Pam and I drove over to our place with big plans to re-smooth the land and gather stones for the rental driveway.  Pam drove the dogs in the Kia, and I drove Bessie the Tractor.  On the way, I stopped to unclog another leaf dam that was blocking a small stream uphill from our driveway, causing the stream to overflow onto it. I think this is a never ending battle.

When I got to our place, Pam said that Earl thinks we should weld up the cracks in the bucket loader on Bessie, so that's what we did.  Well, that's what Earl did.  I kept the dogs away.

Pam moved the electric fence so Jeremiah the Horse could go inside the barn instead of just under the side roof.  Earl's tractor was moved out under the side roof.

After the welding, I helped Earl get the backhoe out of a deep hole that it fell in.  We "pushed it out" with the backhoe, while I gunned the engine and spun the tires.  After about an hour, it was free.

Pam and I then spent an hour or so gathering stones on our property to deposit in our rental driveway's mud bog.  Once the bucket was full, I drove Bessie over to the bog and dropped the stones in, where they promptly disappeared and sunk to, presumably, China.

3 PM.  Time for lunch.  Then we drove an hour and a half to Clifton Park to buy a saddle.  A nice, inexpensive one used only a few times.  A good deal at $125.

Then, we filled up our drinking water container at the Bleecker Mountain Spring, dropped it off at our rental Unabomber Cabin, gathered the dogs and then to our land for a bonfire.  It hadn't rained in 24 hours, and we had great expectations that our big brush pile would give us hours of pleasing light and warmth.  It gave us squat.

Sure, I doused it with gasoline, and then torched the pile of cardboard underneath the brush.  But we've had so much rain in the past two months that once the gasoline burned off with a big WHOOSH, it sputtered and went out.  We need an extended dry spell.

Some of you might think I'm exaggerating about all the rain we've had.  It is now 5:20 AM, and this article is what I found in this morning's paper -

Heavy rain punishing local farmers

It seems that all that talk about climate change and how great it will be to have two growing seasons may not be such a good thing afterall.

Climate Change...

There are climate change fanatics, and climate change deniers, and climate change skeptics.  I have to admit that, since returning to upstate New York, I am a firm climate change fanatic.  Since we got back in mid-May, we've had rain every single day except for four.  And I'm not talking just passing showers.  I'm talking serious rain and thunderstorms, just as Al Gore predicted in An Inconvenient Truth.

Yesterday.

Gore predicted droughts in the southwest, and above average rain in the northeast.  Holy crap, he nailed it.  The Erie Canal has been closed for weeks, towns in the Mohawk Valley have been flooded out AGAIN, and any progress on working our land has been pretty much halted.

I don't believe these are isolated weather events.  They're too frequent over the past years, and too intense.  Upstate New York is suffering from flooding, and we haven't even been hit with a hurricane yet.  If and when that happens, it will be catastrophic.

We had a break from the rain on the 3rd and most of the 4th of July.  Pam and I took a road trip to the Unadilla horse auction, and we were amazed at the number of hay fields that were in the process of being cut.  Just like the old saying, "Make hay while the sun shines".  All the fields we saw were cut and raked, but not baled.  And then the skies opened.  There goes that crop.

We didn't go to the Unadilla horse auction to buy a horse.  We went for the tack sale.  Pam picked up a lot of horse stuff that I have no idea what it is, but I scored a saddle.  An old, beat up western saddle that needs some fixing.   No one else wanted it.  I bought it for $15.

In the photo above it's sitting in the back of the Kia along with all sorts of other horse stuff, and the magic pretzel can.  I figured that for $15, we can use it as is until Pam finds a good saddle, and then use it for decoration, or to let the grandkids play on.  But later, Pam's friend Kim arrived at the auction and wanted to see the saddle.  

"That's not bad at all", said Kim.  "I know an Amish guy who can fix that right up, and you'll have a great saddle at a great price."

Sounds good to me.  I love the Amish.

So it rained AGAIN last night, but I think the July heat is drying things up a bit.  Our plan is to rake rocks off our property and bring them to our rental driveway to fill the mud puddle at the bottom.  I left Bessie at our property a couple of days ago.

Bessie.

Driveway.

I'm going to unhitch the plow and drag a rake around our property.  Pam will help by shoveling small rocks into piles, which I'll pick up with the bucket, drive Bessie to our rental places, and shovel into those ruts in the pic above.   Two or three trips like that and we should be done.

Unless it rains.

What's In A Name?

I hope you all had an enjoyable 4th yesterday.  We did a traditional BBQ with family.  We had a great time and planned to have a big bonfire on our land last night, but... it rained.  Big surprise, eh?

Now that we have Jeremiah the Horse and Bessie the Tractor, I guess you could say we're on our way to... what?

My grandparents had a dairy farm and truck garden.  They milked by hand and so never had much more that a dozen and a half cows or so.  If I remember correctly, they had about 125 acres of land, much of it used for pasture and hay.  We don't have anywhere near that.  We have ten acres, and most of that is woods.  After building our house and outbuildings and digging up that mucky mud spring for a duck pond, I'd be surprised if we had an acre left for "farming", if that's what we'll be doing.  What do you call what we'll be doing?

From Wikipedia - A hobby farm (also called a lifestyle block in New Zealand) is a smallholding or small farm that is maintained without expectation of being a primary source of income. Some are merely to provide some recreational land, and perhaps a few horses for the family's children. Others are managed as working farms for sideline income, or are even run at an ongoing loss as a lifestyle choice by people with the means to do so, functioning more like a country home than a business.^[1]

Some have traced the growth of the concept to cultural influences such as the UK TV show The Good Life.^[1]

Ah. The Good Life, one of my favorite British comedies after Fawlty Towers (my fav!) and Monty Python. It was a show about a couple who quit their jobs and tried to make a living farming the tiny plot of ground around their little house in the suburbs. Funny stuff. But I digress.

I guess "hobby farm" is a good as description as any.  Certainly, I don't want to run at an "ongoing loss", nor do I expect to earn a living at it. I expect it to be a lifestyle choice, just as living aboard Drift Away for several years was.  It will be more like a hobby than anything else, something to keep me busy in my retirement years and to add a few coins to the purse, hopefully.

Hobby farm, farmette, truck farm... I don't know what the accurate name for it is, but hobby farm is as good as any.

The Dogs Meet The Horse

I've never owned a horse.  I don't know anything about them.  Pam grew up with horses and knows quite a bit.

I've also never owned a dog until we got Ruby in 2008.  I only know a little about dogs.  But one thing I know is that some dogs were bred for specific purposes.  Olivia, our German Shorthaired Pointer, is a hunting dog and bred to flush out birds and small animals.  And that's exactly what she does.  Put her in an open field and she'll gallop all over it, nose to the ground, flushing out anything there.   We didn't teach her to do that.   It's in her genes.

Ruby and Chevy are pit bulls.  They're truly wonderful dogs, loving and affectionate, especially to children.  They are also obedient and eager to please their owners.  But they were bred for a specific purpose, to bring down livestock.  How would they react to Jeremiah the horse?

Yesterday we decided to find out.   I set up my camera on a tripod and then Pam and I put the dogs on leashes and, with some trepidation (on my part anyway), introduced them to Jeremiah.   The video below shows what happened.

So it all worked out OK.

Ruby decided to watch from a safe distance.

Chevy watched from the safety of the barn.

Jeremiah wasn't fazed.

When Pam went in the corral to spray Jeremiah with bug spray, Chevy went in to watch.  I missed it, but Pam said Chevy went behind Jeremiah to sniff his butt.  Does Chevy think Jeremiah is a really big dog?

On a bright note (literally) it didn't rain yesterday.  It looks like it might not rain today.   So I'm headed over to our property to get more fill for our rental driveway.  With the record rain we've had, it's a real mess.

Oh, and Happy Fourth of July!  One year ago today, we arrived in Brunswick Georgia aboard Drift Away.   If you missed it, here is a slide show of that trip-

 Cruising the ICW from Savannah to Brunswick, Georgia.

Have a great day!

Get A Horse!

Pam drove over to our land yesterday morning to fetch a few things.  She called later to tell me that it looks like Bessie was sinking more and more into the muck.   So I hied myself over there to have a look see.  There she was.

Water had filled the ruts I made the day before.  I don't believe this is rain water.  I think it's spring water.   Bessie was stuck real good.  Check out the front tire, up to the axle.  

In the old days, isn't this when someone would holler encouragement?   Something like "GET A HORSE!"

So we did.  Jeremiah is a ten year old Morgan from fine breeding stock and registered with the American Morgan Horse Association.

He's a handsome boy.

The black flies and mosquitoes were thick, especially around poor Jeremiah, so Pam put on some kind of a net thing.  Jeremiah didn't seem to mind a bit.

Until I get a barn built, Jeremiah is staying at Judi's and Earl's place.  Earl is happy because now he doesn't have to mow the field.

Abbey the Chihuahua was fascinated by the big animal behind her house.

Oh, and for the record, I did get Bessie unstuck.  It took a lot of shoveling.  If I had Jeremiah, perhaps I could have had him pull it out.

Bleecker Mountain Atomic Horseradish

My dad was a kid during the Depression.  I remember him telling stories of the various peddlers that would come by his neighborhood.  The Freihofer's wagon pulled by a horse (which I also remember as a kid in the '50s), the milkman, the butcher, the ragman, the horseradish man... yep.  The horseradish man.   He walked the neighborhoods with a big bucket of horseradish strapped around his chest.  If you wanted to buy some, you presented him with a container and he'd ladle horseradish into it from his bucket.

Pam is a wonderful cook and so she does most of the cooking.  I only make some things well, like my Man Chili.  I won't divulge all of the ingredients here because Eric Snowden would then sell the recipe to the Chinese and use it against us, but one of the ingredients I use is horseradish.

One day, while making chili, I read the ingredients on the bottle of horseradish.  Contains horseradish, vinegar, and salt.   That's it?   Heck, what's special about that?  I can make my own horseradish.

So I did some research on Al Gore's interwebs and learned that horseradish is easy to grow.  It's almost like a weed.  You stick it in some dirt in a sunny place and leave it be for a year and it grows.  It's like a weed in that you better not do something dumb like rototill the horseradish patch because it will spread all throughout your garden.

Pam and I went off the mountain yesterday.  We hied ourselves to Tractor Supply to buy $300 worth of electric fence, and then stopped at the grocery store to pick up a couple of hundred dollars worth of stuff.  You know, half a cart full.  sigh.  While there, I bought a horseradish root.

This is basically how it's done.  You wash the horseradish root real good, and then peel it like a carrot. You cut it up into small cubes and dump those into a blender or food processor.  Grind it up.  A nuclear reaction takes place and creates heat.  Vinegar stops the fusion reaction.  So depending on how finely you grind the horseradish combined with how long you wait to add the vinegar determines how hot your final product will be.

So I washed and peeled the horseradish root, saving the top to plant in my horseradish garden.  I then cubed the horseradish... the smell was definitely that of horseradish.  Not bad.  I even tasted a little piece of raw horseradish... not too hot at all.  I dropped the cubed horseradish in our blender and chopped it up real fine.  The odor was more intense, but not too overpowering... until I removed the blender's lid.  HOOOO HAAAA!  Wow!  That's goooood stuff!  The dogs ran outdoors.

Some recipes I read said to wait up to three minutes before stopping the nuclear reaction with vinegar. I waited four.  I took the lid off the blender.  My eyes and nose began to water at the same time as my hair started to curl and my moustache started to smoke.  I dumped in the vinegar, two teaspoons of sugar and one of salt and clamped the lid back on quickly.  The plastic lid felt a little soft, like it was melting.  I hit the blend button on the blender and let it hum for ten or fifteen seconds.

I lined a bowl with a paper towel to drain out the vinegar and picked up the blender to pour it in WHEN THE FRIGGIN' BOTTOM FELL OFF!   There was steaming toxic waste everywhere!  I guess I must have made some noise because Pam came running in to see what the fuss was.

"HOLY CRAP!  I CAN'T BREATHE!" she said in her usual cheery happy voice.   "AAAAACK!   DAVID!!".

THE BOTTOM CAME OFF THE BLENDER!  NOT MY FAULT!

I'll leave out the details of the conversation here.   Children may read this.  Suffice it to say that Pam rescued most of the horseradish in her usual cheery way while I opened all the windows and turned on the fan.

This is my finished product in the pic below, on the right.  On the left is a new jar of Farmer's horseradish, which I always thought was very good.

It doesn't hold a candle to Bleecker Mountain Atomic Horseradish (patent pending).  It seems bland by comparison to the real thing, freshly made Bleecker Mountain Atomic Horseradish.  I'm surprised that the glass mason jar can hold it.  Certainly, there is no putting a paper label on it.  It would burn clean off.

Bleecker Mountain Atomic Horseradish was a little time consuming to prepare, especially washing and peeling the roots, but we're definitely going to add it to our list of goods to be sold at the local farmers' markets.    I think I'm going to prepare it in its own building separate from the house though.  The new place will have too many flammable materials.

Bleecker Springs?

Pam was off looking at horses yesterday, so it was just me and the dogs for most of the day.  The first thing that happened was when Olivia (the hunting dog) saw what was most likely a chipmunk and dove through the screened window to get it.  It's not her fault.  She was raised on our boat, Drift Away, and I had hung screens on the doors to keep the Georgia insects out, but they hung free so the dogs could come and go as they pleased.  Well, the chipmunk pleased Olivia so out she went, right through the screen.  My solution to that is Adirondack Screen Art (patent pending).

Pam likes it.  Good thing.

I'm getting concerned about the Big Wet Spot on our property.  Although we've had rain almost everyday since May, most other places on the land are drying up, but not the Big Wet Spot.  I took a shovel and dug a hole.  Yesterday, it was full of water.  I think we have a spring here.  Instead of a potato farm, we may dig out the spring and build guest cabins for tourists to come soak in the healthful waters of Bleecker Springs.

Hole, bottom right.

The folks carting away the mobile home for scrap finished up yesterday.  There they go with their last load.  What a relief to be rid of that.  They worked hard cutting it up and hauling it away.  I hope they made a lot of money selling the scrap metal.

I was working pretty hard myself, sorting through a wood pile, putting the brush on the burn pile and the firewood on the log pile.  The scrap metal folks left a pile of mobile home lumber and I decided to fetch it.  I took a short cut across the Big Wet Spot.   Big Wet Mistake.

Bessie is stuck real good.  I shoveled out around the tires and filled in with rocks, but Bessie refused to start.  She's a pretty cranky old lady and knows when she's had enough.  So I decided it was time for a victory defeated beer instead.  

It's raining right now on Monday morning.  I don't know if it will stop long enough for things to dry out so I can extract Bessie.  It might be a western movie day for me.

Just so you know that I'm not making it up about the rain... 

The rain totals above do not include Sunday's rain.  I'm sure we set a new record.

And what's important to note is that July is the rainiest month here. Here is the forecast for Bleecker from Intellicast. 

5-Day Forecast for Bleecker, New York

Today: Thunderstorms, High: 73 F, Low: 66 F

Tomorrow: Scattered Thunderstorms, High: 77 F, Low: 68 F

Wednesday: Scattered Thunderstorms, High: 79 F, Low: 68 F

Thursday: Scattered Thunderstorms, High: 80 F, Low: 68 F

Friday: Isolated Thunderstorms, High: 82 F, Low: 66 F

=========================================================================
Forecast Details 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today:
Scattered thunderstorms this morning, then mainly cloudy during the afternoon with thunderstorms likely. High 73F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%. 

Tonight:
Showers and thundershowers likely this evening with a shower or two possible overnight. Low 66F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%. 

Tomorrow:
Scattered showers and thunderstorms. High 77F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%.