Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
Ken waters the straw bale garden
The vegetable garden this year is both small and late, because of time spent putting up the garden fence and planting permanent fruit trees. In future years, I intend to have a much larger vegetable garden. But the plants are all developing. The blueberry bushes and grape fines actually will have a little fruit this year.
The first tomato
Baby grapes
Wild blackberries
Late yesterday afternoon, a thunderstorm dropped almost one and a half inches of rain here. So all the growing things are very happy this morning. The first railroad lily opened this morning.
This terrapin slowly wandered across the driveway.
A baby bell pepper
A couple of the straw bales have a crop of mushrooms each morning. As soon as the morning sun hits the mushrooms, they turn black and dry up.
Ken and I made a run this morning to Mitchell’s Nursery and Greenhouse at King. We came back with the trailer loaded with: Another fig three, two peach trees, 3 blueberry bushes, two grapevines, a rhododendron, 2 crepe myrtles, a dogwood tree, and two emerald green arbor vitae trees. I wanted a couple of cherry trees, but unfortunately they didn’t have that.
This nice man answered all our questions at the nursery.
Ken among the shrubbery
Mitchell’s is one of the biggest nurseries in the area.
After the nursery, it’s off to Sandy Ridge Landscaping Materials to get more compost. Ken has used three loads of compost already, and we’re not nearly done.
This old mattock couldn’t stand up to Ken’s demands.
Though we used a rented gasoline-powered augur to drill the holes for the fence posts, and though we frequently use a battery-powered drill and screw driver, otherwise we are using hand tools this summer. Ken is strong and doesn’t mind the work, and in most cases the hand tools are much safer.
Ken saws a post.
Ken planting a post for a hose rack
It was a long day, but Ken and I finished building and installing the two gates today. So the fence is officially done. We let the chickens celebrate this event by letting them out of the chicken coop to scratch inside their vast new garden fence for the first time.
Ken opens the door to let the chickens out. By the way, I believe we are seeing the pecking order here, left to right. The red chicken is No. 1 in the pecking order, so she is first up to the door.
All this new ground to scratch!
One of my regular stops is the Monitor Roller Mill at Walnut Cove. There’s a family of cats there, working cats that patrol the mill. Here’s one of the spring kittens, making himself at home on the front counter.
Ken and I planted some tomatoes and basil in the straw bales yesterday. We’ll see how it goes. The vegetable garden is going to be very limited this year. The fence-building project got in the way. Not to mention that to start a garden before the fence was up would be to take chances with the deer (again). Last year, for example, the deer pretty much wiped out all my tomato plants in one night.
This year, however, there will be a weekly farmer’s market in Walnut Cove, and a farmer’s market every other week at Danbury. I’m hoping those two farmer’s markets will make up for the smallness of the vegetable garden.
For more than a week, Ken and I have been hard at work on the deer fence. The posts are all in place, and the corner reinforcements are done. We’re ready to start putting up wire. I’ll blog the whole fence-building process when the job is done.
The sign marks the spot on Brook Cove Road.
It had been 20 years since I’d made strawberry preserves. Ken was eager to make preserves for the first time. Monday, May 10, was an unusually cool day, perfect for picking strawberries. So off to Mabe’s Berry Farm we went. Mabe’s Berry Farm is on Brook Cove Road near Walnut Cove.
A strawberry field worker loads berries to be sold already picked.
The berries are cheaper if you pick them yourself. Here’s Ken with the three gallons of strawberries we picked.
Our berries are transferred to boxes for the ride home.
Back at home, the jars and berries are almost ready to start. The jars will go into the dishwasher to get them clean and hot.
Ken caps strawberries.
Washed and capped and ready to cook
The strawberries are boiled with sugar. The preserves use a lot of sugar — five cups of sugar for each quart and a half of strawberries. The lids are boiling in the pot to the right.
All done.
David and Ken use a rented machine to drill post-holes for the garden fence. The trailer is gone now, by the way. I sold it the same afternoon this photo was taken. The trailer was my home while Acorn Abbey was under construction.
Now that the house is built, much outdoor work remains to be done. The first priority is a deer fence. There is an overpopulation of white-tail deer here, and they can destroy a garden overnight. There also is a great deal of planting and landscaping work to be done. I was despairing of how all this work would get done, so that my vision for Acorn Abbey can continue to unfold. Much of this work — especially the fence-building — requires two people. It’s hard work, and I am not a young’un anymore. It would be possible to pay someone to do this work, but that wouldn’t be frugal, would it, if alternatives can be found?
The alternative turns out to be Ken Ilgunas. Ken, you may recall, visited Acorn Abbey during the winter. Part scholar and part adventurer, Ken was looking for a frugal summer situation that combined peace and quiet for reading with old-fashioned outdoor physical labor. Am I lucky or what? As I mentioned when Ken first visited Acorn Abbey, he has become quite a celebrity after he wrote a piece in Salon Magazine about how he lives in his van while attending graduate school at Duke University. Here’s a link to the Salon article. Many media outlets picked up Ken’s story and interviewed him. Here’s a link to an ABC News video. A literary agent recruited Ken, and they’re working on a book proposal about Ken’s experience living in the van while going to Duke. Ken brought 50 books for summer reading from the Duke library.
On Monday, we picked three gallons of strawberries at Mabe’s Berry Farm and put up 17 pints of strawberry preserves. Photos of the preserve-making will follow soon. We also started building the garden fence. It’s an ambitious fence project. The fence is to be 365 feet long and almost 8 feet high. It will surround the garden area, the chicken house, and my small orchard of 11 trees. After several dawn-to-dusk workdays, the fence posts are all planted. Next week we’ll work on the wire. I’m planning to save the fence-building photos and post them all at once, hoping that our fence-building experience and methods may be useful to someone else who needs to build a deer fence.
I’m exhausted from a week of hard work (though Ken doesn’t seem to be). I’ve declared that we’re going to take the weekend off from hard labor outdoors.
Ken caps strawberries.