High tunnel construction, part 1

We started the week by counting the poles for the high tunnel. Terry assumed that since there were 7 hoops to the hoop house, everything should be in multiples of seven. I preferred the approach of comparing the inventory sheet to what was delivered. Between both methods, we arrived at the conclusion that we were missing 6 posts for the hoop and one of the ground pipes. Before Terry called the company, I thought it prudent to check the rest of the inventory. I know that Terry doesn’t have the patience for that activity, so I did it myself. There were lots of boxes.

Boxes of hardware

And about ten thousand “Tek screws,” which I assume are proprietary to Farm Tek, the company from which we ordered. Every one of those screws will have to have a hole drilled for it in metal. I just hope we don’t have any big parts left over when we’re done.

So many Tek-screws!

Terry started by putting in wooden stakes and getting the corners square. I helped by holding one end of the 100m tape measure. I couldn’t get my head around what needed to be done to get the corners matched up. The Pythagorean theory was involved somehow. Terry had a better mental image from having had more experience, and soon it was exactly how he wanted it, or at least close enough.

Marking and squaring the corners

Terry then drilled holes for the ground posts. 

Drilling the post holes

After the east side was done, I held a string so he could adjust the posts up, down, or side to side so all the posts were in line and the same heights, or at least close enough.

East side posts in with base board

Two days later, he had the west side done. 

East and west sides done, with baseboards

He was raring to start drilling holes in the hoops today but got rained out. It was a nice, gentle, all-day rain with an accumulation of only 0.3”. it will all soak in and do the plants good.

Hilda and I reinstalled the fence around my woodland garden. I hope that with the rain and the exclusion of the damned varmints, what’s left of the plants will start to grow.

The re-installed fence around the woodland garden

In all my experiments with aggressive native plants that might out-compete garlic mustard, the only one that is showing promise is the mayapples. Here’s a picture of 5 out of 10 plants that are coming up. I keep finding more and more as time goes along.

Five of 10 mayapple sprouts

Still no orioles at the grape jelly. This house finch has acquired the taste, though. So much for hard-wired food preferences.

House finch eating grape jelly. It's for the orioles, silly bird!

We’re hoping for warmer, drier weather this week. If all goes well, we will move the chickens to their summer pasture in the orchard. They love that. Best thing ever.

High tunnel delivered

Easter Sunday was a lovely warm day. I walked all around the property without coat, gloves or hat. Hilda told me that the creek bank had lost a chunk by the railroad bridge. I took a picture of it. Hard to say how long it will be before the tracks become unstable. Thankfully, that is not our problem.

A chunk of the bank, left, has fallen into the creek. Not too long before the pole goes in.

Looking the other way up the creek, washed out drain tiles are visible.

Drain tiles that have washed into the creek from our field

The grass by the fire ring is looking good. We have at least wrested that much of the riparian strip from the garlic mustard.

Grass around the fire ring

The box elder trees are starting to bloom. The pollen-producing structures shown here look like rusty-colored rice.

Male flowers of box elder

I finally got a good picture of a male cardinal.

Mr. Cardinal in an apple tree

I got all excited when I saw sparrows with sort of a white throat. They never got close to the house, and it was not easy to get a good picture when the grass was nearly as tall as the birds. (I will be mowing before long.) I thought at the time they were white-throated sparrows, which are usually only around for a single day on their way north. When I compared the picture with the book, I realized it was a chipping sparrow. I was still happy to see them, but they will be around all summer.

A chipping sparrow

The ground squirrels came out of hibernation when it was warm. When the weather turned cold last week, they had to fluff out their fur to stay warm.

A fluffy 13-stripe ground squirrel

A pair of robins has been hanging around the deck, but I have not seen any activity in the nest from last year. This robin at the bottom of the deck stairs seems to be guarding the area. I think Terry knocked the nest down in previous years. I wonder if one can prevent robins from nesting by leaving the old nest. If true that would be useful information. I’ll just watch and wait.

A robin stands guard at the bottom of the deck stairs

I made osso beefo for Easter dinner. I have a good recipe for slow-cooker osso bucco (braised veal shanks), but I use beef shanks which are easier to come by and taste as good if not better. Hilda made polenta, and the dinner was enjoyed by all.

Osso beefo

I also made some cinnamon swirl bread this week. It is very good with cream cheese. I gave one of the loaves to Hilda. She made French toast with it. I never thought of that.

Cinnamon swirl bread

The parts to our new high tunnel arrived on a semi Thursday.

The delivery of the high tunnel

The shipping weight was 1320 pounds, and at least 1200 pounds was in one 4’ x 9’ box. The other box fit easily in the Gator. The big box couldn’t be budged, so we had to open the box and unload it onto Terry’s pickup one pipe at a time.

Unloading the big box

In this photo, the first box is on the pallet to the left of the Gator with some of the plastic covering on top, and the contents of the big box are in the pickup bed.

The high tunnel parts to the left of the Gator on a pallet and loaded in the back of the pickup

After lunch, Terry and I laid out the pipes on the lawn by the site of the high tunnel, matching everything up by shape.

All the pipes for the high tunnel

And Friday it snowed.

Friday morning, more snow

The male goldfinches are almost all gold. This one is probably not too happy about the snow but is glad I finally got my feeder filled.

Goldfinch in the snow

By 11:00, the snow had all melted. It wasn’t supposed to get cold again, but it was 27°F again this morning. Nothing we can do about it except have faith that it will get warm and stay warm sometime.

Snow

Winter came back yesterday. The temperatures dropped, and we had periods of snow instead of rain.

Afternoon snow shower--if you look carefully, you can see streaks of white

In the evening, I looked out to something coming down right lively. I thought it might be pea-sized hail.

It had been so nice and warm that Terry turned the outside spigots on early. Before he went to bed last night, he had to turn the faucet under the deck on just a tad so it would drip all night. For my readers in perpetually warm places, the running water prevents the pipe from freezing. Frozen pipes burst. Burst pipes mean water everywhere and emergency calls to plumbers ($$$).

When I went out to do the chicken chores this morning, I was greeted by an ice garden. It was beautiful in the early morning sun.

The faucet is next to the pillar supporting the top of the stairs. Wind blew the dripping water out into the yard.

I’m not sure how it happened. I will conjecture that as each drop splattered on the ground, the wind bore the spray away from the house. Meters away, in fact. Admire, if you will, how much water was able to accumulate on each blade of grass. I was amazed.

Look at how much ice grew on each blade of grass!

Some of the snow/hail was still on the grass and in the garden. Hilda and I disagree about the nature of the precipitation. I think hail because the balls were too big for snow; she says, “rabbit snow, because it’s not ice.” We actually did not do an in-depth study of the pellets. They might have been white ice. It’s gone now, and it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the garlic was undamaged by the frost.

Garlic and hail/rabbit snow

The rhubarb is also maturing regardless of the cold. It won’t be long before rhubarb coffee cake!

Rhubarb

Hilda and I found pussy willows on our morning walk today.

Pussy willows with pollen-producing anthers (yellow)

Some of Terry’s trees are budding as well. This is dappled willow.

Dappled willow catkins

The ramps are not spreading like we hoped, but two plants came up and are looking robust. Perhaps they will sucker next year.

Ramps

Trout lilies are also among the slackers. Three leaves have come up. Like the ramps, they are supposed to clone themselves.

The mottled leaves are trout lilies. The scalloped leaves are the ubiquitous garlic mustard

Yesterday, Terry asked me what I would think if he used the rocks that he dug out of Kate’s landscaping under the deck. (Kate preferred plants to the rock bed that came with her townhouse, which is a little odd, as I think about it now, because she is a geologist. I guess there are limits.)

“If you do that,” I replied, “I won’t be able to get my feed muddy when I take out the compost.”

He got to work, and now it looks quite beautiful. His larger goal is to control the runoff from the slope under the deck so it doesn’t flood the patio. We hope it works.

Rocks beneath the deck for better drainage

On Tuesday, we decided to support our local economy by ordering pizza and wings from Angelo’s. We’d had dinner there once, but not pizza. The pizza was good! I was not impressed with the wings. They were not spicy, nor a good value. Kudos to Angelo’s, though, for not packing their take-out in Styrofoam!

 

Angelo's pizza and wings in a paper bag (front left)

Nice weather

The storm we were expecting last weekend missed us to the south. No flood! Hurray! Two days later, the creek had dropped 18” and was running clear again.

Even without more rain, we have puddles that are large and persistent enough to attract the attention of a pair of geese. 

A pair of geese hanging around a puddle in the south field

We haven’t yet had any that were foolish enough to build a nest. There’s always a chance that these two will try it. It depends on how much rain we get in the next weeks. If the puddle dries, they will move along. If they nest before the puddle dries, it seems unlikely that they will be able to fledge chicks before the water disappears and the coyotes move in. No great loss. It’s not like there aren’t enough Canada geese in the world.

Wednesday, April 1 was a beautiful day. The chorus frogs and cardinals serenade us as we start doing a bit of work outside to get ready for summer. Terry cleaned out all the dead asparagus stalks from the bed earlier in the week. He put several muck buckets and bags of wood chips that he collected over the winter by the asparagus beds so I could mulch the rows. 

Mulch awaiting the asparagus bed

I was thinking of waiting until after the asparagus came up, but it became clear that Terry thought it was time. So I spread the mulch. Terry was careful not to include any wood chips from the chickens. Chicken manure is too “hot” to put directly on plants. I think this is about nitrogen content, which burns the plants if it’s too high. Also, we worry about bacterial contamination. Both of these problems go away with weathering or composting. Anyway, the muck buckets were filled with regular wood chip mulch that we used to winterize the strawberries and Terry’s nursery stock. The bags had chain saw sawdust from cutting wood for the stove in the Ag garage.

Mulch out of the buckets/bags and on the asparagus rows

It seemed like a lot of mulch, but when all was said and done, I was could have used a little more. It was hard to tell how thick I was getting it. I hope Terry is right about the asparagus being able to get through it.

Wednesday was also a nice day for a dust bath.

Hilda and I took a walk to the creek on Thursday. The newly deposited silt had duck prints in it.

Duck prints by the creek

There were also prints from a racoon. Long claw marks near the creek told me that the racoon had trouble getting up the bank.

Racoon prints (I think the deep ones are deer)

Thursday morning was cold. Frost was all over the grass, and the robins were looking grumpy. Their feathers were fluffed out so they looked twice as big.

Grumpy robin wondering why he flew north so early

It warmed up nicely, however. Much to my surprise, the garlic was up already. Hilda and I took off the row cover and rolled it up.

Hilda pulling out earth staples to release the row cover

Me shaking off the oak leaves before rolling up the row cover

Garlic sprouts

I also took my small clippers and got the dead strawberry leaves off the top of the sprouting crowns. If it gets very cold again, I’ll be sorry. I may have to put on some row cover. It looks like most of the plants that we bought survived the winter. The runners that crowded around the periphery did not fare so well. I left some of the leaves in the hope that they would discourage weeds. It will be easy enough to pull the weeds. The beds have the loosest soil of anywhere on the farm, and the surface is at a comfortable height. Easy peasy.

Strawberry bed before I cleaned it

And with much of the dead plant material removed

I heard the oddest bird call while I was out and about. It sounded more like a dripping faucet than a bird. Drip, drip, tweet. Drip, drip, tweet. I saw three birds in the second oak that were making the noise, but I couldn’t tell what they were. Hoping that they would hang around for a bit, I got my camera with the telephoto lens. They were still there! I was sure it was going to be some unusual, cool species that would make such a weird sound. I took the picture, enlarged it, and saw that the birds were...(drum roll, please)…brown-headed cowbirds.

Three brown-headed cowbirds

Shoot. Neither cool, nor unusual, nor even welcome. Cowbirds are nest parasites, laying their eggs in the nests of other birds and tricking them into raising cowbird chicks, often to the exclusion of their biological children. I suppose I shouldn’t begrudge them. It’s not only a successful strategy, but also self-limiting. If too many nests are parasitized, there would not be hosts for the cowbirds in the next generation.

The temperatures on Friday afternoon were in the 60’s. Terry expressed a willingness to grill. We had two thick ribeyes in the freezer, which I thawed, and a thinner steak I got for Hilda when I was shopping. I ate the thin steak and let Hilda have one of the thick ones because she likes her steak rare. I prefer medium. 

Grilling season arrives!

Terry did a great job with the grilling. We also had foil-pack potatoes and a cheesy cauliflower and broccoli casserole. And champagne to celebrate the beginning of grill season.