Riverbend Journal

 As you can see from this picture taken as a slightly different angle, I finished making the doors for the upper cabinets and got them installed last week. You can also see the two doors that I made also installed. With this milestone, it completes my promised obligations for the cabin build and I am going to move onto other things, what, I don't right know yet, at least when it comes to making things out of wood. My immediate project is to finish up preserving our fruit harvest. I'm about halfway done with the bushel of pears that I picked and I just picked a bushel of apples on my way back to town from the old tree in our fenced off farm garden area. It has always produces a lot of apples, but these were the largest, defect free apples I have ever seen outside of a grocery store shelf and we didn't do one thing to make them that way so they are completely organic. If will take me a few days to get all the fruit preserved and canned for future use so I have time to think u...

  After three waterings, followed by tilling as deep as it would go, I was able to scratch down a few inches and was pleases with what was revealed. It is darkish soil meaning there is organics present and it was large clods as it would have been with a lot of clay in it. I'm still not as deep as I would like to condition the soil, but it is a start. I grabbed a bag of daikon radish seed and sewed my first crop out behind my house along with some starter fertilizer for good measure. With a light raking, I have watered it every evening since because we are still in a severe drought of the worst magnitude and the package said radish seeds like continual moisture until germination. I'm not looking forward to my water bill next month. Four days later, I saw radish seedlings popping up everywhere. Oh how it made my heart flutter! The idea of planting daikon radish is two fold. First they are a cover crop until next spring when we hopefully will till them up to add organic matter int...

  After hanging up the cabinets in my last post, I drove onto one of my parent's farms where an old pear tree stands in one corner, probably planted way before my time by a past owner of the farm. It is starting to show its age but as it has been nearly every year, it is absolutely loaded full of pears. They aren't a fresh eating pear but more of a baking pear, I think. I have never seen one soft enough to eat without breaking teeth in the process. But while listening to a gardening program on public radio, I heard someone say that pears never ripen on trees and need to be picked and left to rest to fully ripen. Two weeks ago, I picked a couple pears and indeed they did get a bit softer but aren't sweet like an eating pear. Several years ago, I had picked a bucket of those pears and pressure canned them in a light syrup to sweeten them up. The pressure can cooked them so they were soft and sweet but my kids just weren't into them and so I was slowly working my way throu...

  I squeezed in a couple morning when I wasn't working on the urban garden to finish up the face frames for the upper cabinets and on a sunny midweek morning, took them out and got them hung in place. This wasn't without complications, namely the amount of strength I have available. I could get the single cabinet on the right hoisted up in place and screwed into the wall but the two upper cabinets fastened together were another story. I had thought about that of course and screwed a board to the wall underneath so that once high enough, they could just rest on the board while my other hand drove a screw home to hold it permanently. But I just couldn't get it lifted up to rest on that board. I was just going to leave it and enlist some help on another day when my mind got to thinking about hydraulic bottle jacks back at the farm. They don't have the stroke capacity to get the cabinet in place either but got my mind thinking about jacks and the scissor jack in the back of...

  Great plans lead to great disappointment. Back in the spring when we finally made the decision to begin to transfer our farm garden up to our urban property, we weren't in the worst drought in over a decade. Our tiller was tied up at the farm garden and by the time I finally got it moved to town, the ground behind our house was harder than concrete. My plan was/is to seed it down this fall in daikon radish so that the roots puncture down deep into the soil adding organic material and providing a path for rainwater. For that, I need to plant them six weeks before the first hard frost which could be within six weeks already. I waited on the rain until I couldn't anymore and decided to run the tiller over it anyway. It was so hard that essentially all it could do was skin off the sod and chop it up. After two passes, I would say I got down to about 1/4" deep, i.e. jus scratched the surface. As you might see, I put a sprinkler out in the middle and have it hooked up to our w...