September 8, 2013

Fall is coming…each morning as I walk out to the stable, I see that Orion has inched up over the eastern tree line just a bit more. The horses and goats are growing out thicker coats, getting ready for cooler days. Sour gums are showing small, hanging berries and red leaves, and the sassafras leaves are turning yellow at the lobes. Evening’s light is growing shorter, while the morning’s darkness lingers on long past my awakening.

I love this time of year. It’s all of subtle changes….and it brings sentimentality to the summers end and I think back…

A fallow year on the farm…Lou’s eye and Lymes disease…seven new chicks…harvesting honey…bluebirds and grackles…rain, and more rain…mud…digging potatoes…broken ribs…Martha.…strawberries…poison ivy and chiggers… baby sitting a friend’s chicken flock…pulling garlic…first time riding English style, leaving my western boots at home…Lou ambling over to hang his head on my shoulder, as close to a hug as can be…waiting for Cherokee Purples to ripen…discovering the Stable Song by Gregory Alan Isakov, a farmer/ musician…Zero 7…Margot….our vet, Tanya, coming to the barn at 11pm for Lou, more than once…Paddy waiting for me at the fence corner each morning…losing my religion…peas and eggplants out growing the hoop house…first summer without any kids at home…a rained out concert…letting the  back yard grow into a meadow…watching kids that visited touch a horses nose for the first time…Topsy…Zip running laps in the pasture, kicking his heels at the wind…friends who showed up just  when I needed to break out of my silence.

Overall, it was a good summer, but I am looking forward to fall’s slower pace and maybe, if I am lucky, napping in the hammock for an afternoon.

July 29, 2023

Sex in the hoop house hasn’t been so great. I thought it would be, and I thought it would be really fun, but that’s just another one of those fantasies that come true in friends drunken stories and in books and magazines but not so much in real life, or especially at least in my real life. It’s been so bad I had to ask for advice, search the internet, and do some experimenting. Its embarrassing for someone like me who usually takes it for granted, but at times, not everything goes as easily as planned, and at my age, it gets a bit frustrating.

The problem is getting the pollen to the stigma. The eggplant and the tomatoes just don’t get it, or just can’t get it right. Although the plants are huge and full of flowers, there hasn’t been any developing fruit.

Tomatoes and eggplants don’t necessarily need bees to pollinate them. They don't need a match maker. They are considered self pollinating since each flower has both male and female parts; pollen doesn’t have to be carried from a male flower to a female flower. Mostly they rely on air and a little wind, and insects and bees to a lesser extent. Last year when I did my first hoop house tomatoes there wasn’t any problem at all- I set up a fan to keep a breeze on them that gently swayed the flowers back and forth enough to dislodge the pollen from the anthers so it would land on the stigma for the trip to the ovaries, and I was happy with the amount of tomatoes I  harvested, but this summer, the fan isn’t doing the trick at all.

Stacy gave me some advice – she told me to try a brush and to pollinate the flowers myself – going to each flower and brush the pollen from the anthers to the stigma. I would be an artificial wind and/ or artificial bee (lets forget I have 100,000 or so honey bees hived a few hundred yards away that could do this for me through all the vented openings) ….so I found a soft makeup brush in my daughter's leftover things (when kids leave the nest they leave you with all sorts of stuff that looks like junk until you need it, then its sorta not like junk anymore) and I began the process of brushing each eggplant flower. All of them. And every day. Or at least every day that I could and can, just adding another hour job to my day!

It seems to be working a little bit as I do have a few pregnant eggplants, although there are not as many as there probably would be if the plants were outside, according to my past experiences. Sex out doors is definitely better!

Brushes don’t necessarily work for tomatoes because of their flower structure. The flower needs to be

shaken either by hand or, as I was doing last year, aiming a breeze from a fan at them. I have repositioned two fans so that they blow more directly on the flowers and I shake the plants and the individual flowers as many times a day as I can. But so far nothing much has happened – one tomato for seven plants. Outside in the garden, the tomatoes, though not as healthy or as tall, have quite a few more fruit. Again, outdoors seems key.

It’s interesting though because I also have pepper plants in the hoop house which are also self pollinating and with no help from me, are producing a good amount of peppers. So why just them? I don’t have an answer. They aren't inhibited and like sex anywhere?

I did read that temperature and humidity are the keys to germination. At high temperatures, tomatoes, etc don’t release pollen. With high humidity, the pollen sticks to the anther and can’t be released. This environment has happened in the hoop house often this summer and I am thinking that maybe I need more ventilation than what I already have. Or maybe after the apex of summer weather passes, these environmental conditions may get more favorable. 

Or maybe I don't have the music right to get these flowers in the mood and need to change to another Pandora channel - I hope to God it isn't country music that get's em turned on cause I wont do it. They will just have to like Aexi Murdoch and Zero 7 for now. 

I think though, the real challenge to all this hoop house libido is to make the inside more like the outside while keeping it inside. I am confused too.

Its all relative. In the hoop house there are no huge insect populations, nor is there fungus or blights. I can control watering, etc so these plants are the healthiest things I have ever grown, while outside the same plants are weaker and are already showing signs of blight and insect damage and overall are not as healthy. They do have fruit though, but I don’t know for how much longer or how good they will be with all the rain and heat we have been having. Its a trade off now, but in the long run I think the hoop house will still be the better way to get a perfect harvest.

I think that I will eventually get this hoop house sex thing figured out. I think that in time, all the work and the frustration will reward me. And if not, well, it has been fun trying. Like some therapists say, “you don’t necessarily have to be good at it to enjoy it”. That's the way I feel about farming too.

June 24, 2013

I have been doing my best these last six months or so to get some half decent shots of our horse’s eyes to do a photo series. I don’t think that I have yet to, or ever will, capture what I think will be a photograph that shows all the meaning I see in a horse’s eye. I think it is only possible to come close, but never close enough.

I think there is something special about a horse’s eye that sets it apart from any other animal. To me, a horse’s eye shows a deepness, a spiritual wisdom, and when calm, an indescribable peacefulness. It is mystic…a horse’s eye can draw you into the horse’s being and outside of your own…

I included a shot of Lou’s orbit … he may have lost the eye, but within the recess and the surrounding rim there is still so much expression. It seems that he can still sense the world from that side as if it were seeable. The skin wrinkles with excitement, curiosity and happiness, and relaxes when the world is still and he is contented. It is still his eye…just a different form and just as reactive.

This series will always be a work in progress, so please don’t judge it as an end…I am going to keep trying!

May 11, 2013

 Nature is rarely kind.

I put up a bluebird house on my raspberry support end pole sometime in early March and was happy to see a pair of bluebirds take up residence in it in early April. I spend a lot of time near the birdhouse as it’s near the garden, the hoop houses, and the compost area – places I am constantly moving in and out of and working in.

A Sunday morning just a few weeks ago I leaned up against the hoophouse and watched and photographed the bluebird couple diving into the garden for bits of straw for nest building, and taking the pieces back to the house. Since then I have watched the pair going in and out of the house, perching on nearby fence posts, and fluttering over the back field where Lou grazes.

Late yesterday afternoon when I went out to the hoop house, two starlings were perched on top of the bluebird house as if guarding it. I shooed them away and when I looked down, I saw the mother bluebird on the ground, life having passed away from her as she must have been doing all she could to defend her nest. I checked inside the box and in the nest were 5 blue eggs.

It was one of those moments that left me feeling somewhat empty. Nature isn’t always kind and it leaves me wondering why it evolved in this way. It seems so senseless.

Lately, I have been wondering why a lot.

Events such as Sandy Hook and the bombings in Boston have left me wondering why.

It seems that no matter how much we gain in knowledge and technology to advance our civilization, we are still stuck with a senseless instinct for violence that is not changed by law or spirituality or social pressures. We work hard each day to hurt each other whether it is done with bombs, guns, or words. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the violence that we create. And it’s all the time. There are just certain types that thrive on the ability and the power to hurt another.

I went back to the blue bird house and taped duct tape over the opening just to feel that I was doing something.  The entrance hole to the bird house was made too small for the starlings to fit through, and they would not have been able to nest there anyway. The duct tape was pretty much an empty attempt, but I felt the need to respond, even if in vain…and the starlings flew away, never changed, leaving six bluebirds never to fly.

Seems we are all the same.

April 6, 2013

The hardest thing for me is bees. The hives just don’t make it. And I don’t think it’s me as a beekeeper… I think that there is just not enough nectar or pollen in the area to support all the bees. Popularity is great, but it might be killing them.

I have been doing bees for almost five years now, and my losses have averaged over 50% every year. As recently as last September, 2012, I had seven hives and today I have three. Two hives lost queens to unknown reasons late last fall and two starved during the winter. A long time beekeeper told me the other day that he has lost nine out of ten hives due to starvation. These loses aren’t a new phenomenon. These are accepted as normal.

At every bee club meeting I attend I am told to feed, feed, and feed my bees. Almost any sugar will do – sugar water, fondant, fructose corn syrup, etc. The more food, whether natural or not, will allow the hive to increase it’s population, raise more forage bees, and in theory, make more honey.

Whenever I have started new hives and haven’t fed them, they never expanded much. The ones that I fed got bigger, but not big enough for extra honey. (And I always wondered if the honey they did make wasn’t from foraged nectar but instead made from the sugar I was feeding them?) There was a year that I had an exception.  A few of my hives expanded without being fed and produced enough excess honey that I could take some off. That year was definitely an exception. Yet two of those hives are dead now too.

If we can’t raise bees without feeding them sugar, it has to mean that there just is not enough food out there. Maybe with all the popularity of bees, are there now too many honey bees and not enough flowers? The State tries to track and count hives, but do they count flowers?

If you look around the area I live in, there isn’t a field of wildflowers and there certainly aren’t many farms with flowering crops (and the farms that exist are small like mine). Right of ways are cut down, weeds are killed, etc….what’s left are backyard gardens, and a few flowers decorating houses. I don’t think that’s enough. It can’t be.

I bought fondant a week ago and put some in each of my three remaining hives to get them through these last days of winter. After the two that I previously mentioned starved, I felt I needed to do something. My plan, which seems to be working, is to only feed them until they start foraging, which is already happening. At the most, each hive will get less than a pound of sugar, which is a lot less and a lot better than 10, 20, or 50lbs plus which I have heard some people in this area are forced to do to keep their hives going for awhile.

And then there is this: Area beekeepers are beginning to suspect that maybe the sugar water that is being fed to the bees isn’t acid enough, which compromises the bee’s digestive system, and eventually weakens the hive for mites and disease. A granted study is being proposed.

But I think – feeding them doesn’t help and feeding them is killing them? Something is wrong here. From my lay person’s perspective, it’s a merry –go – round situation. I had been told long ago that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again expecting different results. If something isn’t working, try another way.

What I think we need is more weeds and less hives. A few strong hives are better than an apiary of weak, sugar boosted hives that are unsustainable and susceptible to disease and mites.

 I am beginning to think that bees can be as simple as that. We need to work in natures balance.

March 16, 2013

To all those who never came off a horse the wrong way – don’t.  I have fallen off a horse a few times now, but never like I did a few weeks ago. This time the saddle slipped and dumped me on my ribs. Bruised, broken, or cracked – who knows? I wasn’t given x-rays because the x-rays don’t always pick theses things up and the treatment is the same for all three scenarios anyway – pills to kill the pain.  Of course, depending on the pill, they can be quite addicting or cause liver problems, so it’s not really a “win” situation. Any way, I understand that the heal time can take months. And yes, I am riding again. Twice this week, but nothing dumb.

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Since I led in with horses… Louie has made a full recovery from his eye removal. He’s bouncin’ around the pasture like a charged up ping pong ball - happy and seemingly pain free. He’s doing really good and it’s really good to see him so playful! Watching him now, I know we made the right decision at New Bolton. And no, it wasn’t Louie that caused the above mentioned incident.  Louie never would have let me fall. Super Lou, would have felt that saddle slipping and inhaled. On the other hand, I think Bill Clinton trained the horse I was on.

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A week after I did in my ribs, Kath and I headed back up to the Allentown area for another goat adventure. We purchased two boer does, approximately 3 1/2 months old. The farm owner was happy to see them come with us – all the goat kids at his farm are eventually sold at auction and finished for meat. I think he liked these two and was glad to know that they will have a different chance at fate. Right now they are in a separate pen from the others until they get acclimated and checked out by the vet. In another week or so, we will put them in with Frances, Irene, and Mary. The names of the new gals are Martha and Ellen.

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Wearing of the green is tomorrow….and I will admit it – I don’t like bagpipes. They sound like fingernails across a black board. Like two cats screaming in a brawl. Bad brakes on an eighteen wheeler.  Like an old guy moaning in pain that just fell off a horse and broke a rib or two. My opinion has nothing to do with the fact that I am not Irish; it’s just that awful noise that bagpipes make. I don’t think anyone really likes bagpipes. I think they pretend to like them just to be polite.

February 15, 2013

that eye

wet with sun and allergy

kissed with a prayer

Awhile ago I wrote and put these three lines in the “Reflections”. These lines are a reference to Louie’s eye which was clouded and blind. It always had a small tear drop in the corner, and because of its stillness, was almost spiritual to me. With all the light and movement in the world around us, Lou’s eye always seemed at peace, even in the center of all the confusion. It is one of those type feelings that I have never been able to fully explain. But that eye had a calmness that could make the world seem quiet…

Unfortunately, Lou’s blind eye began to worsen – it became darker and the tears increased until a constant rivulet formed that ran down his cheek. It wasn’t just a blind eye anymore – something else was going on.

The vet suspected that cancer was growing in his nasal passage which was putting pressure on the eye, and she arranged for us to take Lou to New Bolton to get a more thorough examination and a definite diagnosis.

At New Bolton, the veterinarians, veterinarian interns, and veterinary students under the supervision of  the resident surgical veterinarian did a lot of testing –they gave him a basic physical, checked his vitals and heart, gave him a complete ophthalmological study of both eyes, scoped his nasal passages twice, did x-rays, and other work-ups.

The good news was that the veterinarians didn’t find cancer in his nasal passages where it was originally thought to be. They found what possibly could be cancer in his eye. (See note.) The eye was becoming more and more painful to Lou. The resident surgical veterinarian gave us a few treatment options but recommended that the best approach would be to remove Lou’s eye altogether.

That all happened a week ago. Louie’s recovery has been going well since. We removed the bandages Tuesday and the stitches and skin are healing nicely. Where his eye was is the eyelid sewn over. It looks as if his eye is closed.

Since Lou had been blind in that eye ever since we’ve had him, he is well adjusted to life with sight from only one eye.  And now, without the constant eye pain, he should be a more relaxed and happier Lou. It already seems to be happening. There’s a new found spirit in his step these past few days.

I feel blessed that things are turning out this well. At almost 26 years old, Lou is past the average life span age of most horses, and the chance that fate would not have been so kind to him is considerable. But he’s fine now – and though age has given him a few nicks and dings along the way, the doctors said his health is “remarkable” and his prognosis is “excellent”.

Note: February 20, 2013. Histopathology results indicate that Lou's iris was growing into the "ruptured and detached lens capsule",  and mineralization was taking place which gave it an appearance of cancer.

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I want to recognize Lou’s doctors –Dr. Beth Hirsch of South Jersey Equine Associates and Dr. Janik Gasiorowski of the New Bolton Center. It takes a very special type of person to be a large animal vet. I really appreciate all they have done for Lou.