If you ever hear that Small Potatoes is playing nearby, you owe it to yourself to go see them.
It’s hard to describe Jacquie Manning and Rich Prezioso in simple terms. They defy being put into any one musical category. I think my personal favorite was an Irish song, - Jacquie played a Bodhran (Irish drum) for this one. I posted something on my other blog here if you’d like to know more.
After the concert, we headed back to our B and B, we were all hungry, so we raided the frig, ended up visiting until almost midnight, drinking chocolate milk, eating freezer pops , laughing and swapping stories.
The next morning after breakfast, we turned the camcorder back on and did a one hr interview for a compilation DVD . Most of you regular readers already know about the concert series..but just in case you don’t…We’re co-hosting (7) concerts this year with Camp Courageous, the first concert was May30th and the last one will be November 28th with Johnsmith. Each of the artists are masters at what they do. All of the concerts are in one of two barns, either the Sill Barn @ Camp Courageous, or at our place in a 100 yr old post and beam barn. The acoustics rock, so does the atmosphere. A local public access tv station has agreed to create a “behind the music” dvd w/ highlights of each concert and one on one interviews of each artist, which I can’t wait to see.
Here’s a picture of Rich and Jacquie doing their version of American Gothic in front of our house after breakfast:
Our next Concert is July 18th featuring Gayla Drake Paul. Here’s a little bleep about her I grabbed off her website:
www.digitaldreamdoor.com, ranks Gayla as one of the top 100 acoustic guitarists on the planet, and also recommends her solo guitar CD in their top 10 Suggested Listening for Acoustic Guitar, and recently chose Broken Blues as one of the top 100 acoustic CDs of all time).A rarity beyond her achievements as an instrumentalist, she is also regarded as one of the finest songwriters of her generation, with an intimate and evocative voice. She is a frequent contributor to the fastest growing guitar magazine in the country, Premier Guitar.
All of this fun and excitement happening in 2009 because my wife saw a notice in the paper last Winter for a grant that we applied for to help underwrite these concerts.
If you love great live music in a unique setting, you owe it to yourself to check out one of these events. If you time it right, you might even get to stay in our B and B and get to know these artists with us…just a thought.
On a completely unrelated note I’m going to leave you with this clip from utube- I’d love to have this kid play @ one of our concerts:
As always, thanks for reading “my stuff”- drop me a note and let me know what you think. DM
“Each year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere. He’s gotta pick this one. He’s got to. I don’t see how a pumpkin patch can be more sincere than this one. You can look around and there’s not a sign of hypocrisy. Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see. “
Linus from It’s The Great Pumkin Charlie Brown
This is one of the pumkin hills that will greet you as you drive on to our property.
Here’s a picture taken behind the barn with another 9 pumpkin hills.
There is something magical about a pumpkin patch for me. I love watching the vines take over a piece of ground, then there’s the large yellow flowers, I’ve been told can be fried up like mushrooms. Later, when the fruit begin to form, it’s fun to discover them hidden under the large green canopy of leaves.
We have this area behind our old barn that just begged to have a pumpkin patch on it , so late May, I decided I would take my best shot at creating a pumpkin patch for the grandkids.
Last night I did some additional reading and discovered…
#1 I will need to water pumpkins regularly, especially as we enter the dryer months of July and August.
#2 The most effective way to water pumpkins is with a “drip” garden hose, that gently soaks the soil all around the plants.
#3 As the vines shoot out from the “Mother” hill, additional roots are thrust into the ground along the vine to collect water.
#4 It is recommended to mulch around the plant to help keep the weeds down and conserve the moisture in the soil.
There will be many more pumpkins than the grand kids will want, so here’s the deal..for $3.00 a piece, you are invited to come out and pick your own pumpkin. If you plan ahead, you might even want to spend the night in our B and B, or take home some apples from our small orchard.
This is shaping up to be a bumper year for the orchard. In case you’re wondering..we have Royal Court (it’s a variety of Cortland), Gala, 3 varieties of Red Delicious (including an an heirloom variety) Braeburn, Honeycrisp, Suncrisp, Gingergold and Liberty. We only have 100 trees..so it’s first come first, serve.
I plan to keep posting photos of the pumpkin patch as we head into the Fall. Drop me a line if you want directions on how to get here.
ps The baby chicks are doing great, as are the 6 little runt pigs we recently acquired….none of which I’ve named as per request of Kristina, Winston’s good friend from Washington.
pss You’ll have to excuse me now, while I go take a power-nap. The 2nd concert of the 2009 Bear River Concert Series is tonight..so it’s going to be a full weekend.
“Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw. “
Henry David Thoreau
I like that quote by Thoreau where he talks about gardens, forests and outlaws, but I’m not sure what he was trying to say. I’m serious. Could one of you translate that for me?
Here are some photos of our 2009 garden taken 6/7/09:
The garden this year is one giant laboratory . I have this quote taped to my computer:
“If I’d learned anything from experience and from Ruth Stout’s books it was to experiment….try different methods, be open to the ideas of others, but always temper those ideas with common sense…..Gardening is like cooking: Read the recipe and then use your head.” A dash of skepticism can do no harm. Go lightly on caution, heavily on adventure and see what comes out. If you make a mistake, what of it? That’s one way to learn, and tomorrow is another day.”
One thing I learned this season was I jumped the gun with the potatoes. You know how it is, after a long winter, you want to get in the dirt and plant something . The week before it was time to plant the potatoes, I was told I needed to “harden them”, basically cut them up, allow them to skin over.
So far so good. Well, my mom saw them in the shed and expressed a concern it might be too early and they would freeze. She was right. 25% of them got moldy and mushy from being frozen. Imagine if we lived 150 years ago, and those seed potatoes were all we had for the coming year to live on. We live such sheltered lives.
This next experiment is my personal favorite . Michael (fellow blogger) suggested I plant some of the potatoes in tires, as the plant grows, you stack tires and fill them with dirt. When it’s time to harvest, you just kick the tires over. Well, we didn’t have any tires , and I didn’t really want to drag some home. They’re a pain to get rid of. Plus, with tires, you need to make sure you fill them completely with dirt-no void.
I did have dozens of 25 inch long 2 by 4’s in the shed, so I call this the modified tire method:
.
Here is a picture of some sweet potatoes we were trying to get jump started. Sweet potatoes are sprayed with a retardant, to keep them from sprouting. It took weeks before two of them began to ”root”. Two of them never did germinate. We started smelling something nasty in the house, could not locate the source of the odor..until it was time to plant the sweet potato’s. Here I thought they were all rooting, when in fact, two of them were just rotting in the water.
Here is a photo of me next to 3 different potato growing methods. On the left is a garbage can with a sweet potato plant. . The stacked boards you already know about and below them are potatoes I’m just heavily mulching with hay.
This next one is a close up of a tomato flower. We planted four varieties: Golden Jubilee, Better Boy, Celebrity and Heirloom Red. Eight of the tomatoes I am training to climb a pole and eight of them I planted in wire frames.
Have you ever trained the tomatoes to climb? If not, it’s really kind of fun. You just keep pinching the “sucker” branches off and tie the central branch to a pole. The tomato will get to be 6 foot tall or taller, and the fruit will be easier to see and pick.
Here is a photo of our baby chicks (Joyis on the far right) For those of you that didn’t know, we are keeping 3 of the hens and naming them after famous people. One of them is named after Joy the blogger. A second one is named after Lori, a friend from town. (she’s the brown one in the middle.) The hens are all brown, and the roosters are white
So tell me, what are some of the things you’ve learned in life the hard way? It can be from any area of life. And be sure to take a stab @ that Thoreau quote while your at it. Thanks in advance! DM
One of the perks for hosting the concert series we kicked off last night with Scott and Michelle Dalziel and Beth Wood is spending time with the artists one on one before and after the show. We told Beth, she was welcome to crash in our B and B when she was in the area, she took us up on the offer.
This morning we filmed a 30 minute interview with Beth.
I’d talked with Becky, who runs programming @ our local access channel about putting together a DVD with highlights of the series, she loved the idea. Becky suggested in addition to filming the concerts themselves, to also interview the musicians on the side, so she could create a “Behind the music” documentary .
We talked with Beth about her musical roots, the high lights and low lights of being a professional musician, how she goes about writing her songs, the Kerville Folk festival , and her chocolate lab Marble:
If you love live music in a non-bar setting, and you’re looking for something fun to do, we have (6) more of these concerts scheduled once a month. Each one of the concerts will be held in the Sill barn on the Camp Courageous property (except for September) - The Sill barn is nestled in the woods along the Maquoketa river- you’d swear you have been transported to Colorado as you walk among the tall pine trees.
In July the guitarist we have coming (Gayla Drake Paul) is on a list of the top 100 guitarists ON THE PLANET- get that? Top 100 acoustic guitarists in the world. Each one of the artists coming is of that caliber of musician….right here in Eastern Iowa- the new live music capital of the Midwest.
Let me know if you’d like either a DVD of a certain concert, or the compilation DVD of the series. I’m guessing they will run about $20 each. The money will get evenly divided between the artists, the 2 charities sponsoring the series , and the local access channel producing it.
“John Chapman, or Johnny Appleseed was born September 26th1774, was the second child of Nathaniel Chapman and his wife, the former Elizabeth Symonds. of Leominster, Massachusetts. His father started young John upon a career as an Orchardist by apprenticing him to a Mr. Crawford, who had an apple orchard.
There are so many legends and myths surrounding the guy, you might be tempted to blow him off as just a story.
I (DM) got it in my head a couple of years ago to see if it were still possible to get a tree for our apple orchard that had some connection to Johnny Appleseed. I got on line and discovered Historic Trees where you can purchase direct offspring started from cuttings taken from the last known surviving tree he planted.
We purchased (3) of them and planted them by our old barn. Here is a photo of one of them I took this morning:
The deer are thick in our neck of the woods, so I had to put a fence around the young trees.
Here is the certificate of authenticity you get with the tree:
Here is a photo of the original tree from a magazine article before it died:
There are over 2000 varieties of apple trees world wide. This variety is called a Winter Rambo. It is a tart, red- striped apple. These flavorful heirloom apples, which are great for pies and dumplings, and make good applesauce.
My thought is, when this tree gets a little bigger, have an outdoor sign made w/ this certificate placed next to the tree.
I love incorporating whimsey in my life, this tree, does that for me.
How about you? What sort of ways do you add whimsy into your life?
Getting back to Johnny Appleseed for just a second. The guy was a real person. If you get on line, you can find him on the genealogy websites. If you know someone whose last name is Chapman it might be fun to see if there is a connection.
Twice I have dressed up like Mr John Chapman (pot on my head, fake beard, bare foot) and given a presentation in our local library My wife has accompanied me dressed in period costume. I have a couple of pictures around somewhere…if I can lay my hands on them I will post them .
Perish-ability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, “Gee, I’m glad I have that moment.”
~John Loengard, “Pictures Under Discussion
I submitted three photos to our county conservation photo contest last week. This is the second time in my life, when I decided to enter a photo contest- just for fun mind you. Here they are:
This first one is of an asparagus plant with little red berries on it. My son John and I made an asparagus “bed” for my wife a year ago. Its a 3 ft by 4 ft raised garden bed. I can’t stand the stuff myself, but love to watch things grow. The contrasting colors grabbed me when I stepped outside after we had some freshly fallen snow.
This second one reminded me of the movie “The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe” and the land of Narnia. Can’t you just see the White Witch coming through those trees on her sleigh?
This last one is my personal favorite. It’s a little grainy, but I have to tell you the story behind it. As I was leaving for work last October, I spotted this Bald Eagle sitting in the top branches of a pine tree in our North windbreak. I ran back inside to grab my Cannon PowerShot A560 camera. He spotted me just as I rounded the corner. I had just enough time to point and click. It looks like he’s landing in this photo, when in reality, he is taking off- it looks like he’s leaping backwards. The next moment he was gone.
I am surrounded by so much beauty. This is my way of sharing a little sliver of it with you.
Last week, on a totally unrelated note, I noticed the baby chicks we are raising had balls of chicken feed and ??? on their toe nails. The stuff was as hard as cement. I grew up on a farm and have never seen anything like it. My concern was, if it didn’t come off by itself, it could cause their toes to become infected. It was baked on because they’ve been spending a lot of their time under the heat lamp. I decided to soak their little feet in water and try to get it off:
Here two of them are getting “the treatment” (standing in 1/2 inch of warm water for 3 minutes) It worked by the way The reason I’m telling you this is , as I was handling the camera I thought I accidentally scratched the lens. I ordered another Powershot A560 before I realised it was just dirty and not scratched. Live and learn.
Rebecca asked about the eagle photo..I remembered these other two photos in one of my scrap books…they were several hundred yards from the highway…so I apologize for the poor quality:
There were so many eagles, when I first saw them I thought they were crows.
“Do you want to see a swarm of bees?” my wife asked me.
Paul and Deanne pulled into our driveway last night around 7:30 PM. They stopped to see if we’d like to see the swarm of honey bees Paul had spotted on an old wood fence post.
Here’s what we saw:
This is a large cluster of bees. When we got there, they were pretty quiet.
This is a picture of Dean/ a local bee keeper setting a bee hive down on the ground below the swarm. I noticed he was wearing shorts.
Here’s Dean squirting honey on the hive
\
Here he is physically picking up the bees and placing them on the hive.
Dean said they were not his bees. He thinks another bee keeper lost a swarm because he didn’t take the time to split the hive in the Spring. He said if there are too many bees in one hive, they will take off (just like this band of traveling bees) He told us he did get a couple of stings on his leg as he was working with these bees.
As many of you know, we have a small orchard (100 trees) I’ve been told larger orchards will pay to have a hive of honey bees placed in their orchards while the trees are in bloom. Unless an apple trees flowers gets pollinated, it will not become an apple.
Here are some pictures of our trees I took yesterday. You an already see the small apples forming:
Here’s a picture of what I’m pretty sure is purple phlox next to our barn from the 1800’s:
If you’re looking for something fun to do this year, think about staying in our B and B. For a price, I will give you the keys to the orchard and you can pick your own apples. We also picked up a dozen chickens a couple of weeks ago:
It won’t be too long before they start laying eggs. You could go out and gather your own fresh eggs for breakfast. Drop me a line and I tell you when some of these things will be happening. Lest I forget…the concert series kicks off this coming Saturday…the first of 7 concerts. Each of the artists coming is awesome. You won’t regret coming to see them. Gayla Drake Paul for example is coming in July. She is on the list of the top 100 guitarists on the planet. Here’s a link to the series if you’re interested. Drop me a line if you want to know more about any of these things.
We are ready! A dozen baby chicks are headed our way next week. Here is where they will be staying:
Eventually we will move them into a ”chicken tractor”:
A chicken tractor is a portable unit the chickens drive around the farm yard so they can have fresh grass and bugs without getting eating by Oscar the Beagle, or the red tailed hawk nesting in our windbreak:
I promise to post some photos when the chicks arrive. We’ve already named one of the chicks – ”Joy” in honor of a fellow blogger. Our plans are to end up with (3) hens and (1) rooster..the rest..well, we won’t talk about that here.
Here are some recent photos of Hamilton the piglet and Winston’s three little pigs that moved to Minnesota: As you can see, Hamilton has been getting into trouble:
Then the little rascal got into Grace’s garbage:
So…he had to sit in the chair for a cooling off time:
Here are the three little pigs that Joy agreed to sponsor:
Here they are taking a nap:
If you could raise any animal you wanted, (that you don’t currently have) what would it be? (or what would they be) Don’t have to just stop w/ one.
“You can’t stay in your corner of the forest, waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.”
Winnie the Pooh
Our apple trees are just about ready to burst into full bloom:
Every apple blossom is potentially an apple. As you can see by these photos, I’m thinking we might have a bumper crop this year….all we need now is for the bees to show up and do their thing. Have you ever heard of the “waggle dance?” Check out this short video clip- you’ll be amazed:
The waggle dance is how the worker bee communicate with the rest of the hive where they’ve found a source of food (ie. an apple tree in bloom, a field of clover, etc.)
Here’s are some additional resources on bees, the waggle dance, the hive, etc, you might enjoy:
As I’ve walked through our orchard the past couple of days I’ve noticed there are a lot of blossoms. So much so, I decided today Rebekah and I would spend the day building apple crates:
Today we were able to build 15 new crates and repairing 3 old ones. That gives us enough crates for about 40 bushels, which is about 10% of the number of crates we will need when all 100 trees are in full production.
We make the crates out of old pallets, so all we have in them is our time. I figure if we make 15 to 20 crates a year, we might stay ahead of the demand. Today was a beautiful day to putter outside. Can’t wait till next week…the trees should be in full bloom. Be sure to stop back…I’ll try to post some additional pictures.
“If you tickle the earth with a
hoe she laughs with a harvest.”
Douglas William Jerrold
Friday afternoon I was behind the barn building a new fence for our pig Winston. I heard, then saw our neighbor Peter moving into the field next to Winston’s pasture. Peter was disking with a 250 horsepower John Deere 4 wheel drive and pullingthat disk like it was a small toy. I had the camera in my truck and took a few shots. I love this time of year in Iowa. Here’s a quote by another Iowa farm boy…he left it on my other blog last year:
“I believe that Iowa is the greatest place on earth and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the world. The west coasters don’t know where it is and don’t understand either, but that is ok with me. I completely resonate with your blog and I can’t wait to be home.
First, there is the freshness of a dewy spring, bursting with newness of life. This gives way to the warm summer nights illuminated by scattered fireflies and the starry sky undefiled by city lights. Soon, a crisp clean wind blows brilliant color into the trees, soon stripping them naked. The coolness of fall soon ends with a silent night of freshly fallen snow, blanketing the rolling hills with blue and white. This lasts only until the trees are awaken once again by the warm sunshine, melting away the frozen ground, giving way to the freshness of a dewy spring once more.
The greenest of green rolling hills, black and white oak trees, fence-less neighborhoods, friendly people, genuine hearts willing to give, hard work, the smells of the changing of the seasons, and finally…
The neighbor driving the tractor in that photo is in his mid 50’s single, hard working, never been married. Just within a 5 mile radius of where we live there are 4 other single farmers. 1 lost his wife and the other 3 have also never been married
Here’s a link if you’re interested, if you’re single, and you’re looking for a man who also happens to be a farmer…;-)
\
