View from the Mountain

My Theory of Soil

As I wrote in November 2021, there has been dirt on my hands for many years. I started serious gardening in the summer of 1972 on our farm in St. Croix, Nova Scotia.  It was grass pasture that we turned into a garden. It was plowed with my John Deere tractor and its three furrow plow. It was then harrowed, covered with old chicken manure. The next spring we tried beating it into submission with a tiller with front-mounted tines. It was a bone jarring experience.

We were young and strong so it still became a great garden. We grew so much broccoli that I am still traumatized if I eat broccoli more than once a week. We moved to New Brunswick where we raised cattle for ten years. Not only did we garden, I also planted twenty acres in oats most years. We did not harvest the oats as grain but green chopped them in the fall to extend the pasture season. The oats were a cover crop for reseeding an old field in grass and clover.

The garden spot that we inherited on the old farm in Brunswick had been used for quite a while so it was at the opposite end of the spectrum from our garden spot in Nova Scotia. It was also rocky, well-drained soil while the Nova Scotia soil was heavy clay once you got down over a foot.

If you a trying to grow new grass where mostly weeds and brush grew, you work the land hard. If you are trying to build up a worn out soil, you hardly work it.  What did do was apply as much rotted manure to the old garden as we could. We never plowed. We would use a disc harrow to work the composted manure into the soil.  Then I would till it in the spring before planting with my tiller that now had rear-mounted tines.  Towards the end of our time on the farm in 1984, the garden really did not need tilling.  The soil structure had been restored.  You could easily stir it with a three-tined digger. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do about the rocks. As the old-timers were fond of saying, the most reliable crop in the area was rocks.

Since the farm we have lived and gardened on a mountain overlooking Roanoke, Virginia. Next we did the same along the marshes at the North Carolina coast and finally here on ridge in the North Carolina Piedmont.

The recipe for good soil has always been the same, plenty of compost, mix it with the soil so the air, soil, compost, and moisture can do their thing.  This year our soil needed stirring, I used a broadfork to lift and break the soil a little. It was not turned over like with a plow. I figure three or four years of this and I will be able to stir it with my three-pronged digger. As for no till gardening, it can work if your soil is in good shape. As for no-till farming, I am all for the no-till not so much for all the chemicals.

Mowing Your Way Through Life

I am not sure not how people managed in the first half of the twentieth century before there were yards to connect them to the soil around their homes. I suspect that they were working in their gardens and fields. By the time I was growing up in the fifties in Lewisville, North Carolina, yards had become important. The condition of our grassy yard often stood between me and a trip to my uncle Henry's fishing ponds. My mother who claimed the only yard she had as a child was packed dirt swept with broom straw wanted our yard neatly clipped. In driving by our old home, I am little disappointed the town did not put in sidewalks in front of our house during my youth. It would have eliminated the slope on the front yard. It was by far the hardest part of the yard to mow as a youngster.

Going away to military school (high school) and then college got me out of mowing yards for almost a decade. My first home after graduation was a two-hundred year old farm house located in a sheep pasture on the Fundy coast of Nova Scotia. No sheep came with the old farm house but long grass did not bother me as a young farmstead owner. When I first moved there in the summer of 1971, the yard was the least of my worries. Getting hot water plumbed in and running so we could stop taking showers at the local campground was close to the top of the list. The second summer I had a tractor with a nine-foot-wide bush hog which I used to mow around the house a couple of times a summer. That was all it needed in my days of being single. After all, I mowed plenty of mature grass or hay, starting with the twenty acre field behind the house which served as one of the few backyards in my life away from home.

Then came the summer of 1973, and I married Glenda, the love of my life from the world of well-manicure yards in North Carolina. Her mother often mowed their yard twice, the second time against the grain, just to catch any grass that might pop up after the first mowing. Sometime during the summer of 1974, Glenda and my neat-lawn-loving mother who was visiting us formed a conspiracy. They drove down the mountain to Bridgetown ten miles away and came home with a Toro push mower. I spent much of the next forty-forty years sharing the task of mowing whatever yard happened to be attached to our personal home.

For the ten years or so when we lived on our farm in Tay Creek, we had a nice riding lawn mower which was adequate for much of the yard. Even Glenda did some mowing. When we lived in Halifax, our yard was postage-stamp sized. By the time we arrived on the mountain in Roanoke, Virginia, I had come to somewhat enjoy mowing. There are those times in your life when something as simple as mowing a yard can be very satisfying because you can actually see what you have done.

One of the immutable laws of mowing is that the farther south you live, the more miserable the task of mowing can be. Sometimes, even the most careful home yard person can end mowing in the oppressive heat of the day like I did more times than I want to admit after we moved to the North Carolina coast. As I wrote then, there is a true brotherhood of Southerners (both men, women, and teenagers) who have mowed yards when they never should have.

Mowing is one of those circular things in life. In your early years, you are too young to push a mower, so it seems fitting that in the later years of life, it is also okay to be too old to push a mower. You come to a point when you are faced with either hiring someone to mow the yard or buying a riding mower. Since I spent many years straddling a John Deere farm tractor, we chose not to revisit those days after a back problem slowed me somewhat. For a couple of years, I shared the task with our mower of choice, choosing the spots that required a push mower for myself. However, it was an easy transition to giving it all up. When we made our 2021 move from the land of coastal centipede grass back to the fescue grasses of the Piedmont, we left our third Toro mower with the father and son team that was doing our mowing. I even gave them my gas-powered trimmer.

When our current mowing team shows up, I know the noise will be over with in a few minutes as opposed to the hours that it would have taken me with a push mower. I still enjoy our green space especially the backyard which is the nicest we have had since that twenty-acre field that came with our first home. 

 

 

Not the Last Famer's Market

We actually started going to farmer's markets as a couple when we were living north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. We went to see people and to pick up a few things that we did not grow on our own farm. Even more so than most farmer's markets, there were homemade items interspersed with farm produce. There were no food items that we really needed but I think we went home with baskets to use with our own garden produce. Still we enjoyed the market especially the people.

Maybe it was because we had dirt under our fingernails and a close connection to producing food but for whatever reason, visiting farmer's market became a life-long passion. Once we got settled in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1989, Saturday morning visits to the Roanoke City Market which has been operating since 1882, became a part of our regular routine. We rarely came back empty handed. My wife, Glenda, almost always found some flowers and during the growing season there tomatoes to supplement our own, corn, peaches, and other goodies.

Once we moved to the North Carolina coast in 2006, we had to adjust and change our produce hunting habits and frequent local produce stands like we did when we were first married and living close to Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley.  There are some great produce stands in Carteret County and we appreciated all the great food to supplement our own garden.

Fast forward to 2021 and we moved to Davie County, North Carolina. It appears this area stretching through the Triad is home to more farmer's markets that even we can visit. We have three regular ones that we try to hit each week, Smith Grove, Bermuda Run, and Mocksville. We also have visited the Clemmons market. We have not yet made it to the ones in Winston-Salem.

One of the great worries about farming and certainly farmer's markets is that the current crop of farmers are getting old and there will be no new farmers to replace them. I am happy to report that I have seen more young farmer in this area than I have seen since I was a young farmer back in the seventies.  No only are they young but they are bringing new ideas and energy to the world of farming.

I think we are okay at least in this part of North Carolina for farmers to carry on the tradition of direct marketing to consumers.

 

The Home Office Commute

Now my commute is just to the big middle window of our second floor. It is a lot easier than the long walk that I used to take to the barn and certainly better than the almost four hours of driving from Roanoke, Virginia to Reston, Virginia, in my Apple/federal account call days.

Still, it is probably good that I had pioneer blood from the start. I did go off to Canada and its cheap land after college. It was not long before I decided to get serious about cattle after spending a couple of years remodeling an old house and chasing a few cows around the North Mountain of Nova Scotia.

Making hay on the foggy slopes that run down to the Bay of Fundy was not the best idea so we moved to New Brunswick and made a lot of big round bales hay over ten years for our herd of Angus that grew to two hundred before we had our dispersal in 1982. It was during those years on the farm when my first home office appeared.

Those first years, the home office was pen and pencil, sometimes my old college typewriter and a strange copier that smelled of the old mimeograph machines in my elementary school. Then the spring after the cattle left the farm, I took a job as a field man for the Maritime Angus Association.

The marketing that I had done for our dispersal impressed a few people and they wanted me to write a newsletter and help market the Angus breed. I was always pleased that they asked me to write instead of judge cattle. The first newsletter that I wrote took over three days to churn out on the typewriter and I am a pretty good typist. Then it took nearly three days to copy and address the newsletters. I knew there was a better way since I had spent my first winter not taking care of cows reading computer magazines and visiting the one local computer store in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

Luckily, my mother, the one who was adamant about me going to college, was desperate for me to do anything beside chase cows and ride around on a tractor. She bought me an Apple II+ computer, an Epson MX-80 printer, and the right software. It was one of the first home computers that came to New Brunswick. The next newsletter was written in a matter of hours. The labels for them printed in two minutes and thirty seconds. This was the beginning of my first really productive home office.

In a twist of fate that changed my life forever, the company who sold me the computer realized that I had the rare for the time ability to understand computers, explain them to others and sell them. I went into the computer business, became a sales manager, and we went from one store to five in less than two years.

When the company started chasing an IBM medallion, I started looking for a job with Apple which I got in October 1984. I started with Apple in November of that year and worked there until July 2004 when apparently I flew to close to the sun and my wings melted even though I was director of federal sales by then.

Over all that time and the years that followed, I learned the value of working from home. While I spent many days working out of offices, I always got more done from my home office. The idea that people work less at home always amused me. It was close to hilarious when various bosses preferred sales people to spend their time in the office filling out forecasts instead of calling on customers.

Fast forward to the pandemic years and I am still working from home and still very productive. The pandemic has changed the rules and working from home is now not only even smarter but also about the only way to do business safely. The pandemic has caused a seismic shift in the workplace. Many people have figured out what I long knew, home is where the office should be.

While I have battled for bandwidth most of my professional life, now it is no longer a problem since I have fiber running to my house and a symmetric 500 Mbps connection is only $85 per month.

Home offices that I have enjoyed- My first one on North Carolina's Crystal Coast.

My second office at the Crystal Coast. It came with the best view in the area.

My Roanoke office after I had to start over after a pipe sprung a leak.

Waiting for the Big Snowstorm

Snowstorms can be a peaceful interruption to modern life as long as you have power, remain healthy and do not feel the need to prove the worth of your seldom used four-wheel-drive vehicle. Most snow in North Carolina east of the mountains rarely stays on the ground more than a few days. Certainly here on the coast of North Carolina, snow is a minor worry compared to hurricanes. I would much rather be waiting for a snowstorm than a hurricane.

When we lived on a farm in Canada (one of our barns pictured), getting ready for a snowstorm was not a big deal unless it was the first snowstorm of the year.  The first storm was a challenge because if you left something on the ground before that first storm, you might not see it again until the spring thaw.  After our first storm, most storms usually just brought a yawn unless they were classed as blizzards.  We lived in a land of real snow which means the plows did not even bother with snow unless it was more than six inches. Keeping a clean driveway was a virtue since no one wanted a permanent skating rink for a driveway.

After coming to live on the side of a mountain near Roanoke, Virginia, we learned it was still prudent to clean your driveway there because the snow and ice could last for up to a month. Snowstorms did force us into a routine.  We always filled the cars with gas and made sure we had a little cash and some eggs with bacon in the fridge. Our mountain in Roanoke was steep enough that VDOT would sometimes appear to forget that we existed. Once back in 2009 we waited for there days before VDOT sent a road grader to clean our hill. For many years while living on the hill, we had a small SUV which I equipped with chains on all four wheels.  I often ferried people up and down the hill while retrieving our important morning newspapers which whenever the road was snow-covered would end up dumped at the bottom of the hill.

It used to frustrate me to no end since during my farming days I had equipment that could have easily cleared our half-mile hill.  There was little chance even in Canada of running into a snowstorm that my ring-chain equipped tractor with snow blower could not handle. The big tractor could cut through drifts over three feet and blow the snow over one hundred feet.  Each storm and we had many of them, I cleared a mile long road back to our cattle so I could haul them a two thousand pound round bale of hay each day.

Living on our often-ignored by VDOT side of the mountain in Roanoke taught me patience that few of my neighbors in New Brunswick ever needed. I spoiled them.  As soon as the cattle were fed, I cleaned a few driveways after each storm. I never took money for my efforts, it was just a neighborly thing to do. In Virginia, I learned that some people's first impulse upon getting a new SUV was to find the steepest possible snow-covered hill and try to get to the top of it. In our area of Roanoke that meant our hill which was a one-half mile up the side of a mountain with a couple of curves thrown in for fun.  I should have posted a sign at the foot of the hill which read, "Getting up the hill is not the hard part, getting down is what separates the fools from the good drivers."

On really snowy days, I was fortunate in that I could work from my home and be entertained by the doctors who had to get to work no matter how bad the weather was.  Since I could look out one of our windows and see some of the worst places, I was well entertained but unfortunately, I missed some of the best shows. One doctor pulled out of his driveway once only to have his Subaru spin around on him and head downhill backward. He was a very good driver and made it all the way down without hitting any of the guard rails.  Others including more than a few snow plows were not so fortunate. Sometimes a vehicle would get stranded on the side of the road and it would appear they were frozen in a snowbank for the winter. Once the road was so slick that a neighbor left his car and walked up the hill but had to slide the final one hundred yards home on his rear. I learned long ago on the farm, that a four-wheel drive vehicle just lets you get stuck in a more inaccessible place.

So as this potentially historic storm approaches North Carolina and Virginia, my suggestions are simple. 

Hunker down and stay off the roads. The thrill of going up a big hill is not nearly as big as the heartache of having your mangled SUV towed to a repair shop after you put it in a ditch. Neither North Carolina or Virginia are Canada where putting your car into a snow-packed ditch is often a good alternative to running into another car. I did it a couple of times myself without any damage, but all I had to do was walk home and get a tractor to extricate my truck.

Just enjoy the time in front of your fireplace and if you lose Internet connectivity or your smartphone will not work, you will survive.  Read a book or go stand outside and catch a few snowflakes on your tongue and listen to the quiet.  It will be good for your soul.