ocracokewaves

Partners in Cooking and Life

When I was chasing cows around our farm in Canada, I would have laughed if someone told me that I would replace my wife as the bread baker. I still remember the days that she would bake four or five loaves of oatmeal bread and the kitchen smelled heavenly every time I entered during the day.

I know that cooking together with my wife has become a great joy. We have found a few regional recipes to carry with us as we have wandered from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to Virginia, the North Carolina coast and back to the rolling hills of the Piedmont.

The meals that we have cooked are almost always based on simple ingredients. We are blessed to have grown up in families that were close to the land. Fresh vegetables and food direct from the farm or sea often have delighted us and made our meals special.

We were blessed to have grown much of our own food for over a decade. We have never lost those skills or the appreciation of truly fresh food grown in soil that has had enriched with compost that we have made.

For much of our life, we were too busy to do much more than get food on table. That has changed. (Read More)

Empowering Technology

Technology that empowers you is more than just the technology. To be really successful technolog has to be packaged in an affordable way and be easy to use to accomplish tasks that are important.

I was working for Apple Canada and living in Halifax, Nova Scotia in January 1985 when Apple introduced the LaserWriter, the first laser printer to be widely used. Ignoring the first home computers, this was also the first time I was involved with the rollout of technology that had the power to fundamentally change the way we did things.

The list price was $6,995 and more important to those of us lugging it around for demonstrations, it weighed 77 pounds.

I was happy that my previous career was running a cattle farm where I spent much of the winter hauling around 100 lb+ bags of feed.

It is a measure of how technology change accelerates that the third week in December 2011, just about twenty-six years later, I bought a Brother HL-2270DW laser printer for $99.98. It only weighed 15.4 pounds.

The original Apple LaserWriter printed eight pages per minute of 300 DPI text and graphics using a 12 Mhz Motorola 68000 chip.

The Brother printer that I bought in 2011 printed at 27 pages per minute at up to 2400 X 600 DPI. It had a 200 Mhz processor. The Brother printer comes with Ethernet and wireless connectivity. The Apple LaserWriter only had LocalTalk, a very slow but revolutionary network for 1985.

The original LaserWriter were heavy and expensive. Few of them made it into home offices in the early days. The most recent Brother Laser that I purchased was only $85. (Read More)

A Cathedral of Leaves

Trees at Rich Park in Mocksville, North Carolina

Apparently none of the storybook scary tales of danger in the forest ever stuck with me. In rural North Carolina in the fifties, no one worried about evil happening in the forests that surrounded us. We did not understand it at the time, but the cathedral of leaves where we played immensely enriched our lives. As a fifties explorer of the local woods, I could not make the connection because I had yet to experience any of the great cathedrals of the world. Now it seems pretty obvious.

In the summertime, we got up in the morning and headed to the coolness of the deep woods. The towering trees and the brooks that ran through them were our playgrounds. We built dams, seined for minnows, made forts, and played elaborate games in the woods. Sometimes we hardly bothered to leave the woods for meals. We barely escaped the trees as dark descended on the forest.

(Read more) This is post number nine in a series of twenty-two designed to get my blog to 1700 posts before Thanksgiving 2021.

We Were Barn Builders Once

The first barn we built on our farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick, Canada

We moved to our farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick in the fall of 1975. We bought a few cows and they were housed in the old style barn that came with the farm. That spring I went to Manitoba and Saskatchewan and bought a trailer truck load of cows. I had no intention of wintering that many cows in an old style barn. We got a couple of estimates to build a barn. We decided to build a couple of barns ourselves.
While I had learned a lot about working with my hands since I graduated from college, building a barn was not one of those skills. Living on a farm teaches you quickly do what needs to be done even if means learning how to do something new. I ordered all the materials that we needed from Ontario. They were shipped by rail to New Brunswick and then delivered by truck to our farm. The trusses for the barns were 36 ft. long and the others for the other barn were 36 ft. Even getting those trusses unloaded was not easy but it is amazing what you can do with a couple of farm tractors with front-end loaders.
It was harder getting a crew together but a couple of older neighbors agreed to help the two alternative life-style individuals that I hired. They had both come to Canada to get away from American life. I did not care about anything other than they were smart and hard workers. I started by digging a trench four-feet deep as straight as possible for 128 feet. We followed recommendations and made concrete pads to go under each of the four by six pressure treated poles. It was the last time we put pads under poles.
It turned out the instructions we were following were written for building barns in rock-free Ontario soils. New Brunswick soils were mostly rock. There was little danger of them sinking. After the first trench, I decided that we would dig holes with large hydraulic-powered auger mounted on a front-end loader. The advantage of having it on a front-end loader is that I could put down pressure on the auger with the loader so that it would dig more efficiently in the rocky soil. Once the poles were set, we used a tractor-mounted concrete mixer to pour concrete around the poles.
Once the posts were in the ground, it was just a lot of chain saw carpentry cutting the posts off to the same heights. Then we put plates on either sides of the poles. Then the trusses were put in place one at a time. The first truss was the hardest since there wasn’t a lot to brace it with when it was first lifted up. By the time I built the second barn, I had figured out how to improve the construction so that the first truss really was no longer a problem. If you look closely at this picture of the construction of our second barn you can see we put longer posts at the end of the building.
Beyond all the strapping that goes on a pole barn, the hardest thing is putting on the big sheets of galvanized roofing. Often you are way in the air and the only thing keeping you from slipping is the head of a nail. The second barn also got extensions on both sides. We ran out of pressure treated wood so we used cedar posts that came from trees cut off the farm.
The first barn was finished by Thanksgiving (American) 1975. I put the last steel on the barn door before I had any turkey. There a lot of other things that went into making the barns functional like getting electricity to them and of course water. We had to drill a well. I used the backhoe to build a small underground building around the well so I could keep it going in the brutal New Brunswick winters. I dug trenches to put frost free hydrants at both barns.
The finished barns had dimensions of 128 ft. by 36 ft. for the first barn and 69 ft. by 64 ft. for the second one. When I visited the farm back in 2012, both barns were still in good shape in spite of no real maintenance since 1984 when we moved from the farm. They were the only barns that I ever built.
It took at least of couple of years to get the interiors of the barns done so that they met the needs of our growing cattle herd. It was a lot of work but the new barns, a round baler and big farm tractors allowed me to run a cattle operation with 65 or so calving females before we decided to change careers. At our peak before our dispersal in 1982, we had 200 head of Angus, both red and black. The open style barns gave us a very healthy herd of cattle. In the nearly ten years we farmed, we never had a vet visit the farm. We probably had well over three hundred calves in that time.

Turkey Tussles

The first turkey that I remember being prepared in our house was cooked after we moved to the Mount Airy house with my dad. The first Thanksgiving at college, I did not come home but I got invited out by a college friend, Jack. We had a wonderful dinner and I got my one and only opportunity so far to sample stuffing with oysters.

The next memorable Thanksgiving happened after college. I had purchased an old farmhouse with a barn and 140 acres on the shores of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. Four of us had spent months remodeling the two-hundred year old house with hand-hewed beams. College friends came up to celebrate that first Thanksgiving on our own in the fall of 1971. We bought the biggest turkey we could find and the ladies in the group figured out how to cook it.

Little did I know I was already on the slippery slope to a smaller turkey and eventually just a turkey breast. I never take exception with the cook but I sure do miss those whole turkeys. (Read more)

Dirt On My Hands

Our first off-the-farm garden in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Spring 1986

I farmed for over ten years, but I did not grow up on a farm. I graduated from college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as those of us who went to Harvard in sixties and seventies are fond of saying. The closest I got to farming there was my focus on colonial American History. My family did have a rich history of being close to the land and my grandfather was a miller and then a dairy farmer. I never knew him.

I grew up with a mother who spent most of her free time digging in the dirt. She loved flowers and they responded to her love. Roses grew for her in places no one else could get them to grow. Tomatoes were the only vegetable that we had room for at my childhood home, but they did incredibly well.

Growing up, the only digging in the dirt that I did was to get worms so I could go fishing. I was completely uninterested in growing anything. That certainly continued through my college years. The change and how it came about are something of a mystery even to me. When it happened is easier. The change happened sometime between August 1971 and January 1972 when I started ordering seeds from a catalog. (Read More)

The Mill Pond

Mill Stone from Walter Styers Grist Mill

My mother spent her childhood up to her teenage years on a mill pond. In my mind’s eye I can see the mill pond, the mill and the house. I have certainly heard enough stories. My mother grew up there. As a very young child she got lost in the woods one night. She had tagged a long with her older brothers to play at the other end of the pond. Like older brothers will do, they got frustrated with their sister hanging around and told her to go home. She got lost on the way back. She was found by a black man who helped at the mill. She was found only after spending a long cold night in the woods with only one of the family’s dogs as company. Walter Styers, her father, was getting ready to drain the pond and start looking for her body just before she was found. (Read more)

If Silver Could Talk

Silver is not very popular these days. Some silver things can hardly be given away. My generation has one foot in the world where silver items were well used and certainly respected and today’s world where silver pieces cannot find a home where they even see the light of day and a little polish.

At least this straddling of worlds provides a little perspective. I know my mother who was definitely not born with a silver spoon in her mouth learned to love silver when she became the grand lady of the house at 347 West Pine St. My dad who I hardly knew loved to have dinner parties. In those days, the first half of the last century, a good party apparently required silver. I wasn’t around but the silver was and if only it could talk. (Read more)

Finally a Backyard

Our Backyard in the North Carolina Foothills

It seems since my childhood that I have spent much of my life searching for a backyard. I have had hayfields and marshes as backyard but until this last move none were close to the one where I played ball with friends when I was in elementary school. I could plow up part of it for a huge garden but I have been there and enjoyed that when I was a lot younger. Read more.

Not the Last Farmer’s Market

Mocksville, NC Farmer’s Market, November 3, 2021

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

Maybe it was because we had dirt under our fingernails and a close connection to producing food but for whatever reason, visiting farmer’s market became a life-long passion. Read More