TORNADO!

   We're not supposed to have tornadoes in north central Pennsylvania, but on Thursday, July 26, 2012 we had one touch down here in Coudersport, PA.  I heard it coming. And it passed over/very near to our house before continuing over the town to where it touched down just to the east. The National Weather Service confirmed it was a tornado, along with one in nearby Elmira, NY.
   I subscribe to weather.com's text notification service for severe weather and received a notification at about 2:55pm that we were under a tornado warning.  Always the skeptic, I opened the sliding glass door opening onto our back deck, which faces westerly.  Everyone always talks about tornadoes sounding like a train, but I don't think so.  I would describe the sound as a dull, continuous roar, like you might hear when blowing over the end of a small pipe, only louder.  WORRRRRRRRRRRRRL.  I retreated to the basement, where Melissa and the dogs were cleaning the basement bedroom, and went into my den and watched the weather unfolding.  The tree tops began circling in wide arches like I have never seen before.  When the rain blanked out the treeline some 150 feet away some time between 3:05 and 3:10 pm, I decided it was time to move to our "safe room".  The safe room is a closet I built in the middle of the basement that is along the front wall, which is underground and the concrete wall that keeps it from pushing in because of the back being a walk-out at the south-western corner.  I built the closet big enough for our family of 4 to hunker down in and Melissa, 3 dogs and I fit inside without too much crowding.
   We were lucky in our subdivision overlooking the town.  Only one building was hit by falling trees, the neighbor's garage on the downwind side of us.  We had the top come out of the top of a large beech tree at the southern end of the house.  It fell eastward, between the deck stairs and the shed about 20 feet away.  It missed the fence's 4x4 post by mere inches, taking out just 4 boards.

   In the garden on the northern end of the house, the plants did okay for the most part.  All of the peppers were laid down, pointing at the house; most of them have erected themselves.  The tomatoes fared the worst.  They rubbed hard on their ties and some of them were broken off at the ground.  Many of them have since caught the blight, I believe because of the stress of their wounds.  The top snapped in one of the maple trees at the top edge of the garden, and is still hanging there.  Another 50 feet or so and another had it's topmost branches stripped of all it's leaves and the ends of it's branches too.  The oak tree, our best oak tree, on the downwind side of it was pushed over onto some smaller trees.  It leaned there for over a week before coming the rest of the way down on the 9th of August.  It is out of the frame, to the right and I missed getting a photo of it before it fell completely.

   No one was hurt on our road, nor by the tornado but the storm did cause one wind-related death when a tree fell on a camper nearby.
   Power was out throughout much of the county due to numerous fallen trees and it was out on our road until Sunday around noon.

Garden Progress Update

Bottom (B) working up, Left (L) to Right (R): Strawberries (B); Sweet Potatoes (L); Beets (R); Yellow Squash, Lettuce (L); Beans (R); Basil, Cilantro, Red Hot Cherry Peppers, Eggplant (L); Beans (R); Yellow Onions, Red Onions (L); Beans (R); Brussel Sprouts, Late Cabbage, Cauliflower (L); Cucumbers, Bush Pickles (R); Early Cabbage, Red Cabbage, Acorn Squash, Yellow Squash (L); Butternut Squash and Zucchini (R).

 At the top-front of the garden we have Hungarian Wax (top bed, 2 rows), Jet Star Tomatoes (beds 2-4 with 2 rows each)

At the bottom front we have Broccoli  (transplanted from a traditional row (or was it 2 rows) that were where bed 5 now lies.  Then we have 3 tomatoes left over from beds 2-4, followed by Big Bertha Green Peppers and 2 dozen Cauliflower.  The bottom 4 traditional garden rows are all Broccoli.
   The Cauliflower are under attack, along with the beans you can see in the beds in the back half of the garden.  I believe the culprits are army worms, based solely on the leaves being eaten from the edges in.  There were flea beetles in the eggplants, which are above the green beans, a chipmunk is eating half of each strawberry left to ripen and the beets are disappearing, I think crows might be getting into them.
   Other than that, the plants are all healthy and growing well.  Melissa visited relatives down state this weekend and she said their plants look sick compared to ours :-).  That makes my competitive side happy!
   I'll try to get some pictures posted of the back half of the garden soon.

Chickens, Chores and Staining Tip

   This past "weekend" sure was a hectic one.  On Wednesday Melissa and I spent the morning running down the best price on stain for the deck.  She pressure-washed it on Tuesday in preparation for the long, sunny forecast that dictated outdoor house maintenance be done.  We spent Wednesday afternoon with our son "Luke" and his girlfriend staining the railings of the deck and the 2 staircases leading up to it.  It took the four of us 5 hours to complete it with paint brushes.  Wednesday evening a friend asked if anyone wanted one of her chickens that refuses to stay in the fence and keeps digging up her garden.  Melissa has been after me for a couple of years to get chickens, and since I wouldn't have to raise it from a peep, I relented, as long as she gave us two so the hen would have a friend.
   On Thursday morning I had scheduled a contractor to install gutters on our house so bright and early Luke and I were out putting silicon in the nail holes of the aluminum fascia where they had pulled through and tacking it down before they arrived at 9:45.  In the meantime, Melissa started building a small chicken fence inside our large dog fence.  She went out to our friend's around noon and got the chickens.
   When the contractors were finishing up around 2:30 with the gutters we were talking about the things I had to do that afternoon, which included staining the deck floor and the steps on the stairways. He passed on a tip that we found very useful: instead of using a brush for staining, use one of those rectangular paint edging pads that you can put a broom handle in.  We happened to have one and gave it a try.  Melissa stained the entire deck floor in an hour and a half, the same amount of time it took me to brush-stain one of the 2 sets of steps..  The last time she did it with a brush and it took her all day.  She did the other set of steps in about 30 minutes.
   At 5pm we started working on a chicken coop for our new "flock".  We found some left-over pressure-treated 2x2 square railing spindles to use for the frame. Then we found some tongue and groove cedar plank cut-offs left over from my brother's camp we had planned to use for a dog house that we used on the two sides.  We had a sheet and three quarters of 3/16" interior plywood that we used for the floor, front, back and roof.  I keep a supply of deck screws and roofing nails on hand and we had shingles that were left-over from building our house.  By 9pm we put the chicken coop in the fence and then put the last piece of fence up and locked the chickens in their new coop for the night.
   On Friday morning we got the roll of wildlife netting that we had left over from fencing the garden and and covered the entire enclosure to keep Miss Houdini in.  SHE'S NOT GETTING IN MY GARDEN!  We've been getting 2 eggs a day ever since.  - Thank you, Sharon!

Vermin Venison

   Last year we planted a flat of Strawberries (4 dozen) in front of the boulders in front of our house.  Some of them disappeared before fall and I strongly suspected the local Whitetail Deer population.  This past week I've been watching my nice lush plants with berries with just a hint of color starting to appear in them.
   This morning, while going out for our walk, I discovered that I no longer have berries with any color, and most of the leaves on most of the plants were gone as well.  Out of the 4 dozen plants we planted last spring, we transplanted just 17 survivors to the bottom of the fenced-in, back garden and only 3 of them escaped undamaged.  The rest are just gone, even though I had let the sporadic volunteer wheat from the straw mulch I put down grow up around them, standing.
   The incriminating hoof prints in the road in  front of the garden, pointed directly at the strawberries are all the proof I need.  Yes, deer are vermin, tasty vermin, but still vermin; and I'll be fighting the ever-losing battle to eliminate them again this fall!

Mounds of Dirt

   On 12 May we hurriedly planted our broccoli in the traditional garden rows we grew up with, not exactly understanding what we've been reading in "THE VEGETABLE GARDENER'S BIBLE"  by Edward C. Smith and on several gardening blogs.  We were in a hurry because our fathers were arriving for our daughter's college graduation on the 13th.  A week later, Thursday evening actually, as we were sitting at the picnic table looking at the garden and discussing our growing plans, we realized just how much space our 8 doz broccoli consumed (our garden is now a multifamily garden).  If we continued to plant in traditional rows, with traditional walkways between the rows, we would run out of space before we planted half of what we wanted.
   I started thinking about last year's garden that did really well even though I had spaced the rows really, really tight.  It worked because we applied a PILE of mushroom soil to transform our woods soil/clay into decent top soil.  Since we took out some trees to double the size of our garden to about 1/4 an acre, we applied 30 yards of mushroom soil again this year.  I deduced that we could probably plant the garden as tightly this year as we did last, with all of that extra nitrogen laying around.  With our new plan formulated, we went in for the evening and I picked up "THE VEGETABLE GARDENER'S BIBLE" to refresh myself about the different requirements for some of the plants I would be buying the next day.  I read again "deep, wide beds", but it still didn't click.
   On Friday morning I tilled some of the garden again, while waiting on the garden center to open.  After picking up all of the plants on my list, and waiting for the heat of the sun to dissipate some, we planted the the Hungarian Wax Hot Peppers.  Melissa had scheduled dinner out with a few of her friends.  After she left I puttered around the garden some more and I put a string up below the hot peppers and stepped back to look at it.  I thought to myself, what a waste of good mushroom soil.  All of that work going into a path!  Then I got an idea.  What if I shoveled the good, nutrient-rich, soil out of the path and put it in the next row to be planted?
   Bright and early Saturday morning I left Melissa weeding her flower beds while I went for a load of mushroom soil (1 yard) for our very front garden and for the top, back edge of the back garden where we missed spreading some earlier, and more importantly, a flat shovel.  As soon as I got back I backed the truck up to the back garden and set to work with my new shovel.
   I found scooping the loosely tilled soil out of the defined path to be relatively easy, except for areas where we stepped on it repeatedly while planting the hot peppers.  I remedied that problem by re-tilling the tramped in areas.  Tilling the pathway helped immensely in reducing the the amount of force required to move the dirt and it wasn't very long before I had a 55 foot long path below the the hot peppers.
   Melissa finished with her flower beds as I was reaching the end of the row and she decided she liked the idea except for one thing, the path wasn't quite wide enough for our pull along wagon so she widened it out by another 1/2 a shovel width.  The BOOK said he (Edward) likes wide rows of 30, 36 and even 48 inches.  Needing a number of rows for different plant types, I opted for 30 inch rows so I measured down 30 inches and began digging the next path.  We went the whole width of the new garden and ended up with some really deep beds.  We leveled off the dirt we had piled on each row as we dug the path above it and ended up with our planting surface, and I was quite pleased.
   Late Saturday afternoon we were finally ready to plant.  We planted all of the raised beds we had created and then stood back to look them over. What we have looks very good and we're quite pleased but something didn't seem quite right.  I studied the book Saturday evening and it hit me like a 2x4 up a'side the head - I made the BASE 30" not the top!  Dirt doesn't stack straight up like blocks very well, it tends to settle outward at the base until there is sufficient width to support the height.
   On Sunday we worked the back half of the garden, putting in wider beds.  My goal was for a 36" wide planting surface on top and I found that a 40" base allowed me to achieve that with the amount of dirt I was digging out of the pathway (4-6") without getting the sides too steep to hold up.  I was VERY please with the results and next year I will redo the front half of the garden to have the wider, 36" RAISED beds.
   That was my final epiphany: RAISED BEDS.  Every time I read about raised garden beds I always pictured a wooden box structure with dirt poured in it.  It never occurred to me that a raised bed could be made without any construction materials!  Mounds of Dirt aka RAISED BEDS!

Of Bears and Bees

Today Sharon and Fitz from Fitzgerald's Family Farm are getting in a new bee hive and placing it on our property.  We have been busily preparing for this day to make the bees as safe as possible.  When you live beyond the edge of a small town, in the woods, bears are a huge consideration.  Especially considering one got a bag of our trash a couple of weeks ago and a few days later he walked across our front garden again.  The evidence is in the footprints.
   We have given a lot of consideration on where to place the hive.  Since we already have a 5' wire-mesh fence around the back garden that includes a small alcove at the back, bottom corner with two young apple trees, we decided to place it there.  In addition to the wire fence, we have a 7' wildlife netting on the outside of it that is "decorated" with fluorescent pink marking tape to make it visible.  The wildlife netting won't do much to stop a bear, except to create a nuisance for him.  Over the weekend we began construction of a third, outer-layer of protection: an electric fence.
   On Saturday I bought a 30 mile solar powered electric fencer and all of the supplies I calculated that I would need.  Why a 30 mile fencer for a small garden?  Power.  Bears have long hair and a tough hide.  I want to make sure that the fence gets their attention and deters them from crossing it.
   While Melissa was picking up some supplies in another store, I read the manual for the fencer and ended up going back to the hardware to get some more fencing supplies.  The second-most important component of an electric fence is proper grounding.  I had bought one 6' galvanized ground rod but the minimum specifications are for three of them, spaced 10' apart with the first one within 20' of the fencer.
   First thing Sunday morning I set the solar fencer out in the yard facing due south to start it's 3 day charge cycle that is required for start-up.  The sunniest location in our back garden is the back, upper corner, so I put the post for the solar fencer there, positioned so one side is facing due south to hang the fencer on.  I spaced the ground rods along the back fence, leading from the post I set for the fencer, down toward the bottom of the garden.  We spent the rest of the day clearing the fence line and driving in corner posts.
   Last night we did our best to finish the fence.  Unfortunately, when I was calculating our material needs I missed counting one corner (my garden isn't a rectangle) and I didn't allow for using twice as many insulators on the hinge side of the gate.  One set is to terminate the run and the second set is to connect the gate strands to it; one set on each side of the post.  Electricity at the gate is fed into the gate strands from the handle connection.  This has the advantage of removing the electricity from the gate strands when its laying on the ground while we're working in the garden.
   Melissa has picked up the additional insulators we need to add rows 3 (mandatory) and 4 (will be nice for deer). Hopefully the rain will hold off this evening until we can get those 2 rows hooked up and the fence tested.

Behind Schedule - Or Are We?

It sure feels like I'm behind last year's schedule, but after reviewing last year's garden notes - not yet!  Yesterday we came a long way in getting ready for this year's garden season.  I hired Smoker Excavating to put a sluice in the ditch that divides our property so we can get in and out of the garden with heavy equipment (dump truck loads of mushroom soil, for example), without running over our water line from the well.
   He removed the stump pile from above the garden and leveled it out.  The top soil from the roots looks like the best soil on the property!  It's too bad that we didn't have that area cleaned up before we made our garden!  I also had him bring in a tri-axle load of mushroom soil, about 30 yards worth.
   I wish I would have had him come in last fall instead of the kid I did hire.  I think the garden would have been ready for easy tilling instead of the back-breaking work we have ahead of us to remove the roots and rocks the other guy buried.
   One last note on excavating - if you hire an excavator make sure you're able to be present during the entire job.  Questions always come up and the excavator might have a pretty good idea on what you want, but if you're not there to make sure it's EXACTLY what you want, you may not get it.  Everyone has a different picture in their mind and you need to be on hand to provide some direction when your picture and the excavator's don't match precisely.  Using yesterday for an example, David and I had a different idea on where the sluice pipe was going to be placed, had I not been there it would have been 20 feet further down the ditch than where I wanted it.  It still would have worked, but it wouldn't have been where I planned it to be which would have interfered with my ideas for the future.
   Back to the garden.
   We are now on par with last year's schedule, except for planting onions.  Last year we didn't plant them until May 1st and most of them didn't get very big. This year we planted some around March 24th and they're already as tall as the garlic!  I hope we get enough large bulbs to can all of our spaghetti sauce with them this year.  Last year we had to buy a 25lb bag to finish.
   I finished reviewing last year's notes.  We didn't buy our plants until May 15th and couldn't even start planting them until the 21st, finishing on the 26th.  I need to take a deep breath and relax, instead of trying to work in the mud like I just did!