Warning Squall Warning Squall

It was a crunchy snow squall for sure:

So What do YOU Do?”

At the memorial service for a freind recently, a fellow I didn’t recognize, with a steel-grey, handlebar moustash I admired, stood alone in the middle of the crowded room holding onto one handle of his stash, like a biker idling at a stop light. Coming from the buffet with a spiked egg nog in my hand, I saluted him with my cup of nog and stopped to stand beside him looking at the crowd which was mostly a mix of academics and builders I knew. “Lots of Proffs”I observed (taking him to be something more outdoorsy) He moved his finger grip from his mustash to the earlobe and looked at me sideways. Then he let go of his ear lobe; and studied the ceiling. “Well … in the morning I drink coffee, and in the afternoon I drink wine.” “Right, I said.” “ Of course I eat too, but after dinner it’s rum,” “ what do you do …do. I mean, work at?” I asked, pretending not to get the joke. Or maybe I DIDN’T get the joke, or maybe he wasn’t quite joking. “ Well, I’m retired, and there’s no work more serious than getting my clothes on, which at my age and in my condition, is quite work enough, exhaustausting really,” he explained, looking at his feet. “I could make it easier, but I prefer to make it FUN, as the struggle with getting up and dressed, specially when you consider the demands of the cooking, eating, drinking and personal hygine cycle (which I won’t get into here) so I try to have as much fun as I can just getting dressed in the morning.” “How fun is THAT?” “First of all, I balance on one foot while putting a sock on the other, and usually imagine that I’ve been asked to step out of my car take a sobriety test.” “Not to say THAT would be fun itself. I can hardly do the finger on my nose part while putting socks on anyway, and I usualy fail the test but I always do it near the dresser so I can catch myself when I need to. No … after that or skipping that If I can get right into it, I practice perfecting a routine I once saw Fred Astair do in an old movie set in Paris. He is singing happilly in some Paris garret while dressing for a party of some sort. I can’t remember which movie or f “ Well I guess you wear shoes and eventually get out of the bathroom…do you GO anywhere or DO anything. I mean like for Sport even?” “ Oh yeah sure, that, I go to the lake shore and look for turd shaped rocks, to use as key hiders and paper weights. Trouble is I never found a REAL coprolite, though a lot of look alikes and more than a few real turds.” “ I suppose that isn’t exactly a TEAM sport. “Oh, but a good elder work out, slow attentive walking and occasional downward dogging to pick up a pseudo turd. But if its socializing you mean, I do Facebook under several names with different faces. Also I go to funerals and memorial services of people I don’t know. Fascinating the people you meet there because somehow you never see them again, anymore than you do the guy who died. Do you mind if I take your picture?” “How do I know you aren’t a Russian bot? “ I asked. He laughed. And he took my picture. I Haven’t seen him since, but of course I had never seen him BEFORE; and maybe even that he was a man who wasn’t there. Anyway,I AM going to look up that Fred Astair movie. Anybody remember what it was? By the way: be very wary of accepting any friend requests from people who appear to look a lot like me.

Copernicus and skunk kitty

Copernicus our second- tier rooster, seems to have decided that Mss
Fifii is a cat: a kitty to be trusted and respected....as well as
admired; because from behind she can look pretty much like a chicken. As
for us humans here, we are content, remembering that a few years ago we
had a mamma raise her babies living in the basement of the chicken
house, and there was never any stink and they only picked up eggs that
got laid outside. But the rule is skunks eat first.

Nymphs at Play

Fun in the Dog's Plot Brook:

Bloody Butcher

 

     Back when they were young, some Cornell agronomists developed a new breed of corn for South American native farmers to grow their pole beans on, rather than the squat mt. types they had been using.

The natives planted the super corn, which grew well in those altitudes but, as it turned out, could not hold up the corn.

That is why I planted a native corn most widely suggested for growing in the squash, bean, corn sister complex. It gets ten to twelve feet tall and is not pulled down by the weight of the bean vines. Mine, however, was pulled down by the weight of the RACOON, which was ungrateful of her, since we feed her along with the cats.

Well, DAMN the coon: I will plant this corn again next year.

This variety of Indian dent type corn does not have the gem like kernels of wildly different colors, but it is best for the job. The whole cob is the color of .... well, you decide what it is the color of, but it's name is "Bloody Butcher"

Bottling the Applejack

We bottled the last of the applejack made from bought apples and it's
going fast, but we are fermenting twenty+ gallons of cider from our own
pears: Tart and sweet Asian pears and Seckel pears. We spike it with
mango juice. It is our special reserve, and it is not going to leave the
homestead.

Chicoletta 2019

 Here they are, our home ground favorites:

This will press your cheese

  Before we got deeply into cider making we bought this little antique press to experiment with, and NOW we have a larger press  (you can see the bucket on the floor beside the other) and we intend to use the old one as a CHEESE press ...  having learned that the pressed- pulp wheels of waste that result from cider pressing are called "cheeses".  Following up on that clue, we learned that one can just as well press cheese as apples or pears or grapes with a  regular cider press; and that is what we are going to do, inspired by our love of all things that ferment and get better with age, by our love of cheese in particular, and lately by a post from the wonderful word woman  Nancy Vieira Couto's blog: http://www.nancyvieiracouto.com/blog/eating-with-the-ancestors-curds-and-whey
which is like a virtual kitchen with actual cheese  in  it. .... and which we be impressing into our Food-themed, upcoming issue of the Metaphysical Times magazine.
   Besides enabling us to smell the cheese, we learn from Nancy that  the process of cheese making removes the lacstose, which all goes into the whey. That means that cheese is just right for the non-ideological, lactoses intolerant.  We here at Dog's Plot are extremely tolerant, so send us your whey and we will figure out what to do with it.  Also accepting separated gluten, which we use in large amounts to add chew and to bind the mostly whole grain flours we use in or pasta, crackers, bread, and pizza dough,  We like it sour.
   

Supplicating Mantis

This Mantis prayed that I would let he'rm into the shed for the winter.  So I let herm in. Not much for Herm to eat in there: lesser used tools and , it seems, an occasional cat who has ... left some scat.  Scat is what you call it when you are tracking game in the woods.  I think I know who the cat is, the most feral "Stranger", as we call him, who is often as not around,  but whom we seldom see.

Supplicating Mantis

This Mantis prayed that I would let he'rm into the shed for the winter.  So I let herm in. Not much for Herm to eat in there: lesser used tools and , it seems, an occasional cat who has ... left some scat.  Scat is what you call it when you are tracking game in the woods.  I think I know who the cat is, the most feral "Stranger", as we call him, who is often as not around,  but whom we seldom see.

Last Pressing

This was our last pressing of pear cider for this year ... whatever year it is; we got lost in it.

Last harvest in the secret garden

spurs and chain saws

Gerald  is not going to tolerate any more of this chain saw crap.

Our Warrens

I am David Warren and we have Warren Pear trees, although this is an off year for them. They are a type of Seckel Pear, which derives from a seedling produced by a European Pear and discovered by an orchard man in Pennsylvania . Unlike other European derived pears (but like Asian pears} Warren pears ripen on the tree, which is a great convenience, except for shipping, like other Sedkels, the Warren is super sweet, but the Warren is much larger than the other Seckels.
I don't know if we are related to the Warrens who discovered this variety, but it it about my favorite. Also very valuable in some markets, as here below. Do the math and you will find pears for about ten bucks each. We may not sell them for that, or sell them at all. We may just shake them down, roll on them, blend them into the cider we press and will give away to influence politics.https://www.froghollow.com/?fbclid=IwAR32KGcU3Dzf8C9aQsoB8nQXZ_c4xywJx75rbPMCuWpieKglfi7u_tIYMGk

Sun Flower Slow Dance

 Forget your common farm and garden Sun Flowers with their swollen heads that can hardly manage to follow the sun.  The native natural sunflowers not only follow the sun, but they dance in the wind.  If it can't dance, it's not a Sunflower, it's a monster.

Calae Sings

At Dog's Plot, we particularly appreciate a dog who sings:

Little Beluga Tattoo

This is what we do for fun, here at Dog's plot.

Mad Monarch

                      Monarchs do not live on Milkweed alone.  This one lives along with a blissed out Bumble Bee on a stand of Joe Pye Weed, and the monarch seems to have gone mad, trying to drive the bee away, but without success.Joe Pye Weed has a wide reputation for a range of medicinal uses. Maybe the Monarch has a urinary infection.

Bee Friend

I don't KEEP bees, but I am using their honey in fermenting pear cider, so I am really sorry about that  rotted bee tree on the cliff near Green Pond that my brother and my cousin pushed over back there long ago. I am especially sympathetic to the native carpenter bees that I I so often encounter working on houses.  They like to drill holes in good wood, just far enough to lay their eggs in.  It isn't that they eat the wood and neither will their larva....it is just a one bee nest. It will safe nothing to kill them and while roofing, I have occasionally had one hang in the air a few feet away, watching.  And I don't object, though I have expressed to them my admiration for their hovering ability. I could also thank them for their work of polination along with the help of other native bees, now that the domestic honey bee populations are so sparse here.  A couple of weeks ago I noticed a cone of carpenter bee dust coming from behind a loosely attached sign on one one of the sheds, and pretty soon a carpenter bee noticed me.  She hung in the air a yard from my nose for a long moment, during which we did not speak, then I went on my way. 
   A few days later the bee you see here showed up when we were sitting out on the deck, and she seemed to know me.  'Also a day later. I haven't heard from her since but wherever she is, I am sure she is doing good work, hope she comes again ...or at least writes to us.

Dogs Plot Cider Crowing

The Elephant in the Bathroom

The Gigantic Truth


     It is pretty well known around Cayuga Lake that these characters fabricated a fossil giant to “discover” and rival the recently then “discovered” Cardiff giant, although their attempt was low scale and rather transparent if you look at this photo from the time: the body thing is no giant, but rather the size of  normal enough human, as if if an obligioning person had concented (as long as he could cover his genitals) to being cast in a mold for replication in lime cement to replicate th original … and no doubt now days but that is pretty much what happened, but the deeply ironic and unapprediated fact of the sham paleontology is that in the process of digging a hole in order to find at the bottom this sham pleistobeing, they revealed and themelves failed to notice what is as obvious in this picture as an elephant in the bathroom: THE FOSSIL HEAD OF A TRUE GIANT.  See under the shovel-guy’s arm, the eye looking at the hand over the thing’s thing?
  Anyway, the leason her is clear:  If we don’t learn from history, it may be because there is an Elephant in the Bathroom, in which case, we must be INSIDE the elephant inside the bathroom.  I’m out of here.



Setting Free the Chickens Two

The Dog's Plot frogs discuss whether it is a good idea to set the chickens free at all, as they have been known to eat young folks.

Dog's Plot Vintage One

Green Super Wet Coyote Moon Retrograde

The over-saturated Spring has been bad for most new planting and a lot of perenials not growing on mounded ground, like some of our lowern patches of asparagus, which seems to have drowned and rotted. But one plant: the herb Pennyroyal (which we do not cultivate and has been present though not that common here in the past) finds this spring to be very much to its liking, is ramping over our borders, poking up everywhere, and confusing us. Like most herbs, Pennyroyal ha been used "medically" for most every purpose, but for two things in particular: contraception AND abortion. It's essence concentrated in oil can be fatal. So then, take it to prevent conception and i that doesn't work, take a double dose to abort the prgnancy, and if that does not work, take a whole lot more and just kill yourself.

Lost Dock

Cider Practice

Being a one eyed cat who has spent years in the wild in that condition, Twinky is extremely vigilant. She will not let us touch her, but she has decided to spend the winter indoors, so we are letting her keep her eye on the cider that we are fermenting. This here i a practice batch pressed (on our new cider press) from four bushels of apples we bought from Cornell this winter, but this fall we will be making pear cider, sparkling pear wine, perry, perryshine, from the hundreds of wild pears we have grafted to, including some wild pears too.
There will be no booze for the cats though, and they probably don't want it, but the deer and the birds seem to enjoy fermenting windfall pears a lot, and some folks say that if you get a rooster drunk, he will take to incubating eggs. I don't even know if I would want a drunk rooster sitting on eggs...would he be delicate enough to not break the eggs? Would he be smart, or motherly enough to turn each egg once a day, so they develop properly?

Early Spring Watercress

Tree's view of early season of the Watercress flow I have established over the years by digging out, damming, widening, and generally interfering with the old drainage ditch that was dragged along our hedgerow when the bordering clayey and shallow soiled land, now state forest, was privately owned and too wet for most farming, even with the ditching. . 

nobddy here but us chickens

Walking with my feet

Out walking with my feet, familiarly known as my dogs, whom should I meet but our birds: Gerald and his girls:Nothing much going on, other than the passive solar thing.

 I liked the look of this operation, and they were inviting, so I wrote to them:


Greetings Carr Folk,
   
    I am writing this in response to your general invitation regarding high-head orcharding, as I  myself have an orchard of trees that I have trained to branch higher off the ground, as I have learned to do here  in order to protect the trees without having to build a wall around Dogs Plot
   I was very interested to read your introduction in the new Mother Earth; being particularly struck by your take on pruning, thinning, and the two year cycle;  I never  heard of the pest- avoidance justification for the alternating fruit.  .   

    I have five acres of abandoned farmland In Cayuga County, New York. Our plot  partly borders the state forest, and, in the last twenty years since being brush hogged has been taken over mostly by Asian Buckthorns ... but up through which is coming (as I discovered after a few years of planting pear trees) naturally seeded pear trees of all sizes from finger thick to thicker than my neck.  Pears are not native in the US and weren't even much planted here until the late nineteenth century (Old Professor Cummins told me) but I live on a hill at the base of which - about two miles down hill on the Cayuga Lake shore -  there was once a Cayuga Iroquois village which for a long while before English settlement, had been tended by French Jesuits who had a mission just up the lake.  The Jesuits always brought their gardens with them to survive on and it was from them that the Cayuga got apples, pears, and peaches.  The Cayuga had some extensive orchards, which were cut down by George Washington's troops when the Cayuga sided with the British; but a good thing about pear trees is that they come up very well from the stump.
  0ver the years the pear sprouted and seeded and made their way into the  hills all around the village.  Most all the individuals have fruit that is round rather than pear shaped, so people like me can mistake them for apples.  The edges of the woods are white with Pear blossoms here in May.  I had planted pears because I learned that they could handle my thin, poorly drained  - according the Cornell Cooperative Extensionl.  And the eventual succession of the wild pears here proves, and improves upon their fitness for the location.  After so many generations, I am sure that the root stock established here has evolved to be much better suited to where it is than the Jesuit stock.
     So for the last ten or twelve years after discovering our pears, I have been high grafting onto this wild stock right in the field, at first using bought scions and increasingly, scions from my own trees... my preference being more and more got the Asian pear type, because they ripen on the tree like apples and don't require a long cooling off period, which in itself requires a cooling shed, more investment and so on. 

      My aim has for one thing, been to avoid big infrastructure and equipment expenses which would make it necessary for me to scale up the operation, specialize, and do well more than break even with it. Mostly we are a Homestead, with plenty going on and plenty left over, but not a lot of time for business.  We give eggs ad garlic and pears to our mechanic and it probably saves us a lot of money.

    Among other things, the low infrastructure requirement  means NO FENCE. A deer fence needs to be eight of ten feet high.

      And no fence in deer country means that everything a deer can reach has to be in a cage.  I learned that very quickly, and was inclined to graft higher anyway because that allowed me to graft onto sevearal branches: so that one or two at least were likely to survive, and I used two or three varietes o a tree so that  the various ones could prove their worth.  Most of the trees were grafted at head height and protected until they got over deer range, some larger ones were top grafted from a ladder. I am tending maybe a couple hundred trees, some doomed, some of some value, some overbearing monsters....when they feel good.

     With a scythe I mow  lanes, paths, and alleys, so that I can keep track of and take care of the trees, but the paths also lead the deer to the trees ... which wouldn't matter much once the bud ends are out of reach, but the bucks can ruin a tree rubbing the velvet off their antlers.  For that reason, I generally let the trees sprout down the trunk below the grafting.  The deer can eat it if they care too, and the native growth is thorny so they won't do much rubbing.
     Another reason for the low level stubble is that my volunteer trees grow where they will, sometimes in pairs, or up against the south side of a pine tree, in little groves, and most often well more than twenty feet from another.
    So I can ... and do ... encourage them to spread into a vase form; partly by cutting out the center, also by weighting branches with stones or chunks of wood, but also by tying them down to the lower branches.
      I do some clearing with loppers, some with a cordless reciprocating saw, and also with a cordless electric chainsaw.  Litinum batteries have made it possible for me to do without gasoline power.  I mow only with the scythe, using the rougher, short bladed ditch scythes, as I tend to break the other blades when I hit a stump or a rock I didn't see..
   I leave many of the wild pears to grow big and tall and unprunned, inorder to pollinate...and produce what they will.
      With the the wildings, plus the planted , and all those grafted pear trees, (and despite a series of climate disaster years) I will generally have more fruit on the trees than I can harvest or handle,  and I don';t want to extend sales beyond the farm stand here, but I would dearly like to shake down some pears to make or get made, a lot of pear cider, even pear wine, which we have tried and like.  I know I can spend a thousand bucks or so on a grinder and a press, or maybe rent equipment, or take it to a mill for a buck a gallon ... or maybe just let the deer the possums and my chickens feed on it. We can and dry as many as we can, and the dehydrator was one good investment.

         We are not trying to make orcharding the gig that saves us or the farm, as we are growing a lot aside from pears, and have learned to get by on not much, which is mostly covered by social security, since we got old.  I have several plots of Asparagus out in the orchard, a few salad garden plots, and half a dozen Garlic beds....our favorite crop, all of which I tend by hand and feed with compost form our chickens, from our kitchen, from our wood-chip cat litter, and from a few tons every year of  cow manure compost mixed with wood chips, which we ourselves augment from a perpetual pile of sand, to help drain the clay soil. I was hoping that the asparagus would spread and go invasive in the orchard.  I have turned an old drainage ditch on our border into a sometimes brook, with a series of dams and cisterns, and enough constant water to have developed a pretty good Watercress crop. 

     I don't think it will make our fortune though. We also are unlikely to make a fortune with our magazine at metaphysicaltimes.com, as we don't have a whole lot to sell there either, but you can find us there, and we will be  eagerly following you on Facebook.

        I hope you sensed that I was fishing for a suggestion for our cidermaking.
          Thirty some years back I wrote a cover story for Mother Earth, about how I build a rough-sawed cottage on an island my brother bought in the Adirondacks.  They edited out the most dramatic part .... where the rafters collapsed after we had them most all up (inadequate bracing) but we recovered, and had them all back up and braced, by the end of the day.  That kind of cheapened the story I thought, but I understand they were trying to appeal to people on the fantasy level.  They seem to have a more solid mag now days, and it is hard to keep something like that going, when you have to appeal to all levels all the time.  You will be a good addition there.
      My long time friend John Irving wrote the Cider House Rules, as you are likely to know.  I recently explained to him the difference between seedling trees and cloned ones, which surprised him a lot,and it is impressive how few people understand the rudiments of sex, but I don't know that mattered for the book.  The only Cider House Rule that I remember is "Do not sleep on the roof."
              So Good to know of you.
                Don't sleep on the roof,
                     Yrs Trly,
                            David Warren.

          

           http://dogs-plot.blogspot.com/
  http://www.metaphysicaltimes.com/

https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/natural-cidermakers-approach-to-sustainable-orcharding-zbcz1902?fbclid=IwAR3P0UDMg1lI6LZlZjWql8oXSq96poao8OsovLNNvky5byUxCC4PZ3LGkv8

Cat Ate My Muse

Bar of many pruposes

 

What you call this may depend on what you use it for.  I encountered my first one, called a Lining Bar, when I worked on the railroad one summer as a kid, and somebody else me know it as an Ice Spud, used to make holes to ice fish through, but then I used them in construction foundation work as a digging bar, and now I am using it as an Ice Breaker to loose up the frozen wet gravel pile, so I can shovel some onto the mushy parts of the driveway.  It is a bit much to enlist it as a Javelin though.