Our technological infirmity

Chiggers were our worst enemies

Most of my early childhood was spend in Lewisville, North Carolina, which at the time was a very rural spot with a feed mill, post office, hardware store, two gas stations, a volunteer fire station, two general stores, a dry cleaners, our one school with grades one through twelve and my mother’s beauty shop. We also had a Doctor and two churches, one Methodist and the other Baptist. Our connection to the big city of Winston-Salem was the twisty two lane Country Club Road. There was no grocery store or restaurant in our first few years there. We also had the bumpy old concrete Highway 421 that took us across the Yadkin River to our many relatives living in Yadkin County.

It was there on the western edge of Forsyth County where I used to play deep in the woods with my friends. That is where we played football and baseball in fields and backyards after walking home from school. Sometimes we used to go hunting squirrels after school. In the fifties no one thought much about young teenagers going into the woods with guns. A couple of the fields we played in had deep ruts, some were less than 100 yards from our home on Styers Street. I recently found out that those ruts were remnants of the Great Wagon Road. My mother was a Styers and my great grandfather was Abe Styers who ran Styers Ferry which crossed the Yadkin River before the bridge was built around 1918. His wife Millie was still alive when we first moved to Lewisville in 1952. One of my early chores was to peep in her window in the mornings to see if she was still rocking by her wood cook stove. She died our second December there at the age of 100 years, six months, and 21 days. I still remember her laid out in the parlour of the big old Styers house beside us.

I have strong memories of the woods and fields of the area from my years in the Boy Scouts and the many weekends we spent camping. We lived on a red dirt road and used to marvel at the ice crystals when they forced the red clay ground into contorted shapes. We ran through the overgrown fields nearby with hardly a worry. We did know to stay away from Queen Anne’s Lace because you would likely get a chigger if you brushed against it. Chiggers were painful and required the bite being painted with finger nail polish. Snakes and poison ivy were hardly on our radar. I only remember seeing one or two snakes while growing up. I run into poison ivy until my Scouting days but nothing like I have seen in my adult life. The only ticks we saw were the swollen ones that got attached to people’s pet dogs. I remember having a swollen tick on me when we lived in Canada in the eighties.

Times have really changed, Lewisville is now a busy little town with plenty of expensive subdivision tucked in the woods where I used to play. Many streams where we hunted crawfish and minnow have been corralled into culverts. Winston-Salem’s development tendrils are stretching towards Lewisville. It is unlikely that today’s teenagers in the area go into the woodswith shotguns or even play pickup baseball or football in vacant lots even if they could find one. Those days are gone.

Sadly, I recently read that the fields of much of the United States are no longer safe for young explorers and childhood’s forts. The article in the Atlantic magazine had this to say.

“The ticks are winning,” a CDC scientists wrote in a recent paper. To put it even more bluntly, humans are losing and are on the retreat. Ilia Rochlin, a tick researcher at Stony Brook University, told me he stopped hiking in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey after he and his wife came across hundreds and hundreds of newly hatched lone star ticks on a trail several summers ago. And on Long Island, where he lives, “it is impossible to go hiking in most areas,” Rochlin said. “Just because of ticks.”

“No one thinks we should solve our modern tick problem by chopping down all of the trees. But everyone I spoke with agreed: We have to do something about the deer. “Deer are the key.” The “common denominator.” The “crux of the issue.” The “main driver of all that is evil today in the northeastern United States.”

“That last quote is from Sam Telford III, an epidemiologist studying tick-borne diseases at Tufts University, who calls himself “the nation’s biggest advocate for killing deer.” Ticks rely on the blood of deer to reproduce, his argument goes. A single deer, Telford told me, can feed 1,500 female deer ticks, each of which can lay 2,000 eggs. That’s 3 million deer ticks per deer, over one breeding season—even higher for the more fecund lone star tick.”

Deer were non-existent in Forsyth County in 1956. Twenty years later in 1976, the first year the state kept records, five deer were harvested in the county. Last hunting season fourteen hundred seventy deer were harvested in the county. Approximately 168,000 people lived in the county in 1956. Less than 1,500 of them lived in Lewisville. Today 401,718 people call the county home and Lewisville has grown to 14,615. The deer population in the county has exploded more than the human population. That should alarm everyone especially health professionals. One of the few successes I have heard about is an island killing all of their deer to eliminate the ticks. It seems to have worked.

It is hard for me to process that the woods and fields that have defined my life are no longer safe without long pants taped at the ankle, long sleeve shirts secured at the hands, and permethrin spray on anything exposed. The changes are breath taking. When my mother grew up around a millpond in Yadkin in the 1910s, the only yard they had was the bare dirt around the house that they swept with broomstraw. Fields and woods were part of mother’s lfe. Mother who lived into her early nineties died in 2004. She remembered the horse and buggy days as well as walking beside her dad’s wagon on the two-day trips to Winston-Salem to deliver the grain he had milled. She used to sell wild strawberries on those trips for twenty-five cents a gallon. One can easily imagine her tramping through the fields and along edges of woods in search of berries. Even in her later years, she was not afraid of venturing into the fields and woods in hopes of finding some unique wildflowers.

I hope the government starts taking ticks seriously and applies the same resources to tick control that they have to mosquitoes. We certainly cannot depend on oppossums as the Facebook memes suggest. A very rigorous study found that ticks are not normally part of the oppossum’s diet which is certainly a long way from oppossum eating thousand per week or year.

I will cross my fingers, encourage the deer hunters that I know, and hope our subdivision in a very agricultural area of Davie County remains relatively deer free.

Listen to the stories before they disappear

My wife getting her first tractor driving lesson in 1974

The art of story telling has fallen on hard times. It is debatable whether it is due to everyone being glued to their phones or the people who should be listening believing they were born with all the knowledge they will ever need. Some might argue that YouTube videos have taken the place of the old stories, but they miss the mark on at least a few levels. YouTube videos are designed for mass audiences of people who don’t know you and likely will never be close to you. I enjoy watching YouTube videos but it is often hard for them to have relevance in my life. Now is possible to film a good story and make it a YouTube video but that happens very rarely and it will likely only have significant meaning to a handful of people.
Since television came along, passing along oral history has not been easy. Most people who are not looking at their lives in the rearview mirror are laser-focused on the future. Wisdom gained over the years is easier to keep to yourself than to pass along. Asking someone older for advice must be one of the hardest things to do, because I have rarely been asked. Maybe the old situations that we faced look so out of sync with the modern world that whatever knowledge we might have must appear useless.
While I can understand no one looking for my advice on how to start a cattle herd or build a barn, I think the rapid disappearance of oral story telling is more worisome.
Few families have their stories written down. The only way for some of the most precious moments to be passed on is by oral story telling.
For me there is a huge difference in writing down a story and in telling it orally. The following story dates back to 1982, and I first wrote it down thirty years later but only after telling it in person several times. I can read out loud what I have written without getting emotional. However, when I start telling the story from memory, the story has a far greater impact on me and at times has brought tears to my eyes. Here is the story.
When we decided to disperse our cattle herd in 1982, it was a huge undertaking and took the better part of a year to prepare for the dispersal sale. A lot of the work was in converting one of our barns into an auction ring with seats for bidders. It meant cleaning out the barn and moving tons of manure. Selling over two hundred head of cattle in a few hours requires the right kind of facility.
Our sale was scheduled in October and the weather turned terrible in late August. There was non-stop rain and the temperatures were often in the forties. It looked like the three people I had hired were not going to be enough to get the job done. We did not have more money to hire additional people. We had to take every load of manure out in a wheel barrow instead with a tractor mounted front end loader
Monday morning two weeks before our sale date, most of the men from the community showed up unannounced on our doorstep willing to work with no pay until our barn was ready. One neighbor even took vacation to help. I couldn’t believe it. They worked shoulder to shoulder with the people I was paying but they refused all pay. It was an effort to get them to take a plate of hot food at lunch. They would work until they had to go do their chores. When they finished their chores they would be back. They did not stop until everything was done. No one would tell me who organized it.
They all showed up for the sale. Friends whose sales I had supported over the years also showed. The rancher from South Dakota that I hired to talk up the cattle saw the great outpouring of community support wouldn’t even take the money I had promised for his trip. Our sale went on to be a great success. I have never forgotten the people who worked in such miserable, cold, rainy conditions to help us take the next step in our lives. It has been over forty years, but I would still help one of them as much as I could if asked.
My mother was a master story teller and I am happy to say that I captured a few of her stories on video. Right now I have them on my iPad so that I can share them and add some context. If you take away two things from this, listen to the stories before they are gone and learn how to spin the best of your stories in the hopes that a family member will remember them and retell them. I learned long ago that every picture has a story and sometimes the story is more interesting than the picture.

Disappointed by Mediocrity

Tasty Homemade Ham Sandwich, Duke’s Mayo, Cherokee Purple Tomato, Sourdough Bread

My mother had few rules more important than be the best that you can be at whatever you choose to be. She had grown up with little education beyond the one room school house she walked to as a child, but she never let that hold her back. She learned how to drive and and left the fields of Yadkin County for the big city of Mount Airy, North Carolina where she owned a very successful beauty shop for a couple of decades. She also became the matriarch of her extended family. She was determined that her sister’s six children would have the opportunity for successful lives. Two of them followed her and became beauticians. They all leaned on her and came to think of the house where she lived in Mount Airy as a gateway to another world. In time as she aged, she would lean on them which is how families should work.
Mother was also a great cook and gardener. She made it clear from as early as I have memories that I was going to college. She expected no less and I felt bound by her wishes until I graduated from Harvard in the summer of 1971.
Mother lived to be ninety-three and six months. She has been gone for twenty-two years. She loved life, travel, gardening, and working. The other side of mother was someone who long remembered anyone she believed had wronged her or not delivered on their part of an agreement. She never believed that fancy had to part of our lives but that did not preclude things being special. Even in her seventies she would quickly choose to work three days putting together a family celebration rather that hiring someone to cater it. Part of that was her belief that she could do a better job than most caterers. Most family members would agree that she was right.
The world has changed a lot in the two decades since mother died and I have gotten a lot older. At one time matriarchs like my mother and her sisters could hold their families close together. It is much harder today. Families no longer work the land where they were born, they live where they can find jobs often in a different state. People have a harder time getting together because of distance and the divisive politics that now ravages our nation. We can no longer even agree on what the facts are. Even today’s newscasters are jokes compared to the giants of the past. Our economy is now filled with franchises where the locations are run by poorly trained teenagers working for minimum and caring even less. The soul seems to be gone from the economy. Now it is just about making money. When I joined Apple for a nearly twenty-year run, we were out to change the world with products that everyone still remembers. In the over two decades since I left Apple, my only enduring memory of the company is Tim Cook on bended knee with a gift for our morally challenged president.
Now the business model is come up with a good idea, hook people on it, and figure out how to make as much money as possible while making the product cheaper and sustaining it with often borderline deceptive marketing. The formula for government is worse. The party in power has spent the last thirty years convincing people that government is bad even though people really do want things like good roads, education, social security and medical care.
With evangelical Christians giving religion a bad name, Congress barely holding a 12% approval rating while clearly in the pockets of special interests, and families more challenged at staying close together than ever, things do not look great for our society.

I believe the only hope for society is to demand more from each individual. We should expect everyone to be proud of their accomplishments and the work they do while understanding the impact their efforts and words have on the lives of others.

Instead of the salesman who sold us our $40K plus new car telling us to contact the parts department to get the forgotten owners manual, go find one and drive it to us. I would have done that when I was selling computers in the eighties. I would not have thought twice about it. It is how I would have expected to be treated myself. My customers deserved no less.
If someone makes me a mediocre sub or sandwich that costs $10, I am going to let them know about it. On the flip side if someone does a great job and fixes me a memorable meal for a reasonalbe price at a restaurant, I am going to give them some praise including a positive Google review.
As much as I want to be surprised by the extra individual effort that can make difference from Congress to a sandwich shop, I am moving forward with the knowledge that I hold our Constitution in higher regard and understand more about its creation and protection than most representatives. I plan to keep explaining that to them until my digital ink runs out.

I can also make a better sandwich than any teenager in a sub shop. As the cost of eating rises, I expect to eat out less. There are already too many bungled orders to expect things to turn around soon. There are few things worse than spending hard-earned money for something that disappoints.

I will also continue to highlight those services that continue to deliver great value and are proud of the work that they do.

My Mother, Grand Lady of Pine Street

My mother was born in August of 1910. Had she not smoked for a few decades, she might have made it to one hundred, but it would be selfish to wish her here. When she died in March of 2004, she was ready to go. Her body had given out and even her most recent friends had passed. She was content with her life but still loved her family especially her grandchildren. She loved them with all her heart even if sometimes her words did not express it as well as she would have liked.
In her nineties, she was not happy that her body could not do the things that she wanted it to do so I am pleased that she left while her mind was still sharp and before she became too uncomfortable.
I remember lots of things about my mom including many warm beach evenings with her on the North Carolina coast. If you have followed my posts over the years, you might have read our chicken frying adventure which was inspired by her.
When I originally wrote most of this post on August 22, 2005, I enjoyed some cold fried chicken which to me is the comfort food from my childhood. Thirteen years later, I ate some fried chicken which of course was nowhere as good as mother’s chicken. Still, the chicken brought back some memories. I think the summer of 1962, when I was in a special summer school, over half of my lunches contained fried chicken. Mother could fry a chicken blindfolded.

This picture is my mother cooking fried chicken for my birthday in March 2003. She died about a year later. That was the last chicken she fried. She was 92 and six months. She started cooking for her family when she was nine years old. Her mother had died. Mother used to tell us that she was so small and the cast iron pans were so large and heavy that her older brother had to put the pans on the wood stove.
Mother left home in the twenties when few women strayed far from home. She learned to drive a car while her sisters weren’t interested. Eventually she started her own beauty shop. For years her shop was on Main Street in Mount Airy, NC. Eventually, she had a very successful one in Lewisville, NC in the fifties until she retired and moved back to Mount Airy in the sixties. She lived there in the family house at 347 Pine Street until July 2000 when she moved to Roanoke.
It was a remarkable journey for a country girl who never had the chance to get a lot of formal education. She was a true matriarch who was willing to do anything for her family. I still remember my oldest cousin telling me the story of my mother deciding that he was going to military school. He didn’t want to go, but she would not take no for an answer. To this day, he believes that year in military school kept him from heading down a deadly path.
I learned a lot from my mother. She taught me to never be afraid of hard work and to be proud of my roots. Mother’s family was the source of her strength. She leaned on them and they leaned on her. One my cousins who grew up in a wonderful large family, tells the story that without my mother, they would have had no Christmas when growing up. Mother would drive home from Mount Airy to Yadkin County often getting stuck along the way. That was no problem for mom, she would just find a farmer to pull her car out. She never forgot to bring a car full of presents and clothing for her family.
The most important thing that I learned from mother was to live in the moment with an eye to the future. Mother never dwelled on the past. Mistakes were learning experiences. Mom also kept score so if you crossed her, she probably wouldn’t let you forget it. She also was never afraid of saying whatever crossed her mind which sometimes caused a few hurt feelings.
Mother was also a great gardener, a fantastic cook, and a loyal friend to many. Her one rule was to do whatever you were doing to the best of your ability. At the end that’s a pretty good way to live.
The one final thing that I learned from mom, is that material possessions really aren’t very important. The more you have, the more worries that you have. We’ve learned that lesson well, we have spent many years getting rid of things which we have accumulated over the years.
There still aren’t many days that something doesn’t remind us of my mother who was such an important part of our lives. She was never afraid to gamble on us and was always there for us when we needed her. She learned to navigate to Boston’s Logan Airport and fly to Canada at an age when many were afraid to leave home.
There’s probably no more relaxing feeling than coming home as a young adult and having your cares disappear into the walls of your family home as your mother’s home cooking completely finishes off your worries. Mother was an expert at creating that environment which could make your cares disappear in minutes though she apparently decided she would never make a homemade biscuit after she left home as a teenager. She did pop a few cans of refrigerated biscuits but my favorite were her rolls that melted in your mouth.
If we can provide that same spiritually nourishing environment for our kids, I think my mother might be proud of us even if we are amateurs at frying chicken.

Respect for Homesteaders

Our Lab Fundy, Summer of 1972, Guarding Our Woodpile

I spent fourteen years living very close to the land In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick from 1971 to 1985. We grew huge gardens, eventually had cattle, chickens, a milk cow, built large barns, cleared land, built roads, grew hay/oats, and heated with wood. We had a couple of Labs and a bunch cats. We could not have survived, much less farmed without the right tools.

I have great respect for this generation’s off grid movement. Going back to the land is not any easier today than it was fifty-five years ago. In some ways it was easier back in the seventies. I don’t think you had to get quite as far off grid to get back to land. Nova Scotia winters while sometimes wintery are no match for winters in Alaska and Northern Canada. Most of us just wanted to get away from the cities and did not care about proving that we could live in some of the world’s harshest climates.

Going back to the land and building a life there did not happen at once. For me it all started with the farm house, barn, and land along the Bay of Fundy shore in Nova Scotia. While we didn’t build a cabin on raw land, it was still an uphill battle to have shelter, warmth, and food from a garden.

The right tools and persistence are the keys to success in getting back to the land. In over four decades things have changed. Many tools that are now available were not around when we were living on the land. Surprisingly except for the rise of solar power, the changes are minor for small scale homesteaders and farmers.

What you buy first depends on your individual situation. The top brands have mostly changed in the last fifty-five years but I learned that cheap tools break far too often.

We moved into our 200 year old Nova Scotia farm house in the summer of 1971. While the house was in rough shape, it had electricity (30 AMP service), a small spring providing some water, a functional toilet but not much else in the bathroom, and an old wood kitchen stove with enough wood for a couple of summer months of cooking. We had the basics covered but the house needed a lot of work before fall and winter. The only hot water came from an electric kettle. We were lucky that there was a summer campground with showers (and a fried clam shack) just three miles away.

I bought the place for $6,000 Canadian. At the time the US dollar was worth slightly less than the Canadian dollar. Besides the house, there was a barn in need of a roof, a carriage house, and 140 acres with about 25 of those acres cleared. The soil was heavy clay and the 25 acres had been in pasture for decades. It also came with a huge chicken house that had not been used in a decade. Behind it was a giant pile of well-composted manure.

Going between countries was easier back then. I brought with me four former college roommates who had all except one just graduated from college. As I remember the first power tools we bought were a 10.25 circular saw and a three quarter inch power drill. We also got crow bars, hammers, screw drivers, a sledge hammer, an axe, a bow saw, shovels, brooms, and a ladder. Surprisingly basic tools were our best friends and I image they still are today. There were no nail guns in those days.

I brought two vehicles with me, a four wheel drive Dodge Power Wagon pickup with an 8,000 lb PTO winch on the front and a Land Rover that would go through almost anything but at a very respectful British dawdle. Considering what some people go back to the land with today, we were pretty well equipped at the beginning of summer. We even had a TV and could pick up two channels most days but CBC Radio was more reliable.

The early part of summer was spent tearing the old lathe and plaster off the walls and putting a new roof on the house which eventually meant tearing down the old chimney and moving all cooking to an electric frying pan and a Coleman camp stove. We actually got the house down to bare walls on the inside and started caulking the cracks and replacing any cedar shingles on the outside that had deteriorated.

The first big decision was how to the heat the house. In spite of over one hundred acres of woodland, almost all of it was small wind blown spruce. Most of the farms along our road had wood lots with hardwood farther up the mountain. Our farm didn’t have one. After a lot of discussion, we decided to put in electric baseboard heat supplemented by a fireplace and eventually a wood kitchen stove. At the time it made sense. High efficiency wood stoves had yet to break into the market.

I became the electrician. I installed our 100 AMP electrical panel and ran wiring throughout the house. At the same time I hired someone to build us a new brick chimney and a stone fireplace. I also hired a local with a backhoe to run plastic pipe across our dirt road to a very good spring. Next I installed a shallow well pump in our cellar along with a hot water heater. I got the water running to the kitchen first. Getting the hot water to our newly planned bathroom in the upstairs of the house was a bigger challenge since we had to build the bathroom, install a toilet, shower enclosure, and sink. It was almost fall before my plumbing efforts got the shower running with zero leaks in the copper pipes.

Once the plumbing was installed and all the electrical wiring was done, we started installing our wall and ceiling insulation. We also started painting the outside of the house after all the shingle repairs. We got some of our tongue and groove pine paneling installed.

As fall approached, I bought a chain saw. I bought the easiest saw to get in the area. It was the first power of the tools to be replaced. I got it right the next time when I purchased a Stihl 028AV chainsaw. The Stihl stayed with me from around 1977 until I retired it 35 years later. The original circular saw and drill were also retired then. Good tools last.

The original chainsaw allowed us to cut a few pickup truck loads of wood each year while we lived in Nova Scotia. There was some hardwood at the edge of one my fields. The wood turned out to be more important than I first guessed when in September 1973, just after I got married, an early season snow storm took our power out for a week.

Early in that first fall, I installed a new refrigerator, new electric stove, a huge chest freezer and an electric dishwasher which was a gift from my mother.

The next phase of the adventure started when at the end of September, I bought a tractor, disc harrow, mower, bush hog, plow, front end loader and manure spreader. They were all tools that would stay with me until I quit farming over a decade later.

By Thanksgiving of 1971, we had heat, the fireplace, a shower with hot water, a functional kitchen, one bedroom, our great room with a fireplace, and an upstairs still to be finished. Our kitchen cabinets were still wooden egg crates and our glasses were old mayonnaise jars.

That fall more college friends from the states visited us and we managed to cook the first turkey that any of us had ever cooked away from home.

A Broken Connection to the Land

My wife, Glenda, our two Labradors, Tok and Fundy and our third Nova Scotia garden

In 1971, after college graduation — I moved to the Nova Scotia shore and began rebuilding a 200 year old farm house still standing because of its massive hand-hewn and pegged beams. That first winter I immersed myself in gardening books and magazines, extending my limited gardening knowledge while trying to pick the right varieties that would thrive in the North Mountain’s short, cold and foggy summer. That first May on the homestead, we had a cold frame, and we started working the land as early as possible. Even with the huge, years old piles of chicken manure getting a garden going in the heavy clay sod was a real challenge for us first time serious gardeners. While we had a tractor, three furrow plow, and manure spreader, we had not gotten them early enough to plow our garden plot the previous fall before the snows came.
In spite of the challenges, it was a bountiful garden, yielding even corn and tomatoes which aren’t easy to grow in the coastal fog. My mother and her sister came up to teach us how to preserve our food for winter. Had I studied colonial American history after that first season of farming instead of before going back to the land, Jefferson’s thoughts would have meant a lot more to me.
Thomas Jefferson believed that “independent, land-owning farmers (‘yeoman farmers’)” were the bedrock of American democracy. Over fifty years of getting my hands dirty have been convinced me that a connection with the land is one of the most important spects of our lives. Being on the land was part of my consciousness well before I started gardening in the summer of 1972. I came from a long line of farmers and millers.

My powerful desire to have land and work that dirt was deeper than most topsoil.
I am certain that I will never understand how that came to be.
But the city was never for me. The strange unnatural color of the night made sleep hard to find.
The land was what gave life to us all, and where we go when our lives are gone.
The land was at the center of it all, so how could you understand anything without being on the land?
You take whatever road you can find to get to the land even if you have to build the road yourself.
Paraphrase of Page 22, paperback version, The Road to My Country —David Sobotta

That connection to the land teaches some powerful lessons. One is that you can do everything right and end up with nothing except the choice to push yourself and try again with the hope that this time you will be successful.
You learn to appreciate the unyielding will of a seed to germinate and grow sometimes only to fall victim to a crow, cutworm, or insect.
One of the most important lessons is that when you are successful, that success is directly porportional to the effort that you have expended.
Once you throw animals into the mix, it becomes clear that when you have responsibilities to animals or others, you cannot just blow them off. Your responsibility is a sacred trust.
The great lesson of all is that there are jobs that need to be done and some of them will not get done unless you take them as yours. You can be sure you have grown into the role when you know that you cannot walk away.
These lessons are not easy ones, and not surprisingly they are best learned on the land.
In today’s world it seems impossible for everyone to have their own piece of land. For a young person to become a farmer requires far more resources than almost anyone has.
However, if the connection to the land is so important why not teach it in our schools. Educate the children of today about the importance of farms, especially family ones. I believe that schools in non-urban areas could add gardens to their campuses. Why not have today’s children learn about composting, building soil, planting seeds, and transplanting vegetable plants. Small orchards could be established and students could learn pruning and horticulture. Learning how their food is grown and what happens when the weather doesn’t cooperate are valuable lessons. Any food grown could be taken to food kitchens.
If it is important to teach student financial literacy, writing, math, and computer skills, surely it is important to teach them life skills relating to growing food for themselves and others. Courses like this could be intertwined with the history of our population shifts to urban areas and the rise of factory farms. In learning about growing plants students are learning about recycling and composting required for building healthy, sustainable soils. In teaching students about the land we are creating a potential pipeline of young people interested in farming or at least cognizant of the challenges faced by farmers.
People talk about the importance of national service. What if an option for a national service program is helping family farmers for the summer. When we had our cattle herd in the seventies in New Brunswick, I got a call from a friend who asked me to take in his teenage son and teach him responsibility. He was sure his son was headed down the wrong path. He came to stay and work with us. He had a bedroom in our house and ate meals with us. We worked him pretty hard for several months. He learned to drive tractors and he made his share of mistakes.. I don’t take credit for turning him around but I do think we helped him appreciate hard work and attention to detail. He left our farm ready for college. He went on to get his doctorate and become a professor at an American university.
Even urban schools could adopt vacant lots and turn them into gardens. Failing that we could set up summer farm camps where the efforts of campers help grow food for food banks.
It is really time to realize the importance of giving a new generation a connection to the land which could create a generation of young farmers who care enough about the land to maybe put down their cell phones occasionally. If we don’t create farmers, at least we will have a group of much more educated young voters.

The Leap of Faith

My wife deciding what plants are needed to finish out this year’s garden

Life is full of decisions. Some of them are major ones that can change the trajectory of your life and others are seemingly small ones like trying to decide which flowers we need to fill out this year’s garden. My wife has been handling the flower beds for over fifty-three years since she planted our first flower bed in St. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia. The flowers might not always have turned out as she planned but we have always enjoyed them.
Most would agree that our country feels different today than it did thirty years ago. A lot fewer houses have flowers now. My mother would have considered no flowers a dereliction of duty and a sign that no who cares about the world beyond them lives in the flowerless homes.
Even ignoring the toxic politics, people are more cautious especially since the pandemic. Also I see far less risk taking. No longer does the decision to stay close to home raise any eyebrows. Getting out on your own is an often insurmountainable challenge without help from others. The farther you are from home the farther you are from a supporrt network you can count on when you need it.
Planning for a move, assessing the potential benefits, and taking a risk on another life in an unfamiliar area far from home drove much of the change in our country until recently. Among my generation born around 1949, we could not wait to get as far away from home as possible. In my case, I started in North Carolina’s Piedmont, went to military school in Tennessee and college in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After college I moved north to Nova Scotia. It took thirty-five years to get back to North Carolina another fifteen to get within thirty minutes of where I grew up. It was a long circuitous jouney.
Life does not come with a manual that gives us instructions on the steps we need to take for a successful existence and there are no guarantees. If you are lucky enough to have older adults in your life, you can seek their advice but with today’s speed of technological change they might be of little help.
I grew up with a single mother who was born in 1910. I was the first of our family to go to college so I was on my own at a early age with just one piece of advice from my mother ringing in my ear. That advice, be the best that you can be at whatever you choose, was great advice but only covered a few situations.
The result was that I learned to think for myself at an early age. Not all my decisions were perfect but in the grand scheme of things they were all workable. The first big decision was to not take the law boards. Instead I took a $6,000 gift from my mother and bought 160 acres with a 250 year old farmhouse and barn on the Nova Scotia shore of the Bay of Fundy. It was a leap of faith for both my mother and me.
The move turned out to be good first steps to becoming a cattleman and eventually a director at Apple Computer. Times were very different in 1971, when I graduated from college. The only ways back then to research something was in person, by mail, books, or telephone. Long distance calls were very expensive and the mail took forever it seemed. Still those were the only tools available when making the final decision to buy my Nova Scotia farm.
Over the years my wife and I faced a number of big decisions that became turning points in our lives. Ten years and 200 head of cattle into farming in New Brunswick where we found the farm of our dreams, we were faced with twenty percent interest rates. We decided to sell our cattle and I would go to work in town. We had been successful because of the support network we had built in the tiny farm village of Tay Creek, New Brunswick. Even there it was not an unusuable decision in the world of small farmers to take a job in town. It was also a time when things especially in the computer world were moving rapidly. Two years after going to work in town, I was working for Apple and we were moving to the big city of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Eventually, we made another leap of faith and moved our family of five to the states. It was a side step on my career but we judged it better than moving to Toronto. It worked out in the end eventually landing us in Roanoke, VA where all our children graduated from high school and eventually college.
Today is a different, less friendly world with steeper entry points to good jobs. I wonder if there is too much conflicting information available. It is easy to get overwhelmed with all the online opinions, evaluations and recommendations compounded with the difficulty of getting a good job. Making a meaningful decion is hard if your brain is overloaded with information. Much of the online informaiton is something of a rat hole which sucks you into vortex with no clear answers. To effectively make a decision you need to be brutal in discarding the opinions of others. What one person loves, you might hate. My wife and I have often made lists to evalutate our moves. We have moved enough that we can focus on the things that are important to us. We have learned it is important to set goals with our moves and to hold those goals tight.
Comparing the process for my first house purchase in 1971 to our most recent one in 2020, is an interesting exercise. We were in our fifteenth year living on the North Carolina coast when we made another leap of faith. We decided to leave the coastal paradise and people that we had grown to love. We wanted to be closer to our grandchildren, our remaining relatives, and better services especially medical ones than what we had at the coast. The Internet was our primary search tool. We made only two trips before picking a home, but we had a tight list of requirements that kept us focused on our needs. Moving during a pandemic was no picnic, but with the information that we could find on the Internet and a very good real estate agent, it was much less of a risk than my original move to Nova Scotia. Hardly anyone worked from a home office in the 70’s but today it is pretty common and my home-based job gave us lots of flexibility. It also helped that I was familiar with large part of the area where we moved from living here as a teenager.
The house purchase in 1971, involved a few letters, some tourist brochures, one trip to Nova Scotia to look at the house. Another trip a couple years earlier helped me fall in love with Nova Scotia and helped kindle a flame for Nova Scotia. Still it was a lot of faith for someone only twenty-two years old to pick up and move to another country where I knew no one.
I hope the environment in our country changes so people can take more risks that have the potential to improve their lives and the lives of everyone around them. If we had healthcare for all, mobility would be easier. There is an argument for staying in one place and developing intimate knowledge of one area. I know some people who have thrived living in one area and others who have become insular and perhaps jealous of others who have seen more of the world I believe the arguments are much stronger for spreading you wings and being the new person or outsider in the area a few times in your life. Living where you are the outsider builds tolerance, patience, and acceptance, all values that are hard to find today.
Below is list of goals that we drew up in 2005 before our move from Roanoke, Virginia to Cape Carteret, North Carolina. We did pretty well on the list.

We did simplify our life and downsized to a home one half the size of the one where we raised our children. We were unable to find a home we could afford where we could walk to stores but giving up the stores gave us better access to water.

We gardened a lot more, our beds produced three crops a year. In 2017, I did over 10,000 steps a day for 365 days with many of those steps being along the beaches of Emerald Isle. I could often be found biking in our neighborhood late in the evening or in the early morning swimming a few laps in the pool that was a five minute walk from our home.

I piloted my 20 ft Sundance Skiff over 600 hours on the White Oak River, in Bogue Inlet, and the Atlantic Ocean.. I was a regular feature on the White Oak River in my kayak which I could slide into the water from my backyard. I caught more fishi in the ocean and river than I dreamed possible.

I took hundreds of thousands of pictures, and even published a Kindle picture book. I tried a couple of small businesses on my own but the real estate world was in collapse so I ended up joining a fiber network startup as a Vice President. I spent the last fourteen years there until retiring in 2025. We didn’t have much luck with younger relatives but I did write five books and a few thousand blog posts. I feel the leap of faith that led to adventure was worth the risk.

Tomatoes in the South

Twenty-one years ago in 2005, I wrote this post about growing tomatoes. At the time we were growing tomatoes on a mountain overlooking Roanoke, Virginia. I first helped my mother with her tomatoes in the fifties in Lewisville, North Carolina. We have also grown them in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and coastal North Carolina where I once harvested 100 tomatoes in a day.

For the last four years we have been growing them back in the Piedmont in Davie County, about thirty minutes from those Lewisville tomatoes. In 2024, I grew over four hundred eighty Cherokee Purple tomatoes from just six plants. This year we are planting just three or four plants. I have updated the post where necessary, but growing tomatoes doesn’t change very much. The key to get lots of tomatoes is pruning. I will cover that in another post.

Growing tomatoes is one of the great pleasures of living in the south. Most years they are easy to grow and almost every house has enough sunshine and dirt to grow a bountiful crop somewhere.

Today we planted eight plants which will give us more than we will ever be able to eat.

My goal is to have ripe tomatoes by the Fourth of July which is a little bit of a challenge up on the mountain. (We regularly have ripe tomatoes by the middle of June in Piedmont. On the coast, our first ripe tomato often came in late May.)

We have planted tomatoes many times before, and this year (2005) we have the plants in the ground about one week early and the soil seems relatively warm which is very important in getting a good start.

Assuming we have the right amount of warmth, we have a good chance of having that first tomato sandwich before the Fourth. One of my cardinal rules for growing tomatoes is that you have to get your hands dirty and feel the dirt. In fact feeling the dirt tells you if it is too cool or too wet. We have been growing tomatoes in the same spot for many years so our dirt is in great shape. It crumbles easily and we control disease by a meticulous clean-up at the end of the season.

Originally we dug out most of the dirt and replaced it. For several years we tilled it and worked it. Now we just stick a shovel in, make a hole about the size of a large coffee cup, pour a cup of water in the empty hole, once the water disappears, put in the bottom of the hole about a cup or two of very well rotted cow manure/compost and a sprinkle of Osmocote.

With a trowel I mix the dirt I have taken out of the hole with the manure and fertilizer and put the tomato plant in the hole and pat the dirt around it while making a slight depression around the plant so it will be easy to water.

You do not have to make a large hole unless you have a tomato plant that is so large that you need to put it partially in a trench. A plant twelve inches tall can easily have the branches cut off of the first six inches and the tomato planted so that only six inches is above ground. The plants done that way grow very strong, are wind resistant, and tolerate dry conditions a little better.

Just make certain that you really make a connection with the soil. It’s good for the soul and will make you appreciate all the effort that goes into growing our food. Mixing the soil with your hands is good for the soul.

After transplanting, the plants need to be well watered immediately. After a week or so, I start using Miracle-Gro soluble tomato fertilizer a couple of times a month. As the plants get bigger we stake them, but I will record that a little later just so this is complete guide to tomatoes for my kids. Sometimes you get some little flies on the plants and need to treat them with an organic spray or the plants can be so weakened that they die.

You can choose to use completely natural fertilizers if you want, we have done that many times, but find that with our well cared for soil, this compromise method works very well.

(As to varieties, the absolute tastiest is the Cherokee Purple. They grow well in North Carolina, but you will likely not have much trouble finding good varieties for your area when you go to buy plants. If you can find an old time garden store, they will have far more useful advice than Lowe’s or one of the other big box stores. I can recommend Better Girl, Mortgage Lifter, and for smaller tomatoes, Umberto or Huskies which are exceptionally hardy and easy to grow. The German pinks are good but they take a lot of space for the amount of tomatoes they produce.)

Pictures from when we built our current garden in 2023 and had a bumper crop of tomatoes. That year we grew some of our plants from seed.

Cherokee Purple Tomatoes, ready for the garden April 2026

A Place To Take Root

Our Tay Creek Farm, The Road Back From Our Cattle, Our Barn In The Distance

Just as we were getting married, my mother-in-law-to-be told my bride-to-be, “You know David (me) has a lot of miles on him.” It was a true statement but probably not a compliment. At twenty-four years old, I had driven around the country, driven to Alaska and back, plus wandered as far north as Gander, Newfoundland, and at the time was living on the Nova Scotia shore, 1,300 miles north of Mt. Airy, North Carolina. Even so I was still looking for the right place to make a home.

After we got got married, we traveled back to Nova Scotia, and we continued my search for a place to farm and make a home. In spring of 1974, we found a farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick, twenty miles north of the provincial capital, Fredericton. The first time we looked at the farm was earlly May and there was still snow on the ground. Even with the snow, it immediately felt like home.
It was very different from where we were living in Nova Scotia. Tay Creek was an old farming community with a couple of country stores, three churches, a community hall, a saw mill, and a number of active farms. It still had a tradition of farming with horses. Where we lived in Nova Scotia was just a settlement with just a handful of houses. The Nova Scotia shore had winds that never stopped. New Brunswick had snow that only stopped long enough to give the black flies a chance to breed. There was a never-ending forest of spruce and hardwoods in New Brunswick. Nova Scotia had a rocky coast and a lot of wind-stunted spruce. New Brunswick was by far the best place to farm. It also turned out to be a great place to have our children and give them a good start in life.

For nearly a decade we put down roots and learned how to be part of a farming community. That encompassed everything from clearing snow from neighbor’s driveways with my tractor-mounted snowblower to digging a grave when someone died. We became such a part of the community that when we decided to disperse out cattle herd, many of the men pitched in to make sure our dispersal sale was successful. Even when I went to work in town, we were still a big part of the community.

One other element that I credit with building ties to the community was my haying operation. I bought standing hay off three or four old farms that were no longer being actively farmed. I got to know the older couple and most were glad for a little extra income and to have their fields cleaned up each year.

What we learned and the strong roots we developed made it much easier to live in other places. When you are twenty miles from town in area that was easily isolated, you quickly learn that you are as much your neighbor’s safety net as they are yours. Our first year in Tay Creek we had twenty-three feet of snow. My first chore every day was to shovel the sidewalk. My youngest daughter claims that the sound of snow shoveling helps her sleep. It came as no surprise when we learned that until the late fifties, the road to town was not plowed during the winter. Any winter travel was on foot or by horse-drawn sleigh. In late spring every year a bulldozer would clear the Royal Road which led to town. Some of the cohesiveness of those years was still there when we moved into the community.

At the heart of community were the country stores, the churches, and the community hall. Where we lived in Nova Scotia, neighbors rarely dropped by but it was a different story in New Brunswick. People were always stopping by to chat on the front porch and to see how things were going. Talking to each reinforced the sense of community. Not once do I ever remember anyone talking about politics.

I also learned to stand up for what was right. When the Provincial Minister of Education declared that those living in out in the country should not expect to get the same quality of education as city students, my wife and I organized our community and fought for our school with meetings and letters. I ended up in a newspaper debate with the Minister who boxed himself into a corner and ended up having to resign. I have never forgotten how it felt to win against what seemed like overwhelming odds.

Living that far from town, we also learned to be self-sufficient. We had wood heat, spring-fed water, a generator and plenty of food in the cellar and freezer from our gardens and cattle. We even had a flock of hens who never failed to give us some eggs and a Guernsey cow that provided three gallons of rich milk every day. If something broke, I fixed it unless it was a serious problem with one of the diesel tractors. We built two huge barns and I often could be seen at the far end of one barn with an electric welder or acetylene torch. I was carpenter, electrician, and plumber. We faced blizzards not with fear but with a sense of calm, ready for whatever the storm could throw at us. We were the farm that people came to if they were stuck and needed pulling out of a ditch.

What we learned from farming for a decade served me well. I used to joke with the computer sales people I was training that if you could convince someone that one of two black cows was worth a thousand dollars more than the other because of its genetics, you could sell almost anything to anyone.

By the time we moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, the roots that we had put down in Tay Creek served us well in making a home there, and later in Columbia, Maryland, and Roanoke, Virginia. There was nothing that office politics could throw at you that came close to a blizzard at minus forty with 60 MPH winds and a cattle herd a mile away through the woods that needed to be fed.

A Measure of life we all should take

When my first grade career started under the watchful eye of my mother’s first cousin, Ms. Conrad, I was only thinking about what it would take to make it to the end of day. Then I could walk home, play a little football with friends, watch the evening news with my mother, and do my homework with some help from Whiskers, my cat. There was no thought of where the next seventy plus years would take me.
It is a lot easier to look back on seven decades than to imagine the future when you are six years old in a rapidly changing world. Now it makes sense for me to look back. I retired about a year ago when our company went out business. Our business dried up with changes in government funding. Since then I came back and worked one stray project but there haven’t been any others in eleven months. We weren’t building buggy harnesses, we were analyzing needs and designing fiber networks.
My first thought is that I am happy to have worked for the last fifty-six years in a number of productive roles. I consider myself even more fortunate to have worked from home the last fifteen years. I worked hard, maybe too hard during large parts of my life, but I do remain proud of what I have done.
Still it is important to acknowledge that your work career is not your life. How you measure your life probably says a lot more about the person you have become than almost any summary you could write.

My overall measure of life is to look and see if the places, people and organizations that I have touched are any better off for my having been there.

Digging deeper, I look at the kind of people that our children have become. Then, I look at the kind of life we have lived. Did we help others when possible, were we kind and respectful people, did we strive to give more in relationships than we took? I also look at what we learned from life, how much we enjoyed the things we have done, what kind of relationships did we build including those with our spouse, parents, children, grandparents, and friends. I don’t seek to measure anything precisely or to see how close to perfection we got, I just want to understand if our good intentions came through. To have more friends than we started with in first grade isn’t a bad accomplishment especially if you have managed to keep one of those first grade friendships going.
It is not important to me that every person I have met likes me because I have run into some not so nice people along the way. If they tried to harm me or those working for me, I hope they remember that I always stood up for what was right even if it made some people unhappy or came with a personal cost. There are also some people with extraordinarily thin skin who expect to be treated like the privileged person that they have adopted for their persona. You can never do enough for these folks because they will always be slighted by something you said or did which would not bother a normal person. I happy to let these folks stew in their own juices on the sidelines of my life. Whether they ended up liking me or hating me is irrelevant. That handful of people like that intersected my life for varying periods of time is hardly matters because they were just passing through.
Finally in measuring our lives, we have to look at the times we have lived through. I lived in Canada for sixteen years and over sixty years in the United States. I can remember things that touched me throughout life, the polio epidemic, President Kennedy’s assassination, Nixon’s election, the Watergate hearings, Vietnam demonstrations, moving to Canada, the energy crisis of the seventies, 20% interest rates in the early eighties, the Quebec separation crisis, the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Obama’s election, COVID and Biden’s four years in office. I have lots of other memories especially of farming in Canada, my twenty years with Apple, and the fifteen years living on the North Carolina coast. For over fifty years the challenges thrown our way have been ones where we could adjust our lives and get on with it. Only recently has that changed.
Governments have come and gone, we have lived our lives. Then Trump and the MAGA movement showed up. The first four years were bad but largely erased by the peace and sanity of the Biden years. Now Trump is back and the threat to our country and the life we have lived is immeasurable. We wake every day wondering what the idiot in the White House has done overnight. If we were ten or fifteen years younger, we would move back to Canada. I don’t want the final chapters of my life written from within the confines of Trump’s world of hate and violence. I fight Trump world with the written word and my voice. The hope we nourish is that we can finally have justice in the White House. We must demonstrate to the world that no man is above the law in America.