Life On The Hill

[pa_friendly_guy]

Fall is in full swing here in western Pa, the leaves are changing, the days are shorter, and it is getting cold at night. We have had frost warnings a week ago and it will be down in the 30's at night for the next several days. We normally get one frost about the 1st week in Oct, and then what we call Indian summer, a week or 2 of days in the 70's. I am still picking peppers, a few onions, some yellow squash and I have the carrots to dig up yet. I planted my garlic today as well as some yellow onions. I have never tried planting onions in the fall, we will see how they go. My neighbor got me the onion sets, I figured the least I could do was through them into the ground. Pulled out all of the sunflowers in the sunflower garden and carried the stools into the garage. Picked up sticks in the yard all morning so that I can start sucking up the leaves. I got one load of leaves sucked up this afternoon. That is a little less than 1% of all the leaves I have to pick up here. Last year I got 52 cart loads of leaves, that is just under 52 short bed pick up truck loads of leaves. I put a cart load around every apple tree, 3 loads of pine needles around the blue berrys, several loads on the sunflower garden and the rest in the garden. That leaves about 30 loads of leaves to sift into the next hugel bed along with the wood chips and logs. I will be sucking up leaves from now until Thanksgiving. After Thanksgiving Hunting season starts here in Pa and I will be up at camp for awhile. I have picked which section of the garden I will double dig next, I have to wait until the tomato plants are 100% dead, and I have to dig up the carrots so I have space to put the dirt I take out of the hole and sift. I don't know when I will get to that project, it maybe early next spring.

PS. Update on the leaf sucking situation, I sucked up 9 load yesterday and 9 more today. That brings the total to 35 loads so far this year. 25 loads I dumped in the garden for mulch, 3 loads with alot of pine needles in them for around the blue berrys, and 7 loads dumped one load around one apple tree for mulch. That makes me about 2/3's done for the year. I should be finished by Thanksgiving.

PSS I am done with the leaves now. I finished before Thanksgiving, the total for the year was 52 loads, a goodly amount of mulch I would say.

[pa_friendly_guy]

My land was bought as 2 parsells, one with the house and some fairly mature woods that were planted as a public park in the 1930's and 22 acres next to it that had been pasture land as late as the 1960's. The 22 acres is where my garden, ochard, blue berrys etc are all located. When we built here in the late 70's the 22 acres was grown up in brush and sapling trees. We debated about bull-dozing down the steep hill a-ways so that we would have a view. Several of our neighbors have spectacular views of the Chestnut Ridge. It was a difficult choice. We debated long and hard. In the end we decided that we did not know what would or could happen out there, housing, factorys, etc that we might have to look at all the time. We decided that we wanted to control what we saw and left the woods grow up. Frank Lloyd Wright when he was designing Falling Waters, his most famous house, made it so that there is no place in the house, or on the porches that you can see the water falls. You can hear the falls from the house but you can not see it. To actually see the water falls you have to leave the house, walk down a path, decend a set of steps, and then look back toward the house to see the falls. His thought was that if you could see the falls from the house they would become part of the back drop, but if you had to make an effort to see them you would appreciate its beauty. We control what we see, and if we want to see a view we can just walk a short ways to either side of our land and see spectacular views. When Lolly was here I took her to one side of the property and showed her one of the views, she had a limited time line so I did not drag her to the other end of the property to show her the other one. I thought I would post some pictures so you can see what Lolly saw.


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These 3 pictures are the view that Lolly saw when we walked down the path to the pond.






These 4 pictures are from the other side of my place, taken from my neighbors deck. Lolly didn't have time to walk over that far. The pictures are taken in order so you can see what you would see as you turned and looked left to right. You can see the Chestnut Ridge fade into the distance about 25 to 30 miles away.

[boo]

Pa_friendly_guy.....what a beautiful place you have. Thank you for showing us.

[Lollykoko]

That is a wonderful panorama, Guy. It is well worth the walk needed to enjoy the view.

[pa_friendly_guy]

I have talked about the spring that is running out of the rock ledge in the middle of one of my paths. I dig down through the rock and have directed the water off the path into the woods. My efforts have paid off nicely, the path is still dry. Here are some pictures or the rock ledge and the drop off in the middle of the path.







Here is what the path looks like, it is fairly steep at this point as Lolly can atest.



I do love it when a plan comes together. Since the path is now dry and the water seems to be diverted toward a good spot I think I will install 3 inch flexible pipe and cover it with stone so that I can drive my mower over the rock ledge and not smash the mower deck.

[pa_friendly_guy]

I have complained that my pond is in terrible shape right now. I started the pond in the 1980's by hand digging a small area along the one spring. I put a log across the stream and hand dig an area maybe 20' X 20' . The water just over flowed across the top of the log which eventually rotted away. I sort of liked the pond and so I had a local fellow with a Dozer and a back hoe come over and make the paths down through the woods and dig out the pond to about 20' X 40'. It was only 3 ft deep and small because my wife hated ponds and was very afraid of them. Her best friend in school lost a 2 year old sister who drowned in a pond when they were all young. She hates ponds to this day. So I have a pond, but it is small and shallow, The spring that feeds the pond comes out from under a rock shelf and has 3 seporate flows that come together at that point. The one was very close to the surface and I had the back hoe follow it up the hill as far as he could and install a holding tank which I piped to the pond and made a gravity flow fountain. Here is the spring that feeds the pond.



The fountain was held up by a 2X4 which I pounded into the pond bottom, that rotted away and fell over last year. I have to get wet to fix it. Some local kids shut the valve off one winter and the main pipe froze and cracked, that needs to be fixed as well, so the fountain is not working at this point. There have been a bunch of trees that have fallen into the pond and made it so that I can not drive my tractor around it to mow. So things are growing up and getting to be a real mess down there. Here are some pics.







I still love the pond, I enjoy seeing the water and it is very quiet to go down there and sit. I need to spend a day or two, maybe 3, lol and cut up the trees that have fallen in there and clean things up a bit. Then I can mow and make it so that it is easy to walk around down there. When I designed the pond I intentionally kept the water out flow high on the breast. My plan was to build a water wheel coming from the pond and run a 12 volt generator to make electric. I planned on spot lights for the pond and fountain as well as music from a car radio all run off the 12 volt battery system what would stay charged by the water wheel. I even designed a string of tail light bulbs that would line the path down to the pond at night. NONE of these things actually happened, lol, but because of the location of the water exit I have no way to drain the pond and it has started to sediment in some over the years. I had stocked it with blue gill gold fish and cat fish, but a local boy thought he knew better than me when I told him no Bass. He throw in 2 Rock Bass which ate everything else in the pond and then died. There is one large fish in there now, I believe it is a cat fish, but it could be a carp. What ever it is he is the Boss of the Pond, lol, maybe 2 ft long. If I ever get around to cutting up those trees and cutting out the brush that has grown up I will send more pictures. It is still a good thing for wild life, I see raccoon tracks around a shallow area of the pond all the time, as well as deer tracks etc. Haveing water on the place is very nice. Water is needed by all living things.

[pa_friendly_guy]

One of our members thought that having a picture on our profiles would be a nice idea. I agree but have not been able to get that done. here is the picture I wanted to use on my profile, I think it should be titled " A Learning Experience "



I thought it was appropriate because I have had so many of those Learning Experiences, lol

[Lollykoko]

Guy, I wonder if he has a penny in his mouth? That was MY favorite way to check the power supply at home.

[pa_friendly_guy]

It was warm here in Pa today, high of 46 and no rain so I took advantage of the warn temps and worked outside. I dug a good bit of rock out of the next hugalbed I am making. It was all pick work, mostly solid rock in this hole. I have been able to make it a little bit deeper than the 2 beds next to this one. I would use the pick to loosen the dirt and stone and then shovel it out into a pile. I can only use the pick for a fairly short time until I am winded, then I rest a bit and when I catch my breath I shovel out the loose rocks. This bed is about 8 ft wide and about 15 ft long. There is only one more 8'X8' section left after this one on the left side of the garden. The right side is a little less than 1/2 done. Not all of the beds are hugelculture beds. I have only been adding the logs for the last 2 sections , before that I had never heard of the idea. I have always put a heavy layer of leaves at the bottom of my holes, my thought was that they would act like a sponge, so I had the same idea, but not the same tech. I think the logs will work much better at holding moisture. I have been very well pleased with my results so far. My tomatoes and my peppers both did very well last year in the hugelbeds. Warm days in Dec are not all that common here next to the Mountains so I try and take advantage when ever I can.
My asparagus ferns are all dead now, I think I should cut them off. My garlic is up nicely and I have some green onions that are up and some that could be picked for our salads now.

[boo]

Those are big beds pa_friendly_guy.......I'd have to go around corners to fit them in here You are going to have some huge muscles by the time you're finished