Sounds of civilization

New chicken coop. It will be painted and pretty-ed up once we get more sun.

After what seems like a marathon move, I'm pleased to report that everything we own is finally in one place, our chickens are safe and dry in a REAL chicken house once again, and we have both TV and internet service.  These seem to be the foundations of civilization as we know it (in our household, anyway) and so it feels like once again all is well in the kingdom....the kingdom of unpacked boxes, ladders and paint cans, of course.

There are still more projects than I can count. But I did finish the yellow library walls before the furniture that's too heavy to easily lift got moved in!

I'm trying to pace myself on everything else, and enjoy the spring and the garden. There are three raised beds built over the septic drain field, which will now be used for flowers and ornamentals -- not food, ever. Big Ag will be building some other large beds not on the drain field and that is where we'll grow our food. Putting those three original beds over the leach field is a puzzler, as are a few other things, which I'm sure I'll be sharing in the coming days. I guess you never know what the previous owners were or were not thinking when they did stuff (I know they grew food there because there were still tomato cages in place).

Just say no to food grown over the septic system.

The best thing about living where we do now is that while we have two acres, we have all the sights and sounds of a neighborhood once again. I always felt very isolated in the vineyard. Sure, I loved the natural beauty that was present everywhere and yes, even the silence, but there was not a familiar face to be encountered anywhere except for Prince Albert, the resident and lone turkey on the property. Living on 200 acres is one of those things you think sounds great until you actually experience it. I discovered I really missed seeing other people -- just folks walking by, working on their yards, or driving past.

I miss Prince Albert, the vineyard's resident turkey.

I think that's because ultimately we are social creatures, even if we don't want our neighbors too close. I suppose there are a few Henry David Thoreau types who really could live in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no sight or sound of other people. But even he had his mom stop by to help with laundry and make dinner for him sometimes.

In this neighborhood, we have a lot of walkers, kids coming up the street on their way home from the school bus drop-off, and the occasional car, although since we live on a dead-end road the traffic is minimal. There's people out mowing their grass anytime it's not raining. You can hear the highway in the background, the trains running through the nearby town of Turner each morning, and also assorted domestic livestock noises from horses, roosters and sheep. But we're also less than 10 minutes from true civilization in Salem, where there is shopping, healthcare, and entertainment. The nicest part is, when we're done with the city, we can leave it and come home here to where there's plenty of space... but not too much. I have to be honest, I think we're in the Goldilocks Zone of property zoning and size. Lucky us. 

Meanwhile, East of Eden

"The water came in a 30 year cycle. There would be five to six wet and wonderful years when there might be 19- 25 inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then there would come six to seven pretty good years, with 12 - 16 inches of rain. And then the dry years would come..."

                                       John Steinbeck, "East of Eden"

Steinbeck summed it up pretty accurately, and so here we are in the midst of one wet and wonderful year, with the only detractor being that with so many dry years in a row before this, the land is scarcely capable of holding all this water.

Dry creeks filled with drought-killed trees are flooding for the first time in years and carrying the debris downstream. Sinkholes of formerly parched earth are opening up underneath the streets in southern California and swallowing cars whole, and 40 year-old trees are finding that even harder than surviving the droughts, surviving the deluge that comes after the drought is even more impossible.

And so it is in my neighborhood. Yesterday we had an astonishing 15 inches of rain on our hilltop, thanks to three micro-bursts which caused literal walls of water to fall around us. 50 mph wind gusts took out five of the neighbor's trees, narrowly missing our property.

The community effort which occurred immediately after these tree falls was nothing short of amazing; in less than 15 minutes there were at least 10 neighbors, half with chainsaws, hacking off branches, stacking logs and clearing the road. It was heartening to see, and made me realize what a wonderful neighborhood we live in.

But as a result of so many trees in the area coming down, we also lost power for about 12 hours on a very chilly and windy day. I sent Big Ag a text with one word:  GENERATOR. We've been bickering over the last several years about whether or not we needed one, and thankfully (or not) Mother Nature saw to it that a combination of necessity and comfort won this argument.  

So that night, we cooked dinner indoors, had a lamp on and ran our pellet stove until we were warm and our bellies full. I am as proud of that new generator as I would be of a Mercedes -- prouder even, because it's much more practical for where we live and we'll probably have it longer than we have any car we currently own. 

Today the power is back on and the cleanup has begun all over the state as we slog our way through this "wet and wonderful" year, ever mindful that too much water is still preferable over not enough. We'll take the downed trees, flooding and power outages over endless sunshine any day of the year. Because just like Steinbeck points out, the dry years are always coming.

Just not today.

The new "kid" in town

New baby.

Our neighbors' Dorper ewe had her lamb last night, and I feel just slightly less proud than they do right now, because I am the one who gets to watch and feed these guys when their owners are away on vacation. So I've of course developed something of an attachment, and watched this pregnancy as it has developed. 

I headed down to their pasture as soon as I got the call about the new lamb, and just stood around enjoying watching the new mother and her little one together for awhile. The weather has been mild and so this has been a perfect time for this ewe to lamb; a few weeks ago it was so cold I think it would have been a lot harder on everyone because the nighttime temperatures were so cold. 

Proud mama.

Not sure if they are going to keep him/her or not, but we've offered to buy it (and another one which is due later this week) so we will see what happens. I would love to have a couple of sheep down in our pasture for brush control and general bucolic cuteness. Here's a pic of the little one, standing up and looking good! 

It's always a happy thing when new life comes into the world, and so I can truly say today's a good day in the neighborhood! 

Dad wanted his pic taken, too, so I obliged.

One A Year

I was at a party last night where one of the hosts was extremely late. Since he works as a winemaker at a neighboring winery, no one was really worried because it's harvest and everyone works long hours at harvest. Sure enough, he showed up a couple of hours into the party....purple as could be. Yes, you are reading correctly -- HE was purple. From head to toe purple.

He explained that he'd fallen into a vat of Petit Syrah while they were doing punch-downs (when grapes first begin to be processed, they go through two processes called punch-downs and pump-overs in order to keep the wine and skins stirred and mixed up as they're being processed). He was punching down of a thick vat of wine (probably 10 feet tall) when he slipped on the edge of the vat and fell in.

Death by Syrah? Could happen!

After we got done giggling and teasing him as he peeled grapes off his ankles and arms and shook them out from the inside of his shirt, he explained that although he was absolutely fine and found the whole thing kind of funny himself, in California one cellar worker a year actually dies from falling into vats during punch down. Depending on how you fall, apparently once you are under enough of the grape skin/wine mixture (which can be extremely thick early on the process) it's hard to "swim" back up to the surface. So people sink to the bottom before they can be saved.  That's why at most wineries, cellar work is done with the buddy system, where one person will always watch another if they are punching down, for safety reasons. Which was proven to work last night, as my friend was able to be pulled back out of the vat after falling in.

At times my job in the tasting room is challenging, but I can honestly say it's never been life threatening. And up until last night, I would have said the same for winemakers and cellar workers. So the next time you hoist a glass of wine, remember that someone possibly risked their life "punching down" those grapes so they could be juiced, fermented and bottled for you to enjoy! Another "strange but true" tale from wine country: Death by Syrah -- and not from drinking too much of it. Who knew?

You're Not The Only One

Ah, that title sounds like the start to a beautiful love song, doesn't it?  And love is like that .. the wondrous feeling that you'll never be alone, and that you're not the only one who may be going through challenges and tough times.

But the beauty to that sentiment is never more true than on the farm.

As I've discussed in many a blog post these last few months, everything growing (or attempting to grow) on this hill has been affected by a summer of weather-weirdness.  Our tomatoes have been especially hard hit.  They have arms but the blossoms have blown off. The ones that have stayed have produced tiny tomatoes that are incredibly slow to ripen.

But what I never realized was that maybe it was just not our little hilltop outpost that's suffering.  

We had some contractors here the other day, working on an outbuilding Big Ag is constructing, and it turns out the foreman is something of a hobby farmer himself. "So how are your tomatoes doing?" he asked me as we visited the other day.  When I informed him of the weather-related maladies we were having (due mainly to the winds we face up here, I thought), he told me that he didn't know a person in the entire county who wasn't having the same problem. 

That's right, he said the entire county was having the same problem.  I could have hugged him.

The next day, I worked at the winery, where there is also a vegetable garden which grows tomatoes.  And just to check the validity of this "entire county" thing, I took a break from pouring and went outside to check on our winery tomatoes.  They too all looked like crap.

And for some reason, this made me feel a whole lot better. In part because of a kind of "we're all in this together" camaraderie -- we can all lament the loss of our tomatoes, which is a lot better than when you have a crappy crop, but your neighbor's crop is absolutely perfect and you don't understand why.

The other part is because at least you know you didn't do anything wrong. It wasn't your soil, not staying on top of insect or bacterial pressures, or too much/not enough watering.

Sometimes you're not the only one, and there's nothing you can do about it. Except take comfort from your neighbors, who are in the same boat with you.

You don't want to wish anyone harm, but in tough times sometimes it's nice to have company.

A Morning's Meditation

Since I am blessed with not having a job that starts in the morning, most days I have the luxury of waking up slowly, allowing my body to adjust to consciousness...to think, to pray, to meditate before rising.  It's a gift I don't take lightly.

Usually I am awakened by the mockingbirds who live in our backyard, which is the one slight negative to the whole experience, because to me mockingbirds are the car alarms of the avian world.

In case you are unfamiliar, the mockingbird's song sounds something like this: "Cheep cheep!  Blurt Blurt! Waaooo,Waaaaoooo,Waaoooo,Waaooo!  Reeeeet Reeeeet. Meh! Meh! Meh!"

Car alarms, on the other hand, sound something like this:  "Woo, woo, woo, woo! Meh! Meh! Meh! Wahooo, Wahooo, Wahooo Wahoo! Aaat, aaat, aaat, aaat, aaat!"

You can see the similarities.

But other than the mockingbirds, the Dawn Chorus is a wonderful way to be awakened each morning, and for some reason I was very conscious of that today.  While I was laying in bed thinking, I tried to remember what mornings were like at our last house, the one in the suburbs.

Since we lived 1/4 miles away from an extremely busy rail line, my morning usually began with two or three trains rumbling by, blowing their horns when they reached each intersection.  (This had gone on through the night as well, but that's another story.) Some engineers seemed to like to blow the horns of their trains more than others.  For some, I suspect it was the reason they  lived, breathed, and went faithfully into work each day. It was all about the horn. 

Or maybe an engineer's ex-wife lived in our neighborhood, and he passed the word to his engineer buddies to make sure she never got a good night's sleep again, after breaking his heart. That was actually the preferred working theory of mine, back when I lived there.

Anyway, now it's about 5:00 am in my old neighborhood, which means it's time for the neighbor down the street who always forgot he had a working car alarm to open his car door in his driveway to leave for work, setting the alarm off (see the "car alarm" description above for what this sounded like).

Then usually about 6:15 or so, the neighbors across  the street would leave for work and the day care drop-off at the school.  They would start their car, and immediately the "thump, thump, thump!" of their mega-stereo's bass line would begin, followed by some (usually) obscene rap lyrics.  They would go back into the house and back to the car approximately 50 times in the next 10 minutes, slamming the car doors each time they entered or egressed the vehicle, leaving the engine running and the stereo booming the whole time. They'd finally decide to officially shove off, kids in tow, and would leave for work and school soon after.

And the "De-Boom Boom BOOM" of the bass would trail off as they drove down the street.

Of course if it was a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday morning, I would probably already be awake, because our neighborhood was first in line for trash pick-up, and the garbage/recycling and greenwaste trucks would come by about 5 a.m. to start their rounds....4:30 in summer.

If there were any mockingbirds singing on those mornings, I never heard them, because my fellow man pretty much had the sound meter pegged with humanity's din.

And this particular morning meditation today, as I lay in bed with a few acres in between me and my closest neighbor, made me mindful that the cry of mockingbirds is really,  not such a bad sound to wake up to after all. 

Spring Animal Plans

Right now we're in conversation with the couple down the road, David and Ray, to raise a few hogs and possibly some chickens together.  They have an ideal, flat-ground pasture with stables that were on the property when they bought the house.  So we are thinking between the four of us we think we can handle feeding and cleaning without it taking up too much of any one person's time, since we all work off-property at least a few days a week.

Until recently, Big Ag and I were buying shares of my nephew's FFA hogs, but he's graduated now and is out of the program, so if we still want a freezer full of pork we're going to have to raise it ourselves.  And we were buying store-bought organic, free-range chicken, until we discovered even organic chicken has the same bacterial loads of salmonella as factory-farmed birds do, which is not encouraging.  So meat birds are a definite possibility.  One of the chefs at the winery even offered to do all the butchering of the birds if we give him a few to take home with him!

I feel lucky to be going into this proposition with not only Big Ag, but also two other strong men, who will be strong enough to wrangle the hogs once they get large and potentially unruly.  I am hoping we can do all this animal raising before the heat comes, since hot animals are stressed, and I don't want to have to worry about their well-being when it's over 100 degrees.

It will be a lot of work, but I know I will truly appreciate the bacon, chops and sausage in the freezer come summertime.

Neighbors

Back when I was living in LA, a good friend once likened the city to a cage filled with chimps.  She was an animal behaviorist, and had worked with primates in her college years.  She told me that if you have a cage (like a zoo cage, for example) and place three or four primates inside it, within a short period of time they will figure out a hierarchy and things will proceed along smoothly.  Put 20 primates into the same sized cage, and you will set the stage for intra-species murder, in this case chimp murdering chimp.  Intra-species murder is something very rare in the wild, and usually only happens when something within the animals' environment has gone terribly wrong -- like having too many others like you, too close.  

Her point, of course, was that we human primates have clustered ourselves into cities, and there are more of us per square mile than there should be.  LA's homicide rate was proof of this, she said, just like the chimps.

I think she is right.  Sure, we gather together for protection and a sense of community, but every one of us "chimps" still needs a certain amount of space to be comfortable -- especially once any predators like  wolves or bears are no longer a threat and we know we'd be OK with a little more space.  Then we resent being gathered around in thick clusters as if we're in danger.  

I live in a subdivision with small lots.  No, I don't want to hurt/murder or do any kind of intra-species damage whatsoever to my fellow chimps neighbors.  I actually really like my neighbors.  My next door neighbors are my favorites. But I have to say, on summer days when they gather out by their swimming pool I tend to close up my windows so I can't hear the music and kids screaming.  Several of my neighbors have pool pumps and I hear them if I'm hanging wash outside. That gets annoying sometimes.  An acre between us would not hurt anything.  I'd still wave to their kids, stop to chat when coming home, and bake them homemade Halloween and Christmas treats. My neighbors are not the only ones who create noise, either.  We have a dog who occasionally barks continuously for no apparent reason (despite our best efforts to stop her) and I'm sure its tried the patience of every one of our neighbors. I say again, an acre between us would not hurt anything.  

This is one of the many reasons we're looking for country property.  There's just too many chimps in this cage.

So here is my take on city planning.  it's a cool little 8-point primer to know if there's too many chimps in your cage:

You know you’re living too close to your neighbors when:

1. You've ever accidentally flooded your neighbor’s yard using a garden hose in yours (I include this because I did it yesterday).

2. You pass gas while on the toilet and suspect your neighbors can probably hear it from their patio.

3. You know the names of one of your neighbors' dogs and/or children only because you’ve heard the adults in the house screaming at them in their back yard.

4. You can’t hear your TV when your neighbor is mowing his lawn or blowing off his sidewalk with the leaf blower.

5. With your windows open, you can, however, keep up with whatever television program your neighbors are watching.

6. You can smell exactly how much lighter fluid your neighbor used to start up his barbeque.  You can also tell exactly what he’s cooking.

7. You know what musical instrument your neighbor plays, and you also know he doesn't play very well.

8. You have reason to believe that when you’re standing in your back yard talking to yourself, you are not the only one who’s listening.

9. When searching for new property, your first task is to check and see how close your neighbors' houses would be, and assess whether any of the above might be true once again.  If it is, you move on and look at something else.

Some people don't mind living in a subdivision, surrounded by other people.  Even though we've been blessed with good neighbors -- people who we enjoy living near -- we'd still enjoy life a lot more in an area with one house per acre and space between.  That is all.