I hate falling.  I’ve feared falling from a horse ever since my old Appaloosa gelding fell with me and rolled clear over me, because I figured then that I had used up what little horse-luck I had managed to accrue since the other time when a driving accident nearly killed me.  I hate falling, and I have hated the grim anticipation of falls that almost certainly lie in wait when a green trainer and a green horse commence their education.

Experiential education.  There’s nothing like it.

To summarize:  I bought a dark bay filly, a long yearling, back in October 2008.  Next I set myself a course of study:  I read books and watched videos and attended clinics and asked a thousand questions and put in hours and hours of work over the past three years, finding out through direct experience how to start a young horse under saddle.

We’re not doing badly, all things considered.  We’ve gone through desensitizing, round penning, in-hand work, longeing, harness-breaking, ground driving, stoneboat-pulling, saddle-fitting, shoeing, fly-spraying, vaccinating, and blood-drawing.  Consider, if you will, that this animal is now near her full growth, standing over 15 hands in her shoes and weighing in at a slick thousand pounds.  She doesn’t have to do a blessed thing if she doesn’t want to–it is up to me, as the opposable-thumbed portion of the team, to convince and cajole and reassure and sometimes bluff her into doing as I ask in a way that keeps us both safe.  I’ll gloss over those 34 months of highs and lows, trials and errors, anxiety and neigh-saying, by quoting one of my mentor-trainers:  ”We make mistakes, the horses make mistakes. That’s why we call this training.  Mostly we survive, mostly they survive.”

Yesterday was our very first all-by-ourselves ride down the town road.  Unaccompanied and uneventfully, I brought her into the shed, tacked her up, and climbed on.  We sedately walked the 2/3 mile to my neighbor’s farm, visited a moment, and walked back home.  You must do your best to imagine the scope and depth of my euphoria–this kind is  indescribable.

Alas, all things seek balance.

On this evening’s ride I unilaterally decided to turn right instead of left at the foot of our drive.  Ebony appealed.  Firmly and calmly I denied her.  Politely but inexorably she refused to acknowledge my denial and in classic quarter horse fashion she tried a compromise:  she faced where I pointed her, but tentatively backed up in the direction of her choice.  She wasn’t flustered, nor was I; she was not being punishably stubborn and my temper was well in check.

But then she backed one step too far, and set her hindquarters against an unfortunately hot electric fence wire.  In less time than it takes to tell, she leapt forward with a unsittable writhing twist that spilled me to the road–shoulder to shoulder, you might say, judging from my dirty shirt and the scuffs in the loose gravel to one side of the traveled lane.

Again, I’ll summarize:  Ebony ran home, I picked myself up, I followed her and gathered her up, side-by-side we walked ourselves to consensus, and then under the supervision of a kindhearted neighbor (may his good fortune ever flourish) I remounted and we walked home together.

It’s an odd sort of relief, this first unscheduled landing.  It happened, I coped, and I moved on.  I’m not looking forward to the next spill, but I’m no longer burdened by dread.  Why do I feel like there’s a deeper lesson here?

She was named Ebony Diamond Star when I bought her. Sometimes I call her other things, but not when she's being good.

In just that spirit I present these short annotated remnants from last term (have I mentioned my MA is underway?) which may well appear again in later semesters.

Open-source learning was up for discussion at the AESS conference I attended earlier this summer.  This concept has many fascinating wrinkles, including portents of radical change in the role of colleges and universities as knowledge-brokers.  With epistemic information so readily accessible (provided one has internet access, of course), anybody may poke around on the web and soon learn enough vocabulary to enter into dialogue about any imaginable topic.  Talk has never been cheaper–we live in a fortunate age.  But what lacks in the online-learning model is embodied knowledge–the practiced, applied, lived learning that permits us to truly own what we know.  It is one thing to understand that milk comes from a cow; it is another matter entirely to successfully milk a cow.  Experiential education, in the tradition of my own workplace, seems to me the logical complement to open-source learning.  Well-rounded scholars need both.

Investigating OSL led me to a TED talk which reminded me again of the similarities in education and farming.  Disintermediation, the cutting-out of middlemen (textbook publishers, in the TED talk), has also been trending in small-scale ag circles from veg production to specialty dairy to microbreweries.  Around here we commonly see farmstands, small farmer’s markets, and community-supported ag models.  Interestingly, in agriculture at least, as soon as a given small enterprise gains a toehold in local direct markets, the first impulse seems to be planning to step up the production model and start seeking distributors (middlemen, again.)  Who’s been studying this pendulum, I wonder?  In another life, I will take up economics.

My academic pursuits imbricate remarkably with notions of food farming and its associated vorisms (such as omnivore, localvore, and my new fancy, invasivore.)  One advisor styled me a “voracious learner” and she is right on the mark:  I feast upon knowledge, and life’s table has not disappointed me yet.  I know I dine in good company–here is a beautifully put statement of such learning,  and this is a particularly stellar example of turning prix fixe into smorgasbord.

Chautauqua roller organ, patented May 31 1887

Shades of the past!  When I was a child, the roller organ mostly stayed stored away in the closet of my grandfather’s study.  Once a year or so, my sister and I would tease Papa into unpacking the closet.  First he would bring out his deer rifle, securely zipped into its case, and lean it up against the wall between glass-front sectional bookcases full of theological studies.  Next he pulled out box upon box of slides from his trip to the Holy Land.  Then he would cautiously shift the rickety wooden toy cupboard that held old children’s play-dishes of tin and blue patterned china.  Finally he would back out of the closet, cradling the roller organ, exhorting us girls to get out of the way so he could carry it down the hall to Grandma’s dining room table.

This afternoon I opened the closet in my father’s study and pushed aside his hunting clothes, some empty luggage, and the gun case from my grandfather’s rifle.  There in the back I found the old roller organ, its woodwork and paint and glass-paned case just as I remembered.  I cradled it in my arms, shooed my kids out of the way, and carried it down the hall to Mom’s dining room table.

She graciously operated the crank for a rendition of Cricket on the Hearth which I hope you’ll enjoy.  Please bear in mind there is one missing reed, so occasionally the melody skips a note or two; and the castanet-like clicking is due to the condition of ancient dried-out felt pads that no longer cushion the keys as they spring back into place.

Additional trivia:  the machine was purchased by my grandfather’s grandmother, Elinora Frey, who loved attending public sales and estate auctions.  Together with the organ, she bought nearly four dozen song-rolls.  Most of these have similar red-paper labels with the title, a number (which I think corresponded to a catalogue of tunes), and a patent date of July 14, 1885.  The songs are mainly hymns, patriotic tunes, and popular (ca. late 1800s) music, some of which may be familiar to you.

—  Nearer My God to Thee

3    I Need Thee Every Hour

4     From Greenland’s Icy Mountains

12    Hold the Fort

14    America

19     I Love to tell the Story

21     Is My Name Written There?

23     Home Sweet Home

24     Bringing in the Sheaves

29     Pull for the Shore

30     Shall We Meet Beyond the River

65     What a Friend We Have in Jesus

67     Rock of Ages

71     Old Hundred (Doxology)

109    Marching Through Georgia

112     Old Uncle Ned

121     Old Folks at Home

122    Sailor’s Hornpipe

152     See Saw Waltz

190     Yankee Doodle

194     The Golden Slippers

226     Bring Back My Bonnie to Me

228     A Maiden’s Song

231     $15 in My Inside Pocket

234     Cricket on the Hearth

262     Old Black Joe

279     Red White and Blue

283     The Old Oaken Bucket

313     National Song (German)

385     on de banks of the ribberside

390     The Battle Cry of Freedom

417     Oh!  You Little Darling

434    Champagne Charlie

442     Down on the Farm

594     My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon

634     Shall We Gather at the River?

722     ‘Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus

1027     Daddy Wouldn’t Buy a Bow-wow

1030     In Love with the Man in the Moon

1050     I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard

1059     Only One Girl in the World for Me

1068     What Could the Poor Girl Do?

1071     Sweet Rosie O’Grady

1086     There’ll Come a Time

1088     Blue Eyes

1090     On the Banks of the Wabash

The empty place is where a battery once stood. See the black soot marks on the underside of the raised hood? Good thing to look for, if you're shopping for secondhand tractors.

Here's what's left of the battery.

Between the flames, the battery acid, and the residue from the fire extinguisher, you KNOW there's no cheap fix to this situation.

Practically speaking,  this job entails cleaning away the gunk, cutting out the melted remnants of the old wiring, and splicing in a new wire harness.  And a new battery, of course.  Not impossible, nor inexpensive.

Good thing the kids and I learned a new skill last week.

We traveled to Soter’s Mine, 130 miles south of here, on a club-sponsored collecting trip to learn about gold panning.

This pile of gold-bearing sediment was scooped out of an ancient riverbed.

The kids fill their buckets with mixed sand, stone, and plant roots . . .

. . . and transport it to the present riverbed for panning. The gold pans are tough plastic with molded-in ridges to trap heavy gold particles.

I tip the pan so it catches flowing water, then I vigorously swirl it to rinse the sediment. There's a learning curve to this part.

Most of this stuff will be sluiced away . . .

. . . and with luck, amongst the dark grains of black sand remaining in the pan, there will be the unmistakable glitter of gold. The old miners of the club probably wouldn't bother with the infinitesimal speck of metal on the tip of my pinkie, but it was my first-ever flake of gold so into my vial it went. I found half a dozen more and slightly bigger ones as the day progressed.

This doesn't look like much for four hours' work plus a 260-mile round trip, eh? But now that I've got the knack, I look forward to trying again on another club trip.

Something else my father-in-law said, and his son often repeats, is that every farm needs a gold mine.  ”You don’t suppose  . . .” I asked the mine owner, and she encouraged me to try panning in my farm’s streams.  ”There’s gold all through Vermont, but usually not in amounts worthwhile for mining companies,”  she said.  ”What’s the harm in looking for it?  You just might find some.”  And if I did find it?  You can bet it would go straight into that poor blue tractor.

“There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting; / It’s luring me on as of old; / Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting  / so much as just finding the gold.”

I learned of Chautauqua from my grandparents, who owned a portable hand-cranked roller organ whose varnished oak case was lettered with the word in fancy black-painted script.  The lettering, the obvious age of the machine, the brittle yellow newspapers wrapping the toothed song-rollers, and the nature of the songs (Marching Through Georgia, Shall We Gather at the River?, Hooray for the Red White and Blue) all convinced me that Chautauqua meant antique, not least because both words have ‘q’ in them.

But that’s not accurate. Popular for fifty or so years between the Civil War and the Great Depression, and modeled after open-air church tent meetings, chautauquas were traveling humanities seminars that brought lectures, dance, music, and performance art to backwater districts across the nation.  The original Chautauqua awarded correspondence degrees, and altogether the many variations of chautauquas established an American habit of adult education that persists today.

One famous Chautauqua lecture, Acres of Diamonds, was recommended to me by an elderly friend when I explained to him that I was returning to school in order to preserve our farm.  ”What will you do?”  he wanted to know.  ”I don’t know, but there must be something somewhere that will let me make ends meet,” I told him with great determination.  ”Sometimes you find what you are looking for right in your own dooryard,” he said, “acres of diamonds, right there in the mud.  They just don’t look like what you expect.”

Geographically, I’m not travelling far.  I finished my B. A. at a tiny college not four miles from this farm, and am presently working on an M.A. at a slightly bigger college just 28 miles south.  My real travelling is a journey of perspective:  I’m looking at the resources of our farm with different eyes, wondering where in the acres of pastures, woods, and fields might the diamonds be hidden.

Abundant rain and long summer days have the flax trial proceeding well:

Flax plot, three weeks old. Sweden is lagging, there in the upper left plot.

Four weeks along.

Five weeks, and most stems are well over a foot high. Time to get a taller measure!

At six weeks, interesting things are happening.

The Czechoslovakian strain, though not the tallest variety, has set the first flower of this trial. Look at that gorgeous blue!

This Hungarian variety is very close to blooming.

The tallest plant so far is one of the Belgians. It is not budded out yet, either--I wonder if the growth rate slows after flowering? TIme will tell. The stick is ruled in inches, by the way, consistent with the data records of the USDA germplasm repository.

Updates from the hide-tanning realm:   remember I had another brain-tanned hide yet to soften?  I thought I would put it on a rack and soften it with a stake instead of by hand.

I slitted its edges all the way around . . .

. . . and laced it onto a rack. Spread out like that, it soon dried enough so that when I stretched it, it turned opaque.

I used a canoe paddle, by-product of a long-ago woodworking course, to stretch the hide.

This should have been easier, overall, than hand softening as I did on the previous hide.  Alas.  Two hours later, parts of the hide were still too damp to stay stretched.  By evening dew the hide still wanted more working.  I moved the whole rack indoors, turned a fan on the hide, and worked it another half-hour.  And then I stopped.  I tightened up the slackened laces all around the hide, left it on the rack in front of the fan, and went to bed.  By morning, the hide was dried stiff and smooth like parchment–not soft drape-y buckskin, but not useless either.  I will use it for bookbinding later on.

From the top: bark-tanned deerhide, grain-on, racked not softened; brain-tanned deerhide, grain-off, racked not softened; bark-tanned kidskin, grain-on, softened not racked; brain-tanned deerskin, softened not racked.

Same samples, bottom to top. The softened buckskin on top is thick, almost spongy, compared to the rest.

The other two deerskins are still in the hemlock bark tanbath.  I stir them around every few days, when I add fresh bark-broth.  I’ve begun work on a veal hide, too.

This one soaked in the buck for over a week.  The hair slid right out.

The dehaired hide hangs at about 18 lbs, or maybe 5% of the veal calf’s live weight.  This hide may have been worth as much as $15 dollars to a dealer, or it might have been worth nothing at all.  Depends on the market.

The veal hide has been in the tanbath for less than a week. I think the two deerskins are almost tanned through, after these past warm weeks.

The color is fairly even all through the thickest part of the deerskin. Compare that to the very thick neck-skin of the veal hide, from a calf probably only 6 months old! No wonder the veterinarian has to literally punch a hypodermic needle through cow hides.

The field corn I planted is up and grown past danger from crows.  Corn is sometimes “knee-high by the fourth of July” but not in my garden, not after this cool wet spring.  I planted late, on the 10th of June, but in theory the short-season Painted Mountain corn will mature by mid-September anyway.

Looks like almost every single kernel germinated! These are way too crowded, but I don't want to thin them until I take some anti-sheep measures.

I will hoe the weeds and hill the baby corn plants one more time, to encourage stronger roots.

These stalks are well-started, but look sort of flimsy at the bottom.

Soil mounded up around the stalks shores them up against torrential rains and other miserable weather events.

Part way through the first row, I found a critical observer. Toads are good luck in the garden, I always think, and I don't mind their presence as long as I see them first. One time, when I was picking potatoes, I picked up a toad by mistake because it was lurking under the potato-mulch looking very much like a clod. I would have hollered, except my liver was up in my throat and I couldn't make a sound.

The corn needs thinned, probably weeded and hoed once more after that, and then it's pretty much on its own until September. I hope the sheep fence holds--I had to get a new electric fence charger, because the one I had blew apart in a lightning strike this spring.

The flower beds are making progress too.

This iris bud, which incidentally is wound counterclockwise like every iris bud I examined this spring, unfurled . . .

. . . into one of these, my very favorite silveredge iris.

This oriental poppy started out as a kiwi-fruit-looking bud . . .

. . . then for a while mimicked a carnation . . .

. . . and spent a few days showing off exotic contrast.

When this pod dries to a grey-brown husk, I will be able to harvest a teaspoon or so of poppyseeds.

At the conference there was a special place just for cars to park:

Gutterson Parking Garage, UVM

Where I work, the parking lot is a great deal more diverse:

Sugarhouse Parking Lot, Sterling College

Both places have certain parking conventions:

Special but anonymous parking, UVM

Special parking just for Barb, Sterling College

There, the buildings are mostly taller than the trees:

University Heights dormitories, UVM

 Here we do it the other way around:

Dunbar Hall entrance, Sterling College

Both places have structures of brick and concrete, I notice:

Student residences, UVM

Student-built outdoor oven, Sterling College

Both campuses have miles of opportunity for foot travel, but the footpaths there are paved:

well-marked footpath through campus, UVM

Whereas the trails here are not:

lane to campus woodlot, Sterling College

Both places use signs to give direction:

Direction, UVM

Directions, Sterling College

This sign seems abrupt:

traffic control sign, UVM

I think this one is more polite:

Traffic control sign, Sterling College

In both places, signs explain norms:

Explanation, UVM

Explanation, Sterling College

Campus security seems good there as well as here:

Vigilance, UVM

Vigilance, Sterling College

Both places include legumes in their permaculture plantings:

lawn of white clover and crown vetch, UVM

pasture with red clover and cow vetch, Sterling College

And both places have bird life:

Gull taking bird's-eye view of campus, UVM

Bird's-eye view of student project, Sterling College

The main place-difference I notice is that the conference center has a beautiful view of Vermont’s landscape . . .

Green Mountains to the east of campus, UVM

. . .while back  here in Craftsbury, we are Vermont’s landscape.

Wild apples, hillside, and the McCarthy Barns, Sterling College

Wonderful as it is to attend conferences, see a new place, and hear tales of other campuses, I’m not a bit sorry to work at this one.

When high clouds' shadows mottle the hillsides, that's a good hay day.

Whatever could this shadow be?

The tire in the foreground should give you a hint.

Fourth wagonload, and the evening shadows are gathering.

This kicker wagon holds maybe 85 or 100 bales of hay, depending on how they’re piled.  Putting away the first hundred bales is a good warmup, and the next few loads aren’t too bad either; but by the fourth and subsequent loads the novelty is gone and I am ready to stop picking up 50-lb objects.

They won't jump out of the wagon on their own--I will have to shift them.

Thankfully the elevator helps. That's Himself, offloading up there in the hayloft.

Happiness is an empty wagon . . . but there are plenty more bales yet in the field.

This wagon is just about full. Load number five and suppertime coincide.

My heart gladdens when I hear of two strong students who offered to help put away this last load so John could get started on evening milking. . . but my hopes are cruelly dashed a short half-hour later when I try to pin those slippery eels.  One changes his mind–he prefers to go play soccer.  The other assures me (before supper) he wants to help, but after supper he fails to show up.  I used to get righteously indignant about these things, but I’ve mellowed over the years.  As dairy farms dwindle in this state, fewer and fewer people have a clue as to when or how work gets done.  But those same people can be so endearing, when they talk about the idea of agriculture, that it’s hard to hold a grudge.

I am hot, irritable, and dreading the prospect of unloading a wagon all by myself.  It can be done; I have done it before.  Single-person unloading means I put three or four bales on the elevator, let it dump them in a congested heap on the loft floor, jump off the wagon to unplug the motor, clamber up into the loft, stack the bales in the bents, climb down out of the loft, plug in the elevator again, hop back on the wagon, and repeat.  Even one helper makes a huge difference, but when no help is to be found and the wagon needs emptied, efficiency has no bearing on the situation.

But wait–who’s this?

Willing hands! Katie, a returned Peace Corps volunteer, knows the full worth of working when the work needs done. She and my three kids will go up in the loft and stack the hay that I unload from the wagon.

Tomorrow, if it doesn’t rain, we’ll do it all again.  And again, in the next sunny spell after that, and the one after that, until September’s morning-dews and evening-dews come too close together and the mown grass will refuse to dry into hay.  So it has been for a hundred years on this farm–solar gains from June and July and August are stored against the dark and hungry winter.

Used to be, winter cold was stored against summer heat too–when nearby Lake Eligo froze hard and thick, farmers cut block ice and packed it in sawdust and chaff so they could cool their milk cans in summertime.  As long as we have electricity on the farm, we won’t be keeping up that tradition.  Even so, Eligo still matters to us.  Today the water is plenty cool for our purposes:

Sundown on the longest day of the year. Summer is officially here. How was your solstice?

For instance, I still haven’t located my packet of dyer’s coreopsis seeds (Coreopsis tinctoria) which I put in a safe place last fall, but when I was looking for something else in the shed I found a leftover dye-bouquet of dried tops from last summer.  No time to waste!

If this coreopsis plant had overwintered in the garden instead of the shed, it would have been flattened under the snow.

Following nature’s logic, I figured I could “plant” the entire top, seedheads in situ, and thereby eliminate the fuss of seed cleaning, figuring spacing and planting depth, and worrying about germination rates.  I raked back (with the side of my shoe) the bark mulch in one corner of the dye garden, dropped the dried plant tops, and stepped all over them to press them to the soil.  It takes no longer to tell than to do:  30 seconds and the coreopsis planting was done.

Unsightly but effective.

The seeds, in their generous way, tolerated this cavalier behavior and germinated in good faith.

These will become a weedy three-foot-tall mass of dye potential by the end of August.

Dyer’s coreopsis is native to North American prairies.  That’s probably why it’s so self-sufficient.

Corn, Zea mays, is native to North America too.  There are a zillion varieties, hybrid and open-pollinated, of all colors and patterns and characteristics, for all purposes:  sweet corn, popcorn, flint corn, dent corn, flour corn.  I’ve been growing ornamental flour corn for the past few seasons.

These ears were saved from last year's crop, which was planted with seeds saved from the '09 crop, which was planted with seeds bought from Fedco Seeds out of Waterville, Maine. Painted Mountain is one of the shortest-season commercially-available field corn varieties: it will be mature and drying down at 85 days. Besides being pretty to look at, it is easy to pound or grind to flour. My horses favor ears of this corn as a treat--their own ears are finely attuned to husk-rustle.

I did intend to give more attention to the corn planting.  I fastidiously selected my seed corn, picking out fourteen ears based mostly on looks:  color and pattern, good arrangement of kernels, well-filled cobs, and row-count.

Perhaps because a few strands of silk didn't get pollinated, in some places kernels never developed on the red ear. The neighboring kernels grew into the vacant spaces, so the red ear has twisty, uneven rows compared to the beautifully consistent regularity of the speckled ear.

The red ear does show good tip fill--full-size kernels right down to the tip of the cob. This is mostly cosmetic, important only if I want to market ornamental corn.

These cobs were all long top-ears, set high on their cornstalks. Second, or sometimes even third, ears are set lower on the plant and don't generally get as big or as well-filled with kernels.

Ancient corn had a mere 4 rows of kernels on each ear. I like to think of my prehistoric seed-selecting counterparts figuring out how to improve on that design. All else being equal, I will choose a 10-row ear over an 8-row ear. Other varieties of corn can have 12, 16, or even 18 rows of kernels.

I always did like to shell corn. These kernels are excellent candidates for planting: good-sized, undamaged, no apparent disease, and in a range of colors and patterns that make me want to go polish some more stones.

Even the cobs are colored. If I were to make corncob jelly, I would boil the darkest red ones in sugar syrup and pectin. Dry cobs make good kindling, and dampened ones make good curing smoke: down in Wallingford, Vermont, is one of the last butcher shops where I can find cob-smoked ham and bacon, which would go well with cornbread made with meal ground from the fruits of my planting . . . but I'm jumping ahead.

I hoed fourteen 25-foot furrows in the garden, and for curiosity's sake planted one cob to each row. It will be fun to see what colors the offspring are--for example, will this row have mostly blue children? I intend to read up on Barbara McClintock, a Nobel-winning geneticist whose work with colored corn led her to discover "jumping genes." Fascinating!

I had fiddled around so long, selecting corn and taking pictures, that I made haste with the actual planting in order to beat a rainstorm.  Of course I was barefoot–if the soil is too cold for my bare feet, it is too cold for the corn, which will rot in cool wet soils unless fungicide is used–and while I don’t mind dusty dirt, I don’t require to be muddy.  I had time to make furrows, shell the cobs, and strew the kernels thickly before the storm came.  The furrows lay open to the sky for two days of steady rain, so the seed coats were soft and swollen and ready to sprout when I finally tucked them into the ground.

Corn, being a monocotyledon plant, sends up a single leaf-shoot. These beckon irresistibly to crows, who pinch up the sprouts, peck off and consume the softened kernels, and leave the amputated green tops to wilt in the pitiless sun.

My work is just beginning.  The corn shoots need protected from crows and roaming sheep.  I will need to heartlessly thin the plants to six inches apart, hoe them clean of pernicious weeds (mustard, millet, witchgrass, galinsoga . . .). and hill them at least twice so they develop the prop-roots that will help them stand against winds.  When the ears are in the milk stage, I will have to coon-proof the corn patch with electric fence and terriers.  Come September, I will be hoping for a spell of fair weather so I can get the ears picked, husked, and dried down before they are beset by evil fungi.

Looking ahead can be so daunting, sometimes.  Better I should plant quickly, without overthinking the possibilities for disaster.