A cacophony of green black walnuts

Things are quiet in the country unless you have a metal roof with a black walnut tree nearby.

Visitors sitting on our front porch jump out of their rocking chairs when a slight breeze drops a green walnut or two on the metal roof of our garage. It can sound like a pistol being fired or at least a pot hitting a tile floor.

If this season's premature walnut blitzkrieg is any indication, we are in for a good black walnut season. Last year's was the best in recent memory of the old timers. I gave away more than 100 pounds (husked but not shelled.)

I picked up the two dozen or so walnuts in the photo in just one pass around the garage. That's just from one tree. We have about 25 mature walnut trees on our property.

If I offer any of you black walnuts this fall, don't even asked if they are shelled. You know the answer.

Locally grown

While we won't make the cover of Subsistence Farming magazine anytime soon, it was nice to have a big family meal with a few local delicacies.

The morel mushrooms which I fried and served on toast were harvested from our place in April and then frozen. Betty added our raspberries to her peach/raspberry deep-dish pie.

I'm glad I waited to plant a vegetable garden. The silt and runoff would have destroyed anything planted in the garden spot. I hope to get an earth-mover in here soon to solve our drainage and runoff problems. It has been too wet to do anything like that for the last couple months, but the summer dryness is starting to take hold.

Raspberry surprise

The fields have been so muddy I haven't been looking in on the berry patch much, but I received a nice surprise yesterday when I found some nice looking raspberries. I didn't think I would have any the first year.

Speaking of berries, we went on a hike in the Smokies yesterday with our son, Lem, and his friend from Minnesota, Alice. We hiked to Andrew's Bald from Clingman's Dome where the altitude is getting close to 7,000 feet. We were amazed to find flame azaleas in full bloom and the blueberry bushes just beginning to get a little fruit. At that altitude the area seems to be about six weeks behind us.

I saw blueberry bushes seven-feet tall. It makes my puny little flatland blueberries look like pavement-crack weeds.

Happy Father's Day to us turkeys

Coming up our driveway on our way home from a nice Father's Day dinner with our daughter's family, we caught two wild turkeys pecking around in the front woods.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: Blog entries may be a little light this week since our son is visiting from Minneapolis.

Oh . . . well

It started out innocently.

In my May 18 post I told about an above-ground and freeze-proof water faucet that I installed down on the lower level near the garden and berry patch. It worked fine, but I started worrying that I would hit it with the tractor or someone turning around before making the switch-back up to our house would do the same.

I thought about making a wooden box to go around it, even toying with the idea of making it look like an outhouse. Nothing seemed to fit until I extrapolated that water actually comes from a well and so what I needed was a rustic stone well with a cedar roof.

Three tons of rock later, I have my well. It's my first masonry job and looks halfway professional. You really can't screw up stacked rock because it is uneven by nature. I hope to plant some ivy and other climbing vines around the base. The handle and rope mechanism actually work, but it's all for show of course.

And so we have our wishing well. Betty is wishing I wouldn't come up with such projects, but, remember, it could have been an outhouse.

Gravity tomatoes on the cheap

Who among us has not seen the info-commercial about the upside tomato plant? Just send those fine folks $19.95 (plus shipping and handling) and you will receive a magic hanging planter to grow your upside down tomatoes.

I've got a gravity tomato and it cost me a buck, plus a tomato plant. Here's what you do:

1. Get a plastic bucket with a handle. Drill a 7/8 inch hole in the bottom of the bucket with a spade bit. (You can just use a sharp knife if you don't have a bit.)

2. Take an empty 2-liter plastic bottle and cut it into 3 inches down from the neck.

3. Insert the bottle into the hole in the bucket with the neck sticking down (see photo at left).

4. (This is the tricky part.) Carefully feed your young tomato plant through the neck of the bottle. This will take some time and patience.

5. Fill the bucket with potting soil and hang it in the sun. My tomato has been hanging for seven days. It seems to be doing fine.

You will want to use a small variety of tomato such as Rutgers. Also, remember that a plastic bucket dries out quickly. You may have to water a couple times a day in extremely hot weather. You can also try cherry tomatoes or different types of peppers.

I wish I could say I thought of this myself, but I found the idea on the Internet. The site is www.gravitygarden.com.

More bush-hogging . . . boring

The second 8-hour day of bush-hogging has left me dull and uninspired. I would have finished today, but I got the tractor and bush-hog stuck in a ravine and had to call my neighbor to pull me out with his tractor. Larry has a real farm tractor, a 60 horsepower diesel that can pull a small mountain.

Another hour or so tomorrow, and perhaps I can get my inspiration back.