For the past few weeks we’ve been afflicted by the nuisance of being bombarded by thousands of two-inch ball bearings cascading down into the yard. You might call these ball bearings “black walnuts” but we just view them as hazards of the yard and hillside to be navigated around.
Neither of us like eating black walnuts so we see nothing beneficial in their presence. In addition, many of Mrs. Barn’s plants, especially in the vegetable garden, are harmed by the toxic juglone in walnuts, walnut leaves, and walnut sap. She’s had to reconfigure the garden continuously to accommodate the magnificent trees growing just outside the west end of the fenced area.
Bombing season is drawing to a close so I will rake up the trash-can-full of these dangerous nuisances in the coming days. If only we had a better breed of squirrels to haul them all away. We’ve got gigantic squirrels here (seriously, almost as big as the cat) but the bums are too lazy to bother with our needs and clean up the yard.
With days getting shorter and nights getting cooler, the forecast for a few days of below-freezing nights had us diligently wrapping up the squash harvest. This is about 2/3 of the haul, I just forgot to take the last “all done” picture. Winter is a time of heavy soup and stew lunches, and one of my absolute favorites is her squash soup made with fresh raw milk and heavy cream. No need for dessert with that on the table.
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Combined with Mrs. Barn’s relentless earlier harvesting and canning, we are just about wrapped up for the season. There are a few more tomatoes in the greenhouse but we do not know their ultimate disposition.
In the aftermath of the snow/sleet/freezing rain/ice/snow adventure of last Sunday you could definitely say we were disheartened at the sight of the collapsed greenhouse. The broken internal structure was clearly evident, in one place the end of the snapped off arched beam had poked through the plastic skin. Mrs. Barn rightly insisted on clearing off the ton of ice to assess the damage and get a plan for the reconstruction.
One thing we did not want to do was wail away at the shell and damage the skin even more than it was already. Finding the right tool was a conundrum. She tried with one of her gardening tools but it was a poor fit for the problem, plus she was too short to get up high enough to get much done. I’m taller and with my spiked boots I could get up on the snow/ice dam along the edge of the building. And fortunately I had just the right tool.
Many years ago my woodworking pal TomS gave me my favorite walking stick, about shoulder length with a bulbous knot near the top. Since the knot was gentle in shape I could stand and whack the ice until it broke up without risking more damage to the plastic skin. After about an hour of careful work the last of the ice slabs slipped off and the arched structure popped back to its original shape. Hallelujah! You can see that slab leaning up against the greenhouse, it was about six square feet of four-inch-thick ice/snow composite. It is several hundred pounds. So even though we have not seen each other in more than a decade, TomS saved the day!
I found just a couple of punctures to the plastic skin and repaired them straightaway. I still have to build four new laminated arches, but the necessary repair is much less than anticipated. I’ll get to work on the repairs as soon as we get a bit more warming.
I just checked and the outside temp is 16 and inside the greenhouse it’s nearly 60.
PS. Here’s a glimpse of what we were dealing with. We estimate it would have taken a month to clear the six inch thick ice slab on driveway with a pickaxe and shovel. It was brutal work for us septuagenarians. Thank goodness for hearty mountain men willing to work all night long in frigid temps with their monster machines. It was well after 10pm when we finally got to the top of the list. They finished with us and moved on to the next name on the list.
PPS A fellow at church told me he had seen some of the Amish kids skating in a field. Who needs a pond or rink? We certainly could not navigate our place without snow cleats.
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