Finnegan

Our hearts are torn asunder today as our most faithful friend and regal protector has passed away.

So savage winter catches
The breath of limber things,
And what I love he snatches,
And what I love not, brings. Thomas Hardy

"The poor dog, in life the the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still the master's own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour'd falls, unnoticed all his worth,
Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth,
While man, vain insect hopes to be forgiven,
And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven." Lord Byron


There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.
Rudyard Kipling


"Not the least hard thing to bear when they go from us, these quiet friends, is that they carry away with them so many years of our lives. Yet, if they find warmth therein, who would begrudge them those years that they have so guarded? And whatever they take, be sure they have deserved."John Galsworthy

Seventeen persimmons on the American Persimmon tree planted in the spring of 2009. Exciting! I am going to attempt some persimmon pudding. The persimmon is a bit out of its range here, but so far, so good. We have a few smaller Asian persimmons planted, I don’t know if the American and the Asian pollinate each other but the American is self fruitful. The Asian fruit look different, more acorn shaped and less squashed tomato shape. Dried persimmon leaf tea is reported to be very delicious and high in vitamin C, best gathered in the summer. Would you like to try a cup?

No clouds are in the morning sky,
The vapors hug the stream,
Who says that life and love can die
In all this northern gleam?

At every turn the maples burn,
The quail is whistling free,
The partridge whirs, and the frosted burrs
Are dropping for you and me.

Ho! hilly ho! heigh O!
Hilly ho!
In the clear October morning.

Along our paths the woods are bold,
And glow with ripe desire;
The yellow chesnut showers its gold,
The sumachs spread their fire;

The breezes feel as crisp as steel,
The buckwheat tops are red:
Then down the lane, Love, scurry again,
And over the stubble tread?

Ho! hilly ho! heigh O!
Hilly ho!
In the clear October morning.

a poem that suits the day, it was written about the time the farm house was being built, by Edmund Clarence Stedman

The chestnuts are ripe and falling from their husks. The farm has 9 chestnut trees planted a few years after our arrival, some are Chinese and some are the Dunstan hybrid. The Dunstan hybrid is a blight resistant cross of the American and the Chinese chestnut. There is not a whole lot of difference between the taste, the Dunstans seem starchier to me. The Dunstans are ripe earlier and they are browner in color and somewhat smaller. Chestnuts are rich in the monounsaturated fats oleic acid and palmitoleic acid, known to lower LDL cholesterol, they’re rich in the B vitamins thiamine, riboflavin and niacin and a source of calcium, iron and phosphorous. This year was a very good year, the branches loaded and hanging on the ground. We took some to the market this week, and despite the cold rainy day and lack of market shoppers we managed to sell some. I kept imagining how well they could sell if we had a mechanism there to cook them and had a young chap to loudly chant- hot roasted chestnuts!!

It has been a fun and amazing wild mushroom gathering year in this part of PA. Learning lots of new mushrooms but it’s a challenge as there are so many that look so similar!! The conditions were ideal for an abundance of all sorts of mushrooms and a kind friend is guiding us to differentiate the bad from the good. Many are being dried for winter soups. They’re so ephemeral, popping up where there was nothing and in a few days all that is left is sort of a disgusting pile of slime. Would love to identify all those that grow on the farm. If you have a favorite definitive mushroom identification guide, let us know!

Approximately 48 days after they were found some of the snake eggs have hatched!!! (see earlier post) They are milk snakes, born with an umbilical cord attached! There is a bit of hope for the remaining eggs but the first 3 all hatched within a day or two of the other. We’ll wait then and perhaps do an autopsy on a remaining egg. The babies will be released close to where the eggs were found.

The new carrot colors are far from new, the first carrots were purple, white and yellow. Orange was the unique variety that got cultivated widely hundreds of years ago. The orange color is the result of Dutch cultivation in the 17th Century, when patriotic growers turned a vegetable which was then purple into the color of the national flag.
Purple carrots have up to 28 times more anthocyanins, than orange carrots. Black Carrots also contain anthocyanins, flavonoids have anticancer compounds, they are free radical scavengers in living systems, as well as inhibitors of LDL (the bad) cholesterol and the black carrot anthocyanins are especially active.
We have not yet planted black carrots, haven’t seen the seeds for them. I am wondering if they look very appetizing. The purple carrot, we noticed, are not always purple all the way through. Some have yellow or orange insides, but some are deep purple the whole way. The "Deep Purple", I think, are uniformly colored the whole way through. It was disappointing when we first planted purple carrots to find that the variety we planted had only the thinnest layer of purple on the outside and if you peeled them they were orange!
Yellow carrots are rich in Xanthophylls, similar to beta-carotene, they are linked to eye health and may reduce the incidence of lung and other cancers.
Red carrots are rich in Lycopene, found in, is a type of carotene also found in tomatoes. It is believed to help prevent heart disease and, in conjunction with other phytochemicals, reduce the risk of certain cancers.

Purple carrot varieties: Indigo, Maroon, Purple Dragon, Cosmic Purple,
Purple Haze
Yellow Carrots: Sunlite, Solar Yellow, Yellowstone,
White Carrots: Creme De Lite, White Satin
Red Carrots: Supreme Chateney, Red Samurai
Black: Black Knight, Indigo

Concords are the favorite of all fruits on the farm. It's funny though when the strawberries are first ripe they are our favorite, then when the cherries ripen they are we we have been waiting for and of course the peaches vie for top ranking. Soon we'll be saying the same about the crisp ripe, bursting with juice fall apples!!

We had a great crop of edamame ( green immature soybeans) again this year. A third of the crop is being saved for planting next year. We are trying to save more and more seed, if something works well and we really like it it makes sense. The black pearl soybeans are for some reason expensive seeds, even though they require nothing different than the regular soybeans, so it is just a matter of availibility. We have lots now , so if you would like to try some, let me know. The Black Pearl are a delicacy in Japan as they are so buttery delicious.

Tree on the farm, friendlier than it looks

This is the good life, you haven't had a peach until you've had a peach plucked off the tree, warmed from the sun, at the peak of ripeness and of flavor. The color or blush as they say is so beautiful. Peach, who named the peach, does the fruit peach taste or look like it deserves the name peach.If you had to rename the peach what would be its new name?

The berry season is near the end, the long period of heat and lack of rain was not helpful. The drone of cicada, katydids and crickets and the blooming of the goldenrod always signify, to me, the end of summer. The trees are apt to drop a few leaves in the wind, the air faintly smells of honey and one is tempted to try a bite from a the apples and pears that are getting big but still quite unripe. If it were a wetter summer there would have been berries to the end of September, but not this year. They started earlier and ended earlier, is is it a sign of the times?

So, a trip to the labs of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History positively identified our little shrew as a masked shrew. You can only positively ID the pygmy shrew by a cranial examination. The small mammal expert was gracious and generous with her time, and she was impressively knowledgeable- we learned a great deal and we are so very thankful for her hospitality. I think now we have a much better idea of what we are looking for, although now we are desirous of a dissecting microscope. It was a bit disappointing to find that it was not a pygmy shrew. One should be up to snuff on their species of special concern- there are several species that are so similar to their more common cousins and only close inspection can determine which it is for sure. For instance, there is the pygmy shrew which looks so similar to the masked shrew except for their teeth and there is also the smooth and rough green snakes, where only the rough is a species of special concern. The spotted salamander is another example, where the yellow spotted is rather common but the blue spotted one is endangered.

Have seen 3 different type of snakes this week, is it the heat, or do they show up better in the sparse brown grass? There was a green snake in a blueberry bush, a garter and an unidentified snake that was possibly either a rat snake or a black racer. Along with the snake we also saw… drum-roll… snake eggs!!! How often do you get to see them? At other times we have seen ring necked, black snakes, red bellied and milk snakes. Garter snakes do not lay eggs, neither do rattlesnakes. It will be interesting to see what hatches out of these eggs.

It’s blueberry season.. They were doing great early on but as you can expect, they do not like this record breaking heat. It has been quite warm and dry. We have been doing some sporadic irrigating but we are not set up like we ought to be. Hopefully we will do better in the future. A goodly amount of money spent on an irrigation system will ensure that this will be the last severe drought on this farm in our lifetime.
You can zone out picking blueberries for hours on end and sometimes there is too much time for your thoughts to get away with you. Unfortunately these days a lot of that thought goes to fretting. So sometimes a book on tape is playing while picking if there is not some companion to have conversation with.

This the caterpillar of the cecropia moth, It is huge!!!! it seems it would be more able to eat a bird than the other way around!! This picture is from last June, one wonders if it could possibly be the caterpillar of the moth we saw this year. It has a wide variety of host plants and quite a few are here on the farm -cherry, plum, apple, elderberry, box elder, maple, birch and willow, linden, elm, sassafras and lilac.

Making hay the old fashioned way! The baler is a New Holland 68 circa the 60's, still working well. we sold it all to the Amish neighbor which sort of seems backwards somehow. We can keep some of the second crop as we only need some for mulching.

In the cloak of darkness someone else enjoys cherries .

The magnificent cecropia! Found this evening at dusk, inflating and drying its wings just a few inches above its large cocoon!! So cool to watch so colorful, perfect and new, pictures just can’t do it justice. Notice its bottom wing tips look an awful lot like a snake or perhaps some other reptile? On close inspection its surreal body is quite furry looking. So lucky to see one every so often. The cecropia does not eat or drink and only lives a few weeks :- (