The impending orchard has been a topic of serious discussion of late, as we ponder our next step; should we plant the apples next year?  Or should we build the little shop?  Remember, I said, we also are purchasing our evaporator (a considerable expense in itself).  Oh yes, Lionel said, I forgot.  In that case, maybe we should postpone the store for the following year.  That's the year, if all goes well, that the pick-your-own will finally be open.

It was a heated but friendly discussion, there at the dinner table, and naturally the last remaining participant of dinner wanted to join in too.  So suddenly from left field came the voice of reason from the Bundle O' Joy:  "Or," said our two and half year old, "maybe we should bring down the wagon for the sugar wood and push the snow off to the corner, I don't want it to be too high, and then we should get some sap."

About a sensible a plan as the one we were trying to devise, to be sure.

With Lionel in two shoes and new, light-weight, steel toed boots, the LARC household is once again fully staffed and rearing to go.  Only its November.

Normally this time of year brings with it snowfall which melts in the morning, frosty windows, glassy ice on the edges of the ponds, but this year the weather has been balmy; 60's and sunny.  We've gotten all our wood in, and we're starting on next year's (a virtual rarity), we've got a new sugar house and its wood in a new wood shed, and I've taken advantage of the clear woods and warm days to go hunting for Christmas trees.

It turns out that all of our land is surrounded by other people's land with beautiful, gorgeous fir balsams just aching to be brought to my house, if only they were just this side of the stone wall.  All the potential open spots we own are covered by white pine or blackberry briars, neither of which fit my criteria for indoor December habitation.

This very point was brought up the other day when we we discussing what we might do with the area currently occupied by a red pine plantation, which we've been carefully nurturing over the years (it's our mini redwood forest) but came to the conclusion, after last year's ice storm, that as a plantation it was planted, and planted things are meant to be harvested.  Lionel was discussing putting cider apples there, but I intervened.  "A Christmas Tree farm," I said.  I've been lobbying for a Christmas Tree Farm for years.  Surprisingly, he tentatively agreed that this would be a good use of the space.  So watch out, world.  Big House Farms is expanding at supernova rates.  With any luck, we'll suck you all in, too.

While Fox News has been concentrating on turning the Fort Hood massacre into the next great Muslim attack against Americans, the rest of the world of news media has merely reported the ongoing investigation, responsibly staying away from conclusion, and also incidentally, covering the other workplace violence attack which happened the next day (Fox was so busy investigating what kind of traditional Muslim attire Major Hassan was wearing a few weeks ago that they apparently failed to notice that a redneck American in his own traditional dress had just blown away a bunch of colleagues as well). 

While the rest of the news media has been trying to find different perspectives on the health care debate, Fox has repeatedly kept up the same three headlines (note the word LIBERAL in the link, just in case you didn't know that MoveOn was a liberal organization).  Message:  Run for your lives:  Big Brother is Coming!!

We all know that Fox is nothing but the trashy mouth piece of the increasingly right wing conservative Republican machine.  Everyone knows that.  Even conservatives know that.  That's why they watch it.  The funny part is that they get indignant when people actually say it.  So tell me this isn't funny:

Fox didn't think so.  They've got no sense of humor.

Just to spite us, it snowed all day yesterday and through the night.  Most of it disappeared on contact with the still warm ground, but this morning there's a carpet of fine dusty powder. 

It'll melt.  But we still have 8 cords or so to bring in the house and not many hours to do it.

In any event, we're scramblin like squirrels to build a nest for the winter, and while some pieces, like the wood, are going slowly, others have beens atisfactorily simple, like installing sliding glass doors that don't leak and actually lock, taking the mental and then physical leap of cutting off our greenhouse for the winter, saving us heat and propane, and in general modernizing our old, leaky, quaint, New England brick farm house.

In the back of our minds, we're hoping if we tighten up the house enough we won't need to bring in the rest of the wood.  On the other hand, if it's already snowing in the middle of October, maybe we'd better buckle down for a cold, long winter.  We're not squirrels and can't predict the weather.

The Bundle and I recently came back from  a trip to San Diego (a trip originally all three of us were to go on), leaving Lionel to his own devices, ice, elevated feet and numerous distractions to keep him sane.  The trip was to participate in the wedding of an old high school friend.  She was the Best Person at my own wedding and she returned the favor, right down to letting me choose my own dress-- a nice gesture in theory, except she forgot that when we were in high school I relied on her fashion sense to get myself dressed and presentable in the mornings, and frequently borrowed her old prom dresses to go to formal affairs, having no idea what to wear on my own.  Anyway, a dress was found, altered, and sent to San Diego along with myself and my daughter, and we came back to the cold October weather just after the peak of leaf-peeping season.

Still, the days warm up enough that coats are no longer necessary, and the remaining garden tasks-- harvesting carrots, planting garlic, spreading manure, have been accomplished in the warm fall sun.   The leaves are now bright yellow, still smling brightly at us before they all fall.  We're doing other things, too, now that we've matured enough to really live in this old house of ours; replacing sliders that have failed to keep the winter in and were installed backwards in any case to begin with, splitting poplar wood for the fireplace so that we can have warm nights by a crackling fire, and in general putting it all to bed before the big freeze comes and we hibernate for the next 4 months.  Or at least until sugar season.

Hi there folks, yes I'm still here!

"Time" is one of those things that increasingly becomes a luxury, or rather, "free time": that time in which you are not eating, talking with your spouse, paying bills, washing dishes, laundry and children, cleaning up after an old, frail dog, chasing after a young, spritely cat, reading Sesame Stree dictionaries with a curious 2.5 year old, chopping, splitting, stacking wood, putting said wood in the furnace, weeding, harvesting, pruning the various projects, and overseeing the construction of your new sugar house.  A little time, all by yourself, to do whatever it is that strikes your fancy.

These days, sleep has struck my fancy.

Anyway, we were going along all busy like, doing our fall dance before the frosts came, Lionel running the chainsaw day in and day out, trying to get in the wood for the winter, myself splitting and stacking the wood and trying to get the harvests in in between my day job, when it all came to a screeching, crashing halt.  Lionel had a chainsaw accident.

I wasn't, when all was said and done, all that surprised.  It's a dangerous, scary, incredibly useful instrument he wields when he goes out to do this work, and the dangers don't just come from the whirling saw.  There's tree limbs coming loose from on high or entire trees coming down unexpectedly or in the wrong direction, not to mention the rocky New England ground apt to turn ankles or bruise shins.  But even so, I wasn't expecting my Wednesday evening trip to the emergency room, nor was I expecting to spend the rest of my short days trying to pull together the harvest, the wood, the laundry, etc, in addition to fetching water, pills, ice, pillows, making dinner for all and somehow do all the other things that I normally do in addition.

Lionel, by the way, is mostly fine, and completely embarassed, since in the end, all the damage is confined to his left big toe and the tendon which normally holds it on.   And yes, my well meaning friends, he knows all about steel toed boots.  When you've been using a chainsaw for more than thirty years, some of your initial safety precautions go out the window in favor of comfort and agility-- steel toed boots are heavy and clumsy and hard to wear when you've got bad arches.  You have to weigh your options in the real world.  You take all sorts of chances when you run a farm.  Some are financial, some are physical.  Sometimes you have bad luck.

Although it is "just" a toe it turns out that toes are important for balance and walking, and in their delicate makeup leave little room for error.  So Lionel's laid up, on crutches, hoping that what is left of the tendon stays attached to the bone so he's not in for more reconstructive surgery.  Fortunately, all the wood is cut up and I split the last of it this weekend.  Fortunately, we're almost ready to put the garden to bed.  It certainly could have been worse.  But I'm exhausted, all the same.  When you're used to teaming up its hard to suddenly pull the cart alone.

For the past two or three weeks we were waking up to the sound of demented crowing from our second flock of chickens.  This flock, Rosemonts, were livelier than the White Rocks, and ate more grass, bugs and worms than the first flock, which we liked.  What we didn't really like was the fact that some of them never grew out of the Cornish Hen stage, and some of them decided to start crowing.

Anyway, they've crowed their last cockadoodle, and we're swimming in homegrown chicken.  The chicken project we can deem a success.

Just to dampen our enthusiasm a little bit, I went to start the tractor to move the coop closer to the hose and discovered it didn't.  Start, that is.  Anydboy have some draft horses?

Yesterday, in the remnants of Danny, we reluctantly removed from the garden 60 dying blighted tomato plants and the subsequent 50 or 60 pounds of unusable fruit--gorgeous, beautiful fruit except for the spreading brown spots which we knew would only get worse.

Those tomato plants represented 6 months of work, first selecting and planting the seed, then subsequent repottings until they were almost three feet tall, then digging down each hole two feet to bury the plant, then watering, tending, weeding, pruning, etc.   We're having all sorts of issues with our garden this year, partially due to the wet, rainy, cold June we had, and partially due to a lack of nutrients in our soil, but we never expected that our entire tomato crop would fail due to a growing interest in the localvore movement.

But here it is folks-- just about everyone in the North East has lost their tomato crop and is in danger of losing their potato crop (these two crops represent half our garden) because consumers, increasingly and suddenly worried about the current food system they participate in, along with some latent anxiety about the economy, decided to start growing their own food.  Unfortunately, a majority of them missed the point and went to buy their tomatoes at Home Depot, Wal-Mart, or some other big box store.  All these plants come from a single source--a diseased source, in this case. 

So, a message to the big box stores: If you want to sell plastic crap made in China which disintegrates within a few months, fine.  But stop meddling in things you don't understand and messing with the local food economy.  That's three hundred dollars worth of produce you've destroyed for the sake of a quick profit selling diseased, sickly McTomato plants.

And a message to my would-be, wannabe, Sunday Farmers--want local? Don't have time to start plants from seed? Go to your local farmer's market. Participate in a CSA.  Go to a farm stand.  Support your local farmer.  Don't buy your upside-down porch tomato plant and ruin it for the rest of us.  Trust us.  It isn't worth it.

Lionel had gone off to a college reunion in New York City, and left me behind to tend hearth, child and farm. So I did.  With some help from Grandma, who took it upon herself to entertain the Bundle, I split and stacked a cord of wood, cleaned the chicken coop, tied up the tomatoes.  I vaccuum packed the 4 1/4 lbs of beans we'd frantically processed before Lionel left on his journey, split another half cord of wood, and dug up two rows of dying potato plants in an effort to stop the spread of blight--if it was blight.  In between I washed and folded laundry, did dishes, cooked meals, and went shopping.

However did we manage this farm when I was working five days a week?

In any case there's still lots left undone; weeds to be pulled, still more wood to be split, laundry, dishes--it kind of never ends.  And the smell of wet soil lingers through multiple showerings--my daughter, upon laying her head down on top of me, then raised her head and said in that honest, two-year-old matter of fact way:  "You smell funny."

Yes, I suppose I probably do.  We here at Big House Farms have several different new colognes for the discerning public:  Woodsman's Wonder (a hint of sawdust and chainsaw oil), Tomato delight (that tomato plant fresh scent), and finally Down and Dirty, a melody of rotting plant matter, slugs, worms, grubs, dirt, and the occasional potato.

Just in time for fall, summer has finally arrived here at Big House Farms.  And it's none too soon.  Our basil is sputtering, our corn is stunted, and our beans, while finally putting out fruit, are hardly the beautiful specimens we'd imagined this spring.  Supposedly the late blight is coming early this year, which bodes well for neither the potatoes nor the tomatoes.  On the other hand, we're drying 200 superb specimens of garlic and we put up 24 pounds of peas.  Not everything is a failure.

Today, however, was one of those days where the humidity hit close to 100 percent and the temperature rose to match.   The dog, who has finally decided to shed his winter coat, was miserably panting his way through the day, when I took it upon myself to give him a cold shower.  He stopped panting, but six hours later he still isn't dry.   Two torrential downpours tore through the yard, neither one cooled us off as you might expect. One I stubbornly worked through. The rain felt nice while it lasted, but the oppressive heat returned soon after.

The whole week promises to be like this, and I really can't complain, since it's nice that we're having summer, finally.  It's just that its hard to plan your wardrobe this way.  Last week we were smelling apple crisp and pumpkins in the air.  Sweaters were broken out.  I can't keep up.

Today we had a small gathering honoring the C portion of the LARC household.

Though "C" does not stand for "Citified" it turns out that all of our guests normally live in a city proper or what some might refer to as a "suburb," the practical difference being unimportant.  If they own any land at all it is a postage stamp cramped up against three other houses or a road, and any opportunity one might have to garden is tempered either by space or by neighborhood restrictions on what one's backyard should look like. 

In any case, it was ridiculously easy to impress them with our Gentlemen Farmer routine. 

The whole gathering was a result of found relatives; found in the sense that they all shared the same last name, a false dichotomy which immediately began to make itself known when the geneaological line began to be discussed.  Since humankind has continuously through its history discounted the contributions of the female gender, including their own considerable genetic inheritance, geneaological research in general is biased to favor only the traceable, single, male line through a single name.  The result was that all the married women, even the two genetic "C",s at the party, immediately broke away from the history discussion and began to discuss the futility of the discussion going on amongst the men and the one single "C" woman.  We realized that not only were we not "C",s, having married into the name only, but that none of us were merely our "maiden" names either, since those names were taken from our fathers and not our mothers, or our grandmothers, or our great-grandmothers--a lline completely untraceable in a historical sense.   To trace only the male line down to a single individual may be satisfying but isn't all that significant if you can't trace the rest of your ancestry.

Once the party broke up, all received freshly dug garlic as a party favor and went on their way, duly fed from country air, country food and good company--a quality which can be found in any setting.  The LARCs took the Bundle, whose name incorporates both the "R" and the "C", swimming at the local beach.  All was well on this beautiful, warm, country August day.

Now that I've got that off my chest, I can move on to more important subjects, such as New Hampshire's slow, inexorable transformation into New Seattle.  In the last rain storm we had, which dumped almost four inches of rain on us, the rivers finally woke from their slumber and started their trek towards houses and streets barely dry from the last "100 year flood" we had.  A few more rainstorms like that and they will complete the process.  Good thing I'm off on Monday anyway.

Still, yesterday's weather was gorgeous and in the afternoon it even dried out enough for limited mowing and weeding and a short jaunt to the beach (now that I have the Bundle, I have ample excuses to relax in various settings, citing "duty" and "good mothering").  So I guess we can't complain too much, even though our orchard is drowning and our vegetable garden is late and stunted and our basement, despite our best intentions, still floods in a heavy rain.

Par for the course for living in New England.  No, scratch that.  It's par for the course for living.

Just in time for the Chicken Fest Weekend, my company announced they would need to put all employees on a one-day-a-week furlough, resulting in a 20 percent reduction in pay.  Their reasoning was democratic; that they could not lay off the 15 people to achieve the same goal, and this was much more fair.  That didn't stop them from laying off some people--which resulted in my staying late to complete the surprise security requests.  Did I mention there's more work than people?  I predict the Furlough idea will quickly gain disfavor and the "let's lay off the deadwood" idea will quickly gain acceptance.

But for now I have Mondays off, even though technically they can't furlough me at all-- I'm salaried.  The legal niceties will coime out later, I suppose, but for now I'll be enjoying a 4 day work week, albeit with a day of pay taken out of my salary.

In other news, 24 chickens are now in our freezer, and we're going back to complete the process for our neighbor--who kindly let us use his equpment.  We'll most likely finish up today--and then Monday I can play.  They better end the furlough quickly.  We'll all get used to this.

This morning, as I began the process of feeding, watering and unleashing the chickens from their nightly captivity, I heard one of them crow in protest--Cockadoodle do!--a first hint of sexual maturity from our meat chickens.  The end is near.

The original game plan was to get 25 chickens and shepherd them through the process, and then, if we could stand it, we'd get 25 more, resulting in 50 chickens total-- almost 1 chicken per week.  Somewhere along the line we ended up with 25 chickens and then 25 more, with the resulting chaos when we realized the "small" chickens weren't so small anymore and had to go out with the "big" chickens whom, we were pretty certain, would regard the smaller ones as food.  To prevent this, we jerry-rigged the electric fence,separating the flocks nicely but making the feeding, watering, etc parts much more difficult.

Fortunately this weekend is the Big Chicken Fest.  After that, we'lll have only 25 chickens again.  25 to feed, water, etc, anyway.  The other 25 will be feeding us instead.

On Monday or Tuesday of last week I went to close the door of the chicken coop in the pouring rain (so what else is new?) and found one chicken sitting stubbornly outside the coop.  I picked her up and placed her in the coop.  The next day all the chickens left the coop for their morning constitutional, and so I lost my excuse to call into work and tell them I couldn't make it that day because I had to go make dinner.

But by Friday our stubborn chicken clearly could no longer walk, and we knew it was harvesting time.  We borrowed the necessary tools from our neighbor, Lionel took the Bundle for a very long bike ride, and I set about dispatching my very first chicken.  Mostly it went according to plan, except I swear the pin feathers multiplied no matter how fast I tried to strip them off.  By the time the Bundle came back, though, there was a rendered chicken in the meat cooler and all evidence had been cleaned up.  We plan to eat it tonight.

As with all projects there are some start up fees involved, although there weren't too many involved in this one until we bought the chest freezer, which brings our start up costs up to around a thousand dollars.  These are very valuable chickens, it turns out.

On the other hand I finally noticed that the people who work in Administration at my place of employment-- who, although they surely don't do less than I do, certainly make less money-- all drive better, more expensive cars than I do.  That means they're spending more on car payments than they do on food.  I'm spending nothing on car payments and lots on food.  The money has to go somewhere.