Pulling Everything Together

Went on the weekly trip to Valentine yesterday, and dropped in on the UN Extension folk.
It was pressure canner testing week. There were at least a hundred pressure canners, all shapes and sizes, makes and models - from ceramic-coated cast iron to the squat old aluminum ones with the rust around the pouted lips, smoke and fire marks around the bottom.

Well, the guy in charge was quite to the point ( nicely, of course) he's an AI guy. What's AI? Artificial Insemination. Of course in this area, that means - cows. We talked a bit about the methods and practice of AI (one of my precious 'children' went to Clemson and learned how, and explained it all to me over a couple of drinks one night) and had a few good laughs. Then he looked up the info and the people I needed to talk to; the organic and vegetable persons.

As always, the folks in the office were inquisitive. Not a whole lot of folk move TO here; most move away. There are vacant houses and properties standing in most towns. Sometimes they are rented out to cattle hands for local ranchers. Of course they are never broken into, defaced, or used by crackheads. Private property - even unoccupied - is still private property here. So the ladies wanted to know (as does everyone) HOW we found our place (the Internet), if we had ever lived here before (no) if we had family here (no) if we understood that it got really cold and snowed a lot here (that's one of the main reasons we came). As always, I tell them that we have lived other places (TX, NM, CA, OH, IN, NC) and that we used to be avid cross-country skiers so we knew cold. Then we go on to talk about greenhouses and horticulture and what grows and what doesn't (or, as I explained, what hasn't before but can). Oddly, the lovely offce manager was surprised when I told her I had two huge majestic sugar maple trees off of my verandah; they aren't supposed to grow here either.

My talent has always been planting in unlikely places, challenging the elements and status quo of soil and water conditions, and with organic efforts, making things grow. SC was easy to make things grow - plant a stick, up comes a peach tree. While in NM's desert, I had a huge garden, and grew some pretty bodacious potatoes. So growing things where there are winter storms from October thru May will be a challenge... but with carefully prepared soil and proper maintenance, one really can grow anything. What surprises me the most, I told them, is that they have the perfect conditions for collards - lovely and cool - but no one grows them! Weird, especially since they are so high in iron. As into vegetables as folks are here, you'd think that they would be everywhere. Ah, well, exposure is everything... I figure I will have to grow them myself, have their large leafy plants breaking out next to the board fence by the road, where people can wonder what they are and why one would grow them, for about three years before I get folks to eat them.

Leafy spurge is the curse of pastures locally, and poisons the cattle when they eat it. Usually they don't when it is green, but if it's cut on a haying slope and mixed into a dry bale, they don't know it's there. It is a latex producing plant - and that latex is caustic, burns the eyes and skin if you get it on you. I have a patch on the first hill, so I am researching ways to get rid of it. So far goats or sheep eating it, flea beatles decimating it, or plowing it up then planting cover crops like buckwheat, clover, or legumes to starve its roots out are the only ways. This will take some experimentation as well. I may need to get a goat to stake out. I don't really want to - I don't care for goats since I took care of them in SC for a friend - but at least I can use goat's milk for cheese. "Stake out" because that's easier than setting up and then moving the fencing; goats will wriggle out of any and everything and won't be kept in, as cattle and horses are, by three strands of barbed wire. Sheep I don't have time to mess with for the wool, and I don't care for mutton.

Lots of things to think about - is it worth it to get 1,000 poinsettia cuttings in December, pinch them and baby them for a year, for poinsettia plants to sell the next November? Probably not yet, but getting poinsettia plants here is a bear because shipping full size ones in the cold usually kills them. Hmmmm... People who lived in this house before had a pot garden in the basement, grow-lights and all, so maybe the pointsettias would do well there. Working on getting the fruit orchard set up, preparing to move the 2-foot-high windbreak blue spruces and cypress back 15 feet out of the garden and along the fence where they NEED to be, to get them out of the way of the chicken moat and to do their job - which is to keep the blowing snow out of the garden. Also getting the house and yard sealed and prepared for winter while still encouraging blooms for fall. Gotta get the wood sized and stacked up - it is all scattered over the yard - and cut, for firewood for the winter, too. Preparing the spot for the big half-buried greenhouse, the front display/vegetable garden next to the whiteboard fence, the 'chicken moat' to go around the garden to keep out the grasshoppers, laying out where everything should go for ease of access and simplicity, is an experiment in mathematical complexities.

Yes, I've thought it all out, and the people at UN Extension were so helpful... but so amazed that someone would move here on purpose with a whole plan. There are still some variables - like the poinsettias and the leafy spurge problem - but that's the challenge of it all. When you stop planning, stop thinking, stop doing, you die. And I plan to have this on my tombstone -
Wiley Coyote
Born 1957
Died 2059
The Good Die Young.