Not Killing the Apple Tree with My Muscles

I've been psyching myself up for pruning the apple tree for months now.  I read about pruning in books and on the interweb, and bought myself the most highly rated pair of pruning shears.  Everyone  said not to skimp on tools, and that it's important to get a quality pair of pruners.  I bit the bullet and spent nearly fifty dollars on some Felco's, and even paid an extra fourteen dollars for the nifty holster so I wouldn't lose my expensive tool.  

Last Saturday was the big day.  During a break in the house renovation where I wasn't being very productive, I grabbed my new pruning shears, clipped them on my hip in their lovely leather holster, and approached the tree.  It took about two seconds for me to realize that pruning shears are not the right tool for a job this size.  I didn't want to surrender, so I scrounged around until I found a rusty bow saw (why does Brandon keep this in his truck?), some loppers that appear to have blue plastic melted on the blade, and a cordless saw with a half charged battery.  Who needs quality tools anyway, right?      

Before

After

I was really hoping for a dramatic before and after photo so I could brag about my hard work and get lots of compliments from Brandon.  Unfortunately, the after photo looks only slightly different to the casual glance, and since I had to explain to Brandon what was different, I don't think I got the transformation I was hoping for.  I didn't use a ladder, so all of my pruning was done within lopper reach.  I focused on sawing off some half-dead branches and opening up the center of the tree to improve airflow.  I can't remember the last time I sawed with a hand tool.  Maybe never.  I'm amazed that I can remove limbs from a tree with my muscles, but even more amazed to find out that if my feet are cold in damp boots, all I have to do is saw a two inch branch and suddenly everything is too hot, including my feet!  I was glad to get a work out, but found myself easily satisfied, and I left some branches that I would have removed if only I had more stamina.  After all, I didn't want to be greedy, so I left some fun for next year.  

I cut off all the low water sprouts, and cut down the three inch thick wild vine that was growing up the tree.  Some of the folks I read talked about how pruning really puts you touch with your tree, and how it's a time of communication with a tree.  Eh, maybe... I did apologize to the tree several times when I made accidental nicks in the bark, so maybe we did do a bit of bonding after all.  

I read that it's not good to remove more than a third of the tree at a time, and after cutting a few big branches I got nervous that I was taking too much (and my right arm was like jelly), so I piled up my cuttings near the edge of the woods, and called it done for the year.  I really hope I didn't kill the apple tree!  

Our House Design Sketches on Graph Paper

It is nearly time to decide where the electric should go in the the kitchen, which is forcing me to make decisions about where the appliances will go.  After I looked up some standard dimensions for stoves and sinks, and also typical counter widths and heights, I made some kitchen layout sketches on my trusty graph paper.  The kitchen is rectangular, with one tall wall and two windows.  With these things in consideration, I brushed up on my one-point perspective drawing skills and made the above sketch of my most recent version of the future kitchen.  It's not drawn to scale exactly, but it has really helped me visualize the space.  I'm even considering using chalk to draw the appliances and counters on the floor and then pretend to cook with this arrangement.  

One of the very first things I did when we bought the house was to measure all the walls and make a schematic of the floor plan.  Since then, we have traced the original drawing several times while we brainstormed different floor plans, but we try not to mark up the original when we can remember.  After all the work we have done, the floor plan is different now.  We decided to remove the bathroom from the center of the house, where it opened into the living room next to the fireplace, and move it to the small laundry room on the left (north) side of the house.  Removing the bathtub really opened up the entry to the kitchen.  We also removed the wall between the kitchen and dining room, and the wall between the dining room and living room, and replaced it with two posts and a horizontal beam as a room divider.  The stairs we built are in the same location, but we removed the walls from around them and made them exposed to the room.  The main entry to the house is the new door we added to the dining room wall on the west side of the house next to the bottom of the stairs.  

The second floor is two rooms over the living room and downstairs bedroom.  Now that I have all the drywall off the walls, and the closet next to the chimney removed, we can see what it's like if this were one large space with only the chimney in the middle as divider.  We like it.  The light is wonderful when you can see all the windows.  We are considering leaving it open, since our plan is to have one room as the spare bedroom and use the other as the office.  We could essentially make this one large room with two different uses, and this open space may compensate for the close feeling of the low ceiling.  

We also use the graph paper and tracings of the floor plan to figure out where lights, switches, and outlets should go.  Since we have almost all of the old electric wires removed now, Brandon has been planning new routes for the wires through almost the entire house.  This seems to be one of our most complicated tasks.  

I took this picture on Sunday as we worked on stabilizing the floor upstairs by adding long boards to the living room ceiling.  When the termites ate the girder under the house, and the wall above it, which we replaced with the posts and beam, this added an extra fun bounce to the upstairs office floor.  By adding these new boards we have been able to reduce the bounce substantially.  The floors in this house are always going to be a bit wonky though.  I'm really pleased with the fact that the old and busted up ceiling fan, and the crumbly plaster that it was hanging from, is finally gone from the living room ceiling.  We have no working lights now, but I feel like we are so much closer to getting these rooms put back together just because it's gone.  

It Is Cold

There's nothing less exciting than reading a blog entry about the weather, I know, but these cold days are making it hard to focus on anything else.  This morning I worked in the field for a few hours and I actually felt pain in my front teeth from breathing such cold air through my mouth while I gasped my way up a steep snowy hillside.  That's cold!  We have been continuing with our work on the house despite the cold.  In the photo above you can see just how cold the unheated and non-insulated house is.  Brandon is not a smoker - that's steam from his breath!

Underneath our snow, which is rare in these parts, is a thick layer of ice.  I tried in vain to capture photos of the way the ice glistens in the sun and makes the trees look like they are coated in diamonds.  Brandon said he understands, for the first time, why people put those shiny strips of foil on their christmas trees.  Right now, every ice coated branch reflects light just like tinsel.  It's very lovely, but dangerous to drive on icy roads while looking up into the branches to admire the shimmering twigs.  

Working on the house in the cold isn't a problem.  The tool in the picture above is an instant warming devise.  With this tool a person, even me, can tear significant portions of a house down and reduce it to nothing but a pile of rubble.  Heavy rubble that must be hauled to the dumpster.  It doesn't take long before layers of clothing must be shed and I start wishing for a breeze to blow away some of the steam coming from my face mask.  

I've nearly completed the drywall removal in the entire upstairs.  I like to use a hammer to punch holes in the drywall, sometimes in friendly patterns, and then with my handy crow bar rip it apart and pull out all the nails.  We can keep warm and active for about five hours before we start to wind down and the cold begins to seep in.  We pack up when the sun starts to go down, which is getting later every day, but by the time we get home all I can think about is the hot tub.  Oh man, if I were to advise anyone working on house renovation about the most important tool to have, I would have to recommend a hot tub.  All the chill and aches and pains get soaked away in a matter of minutes.  End the day with a hot meal and some quality time in front of the TV covered with an electric blanket, and all is right in the world.      

On Sunday, after we packed up our tools, we took a long walk in the snow and explored the perimeter of the property.  

Our tiny stream actually had flowing water.  In the summer this little channel is barely discernible, but right now, with a snowy outline it looks like a stream.  

We saw deer tracks, and so many rabbit tracks, like the one in the photo.  We found bird nests and squirrel nests, and even visited with our neighbor when he came over after we waved to him while he secured his chicken coop for the night.  There's lots of life out there in the cold.  

I took this photo of the farm house and our little barns in the distance, while we stood on the back corner of our property.  The blue color is not something the camera did, the sky and the snow were truly blue right after the sun went down.  It was beautiful, and for once the wind wasn't blowing and it was still and quiet. It was cold.      

Nerdy Dirt Talk - Understanding Soil Test Results and Lime

Got my lab results back.  Mixed news- I'm going to be okay, but my soil is acidic.  Ha!  You thought I was going to get a little too personal, didn't you?  I can't imagine what could be more revealing about a garden than to see the results of a soil test, so brace yourself, I am about to go all nerdy about my dirt.  

The best news from the results of the soil samples that I took around the farm, is that the location of the yet-to-exist garden, has a perfectly neutral pH.  Good to know.  This confirms my theory that this was a garden location in the past.  Also good know is that the soil there ranks very high for phosphorus and potassium, and high for magnesium in the "level of adequacy" scale.  It also has plenty of calcium and zinc.  Because the pH of the soil isn't acid, these nutrients will be readily available to plants and I shouldn't suffer from nutrient deficiencies with crops grown in this soil.  The only recommendations were to add nitrogen, which I will by adding organic matter.   

The other four samples, while still showing high levels of adequacy for most of the nutrients, also show that the soil pH ranged from 5.0 to 5.6, which puts my dirt firmly on the acid side.  So, despite having medium to very high levels of adequacy for the measured nutrients, it will be hard for some plants, like common crops, fruit trees, garden plants, and good pasture grasses, to get their hands (roots?) on enough of them to be peak performers. A pH of 6.3 is the lowest recommended for optimal yields.  Do I need optimal yields?    

This little schematic of the farm shows the general locations of the soils I sampled, and their measured pH.  The pear and apple trees I planted early last spring were in the 5.6 pH in the upper left corner.  If you remember, only the pears survived.  I recently ordered more fruit trees to plant this spring, and when I looked up the preferred pH of different fruits, it shouldn't have been surprising to me that pears are one of the most tolerant of acid soils.  Hmm, maybe I should just grow pears and other acid loving fruits, like blueberries and blackberries?  Good idea, but I already ordered and paid for more apples, plums, cherries, and even some peach trees, so now I've got to decide if I can amend the soil enough to plant them where I envisioned, or if I should give up some of the neutral garden real estate for fruit trees.  

Increasing the pH of the soil is something that farmers do all of the time.  The solution they use is to add lime. I knew this, but what I didn't know is how does a person add lime to an entire farm?  Even a small wanna be farm, like our ten acres.  And is it an environmentally sound practice?  I haven't figured out what the downside is yet, but I did figure out that if I want to know how much lime I need to use,  I use the reported pH and the reported "buffer pH" (I gave up trying to understand what exactly the buffer pH is) and compare them to a table.  This magic table tells me that I need to add two tons of 100 percent effective lime per acre.  But, since most lime available is not 100 percent effective, I have to factor in the RNV value (what ever that means) of the lime.  The quarry nearest the farm has lime with a RNV value of 63.  So, after some math, I find I need to add three tons per acre.  Three tons on each acre!  For nine acres, that's only more than sixty thousand pounds, which would be more than twelve hundred fifty-pound bags, just for some perspective on how much lime this would be.   

Of course, real farmers don't buy it by the bag, they pull a lime spreader behind their tractor.  And if they really want their lime to be effective, they till it in.  Well, we aren't equipped to till up the entire farm, but we could hire the lime spreader from the quarry and have them spread up to two tons per acre on the surface.  This isn't as effective, and would probably require years of application before the soil was up to the recommended pH, but it might be worthwhile if we want to try growing some grains or grazing more animals. At least in the fields with the lowest pH.  From what I've read, it seems the end of the growing season is the best time to spread the lime, so maybe next fall I will revisit this post and remind myself that I should hire a lime delivery.  

One lingering question I have is about the toxicity of the lime to insects.  While I was reading about lime I saw several references to people using lime to combat fleas and roaches, and when I watched a video of lime being spread on a field there was a giant dust cloud over the spreader, so I'm sure the lime gets on all the vegetation in the area.  If lime kills fleas, wouldn't it kill all the other bugs, like honey bees, in the field?  

All this investigation into soil pH prompted me to pull out the soil survey book for our county.  I highlighted the boundaries of our place with yellow.  Our soils are classified as Lowell silt loam, Faywood silt loam, and Eden silty clay loam.  These are all soils described as "fine, mixed, mesic, Typic Hapludalfs."  How's that for dirty talk!  

If you've never spent time looking in a county soil survey book, then you are really missing out on some great nerdy stuff.  I made myself a table with each of my soil types, and took some notes about how each soil performs for different uses.  If I wanted to grow an oak and pine forest, I have the perfect soil.  My soil has moderate limitations for ponds due to the bedrock that can be found twenty to forty inches down.  There's a clay layer above that.  Water perches near the surface because of this.  All the soils are ranked fair or good for wildlife food crops, and with a high level of management (probably lots of lime!) the best soils could produce one hundred and ten bushels of corn per acre, forty bushels of wheat, four tons of hay, or up to eight animal unit months per acre.  An animal unit month is equal to one cow, one horse, one mule, five goats, or five sheep for thirty days.  If an acre could do that with a "high level of management" then maybe I could have a pancake crop, a flock of chickens and a few four legged fuzzies roaming the fields with my lazy level of management?   

Tools to Make Sparks

Wow, look at all those sparkles!  Brandon was putting on a pretty good show this weekend when he was grinding nails off of old boards in the ceiling.  I was only slightly terrified that he was going to catch something on fire, or send a red hot nail fragment zinging into one of us.  I did double check that the fire extinguishers were handy, just in case.  

After some strenuous math, which we did wrong several times, we finally figured out what we are doing with the kitchen/dining room ceiling.  I think.  We are removing the flat ceiling boards and are going to make the ceiling slanted.  I hesitate to call it a cathedral ceiling, since this old house has no resemblance to a cathedral, but you get the idea.  Removing the flat ceiling boards is not hard at all.  Brandon can rip something apart faster than I can mentally prepare for it, but what is hard, is trying to figure out how to make the new slanted ceiling, which will be nailed onto the roof rafters, level with each other so the ceiling isn't wavy.  This is especially hard when you consider that the end rafter in the kitchen is three and a half inches lower than the rafters on the other side.  We can't just make a level string from the lowest point and line up all the boards like we did with the bedroom, because the low point is so much lower that the ceiling would come down over the window in the dining room.  Which might look sort of strange, and also might encourage head bumping on the ceiling.  With the warped floors may make it sort of like a Fun House at an amusement park, which might be kind of entertaining, for a little while anyway.   

The other challenging thing about this task, besides the mental exercise of dealing with so many angles, is that the boards we are using are twelve foot long two by sixes.  I'm not sure how much these things weigh, but by the time we measure them, cut them, hold them in place, realize we need to re-measure and re-cut them, then nail them up, then realize we changed our mind and need to rethink our whole design, it's a workout!  

That's not even including all the work it takes to deconstruct the old ceiling and grind off all the nails that are in the way.  Not that I did any of that, but I watched Brandon do it and I was exhausted for him.  Notice Brandon's tool belt?  As this project has evolved so has the number of his accouterments.  He has a hammer loop, a measuring tape holder, a multi-pocketed leather bag, and even a holster for his drill.  He has so much stuff on his tool belt now that he has started wearing tool belt suspenders to keep it from pulling his britches off.  I picked up his tool belt the other day to move it, and nearly displaced my elbow.  What I can't understand is why I still spend all my time fetching things when he seems to have one of everything hanging from his body?    

Watching Brandon use his grinder on the nails made me realize how many tools it takes to do a job like this.  Fortunately, Brandon has always had a love of tools, so we haven't had to invest in many and can spend our limited resources on the consumables, like lumber, nails, and screws.  I remember when he was given the grinder as a Christmas gift years ago, and I also remember wondering what he would ever need it for.  Now I know he needed it to make pretty sparkles!