Sidetracked, Just a Little...

The reason for the this title is to add context to the picture of the tomato field being irrigated with a quarter mile wheel line sprinkler system. Most of you that read this blog don't really know what I just described, but you have to have faith that I don't make these things up. That IS what it's called by those who bust their knuckles and sweat in the hot sun putting the pipe together to bring the magic of "rain" to thirsty crops in July. During the recent 4 day "surge" to get our house in a state to be able to live in (read functioning bathroom), I had to take one little mental health break. For some that might mean heavy drinking and going to Las Vegas, but for me, it means taking a drive through farm land. There will always be something about fields of crops that grounds me. The picture in this post shows tomatoes getting a much needed dose of water, but I drove past many other noteworthy fields. On this drive (Which only added about another 20 minutes, but I did have a a crazy beagle with me) I saw sunflowers, corn, cucumbers, squash, rice, honeydew melons, tomatoes, alfalfa, dry beans, walnuts, almonds, grapes, and many other crops that escape me at the moment. Since I have spent most of my life kicking dirt clods to make something grow, this break did me good.

On to the important stuff. Once again I am facing a deadline that is defined by information found on a calendar (mine happens to be hanging on the wall in the livingroom and was issued by the Pro Bull Riders Association, but this story already has enough things that don't make sense). This deadline is much like the last one where I need to have everything done in the bathroom so we can move in. I'm happy to report that the plumbing and electrical stuff is all finished. What's left is to pass a county inspection, get a water heater installed, have the propane company hook up its feeder pipes, tile the walls and floors, AND put the door back on! I think I can manage this is T-minus 12 days. The operative word here is "think". Wish me luck!!!!!

The pictures of the tiles are to give you a sense of how the bathroom will look once this whole thing is accomplished. We bought hex tiles with the flower pattern so we could "steal" the black tiles from some and use them to make snowflakes throughout the entire floor. Part of being able to do this is to visualize. That's why we we laid out the square footage of the bathroom in the diningroom. Now we can work on fine tuning where the snowflakes will be and doing the very labor intensive task of moving the tiles around to fit the pattern. I know this sounds like a bunch of work but everyone involved in this project feels like it's worth it to remodel in a way that's period appropriate. Snowflakes were very popular a hundred years ago. I think we are hoping to do justice to this fact and make this bathroom look like it existed a hundred years ago. Wish us luck!!!!

We Have Walls...Sort Of...

The reason I say "Sort of..." is it's just the corner of one room, but it is still reason to celebrate. Considering we have spent the past several weeks taking walls and floors apart in this project, it feels like progress when we start putting things back together. Before I dive too deep into this progress report, I do have to admit to not making the self imposed deadline laid out in the last post. It is almost the middle of July and the functioning bathroom needed to move in has not happened yet. The new target is the end of July for completion.

The first picture here is the new utility room. Remember that this was formerly a closet, so this is one big transformation. The second picture is what this looked like when it was a closet, so hopefully you can get a sense of what a change (for the better in our opinion) this space has gone through. The door you see in the middle of the back wall will let us come in and out from the outside without going through the main part of the house. The concept is to keep the dirt contained to this area since there will be a washer and dryer here. When kicking dirt clods and doing other equally important farm chores, your boots tend to get a bit dirty, so having this access should help. To the right of this room will another bathroom too. That way we can come in after a hard day of dirt clod kicking, throw our extremely dirty clothes in the washer, take a shower, and change into clean clothes without ever setting foot in the "fancy" part of the house. The reason the corner of this room had to have the walls sheet rocked is so a water heater can be installed in this corner. This water heater is necessary for the previously mentioned functioning bathroom, so we finished out enough of the corner to provide a place for it and our attention is now back to getting the hall bathroom finished.

The third picture shows where things are at right now. After gutting the walls and floor, we shored up the framing and also discovered some damage from water and insects. This led to taking the wall apart into the room next to the bathroom and tearing out the damaged wood. All the damaged framing was replaced and some new pieces were added to add strength so this bathroom can survive another hundred years. The foil you see on the wall insulation serves three very important purposes. The most important is it will keep moisture from migrating through the walls and damaging the framing. Bathrooms always generate a bunch of moist air that can condense on the back side of the exterior siding during the cold part of the year. Moisture behind the siding is always a bad thing. This insulation is installed so there is an air channel to help any moisture back there to dry out and the foil helps keep too much of it from getting there as well. The second thing it does is act a radiant heat barrier. Since this blog is not focused on providing physics-based explanations, we'll just say this helps it be a better insulator than without it. The third thing all this foil does is help keep aliens from outer space from practicing mind control experiments on us while we are in the bathroom. Foil does a good job deflecting their evil gamma-rays back at them.

Let's keep our fingers crossed for smooth sailing the next couple of weeks and maybe we'll see a post with a picture of a finished bathroom.

The Quest for a Bathroom

The title of this post is not referring to the situation where you may have super-sized your ice tea at lunch a couple of hours ago and now you're rolling along that stretch of I-5 in the San Joaquin valley where they have a sign just past the exit you decided to not use. The signs tell you how many miles to the next services (read bathrooms and gas) and you have decided in order to make record time getting to your destination, you can easily wait til then. That's probably about when it would make sense to fuel up anyway. It's funny how once that decision has been made and you see in plain English there is thirty-something miles to the next services, your bladder sends a message to your brain that it made a huge error by not making you take the last exit, AND, to top it off, the low fuel warning light comes on. If you're anything at all like me, your brain goes into overdrive trying to solve the one problem you never could get right back in algebra. You know the one where a car is traveling 80 mph with someone that has only fifteen minutes to live unless they can find a bathroom and you have less than two gallons of fuel in a car that can go 18.26 miles on a gallon of gas if the headwind is less than 3 knots but has to be factored down ten percent for every tenth of a knot over three? That was the one word problem I always missed and karma has made me play it out in real life the past forty years every time I go on a road trip.

OK, now that you know what this post is not about, let's get to the point that it is about. The "new" algebra problem to solve is this. We have about twenty or so days to move into our hundred year old farmhouse and a super scientific poll has indicated a fully functional bathroom is an absolute requirement. The bathroom we started with is being gutted for the most part. I call this the bathroom we started with instead of "original" because you can see from the picture, it was remodeled sometime back in the 1960s and the house was built in 1908. It would hardly be accurate to call it original.

I think the second picture pretty much captures my opinion of bathroom decor in the 1960s. I broke out the sledge hammer and wrecking bar to make some badly needed adjustments. These adjustments included removal of the tub surround, sink, toilet, vanity, and first layer of flooring. Once these were out of the way, closer inspection revealed some water damage to the sub-floor and lower wall areas. I'm a firm believer in not ignoring signs like that so most of the sub-floor and all of the lower half of the wall surface will be replaced. As you can see in the picture, this means cutting and removing quite a bit of material. One very important Law of Remodeling is this: That which is removed MUST be replaced. Being the law abiding person I am and have been for at least the past several days, I will obey this to the letter.

That leads us to the question of what will replace all of that mess? That has been the fun part of this quest. After demolishing the 1960s bathroom, we discovered clues underneath the layers of stuff that told a cool story. The way the toilet drain was constructed, the house was built with indoor plumbing back 1908. At that time in rural areas, that was not too common because of expense. Under the bathtub surround, the original linoleum was still stuck to the subfloor boards. This means there was a clawfoot tub in there too. Under the sheetrock is good quality 1x12 planking, but unfortunately it has had tile scraped off of it in the past, and is too damaged to refinish. Above this planking is a layer of cloth-backed wall paper. In those days, this type of wallpaper was hung and painted. It's almost as thick as canvas and appeared to be very durable. Given these discoveries, it only made sense to put this bathroom back to as much of a historically correct state as possible. It was very fun to research the fixtures and materials that would have been in a bathroom at the turn of the last century. You can lose yourself for hours looking at pictures and imagining what our humble little hall bathroom could look like.

Here is what we have settled on and hopefully this gives you a sense of what it will take to complete this quest. The bathtub will be a clawfoot with a tall gooseneck shower. It will sit where the original one would have sat. There will be a wrap around shower curtain hung from a rod that hangs from the ceiling to keep the overspray from going everywhere. The toilet will be the high tank type where the bowl (the business part) is separated from the tank. The tank will be mounted on the wall behind the bowl and connected by a tall pipe. I'm told these types of toilets work very well and hardly ever get plugged because of the increased water velocity from having the tank so high above. The sink will be an open console with two fancy front legs to sit on. It will be similar to a pedestal sink in that it's open under the sink deck, but will have the legs at each corner. All of these old style fixtures had their plumbing exposed for the world to see, so the new pipes and subsequent finish work is being planned very carefully. In those days, trades people took their time and fit everything together neatly because they had to. The fixtures were not designed to "hide" all of the pipes so you could just put them where ever it was easy and fast to do.

With all of this said, here is the recap of the bathroom quest we are on. In the next twenty days we need to have completely new supply and waste pipes installed under the house. It will also be very helpful to have the new electrical wiring run through the walls and connected to the light switches and outlets. Then the floor will be put back into place and prepared so that 2" white hex tiles can be laid down and grouted. Then the above mentioned fixtures will be installed and hooked up. At that point, I hope we can put up new wall planks and get them painted. We will also tile the walls behind the tub and toilet with 3"x6" subway tiles. After all of that is completed, then it gets pretty easy with painting the planks and installing some light fixtures. Finally, I will put the door back on its hinges and call the job finished. Somehow I think it's about at least a million times easier to take care of the bathroom quest of an over-taxed bladder in the middle of the San Joaquin valley stretch of I-5.... But that's not nearly as much fun.

The New Farmville Reality Project

The way things have unfolded in 2011, the Farmville Reality Project will not produce near the bounty of fruits and vegetables it did in 2010. As a matter a fact, the location of the project has moved to a place known as the "Buckle". The official name of our new hometown is Arbuckle. It's a sleepy little town along I-5. The main crop in this area are almonds. As you can see in the pictures, the new Farmville has almond trees. They have not been well tended the past several years and there are only so many almonds a crew can eat in a year, so these trees will be removed. In their place will be a multitude of trees, vines, and open garden. The new place is two acres total, and I'm willing to bet this soon-to-be-former orchard is about an acre. At this time, no real detailed plan has emerged on what will go where. Here is a list of things under discussion for various reasons.

• Boysenberries- Lynda has promised to make plenty of pies when the berries are plentiful.
  



• Winegrapes- No further explanation needed.




• Peaches, Plums, Nectarines- If you've ever had the opportunity to eat these fully tree-ripened, you too would make it your life's mission to have these very close to your back porch.




• Olives- Home cured olives are always great to have around. We also made some olive oil last year and it turned out pretty good.




• Mandarins- The absolute best mandarin is the Owari Satsuma. They have the perfect balance of acid and sugar, plus the skins almost peel themselves.




• Cherries- Although they can be a chore to pick because of how small they are, Bing cherries are a real treat.




• Apples- Since they are so versatile in the kitchen, there will be a few different varieties so we can cook with them and eat right off the tree.




• All of the same great things we grew in 2010, plus anything else that might come to mind.

How's that for maintaining maximum flexibility for the new location? I'm thinking with an acre to play with, future meals are going to be filled with ample fresh produce straight from the garden. As we get the old almond trees cleared and start planting new trees, I'm sure plenty of other things not listed above will get thrown into the mix.

For now though, the immediate chore was to cut the four foot tall weeds down so the fire department won't come out and taze me til my ears bleed. Because we tend to make things up as we go along, the rig used was the bobcat in the first picture with a hydraulic driven, front mounted mower. I called around to various rental places and this appears to be a popular time of the year to get weeds chopped down. Most tractors with traditional rear mounted mowers were already reserved. While talking to one outfit, they guy mentioned this rig and said it doesn't leave a finely mowed surface behind but it will chop down tall weeds in tight places like nobody's business. After getting the hang of driving this thing, I have to say he was spot on. I was able to turn on a dime and poke the mower between the trees, under low hanging branches and even within inches of the barns. The controls were a couple of levers that are pretty much like joysticks on a video game. The tractor moves according to if the levers are pushed or pulled and speed depends on how far forward or back they go. Same with steering. It turns left if the right lever is pushed and the left lever is pulled because the wheels on one side will move in the opposite direction than the other side. Since it is what is known as hydrostatic driven instead of direct drive, you can stop and reverse course instantly without shifting a transmission. The two foot pedals control the height and angle of the mower deck. After ten minutes of getting used to operating it (and a few broken branches), I was able to flat out slaughter my most despised enemy, the weeds. It was noisy, bouncy, dusty work. For a guy like me that actually likes operating machines instead of computer keypads, it was very satisfying.

I took a picture of one of the weed-infested areas before mowing and then the after shot so you can see what a mess this old orchard had become. It's exciting to imagine the possibilities for creating the perfect home orchard and vineyard. At this time, the olives will likely be trellised to make picking them easier but the grapes might not be so the canopy can better protect them from the scorching sun. I guess we have plenty of research and homework to do as we develop this new location. Sometimes, that is almost as much fun as enjoying the proverbial fruits of your labor.

Still Cooking with Stuff from the Garden

All right, I realize it's been awhile since the last post. The single biggest reason is this time of year is not the best for working out in the garden. However, that does not mean the garden doesn't provide great material to work with in creating good meals. The pictures with this post are of tonight's dinner. As you can see, it fit on one standard size dinner plate and in a soup bowl. Don't let this simplicity fool you into thinking we don't eat well around Farmville these days. Quite the opposite, actually. First let's describe what this meal was and then we'll describe the ingredients, and as usual, my two cents on how those ingredients found their way to my pan tonight.

The main dish, if you have to have one, was a variation of a San Francisco specialty called "Joe's Special". For those that have never had it, use Google to find out what it is. Nothing too fancy, but it hits the spot when you're hungry. Since I like to use what I have on hand, this was made up of Italian Sausage, mushrooms, onions, garlic, brown eggs, Swiss chard, and cheddar cheese. The soup in the bowl is a butternut, wild rice, and smoked sausage soup. The garnish you see on the plate is garlic chives and spearmint. We'll get into that later, if I remember.

For the Joe's Special knock-off, the tie-in to the garden and other things I tend to discuss in this blog are this. The brown eggs are symbolic of another time back in the 1970s when Lynda and I had the dubious honor off going out to collect the eggs from her dad's chickens. He got this batch of Rhode Island Reds with the belief they were all going to be laying hens. As time went on, this pretty much was the case with the glaring exception of this one rooster. Apparently, those that sorted this batch by gender made a slight error on one of them. As he got bigger, he did the usual rooster stuff and tried to kill anything he thought should be killed because he thought so. Since Lynda was the one that did most of the chores at that point in time, she had to face this crazy rooster everytime she went to gather eggs from the hens that were laying by that time. Being the crazy rooster he was, he would charge at her and attack with full rooster force. One day she told me about this situation and me, being the protective kind of guy I am, decided to go out and take care of the egg gathering myself. This rooster did his usual routine and attacked, but this time, the person he attacked had a 2 by 4 in his hands. Being a former baseball player in junior high school, let's just say I hit at least a triple that day. It didn't do much much good though, because that stupid rooster kept on doing his psycho attack routine way after I batted him into the outfield. OK, back to the eggs. Those eggs from the Rhode Island Red hens were the best I ever had. They would have free run of the garden to peck at things and Lynda and I would go to Florin Feed and get a feed mix that was formulated for laying hens. The eggs we would gather were very good. The yolks were so intensely yellow and the taste was very rich. In the years since then, I have never had comparable eggs and I look forward to being able to raise some hens again and have a steady supply of great tasting eggs.

The soup was made with Farmville butternut squash and highlights why winter squash should be in everyone's garden. What other vegetable can you harvest in November and still have around to cook with in March of the following year? All I did to make sure these would keep this long is made sure they were clean and stored in a basket with good air flow. I put this basket in the corner of the shed and have been using squash from it all winter long. The wild rice in the soup is from a farm up in Fall River. Fall River is in the northeast part of California and right in the middle of some of the best fly fishing anywhere. It was nice to use an ingredient from that area and think about next summer, chasing trout in some of my favorite creeks around there. The smoked sausage was plain old store bought, but in the future, the plan is to get back into sausage making. Who knows, once we are settled in the new place, maybe I'll raise a hog or two each year and make sausage from my own pork. I just have to keep Lynda from naming them.

OK, I did remember to go back and talk about the spearmint and garlic chives used as a plate garnish. I stumbled on both of them while I was getting the Swiss chard. Since the plan is to move later this spring, it didn't make much sense to plant anything after the fall garden wound down. This pretty much means the majority of the garden is a jungle of weeds. Under these weeds were very healthy clumps of spearmint and chives. I was feeling a bit lazy and decided to wash and use them for garnish rather than chop and sprinkle over the food. Both would have added some interesting flavors to the dishes. It did show just how hardy some herbs can be and they are definitely going to be included in the next garden project.

Reflections on 2010

The pictures above capture the Farmville Reality Project at three different points of time. There is about two months in between each shot. The first picture is just before the ground was worked prior to planting. I really should have taken a picture a couple weeks before this one was taken to show how ungarden like this site was. I had to spray the waist high weeds two times to knock them down enough to see where all the trash was to pick up. The boy and I spent close to two weeks cleaning things up between the too often spring rains. Even after disking, rototilling, shoveling, and finally raking the seedbeds, we continued to find odd items all season long. These items ranged from old beer cans to horseshoes.

The picture in the middle shows how much bare dirt there was between the various things growing. I bring this up for a couple reasons. One, by the end of the season, there wasn't much bare dirt to navigate around on while picking things. It always amazes me how much corn, melons and tomatoes grow in just a few months time. The second reason I bring this up is to somehow burn into my brain to leave more space between some of these things when planting. I tend to crowd things a bit too much when planting. I'm always trying to get the most from whatever inputs are being used, but I did learn a long time ago that crowding plants that don't want to be crowded doesn't turn out very well. The first time we grew watermelons commercially, we made this mistake. We did end up with roughly twice as many melons per acre than the traditional spacing would have yielded. The punchline was the biggest melon was only about twelve pounds, which for the variety we grew, was not very good. It was a seeded variety and at ten to twelve pounds, each melon had roughly two or three small bites in the middle before you had to work around the seeds. The next season we planted on a wider spacing and had twenty two to thirty pound melons, which sold much better than the prior year's crop. The one major spacing change I'll make next year will be for the heirloom tomatoes. Their plant type is much larger than some of the new hybrids and they need the extra room to spread their branches out. It looked like I crowded them to the point that their branches became too intertwined and did not allow enough sun to hit the plants. I think this reduced the number of blossoms and subsequently, the amount of tomatoes. It also allowed the stinkbugs to build massive subdivisions of stinkbug tract homes deep inside the canopy. This population explosion meant quite a bit of the tomatoes were damaged. These enemies of Farmville feed on the fruit and leave yellow spots on the surface of the fruit. Just under the skin, the yellow spots turn into white blotches that make the fruit taste bitter. If there's not too much damage, you can cut the bad parts out, but if there's a lot, then it's not worth it. For the sake of my mental health, I need to move on now. I can easily lose myself in the never-ending war on stinkbugs and spend every waking moment developing strategies to try and prevail over them.

The third picture above shows how it all comes together with enough sunshine and water. Although the three pictures were not taken from the exact same vantage point, with the old, dead oak tree in the background, you can hopefully get a good sense of perspective on how things went from a weed patch to having eight foot tall corn in just four months time.

The two pictures above have special significance in the context of reflecting back on 2010. The shot of the young melon plants with the morning sun bringing out the glow in the leaves was taken in early June. When this picture was taken, I had the good fortune to reunite with someone that shares this passion for growing a garden that feeds one's self in many ways and on many different levels. Beyond the countless meals that were amazing simply because the ingredients were freshly picked, the garden brought much more to the table. In our small circle of folks, it became a center of many conversations. These ranged from people asking when this or that might be ripe to planning future meals based on harvesting things we were literally planting seeds for at that moment. The picture of the sun going down behind the garden hopefully captures the simple calmness of finishing the day taking care of garden chores. On this evening, it was about watering the thirsty plants. We spent many evenings watching the sun set while doing simple chores like this. I could go on for pages describing the many things you see when you're out at sunset in a garden, but it still wouldn't scratch the surface. We saw everything from intricate spider webs getting the finishing touches to an owl setting up its perch in the dead oak tree. Actually the owl came along a bit past sunset that evening, but it still counts.

All in all, 2010 was an amazing year. The plan is keep the Farmville Reality Project going strong in 2011 and every year into the future. It's very likely the location will change but the concept will stay the same. I plan to continue posting blog updates in 2011, much the same as was done in 2010. The big wild card is that we will be embarking upon a new adventure that will become material for another blog. Then again, it might be the right time to roll everything together into one site with sections for each "adventure". Stay tuned and we'll see where it all takes us...

Not so Random Stuff

It's been just over two months since the last post. To make up for this long gap, there will be two posts today. Truth be told, the reason there are two posts is the site only allows 8 MB of pictures to be uploaded per post and there just happened to be more than 8 MB of pictures I wanted to comment on. I titled this post "Not so Random Stuff" for a reason. While these pictures and the accompanying comments are pretty random, overall it's not. Since two posts were made on the same day, as you can imagine, even in my ADHD world, there is a correlation. It is this; the fact that I'm sitting here commenting on pictures taken many months ago shows how the project became a focal point for bringing together many different aspects of 2010. It was fun to sort through the many pictures taken over the past several months and remember what was going on at the time they were taken. These particular ones stood out for various reasons, so I thought I would upload and comment on them.
Here is a picture of the crooked rows of corn from back in April. I had mentioned in a post in May that they were crooked and would bother me until the next planting hid my crooked rows. I thought I would post it despite how the middle two rows curve to the right. It stood out this morning because I was looking at other pictures where the corn planted a few weeks after this was over eight feet tall. In the next blog post, you'll see pictures of the corn and this crooked stuff is invisible.

The picture of the basil is here because we can't wait until next summer when garden fresh basil will be just a few steps from the kitchen. Although we spent an entire afternoon making pesto for the freezer, it is long gone now. This showed us we need to make at least twice as much next year to get all the way through the winter. In 2011, the pesto making will have a neat twist to it. In early December 2010, Kevin Jr, Jessica H and I spent a rainy afternoon picking olives out by the UCD airport. This was part of an event that resulted in the olives being pressed into oil. Some of this oil has been set aside to be used for pesto making next summer. This will be the foundation for some truly great meals.

The sunflower picture is here to highlight an idea that is not necessarily exclusive to having a garden, but having one helps. The idea is the act of taking pictures sets you up to see some incredible things. The sun behind the sunflower with foraging bees is a prime example. Originally, my goal was to get a shot of the sunflowers in a row. As I looked at them, the bees' activity seemed interesting and they were foraging so intently, an up close shot without disturbing them was easy. Taking the pictures involved moving around to try different angles and one of them was this one. I encourage everyone to keep a camera handy and look for great shots. They're out there, you just have to look for them. Having a garden helps because it gets you outside, where in my opinion, the best shots are at.

This bucket of tomatoes is here because I was just recently reminded about them. As part of my important mission to keep Lynda from having to buy regular old run of the mill food stuff, I sent her home with some tomato puree. This tomato puree came from these tomatoes pictured. They were the Roma variety and in addition to making nice thick puree, they are great for pico de gallo. Now that I'm writing about them, I think I'll use some to make spaghetti sauce for dinner tonight.
The pumpkin pictured here was a, in the words of my daughter, ginormous one. It took RJ and I some serious cussing to carry it from the garden to the front porch for Halloween. Not to deprive Kevin Jr of the opportunity to talk like a sailor, he and I carried it from the front porch to the back porch where I cut it up to cook. This is no exaggeration when I say I cooked less than half of it and filled the freezer up with pumpkin. It has made its way into numerous pies, batches of cookies, a pot of soup, and a casserole. I have also given a few vacuumed packed bags away and there is still a butt load in the freezer. It is amazing how much comes from just one pumpkin. The personalized inscription was done at no extra charge. This was the first pumpkin Lynda and I grew together in over thirty years and it looks like we still have the magic touch.