Free Range Grapes

It's a shame I probably won't be staying here at Dog's Plot long enough to see pears on Davey's grafted trees, Dog help him . But I've got an idea for another project: a project which might even bear fruit before I ship out.
And this time, I'm going to do it myself.



I'm no student of wine, but I can drink a jug of it now and then, and one of the first things I learned from Alan Pike ....and which any beginning student of wine history also knows..... is that when the native European vines developed a root blight back in the twentieth century, it was found that the New World vines were resistant to the disease. So our New World root stocks were exported to Europe for the Chablais and the Chardonadys and all that to be grafted onto. Now, by virtue of these roots, French Champagne is as American as Jerry Lewis.





You know where I'm going with this: I am going to graft cultivated varieties onto the wild grapes.
It should be even easier than the pear grafting. All I'll need is the machete to split the stock, cuttings from the survivors among the half dozen vines Davey redundantly planted a couple of years ago, and to seal the grafts, some tar from one of his abandoned cans behind the trailer.
I'm pretty sure that I get better results than the one-in-four success rate Davey got by doing it in too early spring , when he got prematurely excited about the reproductive process. I can hold the enthusiasm until things are really growing and no frosts are expected.

I won't have to plant, I won't have to water, the vines I graft onto will already be well established, and I won't have to support or prune or cage them. I'll graft above the reach of deer and rabbits, and just let them go right back up the trees they are based on.
I know from the heavy-bearing, never-pruned old vine that wrapped around the south west corner of the house at Edgewood Place, that a single vine can occupy as much space as half a dozen are allowed in a vineyard, and even if it won't produce as much as six vines...a third of that will be fine. About a ton. If it hadn't been for the coons and possums which came into town to harvest them, the weight of the grapes alone would have brought the arbors down.
And anyway, it isn't as if I was going into business here, or had to pay for tractors, yard help, harvest crews, fences, nets,, and electronic protection, etc.. etc. etc. So there you go: Free Range Grapes.

Well, it's as cold as a witch's grapes today and I can't even push the chickens out of here.... but the season is close to the turning point, so I'll go out and cut some bud sticks off the chicken house vine today before they swell, then stick them in some baggies in Davey's fridge until the time is right.
And this afternoon I'll get back to grubbing out some more buckthorn stubs before Dangerous Dave finishes up his obsessive peening and whetting and comes a whacking with the brush scythe.

College Entrance

After the cascading disasters of that October - my beaver lodge burnt, someone walked off with my prosthetic legs , and then I got run down by a thief riding my own bike - I was in no shape to homestead out in the woods again, so I decided to look up brother Davey.
Ever since Davey came back from Puerto Rico, his wife had them moving around so much that I was never sure where he was living, but I knew that Alan Pike had recently got him a Cornell gig teaching a couple of Pike's spill-over sections of freshman English..... so that afternoon, after resting my sore butt in the park, I started up through Cascadilla gorge to campus.

It had been warm enough when I was sitting in the park , but now the sun was off some of the gorge walls, and the contracting stone released a few pieces of slate to screed down into the creek.
A black water snake thick as my wrist, had been drawn from under his ledge by the sun earlier , and now lay half uncoiled in the middle of the walkway..... stopped me like a damn metaphor.
I picked him up and warmed him a minute, then put him under the ledge, hoping he'd make his way into the ground.
Later on that year, the encounter would be the source of one of my precious and popular written aphorisms: You can put a snake to the hole, but you can't push him down it.

I knew Davey shared an office with Pike in one of the buildings on the Arts quad. I wasn't sure which building, but Pike had a couple of labrador retrievers he left out on the quad when he was going to be in the office for a while, and I found them right away, running from one side of the quadrangle to the other with several fraternity dogs, playing football without a ball.

I sat up against a dying Elm in a last patch of sun and watched.

Maybe I even dozed off.....because Pike was suddenly standing right in front of me, asking where my legs were.
I told him about the series of disasters, and that I was looking for Davey. Pike said Davey and Kristal were moving again and he hadn't been in that day.
Pike was going to take the dogs home, then meet Linda and go to King Wing's Oriental Garden for dinner. Every time they went there, the Wings gave them three or four containers of left-overs for the dogs, and it was often food that had never even been on a plate. I could hang out in the office, and he would bring me some fried rice or whatever later on.

The office was was a big garret room on the top floor of Goldwyn Smith hall. It had a cathedral ceiling with a skylight . Alan demonstrated how it could be opened with the dangling chain, in case one wanted to vent animal smells or to smoke anything exotic.
The office had three huge desks: Alan's , Davey's, and one for a guy who was home or in the library writing his dissertation and never came in.
We put my stuff in the drawers of the ghost desk, turned it around so it faced the wall a couple of feet out, and Alan put one of the dog blankets in the leg space for me to lay on.

It must have been a hard day. I went right to sleep, and when I woke up much later, I could smell the Moo Go Gai Pan on top of the desk.
Getting into College had never been a goal of mine, but there I was, and so far it wasn't half bad.

Mysterious Spinning Island Freaks Roosters

The Scythe and The Machete

When I lived in my Ellis Hollow beaver lodge, and before I started using a machete for just about everything, I came to town once in a while for some tool or other, or to get some replacement socks from my trunk at Edgewood place. If Mama Dot was around, she would invite me to stay for lunch and a bath. But as far as I'm concerned, bathtubs are for sleeping in, so I tried to come by when she'd gone to the grocery store to get something she needed for a recipe, which was most every afternoon.

Davey was down in Puerto Rico teaching English then, and during that time, the Edgewood Place refrigerator was my mail box. Mama Dot usually left a bag of leftovers with my name on it there, and sometimes attached a a " Dear All" letter from Davey to it.
One day it was a bag of fried chicken thighs and an unopened letter from Davey addressed to me personally .
In the envelope was a plane ticket to Puerto Rico, and a letter explaining that Davey's wife had left , deeply pissed because the university closed down a modern dance class she was trying to teach. It was too "modern."
I hadn't been anywhere out of New York State since traveling to Alaska.
And I didn't much care to go anywhere either. After all, it was getting to be summer, and it would be hot as hell down in Puerto Rico. And besides....what was his idea? That I should take over the dance class?
I guess if he'd sent cash, I 'd have thought twice about going, but I could take the ticket or loose it, and departure was only two weeks off..... so I ate a couple of chicken thighs and went right back down cellar to start getting my shit together.

Two weeks later I was sitting, trying to play my harmonica, on the balcony porch of Davey's second floor walk-up apartment in the Finca - the U.P.R, faculty housing complex which used to be a ranch , and still was as far as the cattle grazing there were concerned. It was half a dozen three story apartment buildings in a remanent of range and jungle, all inside a chain-link fence, surrounded by many square miles of San Juan sprawl.
Beside me on the porch was a half bushel of mangoes I had picked up off the ground just across the drive the day before, plus a water glass full or pretty good Ron Rico rum, . All around me the roar of a million coquis - the singing national frog of Puerto Rico - so loud I could hardly hear my own harmonica or, when I gave up and put the harp to soak in the rum, it, the sound of the lawn guy's mower.
Davey had gone off to teach a seven am class, and come back at ten for siesta carying a big Jungle toad which he said had been crossing the drive when he left, but was still there when he returned, having died and already half dried in the attempt to cross. He planned to mail it to some friends in Ithaca.
At three O'clock a pair of Puerto Rican parrots flew over: a species endemic to Puerto Rico. Hally Wood downstaris told me that they were the last two of the kind. I don't really remember the parrots on that specific day, but they flew over every day at three o'clock, just like every day at four o'clock, it rained cats and coquis for about fifteen minutes. So the wise grounds man was careful to be finishing up the mowing before the expectable rain.
When the actual mowing was done, he sat on the curb to file the edge of a machete, then he went over it again with a whet stone.
I watched him go all around the borders of his mowing job, trimming up with the machete. Neat as a barber. I don't think he even ticked the curb. It was a beautiful thing to watch.
I suppose that now days that job is done with power weed whackers, even there on the Finca, but seeing it done with the big knife it was a permanent conversion experience for me.
The machete was hardly the only thing I got out of my time in Puerto Rico, but I've been a machete man ever since.
The one I picked up down there cost me a dollar ninety nine and was about good enough for cutting banana shoots and the made in China one I got from Agway the next year wasn't much better - was probably stamped out of old Ford fenders in China, but the one I use now is a Vietnam era government issue machete at Gee's Army Surplus in Ithaca. It's heavy bladed , high carbon steel, and I can do about anything with it that you can do with a Hudson Bay crusier ax, plus filet a trout.
Of course, if I could, I 'd have one made of steel as good as the that in Davey's scythes, which are cold forged Damascus style in Austria from many layers of alternating hard and soft steel - high and low carbon - so that it takes an edge easiy, and keeps it well.
It's a shame to see the damage Davey does to his scythes in the orchard. He has one for brush and one for grass but they both come back looking like bread knives that've been used to cut nails.

Around the time I came here to manage the chickens, Davey destroyed the old power mower by repeatedly hitting rocks, sumac stumps, and half-burried farm implements with the whirlly blades. . So until he he developed his scythe enthusiasm, it was up to me and my machete to keep a way clear through the jungle growing up here. The roosters keep the bamboo, the blueberries and the garden vegetables in check, but everything else has to be mowed, hacked, chopped, or dug.
The machette can do most of that well, all of it if necessary. One of the first things I did when I moved onto the farm, other than my chicken duties, was to hack a loop out through the property and back. Through goldenrod, honey suckle, buck thorn and sparing the volunteer pear trees.
Scythes are fine when you are mowing grass - and if you are normally proportioned - but even Davey's bush scythe won't willingly take out a Buckthorn bigger around than your finger (though he tries) - and until I want to wear my sheet rock stilts around here so I can handle a scythe, I'll stay with the machete.
It's only March here now and nothing much other than garlic has started to grow, but Davey has already been slicking up his scythes, so I 've been out on the lanes with the loppers and the machete, cutting back the sharp, foot spearing stubs left by his earlier work, which other wise will not only lame me and the dogs but also catch and bung up his scythe when the grass comes up to hide them and he comes hacking through.
The harmonica is my favorite tool, and the hammer has been my money maker, but I can always whistle and sing, and I never need more than one sock half full of quarters. Without my machete,
I'd be be dead in the road by now.

Bathes With Roosters

You Want to be an Agrotourist

Here is the ad I expect to put up on Craig's List, as soon as I can scrape some of the caked-on crap off the horizontal surfaces of the chicken house, get in
fresh wood shavings, and ready a new space for myself under the main house. I figure it's going to put a lot of quarters in my sock, which will all go toward my journey to Great Bear Lake .... if I can get Davey to cooperate. So check it out:

Bernie Made Off with your investment money, your house lost half its market value, and your credit cards were canceled, so now you can't even pay summer hotel prices in Paris, Texas ..... and anyway, you want to reduce your foot print and your waist line, while contributing to a sustainable enterprise by eating local foods, and living on the land's natural bounty. Yachtless in the Finger Lakes, you want to ride the bow wave of the latest popular movement: You want to be an Agrotourist.

Here is your chance to experience, not simply life on the farm, but the full, free-range life - life as the farm animals themselves experience it, embedded with the flock, keeping their hours, sharing their quarters and their rations, totally home on the range.

As a guest at Dog's Plot, you will rise at dawn, if not before, and thrill to the fierce mock battles of our colorful, designer roosters, who (because they are not hardened and provoked by professional football players or small time gamblers) will seldom hurt one another while providing your entertainment and working out a social order with their incessant sparring.
You will luxuriate in the affectionate burbling of the hens as you forage with them for seeds, nuts, and small game, then roll and bathe with them in the mulch under the pear trees. You will have an opportunity to join in the usual activities of a small working farm, such as helping the chickens to rid the garden plots of noxious weeds and insects, and occasionally intervening when hens who are overly concerned with their relative status, start to peck and pull out each other's feathers.

After a full day in the sun, you will crawl into the fresh wood shavings of the nest area bedding, and marvel at the sweet smell of the chicken house interior and of the assembled birds themselves - a smell which results from the grains, greens, insects, and occasional frogs, shrews, or voles in the diet which you will share with them.
Of course you will not be required to eat bugs, or mice, or anything you don't want, and of course we will provide you and your family, (who after all have no beaks to crack or crops to grind grain) with the means to prepare your food. Naturally, you will also be free to dust yourself off patronize one of our local restaurants.

But we guarantee that by the end of your stay, living for a week or more entirely on this cleansing diet, you yourself will be as sweet smelling as a bird of paradise or an Irish Spring, and that your personal droppings will be delicate brown curls around a light center, as dry and odorless as cake decorations..... or else the first day of your next stay of a week or more, will be free of charge.
2009 season starts July 1.

Sleeping Dogs Lie

When Davey saw my foot sticking out from the wood shavings in the chicken house, I was already waking up. Dragging me by the feet and bumping my head on the threshold was really unnecessary.
I had surfaced to the point that I was dreaming; and dreaming is next to waking .
Sure, it's true that my natural born ability to lower my body temperature and literally hibernate, didn't come with a corresponding ability to rouse myself from that state. And yes, It used to take another person, a rise in ambient temperatures, or something else external..... like a possum gnawing on my foot.... to bring me around, but I long ago learned to summon dreams and in them to recognize that I am dreaming, so that I can wake myself. Conscious dreaming is an old trick others practice ( they say) so they can fly around and do other such things without consequences or the limitations of physics. For me it is strictly about waking up.
It was a hard skill to learn, and I admit I did some unnecessary fooling around before I mastered it.
Once, when I thought I was dreaming, I climbed up on top of a car and tried to fly off it.... but I wasn't dreaming; I was only drunk, and I crashed directly after take off.
I landed squarely on my feet and, thanks to my short-boned legs, the mere six foot drop, and my rubbery drunkenness, I was unhurt. But I have long since given up drinking to the point of existential confusion, and I have become a lot more attentive to my dreaming.
I learned my lesson; but I am not giving lessons, and I don't encourage anyone to take up hibernation as a sport.. Mostly, I would just urge you, In case you run across someone in my sort of meta sleep state, to use the common sense most people have anyway, if only from knowing the truism : Let a sleeping dog lie.
Thank you for your consideration.