over from Chicagoland for the weekend, which in addition to the socializing provided extra hands and legs for some tasks and projects. The dock deck (as distinct from the grill deck and the Mystery Building deck) got an upgrade with several extra 55-gallon plastic barrels-worth of floatation. By standing everyone else against the far rail, along with eight 5-gallon buckets of water, Alan & I could lever up the near side enough to slip the barrels underneath. We installed a second anchor and built a gangplank and voila! a new favorite place to hang out. The barrels came from an electrician who'd done some work out here recently, who knows a guy at the Heinz plant in Muscatine; they originally contained liquid smoke and barbeque sauce.

Gary also visited, bringing from Center Junction a 3-point hitch mounted auger with two sizes of blade that we'll use for upcoming construction. Serious equipment: it required the big tractor and a logging chain to lift off the flatbed truck. "'I know a guy'," Gary said, referring to our barrel source, "is one of the most valuable assets a farmer can have." We're lucky we knew a guy with a 3-point hitch mounted auger.

Aerial photos of the farm from the 1930s show a cattle pasture with just a few large oaks, with no hint of the dense, richly-diverse woods here today. One legacy of that period, though, is a network of tractor trails that we've been rediscovering as we get to know the property. For recreation and basic access, we want to open up some of these old trails, and this is a job for the bush hog (a scary-powerful chopper mower) and chainsaw.

Caution – you may need ear protection to listen.

We took a bunch of buckets of pond water to a farm supply store in town where a fishery was distributing stock, and brought home a hundred each of 6-inch channel catfish and fingerling large mouth bass.

Kingfishers diving fully into the water. Swallows on the wing dipping sips of water between snacks of insects. Successive large plops into the pond from along the shore as prey escape the stalking ermine. Ruby throated hummingbirds at the coral bells. Orioles and goldfinches and bluebirds. A not yet seen but definitely heard and nearby pack of coyotes. Wind in the big cottonwood. The biophony and geophony of the soundscape.

I began prepping the hops bed for rhizomes that should be delivered this week from Oregon. We're using the corn crib for trellis.

We can stop buying lettuce for the time being. Lots of stuff in the vegetable garden has emerged now and is getting going. I mulched the melon, squash, and cucumber mounds, the blueberries, the little fruit trees.

Lots of balls to keep in the air.

(Thank you to American Nacre special correspondent Debbie Bartsch for photos and videos.)