End of Garden Season Report

 

          

  Steve with struggling pumpkins.  Jerry Apps Photo.

The vegetable garden year at Roshara has ended.  And what a year it has been.  Everything was planted on time: potatoes, onions, lettuce, spinach, kale, radishes, carrots and beets on April 25.  Sweet corn, pumpkins, winter squash, zucchini, cucumbers, cabbage plants, kohlrabi, gourds and tomatoes on May 23.

Although we had periods of dry weather and periods of too much rain, everything came up and was growing well.  Steve put up the fence to keep out the deer, wild turkeys and raccoons. One of our best-looking gardens.  And then it happened.  The rabbits invaded.  Many of them. All hungry.  They ate everything but the tomatoes, potatoes and vine crops.  Ate the beans, lettuce, kale, beets, and cabbage right down to the ground. Hungry little buggers.  In my more than 50 years of vegetable gardening, I had never seen anything like it.  Nothing close.

So, my end of year garden report is a bit thin. Here are the grades:  Potatoes--A—good yield.  No scab.  Blight held off until the potatoes were ready for harvest.  Tomatoes--B—Quite good. Some blight. Sweet corn—C. Winter Squash—D, really never got going. Pumpkins—C.  Harvested several little decorative pumpkins.  Halloween size pumpkins struggled.  Cucumbers—A. Did well; harvested a bunch. Carrots—C. Rabbits don’t like carrots.   Don’t laugh, but by far the most successful crop was the zucchini.  It grew and grew, and produced more than anything else in the garden. A+ for the zucchini.  Of course, the old saying holds, if you can’t grow anything else, you can probably grow zucchini.

Anyone have a suggestion for keeping those hungry little cotton tails out of my garden next year?

THE OLD TIMER SAYS: Just when you think you’ve got everything figured out—you don’t.  Gardening is like that.

UPCOMING EVENTS

October 2, Dregne’s, Westby.  Book signing. 10:30 -2:30.

 

WHERE TO BUY MY BOOKS:

My newest novel is Settlers Valley.  You can buy it at your local bookstore, order online from bookshop.org, or purchase from the Friends of the Patterson Memorial Library in Wild Rose—a fundraiser for them. Phone: 920-622-3835 for prices and ordering.
Patterson Memorial Library
500 Division Street
Wild Rose, WI 54984
barnard@wildroselibrary.
www.wildroselibrary.org

If you live in the western part of the state, stop at Ruth’s home town, Westby and visit Dregne’s.  and look at their great selection of my books, including my new ones, or order a book by calling them at 1-877-634-4414. They will be happy to help you.

 

 

The Pond at Roshara

 

                                                                Steve Apps Photo

When we bought our farm in 1966, the pond in the valley to the west of the buildings could best be described as a large puddle in a good-sized marsh.  Slowly the water level increased.  By 1973-1975, the pond was filled to its banks.  It was a place for swimming and canoeing, a place for bird watching, and animal gazing as deer, racoons, fox and other wild creatures came to the pond for a drink, especially during the often hot and dry days of mid-summer.

               The pond has no inlet nor outlet, it’s a water table pond.  As the water table in the region goes up and down, so does our pond.  By the early 2000s, the pond level returned to about where it was in 1966, when we bought the place.  We wondered if it would ever return to the level it had been in the 1970s.

               Starting in about 2018, the rains became coming.  Fifteen inches of rain in 10 days in August of that year.  Once more the pond began looking like its former self.  By 2020 the pond was higher than it had ever been in recent memory.  Spilling over the banks of its once high point.  Surrounding trees on the  banks, oaks, aspen, cottonwood—and eventually killing them.  Killing cottonwood trees that were likely more than a hundred years old.

               This year, the pond, best described as a small lake, remains high as the rains continue to fall in central Wisconsin.  Seven inches in a couple weeks.  All the wild creatures love it—the pair of Canada geese that nest there and the sandhill cranes that nest there every summer.   How long will it remain a small lake?  One of the mysteries of nature that I find so interesting.

THE OLD TIMER SAYS: Ponds, like so many things in nature, are filled with surprises.

 

WHERE TO BUY MY BOOKS:

Want to learn more about the importance of rain to farmers.  Pick up a copy of my book, NEVER CURSE THE RAIN.  You can buy it at your local bookstore, order online from bookshop.org, or purchase from the Friends of the Patterson Memorial Library in Wild Rose—a fundraiser for them. Phone: 920-622-3835 for prices and ordering.
Patterson Memorial Library
500 Division Street
Wild Rose, WI 54984
barnard@wildroselibrary.
www.wildroselibrary.org

If you live in the western part of the state, stop at Ruth’s home town, Westby and visit Dregne’s.  and look at their great selection of my books, including my new ones, or order a book by calling them at 1-877-634-4414. They will be happy to help you.

 

 

Sunflowers Brighten a Day

            

             Photo by Steve Apps

My dad, a lifelong vegetable gardener, said a garden must always have something that’s pretty.  By that he meant it should include some flowers.  His favorite flowers were dahlias. He always grew a short row of them.  When they were both in their 90s, and my mother was in a nursing home, he would always take a big dahlia from his garden when he went to visit her.

I have followed his advice by growing some flowers in my garden. I grow sunflowers as they are one of my favorites.  As someone once wrote, “No flower can lift someone’s spirits quite like sunflowers.  They are bright and cheery, and as warm and inviting as the sweet summer sun.”

Sunflowers have a long history in the Americas.  In addition to their beauty, they were a food and medicine source for native people.  They crushed and ground the seeds and made bread and cakes from the resulting flour.  They used the juice from the stems to treat wounds.

The sunflower’s name comes from its tendency to face the sun. There are two main types, one grown for its oil, and other, with larger seeds for human and bird feed.  Sunflower oil can be used for cooking, and it is also found in some beauty products. Birds love sunflower seeds

But beyond the practical uses for their seeds.  Sunflowers are valuable in other ways.  They symbolize vitality, intelligence and happiness. Their yellow color symbolizes friendship.  As Helen Keller once wrote: “Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows.  It's what sunflowers do.”

THE OLD TIMER SAYS: Want to cheer up a friend; give them a sunflower.

WHERE TO BUY MY BOOKS:

To learn more about vegetable gardening, purchase a copy of Garden Wisdom.  You can buy it at your local bookstore, order online from bookshop.org, or purchase from the Friends of the Patterson Memorial Library in Wild Rose—a fundraiser for them. Phone: 920-622-3835 for prices and ordering.
Patterson Memorial Library
500 Division Street
Wild Rose, WI 54984
barnard@wildroselibrary.
www.wildroselibrary.org

If you live in the western part of the state, stop at Ruth’s home town, Westby and visit Dregne’s.  and look at their great selection of my books, including my new ones, or order a book by calling them at 1-877-634-4414. They will be happy to help you.

Memories of the Windmill

                    

     Photo by Steve Apps

For many years, on the home farm, a windmill pumped water for our small herd of dairy cattle, for the horses, hogs, chickens, and for the family.  It was an all-metal Aermotor windmill.  Some earlier windmills were of wooden construction.  In 1883, LaVerne Noyes, a Chicago manufacturer hired a mechanical engineer by the name of Thomas O. Perry, who was a mechanical and civil engineer.  Perry experimented with 61 different “experimental wind wheels” before he settled on what became the Aermotor windmill.

The Aermotor windmill was introduced in 1888, and only 45 were sold that first year.  In 1892, the company sold 20,000 windmills.  Soon the Aermotor Company became a dominant supplier of windmills in the world.    At one time the company’s manufacturing operations covered nine acres on the southwest side of Chicago.   In 1915, the Aermotor company introduced an “auto-oiled” windmill, with an enclosed gearcase.  All the moving parts were bathed in oil, and had to be serviced but once a year.

The Aermotor windmill had one serious problem, however.  When the wind didn’t blow, there was no water.  I remember one time in the late 1930s when central Wisconsin was suffering from a serve drought. As long as our livestock had water, and some feed we could get by.  But then one day the wind quit blowing and the windmill quit turning.  Soon the stock tank for the livestock was empty, as was the water pail in the kitchen that provided water for the family.

We heard the cattle bellowing for water.  Not a pleasant sound.  All-day and all night they bellowed, as we waited for the wind to blow.  A neighbor, who powered his water pump with a gasoline engine. came to the rescue.  We hauled water from his farm, and not long after, dad bought a gasoline engine for our water pump.       

THE OLD TIMER SAYS: Wind power is wonderful, as long as the wind blows.

WHERE TO BUY MY BOOKS:

To learn more about early farming history, purchase a copy of Wisconsin Agriculture: A History.  You can buy it at your local bookstore, order online from bookshop.org, or purchase from the Friends of the Patterson Memorial Library in Wild Rose—a fundraiser for them. Phone: 920-622-3835 for prices and ordering.
Patterson Memorial Library
500 Division Street
Wild Rose, WI 54984
barnard@wildroselibrary.
www.wildroselibrary.org