Dear friends...
Here, at last, is the first of what I imagine will be quite a few anguished and tediously detailed notes abut the building of our little house on "Upper Tupper". Tupper Road, for those of you who haven't yet seen it, is a country lane that meanders gently past a couple of decrepit barns, a few old farmhouses, and a trailer or two before turning into a dirt road and heading straight up into the woods.
This stretch affords tantalizing glimpses of the occasional funky remnant of the commune which sprang up here in the more recent past: tipsy yurts, shacks, and A-frames built by stoned hippies and currently returning peacefully to the earth; the remains of the sauna that burned down when the fire department couldn't find it; an outhouse long since tipped over and abandoned; a teepee - even a handful of actual houses with people living in them. When you get to about 1,750 feet, you're at our new place.
Which is a peaceful and very isolated-feeling scalene triangle full of red oak and rocks, and moss and ferns, and witch hazel and moosewood and even a few trillium, and not much else just yet. The downhill side of the triangle is over 790 feet of steeply-banked road frontage. The uphill side is a 630 foot-long abandoned logging road, which has mossed over most romantically, and which is lined by many of the largest trees on the land, each of them surrounded by an enormous heap of fieldstone. Okay, so it's not hundreds of acres of wilderness in the Siskiyou mountains, but it is surrounded by at least a 'hundred acre wood', and it's ours, and it is paid for.
As you can see, there's nothing but woods on either side of the road. No lights, no telephone poles - the reach of the grid ends at Esther's place (where we're living now) and we certainly intend to keep it that way. You can't see another house or even a mailbox, and the only other inhabitants you're aware of are the deer and coyotes, the hawks and ravens, and the ubiquitous flock of wild turkeys. It's a pretty special place, and we'll tell its story here.
This isn't a blog so much as a chronological repository for photos, musings, complaints, and email messages sent to Fred and several other faraway friends. So if you get the feeling you've read bits of this before, you probably have.
July 2006
It was at the end of July 2006 that our friend and neighbor David Hirsch first offered us this piece of his land. David is one of the original members of the Lavender Hill commune that colonized Tupper hill (and founded the Moosewood Restaurant) in the early 70's, and he has held on to about 50 beautiful acres on both sides of the road. The communal mindset is still prevalent; boundary lines around here are still pretty hazy and nobody seems to know or care quite where their land starts and stops. This particular parcel is a few acres just across the road and uphill from Esther's place. As beautiful as it looked from the road, though, when we saw on the tax map that the longest edge of the triangle was along the road, we assumed it must be too narrow to be of much use as a buildable lot.
But on August 6th, 2006, when we finally climbed up the steep bank from the road and walked the land for the first time, we saw at once just how peaceful it was and how right it felt, and we knew this was it.
It's remarkably isolated. Although it's only a few acres, and oddly-shaped at that, it is surrounded on the uphill side (bordered by the old logging road) by 40 mostly untouched acres of oak, beech, white birch, and a few red pines, all owned by a man who grew up in the area, but lives and works in Maryland, returning a few times a year to work on the log cabin he's lovingly building by hand. The woods on this land (ours and his) are both older and healthier than anywhere else on the road (because the land is too steep and rocky for building or farming), and there are quite a few really special trees here. Across the road are Esther's peaceful eight acres, surrounded by the remainder of David's 50 acres, which eventually slopes steeply down into a 510-acre biodiversity preserve.
It didn't take long to make the decision. We walked down to David's house, sat on his lovely terrace surrounded by the delicious fragrance of sweet autumn Clematis, and came to an agreement. Although it was the simplest of cash-for-land handshake deals, we agreed that might be smart to at least have a couple of lawyers make it official.
So David called his lawyer, and we called a different lawyer, and we got in touch with The Driveway Guy who has done such wonderful work on all our neighbors' driveways. And The Driveway Guy came out and looked at our land, and told us how long it would take and how much it would cost, and we all agreed that Labor Day weekend would be a
great time to make a driveway.
Having my priorities well in order as usual, I immediately ordered a few hundred snowdrops and bluebells to plant on the banks of our new driveway. Meanwhile Ron, who is a lot smarter and more practical than I, got out his chainsaw and his tin hat and went to work clearing trees and brush from the driveway-to-be, hoping to keep the The Driveway Guy's costs down as much as possible.
September 2006
The Driveway Guy somehow never made it out on Labor Day, which was disappointing, but probably a good thing after all, since The Lawyers didn't seem to have even started drawing up the paperwork, what with the holiday weekend and all. Itching to get started before cold weather set in, but stymied by the lack of access to the land, Ron started turning the downed trees he couldn't use for the house into firewood, while I started hunting down houseparts on E-bay and Craigslist.
By mid-September, as you see at left, the driveway-to-be was about as clear as we could make it under our own power. It looks pretty accessible from this photo taken from the road, until you realize that the little speck back there in the woods is Ron. That bank is so steep you've got to be part mountain goat to get up there. This doesn't bother Ron, of course, but I'm considerably less physically gifted, and it was an act of bravery for me to get up and down that bank to clear brush, stack firewood, or just wander around. Ron eventually got tired of watching me clamor up and down the hill like a nervous toddler, and hacked a few steps into the bank, which the deer and I all appreciated very much!
The last week of September we drove to Cleveland for a lecture-recital at JCU, and while we were in the neighborhood Fred helped us pick up this splendid Jøtul woodstove in Mansfield, which I'd bought for $500 on E-bay back in August. It's worth about $1700 new! It is currently sharing our 360 square feet of living space with us, piled high with lutes.
The weather that week was glorious - perfect for building a house. Except that there'd been no sign of The Driveway Guy.
October 2006
By the beginning of October, we were beginning to understand that The Lawyers did not share our sense of
urgency about this transaction. In fact, we had never actually spoken to "our" lawyer, who had in place an extremely effective guard dog, an unpleasant little creep incongruously named "Amie", whose mission in life seemed to be to make sure we never met "our" lawyer at all.
The first weekend of the month, we drove to Cleveland for Sam & Jana's wedding and a lute seminar. On the way there we stopped at a yard sale and bought a cast iron bathtub for $20. We made arrangements to pick it up (ouch!) on the way back home, and hurried in anxiously to check for messages, only to discover that nothing had changed - except that more great weather for building a house had slipped away. And there was a rusty, footless bathtub in our back yard.
We continued clearing and stacking brush, outlined our imaginary house with fallen logs and started making drawings. The Driveway Guy said maybe he'd come next week. And the week after that.
The leaves began to turn and the colors were breathtaking. We'd kind of hoped to be able to get some stuff up there, and build a shed, and figure out which trees would have to be sacrificed in order to have enough sunlight to power our solar panels before the leaves fell. But, of course, with no driveway, there was no way to start any of that.
Meanwhile, we got a great deal on the 85-year-old bathroom sink of my dreams (which, unlike the bathtub, is in perfect shape!) at a local antique shop.
Although we had a little flurry of excitement when the surveyors showed up and did their thing, The Lawyers had stopped returning my calls. I called David's lawyer, and was told in no uncertain terms that It Simply Wasn't Done to call The Opposing Side. I told them this was probably most insignificant and least adversarial transaction they would be likely to see in their entire working careers. They were unmoved.
On October 22, I won an e-bay action for a magnificent pair of Pella insulated double-pane
windows, each 96"x60". 600 bucks for the pair - they'd be well over $1000 each new. We're going to be able to see a lot of forest through 5'x8' windows! They were pretty close by, for an ebay auction - about 30 miles south. But since they weighed over 300 lbs each, we decided it would be worth it to pay someone to pick them up and bring them here. The local Pella store was nice enough to recommend someone they use, and he turned out to be efficient, affordable, very knowledgeable about the area, and a really nice guy to know.
It sure would have been nice to have had him deliver them to the house site, but of course there was no driveway, so when they arrived on October 30th, we tarped them carefully and leaned them against our shed at Esther's. Still nothing from The Lawyers, despite a series of increasingly desperate telephone calls.
November 2006
On November 14th 2006, at 4:30pm, after more than 3 months and approximately 12,000 telephone calls, a miracle happened. The Lawyers had finally found fifteen minutes to read over the paperwork, and, finding nothing much of interest to complain about, were ready to allow it to happen. It took half an hour, and it couldn't have been more cordial. Our lawyer, as it turned out really was just as nice as we'd been told, and asked to be put on our concert mailing list. So it was finally official: we were landed.
We had planned to camp on our land the first night we owned it, but of course we made those plans in August. So we settled for taking over a little iron bench - our first furniture - and opening a bottle of champagne that night. It was turning cold, but the weather was remarkably good for this late in the year. Just fine for building.
November 20th: We had now conceived, recorded, mixed, edited, designed, manufactured and released a new CD since all this began, but we still had no driveway.
So to keep busy, we drove to Brooklyn, NY to pick up the brand new Simpson insulated door you see at left. No, really - Brooklyn. Fred has a postcard from us to prove it. The seller, as usual, was somebody whose builder had ordered a custom size which turned out to be wrong. He just wanted to get it out from underfoot and to recoup a few bucks. This door was actually worth the trip - even Ron's excited about it.
More ebay houseparts: a brand new pair of Jeld-Wen windows (I'd never heard of Jeld-Wen either, but they're just about the nicest windows I've ever seen - better than Pella or Anderson!). Worth $700 new, we got them for $42. This may be the best deal yet.
On November 30th, having sensibly sworn off really long road trips for houseparts, we rented a u-haul trailer and drove 156 miles to Lockport, NY (just east of Niagara Falls) to pick up a set of steel-frame double french doors ($125). I imagine these at the foot of our bed, leading out to a tiny walled garden on the north side of the house.
We stopped in Rochester on our way home to pick up 15 feet of double-wall stove pipe which I'd bought for less half their retail price on Craigslist. The seller was a very interesting Native American survivalist who works on laser-guided missile systems or some such, and in his free time is planning and building a safe house in the wilderness with some friends.
Gee...we'd like to be building a house....
December 2006
WE HAVE A CULVERT! On December 18th, 2006 the blessed if, alas, somewhat toothless fellows from our town's road crew appeared before 8am, and by lunchtime they had left behind the scene at left. They hauled away FOUR full two-ton dump truck loads in the process, which made me a bit worried about the prospect of excavating a 150-foot driveway.
December 29, 2006: another stupendous find: trolling Craigslist, I ran across 1,000 square feet of brand new cedar shakes - enough to cover our entire house - for 400 bucks! These ten boxes (at right) would have cost WELL over $2,000 new, not including shipping and sales tax.
We'd been imagining our house as a little western style board and batten cottage, since that's the cheapest thing to build, but I guess we'll have to "settle" for cape cod-style shakes. Things are tough all over.
Make that two finds: This was also the day that I discovered the Freecycle list, which allows people to list things they want or want to get rid of, with the strict stipulation that everything must be completely free. Like online dumpster-diving.
Somebody in our area was unloading a perfectly good skylight, complete with screen, which we picked up this afternoon. Whether it ends up over the kitchen island or in a shed somewhere, it's a great thing to have. Look at me talking about where to put the skylights when we can't even get up to the building site.
...But still no word from The Driveway Guy. The leaves are gone. Just how long can the good weather hold out?
~2007~
January 2007
Until January 8th, that's how long.
By January 7th, we had a culvert and a tax bill, so we considered ourselves landed, despite the fact that we could not actually access the property without an airlift. I wrote in a message to Fred that day that it was an unseasonable 58 degrees, bringing out the delicious fragrance of witch hazel throughout the woods, and it was absolutely maddening to think of all the fine weather we'd wasted since Labor Day. We could have been nearly done by now.
It started snowing on the evening of Monday, January 8th. And of course, at 7am on Tuesday, January 9th, after a four month wait, The Driveway Guy showed up, unannounced, while we had a house guest here for an intense 12-hour practice session for which he had driven 12 hours out of his way.
By nightfall on Wednesday January 10th, there was something very like a driveway up there, although it's very steep and the drainage and gravel haven't yet been put in, since the well-drilling rig will tear it all up immediately. Here's an excerpt from a note I wrote to Fred:
And snow...
February 2007
February 20, since we were both feeling miserable and had no business leaving the house in bitter cold, we took a little road trip to the other side of the Catskills along the Hudson River, to pick up this beautiful pair of mission-style french doors which I'd won on E-Bay. They are truly splendid - worth every penny and every mile, even in several feet of snow.
February - April 2007
Are you kidding? This is upstate New York!
(and this, by the way, is a chair)
April-May 2007
An extremely unpleasant interlude, during which we enjoyed a triumphant west-coast tour, made a ton of money and a lot of great contacts, followed immediately by a carjacking during which we watched a man with a gun drive off with our car, every penny we'd made on the tour, all our instruments, wallets, music, CDs, clothing, music stands - in short, everything we needed to make a living.
Our house could have burned to the ground while we were gone, and it would have had far less impact on our lives than losing the contents of that car at that moment. The car was insured, but nothing else - we're musicians! - and the total losses turned out to be in the range of $15,000, not including nearly $20,000 worth of irreplaceable instruments. A very, very horrible time, about which the less said the better - except that some weeks afterward, I managed to find the instruments in a pawn shop in Cleveland, and we were able to buy them back. I'm afraid our little project has taken on a whole new aspect, though.
June 2007
After a very long winter of thinking about building, followed by the aforementioned little adventure, an unwelcome reality has set in: the local building codes have not yet evolved to the point where the existence of a composting toilet negates the necessity of installing a full-size septic system. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are obliged by law to spend $7,000-$10,000 on a septic system to ensure the safe processing of bath- and dishwater.
Somehow, we don't seem to have an extra $7,000-$10,000 lying around; indeed we have recently been robbed of all the money we'd hoped to use for the summer's building. And given the income that a couple of musicians generate, the quote may as well have been a million.
Desperate, we're toying with the idea of getting a permit for a very large (20'x20') workshop with a wood stove and a loft. That would be more space than we have across the street in the tollbooth. We figure that once we have the shell up and the wood stove installed and inspected, we'd just keep adding stuff to it (like insulation, a kitchen and a hardwood floor) and then one day we'll sort of accidentally move in.
The letter of the law says that if we change anything structurally or add a wood stove, we have to have it re-inspected, but if the shell's in place and the stove is part of the original plan, then who's to know, right? Water is going to be an issue, but humans have been getting water in and out of their houses without benefit of electricity for some time now, and once the house is finished we'll need the exercise. Otherwise, we'll have propane for cooking, refrigeration, and heating water, and we'll have no need of any other utilities. Neither of us is completely comfortable with this scheme, but we really don't see any alternative.
June 6th, 2007: We have a building permit!
I love small towns. Yesterday, we applied for a building permit, and today the town inspector called and told us he was kind of too busy to bring us the permit today, but the drawings looked great and we should just go ahead and get started.
The drawings did look great. I'd been futzing around with floor plans and scale drawings and free software for months, and then one morning Mr. Still Waters sits down with a pencil and a triangle, and an hour later he's produced a four-page architectural drawing that looks like it was done by a professional, and he drags my astonished behind to the the town hall, where I write a check for all of $45 for the building permit fee, and 24 hours after that the inspector calls and says he'll stop by tomorrow and drop off our permit, but it looks great and we should just go ahead and get started.
My head is still spinning. The weather is glorious; it's not quite 60 degrees, crystal clear and breezy. That should entice the honey locusts to hang on for a few more days. Life is good.
June 8th, 2007: Local lumber
Ron made a nice deal today with the owner of a local lumber mill: the guy will buy our trees, mill whatever we want to use for the house, and then work out a trade in dry lumber for whatever he can't provide out of our own material. So we'll have the enormous satisfaction of knowing that all the wood in the house will be either from our own trees or at least from local materials - and we're supporting a local business, which is very nice. WAY cheaper than Evil Orange or Big Blue, of course, and a better product to boot.
June 12th, 2007: The Driveway Guy reappears and is absolved
The elusive Driveway Guy (you remember - the fellow who was going to put in our driveway last Labor Day) made a rare appearance to roll and level the "driveway" enough so that a delivery truck could now theoretically DRIVE on it. This is big news, because the local lumber mill owner who'd agreed to buy/trade some of beautiful red oak for some of his nice dry rough-sawn framing lumber backed out when he got an eyeful of that steep grade.
But I forgave The Driveway Guy entirely when he told us he was certified to install septic systems and could do a minimal but legal one for us for $4,600. This is quite a difference from the $7,000-$10,000 we'd been quoted by everyone else! We still can't afford both a septic system AND a house, but IF I find some sort of outside gainful employment, maybe we could at least aspire to installing one before we get busted and fined for living in a building we're claiming is only a work/storage shed. We shall see.
June 13the, 2007: Where do log chains come from?
Building permit in hand, things seem to be happening pre
tty quickly on Upper Tupper. Four or five more big trees have been sacrificed for the drain field, but as painful as it was to do that, it will both make for a much safer house site and a much higher intake of light to the solar panels. Oddly, the site even looks somehow more enclosed this way. The inspector seems like an actual human being, and is willing to not particularly notice if we should accidentally move all our belongings into the "um, shed" we're building up there.
We're renting a backhoe next Tuesday (the 19th) to prepare the site of the house (and the garden!!), and to dig the holes for the foundation piers. We've got 15 or more 20' logs up there that we need to deck up while we've got the backhoe.
For this we need one of those massive Jacob Marley chains and two gonzo hooks. We went to buy them and discovered they'd cost us well over 50 bucks - and to add insult to injury, they were all made in China, which just sent Ron over the edge. Relentless in my search for bargains, I hit FreeCycle and managed to arrange to borrow a log chain from a total stranger. Amazing.
June 19th, 2007: Excavator, part the first
Well, the best laid plans. Ron canceled his lessons for the day, the weather was cool and perfect, and the excavator never showed up. Some scheduling mixup or something. Grrr....
June 26th, 2007: Excavator, part the second
We finally got the excavator rescheduled for today, which naturally turned out to be over 100 degrees and humid as hell. We spent all day hauling logs out of the building site, and decking them up so the guy who owns the lumber mill can get up there and grade them. The log chain is so massive and heavy that I can barely lift it. But it was amazingly rewarding to haul it from tree to tree, wrap it around each log,
hook one end to the backhoe and then watch Ron drag, maneuver, swing, and stack them neatly on one side of the driveway.
Ron also managed to make the extremely rough terrain something a bit more in the realm of level. Unfortunately, thanks to a particularly stubborn stump, the meter ran out before he could finish digging the holes for the foundation piers, so there's quite a bit of hand-digging in our future. That's one more point in favor of a very small house!
July 2007
July 29, 2007: house guests, human and otherwise
July was entirely given over to music, travel, and several sets of house guests - including the one at left - all of whom helped battle off the encroaching depression at the lack of funds to continue work on Upper Tupper.
We spent a few days rehearsing and performing with Ronn McF, and an even more delightful time enjoying his parents' wonderful hospitality while rehearsing and performing in Maryland. We followed this up with some recording with Ronn's favorite Dorian engineer in MD, and also beginning work on our own Christmas album here.
Brad came for some much-needed R&R, and we all enjoyed wildflowers, waterfalls, woods, and Van Wilder.
And Lisa and Wendy's memorable visit wrapped up a busy month, bringing us news and documentation of some astounding happenings in Cleveland. Equally delightful was the chance to wander all over our woods with two amazingly knowledgeable naturalists who introduced me to several delightful inhabitants I'd either missed altogether or couldn't name. This is such a comfort: after a lifetime of being able to name (in Latin) virtually everything I see growing out of the ground, the last few years have been both exciting and disconcerting. The trunk of their car was characteristically packed full of field guides: birds, butterflies, insects, fungi, wildflowers, trees, etc, and I think of them every time I see a partridgeberry (Mitchella repens) or an Indian Pipe (Monotropa uniflora).
August 2007
August 1, 2007: an idyllic afternoon
At one point yesterday I fled into our own woods and spent a few quiet hours clearing the
logging trail, which had a few squashed shrubs blocking it (after trees fell on them) and very recently had also begun sprouting some sort of thorny berry sprouts among the lovely moss nearly the entire 700 feet. It was certainly not anywhere near the top of the list of Important Things To Be Done, but it did wonders for my disposition, if not my back.
The Indian Pipes, which Lisa and Wendy identified all over our woods, are still going strong, if a little pinker than waxy white now. I was also very happy to discover a tiny grove of Moosewood trees, Acer Pensylvanicum clustered along the edge of our land. And the wood thrushes sang continually while I was up there. What a beautiful spot - I can't believe it's really ours.
Wonderful news: Esther is going to pay us to fix the drainage at the tollbooth once and for all, and we're splitting the cost of a weekend rental of a tractor with her, so that we can finish up the work at our place, too. Since Esther has infrastructure in place, I did the 'Call Before You Dig' thing Monday, and we should have clearance from all the appropriate entities by some time tomorrow, after which we have official permission to dig at Esther's for the next three weeks. The Verizon guy was here this morning spray painting orange lines in the grass, and he talked to Ron about how to avoid digging up the buried phone line on the north side of the house. Most valuable information. The next step will be to schedule the tractor and order the gravel. So, big doings at the tollbooth.
Once we finish up at Esther's, Ron (taking a well-deserved break on the freshly decked-up logs at left) hopes to finish digging the holes for our foundation piers.
We've just bought a nice load of dry plywood from our good friend Peter, who kindly gave us a great deal on quite a few brand new leftover sheets from his own project and is even delivering them for free. We've got - just barely - enough money to buy cinder blocks, concrete, and everything else we need to build an enclosure, we think. Nothing liveable, but something in three dimensions, at least.
After that, we'll be living hand-to-mouth, so we'll just have to see how many "house" concerts we can rustle up!
August 13, 2007: Excavator, again?
We've got a tractor coming tonight which we get to keep for the entire weekend - through Tuesday morning! - for the price of one day's rental, because the rental place has screwed up our order so many times over the last couple of weeks. This makes me awfully happy, because Ron has a very long list of IMPORTANT things to accomplish using said tractor, and IF there's any time and energy left over, he will also push some dirt around in the general vicinity of the garden-to-be. So the likelihood of that extra time materializing has just increased threefold! Oh boyohboyohboy...
August 22, 2007: Or not...
The excavator that they delivered last week was not what we'd ordered, and was, in fact, dangerously unsuited to our terrain. Ron did what he could, but the front wheels lifted off the ground at surprising moments and when the whole thing threatened to tip over while we were still on Esther's comparatively flat driveway, he called to tell them to come and take it away.
So we're both of us frustrated and crabby today. Ron soothes his frazzled nerves by stacking firewood, and I soothe mine by reducing ten pounds of bruised peaches to something wonderful. A dozen lovely pots of peach jam made from peaches grown a mile or two from here are currently resting on the cutting board, and a gigantic bowl of nicely chopped up peaches sits in the fridge, just waiting to top oatmeal and be baked into a cobbler.
And yet another tractor is allegedly being delivered this evening, which will allow Ron to do the drainage work at Esther's place, which will buy us at least a month or two of free rent. So things aren't SO bad, I guess.
September 2007
September 3, 2007: The Right Excavator at last
Glory be...we finally managed to get the right excavator, and we have dug a respectable drainage ditch three quarters of the way around
Esther's place, all without hitting the telephone line, the water line, or the propane line. Of course this means that we dug an awful lot of it by hand - argh.
But we also unearthed the pitiful excuse for a drainage pipe that Esther paid good money to have installed some years ago, and it was very easy to see what the problem had been. It was about 12, maybe 15 feet long, severed nearly all the way through in several places, and packed completely solid full of dirt. It's no wonder this place was uninhabitable when we got here, with that thing as the only defense against all the water running off the road, and no vapor barrier under the floor. I'm so glad that our own land is above the road.
So now there's about 50 feet of nice new drainpipe redirecting the water to each side of Esther's house and off down the hill, all encased in gravel and topped with leftover mulch from the Township's never-ending battle with roadside brush. I have to say it feels wonderful to be able to make some major improvements to Esther's place. She's so much more than a landlady.
We got unbelievably lucky with the tractor, though. The guy at the rental place (which is a locally-owned building supply house, not a big-box mega-store) felt so guilty about having disappointed us several times with inadequate or broken down tractors, that not only did he give it to us for the coveted Labor Day weekend slot, which is often scheduled a year in advance, he "forgot to pick it up" until well into Tuesday. So you may believe we got an awful lot done over the weekend, despite having obligations on two days which forced us to get cleaned up and into the car earlier than we wanted to.
We skidded some more logs, dug some foundation holes, did a bit of leveling, and yes...Ron actually scooted the tractor up the hill further than was probably safe, plopped down the stabilizers, and scooped me out a fan-shaped garden bed that
would have taken me YEARS to dig by hand in the glacial debris that passes for topsoil here. No, I sure wouldn't have asked for - or even thought of a fan-shaped bed. But with with the tractor stationary, and the backhoe able to reach only whatever it was able to reach, that's what I've got, and I couldn't be happier with it!
Unfortunately, in the northeast corner of the site, there's a monster oak tree stump exactly where the corner pier block needs to be, and even this excavator couldn't deal with it. Shifting the footprint of the house would require a lot more excavation, would adversely affect the solar gain, and worst of all, would require cutting down more trees we're just not willing to sacrifice, so it looks as if there's going to be a whole lotta digging going on before we can put in the pier blocks. Can we do it before the snow flies? And if the excavator can't do it, what on earth makes us think we can do it by hand? Stay tuned...
September 7, 2007: Cinder blocks. Lots and lots of cinder blocks.
Well, the queen of Craigslist managed to FINALLY locate someone wishing to unload a few cinder blocks.
Of course, we had to rent a truck to pick them up...but do you know what they're charging for new ones these days?? I was horrified. Cinder blocks are supposed to come from out back behind the garage, aren't they? And should one actually have to break down and purchase a few, on no account should they cost more than about a quarter a piece.
Which is what they ended up costing us, after the truck rental, mileage, and gasoline. The guy at the rental place (another local mom-and-pop) heard what I was planning to do and very kindly gave me the commercial mileage rate - $.25/mi. rather than the usual (gulp) $.79/mi.
Of course no amount of money could compensate for the inc
redible effort of loading more than 150 large cinder blocks completely swathed in poison ivy into a rental truck six inches off the ground, realizing the entire time that this truck could never, EVER haul its pathetic old wheezing tailpipe up our toboggan run - I mean driveway.
So today I'm so sore all over that I can barely type, yet there are two pallets loaded full of neatly stacked cinder blocks at the BOTTOM of our driveway. I have no idea how on earth we're going to get them up to the building site. But they were "free"!
And perhaps (although I doubt it) once we've hauled all of them up the toboggan run, the prospect of doing laundry and grocery shopping in February won't seem so daunting.
Courage...I remember thinking the first time we crept our way 13 miles and over 2,000 feet up the switchback mountain road leading to Little Wolf, that I would NEVER be able to drive up this road myself. I ended up quite happily doing all the errand-running into Happy Camp - dump runs, laundry, post office, gasoline for the generator, phone calls - including picking up every last scrap of our worldly possessions, one pick-up load at a time, for weeks and weeks when we first got there. I learned to enjoy that trek; I can learn how to do this, too.
September 18, 2007: Newfangled contraptions
A minor victory today: at 6:01am, we were standing at the rental counter of The Place Whence Cometh Power Tools, and at 6:20 am, we were towing home a super heavy-duty log splitter. As you might imagine after all the clearing
we've done, we have an astonishing amount of firewood - probably at least 3 cords - cut to stove length, but not split. I'm just not strong enough to do it, and after this winter's shoulder injury, Ron should not ever lift a splitting maul again as long as he lives.
His shoulder has been slowly improving, and I'm determined to keep it that way. So I've been watching him like a suspicious wife and scolding at him every time he so much as looks at a log. It's too bad, because he likes to do it.
Anyway, I've been saying for months now that the new routine is that whenever we need to cut wood for any reason, Ron will buck it up to stove length, and we'll pile it where it's easily accessible from the driveway. No splitting allowed. Then we'll rent a really good log splitter twice a year, split like crazy for 24 hours, and then spend a week stacking it. So that little plan is now officially in place. I figure if I put $13.34 in an envelope every month, it'll always be affordable, and if he knows I'm determined to do it, he'll relax about it and not suffer from "wood anxiety" as we call it. We'll see how this goes.
September 19, 2007: three cords of BTUs
Well, as you can see from the photos, we certainly had a productive day. I took a picture of some of the logs (there are stacks like this scattered all over the place) around 7am, and the picture of an exhausted but happy Ron sitting next to the small mountain of firewood (one of two that size) was taken just before lunch. By 6:30 pm both small mountains had tripled, and we were on our way to town to return the splitter, although it wasn't due back until 6am the next day.
WHAT a wonderful tool. I actually did all but
about three logs; poor Ron spent the entire day hauling wood up and down hills to keep feeding the splitter, which was exhausting but didn't endanger his injured shoulder. If I can spend ten hours splitting wood, anybody can do it. $80 for a 24-hour rental, and we've got almost THREE CORDS of wood split - in one day. So I'm hurting, but I'm happy!
September 21, 2007: An uninspiring find
I found a free propane stove on freecycle. It's really, really tiny - it was so small and light we couldn't believe it. We just picked it up and plunked it in the back of the CRV as if it were a sack of groceries. So now that's tarped and added to the collection. It's not very nice, and I'm sure there will be a city of chipmunks living in it by the time there's a kitchen to put it in. But it was free!
While we were up the hill yesterday, the UPS guy came and delivered my 100' roll of deer fencing, which was paid for entirely from the proceeds of our used CDs, which were sorely in need of thinning anyway, and which have really
turned out to be quite a nice little source of nickels and dimes. You can buy practically anything on Amazon these days - deer fencing, measuring cups, shampoo, bulk curry - you name it. It's weird, but we've got a little online stash from the proceeds of our old CDs, which we weren't listening to anyway. So when something not exactly needful like this comes up, and we can find it on Amazon, it doesn't feel quite like we're spending money on something frivolous.
Anyway, as soon as there's the framework of a house in place, we can start thinking about surrounding the garden-to-be. The entire area to be deer-proofed is roughly 30' x 40', and the fan-shaped bed that Ron scooped out with the tractor is about 16' at its widest point and 11' deep. That ought to make a nice little start!
October 2007
October 4, 2007: Howdy, neighbor!
I once read some excellent advice for newbies to country living: always wave when you pass someone on the road. Always. If you drive past a wild-eyed guy standing on the side of the road with an ax dripping blood, smile and give him a cheery wave; he may end up sharing whatever he's just butchered with you.
Ron was hauling cinder blocks up the toboggan run early one morning a few days ago, two at a time, and another miracle happened. The guy who's building the log cabin up the road (who's only here about four or five times a year), happened by, got a load of what Ron was trying to do, stopped and told him to stop it before he killed himself. He came over with his little tractor and had them dumped at the top of the driveway in about five loads, before I had even finished making coffee. I love living in the country.
October 6, 2007: The rose garden...right here in my imagination
I'm starting to see the garden. I indulged in a bit of reckless spending and picked up three lovely roots of the peony "Mons Jules Elie" for the ridiculous price of $8 a piece today. Here they are, ready to be tucked into the fan-shaped bed, along with some composted manure. I've seen them for as much as $30 in the specialty catalogs, and the deer hate them as much as I love them. Now if only I could find about half a dozen "Krinkled White", which is a luminous, early, single white - almost poppy-like. I'm afraid I've had a vision of them on the banks of the driveway, surrounding the gate into the garden, and nothing else will do.
The soil we've turned over looks exactly like a gravel pit, and some of it lower down looks like sand, too, but fortunately everything in the designated garden area seems a bit more like what you'd expect the forest floor to look like. I'm going to content myself with these three peonies (which can sit out in the open without need for fencing), and a few bulbs this year, since there's going to be an awful lot of trampling around, and the last thing we need is for me to make this construction site even more challenging to navigate.
Speaking of which, I've got a whole box of English bluebells which I ordered in a burst of overoptimistic enthusiasm last LABOR DAY, when you'll remember we were going to have a driveway cut in. They've been sitting in a box ever since, and I'm going to stick them in the ground. Poor things. I have planted bulbs on New Year's Day, but I've never subjected them to a year in a box before!
Just got the T&M catalog today, and had a very nice time imagining our cottage (I mean shed) thriftily smothered next summer in Matucana sweet peas, nasturtium 'Milkmaid' (which is blooming it's lovely brains out right now outside our kitchen door), and my favorite nigella 'Miss Jekyll'.
October 14, 2007: Company's coming
Hmmm... two unacquainted house guests are expected here for the same night next weekend. Esther's place is ample for the two of us, but most people would not find it so, and the addition of two more people who aren't accustomed to sharing sleeping quarters might be a bit much.
Ron is determined that we can make it work by building a shed in the next five days, where he and I could sleep, leaving Esther's house for our guests. Well, at least it'll take our minds off The Stump.
Of course the guy who was going to deliver the milled lumber didn't show up Thursday...or Friday...or yesterday...and then he showed up unannounced when we weren't home today and just dumped it - without even getting paid!
So it doesn't look as if we're going to have a shed to sleep in by next weekend. Turns out it took Ron much of that time just to dig out a level foundation. This terrain is really something else.
October 19, 2007: Now THIS is more like it
Couldn't resist bragging about my latest "freecycle" find: another stove.
Oh, yes, I know we just picked one up off the curb a few weeks ago, but it was hideous, and we didn't know for sure whether it worked, and it was really light and easy so the two of us could just toss it in the back of the CRV, so it hardly counts as a find. After all, where's the drama?
Of course this week, someone posted what I'd hoped for all along - a 1940's propane stove - a great big magnificent thing with a separate warming oven, called a "Beautyrange", of course. We had to rent a trailer, so it cost $14.95, and of course it was like moving a small building. But we did it, and it's up on our land under a tarp, and I spend about half an hour taking advantage of a warm rain to scrub it down, and it is STUNNING. Everything down to the original bakelite handles and the painted "left front" and right back" indicators is filthy, but perfectly intact, and the guy who gave it to us (yet another musician) said it regulates perfectly and he and his wife have been using it for decades. They're renovating their entire house, and he says it's the only thing in the house he's sorry to see go.
We really did not have time to spend all morning wresting this monster into a trailer and up the toboggan run, but as soon as I started working on it, I was SO glad we did it. So we'll freecycle the apartment-size stove back into circulation, and be on our merry way.
October 22nd, 2007: Camping on our own land
So our house guests were here this weekend, and we all had a wonderful time. Since at that point, Ron's new shed more nearly resembled a four-poster bed frame crafted from rough-cut lumber, we pitched the tent right on top of it and slept there so our guests could occupy both the beds in the house.
Poor Louise, of course, worried about us out there in the cold, with the coyotes howling and the bears lurking. I don't think she really believed that we were having such a wonderful time. We'd have happily spent the rest of the week camping in our new home. We did certainly hear coyotes, but then we often do, and the moonlight streaming through the leaf canopy made lovely dancing silhouettes on the tent. It was very romantic, very comfortable, and very beautiful. I was like a little kid - so excited I could hardly get to sleep.
October 31, 2007: Rough-cut lumber
Hey, Ron's cabin has rafters, and they are so beautifully constructed that I told him if he doesn't nail a roof over them very soon, someone may just grow wisteria over the whole thing and claim it as a garden structure. I love the look of rough-cut lumber.
And get a load of that window! We were at Evil Orange the other day for a box of nails or something, and found it on their clearance cart - another special order that turned out to be the wrong size. It would be a pretty big window in a regular house, but in Ron's cabin, it's a glorious picture window, facing due east. Most appropriate for Mr. Early Bird's nest.
November 2007
November 2, 2007: Gainful employment?
What a difference a day makes. Yesterday morning I was moping around worrying about cash flow, and trying to decide among the equally attractive options of bankruptcy, bank robbery, or flinging myself off a cliff.
The nearest town is a famously progressive and charming college town - so much so that no graduate can bear to leave after earning a degree. The inevitable result is that every dishwasher and barista has three Ivy-League Ph.Ds, and there's not much in the way of moonlighting available for poor musicians trying to scrabble together a house.
Today, however, I seem to have myself a promising interview for a job working as a subcontractor, digitizing materials for the Rare & Manuscripts library at the college...right up my alley! Maybe we'll be able to live on our own land before we're too feeble to get up and down the driveway after all...
November 5, 2007: Tupper Road Irises
I was driving home from a town run today, and as I slowly rounded the hairpin curve at the home of an 86-year-old neighbor (whose maiden name is Tupper, because her father was the original settler of this whole area, including our place), I was eyeing her "goodie table", where she usually sets out old rag rugs, clothing, shoes, and whatnots for sale. Today, a bit of green caught my eye, and then a tiny hand-lettered sign reading "free irises". I'm sure I don't have to tell you the rest. They were nestled in the ground 500 feet above on Upper Tupper before their astonished roots had a chance to dry out.
So despite the state of our bank account, I can no longer claim to be truly poor, since I now possess a tiny garden bed containing one rose, three peonies, several clumps of lady's mantle, my beloved Biokovo cranesbill, lavender, violets, and the newly-christened Tupper Iris. Still to be moved: a whole bunch of herbs, a 'Blue Moon' wisteria going on its third year and about to "leap", and some lovely wild cranesbill. I've also got stashed away a big envelope of wildflower seeds (for the heaps of disturbed earth on both sides of the toboggan run-i-mean-driveway), and 100 tiny daffodil bulbs from someone giving them away. I call that a splendid start!
My interview is tomorrow afternoon at 2:30, and I'm trying really hard not to get my hopes up. Oh, but wouldn't it be nice...
November 13, 2007: Now I've done it
The offer letter from my new employer arrived yesterday. The pay is awfully disappointing, but it's a heckuva lot more than what I'm currently managing to scrape up by selling my clothing and CDs on ebay and amazon. A college prof friend of ours was just telling us last night that if she added up her hours, she and her PhD make considerably less than minimum wage, so I shouldn't probably complain.
The benefits are great, the time off is generous, and of course, there are the additional bonuses of the academic calendar and a restricted collection that's only open 9-5. To say nothing of the privilege of handling materials in one of the finest manuscript collections in the world.
There won't be anything left over for shingles, much less the large-ticket items, but shoot...maybe we'll just sell the CR-V to pay for the septic system, propane tank, well pump, etc, and then finance a beater truck with my measly but regular income.
November 27th, 2007: Fred's birthday
No snow yet, but it's been bitterly cold here - in the teens - and all my asparagus ferns froze solid in their pots before I could pot them up and bring them inside. If I do it now, they'll drop their needles so fast we'll be picking them out of our socks all winter long. Drat.
I have, however, taken advantage of the momentarily softened ground to plant a handful of my favorite Siberian squills, which I will remember as having been planted on Fred's birthday, before the house was even there.
~2008~
February 2008
February 1, 2008: A car or a septic system?
In between snow storms, Ron has actually managed to make some progress on the cabin - not the place where we'll eventually live, but the first building. It was meant to be a shed, but has accidentally turned out so nicely that we've bought it its own little wood stove (another Craigslist find) and stopped calling it "the shack".
We've also made the difficult decision to trade in our paid-for CRV, in order to raise enough cash for a septic system. The notion of flying under the radar of what little building inspection exists here in the woods was exciting and romantic and when it comes right down to it, pretty stupid. So we're financing another CR-V, since Ron totally refused to let me consider driving down the treacherous Tupper hill in a beater.
Waaahh... I was so proud to be driving a paid-for car...
February 20, 2008: A septic system
Well, we did it. We sold the car to raise cash for a septic system. And to my complete astonishment, the elusive Driveway Guy has actually followed through. They only started it yesterday, and according to Ron's report of two hours ago, they're all just hanging around waiting for the inspector to show up and approve the finished product. I couldn't be more surprised.
Best of all, his original estimate was at least $1,000 less than the low end of what we were expecting, and he said it turned out to be so easy he's charging us even less than that. Now how often does that happen?
Still, I must admit I was rather pleased to hear that even with the monster trucks he uses to plow driveways, he had trouble getting in and out of our toboggan run, which is poetic justice if I've ever heard it. Ron gently reminded him that he, The Driveway Guy, had not finished the driveway because he figured he'd just tear it all up when he was hauling equipment in and out to build a septic system. Of course I am not getting my hopes up, but this could be a good thing.
February 21, 2008: More infrastructure
A miracle: we seem to have a septic system on our land which has passed the county Health Department inspection, cost an arm (rather than an arm and a leg), and - and this is the real surprise - the terrifying clearing and leveling of which actually made the land look more inviting.
I'm thinking what our woodland needs now is a "little" wildflower meadow over top the 40'x60' drain field... snowdrops, daffodils, bluebells, hesperis, bachelor buttons, daisies, yarrow, sweet Annie, Queen Anne's lace, milkweed. Wouldn't it be great to start a subscription wildflower delivery service some day?
Sorry. This is supposed to be about the septic system. But it's that time of year, when the days are lengthening, the gardening catalogs are pouring in and the world seems full of possibilities.
February 26, 2008: So what exactly is our address?
What a ridiculous morning! In an entirely fruitless attempt to determine what our mailing
address will be at the new place, I've spoken with the Town Supervisor, the Town Clerk, The Town Enumerator, The Building Code Inspector, the County Assessor's office, and two different small town Post Offices. It's like one of those Escher prints - they all tell me to call somebody else on the above list, round and round endlessly.
My question is simply this: What exactly is our new address? I know that our new address is xx Tupper Road. I know that our land is in the Town of __________. I know it's near the border of two small towns, one of which no longer has its own Post Office and is serviced by a Post Office in a different County. So is xx Tupper Road assigned to the post office at Town A, zipcode 1, or Town B, zip code 2? Doesn't that sound like a "just a second, I'll look it up in our database" kind of question?
With the exception of an extremely tiresome fellow at the Town A Post Office who loves to hear himself talk, mostly about how these decisions are made in Town C, where he used to be in charge, NOBODY has any idea why I would ask THEM for this information - and I have to agree with them - it would seem logical, if one wants to know one's mailing address, that the United States Postal Service would be the authority. Mr. Motormouth at the Town A PO seems to think the controversy has something to do with 911 service, and he's pretty sure that they're going to have to send somebody down from Big City D, 166 miles north of here (!!) to look at the lay of the land and decide.
All the rest of them are completely hung up on the fact that xx Tupper Road is our current address, and THAT's assigned to Town B (which is 15 miles south and in a different COUNTY), but of course it IS in the Town D Fire services area, oh, but Town D doesn't a post office any more, either...but still...what's your tax map number?....but that's not xx...oh, I see it's new...yada, yada, yada, before they suddenly realize that they actually have nothing whatsoever to do with any of this and they give me the number of some other clueless functionary.
The Town Clerk actually advised me to mail several envelopes to myself at every possible configuration of both addresses, and see which ones got to me and when. Argh!
I guess there is one hidden blessing in all those boring straight lines in the map of the flatlands.
Spring, 2008
March 12, 2008: One heck of an ice storm
We've been having some weather here. I grew up in Ohio, but I've never seen anything like this, anywhere. We lost four beech trees this weekend - it seemed we'd just finished carving one up, hauling all the bits out of the road, getting inside and into dry clothes, and sitting down with a cup of tea to resume practicing, and another would go down - right across the road. So we'd change back into wet clothes, get the chain saw, and start all over again. Four times. There was another, smaller one on Sunday morning before I left for church. We certainly will not lack for firewood, but we'd far rather have the trees. The amazing thing about this ice storm was that it lasted longer than any ice storm I've ever seen. It started Friday evening, kept getting worse through Monday, and didn't really even begin melting until Wednesday. Everything was encased in ice from Friday through Tuesday. Sure was pretty, though: http://www.flickr.com/photos/uppertupper
April 4, 2008: Tulips from the store.
Spring hasn't even begun to think about it on Upper Tupper, and since snowdrops, crocuses and chionodoxa are blooming all over town, this is very disheartening. So help me, NEXT spring there will be some sort of low stone wall strategically placed to create a sun well/wind block, and I'll have flowers at home, too.
Ron surprised me hugely yesterday by sending me outside to check for signs of sprouting, which I knew was a futile effort. Lo, and behold when I went out, there were two pots full of SCREAMING yellow bulbs - daffs & tulips - outside the door. I burst into tears - it was the brightest color I've seen in months. I guess I still haven't recovered from the shock of being transplanted from zone 7 to zone 4, and there has been snow on the ground here continually since early November.
Poor Ron's got it just as bad, and a pot of tulips won't help him in the least: he wants to BUILD, and there's either mud, snow, infirmity, or all of the above, and in any case not nearly enough money to rent the tractor he needs to get started.
April 22, 2008: Spring at last
It does look as if Spring has decided to be an event rather than a season this year. It's too bizarre to see (in town, anyway) scilla, daffs, late tulips, magnolias, all the cherries/apples/pears all blooming together before the forsythia have even peaked. Like one of those bizarre indoor flower shows.
Meanwhile, on Upper Tupper, Blanc Double de Coubert is covered with baby leaves, five adorable rosettes of lady's mantle are making their presence known, I can see (if I use a magnifying glass and much imagination) where the violets will be some day, and all of SIX scilla have bravely emerged. The maples are a haze of red, the multiflora roses are thinking about the possibility of greening up, and THAT'S IT. Not a daffodil, no sign of the trillium, not even a clump of garlic mustard.
April 23, 2008: A homestead in a fir forest...right here in my imagination
Ron drove down to the county seat south of here to pick up our order of tree seedlings from the County Soil & Water Conservation District sale, and my little fan-shaped rosebed has now been transformed into an evergreen nursery containing 10 each of balsam, fraser, and doug fir, 20 hemlocks, and a big sink full of myrtle starts. All of which are currently dwarfed by Katherine's irises.
So I should talk about bizarre combinations: the baby trees are improbably accompanied by the Tupper Road irises, three peonies, "Fred's Rose", 18 (!) Casa Blanca lilies, and various & sundry other scraps and starts, surrounded by locust fence posts Ron got from a neighbor and swaddled in deer fencing until worst of the construction is done. It's not so much a garden as a holding tank at the moment, but at least the deer can't get to it.
April 26, 2008: Ow.
At the risk of sounding like a cranky old fart, everybody's health seems to be holding out, but the aches and pains are becoming increasingly tiresome. I will write a whole nuther epistle I'm sure about the agonizingly slow progress on the house, thanks to aches, pains, lousy weather, unfriendly terrain and a disposable income of about $17.36/month. It's not all bad, but it's pretty discouraging. All we really need is for about $10,000 to drop from the sky. Is that so much to ask?
Not that we aren't very grateful to be able to live in such a lovely place while we're trying to make our own land habitable. We had just gone to bed last night when a pair of barred owls must have landed in the tree right outside our window and started kicking up a fuss. Coo-coo-ca-chew! Coo-coo-ca-chew-to-you-too! Sure beats the sound of a bag of beer bottles being slung into a dumpster at 2am. I could never go back to living in the city.
May 2008
May 7, 2008: It's chilly in the hills
Down in town, the magnolias are spent, the wisteria is in full bloom, and the peonies are hip-high. Up here on Upper Tupper, I'm thrilled to see Fred's birthday Scilla blooming, and the peonies are up about two inches, bless their intrepid little hearts.
I figured out last week that once you get beyond the limits of the town, you begin ascending by about 200' per mile. This continues until you get to the end of the paved part of Tupper Road, at which point you ascend 500 feet in one mile to get to our place, 1750 feet above sea level. Mayfield Hill, which in my home town is considered a steep hill, is about a 200' rise, by comparison. So it's no wonder we're a whole zone colder up here.
May 16, 2008: Incentivize me!
Well, just to make things a little more interesting in our uneventful lives, that silly old guv'ment actually came through and deposited "incentive"
money in our bank account today, so if I also get paid for that big freelancing job, it looks as if we're going to be able to afford to rent an excavator AND order our well pump. If it all comes together, we could just possibly have a place to live up there before the snow flies.
After all...what could go wrong?
May 17, 2008: The first rose
Fred's Rose (aka 'Rosalind Avenue') is smothered in tiny leaves in its new spot - the very first rose there, ever, probably. Everywhere else but Upper Tupper looks like it's in the throes of high summer - but fortunately we're so busy right now I don't have time to grump about being a month and a half behind everyone else. In July, when everyone in town is sweltering, we'll be so happy to be cool and shady up here in the hills.
May 19, 2008: All hail Louise!
A very good day indeed: payment for the big freelance job just arrived. It was a LOT of money, which means that we're going to be able to rent the big excavator (Wednesday), and order the spiffy new frost-proof stainless steel hand pump for our well. We've promised to build a charming pump house, smother it in roses, and name it after Louise, the benefactress who got me the job. Being of a practical turn of mind herself, she is thrilled at the notion of having infrastructure bearing her name.
Researching roses named "Louise" I stupidly got my heart set on one I'd never heard of called Louise Rödiger, a Kordes climber with an (!) orange-ish cast to it. Not my usual type at all, of course, but it's fruit-flavored, recurrent, rather rugose, and hardy to ZONE 2B! The color is not lurid, and it seems to suit Louise much better, especially accompanied (as it certainly must be) by a lot of Russian sage. Alas, it is commercially available only from an outfit called Roses Loubert, in Maine-et-Loire, France.
So perhaps Marie Louise, a hardy damask. I was momentarily thrilled to see that there was a hybrid rugosa named Louise Bugnet, which looks every bit as wonderful as my old pal Thérèse Bugnet but is only hardy to 6b, whereas Thérèse goes happily to 3b. So that will not do.
...It's so much nicer to dither about roses rather than trying to figure out how to channel the drainage toward the septic field rather than into the wood shed.
May 20, 2008: Heavy frost warning
Sheesh...there's a heavy frost warning tonight!
As Ron wrote to an old friend from Portland recently,
May 22, 2008: Gulp.
A milestone: we ordered our well pump today. Our new best friend, Dave, at Bison Hand Water Pumps in Maine, answered the phone at 6:30am (only Ron would think to call anyone at that hour). Dave cheerfully answered all our questions, and then sold us the Cadillac of hand pumps, which he will ship out TODAY.
I begin to think this could really all be happening...
May 23, 2008: Eating my words
Well, it could have been happening. Microsoft, which had been funding the project I've been doing at the college, has abruptly withdrawn its funding. My next paycheck could be my last.
You know, I think I'm glad we've already ordered the well pump.
May 29, 2008: Still more infrastructure!
Unbelievable. We have water. And we installed it ourselves. It arrived yesterday, and it really is a thing of beauty - very fine craftsmanship. It will certainly last the rest of our lives, and beyond. Hard to believe we finally have the means to mix concrete and water the peonies and irises! This is the last piece of infrastructure - aside from the "yard bomb" (propane tank), which is actually fairly inexpensive as infrastructure goes.
So life goes on - just as if I weren't in imminent danger of unemployment. No matter what happens, we'll always have water. Oddly, I actually feel more secure knowing that.
June 2008
June 3, 2008: Chilly, daffodils still opening
It's still pretty chilly. My daffs aren't finished opening, but in town there are buds on the peonies and irises, so perhaps summer will come to Upper Tupper some day soon. Still no word about my employment situation.
June 6, 2008: 90 degrees
Be careful what you wish for: it looks to be an utterly hideous weekend, with temps in the 90s. Argh. At Esther's place, Blanc Double de Coubert just opened two characteristically flawless blossoms this morning, which will doubtless be blasted by the time I get home. Fortunately she's loaded with many more, which perhaps won't open until after this heat wave.
My "blue moon" wisteria finally coughed up a few leaves (the wisteria in town all finished blooming about the 2nd week of May), and is now showing definite signs of half a dozen tiny blossoms. I've never grown wisteria before (I was afraid it would knock down the house where I last gardened), but from what I've read, they absolutely thrive on abuse. I expect being root-pruned, dug up, and transplanted to a colder, shadier, and infinitely rockier place will be just the ticket.
June 30, 2008: Not this year.
We've just finally admitted to each other that barring a miracle there's no way in hell we're going to be able to have anything remotely resembling habitable on our own land before the snow flies, so it looks as if we'll be in Esther's place for another winter.
The ongoing saga which has led us to this unhappy point (aside from the extremely tenuous work situation I seem to be in) involves a huge oak stump currently residing where the pier block for the back corner of the house wants to go. We'd been scraping and saving for MONTHS and MONTHS to come up with the five hundred bucks we needed to rent the monster excavator needed to remove the stump, without which we cannot start the foundation.
To make a long and depressing story shorter, the equipment we needed was in the shop for several months, and we settled for something different that should have worked but didn't. (No, of course it wasn't refundable) The expensive brand-new cable we'd bought for the occasion - which was designed to withstand 3,000 lbs of pressure - snapped immediately. Professional stump grinders were consulted and advised that there's so much rock in the soil (and such an inaccessible site) that we'd be well advised to build elsewhere. The last few weeks seem to have confirmed that no amount of digging, drilling, sawing, grinding, cursing or praying seems to be equal to the task of removing the massive oak taproot that stands between us and the foundation of our cottage. The only good news is that Ron hasn't been killed in the effort.
This means another year of rent, electricity and propane bills. Just the same, we spent a large chunk of the weekend moving and stacking firewood, and it gives us a wonderful feeling of security to see all those lovely and comforting stacks dotted throughout the woods. We've got earth, air, fire, and water. (And irises, and peonies, and roses, and lilies...and Russian forget-me-nots!) All we need is shelter.
July 2008
July 24, 2008: The Stump succumbs
Thanks to our good friend Tod and his good friend and boss the chief of the local Fire Department (and HIS splendid old Ford F350 with a winch on it), we have at last prevailed over THE STUMP which you may recall has stymied our progress for some months now. At right is a photo of the conquering hero and his captive, which really just barely gives you an idea of the size of this monster.
I don't know if I can adequately convey the enormity of the gift of time, effort, and RISK, here. Dynamite was seriously discussed at one point. Burning was eliminated on the grounds of the danger of fire spreading underground via the monster oak roots.
There was really nothing else for it but to dig, hack, and pull it out - an unimaginable effort, requiring energy, determination, a whole lotta physics, and equal parts delicacy, restraint, and plain old brute strength.
These wonderful guys showed up and cheerfully worked their butts off for hours, evidently for the thrill of seeing if they could do it without killing themselves or pulling the stump down the hill on top of the truck, since once the monster was freed, gravity became a serious threat.
But undeterred by heat, humidity, black flies, treacherous terrain and the obvious
hopelessness of this endeavor, they got it out of the ground, and then began the tedious, complex, dangerous work of inching it right to the edge of the building site...stopping it just short of the edge of the hill. It was a sight to see.
We are trying hard to be good stewards of our little corner of the forest, since it's the only thing we really have any control over. We don't take all this destruction lightly, and we've agonized over every felled tree.
Still, conquering that stump really felt like a major milestone, and we're both really feeling pretty hopeful, although we haven't got two nickels to rub together. We've got more than enough firewood cut, split, and stacked to see us through the first winter, even if it does have to be the winter of 2009/2010. It's like paying your gas bill two or three years in advance. We're pretty lucky.
July 29, 2008: Chimney blocks
Ron was on his way back from having his chainsaw sharpened yesterday, and spotted a pile of cement chimney blocks that someone was unloading for FREE! Not regular cinder blocks, but those huge squares that surround a stove pipe. He made three trips and took them all. This is a HUGE find, since it lessens the need for concrete for the foundation piers, and eliminates the need to build forms for the concrete - all of which must be mixed by hand, remember. This is very exciting.
We've built a tiny little fire pit next to the little cabin, and we've been cooking over there every weekend. Sunday night, a deer strolled up to see what we were up to...she was 50 feet away from us, and didn't so much as flinch when we turned around to stare back. Poor thing...she will be SO disappointed with the 100 feet of deer fencing waiting for her and her family.
Speaking of which, "Fred's rose" has offered not one but THREE lovely little blossoms, which establishes her claim to fame as the first rose on Upper Tupper. The Russian forget-me-not appears to have at least doubled in size, too. Louise spent a few days here last week and she was very excited to pump water from her namesake hand pump.
August 2008
August 15, 2008: Happy birthday to me!
What a guy. Ron has announced his intention to build me a little potting shed for my birthday this month. Of course, Ron is as incapable as building a "shed" as he is of flying: this is turning out to be a delightfully quirky, beautifully hand-crafted timber frame structure, replete with a window seat and a front porch graced with unpeeled log columns. This is no shed.
Whatever it's called, though, the peak of the porch of this delightful structure will be adorned with an ENORMOUS wrought iron raven, which will probably really annoy the real ravens, who were, after all, there first. Oops...there I go decorating a building site again.
I can't seem to help myself...I have these visions. The place is practically furnished already: the Moroccan hanging lantern that's been looking for a permanent home for about ten years...the great huge cushion for the window seat that's moved across the country with us twice but has never been used. About a year and a half ago I discovered a brand new sisal rug with flowers painted all over it for five bucks at a yard sale down the road, and it's been standing rolled up next to three french doors at Esther's place just waiting for there to be a potting shed some day. Who knew there'd be a potting shed before there was a house!
And last January, I picked up a wonky and not entirely comfortable wicker rocker on the Freecycle list. This has also been taking up precious space at Esther's, rapping our ankles at every opportunity, and will either be moved across the road or used for kindling, depending on whether or not it can be reformed and made into a useful member of society.
In a slightly more practical vein, our friends Bill and Jude kindly gave us dibs on a fabulous pile of stuff they were getting rid of some time ago, including a massive oak door with great old bevelled glass, which will make a wonderful focal point for this whole corner of the garden, as well as letting in lots of light.
August 17, 2008: The homestead...right here in my imagination
I love all these little outbuildings. Before we were forced by circumstances beyond our control to install an unnecessary septic system (grrr...), we had toyed with the idea of building a small network of freestanding rooms each tiny
enough (under 144 sq ft) to fall under the building code radar, linking them together with covered walkways. This is not exactly an ideal climate for such an arrangement, alas, and it would require a ridiculous number of wood stoves. But it's such a romantic idea, isn't it?
Still, we envision little structures popping up all over the woods, a free-standing screen/sleeping porch being the first priority after the current two (and the main house). Bill and Jude's junk pile also included several very large screen windows, so we've got a bit of a head start on that. We have a nice pile of very rough-looking locust poles (and access to many more, just about five miles away), and of course all the siding lumber is rough-milled from our own trees, so everything should look as if it sprang from the woods, and be barely visible from the road in the summer.
I interviewed for a real job at the college a week ago, and I'm feeling so hopeful that I've actually allowed myself to think seriously about designing the "real" house. The main house is currently planned to consist of kitchen, bathroom, and sleeping loft, with various and sundry bump-outs to accommodate sofa/bed, computer/desk, and possibly even the bathtub, all without cutting into the precious 16'x20' or so of available floor space. Every inch of wall space not windowed will be lined with bookcases, of course.
Once that space is in a livable condition, there will be (right here in our wild imaginations) a step or two down, opening out onto a small, window-lined, vaulted space facing northeast, and dedicated to music. We have that enormous Freecycled skylight and those two commercial-grade windows, remember - 5'x8' each, which would give the feeling of sitting right in the woods, only without the skeeters, bears, and blackflies.
After that, an attached screen porch off to the north, looking out into the loveliest bit of woods, and taking advantage of both the summer breeze and the shade. We've been so careful to try and avoid the common mistake of building IN the most beautiful spots, looking instead for the places enjoying the best VIEWS of the most beautiful spots. Once the hideous construction wounds have healed, I think it's going to be a really lovely, if unconventional little homestead.
August 27, 2008: Don't count your chickens...
Drat. Nothing tragic, but I didn't get the job I was hoping for.
So a whole slew of tantalizing possibilities just became out of the question, including another excavator rental, a tow bar and roof rack for the car, the badly needed table and jig saws (which have both recently given up the ghost), and of course a thousand other little house parts.
Mostly I'm worried about leveling the main house site, digging nine foundation posts (with a four foot frost line), and mixing 36 bags of concrete all by hand, since power tool rentals are now out of reach.
I was just scolding Ron about the inherent risk in being a workaholic without a day job. He has a busy and surprisingly stable teaching studio, which feeds both us and our gas tank, but aside from that, if he's awake, he's working. He's constantly putting his hands, which he needs to use both to make music and to make a house, at risk. He's been having more and more trouble with them, and it's virtually impossible to get him to stop.
This finally came to a head recently when he had an opportunity to do a roof job for a friend of ours, and he had to turn it down because he was in continual pain. So we were both really hoping this job would pan out for me, because it would allow us to buy him some help with the really heavy work. Damn.
Heavy work like trotting up and down these hills with a 20-foot beam on his shoulder. Or carrying t
he wood-framed double-pane insulated picture window (identical to this one) from Esther's place, where we live, 400 feet uphill and then up our toboggan run-i-mean-driveway. This was a completely unexpected Craigslist find: a window that matched exactly a previously scavenged one. It's in perfect shape, down to the intact screens - so although I'd planned to use a bunch of the great old windows that Carole gave us, we couldn't pass this up.
Ugh...but the last time we did this, we had a roof rack and a tow bar, which the new CR-V doesn't have! Since it wouldn't fit in the car, the two of us lugged it up there by hand.
Well...not to complain. We certainly have more than I ever dreamed, much more than most people. I am still employed (so far), and we can cover our expenses (just). My church gig starts up again on Sunday, and that will pay the fearful car insurance bill (nearly). Our rent is more than reasonable, and we couldn't have a more wonderful landlady. We have all this beautiful lumber, milled from our own trees. Our land is paid for, and we have no debt, which is more than most people can say these days. And we've gotten two messages in the last two weeks from two guys who don't know each other, both reminding Ron that when he needs help with heavy stuff he should remember to call them. That's an awful lot to be grateful for.
August 28, 2008: more free stove pipe
I snagged some more double-wall stove pipe AND a venting kit AND a chimney cap this week on the local Freecycle list. The pipe alone would have cost nearly $200, and it's in perfect shape, so I'm pretty pleased with myself. We've got a great stove, lots of pipe, and a year's worth of firewood...now all we need is a house to heat.
August 29, 2008: A rant about hydrofracking
Turns out being off the grid in the woods doesn't necessarily protect us from the ravages of the rest of the world. We've spent a good bit of the summer getting informed and speaking out on the latest threat to upstate NY: a HUGE boom in natural gas drilling. HUGE.
At least nine different companies are aggressively pursuing drilling rights in NY, PA, and the southern Appalachians, all of which are sitting on a layer of Marcellus Shale, which could meet the whole country's natural gas needs for two years.
However, extracting it requires a new drilling technique, called "hydrofracking", which is every bit as ugly as it sounds. The gas in Marcellus is held in bubbles like a chunk of swiss cheese. To extract it, a mixture of water, sand and chemicals is shot into the earth with such force it fractures the rock, releasing the bubbles to the surface. When the gas surfaces, so does the water...laden with natural toxins from the shale, including suspected cancer-causing compounds.
This is a technique that involves deeper, more complicated wells, and uses VASTLY more water than other drilling methods: two million gallons of water for each well! And where do you suppose that water will come from, if not from our water table?
The U.S. Department of Energy lists "produced water" from gas drilling as among the most toxic of any oil industry byproduct. The byproduct of each two million gallons of water ends up being 10,000 gallons of toxic chemicals. That's for ONE well. In New Mexico, oil and gas drilling projects that use waste pits, like those proposed for New York, have leached toxic chemicals into the water table at over 800 sites.
Best of all, the industry views its chemical recipes as trade secrets and they're not required to disclose them. States have only learned about the chemicals by analyzing waste pits and ground water nearby.
And of course, there is a whole "goon squad" of slick salespeople descending on us and all our neighbors, many of whom are struggling farmers or uneducated and underemployed rural folks. These slicksters describe the drilling as "underground horizontal drilling", as if a huge hypodermic needle will silently and invisibly slither beneath our land ("2 miles deep" they claim), draw the gas out, and leave the land untouched. The promise enormous lease payments, and show up on doorsteps with contracts in hand. It's absolutely terrifying.
So there's the cheery news from our little slice of paradise.
September 2008
September 17, 2008: Level & weather-tight
Ron has finished enclosing the cabin - the first one, the one that was supposed to be an 8x12' shed, but is now a lovely little cabin that a person could certainly live in. Thoreau, say, could live in it. It still needs a few shingles, etc, but the siding and trim is all finished, and it's completely weather tight and really, really adorable! He's even added a little "back porch": a level spot currently housing the generator. The value of LEVEL spots on this terrain cannot be overstated. We've taken our coffee up there several mornings, and just sat and marveled at it as if it were a miracle, rather than the product of a year's very, very hard work.
He's planning to get back to work on my little sanctum today (here he is lounging in the loft above the window seat-to-be), and - hooray! - it looks as if the combination of the take from recent concerts and a big wedding gig this weekend will allow us to rent an excavator again (for a weekend, this time). So at the very, very least, we should be able to get the foundation in and inspected before the snow starts.
And here's some startling news: Two Casa Blanca lilies I planted up on our land, in the garden-to-be - lilies that generally bloom in late June or July - started blooming YESTERDAY. That heavenly sweet, spicy fragrance carries all the way down to the road. And both Katherine's 'Tupper irises' and Fred's Russian forget-me-nots seem to have at least doubled in size over the summer - along with the ferns that hitched a ride with the irises, and the violets that hitched a ride with the forget-me nots. So I have high hopes for next summer, and dreams of glory for the years beyond.
October 2008
October 3, 2008: Eating my words. Again.
Did I say that? Argh. We finally scraped up enough to rent the backhoe again, for the entire weekend, and after a
spectacularly productive Saturday, The Rains Came. Not rain, mind you, but RAIN. 6-inches-in-two-days rain. Not only could we not finish the job, we had one helluva time getting the monster out of the mud without flipping it over. Ron would move it about six inches, then stop while I ran up underneath the tires and rearranged the cinder blocks so he could get a tiny bit of traction. Six more inches, rearrange, etc., etc. The sight of tires as tall as I am, spinning uselessly in eight inches of mud is not a vision I'll soon forget.
I don't even have the heart to detail the whole ordeal. It's a complete mess, and extremely demoralizing, since we saved our pennies ALL SUMMER to rent the thing, and only got half of our money's worth of time. By the time we can manage to rent it again, the ground will be too frozen to work. I cried all the way home.
However...the cabin is closed in and weatherproof, and Ron's made a lot of progress on my little birthday cottage. It's got a teeny little front porch and everything, and every time I see it I feel like clapping. What more could we want?
October 5, 2008: Stowaway Hill
"Stowaway Hill" is the new name for a little hummock created when Ron was excavating for my cottage and had the great good sense to dump all the nice topsoil in a little pile rather than stomping all over it. It's now covered entirely in things that came with things given to me either by Fred, our neighbors Karen & Lizzie, or by Katherine née Tupper. An amazing lot of ferns stowed away with the irises, and I can't believe two of Fred's violets are just about to bloom!
They're all safely tucked in for the winter, right in front of my little front porch where I can keep a close eye on them and remember where they came from.
October 6, 2008: Counting blessings
How did we get so lucky? Never in my wildest fantasies did I ever imagine I would actually own three acres of woods, surrounded by hundreds more, and dotted with charming little cabins, cottages, and shacks.
Hesperus Hill?
All it needs is a name. What do you think of Hesperus Hill? A nod to our native Dame's Rocket, Hesperis matronalis, of course, but particularly after the Greek Hesperus, the personification of the evening star Venus, visible through the trees every night. The Latin Vespers adds another layer of significance as a fitting tribute to our beloved Wood Thrush vespers, which on summer evenings are as soothing and as predictable as the Vespers in any monastery. A lovely and peaceful place to spend our waning years.
October 13, 2008: A new visitor
Ron saw an eagle yesterday morning while I was at church - this used to be so common at Little Wolf he almost didn't give it a second thought until he remembered where he was. It's not the first, but it certainly isn't an everyday occurence. I was working up there until dark on Saturday, while Ron was off fiddling for money, and the owls kicked up such a fuss that I was afraid they were killing each other. It was quite a hoot'n-nanny.
November 3, 2008: Out of plywood again
Well, a month has passed since the awful disappointment of the huge storm that ruined our last chance at having a
foundation in this year. It still stings to think about it.
My wonderful library director is scraping up little projects to keep me employed - working all her contacts and even writing grants to get money. But the job could still end at any minute - and now there's a university-wide hiring freeze, so the temp job she was keeping up her sleeve just in case, isn't going to materialize any time soon.
Now I wish we'd spent all that money on the plywood and shingles we needed to finish enclosing the little cabin instead. But we're out of shingles, tarpaper, plywood, and cash, so it looks as if my little sanctum will spend its first upstate NY winter swaddled only in tarpaper and a scrap of torn tarp - which will only make it feel more aged and charming. I've always wanted a tarpaper shack!
The weather feels as if it's turning early this year, so I suppose the best thing to do is to throw ourselves into music and see if we can raise some money for next Spring.
~2009~
Winter 2009
January 21, 2009: Making music and shoveling snow
Winter seemed to arrive early this year. On November 16th, I was planting a handful of lilies-of-the-valley in the northwest corner of the new garden, and before I had quite
finished, the snow was coming down in a way that I could tell was 'for real'. I don't think it's really stopped since, and we've had some really bitter temperatures already - as well as a propane bill that ate up half a paycheck.
So we have indeed thrown ourselves into music - we made more doing music than I did at my full-time job last month - and we're trying to stash away as much as possible so that when the weather breaks we can make some progress.
The place from which we've been renting equipment was an early and much-lamented victim of the economic crash, and as much trouble as we've had, we're terribly sorry to see them go...not least because the next-closest place with tractors to rent is 36 miles round-trip, and charges by the mile for pick-up and delivery.
Still no guarantee of employment past the end of January. Argh... Gigs! We need more gigs!
February 2, 2009: Catalog fever
We are past the end of January. There's a loaf of bread in the oven, I am still employed, Ron has three new students, and we're doing a lecture/recital at Cornell this week. So hope reigns eternal.
The David Austin rose catalog sits enticingly next to the usual midwinter mountain of gardening books, beckoning me to jump the gun and plant roses before we can properly enclose the garden. Fortunately the flyer from this year's County Soil & Water Conservation District sale has also arrived, and this offers a much more practical menu of temptations.
I've been reading that the original forests of this area, which was Iroquois land, consisted of acre upon acre of white pine. The higher elevations, our acidic hills south of the Finger Lakes, also supported a mixed hardwood forest of hemlock, beech, maple, and oak.
An expedition during the 1790's recorded nearly 100% of this county as heavily forested - the settlers referred to it as the "dark forest". But as early as 1804 potash was already an important industry. I didn't know much about potash, but a quick trip to Wikipedia certainly explains how the deforestation happened so quickly in a time before power tools:
1886 the only sizeable stand of virgin timber left was a tract of about 40 acres. By 1903 land survey recorded forest cover at only 19%.
Tupper Road was settled, named for, and farmed by our neighbor Katherine's father and uncle around the turn of the 20th century. Katherine has a childhood memory of her father plowing the land around Esther's for potatoes - that would have been some time in the mid-twenties. It's hard to imagine the hundreds of acres of woods surrounding us as potato fields.
The deciduous hardwood forests have sprung up and thrived since then. Hemlock clings tenaciously to the rock in the gorges, while those who care about such things keep a wary eye out for signs of the dreaded Hemlock Wooly Adelgid. But unfortunately, there was a concerted effort just after WWII to replant much of the deforested area not with the native white pine, but with the shallow-rooted red pine, which in our shallow, poorly-drained glacial debris tends to grow for a few decades and then topple over. We've certainly seen that on Tupper; one of our well drillers was reminiscing about having planted some of these trees as a boy scout, and many of them are now in serious decline.
These days the forest cover, at least in the hills, has rebounded to over 50%. There's only one corner of our triangle that is pine, rather than deciduous forest. But we both love and miss living among the majestic evergreens, so once again we're poring over this year's list of tree seedlings available from the Soil & WaterConservation Program with an eye toward replacing some of those troubled red pines with something more suitable. We'll be extremely lucky if we live long enough to enjoy their shade, but it seems like the right thing to do.
February 12, 2009: Another hole to dig
Uh-oh. Just got a used copy of a book called "Root Cellaring", by Mike and Nancy Bubel. Just what we needed: another reason to dig a really big hole in the rock. Just the same, I think this is going to be a necessity...
March 8, 2009: Tarpaper!
We discovered a new place north of town today that sells salvaged building supplies. I was quite infatuated with several chunks of what look to be lab tops - countertops from a
chemistry lab, perhaps. I'd love to have a work surface like that in the potting shed, but I'm afraid they're so luxuriously deep that I wouldn't be able to open the door!
We also drooled at some length over a completely gorgeous and impractical oak staircase, but were frankly even more excited to unearth a pile of 14 rolls of 30lb tarpaper - for $15/roll. As a petroleum product, the price of tarpaper has risen right along with the price of gasoline, and the last time Ron stopped at Evil Orange with twenty bucks in his pocket to buy a $15 roll, he discovered that it now costs $36. Sure, oil prices have come down quite a bit since then. But since nobody but us is building these days - and everybody else uses Tyvek anyway - that same tarpaper is still collecting dust on the store shelves, for the same price. So this is quite a find, and not a moment too soon.
Now all we need is a LOT of plywood.
March 10, 2009: Good news/bad news
So it turns out that one of the provisions of the recently-passed stimulus bill allows for an $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers. "First-time" is rather misleading; anyone who hasn't had property in their name in three years qualifies. "Home buyers" includes those who are building a home, and, mirabile dictu, that actually includes folks like us who are building a home with their bare hands. What's the catch? Well, it's a big one: we have to have a certificate of occupancy by December 1, 2009.
Oh, and it looks as if my luck has finally run out: I'll be unemployed on April 1st.
April 2009
April 1, 2009: I'm still employed.
Guess they were just fooling. I was literally taking the pictures down from my office walls
when a miracle happened and another short-term project materialized. So I can count on five more paychecks before it starts all over again.
We've had two 60-degree days over the last week, so now that we can actually see the ground and a flurry of performances is safely past, we're able to spend a little more time up the hill. Tod kindly lent his pickup so that Ron could pick up a few sheets of plywood - enough to finally finish the potting shed. It will be so great to stop worrying about the tarp blowing away in the wind.
April 5, 2009: Scilla blooming... and an especially welcome find
I'm not sure which of these things is more exciting: Fred's birthday scilla started blooming yesterday, and I
found a propane fridge - the very make and model we'd planned to buy new - on Craigslist for half the price of a new one. The nagging expectation of having to come up with that kind of money - plus the additional hundreds in sales tax and freight shipping - has been one more thing to try not to worry about, so this is a real weight off our minds. Good thing they're so tiny, because it's going to have to live in my 8'x8' cottage until there's a house.
Today was one of those rare April days - sunny and cool, and perfect for working. Poor Ron was playing a gig in Buffalo last night and didn't get home until 3am or so, but since the forecast for the next week and beyond is calling for steady rain/snow and some pretty raw temps, he was determined to get the plywood up on the roof. Sleep-deprived or no, he did it, too.
Then, not content with mere Herculean effort, he created a beautiful, flat, wide path from the driveway to my cabin, so that when he and Tod move the fridge up here next weekend they won't kill themselves trying to keep it level (which is critical with a propane fridge).
He meant it to be a quick-and-dirty temporary path with a specific purpose, but a graceful curve around our favorite sitting stump has made it much more beautiful than he intended. It's changed the look of the place so much (see the same area last August, below) that I'm revisiting the location of the rose garden. I have a vision of the difficult rock and root-filled fan-shaped bed made square to accommodate terraced raised beds filled with vegetables easily accessible from the kitchen, enclosed with a low handmade wattle fence.
This will leave the extremely steep area behind the well - which we'd originally planned to terrace for veggies - to be entirely turned over to the important crop of berries. Less work terracing, and the shrubs will hold the soil where the well was dug into the hill.
The roses could then enjoy a much more spacious and sunny spot, a south-facing slope a step lower than the house level and nearer the driveway. Okay, it's currently considerably more than a "slope", but it's been plowed up at least four times already, is all beautiful loose soil (well, rocks and soil) which should make for some awfully happy rugosas. AND there's a lovely view of it from the east-facing window and the porch of my little cottage. If we enclose it with locust posts wrapped with heavy-duty wire mesh, both the driveway and the rose garden could benefit from a backdrop of clouds of sweet autumn clematis, and I can create my own "myrtle hill", with snowdrops, daffodils, and single white peonies on the downhill/driveway/deer side, and a little roseraie tucked next to the cabin and safe from the deer.
And all that came about as a result of Ron's practical little utility path.
April 15th, 2009: Excuse me while I whine a little.
Well, yet another ugly $600 surprise in the form of an entirely unexpected IRS bill - I still don't know how my exemptions got changed from 0 to 3 - and there went the money for the excavator. Again. I know I should be grateful that we had the money to pay the tax bill, but I can't seem to muster gratitude at the moment...not even a little bit. We'd managed to save up enough over the course of the winter to get a running start on the foundation the very instant the weather would allow it, and we even weathered the unexpected $600 expense of four new tires a month or so ago. Sitting pretty, cash in hand, just waiting for a thaw and five days in a row of dry weather. And now it's gone. I could just cry.
April 19th, 2009: Earth-moving
So Ron read the little flight of fancy above (about the roseraie, not about the IRS), and he evidently thought it sounded like a good idea. And when Ron decides something is a good idea, it's as good as done, especially if it is really hard work and the weather cooperates.
I had an unusual Sunday off from church, so was feeling ambitious with two whole days in a row to spend at home. Ron was itching to accomplish something, excavator or no. So we headed up the hill with shovel, pick ax, wheelbarrow, and ibuprofen, and lo and behold, what was on Friday evening a nearly vertical pile of rock, rubble, 
bramble and root, is today a lovely, clear, smooth, blank canvas, gently sloped to the south. Two eight-foot locust posts are already in place, with plans (as soon as we can afford a couple of bags of cement) to line the driveway side with a heavy trellis of fallen logs, which will be beautiful, free, and stout enough to support the 'blue moon' wisteria I've been nursing along down at Esther's place.
The "beautiful, loose" soil that had been plowed up four times already, as it turned out, required a pick ax to hack through, since it's been more than two years since the driveway was dug in. And, like all the land here, it was almost more rock than soil. But as we worked, I threw everything hand-sized or smaller down to the driveway, to be used to shore up the bank, and Ron threw everything foot-sized or larger up to the path, to be used to make a flagstone terrace in the middle of the roses, and what's left is fairly manageable pebbles and chips. Drainage will certainly not be a problem.
April 28, 2009: Shingles!
The Craigslist advert:
April 29, 2009: A rose garden, this year.
Well, as improbable as it seems, it really looks as if I'm going to have a garden...a ROSE garden...THIS year. Ron has become utterly determined to make this happen, and since I last wrote, an oddly elliptical triangle has evolved, carved out of the space between my cabin and the driveway. It's very gently sloped to the south, and is now semi-enclosed with five beautiful locust posts along the driveway side, which will be filled in with log poles as we can haul enough of them out of the woods and the various brush piles dotting the land. The side nearest the potting shed will be temporarily swathed in deer netting until the construction zone is no longer necessary.
The space is roughly 36' wide by maybe 13', depending on how far down the bank I dare to venture, and although there is one very, VERY large oak tree in one corner, the space gets full sun much of the day, since it faces 150 feet of cleared driveway. Which will, incidentally, be invisible from inside the garden as soon as the garden fills in a little. (Warning: non-rose nerds should skip the next paragraph or two...)
Which shouldn't take long, since I'm starting out with a backdrop of five seedling r.r. albas, plus one Eglanteria, of course. Then I'll fill in the border with (this year) Marie Bugnet, Henry Hudson, Blanc Double de Coubert, Heritage, and Stanwell Perpetual.
It's pretty amazing how much else is already either up there or waiting to be moved. My three-year old lady's mantle and 'Biokovo' cranesbill is going mad down at Esther's, Katherine's Tupper Irises are looking great, and the three Monsieur Jules Elie peonies I picked up late last season in a local nursery's scrap heap and stuffed hastily into a rocky bed may or may not deign to thrive. There are lilies coming up in both gardens - maybe a dozen or more. Fred's Russian forget-me-not is blooming wildly. I've been regularly digging violets out of Esther's grass and plopping them into the rosebed there, and they will all come along, ditto the charming wild cranesbill with pink flowers not much bigger than forget-me-nots. I have lots of cornflower and sweet pea seeds (the wild kind, although I did find one precious packet of 'Matucana' at the hardware store!), and a few of my favorite Nigellas, though not nearly enough.
That ought to make a decent start, don't you think?
April 30, 2009: Bayberries
I've settled on bayberry bushes (Myrica pensylvanica) to line the driveway just below the garden, since they're stone cold hardy (to z2), tolerant of virtually any indignity in terms of heat, drought, dust, and even salt,
and because I love them. They're fragrant, native, deer-resistant (although the turkeys, grouse, and woodpeckers all evidently love the berries), and they should slowly sucker to hold that bank in place very nicely.
Maybe best of all, I found a very highly-rated place in Michigan called Cold Stream Farm, that sells 6"-12" rooted cuttings for $1.76, so I ordered a whole bunch. In a few years, they should be spectacular with myrtle at their feet and big pools of daffodils scattered throughout.
While I was at it, I ordered some teeny tiny little Pee Gee Hydrangeas, available only in bundles of 5, for $11. Yes, Paniculata Grandiflora...I know, how Victorian-era cemetery can you get, right? Great Aunt Clothilde's antimacassars and button hooks. Well, I don't care how fussily unfashionable they are; I have loved them since I was a child, and they may well turn out to be the only flower I can bring into the house that won't drive Ron out of the house. So I ordered them, too...five of them. Heaven knows what I will do when they reach their ultimate spread.
May 2009
May 5th, 2009: We got the shingles!
A hundred bucks for enough to cover the whole potting shed, which is about a third of what they'd have cost new. 16 bundles. Turned out the seller had counted wrong, or didn't know how many were in a bundle, or something, so we actually got exactly as many as we need to finish my potting shed. 16 bundles of 25-year shingles should have cost us nearly $450.
Each of these bundles weighs SEVENTY pounds, by the way. And let's see...16 bundles x 70lbs = 1,120 lbs we carried up the hill from the seller's garage to our car, then up the hill from our car to the cabin. Not all the way up the toboggan run, but still pretty steep. Ow...
May 6th, 2009: Where does the money go?
Bargain shingles notwithstanding, it turns out that building a house out of stuff you picked up off the forest floor is still expensive, and there's no end to the string of necessary expenses. I bought a box of nails yesterday - just a small 5lb box - and it cost $13.93 before sales tax!
We need to rent the excavator one more time. 36 sacks of concrete for the foundation piers. The lumber may be made from our own trees, but we have to pay somebody to mill that lumber. And plywood still has to be purchased. At $30/sheet, that will likely be our biggest expense. Nails, nails, nails. More tarpaper. Saw blades. Roof jacks. A 24' extension ladder. Insulation. Drywall. Plumbing.
A nail gun, to protect Ron's hands. Yes, certainly, thinks clueless me. This is clearly not a luxury, we must have a nail gun. Ah, but it turns out there are different nail guns used for siding, flooring, and roofing, and each one costs hundreds of dollars, not including the actual nails and the air compressor to run them. Oh, and the gasoline for the generator to run the compressor.
I was SO happy and excited to have saved so much over the winter, thanks to all the concerts in December and the lecture/recital at Cornell, and I really imagined that the very instant the weather broke we would spend it all on an excavator, and 36 sacks of concrete, and all the plywood we could find, which would mean that we could have the foundation piers dug and poured by the end of May at the very latest. That was the plan, and dammit, it was NOT unreasonably optimistic, even considering the pay cut I received in December when our health insurance premiums tripled.
What actually happened was that we found unbelieveable bargains on tarpaper, a propane fridge, and shingles, which combined either cost us $960 or saved us $1,744, depending on how you look at it. Unexpected expenses in the forms of four new tires and a horrifying tax bill, both unexpected, combined to consume the rest of this winter's savings and then some.
So... for those of you keeping score at home, I'm making about 89.8% less than I was in November; we have now spent 155.8% of our winter's savings, and we still have no excavator, no concrete, and no plywood. The only thing that has kept us afloat has been a welcome increase in Ron's teaching studio, which is now falling off as usual because everybody's taking the summer off.
Unless another miracle occurs I will myself very likely be taking the month of June off without pay, since the current project is funded only through May 31. This would be a welcome opportunity to work on the house, if only we had any $#^%! equipment or materials to work with!
So it doesn't look promising for this year either, does it? Which means the $8,000 tax rebate won't be happening.
But we still have the land, which is currently presenting us with new treasures every day, including nicely spreading patches of mayapple and trillium, a lurid splash of Polygala paucifolia, a pool of spleenwort and a bunch of pussytoes (Antennaria sp.), which I'd mistaken for Edelweiss before Bill the Wildflower Maven kindly set me straight. And before long, there will even be a tiny rose garden.
May 8th, 2009: Roses!
Six of my roses came yesterday, and they are beauties! I've never ordered from this company before (High Country Roses), and I've certainly never ordered anything but bare-root roses. I decided to give this place a try because they're in Utah and specialize in cold-hardy, own-root roses, and because they get ecstatic reviews from the folks at the garden watchdog site.
I can see why. I was a bit nervous because they offer 1-year-old plants in quart-size pots, 4½ inches square at the top and 5 inches deep. So I was pretty much expecting seedlings.
NOT. These are beautiful little plants, fully leafed out and then some. Heritage (is everyone just calling it AUSblush now?) is a hearty-looking thing, as is Eglanteria, which is a big, maybe 10" ball of deliciously scented leaves. Henry Hudson has two buds, Marie Bugnet (left) is loaded with buds and one beautiful blush-white blossom that even Ron was charmed by, and Stanwell Perpetual is in full bloom! There was not a broken branch or so much as a dropped leaf in the entire box.
Ron noticed a flyer in the window of the laundromat a few days ago from somebody offering to deliver a load of composted cow manure for twenty bucks. He memorized the number, so if he can actually make that happen, we're in business. I'm going to be REALLY sore by Monday...I can't wait!
May 9th, 2009: Another bullet dodged
I just heard a few minutes ago that the library which is funding me at the moment has requested another month's worth of work, which will tide me over to July 1, the beginning of the fiscal year - after which, anything's possible. Yet another miracle, for which I am very grateful.
May 18th, 2009: Back from Cleveland and into the dirt
After a long, exhausting, wonderful trip to
Cleveland, we started for home at 5:45am. Arriving before noon, we unpacked the car, scarfed a hunk of cheese and a graham cracker, changed into overalls and ran up the hill to screen the rocks out of what passes for soil up there.
We ended up (after prying the really big rocks out with a prybar) with a big hole, a knee-high pile of gravel, and thigh-high pile of the loveliest soil you've ever seen. Ron ran off to town to teach, while I backfilled the big hole with the screened soil, mixed in peat and manure, and finally began planting.
There's a LOT more of this to be done, but at least everything I spent money on is safely in the ground for the time being. I've ordered a siphon pump for the 55 gallon rain barrel, so I won't have to make quite so many trips across 50 feet of treacherous ground with a bucket (after 25-but-who's-counting strokes to fill said bucket from the well).
May 19th, 2009: counting the till
We were thrilled to see that even after the expenses of the trip we did make just enough to rent the excavator, which means that it is conceivable we may be able to get a foundation in this year. Ron's going to call today and see when and if it's available. Thank you, Cleveland!
May 20th, 2009: Progress. And lots of rocks.
A month ago there was barely room between my cabin and the driveway to squeeze in a ladder before the bank headed straight down to the driveway. But Ron's been behaving like a human excavator, envisioning a garden space in what I would have said was a completely inaccessible location. There is now a lovely, LEVEL irregular triangle where there was once a vertical mountain of rock and rubble left behind when the driveway was created, and a beautiful deer fence in the works, crafted out of 200-lb fallen logs.
I've planted two dozen tiny bayberry seedlings on the remaining half of the bank (which is outside the enclosed bit), and some day I hope to be able to see them without a magnifying glass. Ron built a large framed screen out of old 2x4s and some hardware cloth, and we have poured every shovelful of soil through this contraption before mixing it with compost and manure, resulting in beautiful fluffy, rich rose beds - as well as a hip-high pile of gravel-sized rocks, and a shin-high pile of REAL rocks.
Speaking of real rocks, I came home from work one day this week to discover that Ron had artfully laid some enormous rocks between the front porch of my cabin and stowaway hill, making the steps I'd cut into the hill a lot more useful and less dangerous to boot. It's too small to call a stone terrace, but it's too well-crafted to call it anything else.
I'd call it a miracle if it hadn't been so much hard work.
May 21st, 2009: Socking in for the holiday weekend
Commencement is this weekend, and all the smarter and wealthier locals take the week off,
rent their houses out to the onslaught of visitors, and flee.
After last weekend, though, we're looking forward to not leaving the house this weekend. I have THREE whole days in a row off with no obligations whatsoever! The weather looks to be perfect for working outside, and we plan to dig, plant, haul water, sand, paint, hammer, and haul rocks all weekend. The photo at right gives some idea of what's left after sifting our "soil" through a frame of hardware cloth, so there are always plenty of rocks to haul.
May 25th: 2009: A perfect Memorial Day weekend
What a perfect weekend: I feel as if I'd been away from town for a month. We shopped carefully on Thursday to be sure we wouldn't need to go to town for ANYTHING, and then spent three luxurious days trying to kill ourselves and enjoying every minute of it.
Played a little music down at Tod & Sarah's Saturday night, but that hardly counts as leaving home, since they're all of two miles away. Sunday, Esther stopped out for tea and birdwatching, and we had a delightful time catching up with her.
But mostly, we did exactly what we'd expected to do, which was to dig and dig and DIG. I added nearly 150 myrtle plugs to surround the 25 bayberry seedlings on the bank, and we have heeled in at least more than a dozen roses, forsythia and hydrangea shrublings. I moved ferns, irises, roses, lilies, and peonies out of the temporary bed which will eventually be a vegetable garden. Ron finished digging out a well surrounding the oak tree that had been buried by rock and rubble when the driveway was created. Unsatisfied as usual with the merely functional, created a beautiful bit of stonework to hold the soil in place.
We outlined the borders with orange construction tape, and there are now three small sections ready for planting, plus one which looks as if it's had irises and lilies growing around the birdbath for years. I pumped the 55-gallon water barrel about half full, and if I keep the garden well watered, I should have "Michelle Obama arms" by the end of the summer.
When suppertime rolled around, Ron built us a new fire pit between two 'sitting stumps', and we cooked up the most wonderful meal, deliciously smoked in the cherry wood he's been hauling up the hill all winter long. Of course sitting there, I had a vision of an arc of Russian sage spanning from stump to stump, so now I suppose I'll have to find some.
June 2009
June 8th, 2009: Tupper Irises
Katherine's "Tupper Irises" began blooming today, and they are real beauties. A delicate shade of violet, they're fragrant, which I hadn't expected, and even the fragrance puts me in mind of violets.
I was just starting to wonder if maybe I'd been greedy in taking so many of those irises, since this new garden is really very tiny. But now I can't wait for them to need dividing! Deer don't like either irises or peonies, so I needn't confine them to the enclosed garden, but can put them anywhere there's a patch of sun. What a wonderful gift from a garden that's been on this road for nearly a hundred years.
Speaking of violets, I have succumbed to one of the gazillion pleas that have flooded my mailbox in the last two weeks from plant nurseries begging me to take their overstocks off their hands. I understand that when faced with Hard Times, normal people cut the chunk of the budget reserved for plants BEFORE adjusting the dinner menu to include thrice-weekly appearances of tuna noodle casserole. I guess it takes all kinds.
Anyway, both Greenwood Nursery and Bluestone Perennials have tempted me past my endurance with unimaginable markdowns, and I have unrepentantly spent the shocking sum of $26.00 for the following:
So I'm waiting anxiously for the UPS truck, and looking forward to a splendid, commitment-free weekend, which if the National Weather Service is to be believed, should be sunny and mid-70ish. We have a pile constituting about two thirds of the necessary cross-pieces for the "lattice" part of the log enclosure, and most importantly, two fully functioning chainsaws with which to cut them to size, so it's just possible that by Sunday night - after a lot more scrounging, hauling, leveling, cutting, and hammering - the hortus will be at last conclusus.
June 8th, 2009: Hortus Conclusus
Another action-packed weekend. Saturday morning we finished the exacting and exhausting work of hauling, placing, leveling, trimming and attaching the huge, heavy horizontal logs to the upright posts, then took a break for lunch before finally starting the fun part - attaching the small uprights.
I could not be happier with the results, especially the cool, curvy endpiece. My bright idea, it took longer to fit and trim that piece and get it into place than to complete the remainder of that entire 9' section. It was worth the trouble.
I have changed my mind hourly about what to grow on this
structure. The original plan was simplicity itself: sweet autumn clematis, and lots of it, with five rosa rugosa 'albas' sprawling in front, as a backdrop for a mixed border of roses, hyrdrangeas, lilies, irises, etc. Nothing but calm, soothing, green and white visible from below, including the bayberries and single white peonies on the bank.
The sturdy splendor of the real thing, however - 36 feet of blank canvas - has crowded that simple plan with a dizzying array of possibilities. It would be difficult to improve upon the vision I had, three years ago, of wisteria, fronted by pure white rugosa 'Blanc Double de Coubert', with masses of 'Johnson's Blue' hardy geranium and chartreuse lady's mantle foaming at its feet. That particular vision is about to become reality at Esther's, and it's all being moved up to our place soon anyway.
But of course every day I confuse the issue by going to work at a place which takes its 'Ivy League' label literally. Aside from the endless vertical acres of Boston ivy and Virginia creeper (which is growing wild and FREE in Esther's woods), there are two magnificent climbing hydrangeas growing up the clock tower across the plaza from my library, and I've always loved them...why not grow a climbing hydrangea up the oak tree? It's 75 feet straight up before there's any branching.
And then I start thinking of autumn and winter interest, since after all winter here lasts seven months at least. Hemlock would be beautiful, native, hardy, and free... but risky with wooly adelgig perpetually threatening, and in any event much too big eventually. Still, surely there's room to intersperse a handful of evergreen somethings...my favorite Chamaecyparis, or Pieris, or Ilex glabra, or something among the rugosas?
Oh, but then a message from Fred arrives. How to resist the temptation to plant half a dozen mannerly climbers with an elegant array of clematis twining through?
On the other hand, this is a wild place - who needs to be mannerly? And then I begin reciting the beguiling names of every rambling rose I've ever dreamt of over the years...'Rambling Rector', 'Bobbie James', 'Ghislaine de Féligonde' ...hell... 'Kiftsgate' (the original of which was, when last measured, 80' x 90' x 50' high)!
Now this is my kind of dilemma.
June 13th, 2009: Still more windows, and the cabin is christened
Yes, I know I'd sworn off windows, but they're quite addictive, you know. And when we saw a couple of brand new tall narrow windows that would fit perfectly on either side of the window seat,
on Craigslist, for $35 - well, even Ron said "do it."
So, coffee in hand, we left before 7:30 this morning, drove to the next town south of here, and about $100 later our car was full of stuff - not just the windows, which would have been more than worth the trip and the money, but also a really beautiful maple french door, and a lovely little chair with a cane seat that's the perfect height for making music.
Just what every 8'x8' cabin needs...a porch, a window seat, five windows and a massively windowed oak door, gleaned from four towns in three different counties and two different states! I finally got around to sanding and painting one of the great little windows Carole gave us last year, and Ron has installed all three of them, making the inside of the cabin cosy and bright.
Which was particularly welcome when Peter and Tod and their respective banjos, fiddles, mandolins, etc stopped over to practice for an upcoming gig. It poured rain the whole time they were here, but there was plenty of room for the four of us in our nice dry well-lit cabin.
June 14th, 2009: An impromptu garden party, and a heart-stopping arrival
A delightful afternoon, during which the Bills dropped in on their way back to Cleveland from the Boston Early Music Festival, and spent the afternoon hanging out in the garden, catching up, sampling the well water, photographing wildflowers, and just generally having a lovely time. (Well no, this isn't a wildflower; it's my 'Blue Moon" wisteria, just coming into it's first really big bloom down at Esther's, and soon to be transplanted into its permanent home.)
Speaking of wildflowers, perhaps the most astonishing event of the weekend: I was
pumping a bucket of water on Saturday morning, and suddenly, there appeared ten feet in front of my face, a five-foot tall FOXGLOVE, in full bloom.
This, the only foxglove I have seen for miles around (although I suppose David Hirsch may grow them in his garden half a mile down the hill), was nonchalantly springing up out of the rock, rubble and tangle of brambles left behind after the last bout with the excavator, like a dandelion in a sidewalk crack. That area is so rough (and destined to be dug up again soon), that I never even noticed it until it bloomed right under my idiotic nose!
Rest assured that after rooting out all the undesirables surrounding it and two much smaller compatriots, I dug them up carefully and moved them to more commodious accommodations, where I expect they'll immediately pout and languish and peter out. Isn't that amazing, though?
June 17, 2009: The first peony
Four days before the summer solstice, 23 days after being moved into the new bed, and more than a year and a half after I rescued them from the castoff pile at a local nursery, Mons Jules Elie has bloomed at last.
Worth the wait, I'd say.
June 18, 2009: 'Blue Moon' Wisteria
Some three years ago, during our first summer here, Ron built the prototype of our log garden fence down at Esther's, just about three feet wide. I had a vision of my 'Blue Moon' wisteria growing on it, with 'Blanc Double de Coubert' in front of the wisteria,
and a lot of Alchemilla mollis (lady's mantle) and below. Well, this is the third year, all three have 'leapt' as the old saying promises ("First year, sleep; second year, creep; third year, leap!"), and the blue, white, and chartreuse is even more wonderful than I'd imagined.
Unfortunately, it's been pouring down torrential rain since about 23 seconds after the first wisteria blossom opened, so not only is the light wrong for a really good photo, the poor rose is becoming more bedraggled by the minute. Oh, and the forest tent caterpillars, which are also having an exceptional year, have virtually defoliated both the rose and the wisteria.
Still, I can imagine 36 feet of this...
July 2009
July 5, 2009: the fence is finished, for real.
Another satisfying and productive holiday weekend, during which we finally finished the easiest part of the fence: attaching the small uprights. This "little" project, interrupted a few weeks ago, turned out to be a lot more time-consuming than we would have
imagined, since of course the materials aren't anything like straight, so endless rearranging was required to ensure they'd actually make contact with the cross-pieces in at least two or three places.
It was more than worth the wait and the effort, though. It's literally stopping what little traffic there is on Tupper. No kidding - people actually stop their cars at the bottom of the hill and gawk. The mailman actually braved the toboggan run to come up and make a delivery in person so he could get a better look at it. And one particularly brave soul parked on the road and hiked up to ask Ron where he'd gotten the plans for the fence and for my cabin. He was awfully disappointed to hear that the plans exist only in Ron's head.
July 10th, 2009: a blank slate
For a certain sort of demented gardener - me, for example - this photograph is irresistibly enticing. A blank slate, with perfect, double-dug, richly amended beds, ready to plant. We finally finished the last of the uprights for the fence last weekend, so I was finally able to dig beds right in front of it.
While I was in town replenishing the supply of manure, I accidentally picked up a couple of 'Endless Summer' hydrangeas and a lovely little Mountain Laurel, which turned out to be a dwarf variety, and so will add a much-needed evergreen touch to the garden. As the house site begins to make itself more and more apparent, it's clear that the garden is going to be more visible during the long upstate NY winters than I had imagined, so I have a feeling the fence will end up lined with hemlock, and the roses will be interspersed with a few broadleaf evergreens. We shall see.
July 13th, 2009: Both cabins shingled, and the garden overplanted
From a note to Fred:
July 14th, 2009: Excavator.
I didn't want to jinx this by talking about it too much beforehand, but thanks to Esther and her pal Roger, we seem to have a full-size backhoe today and tomorrow, AND the weather is even supposed to be cooperative. As far as I can tell, Esther knows everyone in this town, and one of her many old friends is a man who owns a company that rents heavy construction equipment. Honestly, at least for us, it's not so much the internet which makes the Yellow Pages obsolete as Esther's rolodex!
Anyway, Ron is spending today digging holes for the foundation for Esther's addition, and if all goes well, he'll spend tomorrow up at our place. Cross your fingers for no further calamities, please.
July 15th, 2009: Groundbreaking.
An auspicious day...no, not Russell Rucky's birthday, momentous as that is. Barring catastrophe today goes down as the official groundbreaking for our new house. The REAL house, the one we'll actually live in. Stay tuned...
July 17th, 2009: Houston, we have holes in the ground
Well, it's official: despite a glitch with the tractor on Wednesday, the ground is officially broken!
It was a lengthy glitch. After a very productive few hours, the boom suddenly locked up at about 10:30am - in an extremely precarious position, as you can see, and no amount of fussing, fiddling, or cursing had any effect. Poor Roger - we called him to tell him what was going on, and he said he'd be over as soon as he could get there..from Albany, a mere four hours away!
The thing sat there stubbornly for four hours, with four days of hard rain forecast to begin that evening. Feeling helpless, we idiotically worked off frustration, anxiety, and flashbacks from last year's excavator disaster with picks and shovels until we were completely exhausted.
You can, no doubt, guess the rest. Exhausted from digging, we staggered down the hill for
lunch, then hauled ourselves back up, praying that the monster hadn't yet rolled over. Threw ourselves down on the front porch of the cabin, and then started wondering if it would do any good to just give it one more try. Fired up the engine, and of course, it inexplicably leapt back into action.
I had just gotten down to Tupper Road on my way back home to look up Roger's number and let him know the tractor was working again when he called from home to let us know he was about ten minutes away. Argh. He decided to come out anyway, and it was really nice to get to meet him in person. Since we'd lost half a day's work (and especially since we were friends of Esther's), he kindly "forgot" to pick it up the next day...and the next, and miraculously, the rain wasn't nearly as bad as what had been predicted.
So no lives or limbs have been lost, the site is now level, there are 16 four-foot deep holes for foundation footings and piers, and the tractor has been picked up. And it's only taken us three years to get here.
A friend wrote to assure us that it's all downhill from here. It certainly will all be downhill if we get the two inches of hard rain they're predicting for tonight. I'm thinking we should maybe throw a couple of bags of Quikrete in each foundation hole and stand by with 5' sticks. Wait for rain, stir well, and presto, tomorrow we'll have footers! Ron seems unimpressed.
July 18th, 2009: A beautiful bench!
Will you look at this? This is half of a very large ash tree that Ron split for me a couple of years ago. There was a bench, along these lines but nowhere near as artful, at the base of a fir tree at Little Wolf, and I loved it so much that he's been planning to make a couple of them for our place just as soon as there was a place for them.
Oddly enough, the stack of bundled shingles that's been sitting in the garden path for a couple of months turned out to be perfectly located, and had become a favorite perch and indispensable sideboard. Now that the shingles are on the roof, we were missing this very handy spot, and Ron decided the time was right for the first bench to happen.
Of course I imagined the log, as cut, plopped on top of a couple of stumps with wedges cut in them - like the one at Little Wolf. Possibly a bit of sanding, but mostly rustic and functional. I don't know what I was thinking...Ron doesn't really do functional. At least, he doesn't ever stop at functional.
So the next thing I knew he was hand-chiseling out a mortise in the bottom of the log, which fit perfectly into the rough tenons he'd carved into the stumps. He knocked it all together with a
sledgehammer, leveled it perfectly into place, then sanded the top smooth as silk and slathered it with three coats of marine varnish.
The splendid result, as you can see, while rustic, looks as if it belongs indoors, not out, and feels as if it's been there for centuries.
The other half now seems destined to become a pair of boot benches on either side of the front door of the main house, and I can't wait to see them.
July 22nd, 2009: Foundation materials
We stopped at a favorite locally-owned lumberyard today and were delighted to hear that
they had all the materials we'll need for the foundation piers, at the same or better prices than Big Blue and Evil Orange, and better still, they'll deliver anything over $300 for free.
So a whole load of cement mix and rebar is on the way in a week, as well as a 20' ladder that would have been a bit much for the CR-V. It looks as if they'll have all the plywood, etc that we'll need for the next few phases of the project, too. We'll spend the next week readying the holes for the footers... so don't be looking for any pretty pictures, unless you have a thing for pickaxes and mud.
July 25, 2009: The first lilies - and another bench
I got home from work yesterday to find yet another bench in place of the makeshift cinder block-and-board contraption I'd set up next to
the cabin. Ron split, sanded, finished, installed, and leveled this one, which is perfectly sized to fit under the eaves of the cabin, all before leaving for town to teach this afternoon's batch of students. Hmmm...it looks remarkably like a daydreamy scrawl in my garden notebook. Isn't he amazing?
And Saturday, those intrepid seven-foot asiatic lilies that I dug up and moved in a bucket from Esther's place two weeks ago actually bloomed, as if nothing had happened. The fragrance is intoxicating, and travels all the way down the driveway.
July 27th, 2009: The first foundation pier!
No, really. This is IT. There are no words to describe the amount of work and anguish this photograph represents. And just so we didn't get to thinking it really would all be downhill from
here, the night after Ron had dug a foot below the excavated hole to level and place the footer - by hand, mind, four feet down in wet, heavy mucky clay, amid clouds of blackflies and mosquitoes - we had yet another hellacious thunderstorm, which washed about half of that muck right back into the hole.
But he's got it in place, and the rebar and cement and mortar mixes are coming at the end of this week, and he's had a nice chat with our wonderful town building inspector, who seems as interested in helping us beat the deadline for that $8,000 tax refund as we are, and he's got the paperwork for the building permits for both projects (our house and Esther's addition), and it really feels like this is happening at last.
UNDATED UPDATE:
Okay, okay, I hear you - all of you. Long, long overdue for an update. The thing is, how many clever ways can I say "it's still raining"? And honestly, how many pictures of foundation blocks submerged in mud do you really want to see? So let's see just how quickly we can get through the next six months:
August, 2009: Rain.
So remember that part where I wrote:
September, 2009: And still more rain.
September was...rainy. We released a new CD, won an award for another, did a couple of radio interviews and a bunch of concerts. But digging holes was not in the cards.
We did, however, manage to find a good hewing axe on Ebay, and Ron has been teaching himself a wonderful new skill. So we have a steadily-growing pile of these beautifully hand-hewn beams, and an even more steadily-growing pile of ideas about how to use them.
Autumn 2009
October 16th, 2009: four inches of snow.
This wet year has one thing going for it at least: the leaves are spectacular. See them there, under the four inches of snow?
November 4th, 2010: Good news/bad news
Well, if the weather ever cooperates, I will have quite a bit more time to put the garden to bed and help Ron with the foundation. Today turns out to be my last day at work - at least for few weeks. I'll be coming back for a day or two just before Thanksgiving to wrap things up for real, and to find out whether the wonderful folks there have managed to scrape up another project while I was gone.
It could happen - they really want to make it happen - it's been happening for the last 17 months - but I'm really not holding my breath this time.
November 27, 2009: last-ditch effort
Ron spent all day yesterday shoulder-deep in holes not quite wide enough to bend over to tie your shoes, prying cold hardpan mud and rocks out of the bottom with whatever implements he could press into service after the second (third? I don't remember) pick axe handle broke. There's no room to swing a pick axe anyway.
Scraping hard, cold clay out of the ground a handful at a time, then hefting it out to above your shoulders - some guys just know how to have a good time. Once he got each hole as deep as required and as flat as necessary, he hauled two chimney blocks (probably 70-80 lbs each) across the building site, which looks very much like a mine field, with sixteen 4-5' deep holes punched at 8' intervals, then pumped a bucket of water, hauled that to the edge of the hole (just getting the bucket to sit without toppling over required more grubbing), then hiked halfway
down the toboggan run to the the pallet of tarped concrete mix. Hauled an 80-lb sack up, up, up (probably the equivalent of two or three flights of stairs), dumped it in the mixing tray, mixed it, then climbed back down the hole, checked and re-checked to be sure everything was still level, then gingerly shoveled the concrete neatly into the chimney blocks (with a shovel handle that's too long to fit sideways in the hole, remember), inserted a length of rebar and carefully plumbed it.
It wasn't nearly as much fun as this sounds, especially with the looming anxiety of the knowledge that our annual 5 or 6 months of snow is already long overdue. But he persevered, and finished the entire south wall of the house-to-be, which would normally have been a good two days' work or more. So, six foundation blocks down and (ugh) ten to go...
I can't WAIT until this foundation work is finished - it's utterly nerve-wracking,
and there's virtually nothing I can do to help, aside from pumping and carrying water, and handing him things. Which I'm sure is a great help when you're in the bottom of a hole and can't reach the level without climbing out, but feels a lot like useless when you're out of the hole and wish you could REALLY help. This is such precision work, though, that he won't hear of help from anyone at all - which isn't as unreasonable as it sounds, since the inspector, nice as he is, will make him tear it all out and start over if it's not perfect.
So I work off my anxiety by cooking, cleaning, taking care of post office runs & laundry (two chores Ron hates), working on publicity, searching fruitlessly for gigs, and of course planting bulbs. Our local feed & seed had those gigantic sacks of mixed daffodil bulbs on clearance and I stupidly picked up several, which are now surrounding the big oak tree above my cabin. I generally don't like the spotty effect of those mixed sacks, since everything blooms at different times and you don't get the big splash you imagine as you're planting, but the extreme bargain turned my head and overwhelmed my better judgment, so I'll have to live with one spotty corner - or just call it the cutting garden, and possibly dig out the more hideous varieties that appear and unload them on Freecycle.
I guess I'm carrying a bit of daffodil baggage after having been forced to plant a huge lot of the most loathsome daffodil ever devised at the place we were caretaking our west - a lurid variety called, appropriately, Fortissimo - one which puts me in mind of traffic cones and fast food restaurant booths. The owner of the place adored them, and ordered 500 or so from my favorite bulb catalog. So of course my worst nightmare is that after all that work this bargain mix will turn out to be 85% Fortissimo and the rest duds. Next year I will order my favorite varieties, from Van Engelen, in July, like the thoughtful, seasoned gardener I am.
December 1st, 2009: The concrete pour
A very big day. The footers are ready at last, and thanks once again to Esther, we were able to bag the ridiculous idea of mixing 135 sacks of concrete by hand, and we actually hired a truck to pour our piers!
It's very important for the tube forms - which are after all just made of heavy-duty cardboard - to remain perfectly dry before the concrete is poured. This, as you might imagine is easier said than done, since they also have to be perfectly plumb and securely braced before the pour, a painstaking operation which takes time. The trucks (there's a pumper and and mixer) were due to arrive at 1pm, and Ron & I just about killed ourselves to get them all ready in time without allowing them to sit out collecting moisture all night.
We were relieved and grateful when our good friend Tod (see "the stump", above)
showed up during his lunch hour to lend a hand in the last hair-raising moments of this ordeal. The trucks arrived early, but they had a LOT of work to do just to assemble the hose and run it up the 150-foot toboggan run, so that bought us a bit of time. With Tod's calm, competent help, we were able to get everything braced and ready without making the guys wait - which would have cost additional money, of course.
So the pour began. It's difficult to describe the amazement of watching seemingly endless cubic feet of perfectly mixed concrete spewing like magic out of that hose, after having mixed and hauled so much of it by hand. Miraculous what money can buy.
Not that it's easy, mind. That huge hose weighs a ton, and is extremely difficult to maneuver, even without another two tons of concrete in it. Maneuvering that hose among sixteen
lightweight cardboard tubes perched in a muddy minefield without knocking them out of plumb is nearly impossible. But with three strong, smart men working together, they managed remarkably well.
Until tube number 8. Fourteen of the tubes were a brand called "ecoform" and the other two were sonotubes, just because the supply yard ran out of the ecoforms. We had noticed that the sonotubes were a lot lighter, and not waxed, but didn't think much about it. We set them all up identically, braced them all identically, identical footers, etc.
But while the guys were pouring the 8th tube, the two sonotubes behind them, already full of concrete, dissolved. Just melted away, leaving a huge pile of shredded cardboard and wet
concrete. Sickening...and of course, expensive.
Thank heaven there were two carpenters in attendance. Ron & Tod rushed to turn eight nice siding boards and a bunch of scrap into impromptu forms. As they say, haste makes waste: one of these burst apart when half filled. Long about this time I asked Tod if he didn't need to be getting back to work, and he laughed and said said "are you kidding? I gotta see how this turns out!".
It turned out just fine, fortunately. The second built form was a lot stronger, and held together. We ended up using 3 cubic yards of concrete, which was certainly more than we expected, but not as much as it could have been. The 14 ecoforms are just fine, and the other two are unsightly, but will do the job. The tubes were installed on top of rather massive chimney block footings, but we weren't supposed to backfill until the inspector got up there. We called him and told him what was going on, and he said he'd seen Ron's work and was sure everything was fine. We're very grateful to have a reasonable inspector, good friends, and a pile of wood at the ready, which is the only reason that we now have a foundation rather than sixteen big piles of concrete.
But shoot - what a lot of panic, hard work, and expense! I've never heard of this happening to anybody else, but the guy running the pumper truck assured us that we had done everything just right, and that this happens with sonotubes - the brand specifically - all the time. He wasn't a bit surprised, and rattled off a litany of spectacular failures he's witnessed that made ours look like small potatoes. He also regaled us with hair-raising stories of the huge commercial and government project he has seen this year utterly ruined by the extremely wet weather. Bridge footings and skyscrapers with the exact same issues we've had on our little scrap of land. Oddly comforting, that.
December 4, 2009: Unemployed
Well, I got the official boot from my employer yesterday afternoon. It's almost good to have it over with for certain, rather than feeling that every paycheck was sure to be my last for years on end. I haven't had a paycheck in a month in any event.
No time to worry about it today; we have 16 gigantic concrete foundation piers up the hill exposed to the weather, and a 24-hour rental of yet another earth-moving machine with which to cover them up. This isn't a big excavator, but a "Dingo" - a small stand-behind (like a souped-up forklift) trackhoe kind of thing. Very high hopes here.
December 7, 2009: 17 degrees and 21 tons of gravel to push around
Lots of snow out there, and it was 17 degrees last night. Which means the ground is a bit difficult to work with. We got almost half the piers backfilled on Thursday before it got dark, but the rest need to be buried pronto, before the frost starts throwing them around. So this week we're working on Plan B, which involves backfilling the rest with gravel. We had 21 tons of gravel (that is neither a euphemism nor a typo) delivered this morning, and the little skid steer is arriving again any minute. And a winter storm on the way...
December 17, 2009: Winter for real
I guess we're done building for the year. Winter, big time. Overnight lows in the single digits, and about seven inches of snow this morning, still coming down heavily. Looks like a Christmas card. Ah, well...it was fun while it lasted.
At least the propane guy is being punished for tucking a $217 bill in our door a minute ago. He's out there in his gigantic truck on Tupper Road, spinning his tires like mad and succeeding only in sliding further downhill. He started off on the uphill side of the end of our driveway, and if he keeps this up much longer, he may have slid far enough down the hill so that Ron will be able to get in when he returns from his lessons this morning. Of course there are two deep ditches on either side of the road, so this is probably not the wisest course of action. Guess I'll suit up and hike out there to see if he needs anything...
~2010~
Winter 2010
Winter in upstate NY. Let's see...I could post the photo of the ruler buried 24" in the snow, or just say "see Winters 2009, 2008, and 2007". It certainly is lovely, and there's a LOT to be said for not needing to leave the house to get to work in all this.
As usual, we've spent much of the early winter focusing on music, with some very nice results, including a good start on the next CD and several great gigs in our very own town for a change. And we've had over 1,600 downloads of our music this year via iTunes, Amazon, CDBaby, and various others, which means we're getting out there.
February, 2009:
After a bitter January, during which we, um, enjoyed wind chills of -15 and below, in late February we were treated to predictions of near-hurricane-force wind gusts of blinding snow falling at more than an inch an hour. 35 mph is considered a blizzard, and they were telling us to expect gusts up to 74 mph. It turned out not to be quite as bad as all that, but it certainly was exciting for a while, and we did end up getting about 28" of undrifted snow. They called it a 'snowicane', among other ridiculous things. Naturally we had a short-notice gig about 30 miles south smack in the middle of it, followed the same day by a further 60 mile-drive (then 90 miles back home in the dark). Let's hear it for four-wheel drive.
Right about that time, we started ripping out the bathroom at Esther's place, where we live - another little project to help raise funds for materials for our own place. The cast iron bathtub made it safely and uneventfully down stairs (yes, the two of us did it ourselves), and the floors, walls and some ceiling have been torn out. Predictably, the usual atrocities were discovered behind those walls and floors, and much, much MUCH rewiring and replumbing has been done. Ron is swearing off remodeling projects forever, and if you wonder why, here's a snippet of a message to Fred about what "installing a new toilet" actually entails:
Argh. No more remodeling!
March 2010
March was consumed by more work on the bathroom, many many rehearsals and performances, and a lengthy battle with bronchitis. And wild swings in the weather: from unspeakable wind chills and 28" of snow to 60+ degrees. Which, of course means gardening season is upon us, whatever the calendar says.
Today I managed to schlep 400 lbs of manure up to the
garden, which is exploding in a most gratifying manner after the unseasonable heat. I will have to spend the next two months fretting about every cold snap and tucking in the hydrangeas, which have LEAVES on them. Fortunately, aside from that, and the poor snowdrops - which are of course fried - it seems to have cooled off just enough that it's still pleasant to work outside, but "Fred's Scillas" are in suspended animation, and the tulips that are up won't go much further for a while.
So I got all the beds raked out and manured, and rearranged some stepping stones, and generally putzed around. I still can't believe there is actually a garden there - I have a garden!! My little seed order has arrived - a whole bunch of nigella, and some Fr. Cupani sweet peas, and a pack of white four o'clocks.
We had our first cookout last night - on Easter Sunday, can you imagine? - and we just kept adding wood to the fire until the songs of the robins had given way to the hooting of the owls and it was completely dark. It's really miraculous that if you stand in our driveway facing south at night, there is not a single light on the distant ridge. Not a cabin, not a trailer...nothing. I can't believe how fortunate we are to have gotten this lovely little piece of land.
April 9th, 2010
The garden is utterly splendid - completely packed with three inch high tulips which I was an idiot to plant in the woods. All the roses are leafing out, and I was thrilled to find a listing on Craigslist Wednesday for someone nearby with seedlings of hybrid rugosas Delicata and Belle Poitevine for sale. I about killed myself excavating a tiny little bed for them, carving it out of what looked like hardpan right up against my little cabin. The soil beneath the layer of construction debris turned out to be very nice, and better than that once I'd sifted it through the big frame sifter that Ron built us last year and added a bunch of peat and manure. Of course the inevitable by-product was yet another shin-deep pile of rocks.
That done, we took a longish and lovely drive out to pick them up yesterday, and found not
the seedlings described in the ad, but rather big hefty plants with really well-developed rootstocks, happily overwintered in a mountain of sheep manure. The only hitch was that the two varieties had intertwined to the extent that the seller had no idea which was which, so I am now the proud owner of a mystery rugosa. I hope it's Belle Poitevine, but Delicata is nice, too, and for (!) $4, I wish I had space for a hedge!
I'm completely obsessed just at the moment with building a tuteur worthy of Father Cupani's sweet peas, and I have hit on what I consider to be a brilliant solution involving 6' sections of rusted rebar and grape vines. I'm convinced that this is a stroke of genius, especially since the beautiful iron ones I had in my old garden are going for upwards of $150 each these days, and they'd be too fancy for this garden anyway. Go ahead and laugh - I think this is going to work!
Off to tuck in the hydrangeas before it dips down to 27 degrees, as they're predicting. If a rose required such heroic measures I'd chuck it out and plant something hardier...
April 13th, 2010
I had planned to treat myself to a little road trip (it's only 23 miles, but country roads, so c. 45 minutes) to a very nice nursery up north tomorrow, but today Ron & I were coming back from town when he realized he'd forgotten to get a lime for the guacamole he wants to make tonight. So we stopped at a largish farm market on the way home to see if they might have one.
Well, he got two lemons, a lime, and a grapefruit for $1.25, but that was not the best bargain to be found. Every once in a while this place picks up cartload of shrubs from a farm auction somewhere down in the Susquehanna valley, and when the stars are favorably aligned, Finds Can Be Had. Today I found three good-sized, healthy Thuja occidentalis 'Elegantissima' which don't look to have been out of the ground for more than a couple of days. They have that lovely, graceful laciness that the ubiquitous Wal-Mart Arborvitae never do, and they remind me of Myrtle Hill Cemetery, where I spent many happy hours as a child. Hardy to zone 3 and $7 each.
Add to that, an exceptionally well-grown (and venerable-looking) Rhododendron, 'Roseum Elegans'. Hardy to -25, this one is a good 3' tall and so remarkably graceful and symmetrical that it called to me from 50 feet away. It's attributes are evidently limitless, as the mere fact of its inclusion in the RareFind nursery catalog attests.
Hang on to your hat...Ron parted with all of $15 for this lovely thing, which is destined to spread its branches under the shade of the oak tree anchoring the new 'winter garden' that I've been working on. This is an enormous curving border about 30 sprawling feet wide, on a very steep slope, visible all winter long from the window over the kitchen sink in the kitchen-to-be. It will be the home of my treasured Chamaecyparus obtusa 'Nana Gracilis', as many different kinds of ferns and mosses as I can convince to grow there, a nice clump of Solomon's Seal from our friend Peter, and all the snowdrops and daffodils I can stuff in. And some day, my impressive Hellebore collection. I have none yet, alas, but I just love them, and some day...
The little iron bench that was our first furniture (we carried it up there the day the land transferred) sits next to the big oak, and the Thujas will eventually be the start of a nice hedge behind it, interspersed with fragrant Daphnes and Clethras. The stone circle that I refer to as our summer kitchen is right in front of the bench, and will eventually be mere steps away from the real kitchen, as well as the veggies and herbs.
So that's the big news here. I don't know when an expenditure of $36 has created such excitement.
April 14th, 2010
Well, the earliest tulips are up and there's no more postponing the deer fencing. I will get used to this...
April 18th, 2010
I rustled my first peony this morning. Named it Paeonia 34/96.
April 20, 2010
It's lovely, but somehow I didn't expect Apricot Beauty to be so...pink.
April 27th, 2010
Song sparrows are back!
April 29th, 2010
I hauled a lot of rocks today, but I think the borders are looking considerably more intentional. If the background of all my photographs is going to have to include deer fencing, at least the foreground will look better.
May 3rd, 2010
Temperatures in the mid- to upper- eighties over the weekend just pounded the dickens out of the daffodils and tulips, but we had a cool rain last night and this morning, and what's left is to die for. I know this tulip is one of about 12,000 such photos taken by me and every other idiot with a close-up lens, but it makes me happy. I told Ron that we can't reasonably expect to see another year like this - with early and late daffs AND early and late tulips, AND rhodies, AND four types of violets all blooming at the same time, together with the starflowers and trillium. Maybe once in a decade. Or not. The sky is so blue it's almost painful to look at, and the trees have fully leafed out since Friday, so the light is beautifully dappled even at
high noon.
And new birds are arriving daily. Today we saw "the Dude" (Rose-Breasted Grosbeak) back at the feeder. Somehow he seems so much less obnoxious since one of our neighbors told me that he spends as much time sitting on the nest as the Missus. Missus was having a terrible time trying to figure out how to work the finch feeder, since the perches are a little too short, and it's a tight squeeze for her to get to the holes. The Dude managed to figure it out first, and reached down to feed her! Awww....
May 9th, 2010
And this morning, there's snow on the roses.
May 13th, 2010
Still having 25-degree overnight temps, but thankfully no casualties, thanks to the old bedsheets draped attractively over the hydrangeas every night. Frost is a fragile thing, and it doesn't take much to stave it off. I'm so grateful that I don't have an orchard to fret over.
I went for a walk in our woods this morning and ended up lingering in our little Moosewood grove, alongside the old logging road that borders our land. The light was perfect, and the trees are blooming. More photos on FaceBook.
Ron's been working way too hard on Esther's addition, and it has gone from bare framing exactly a month ago to an actual room, complete with an actual roof, three splendid picture windows and electricity. Saturday I learned how to be a roofer's assistant. We got all the shingles done during sunshine, blustery wind, HAIL, rain, and sunshine again, with the forecasters assuring us that Armageddon was upon us, to be followed by a week of hard rain and hard frost. What an exhausting day.
But it's done, and it's dry. The insulation and flooring was delivered yesterday, so that's coming up once the electrical work gets inspected. It shouldn't be too awfully long until we're working on our own place!
May 12th, 2010
Indigo Buntings are back...dozens of them, it seems, flitting through the grass all around Esther's place.
May 14th, 2010
Wood Thrushes! I wandered through our woods this morning, oblivious to the most appalling humidity. The Wood Thrushes sang, the honey locusts perfumed the forest, and I found that our patches of Trillium and Mayapples had both increased considerably since last year. Photos on Facebook.
May 16th, 2010
I heard a hummingbird buzz by today. Uh-oh...there's a whole new hunk of house where their feeder was, so we're going to have to figure something out - soon. Don't want to get on the wrong side of a feisty hummingbird!
Here, at last, is the first of what I imagine will be quite a few anguished and tediously detailed notes abut the building of our little house on "Upper Tupper". Tupper Road, for those of you who haven't yet seen it, is a country lane that meanders gently past a couple of decrepit barns, a few old farmhouses, and a trailer or two before turning into a dirt road and heading straight up into the woods.
This stretch affords tantalizing glimpses of the occasional funky remnant of the commune which sprang up here in the more recent past: tipsy yurts, shacks, and A-frames built by stoned hippies and currently returning peacefully to the earth; the remains of the sauna that burned down when the fire department couldn't find it; an outhouse long since tipped over and abandoned; a teepee - even a handful of actual houses with people living in them. When you get to about 1,750 feet, you're at our new place.Which is a peaceful and very isolated-feeling scalene triangle full of red oak and rocks, and moss and ferns, and witch hazel and moosewood and even a few trillium, and not much else just yet. The downhill side of the triangle is over 790 feet of steeply-banked road frontage. The uphill side is a 630 foot-long abandoned logging road, which has mossed over most romantically, and which is lined by many of the largest trees on the land, each of them surrounded by an enormous heap of fieldstone. Okay, so it's not hundreds of acres of wilderness in the Siskiyou mountains, but it is surrounded by at least a 'hundred acre wood', and it's ours, and it is paid for.
As you can see, there's nothing but woods on either side of the road. No lights, no telephone poles - the reach of the grid ends at Esther's place (where we're living now) and we certainly intend to keep it that way. You can't see another house or even a mailbox, and the only other inhabitants you're aware of are the deer and coyotes, the hawks and ravens, and the ubiquitous flock of wild turkeys. It's a pretty special place, and we'll tell its story here. This isn't a blog so much as a chronological repository for photos, musings, complaints, and email messages sent to Fred and several other faraway friends. So if you get the feeling you've read bits of this before, you probably have.
July 2006
It was at the end of July 2006 that our friend and neighbor David Hirsch first offered us this piece of his land. David is one of the original members of the Lavender Hill commune that colonized Tupper hill (and founded the Moosewood Restaurant) in the early 70's, and he has held on to about 50 beautiful acres on both sides of the road. The communal mindset is still prevalent; boundary lines around here are still pretty hazy and nobody seems to know or care quite where their land starts and stops. This particular parcel is a few acres just across the road and uphill from Esther's place. As beautiful as it looked from the road, though, when we saw on the tax map that the longest edge of the triangle was along the road, we assumed it must be too narrow to be of much use as a buildable lot.
But on August 6th, 2006, when we finally climbed up the steep bank from the road and walked the land for the first time, we saw at once just how peaceful it was and how right it felt, and we knew this was it.It's remarkably isolated. Although it's only a few acres, and oddly-shaped at that, it is surrounded on the uphill side (bordered by the old logging road) by 40 mostly untouched acres of oak, beech, white birch, and a few red pines, all owned by a man who grew up in the area, but lives and works in Maryland, returning a few times a year to work on the log cabin he's lovingly building by hand. The woods on this land (ours and his) are both older and healthier than anywhere else on the road (because the land is too steep and rocky for building or farming), and there are quite a few really special trees here. Across the road are Esther's peaceful eight acres, surrounded by the remainder of David's 50 acres, which eventually slopes steeply down into a 510-acre biodiversity preserve.
It didn't take long to make the decision. We walked down to David's house, sat on his lovely terrace surrounded by the delicious fragrance of sweet autumn Clematis, and came to an agreement. Although it was the simplest of cash-for-land handshake deals, we agreed that might be smart to at least have a couple of lawyers make it official.
So David called his lawyer, and we called a different lawyer, and we got in touch with The Driveway Guy who has done such wonderful work on all our neighbors' driveways. And The Driveway Guy came out and looked at our land, and told us how long it would take and how much it would cost, and we all agreed that Labor Day weekend would be a
great time to make a driveway.Having my priorities well in order as usual, I immediately ordered a few hundred snowdrops and bluebells to plant on the banks of our new driveway. Meanwhile Ron, who is a lot smarter and more practical than I, got out his chainsaw and his tin hat and went to work clearing trees and brush from the driveway-to-be, hoping to keep the The Driveway Guy's costs down as much as possible.
September 2006
The Driveway Guy somehow never made it out on Labor Day, which was disappointing, but probably a good thing after all, since The Lawyers didn't seem to have even started drawing up the paperwork, what with the holiday weekend and all. Itching to get started before cold weather set in, but stymied by the lack of access to the land, Ron started turning the downed trees he couldn't use for the house into firewood, while I started hunting down houseparts on E-bay and Craigslist.
By mid-September, as you see at left, the driveway-to-be was about as clear as we could make it under our own power. It looks pretty accessible from this photo taken from the road, until you realize that the little speck back there in the woods is Ron. That bank is so steep you've got to be part mountain goat to get up there. This doesn't bother Ron, of course, but I'm considerably less physically gifted, and it was an act of bravery for me to get up and down that bank to clear brush, stack firewood, or just wander around. Ron eventually got tired of watching me clamor up and down the hill like a nervous toddler, and hacked a few steps into the bank, which the deer and I all appreciated very much!
The last week of September we drove to Cleveland for a lecture-recital at JCU, and while we were in the neighborhood Fred helped us pick up this splendid Jøtul woodstove in Mansfield, which I'd bought for $500 on E-bay back in August. It's worth about $1700 new! It is currently sharing our 360 square feet of living space with us, piled high with lutes. The weather that week was glorious - perfect for building a house. Except that there'd been no sign of The Driveway Guy.
October 2006
By the beginning of October, we were beginning to understand that The Lawyers did not share our sense of
urgency about this transaction. In fact, we had never actually spoken to "our" lawyer, who had in place an extremely effective guard dog, an unpleasant little creep incongruously named "Amie", whose mission in life seemed to be to make sure we never met "our" lawyer at all.The first weekend of the month, we drove to Cleveland for Sam & Jana's wedding and a lute seminar. On the way there we stopped at a yard sale and bought a cast iron bathtub for $20. We made arrangements to pick it up (ouch!) on the way back home, and hurried in anxiously to check for messages, only to discover that nothing had changed - except that more great weather for building a house had slipped away. And there was a rusty, footless bathtub in our back yard.
We continued clearing and stacking brush, outlined our imaginary house with fallen logs and started making drawings. The Driveway Guy said maybe he'd come next week. And the week after that.
The leaves began to turn and the colors were breathtaking. We'd kind of hoped to be able to get some stuff up there, and build a shed, and figure out which trees would have to be sacrificed in order to have enough sunlight to power our solar panels before the leaves fell. But, of course, with no driveway, there was no way to start any of that.
Meanwhile, we got a great deal on the 85-year-old bathroom sink of my dreams (which, unlike the bathtub, is in perfect shape!) at a local antique shop.Although we had a little flurry of excitement when the surveyors showed up and did their thing, The Lawyers had stopped returning my calls. I called David's lawyer, and was told in no uncertain terms that It Simply Wasn't Done to call The Opposing Side. I told them this was probably most insignificant and least adversarial transaction they would be likely to see in their entire working careers. They were unmoved.
On October 22, I won an e-bay action for a magnificent pair of Pella insulated double-pane
windows, each 96"x60". 600 bucks for the pair - they'd be well over $1000 each new. We're going to be able to see a lot of forest through 5'x8' windows! They were pretty close by, for an ebay auction - about 30 miles south. But since they weighed over 300 lbs each, we decided it would be worth it to pay someone to pick them up and bring them here. The local Pella store was nice enough to recommend someone they use, and he turned out to be efficient, affordable, very knowledgeable about the area, and a really nice guy to know.It sure would have been nice to have had him deliver them to the house site, but of course there was no driveway, so when they arrived on October 30th, we tarped them carefully and leaned them against our shed at Esther's. Still nothing from The Lawyers, despite a series of increasingly desperate telephone calls.
November 2006
On November 14th 2006, at 4:30pm, after more than 3 months and approximately 12,000 telephone calls, a miracle happened. The Lawyers had finally found fifteen minutes to read over the paperwork, and, finding nothing much of interest to complain about, were ready to allow it to happen. It took half an hour, and it couldn't have been more cordial. Our lawyer, as it turned out really was just as nice as we'd been told, and asked to be put on our concert mailing list. So it was finally official: we were landed.
We had planned to camp on our land the first night we owned it, but of course we made those plans in August. So we settled for taking over a little iron bench - our first furniture - and opening a bottle of champagne that night. It was turning cold, but the weather was remarkably good for this late in the year. Just fine for building.November 20th: We had now conceived, recorded, mixed, edited, designed, manufactured and released a new CD since all this began, but we still had no driveway.
So to keep busy, we drove to Brooklyn, NY to pick up the brand new Simpson insulated door you see at left. No, really - Brooklyn. Fred has a postcard from us to prove it. The seller, as usual, was somebody whose builder had ordered a custom size which turned out to be wrong. He just wanted to get it out from underfoot and to recoup a few bucks. This door was actually worth the trip - even Ron's excited about it.
More ebay houseparts: a brand new pair of Jeld-Wen windows (I'd never heard of Jeld-Wen either, but they're just about the nicest windows I've ever seen - better than Pella or Anderson!). Worth $700 new, we got them for $42. This may be the best deal yet.
On November 30th, having sensibly sworn off really long road trips for houseparts, we rented a u-haul trailer and drove 156 miles to Lockport, NY (just east of Niagara Falls) to pick up a set of steel-frame double french doors ($125). I imagine these at the foot of our bed, leading out to a tiny walled garden on the north side of the house.
We stopped in Rochester on our way home to pick up 15 feet of double-wall stove pipe which I'd bought for less half their retail price on Craigslist. The seller was a very interesting Native American survivalist who works on laser-guided missile systems or some such, and in his free time is planning and building a safe house in the wilderness with some friends.
Gee...we'd like to be building a house....
December 2006WE HAVE A CULVERT! On December 18th, 2006 the blessed if, alas, somewhat toothless fellows from our town's road crew appeared before 8am, and by lunchtime they had left behind the scene at left. They hauled away FOUR full two-ton dump truck loads in the process, which made me a bit worried about the prospect of excavating a 150-foot driveway.
December 29, 2006: another stupendous find: trolling Craigslist, I ran across 1,000 square feet of brand new cedar shakes - enough to cover our entire house - for 400 bucks! These ten boxes (at right) would have cost WELL over $2,000 new, not including shipping and sales tax.We'd been imagining our house as a little western style board and batten cottage, since that's the cheapest thing to build, but I guess we'll have to "settle" for cape cod-style shakes. Things are tough all over.
Make that two finds: This was also the day that I discovered the Freecycle list, which allows people to list things they want or want to get rid of, with the strict stipulation that everything must be completely free. Like online dumpster-diving.
Somebody in our area was unloading a perfectly good skylight, complete with screen, which we picked up this afternoon. Whether it ends up over the kitchen island or in a shed somewhere, it's a great thing to have. Look at me talking about where to put the skylights when we can't even get up to the building site....But still no word from The Driveway Guy. The leaves are gone. Just how long can the good weather hold out?
~2007~
January 2007
Until January 8th, that's how long.
By January 7th, we had a culvert and a tax bill, so we considered ourselves landed, despite the fact that we could not actually access the property without an airlift. I wrote in a message to Fred that day that it was an unseasonable 58 degrees, bringing out the delicious fragrance of witch hazel throughout the woods, and it was absolutely maddening to think of all the fine weather we'd wasted since Labor Day. We could have been nearly done by now.
It started snowing on the evening of Monday, January 8th. And of course, at 7am on Tuesday, January 9th, after a four month wait, The Driveway Guy showed up, unannounced, while we had a house guest here for an intense 12-hour practice session for which he had driven 12 hours out of his way.By nightfall on Wednesday January 10th, there was something very like a driveway up there, although it's very steep and the drainage and gravel haven't yet been put in, since the well-drilling rig will tear it all up immediately. Here's an excerpt from a note I wrote to Fred:
In the end, the drillers found bedrock at about three feet - hence the gut-wrenching pounding. But they also found water - lovely clear delicious water - at 95 feet. They left a dreadful mess, and a took with them a LOT of money. But we had infrastructure!"So the well-drillers arrived (also unannounced) at 7am yesterday.
It took them an entire workday just to get the rig in place. The Driveway Guy actually did us a huge favor by flattening out the very steep house site in order to get the rig in there, but they still had to pretty much lift it in and then jack the front wheels up about six feet off the ground. It was such an ordeal they just left it in place overnight.They were back at it this morning, and they've been pounding, pounding, pounding, POUNDING all the day long. And every crash is a dollar sign in my mind.
I've memorized the figures: $365 plus $27/foot. If they find water at 25 feet it will cost us $1040.
If they find water at:
50' = $1715.
75' = $2390
100' = $3065
150' = $4415
200' = $5765
Etc. They were at about 20 feet just before lunchtime, and it's now going on 4:30 pm.
And there is absolutely no way to know or even to guess what and when they'll find it. Or IF. And THEN we have to worry about the flow rate of whatever they do find. It looks as if the minimum flow rate of 5 gpm required by the health department will be much more than adequate for our needs, since we won't have a clothes or dishwasher, or a flush toilet, or a garbage disposal, or any of the other "necessities" of modern life. But what a nerve-wracking experience! It must be sheer hell out west, where the odds are actually against you finding anything and a 250' well is considered a real stroke of luck.Fortunately these guys could not possibly be nicer. They're like something from another universe, real old world blue-collar guys full of history and stories about the area who've been doing this for generations. They really like the idea that we're trying to build a house from scratch out of our pockets - unlike all the wealthy and clueless weirdos and hippies prancing around the general vicinity giving orders to the "tradesmen". Having a foot in both camps ourselves, we have carefully avoided mention of the fact that it was the weirdos and hippies that attracted us to Tupper Road in the first place.
Another cool thing is that thanks to the report they have to make to whatever government entities will now take a bite out of us for capital improvement to the land, we have the precise latitude and longitude of the house site, as well as the altitude, which we'd been wondering about.
The house is at 1,730 feet, which is maybe 30-40 feet below the highest point on our land. Ithaca proper is about 300 feet, so we really are as far up in the hills as it felt like we were. I don't know why I care particularly, but it makes me happy to have this statistic rattling around what's left of my brain."
And snow...
February 2007February 20, since we were both feeling miserable and had no business leaving the house in bitter cold, we took a little road trip to the other side of the Catskills along the Hudson River, to pick up this beautiful pair of mission-style french doors which I'd won on E-Bay. They are truly splendid - worth every penny and every mile, even in several feet of snow.
February - April 2007
Are you kidding? This is upstate New York!
(and this, by the way, is a chair)
April-May 2007
An extremely unpleasant interlude, during which we enjoyed a triumphant west-coast tour, made a ton of money and a lot of great contacts, followed immediately by a carjacking during which we watched a man with a gun drive off with our car, every penny we'd made on the tour, all our instruments, wallets, music, CDs, clothing, music stands - in short, everything we needed to make a living.
Our house could have burned to the ground while we were gone, and it would have had far less impact on our lives than losing the contents of that car at that moment. The car was insured, but nothing else - we're musicians! - and the total losses turned out to be in the range of $15,000, not including nearly $20,000 worth of irreplaceable instruments. A very, very horrible time, about which the less said the better - except that some weeks afterward, I managed to find the instruments in a pawn shop in Cleveland, and we were able to buy them back. I'm afraid our little project has taken on a whole new aspect, though.
June 2007
After a very long winter of thinking about building, followed by the aforementioned little adventure, an unwelcome reality has set in: the local building codes have not yet evolved to the point where the existence of a composting toilet negates the necessity of installing a full-size septic system. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are obliged by law to spend $7,000-$10,000 on a septic system to ensure the safe processing of bath- and dishwater.
Somehow, we don't seem to have an extra $7,000-$10,000 lying around; indeed we have recently been robbed of all the money we'd hoped to use for the summer's building. And given the income that a couple of musicians generate, the quote may as well have been a million.
Desperate, we're toying with the idea of getting a permit for a very large (20'x20') workshop with a wood stove and a loft. That would be more space than we have across the street in the tollbooth. We figure that once we have the shell up and the wood stove installed and inspected, we'd just keep adding stuff to it (like insulation, a kitchen and a hardwood floor) and then one day we'll sort of accidentally move in.
The letter of the law says that if we change anything structurally or add a wood stove, we have to have it re-inspected, but if the shell's in place and the stove is part of the original plan, then who's to know, right? Water is going to be an issue, but humans have been getting water in and out of their houses without benefit of electricity for some time now, and once the house is finished we'll need the exercise. Otherwise, we'll have propane for cooking, refrigeration, and heating water, and we'll have no need of any other utilities. Neither of us is completely comfortable with this scheme, but we really don't see any alternative.
June 6th, 2007: We have a building permit!I love small towns. Yesterday, we applied for a building permit, and today the town inspector called and told us he was kind of too busy to bring us the permit today, but the drawings looked great and we should just go ahead and get started.
The drawings did look great. I'd been futzing around with floor plans and scale drawings and free software for months, and then one morning Mr. Still Waters sits down with a pencil and a triangle, and an hour later he's produced a four-page architectural drawing that looks like it was done by a professional, and he drags my astonished behind to the the town hall, where I write a check for all of $45 for the building permit fee, and 24 hours after that the inspector calls and says he'll stop by tomorrow and drop off our permit, but it looks great and we should just go ahead and get started.
My head is still spinning. The weather is glorious; it's not quite 60 degrees, crystal clear and breezy. That should entice the honey locusts to hang on for a few more days. Life is good.
June 8th, 2007: Local lumber
Ron made a nice deal today with the owner of a local lumber mill: the guy will buy our trees, mill whatever we want to use for the house, and then work out a trade in dry lumber for whatever he can't provide out of our own material. So we'll have the enormous satisfaction of knowing that all the wood in the house will be either from our own trees or at least from local materials - and we're supporting a local business, which is very nice. WAY cheaper than Evil Orange or Big Blue, of course, and a better product to boot.
June 12th, 2007: The Driveway Guy reappears and is absolved
The elusive Driveway Guy (you remember - the fellow who was going to put in our driveway last Labor Day) made a rare appearance to roll and level the "driveway" enough so that a delivery truck could now theoretically DRIVE on it. This is big news, because the local lumber mill owner who'd agreed to buy/trade some of beautiful red oak for some of his nice dry rough-sawn framing lumber backed out when he got an eyeful of that steep grade.
But I forgave The Driveway Guy entirely when he told us he was certified to install septic systems and could do a minimal but legal one for us for $4,600. This is quite a difference from the $7,000-$10,000 we'd been quoted by everyone else! We still can't afford both a septic system AND a house, but IF I find some sort of outside gainful employment, maybe we could at least aspire to installing one before we get busted and fined for living in a building we're claiming is only a work/storage shed. We shall see.
June 13the, 2007: Where do log chains come from?
Building permit in hand, things seem to be happening pre
tty quickly on Upper Tupper. Four or five more big trees have been sacrificed for the drain field, but as painful as it was to do that, it will both make for a much safer house site and a much higher intake of light to the solar panels. Oddly, the site even looks somehow more enclosed this way. The inspector seems like an actual human being, and is willing to not particularly notice if we should accidentally move all our belongings into the "um, shed" we're building up there.We're renting a backhoe next Tuesday (the 19th) to prepare the site of the house (and the garden!!), and to dig the holes for the foundation piers. We've got 15 or more 20' logs up there that we need to deck up while we've got the backhoe.
For this we need one of those massive Jacob Marley chains and two gonzo hooks. We went to buy them and discovered they'd cost us well over 50 bucks - and to add insult to injury, they were all made in China, which just sent Ron over the edge. Relentless in my search for bargains, I hit FreeCycle and managed to arrange to borrow a log chain from a total stranger. Amazing.
June 19th, 2007: Excavator, part the firstWell, the best laid plans. Ron canceled his lessons for the day, the weather was cool and perfect, and the excavator never showed up. Some scheduling mixup or something. Grrr....
June 26th, 2007: Excavator, part the second
We finally got the excavator rescheduled for today, which naturally turned out to be over 100 degrees and humid as hell. We spent all day hauling logs out of the building site, and decking them up so the guy who owns the lumber mill can get up there and grade them. The log chain is so massive and heavy that I can barely lift it. But it was amazingly rewarding to haul it from tree to tree, wrap it around each log,
hook one end to the backhoe and then watch Ron drag, maneuver, swing, and stack them neatly on one side of the driveway.Ron also managed to make the extremely rough terrain something a bit more in the realm of level. Unfortunately, thanks to a particularly stubborn stump, the meter ran out before he could finish digging the holes for the foundation piers, so there's quite a bit of hand-digging in our future. That's one more point in favor of a very small house!
July 2007July 29, 2007: house guests, human and otherwise
July was entirely given over to music, travel, and several sets of house guests - including the one at left - all of whom helped battle off the encroaching depression at the lack of funds to continue work on Upper Tupper.
We spent a few days rehearsing and performing with Ronn McF, and an even more delightful time enjoying his parents' wonderful hospitality while rehearsing and performing in Maryland. We followed this up with some recording with Ronn's favorite Dorian engineer in MD, and also beginning work on our own Christmas album here.
Brad came for some much-needed R&R, and we all enjoyed wildflowers, waterfalls, woods, and Van Wilder.
And Lisa and Wendy's memorable visit wrapped up a busy month, bringing us news and documentation of some astounding happenings in Cleveland. Equally delightful was the chance to wander all over our woods with two amazingly knowledgeable naturalists who introduced me to several delightful inhabitants I'd either missed altogether or couldn't name. This is such a comfort: after a lifetime of being able to name (in Latin) virtually everything I see growing out of the ground, the last few years have been both exciting and disconcerting. The trunk of their car was characteristically packed full of field guides: birds, butterflies, insects, fungi, wildflowers, trees, etc, and I think of them every time I see a partridgeberry (Mitchella repens) or an Indian Pipe (Monotropa uniflora). August 2007
August 1, 2007: an idyllic afternoon
At one point yesterday I fled into our own woods and spent a few quiet hours clearing the
logging trail, which had a few squashed shrubs blocking it (after trees fell on them) and very recently had also begun sprouting some sort of thorny berry sprouts among the lovely moss nearly the entire 700 feet. It was certainly not anywhere near the top of the list of Important Things To Be Done, but it did wonders for my disposition, if not my back.The Indian Pipes, which Lisa and Wendy identified all over our woods, are still going strong, if a little pinker than waxy white now. I was also very happy to discover a tiny grove of Moosewood trees, Acer Pensylvanicum clustered along the edge of our land. And the wood thrushes sang continually while I was up there. What a beautiful spot - I can't believe it's really ours.
Wonderful news: Esther is going to pay us to fix the drainage at the tollbooth once and for all, and we're splitting the cost of a weekend rental of a tractor with her, so that we can finish up the work at our place, too. Since Esther has infrastructure in place, I did the 'Call Before You Dig' thing Monday, and we should have clearance from all the appropriate entities by some time tomorrow, after which we have official permission to dig at Esther's for the next three weeks. The Verizon guy was here this morning spray painting orange lines in the grass, and he talked to Ron about how to avoid digging up the buried phone line on the north side of the house. Most valuable information. The next step will be to schedule the tractor and order the gravel. So, big doings at the tollbooth.
Once we finish up at Esther's, Ron (taking a well-deserved break on the freshly decked-up logs at left) hopes to finish digging the holes for our foundation piers.We've just bought a nice load of dry plywood from our good friend Peter, who kindly gave us a great deal on quite a few brand new leftover sheets from his own project and is even delivering them for free. We've got - just barely - enough money to buy cinder blocks, concrete, and everything else we need to build an enclosure, we think. Nothing liveable, but something in three dimensions, at least.
After that, we'll be living hand-to-mouth, so we'll just have to see how many "house" concerts we can rustle up!
August 13, 2007: Excavator, again?
We've got a tractor coming tonight which we get to keep for the entire weekend - through Tuesday morning! - for the price of one day's rental, because the rental place has screwed up our order so many times over the last couple of weeks. This makes me awfully happy, because Ron has a very long list of IMPORTANT things to accomplish using said tractor, and IF there's any time and energy left over, he will also push some dirt around in the general vicinity of the garden-to-be. So the likelihood of that extra time materializing has just increased threefold! Oh boyohboyohboy...
August 22, 2007: Or not...
The excavator that they delivered last week was not what we'd ordered, and was, in fact, dangerously unsuited to our terrain. Ron did what he could, but the front wheels lifted off the ground at surprising moments and when the whole thing threatened to tip over while we were still on Esther's comparatively flat driveway, he called to tell them to come and take it away.
And yet another tractor is allegedly being delivered this evening, which will allow Ron to do the drainage work at Esther's place, which will buy us at least a month or two of free rent. So things aren't SO bad, I guess.
September 2007
September 3, 2007: The Right Excavator at last
Glory be...we finally managed to get the right excavator, and we have dug a respectable drainage ditch three quarters of the way around
Esther's place, all without hitting the telephone line, the water line, or the propane line. Of course this means that we dug an awful lot of it by hand - argh.But we also unearthed the pitiful excuse for a drainage pipe that Esther paid good money to have installed some years ago, and it was very easy to see what the problem had been. It was about 12, maybe 15 feet long, severed nearly all the way through in several places, and packed completely solid full of dirt. It's no wonder this place was uninhabitable when we got here, with that thing as the only defense against all the water running off the road, and no vapor barrier under the floor. I'm so glad that our own land is above the road.
So now there's about 50 feet of nice new drainpipe redirecting the water to each side of Esther's house and off down the hill, all encased in gravel and topped with leftover mulch from the Township's never-ending battle with roadside brush. I have to say it feels wonderful to be able to make some major improvements to Esther's place. She's so much more than a landlady.
We got unbelievably lucky with the tractor, though. The guy at the rental place (which is a locally-owned building supply house, not a big-box mega-store) felt so guilty about having disappointed us several times with inadequate or broken down tractors, that not only did he give it to us for the coveted Labor Day weekend slot, which is often scheduled a year in advance, he "forgot to pick it up" until well into Tuesday. So you may believe we got an awful lot done over the weekend, despite having obligations on two days which forced us to get cleaned up and into the car earlier than we wanted to.We skidded some more logs, dug some foundation holes, did a bit of leveling, and yes...Ron actually scooted the tractor up the hill further than was probably safe, plopped down the stabilizers, and scooped me out a fan-shaped garden bed that
would have taken me YEARS to dig by hand in the glacial debris that passes for topsoil here. No, I sure wouldn't have asked for - or even thought of a fan-shaped bed. But with with the tractor stationary, and the backhoe able to reach only whatever it was able to reach, that's what I've got, and I couldn't be happier with it!Unfortunately, in the northeast corner of the site, there's a monster oak tree stump exactly where the corner pier block needs to be, and even this excavator couldn't deal with it. Shifting the footprint of the house would require a lot more excavation, would adversely affect the solar gain, and worst of all, would require cutting down more trees we're just not willing to sacrifice, so it looks as if there's going to be a whole lotta digging going on before we can put in the pier blocks. Can we do it before the snow flies? And if the excavator can't do it, what on earth makes us think we can do it by hand? Stay tuned...
September 7, 2007: Cinder blocks. Lots and lots of cinder blocks.
Well, the queen of Craigslist managed to FINALLY locate someone wishing to unload a few cinder blocks.
Of course, we had to rent a truck to pick them up...but do you know what they're charging for new ones these days?? I was horrified. Cinder blocks are supposed to come from out back behind the garage, aren't they? And should one actually have to break down and purchase a few, on no account should they cost more than about a quarter a piece.Which is what they ended up costing us, after the truck rental, mileage, and gasoline. The guy at the rental place (another local mom-and-pop) heard what I was planning to do and very kindly gave me the commercial mileage rate - $.25/mi. rather than the usual (gulp) $.79/mi.
Of course no amount of money could compensate for the inc
redible effort of loading more than 150 large cinder blocks completely swathed in poison ivy into a rental truck six inches off the ground, realizing the entire time that this truck could never, EVER haul its pathetic old wheezing tailpipe up our toboggan run - I mean driveway. So today I'm so sore all over that I can barely type, yet there are two pallets loaded full of neatly stacked cinder blocks at the BOTTOM of our driveway. I have no idea how on earth we're going to get them up to the building site. But they were "free"!
And perhaps (although I doubt it) once we've hauled all of them up the toboggan run, the prospect of doing laundry and grocery shopping in February won't seem so daunting.
Courage...I remember thinking the first time we crept our way 13 miles and over 2,000 feet up the switchback mountain road leading to Little Wolf, that I would NEVER be able to drive up this road myself. I ended up quite happily doing all the errand-running into Happy Camp - dump runs, laundry, post office, gasoline for the generator, phone calls - including picking up every last scrap of our worldly possessions, one pick-up load at a time, for weeks and weeks when we first got there. I learned to enjoy that trek; I can learn how to do this, too.
September 18, 2007: Newfangled contraptions
A minor victory today: at 6:01am, we were standing at the rental counter of The Place Whence Cometh Power Tools, and at 6:20 am, we were towing home a super heavy-duty log splitter. As you might imagine after all the clearing
we've done, we have an astonishing amount of firewood - probably at least 3 cords - cut to stove length, but not split. I'm just not strong enough to do it, and after this winter's shoulder injury, Ron should not ever lift a splitting maul again as long as he lives.His shoulder has been slowly improving, and I'm determined to keep it that way. So I've been watching him like a suspicious wife and scolding at him every time he so much as looks at a log. It's too bad, because he likes to do it.
Anyway, I've been saying for months now that the new routine is that whenever we need to cut wood for any reason, Ron will buck it up to stove length, and we'll pile it where it's easily accessible from the driveway. No splitting allowed. Then we'll rent a really good log splitter twice a year, split like crazy for 24 hours, and then spend a week stacking it. So that little plan is now officially in place. I figure if I put $13.34 in an envelope every month, it'll always be affordable, and if he knows I'm determined to do it, he'll relax about it and not suffer from "wood anxiety" as we call it. We'll see how this goes.
September 19, 2007: three cords of BTUsWell, as you can see from the photos, we certainly had a productive day. I took a picture of some of the logs (there are stacks like this scattered all over the place) around 7am, and the picture of an exhausted but happy Ron sitting next to the small mountain of firewood (one of two that size) was taken just before lunch. By 6:30 pm both small mountains had tripled, and we were on our way to town to return the splitter, although it wasn't due back until 6am the next day.
WHAT a wonderful tool. I actually did all but
about three logs; poor Ron spent the entire day hauling wood up and down hills to keep feeding the splitter, which was exhausting but didn't endanger his injured shoulder. If I can spend ten hours splitting wood, anybody can do it. $80 for a 24-hour rental, and we've got almost THREE CORDS of wood split - in one day. So I'm hurting, but I'm happy!September 21, 2007: An uninspiring find
I found a free propane stove on freecycle. It's really, really tiny - it was so small and light we couldn't believe it. We just picked it up and plunked it in the back of the CRV as if it were a sack of groceries. So now that's tarped and added to the collection. It's not very nice, and I'm sure there will be a city of chipmunks living in it by the time there's a kitchen to put it in. But it was free!
While we were up the hill yesterday, the UPS guy came and delivered my 100' roll of deer fencing, which was paid for entirely from the proceeds of our used CDs, which were sorely in need of thinning anyway, and which have really
turned out to be quite a nice little source of nickels and dimes. You can buy practically anything on Amazon these days - deer fencing, measuring cups, shampoo, bulk curry - you name it. It's weird, but we've got a little online stash from the proceeds of our old CDs, which we weren't listening to anyway. So when something not exactly needful like this comes up, and we can find it on Amazon, it doesn't feel quite like we're spending money on something frivolous.Anyway, as soon as there's the framework of a house in place, we can start thinking about surrounding the garden-to-be. The entire area to be deer-proofed is roughly 30' x 40', and the fan-shaped bed that Ron scooped out with the tractor is about 16' at its widest point and 11' deep. That ought to make a nice little start!
October 2007
October 4, 2007: Howdy, neighbor!
I once read some excellent advice for newbies to country living: always wave when you pass someone on the road. Always. If you drive past a wild-eyed guy standing on the side of the road with an ax dripping blood, smile and give him a cheery wave; he may end up sharing whatever he's just butchered with you.
Ron was hauling cinder blocks up the toboggan run early one morning a few days ago, two at a time, and another miracle happened. The guy who's building the log cabin up the road (who's only here about four or five times a year), happened by, got a load of what Ron was trying to do, stopped and told him to stop it before he killed himself. He came over with his little tractor and had them dumped at the top of the driveway in about five loads, before I had even finished making coffee. I love living in the country.
October 6, 2007: The rose garden...right here in my imagination
I'm starting to see the garden. I indulged in a bit of reckless spending and picked up three lovely roots of the peony "Mons Jules Elie" for the ridiculous price of $8 a piece today. Here they are, ready to be tucked into the fan-shaped bed, along with some composted manure. I've seen them for as much as $30 in the specialty catalogs, and the deer hate them as much as I love them. Now if only I could find about half a dozen "Krinkled White", which is a luminous, early, single white - almost poppy-like. I'm afraid I've had a vision of them on the banks of the driveway, surrounding the gate into the garden, and nothing else will do.The soil we've turned over looks exactly like a gravel pit, and some of it lower down looks like sand, too, but fortunately everything in the designated garden area seems a bit more like what you'd expect the forest floor to look like. I'm going to content myself with these three peonies (which can sit out in the open without need for fencing), and a few bulbs this year, since there's going to be an awful lot of trampling around, and the last thing we need is for me to make this construction site even more challenging to navigate.
Speaking of which, I've got a whole box of English bluebells which I ordered in a burst of overoptimistic enthusiasm last LABOR DAY, when you'll remember we were going to have a driveway cut in. They've been sitting in a box ever since, and I'm going to stick them in the ground. Poor things. I have planted bulbs on New Year's Day, but I've never subjected them to a year in a box before!
Just got the T&M catalog today, and had a very nice time imagining our cottage (I mean shed) thriftily smothered next summer in Matucana sweet peas, nasturtium 'Milkmaid' (which is blooming it's lovely brains out right now outside our kitchen door), and my favorite nigella 'Miss Jekyll'.
October 14, 2007: Company's comingHmmm... two unacquainted house guests are expected here for the same night next weekend. Esther's place is ample for the two of us, but most people would not find it so, and the addition of two more people who aren't accustomed to sharing sleeping quarters might be a bit much.
Ron is determined that we can make it work by building a shed in the next five days, where he and I could sleep, leaving Esther's house for our guests. Well, at least it'll take our minds off The Stump.
Of course the guy who was going to deliver the milled lumber didn't show up Thursday...or Friday...or yesterday...and then he showed up unannounced when we weren't home today and just dumped it - without even getting paid!
So it doesn't look as if we're going to have a shed to sleep in by next weekend. Turns out it took Ron much of that time just to dig out a level foundation. This terrain is really something else.
October 19, 2007: Now THIS is more like it
Couldn't resist bragging about my latest "freecycle" find: another stove.
Oh, yes, I know we just picked one up off the curb a few weeks ago, but it was hideous, and we didn't know for sure whether it worked, and it was really light and easy so the two of us could just toss it in the back of the CRV, so it hardly counts as a find. After all, where's the drama?Of course this week, someone posted what I'd hoped for all along - a 1940's propane stove - a great big magnificent thing with a separate warming oven, called a "Beautyrange", of course. We had to rent a trailer, so it cost $14.95, and of course it was like moving a small building. But we did it, and it's up on our land under a tarp, and I spend about half an hour taking advantage of a warm rain to scrub it down, and it is STUNNING. Everything down to the original bakelite handles and the painted "left front" and right back" indicators is filthy, but perfectly intact, and the guy who gave it to us (yet another musician) said it regulates perfectly and he and his wife have been using it for decades. They're renovating their entire house, and he says it's the only thing in the house he's sorry to see go.
We really did not have time to spend all morning wresting this monster into a trailer and up the toboggan run, but as soon as I started working on it, I was SO glad we did it. So we'll freecycle the apartment-size stove back into circulation, and be on our merry way.
October 22nd, 2007: Camping on our own land
So our house guests were here this weekend, and we all had a wonderful time. Since at that point, Ron's new shed more nearly resembled a four-poster bed frame crafted from rough-cut lumber, we pitched the tent right on top of it and slept there so our guests could occupy both the beds in the house.Poor Louise, of course, worried about us out there in the cold, with the coyotes howling and the bears lurking. I don't think she really believed that we were having such a wonderful time. We'd have happily spent the rest of the week camping in our new home. We did certainly hear coyotes, but then we often do, and the moonlight streaming through the leaf canopy made lovely dancing silhouettes on the tent. It was very romantic, very comfortable, and very beautiful. I was like a little kid - so excited I could hardly get to sleep.
October 31, 2007: Rough-cut lumberHey, Ron's cabin has rafters, and they are so beautifully constructed that I told him if he doesn't nail a roof over them very soon, someone may just grow wisteria over the whole thing and claim it as a garden structure. I love the look of rough-cut lumber.
And get a load of that window! We were at Evil Orange the other day for a box of nails or something, and found it on their clearance cart - another special order that turned out to be the wrong size. It would be a pretty big window in a regular house, but in Ron's cabin, it's a glorious picture window, facing due east. Most appropriate for Mr. Early Bird's nest.
November 2007
November 2, 2007: Gainful employment?
What a difference a day makes. Yesterday morning I was moping around worrying about cash flow, and trying to decide among the equally attractive options of bankruptcy, bank robbery, or flinging myself off a cliff.
The nearest town is a famously progressive and charming college town - so much so that no graduate can bear to leave after earning a degree. The inevitable result is that every dishwasher and barista has three Ivy-League Ph.Ds, and there's not much in the way of moonlighting available for poor musicians trying to scrabble together a house.
Today, however, I seem to have myself a promising interview for a job working as a subcontractor, digitizing materials for the Rare & Manuscripts library at the college...right up my alley! Maybe we'll be able to live on our own land before we're too feeble to get up and down the driveway after all...
November 5, 2007: Tupper Road Irises
I was driving home from a town run today, and as I slowly rounded the hairpin curve at the home of an 86-year-old neighbor (whose maiden name is Tupper, because her father was the original settler of this whole area, including our place), I was eyeing her "goodie table", where she usually sets out old rag rugs, clothing, shoes, and whatnots for sale. Today, a bit of green caught my eye, and then a tiny hand-lettered sign reading "free irises". I'm sure I don't have to tell you the rest. They were nestled in the ground 500 feet above on Upper Tupper before their astonished roots had a chance to dry out.
So despite the state of our bank account, I can no longer claim to be truly poor, since I now possess a tiny garden bed containing one rose, three peonies, several clumps of lady's mantle, my beloved Biokovo cranesbill, lavender, violets, and the newly-christened Tupper Iris. Still to be moved: a whole bunch of herbs, a 'Blue Moon' wisteria going on its third year and about to "leap", and some lovely wild cranesbill. I've also got stashed away a big envelope of wildflower seeds (for the heaps of disturbed earth on both sides of the toboggan run-i-mean-driveway), and 100 tiny daffodil bulbs from someone giving them away. I call that a splendid start!
My interview is tomorrow afternoon at 2:30, and I'm trying really hard not to get my hopes up. Oh, but wouldn't it be nice...
November 13, 2007: Now I've done it
The offer letter from my new employer arrived yesterday. The pay is awfully disappointing, but it's a heckuva lot more than what I'm currently managing to scrape up by selling my clothing and CDs on ebay and amazon. A college prof friend of ours was just telling us last night that if she added up her hours, she and her PhD make considerably less than minimum wage, so I shouldn't probably complain.
The benefits are great, the time off is generous, and of course, there are the additional bonuses of the academic calendar and a restricted collection that's only open 9-5. To say nothing of the privilege of handling materials in one of the finest manuscript collections in the world.There won't be anything left over for shingles, much less the large-ticket items, but shoot...maybe we'll just sell the CR-V to pay for the septic system, propane tank, well pump, etc, and then finance a beater truck with my measly but regular income.
November 27th, 2007: Fred's birthday
No snow yet, but it's been bitterly cold here - in the teens - and all my asparagus ferns froze solid in their pots before I could pot them up and bring them inside. If I do it now, they'll drop their needles so fast we'll be picking them out of our socks all winter long. Drat.
I have, however, taken advantage of the momentarily softened ground to plant a handful of my favorite Siberian squills, which I will remember as having been planted on Fred's birthday, before the house was even there.
~2008~
February 2008
February 1, 2008: A car or a septic system?In between snow storms, Ron has actually managed to make some progress on the cabin - not the place where we'll eventually live, but the first building. It was meant to be a shed, but has accidentally turned out so nicely that we've bought it its own little wood stove (another Craigslist find) and stopped calling it "the shack".
We've also made the difficult decision to trade in our paid-for CRV, in order to raise enough cash for a septic system. The notion of flying under the radar of what little building inspection exists here in the woods was exciting and romantic and when it comes right down to it, pretty stupid. So we're financing another CR-V, since Ron totally refused to let me consider driving down the treacherous Tupper hill in a beater.
Waaahh... I was so proud to be driving a paid-for car...
February 20, 2008: A septic system
Well, we did it. We sold the car to raise cash for a septic system. And to my complete astonishment, the elusive Driveway Guy has actually followed through. They only started it yesterday, and according to Ron's report of two hours ago, they're all just hanging around waiting for the inspector to show up and approve the finished product. I couldn't be more surprised.
Best of all, his original estimate was at least $1,000 less than the low end of what we were expecting, and he said it turned out to be so easy he's charging us even less than that. Now how often does that happen?
Still, I must admit I was rather pleased to hear that even with the monster trucks he uses to plow driveways, he had trouble getting in and out of our toboggan run, which is poetic justice if I've ever heard it. Ron gently reminded him that he, The Driveway Guy, had not finished the driveway because he figured he'd just tear it all up when he was hauling equipment in and out to build a septic system. Of course I am not getting my hopes up, but this could be a good thing.
February 21, 2008: More infrastructureA miracle: we seem to have a septic system on our land which has passed the county Health Department inspection, cost an arm (rather than an arm and a leg), and - and this is the real surprise - the terrifying clearing and leveling of which actually made the land look more inviting.
I'm thinking what our woodland needs now is a "little" wildflower meadow over top the 40'x60' drain field... snowdrops, daffodils, bluebells, hesperis, bachelor buttons, daisies, yarrow, sweet Annie, Queen Anne's lace, milkweed. Wouldn't it be great to start a subscription wildflower delivery service some day?
Sorry. This is supposed to be about the septic system. But it's that time of year, when the days are lengthening, the gardening catalogs are pouring in and the world seems full of possibilities.
February 26, 2008: So what exactly is our address?
What a ridiculous morning! In an entirely fruitless attempt to determine what our mailing
address will be at the new place, I've spoken with the Town Supervisor, the Town Clerk, The Town Enumerator, The Building Code Inspector, the County Assessor's office, and two different small town Post Offices. It's like one of those Escher prints - they all tell me to call somebody else on the above list, round and round endlessly. My question is simply this: What exactly is our new address? I know that our new address is xx Tupper Road. I know that our land is in the Town of __________. I know it's near the border of two small towns, one of which no longer has its own Post Office and is serviced by a Post Office in a different County. So is xx Tupper Road assigned to the post office at Town A, zipcode 1, or Town B, zip code 2? Doesn't that sound like a "just a second, I'll look it up in our database" kind of question?
With the exception of an extremely tiresome fellow at the Town A Post Office who loves to hear himself talk, mostly about how these decisions are made in Town C, where he used to be in charge, NOBODY has any idea why I would ask THEM for this information - and I have to agree with them - it would seem logical, if one wants to know one's mailing address, that the United States Postal Service would be the authority. Mr. Motormouth at the Town A PO seems to think the controversy has something to do with 911 service, and he's pretty sure that they're going to have to send somebody down from Big City D, 166 miles north of here (!!) to look at the lay of the land and decide.
All the rest of them are completely hung up on the fact that xx Tupper Road is our current address, and THAT's assigned to Town B (which is 15 miles south and in a different COUNTY), but of course it IS in the Town D Fire services area, oh, but Town D doesn't a post office any more, either...but still...what's your tax map number?....but that's not xx...oh, I see it's new...yada, yada, yada, before they suddenly realize that they actually have nothing whatsoever to do with any of this and they give me the number of some other clueless functionary.
The Town Clerk actually advised me to mail several envelopes to myself at every possible configuration of both addresses, and see which ones got to me and when. Argh!
I guess there is one hidden blessing in all those boring straight lines in the map of the flatlands.
Spring, 2008
March 12, 2008: One heck of an ice stormWe've been having some weather here. I grew up in Ohio, but I've never seen anything like this, anywhere. We lost four beech trees this weekend - it seemed we'd just finished carving one up, hauling all the bits out of the road, getting inside and into dry clothes, and sitting down with a cup of tea to resume practicing, and another would go down - right across the road. So we'd change back into wet clothes, get the chain saw, and start all over again. Four times. There was another, smaller one on Sunday morning before I left for church. We certainly will not lack for firewood, but we'd far rather have the trees. The amazing thing about this ice storm was that it lasted longer than any ice storm I've ever seen. It started Friday evening, kept getting worse through Monday, and didn't really even begin melting until Wednesday. Everything was encased in ice from Friday through Tuesday. Sure was pretty, though: http://www.flickr.com/photos/uppertupper
April 4, 2008: Tulips from the store.
Spring hasn't even begun to think about it on Upper Tupper, and since snowdrops, crocuses and chionodoxa are blooming all over town, this is very disheartening. So help me, NEXT spring there will be some sort of low stone wall strategically placed to create a sun well/wind block, and I'll have flowers at home, too.
Ron surprised me hugely yesterday by sending me outside to check for signs of sprouting, which I knew was a futile effort. Lo, and behold when I went out, there were two pots full of SCREAMING yellow bulbs - daffs & tulips - outside the door. I burst into tears - it was the brightest color I've seen in months. I guess I still haven't recovered from the shock of being transplanted from zone 7 to zone 4, and there has been snow on the ground here continually since early November. Poor Ron's got it just as bad, and a pot of tulips won't help him in the least: he wants to BUILD, and there's either mud, snow, infirmity, or all of the above, and in any case not nearly enough money to rent the tractor he needs to get started.
April 22, 2008: Spring at last
It does look as if Spring has decided to be an event rather than a season this year. It's too bizarre to see (in town, anyway) scilla, daffs, late tulips, magnolias, all the cherries/apples/pears all blooming together before the forsythia have even peaked. Like one of those bizarre indoor flower shows.Meanwhile, on Upper Tupper, Blanc Double de Coubert is covered with baby leaves, five adorable rosettes of lady's mantle are making their presence known, I can see (if I use a magnifying glass and much imagination) where the violets will be some day, and all of SIX scilla have bravely emerged. The maples are a haze of red, the multiflora roses are thinking about the possibility of greening up, and THAT'S IT. Not a daffodil, no sign of the trillium, not even a clump of garlic mustard.
April 23, 2008: A homestead in a fir forest...right here in my imagination
Ron drove down to the county seat south of here to pick up our order of tree seedlings from the County Soil & Water Conservation District sale, and my little fan-shaped rosebed has now been transformed into an evergreen nursery containing 10 each of balsam, fraser, and doug fir, 20 hemlocks, and a big sink full of myrtle starts. All of which are currently dwarfed by Katherine's irises.
So I should talk about bizarre combinations: the baby trees are improbably accompanied by the Tupper Road irises, three peonies, "Fred's Rose", 18 (!) Casa Blanca lilies, and various & sundry other scraps and starts, surrounded by locust fence posts Ron got from a neighbor and swaddled in deer fencing until worst of the construction is done. It's not so much a garden as a holding tank at the moment, but at least the deer can't get to it. April 26, 2008: Ow.
At the risk of sounding like a cranky old fart, everybody's health seems to be holding out, but the aches and pains are becoming increasingly tiresome. I will write a whole nuther epistle I'm sure about the agonizingly slow progress on the house, thanks to aches, pains, lousy weather, unfriendly terrain and a disposable income of about $17.36/month. It's not all bad, but it's pretty discouraging. All we really need is for about $10,000 to drop from the sky. Is that so much to ask?
Not that we aren't very grateful to be able to live in such a lovely place while we're trying to make our own land habitable. We had just gone to bed last night when a pair of barred owls must have landed in the tree right outside our window and started kicking up a fuss. Coo-coo-ca-chew! Coo-coo-ca-chew-to-you-too! Sure beats the sound of a bag of beer bottles being slung into a dumpster at 2am. I could never go back to living in the city.
May 2008
May 7, 2008: It's chilly in the hills
Down in town, the magnolias are spent, the wisteria is in full bloom, and the peonies are hip-high. Up here on Upper Tupper, I'm thrilled to see Fred's birthday Scilla blooming, and the peonies are up about two inches, bless their intrepid little hearts.
I figured out last week that once you get beyond the limits of the town, you begin ascending by about 200' per mile. This continues until you get to the end of the paved part of Tupper Road, at which point you ascend 500 feet in one mile to get to our place, 1750 feet above sea level. Mayfield Hill, which in my home town is considered a steep hill, is about a 200' rise, by comparison. So it's no wonder we're a whole zone colder up here.
May 16, 2008: Incentivize me!
Well, just to make things a little more interesting in our uneventful lives, that silly old guv'ment actually came through and deposited "incentive"
money in our bank account today, so if I also get paid for that big freelancing job, it looks as if we're going to be able to afford to rent an excavator AND order our well pump. If it all comes together, we could just possibly have a place to live up there before the snow flies.After all...what could go wrong?
May 17, 2008: The first rose
Fred's Rose (aka 'Rosalind Avenue') is smothered in tiny leaves in its new spot - the very first rose there, ever, probably. Everywhere else but Upper Tupper looks like it's in the throes of high summer - but fortunately we're so busy right now I don't have time to grump about being a month and a half behind everyone else. In July, when everyone in town is sweltering, we'll be so happy to be cool and shady up here in the hills.
May 19, 2008: All hail Louise!
A very good day indeed: payment for the big freelance job just arrived. It was a LOT of money, which means that we're going to be able to rent the big excavator (Wednesday), and order the spiffy new frost-proof stainless steel hand pump for our well. We've promised to build a charming pump house, smother it in roses, and name it after Louise, the benefactress who got me the job. Being of a practical turn of mind herself, she is thrilled at the notion of having infrastructure bearing her name.
Researching roses named "Louise" I stupidly got my heart set on one I'd never heard of called Louise Rödiger, a Kordes climber with an (!) orange-ish cast to it. Not my usual type at all, of course, but it's fruit-flavored, recurrent, rather rugose, and hardy to ZONE 2B! The color is not lurid, and it seems to suit Louise much better, especially accompanied (as it certainly must be) by a lot of Russian sage. Alas, it is commercially available only from an outfit called Roses Loubert, in Maine-et-Loire, France. So perhaps Marie Louise, a hardy damask. I was momentarily thrilled to see that there was a hybrid rugosa named Louise Bugnet, which looks every bit as wonderful as my old pal Thérèse Bugnet but is only hardy to 6b, whereas Thérèse goes happily to 3b. So that will not do.
...It's so much nicer to dither about roses rather than trying to figure out how to channel the drainage toward the septic field rather than into the wood shed.
May 20, 2008: Heavy frost warning
Sheesh...there's a heavy frost warning tonight!
As Ron wrote to an old friend from Portland recently,
"Somehow we forgot that winter back here lasts about six months, and that summer is intolerably hot and humid; yet we are consoled by the fact that taxes are high and we are really not conveniently located near anywhere."
May 22, 2008: Gulp.
A milestone: we ordered our well pump today. Our new best friend, Dave, at Bison Hand Water Pumps in Maine, answered the phone at 6:30am (only Ron would think to call anyone at that hour). Dave cheerfully answered all our questions, and then sold us the Cadillac of hand pumps, which he will ship out TODAY.
I begin to think this could really all be happening...
May 23, 2008: Eating my words
Well, it could have been happening. Microsoft, which had been funding the project I've been doing at the college, has abruptly withdrawn its funding. My next paycheck could be my last.
You know, I think I'm glad we've already ordered the well pump.
May 29, 2008: Still more infrastructure!
Unbelievable. We have water. And we installed it ourselves. It arrived yesterday, and it really is a thing of beauty - very fine craftsmanship. It will certainly last the rest of our lives, and beyond. Hard to believe we finally have the means to mix concrete and water the peonies and irises! This is the last piece of infrastructure - aside from the "yard bomb" (propane tank), which is actually fairly inexpensive as infrastructure goes.
So life goes on - just as if I weren't in imminent danger of unemployment. No matter what happens, we'll always have water. Oddly, I actually feel more secure knowing that.
June 2008
June 3, 2008: Chilly, daffodils still opening
It's still pretty chilly. My daffs aren't finished opening, but in town there are buds on the peonies and irises, so perhaps summer will come to Upper Tupper some day soon. Still no word about my employment situation.
June 6, 2008: 90 degrees
Be careful what you wish for: it looks to be an utterly hideous weekend, with temps in the 90s. Argh. At Esther's place, Blanc Double de Coubert just opened two characteristically flawless blossoms this morning, which will doubtless be blasted by the time I get home. Fortunately she's loaded with many more, which perhaps won't open until after this heat wave.
My "blue moon" wisteria finally coughed up a few leaves (the wisteria in town all finished blooming about the 2nd week of May), and is now showing definite signs of half a dozen tiny blossoms. I've never grown wisteria before (I was afraid it would knock down the house where I last gardened), but from what I've read, they absolutely thrive on abuse. I expect being root-pruned, dug up, and transplanted to a colder, shadier, and infinitely rockier place will be just the ticket.
June 30, 2008: Not this year.We've just finally admitted to each other that barring a miracle there's no way in hell we're going to be able to have anything remotely resembling habitable on our own land before the snow flies, so it looks as if we'll be in Esther's place for another winter.
The ongoing saga which has led us to this unhappy point (aside from the extremely tenuous work situation I seem to be in) involves a huge oak stump currently residing where the pier block for the back corner of the house wants to go. We'd been scraping and saving for MONTHS and MONTHS to come up with the five hundred bucks we needed to rent the monster excavator needed to remove the stump, without which we cannot start the foundation.
To make a long and depressing story shorter, the equipment we needed was in the shop for several months, and we settled for something different that should have worked but didn't. (No, of course it wasn't refundable) The expensive brand-new cable we'd bought for the occasion - which was designed to withstand 3,000 lbs of pressure - snapped immediately. Professional stump grinders were consulted and advised that there's so much rock in the soil (and such an inaccessible site) that we'd be well advised to build elsewhere. The last few weeks seem to have confirmed that no amount of digging, drilling, sawing, grinding, cursing or praying seems to be equal to the task of removing the massive oak taproot that stands between us and the foundation of our cottage. The only good news is that Ron hasn't been killed in the effort.This means another year of rent, electricity and propane bills. Just the same, we spent a large chunk of the weekend moving and stacking firewood, and it gives us a wonderful feeling of security to see all those lovely and comforting stacks dotted throughout the woods. We've got earth, air, fire, and water. (And irises, and peonies, and roses, and lilies...and Russian forget-me-nots!) All we need is shelter.
July 2008
July 24, 2008: The Stump succumbs
Thanks to our good friend Tod and his good friend and boss the chief of the local Fire Department (and HIS splendid old Ford F350 with a winch on it), we have at last prevailed over THE STUMP which you may recall has stymied our progress for some months now. At right is a photo of the conquering hero and his captive, which really just barely gives you an idea of the size of this monster.
I don't know if I can adequately convey the enormity of the gift of time, effort, and RISK, here. Dynamite was seriously discussed at one point. Burning was eliminated on the grounds of the danger of fire spreading underground via the monster oak roots.
There was really nothing else for it but to dig, hack, and pull it out - an unimaginable effort, requiring energy, determination, a whole lotta physics, and equal parts delicacy, restraint, and plain old brute strength.
These wonderful guys showed up and cheerfully worked their butts off for hours, evidently for the thrill of seeing if they could do it without killing themselves or pulling the stump down the hill on top of the truck, since once the monster was freed, gravity became a serious threat.
But undeterred by heat, humidity, black flies, treacherous terrain and the obvious
hopelessness of this endeavor, they got it out of the ground, and then began the tedious, complex, dangerous work of inching it right to the edge of the building site...stopping it just short of the edge of the hill. It was a sight to see.We are trying hard to be good stewards of our little corner of the forest, since it's the only thing we really have any control over. We don't take all this destruction lightly, and we've agonized over every felled tree.
Still, conquering that stump really felt like a major milestone, and we're both really feeling pretty hopeful, although we haven't got two nickels to rub together. We've got more than enough firewood cut, split, and stacked to see us through the first winter, even if it does have to be the winter of 2009/2010. It's like paying your gas bill two or three years in advance. We're pretty lucky.
July 29, 2008: Chimney blocks
Ron was on his way back from having his chainsaw sharpened yesterday, and spotted a pile of cement chimney blocks that someone was unloading for FREE! Not regular cinder blocks, but those huge squares that surround a stove pipe. He made three trips and took them all. This is a HUGE find, since it lessens the need for concrete for the foundation piers, and eliminates the need to build forms for the concrete - all of which must be mixed by hand, remember. This is very exciting. We've built a tiny little fire pit next to the little cabin, and we've been cooking over there every weekend. Sunday night, a deer strolled up to see what we were up to...she was 50 feet away from us, and didn't so much as flinch when we turned around to stare back. Poor thing...she will be SO disappointed with the 100 feet of deer fencing waiting for her and her family.
Speaking of which, "Fred's rose" has offered not one but THREE lovely little blossoms, which establishes her claim to fame as the first rose on Upper Tupper. The Russian forget-me-not appears to have at least doubled in size, too. Louise spent a few days here last week and she was very excited to pump water from her namesake hand pump.
August 2008
August 15, 2008: Happy birthday to me!What a guy. Ron has announced his intention to build me a little potting shed for my birthday this month. Of course, Ron is as incapable as building a "shed" as he is of flying: this is turning out to be a delightfully quirky, beautifully hand-crafted timber frame structure, replete with a window seat and a front porch graced with unpeeled log columns. This is no shed.
Whatever it's called, though, the peak of the porch of this delightful structure will be adorned with an ENORMOUS wrought iron raven, which will probably really annoy the real ravens, who were, after all, there first. Oops...there I go decorating a building site again.
I can't seem to help myself...I have these visions. The place is practically furnished already: the Moroccan hanging lantern that's been looking for a permanent home for about ten years...the great huge cushion for the window seat that's moved across the country with us twice but has never been used. About a year and a half ago I discovered a brand new sisal rug with flowers painted all over it for five bucks at a yard sale down the road, and it's been standing rolled up next to three french doors at Esther's place just waiting for there to be a potting shed some day. Who knew there'd be a potting shed before there was a house!And last January, I picked up a wonky and not entirely comfortable wicker rocker on the Freecycle list. This has also been taking up precious space at Esther's, rapping our ankles at every opportunity, and will either be moved across the road or used for kindling, depending on whether or not it can be reformed and made into a useful member of society.
In a slightly more practical vein, our friends Bill and Jude kindly gave us dibs on a fabulous pile of stuff they were getting rid of some time ago, including a massive oak door with great old bevelled glass, which will make a wonderful focal point for this whole corner of the garden, as well as letting in lots of light.
August 17, 2008: The homestead...right here in my imagination
I love all these little outbuildings. Before we were forced by circumstances beyond our control to install an unnecessary septic system (grrr...), we had toyed with the idea of building a small network of freestanding rooms each tiny
enough (under 144 sq ft) to fall under the building code radar, linking them together with covered walkways. This is not exactly an ideal climate for such an arrangement, alas, and it would require a ridiculous number of wood stoves. But it's such a romantic idea, isn't it? Still, we envision little structures popping up all over the woods, a free-standing screen/sleeping porch being the first priority after the current two (and the main house). Bill and Jude's junk pile also included several very large screen windows, so we've got a bit of a head start on that. We have a nice pile of very rough-looking locust poles (and access to many more, just about five miles away), and of course all the siding lumber is rough-milled from our own trees, so everything should look as if it sprang from the woods, and be barely visible from the road in the summer.
I interviewed for a real job at the college a week ago, and I'm feeling so hopeful that I've actually allowed myself to think seriously about designing the "real" house. The main house is currently planned to consist of kitchen, bathroom, and sleeping loft, with various and sundry bump-outs to accommodate sofa/bed, computer/desk, and possibly even the bathtub, all without cutting into the precious 16'x20' or so of available floor space. Every inch of wall space not windowed will be lined with bookcases, of course.
Once that space is in a livable condition, there will be (right here in our wild imaginations) a step or two down, opening out onto a small, window-lined, vaulted space facing northeast, and dedicated to music. We have that enormous Freecycled skylight and those two commercial-grade windows, remember - 5'x8' each, which would give the feeling of sitting right in the woods, only without the skeeters, bears, and blackflies.After that, an attached screen porch off to the north, looking out into the loveliest bit of woods, and taking advantage of both the summer breeze and the shade. We've been so careful to try and avoid the common mistake of building IN the most beautiful spots, looking instead for the places enjoying the best VIEWS of the most beautiful spots. Once the hideous construction wounds have healed, I think it's going to be a really lovely, if unconventional little homestead.
August 27, 2008: Don't count your chickens...
Drat. Nothing tragic, but I didn't get the job I was hoping for.
So a whole slew of tantalizing possibilities just became out of the question, including another excavator rental, a tow bar and roof rack for the car, the badly needed table and jig saws (which have both recently given up the ghost), and of course a thousand other little house parts.
Mostly I'm worried about leveling the main house site, digging nine foundation posts (with a four foot frost line), and mixing 36 bags of concrete all by hand, since power tool rentals are now out of reach.
I was just scolding Ron about the inherent risk in being a workaholic without a day job. He has a busy and surprisingly stable teaching studio, which feeds both us and our gas tank, but aside from that, if he's awake, he's working. He's constantly putting his hands, which he needs to use both to make music and to make a house, at risk. He's been having more and more trouble with them, and it's virtually impossible to get him to stop.This finally came to a head recently when he had an opportunity to do a roof job for a friend of ours, and he had to turn it down because he was in continual pain. So we were both really hoping this job would pan out for me, because it would allow us to buy him some help with the really heavy work. Damn.
Heavy work like trotting up and down these hills with a 20-foot beam on his shoulder. Or carrying t
he wood-framed double-pane insulated picture window (identical to this one) from Esther's place, where we live, 400 feet uphill and then up our toboggan run-i-mean-driveway. This was a completely unexpected Craigslist find: a window that matched exactly a previously scavenged one. It's in perfect shape, down to the intact screens - so although I'd planned to use a bunch of the great old windows that Carole gave us, we couldn't pass this up.Ugh...but the last time we did this, we had a roof rack and a tow bar, which the new CR-V doesn't have! Since it wouldn't fit in the car, the two of us lugged it up there by hand.
Well...not to complain. We certainly have more than I ever dreamed, much more than most people. I am still employed (so far), and we can cover our expenses (just). My church gig starts up again on Sunday, and that will pay the fearful car insurance bill (nearly). Our rent is more than reasonable, and we couldn't have a more wonderful landlady. We have all this beautiful lumber, milled from our own trees. Our land is paid for, and we have no debt, which is more than most people can say these days. And we've gotten two messages in the last two weeks from two guys who don't know each other, both reminding Ron that when he needs help with heavy stuff he should remember to call them. That's an awful lot to be grateful for.
August 28, 2008: more free stove pipe
I snagged some more double-wall stove pipe AND a venting kit AND a chimney cap this week on the local Freecycle list. The pipe alone would have cost nearly $200, and it's in perfect shape, so I'm pretty pleased with myself. We've got a great stove, lots of pipe, and a year's worth of firewood...now all we need is a house to heat.
August 29, 2008: A rant about hydrofracking
Turns out being off the grid in the woods doesn't necessarily protect us from the ravages of the rest of the world. We've spent a good bit of the summer getting informed and speaking out on the latest threat to upstate NY: a HUGE boom in natural gas drilling. HUGE.
At least nine different companies are aggressively pursuing drilling rights in NY, PA, and the southern Appalachians, all of which are sitting on a layer of Marcellus Shale, which could meet the whole country's natural gas needs for two years.
However, extracting it requires a new drilling technique, called "hydrofracking", which is every bit as ugly as it sounds. The gas in Marcellus is held in bubbles like a chunk of swiss cheese. To extract it, a mixture of water, sand and chemicals is shot into the earth with such force it fractures the rock, releasing the bubbles to the surface. When the gas surfaces, so does the water...laden with natural toxins from the shale, including suspected cancer-causing compounds.
This is a technique that involves deeper, more complicated wells, and uses VASTLY more water than other drilling methods: two million gallons of water for each well! And where do you suppose that water will come from, if not from our water table?
The U.S. Department of Energy lists "produced water" from gas drilling as among the most toxic of any oil industry byproduct. The byproduct of each two million gallons of water ends up being 10,000 gallons of toxic chemicals. That's for ONE well. In New Mexico, oil and gas drilling projects that use waste pits, like those proposed for New York, have leached toxic chemicals into the water table at over 800 sites.
Best of all, the industry views its chemical recipes as trade secrets and they're not required to disclose them. States have only learned about the chemicals by analyzing waste pits and ground water nearby.
And of course, there is a whole "goon squad" of slick salespeople descending on us and all our neighbors, many of whom are struggling farmers or uneducated and underemployed rural folks. These slicksters describe the drilling as "underground horizontal drilling", as if a huge hypodermic needle will silently and invisibly slither beneath our land ("2 miles deep" they claim), draw the gas out, and leave the land untouched. The promise enormous lease payments, and show up on doorsteps with contracts in hand. It's absolutely terrifying.
So there's the cheery news from our little slice of paradise.
September 2008
September 17, 2008: Level & weather-tight
Ron has finished enclosing the cabin - the first one, the one that was supposed to be an 8x12' shed, but is now a lovely little cabin that a person could certainly live in. Thoreau, say, could live in it. It still needs a few shingles, etc, but the siding and trim is all finished, and it's completely weather tight and really, really adorable! He's even added a little "back porch": a level spot currently housing the generator. The value of LEVEL spots on this terrain cannot be overstated. We've taken our coffee up there several mornings, and just sat and marveled at it as if it were a miracle, rather than the product of a year's very, very hard work.
He's planning to get back to work on my little sanctum today (here he is lounging in the loft above the window seat-to-be), and - hooray! - it looks as if the combination of the take from recent concerts and a big wedding gig this weekend will allow us to rent an excavator again (for a weekend, this time). So at the very, very least, we should be able to get the foundation in and inspected before the snow starts.
And here's some startling news: Two Casa Blanca lilies I planted up on our land, in the garden-to-be - lilies that generally bloom in late June or July - started blooming YESTERDAY. That heavenly sweet, spicy fragrance carries all the way down to the road. And both Katherine's 'Tupper irises' and Fred's Russian forget-me-nots seem to have at least doubled in size over the summer - along with the ferns that hitched a ride with the irises, and the violets that hitched a ride with the forget-me nots. So I have high hopes for next summer, and dreams of glory for the years beyond.
October 2008
October 3, 2008: Eating my words. Again.
"So, at the very, very least, we should be able to get the foundation in and inspected before the snow starts."
Did I say that? Argh. We finally scraped up enough to rent the backhoe again, for the entire weekend, and after a
spectacularly productive Saturday, The Rains Came. Not rain, mind you, but RAIN. 6-inches-in-two-days rain. Not only could we not finish the job, we had one helluva time getting the monster out of the mud without flipping it over. Ron would move it about six inches, then stop while I ran up underneath the tires and rearranged the cinder blocks so he could get a tiny bit of traction. Six more inches, rearrange, etc., etc. The sight of tires as tall as I am, spinning uselessly in eight inches of mud is not a vision I'll soon forget.I don't even have the heart to detail the whole ordeal. It's a complete mess, and extremely demoralizing, since we saved our pennies ALL SUMMER to rent the thing, and only got half of our money's worth of time. By the time we can manage to rent it again, the ground will be too frozen to work. I cried all the way home.
However...the cabin is closed in and weatherproof, and Ron's made a lot of progress on my little birthday cottage. It's got a teeny little front porch and everything, and every time I see it I feel like clapping. What more could we want?
October 5, 2008: Stowaway Hill
"Stowaway Hill" is the new name for a little hummock created when Ron was excavating for my cottage and had the great good sense to dump all the nice topsoil in a little pile rather than stomping all over it. It's now covered entirely in things that came with things given to me either by Fred, our neighbors Karen & Lizzie, or by Katherine née Tupper. An amazing lot of ferns stowed away with the irises, and I can't believe two of Fred's violets are just about to bloom!
They're all safely tucked in for the winter, right in front of my little front porch where I can keep a close eye on them and remember where they came from.
October 6, 2008: Counting blessingsHow did we get so lucky? Never in my wildest fantasies did I ever imagine I would actually own three acres of woods, surrounded by hundreds more, and dotted with charming little cabins, cottages, and shacks.
Hesperus Hill?
All it needs is a name. What do you think of Hesperus Hill? A nod to our native Dame's Rocket, Hesperis matronalis, of course, but particularly after the Greek Hesperus, the personification of the evening star Venus, visible through the trees every night. The Latin Vespers adds another layer of significance as a fitting tribute to our beloved Wood Thrush vespers, which on summer evenings are as soothing and as predictable as the Vespers in any monastery. A lovely and peaceful place to spend our waning years.
October 13, 2008: A new visitor
Ron saw an eagle yesterday morning while I was at church - this used to be so common at Little Wolf he almost didn't give it a second thought until he remembered where he was. It's not the first, but it certainly isn't an everyday occurence. I was working up there until dark on Saturday, while Ron was off fiddling for money, and the owls kicked up such a fuss that I was afraid they were killing each other. It was quite a hoot'n-nanny.
November 3, 2008: Out of plywood again
Well, a month has passed since the awful disappointment of the huge storm that ruined our last chance at having a
foundation in this year. It still stings to think about it.My wonderful library director is scraping up little projects to keep me employed - working all her contacts and even writing grants to get money. But the job could still end at any minute - and now there's a university-wide hiring freeze, so the temp job she was keeping up her sleeve just in case, isn't going to materialize any time soon.
Now I wish we'd spent all that money on the plywood and shingles we needed to finish enclosing the little cabin instead. But we're out of shingles, tarpaper, plywood, and cash, so it looks as if my little sanctum will spend its first upstate NY winter swaddled only in tarpaper and a scrap of torn tarp - which will only make it feel more aged and charming. I've always wanted a tarpaper shack!
The weather feels as if it's turning early this year, so I suppose the best thing to do is to throw ourselves into music and see if we can raise some money for next Spring.
~2009~
Winter 2009
January 21, 2009: Making music and shoveling snow
Winter seemed to arrive early this year. On November 16th, I was planting a handful of lilies-of-the-valley in the northwest corner of the new garden, and before I had quite
finished, the snow was coming down in a way that I could tell was 'for real'. I don't think it's really stopped since, and we've had some really bitter temperatures already - as well as a propane bill that ate up half a paycheck.So we have indeed thrown ourselves into music - we made more doing music than I did at my full-time job last month - and we're trying to stash away as much as possible so that when the weather breaks we can make some progress.
The place from which we've been renting equipment was an early and much-lamented victim of the economic crash, and as much trouble as we've had, we're terribly sorry to see them go...not least because the next-closest place with tractors to rent is 36 miles round-trip, and charges by the mile for pick-up and delivery.
Still no guarantee of employment past the end of January. Argh... Gigs! We need more gigs!
February 2, 2009: Catalog fever
We are past the end of January. There's a loaf of bread in the oven, I am still employed, Ron has three new students, and we're doing a lecture/recital at Cornell this week. So hope reigns eternal.
The David Austin rose catalog sits enticingly next to the usual midwinter mountain of gardening books, beckoning me to jump the gun and plant roses before we can properly enclose the garden. Fortunately the flyer from this year's County Soil & Water Conservation District sale has also arrived, and this offers a much more practical menu of temptations.I've been reading that the original forests of this area, which was Iroquois land, consisted of acre upon acre of white pine. The higher elevations, our acidic hills south of the Finger Lakes, also supported a mixed hardwood forest of hemlock, beech, maple, and oak.
An expedition during the 1790's recorded nearly 100% of this county as heavily forested - the settlers referred to it as the "dark forest". But as early as 1804 potash was already an important industry. I didn't know much about potash, but a quick trip to Wikipedia certainly explains how the deforestation happened so quickly in a time before power tools:
Potash is vital for agriculture because it improves water retention, yield, nutrient value, taste, colour, texture and disease resistance of food crops....Wow. So a mere fifty years later, three-quarters of the county was "improved"; and in
...Potash production provided late-18th and early-19th century settlers in North America a way to obtain badly needed cash and credit as they cleared their wooded land for crops. To make full use of their land, excess wood, including stumps, needed to be disposed. The easiest way to accomplish this was to burn any wood not needed for fuel or construction. Ashes from hardwood trees could then be used to make lye, which could either be used to make soap or boiled down to produce valuable potash. Hardwood could generate ashes at the rate of 60 to 100 bushels per acre (500 to 900 m³/km²). In 1790, ashes could be sold for $3.25 to $6.25 per acre ($800 to $1500/km²) in rural New York State – nearly the same rate as hiring a laborer to clear the same area."
1886 the only sizeable stand of virgin timber left was a tract of about 40 acres. By 1903 land survey recorded forest cover at only 19%.Tupper Road was settled, named for, and farmed by our neighbor Katherine's father and uncle around the turn of the 20th century. Katherine has a childhood memory of her father plowing the land around Esther's for potatoes - that would have been some time in the mid-twenties. It's hard to imagine the hundreds of acres of woods surrounding us as potato fields.
The deciduous hardwood forests have sprung up and thrived since then. Hemlock clings tenaciously to the rock in the gorges, while those who care about such things keep a wary eye out for signs of the dreaded Hemlock Wooly Adelgid. But unfortunately, there was a concerted effort just after WWII to replant much of the deforested area not with the native white pine, but with the shallow-rooted red pine, which in our shallow, poorly-drained glacial debris tends to grow for a few decades and then topple over. We've certainly seen that on Tupper; one of our well drillers was reminiscing about having planted some of these trees as a boy scout, and many of them are now in serious decline.
These days the forest cover, at least in the hills, has rebounded to over 50%. There's only one corner of our triangle that is pine, rather than deciduous forest. But we both love and miss living among the majestic evergreens, so once again we're poring over this year's list of tree seedlings available from the Soil & WaterConservation Program with an eye toward replacing some of those troubled red pines with something more suitable. We'll be extremely lucky if we live long enough to enjoy their shade, but it seems like the right thing to do.
February 12, 2009: Another hole to dig
Uh-oh. Just got a used copy of a book called "Root Cellaring", by Mike and Nancy Bubel. Just what we needed: another reason to dig a really big hole in the rock. Just the same, I think this is going to be a necessity...
March 8, 2009: Tarpaper!
We discovered a new place north of town today that sells salvaged building supplies. I was quite infatuated with several chunks of what look to be lab tops - countertops from a
chemistry lab, perhaps. I'd love to have a work surface like that in the potting shed, but I'm afraid they're so luxuriously deep that I wouldn't be able to open the door!We also drooled at some length over a completely gorgeous and impractical oak staircase, but were frankly even more excited to unearth a pile of 14 rolls of 30lb tarpaper - for $15/roll. As a petroleum product, the price of tarpaper has risen right along with the price of gasoline, and the last time Ron stopped at Evil Orange with twenty bucks in his pocket to buy a $15 roll, he discovered that it now costs $36. Sure, oil prices have come down quite a bit since then. But since nobody but us is building these days - and everybody else uses Tyvek anyway - that same tarpaper is still collecting dust on the store shelves, for the same price. So this is quite a find, and not a moment too soon.
Now all we need is a LOT of plywood.
March 10, 2009: Good news/bad news
So it turns out that one of the provisions of the recently-passed stimulus bill allows for an $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers. "First-time" is rather misleading; anyone who hasn't had property in their name in three years qualifies. "Home buyers" includes those who are building a home, and, mirabile dictu, that actually includes folks like us who are building a home with their bare hands. What's the catch? Well, it's a big one: we have to have a certificate of occupancy by December 1, 2009.
Oh, and it looks as if my luck has finally run out: I'll be unemployed on April 1st.
April 2009
April 1, 2009: I'm still employed.
Guess they were just fooling. I was literally taking the pictures down from my office walls
when a miracle happened and another short-term project materialized. So I can count on five more paychecks before it starts all over again.We've had two 60-degree days over the last week, so now that we can actually see the ground and a flurry of performances is safely past, we're able to spend a little more time up the hill. Tod kindly lent his pickup so that Ron could pick up a few sheets of plywood - enough to finally finish the potting shed. It will be so great to stop worrying about the tarp blowing away in the wind.
April 5, 2009: Scilla blooming... and an especially welcome findI'm not sure which of these things is more exciting: Fred's birthday scilla started blooming yesterday, and I
found a propane fridge - the very make and model we'd planned to buy new - on Craigslist for half the price of a new one. The nagging expectation of having to come up with that kind of money - plus the additional hundreds in sales tax and freight shipping - has been one more thing to try not to worry about, so this is a real weight off our minds. Good thing they're so tiny, because it's going to have to live in my 8'x8' cottage until there's a house.Today was one of those rare April days - sunny and cool, and perfect for working. Poor Ron was playing a gig in Buffalo last night and didn't get home until 3am or so, but since the forecast for the next week and beyond is calling for steady rain/snow and some pretty raw temps, he was determined to get the plywood up on the roof. Sleep-deprived or no, he did it, too.
Then, not content with mere Herculean effort, he created a beautiful, flat, wide path from the driveway to my cabin, so that when he and Tod move the fridge up here next weekend they won't kill themselves trying to keep it level (which is critical with a propane fridge).He meant it to be a quick-and-dirty temporary path with a specific purpose, but a graceful curve around our favorite sitting stump has made it much more beautiful than he intended. It's changed the look of the place so much (see the same area last August, below) that I'm revisiting the location of the rose garden. I have a vision of the difficult rock and root-filled fan-shaped bed made square to accommodate terraced raised beds filled with vegetables easily accessible from the kitchen, enclosed with a low handmade wattle fence.
This will leave the extremely steep area behind the well - which we'd originally planned to terrace for veggies - to be entirely turned over to the important crop of berries. Less work terracing, and the shrubs will hold the soil where the well was dug into the hill.The roses could then enjoy a much more spacious and sunny spot, a south-facing slope a step lower than the house level and nearer the driveway. Okay, it's currently considerably more than a "slope", but it's been plowed up at least four times already, is all beautiful loose soil (well, rocks and soil) which should make for some awfully happy rugosas. AND there's a lovely view of it from the east-facing window and the porch of my little cottage. If we enclose it with locust posts wrapped with heavy-duty wire mesh, both the driveway and the rose garden could benefit from a backdrop of clouds of sweet autumn clematis, and I can create my own "myrtle hill", with snowdrops, daffodils, and single white peonies on the downhill/driveway/deer side, and a little roseraie tucked next to the cabin and safe from the deer.
And all that came about as a result of Ron's practical little utility path.
April 15th, 2009: Excuse me while I whine a little.
Well, yet another ugly $600 surprise in the form of an entirely unexpected IRS bill - I still don't know how my exemptions got changed from 0 to 3 - and there went the money for the excavator. Again. I know I should be grateful that we had the money to pay the tax bill, but I can't seem to muster gratitude at the moment...not even a little bit. We'd managed to save up enough over the course of the winter to get a running start on the foundation the very instant the weather would allow it, and we even weathered the unexpected $600 expense of four new tires a month or so ago. Sitting pretty, cash in hand, just waiting for a thaw and five days in a row of dry weather. And now it's gone. I could just cry.
April 19th, 2009: Earth-moving
So Ron read the little flight of fancy above (about the roseraie, not about the IRS), and he evidently thought it sounded like a good idea. And when Ron decides something is a good idea, it's as good as done, especially if it is really hard work and the weather cooperates.
I had an unusual Sunday off from church, so was feeling ambitious with two whole days in a row to spend at home. Ron was itching to accomplish something, excavator or no. So we headed up the hill with shovel, pick ax, wheelbarrow, and ibuprofen, and lo and behold, what was on Friday evening a nearly vertical pile of rock, rubble, 
bramble and root, is today a lovely, clear, smooth, blank canvas, gently sloped to the south. Two eight-foot locust posts are already in place, with plans (as soon as we can afford a couple of bags of cement) to line the driveway side with a heavy trellis of fallen logs, which will be beautiful, free, and stout enough to support the 'blue moon' wisteria I've been nursing along down at Esther's place.The "beautiful, loose" soil that had been plowed up four times already, as it turned out, required a pick ax to hack through, since it's been more than two years since the driveway was dug in. And, like all the land here, it was almost more rock than soil. But as we worked, I threw everything hand-sized or smaller down to the driveway, to be used to shore up the bank, and Ron threw everything foot-sized or larger up to the path, to be used to make a flagstone terrace in the middle of the roses, and what's left is fairly manageable pebbles and chips. Drainage will certainly not be a problem.
April 28, 2009: Shingles!
The Craigslist advert:
Owens Corning Shingles - $10Unbelievable. This guy lives in the same tiny town that we do, about five miles away. This is even the color we would have chosen - to match what we already have on Ron's cabin. Only trouble is, somebody else has spoken for five bundles. Since we need 16 for my potting shed, we'll have to buy or scrounge three more. Still, if it works out (and no Craigslist deal has worked out until the stuff is in your car), this will count as a miracle, since they're over $25/bundle new!
We have some shingles left over from when we re-shingled our roof back in 1993.
They are Owens Corning Fiberglass shingles of the Oakridge II style. Color is Brownwood (Supreme Brownwood)
I have the equivalent of about 18 packages (many packages have never been opened). Each package has 30 shingles 36" x 12".
I'm looking for $10 per package or your best offer for the whole lot.
April 29, 2009: A rose garden, this year. Well, as improbable as it seems, it really looks as if I'm going to have a garden...a ROSE garden...THIS year. Ron has become utterly determined to make this happen, and since I last wrote, an oddly elliptical triangle has evolved, carved out of the space between my cabin and the driveway. It's very gently sloped to the south, and is now semi-enclosed with five beautiful locust posts along the driveway side, which will be filled in with log poles as we can haul enough of them out of the woods and the various brush piles dotting the land. The side nearest the potting shed will be temporarily swathed in deer netting until the construction zone is no longer necessary.
The space is roughly 36' wide by maybe 13', depending on how far down the bank I dare to venture, and although there is one very, VERY large oak tree in one corner, the space gets full sun much of the day, since it faces 150 feet of cleared driveway. Which will, incidentally, be invisible from inside the garden as soon as the garden fills in a little. (Warning: non-rose nerds should skip the next paragraph or two...)
Which shouldn't take long, since I'm starting out with a backdrop of five seedling r.r. albas, plus one Eglanteria, of course. Then I'll fill in the border with (this year) Marie Bugnet, Henry Hudson, Blanc Double de Coubert, Heritage, and Stanwell Perpetual.
It's pretty amazing how much else is already either up there or waiting to be moved. My three-year old lady's mantle and 'Biokovo' cranesbill is going mad down at Esther's, Katherine's Tupper Irises are looking great, and the three Monsieur Jules Elie peonies I picked up late last season in a local nursery's scrap heap and stuffed hastily into a rocky bed may or may not deign to thrive. There are lilies coming up in both gardens - maybe a dozen or more. Fred's Russian forget-me-not is blooming wildly. I've been regularly digging violets out of Esther's grass and plopping them into the rosebed there, and they will all come along, ditto the charming wild cranesbill with pink flowers not much bigger than forget-me-nots. I have lots of cornflower and sweet pea seeds (the wild kind, although I did find one precious packet of 'Matucana' at the hardware store!), and a few of my favorite Nigellas, though not nearly enough.
That ought to make a decent start, don't you think?
April 30, 2009: Bayberries
I've settled on bayberry bushes (Myrica pensylvanica) to line the driveway just below the garden, since they're stone cold hardy (to z2), tolerant of virtually any indignity in terms of heat, drought, dust, and even salt,
and because I love them. They're fragrant, native, deer-resistant (although the turkeys, grouse, and woodpeckers all evidently love the berries), and they should slowly sucker to hold that bank in place very nicely.Maybe best of all, I found a very highly-rated place in Michigan called Cold Stream Farm, that sells 6"-12" rooted cuttings for $1.76, so I ordered a whole bunch. In a few years, they should be spectacular with myrtle at their feet and big pools of daffodils scattered throughout.
While I was at it, I ordered some teeny tiny little Pee Gee Hydrangeas, available only in bundles of 5, for $11. Yes, Paniculata Grandiflora...I know, how Victorian-era cemetery can you get, right? Great Aunt Clothilde's antimacassars and button hooks. Well, I don't care how fussily unfashionable they are; I have loved them since I was a child, and they may well turn out to be the only flower I can bring into the house that won't drive Ron out of the house. So I ordered them, too...five of them. Heaven knows what I will do when they reach their ultimate spread.
May 2009
May 5th, 2009: We got the shingles!
A hundred bucks for enough to cover the whole potting shed, which is about a third of what they'd have cost new. 16 bundles. Turned out the seller had counted wrong, or didn't know how many were in a bundle, or something, so we actually got exactly as many as we need to finish my potting shed. 16 bundles of 25-year shingles should have cost us nearly $450.Each of these bundles weighs SEVENTY pounds, by the way. And let's see...16 bundles x 70lbs = 1,120 lbs we carried up the hill from the seller's garage to our car, then up the hill from our car to the cabin. Not all the way up the toboggan run, but still pretty steep. Ow...
May 6th, 2009: Where does the money go?
Bargain shingles notwithstanding, it turns out that building a house out of stuff you picked up off the forest floor is still expensive, and there's no end to the string of necessary expenses. I bought a box of nails yesterday - just a small 5lb box - and it cost $13.93 before sales tax!
We need to rent the excavator one more time. 36 sacks of concrete for the foundation piers. The lumber may be made from our own trees, but we have to pay somebody to mill that lumber. And plywood still has to be purchased. At $30/sheet, that will likely be our biggest expense. Nails, nails, nails. More tarpaper. Saw blades. Roof jacks. A 24' extension ladder. Insulation. Drywall. Plumbing. A nail gun, to protect Ron's hands. Yes, certainly, thinks clueless me. This is clearly not a luxury, we must have a nail gun. Ah, but it turns out there are different nail guns used for siding, flooring, and roofing, and each one costs hundreds of dollars, not including the actual nails and the air compressor to run them. Oh, and the gasoline for the generator to run the compressor.
I was SO happy and excited to have saved so much over the winter, thanks to all the concerts in December and the lecture/recital at Cornell, and I really imagined that the very instant the weather broke we would spend it all on an excavator, and 36 sacks of concrete, and all the plywood we could find, which would mean that we could have the foundation piers dug and poured by the end of May at the very latest. That was the plan, and dammit, it was NOT unreasonably optimistic, even considering the pay cut I received in December when our health insurance premiums tripled.
What actually happened was that we found unbelieveable bargains on tarpaper, a propane fridge, and shingles, which combined either cost us $960 or saved us $1,744, depending on how you look at it. Unexpected expenses in the forms of four new tires and a horrifying tax bill, both unexpected, combined to consume the rest of this winter's savings and then some.
So... for those of you keeping score at home, I'm making about 89.8% less than I was in November; we have now spent 155.8% of our winter's savings, and we still have no excavator, no concrete, and no plywood. The only thing that has kept us afloat has been a welcome increase in Ron's teaching studio, which is now falling off as usual because everybody's taking the summer off.
Unless another miracle occurs I will myself very likely be taking the month of June off without pay, since the current project is funded only through May 31. This would be a welcome opportunity to work on the house, if only we had any $#^%! equipment or materials to work with!So it doesn't look promising for this year either, does it? Which means the $8,000 tax rebate won't be happening.
But we still have the land, which is currently presenting us with new treasures every day, including nicely spreading patches of mayapple and trillium, a lurid splash of Polygala paucifolia, a pool of spleenwort and a bunch of pussytoes (Antennaria sp.), which I'd mistaken for Edelweiss before Bill the Wildflower Maven kindly set me straight. And before long, there will even be a tiny rose garden.
May 8th, 2009: Roses!
Six of my roses came yesterday, and they are beauties! I've never ordered from this company before (High Country Roses), and I've certainly never ordered anything but bare-root roses. I decided to give this place a try because they're in Utah and specialize in cold-hardy, own-root roses, and because they get ecstatic reviews from the folks at the garden watchdog site.
I can see why. I was a bit nervous because they offer 1-year-old plants in quart-size pots, 4½ inches square at the top and 5 inches deep. So I was pretty much expecting seedlings.
NOT. These are beautiful little plants, fully leafed out and then some. Heritage (is everyone just calling it AUSblush now?) is a hearty-looking thing, as is Eglanteria, which is a big, maybe 10" ball of deliciously scented leaves. Henry Hudson has two buds, Marie Bugnet (left) is loaded with buds and one beautiful blush-white blossom that even Ron was charmed by, and Stanwell Perpetual is in full bloom! There was not a broken branch or so much as a dropped leaf in the entire box. Ron noticed a flyer in the window of the laundromat a few days ago from somebody offering to deliver a load of composted cow manure for twenty bucks. He memorized the number, so if he can actually make that happen, we're in business. I'm going to be REALLY sore by Monday...I can't wait!
May 9th, 2009: Another bullet dodged
I just heard a few minutes ago that the library which is funding me at the moment has requested another month's worth of work, which will tide me over to July 1, the beginning of the fiscal year - after which, anything's possible. Yet another miracle, for which I am very grateful.
May 18th, 2009: Back from Cleveland and into the dirt
After a long, exhausting, wonderful trip to
Cleveland, we started for home at 5:45am. Arriving before noon, we unpacked the car, scarfed a hunk of cheese and a graham cracker, changed into overalls and ran up the hill to screen the rocks out of what passes for soil up there.We ended up (after prying the really big rocks out with a prybar) with a big hole, a knee-high pile of gravel, and thigh-high pile of the loveliest soil you've ever seen. Ron ran off to town to teach, while I backfilled the big hole with the screened soil, mixed in peat and manure, and finally began planting.
There's a LOT more of this to be done, but at least everything I spent money on is safely in the ground for the time being. I've ordered a siphon pump for the 55 gallon rain barrel, so I won't have to make quite so many trips across 50 feet of treacherous ground with a bucket (after 25-but-who's-counting strokes to fill said bucket from the well).
May 19th, 2009: counting the till
We were thrilled to see that even after the expenses of the trip we did make just enough to rent the excavator, which means that it is conceivable we may be able to get a foundation in this year. Ron's going to call today and see when and if it's available. Thank you, Cleveland!
May 20th, 2009: Progress. And lots of rocks.A month ago there was barely room between my cabin and the driveway to squeeze in a ladder before the bank headed straight down to the driveway. But Ron's been behaving like a human excavator, envisioning a garden space in what I would have said was a completely inaccessible location. There is now a lovely, LEVEL irregular triangle where there was once a vertical mountain of rock and rubble left behind when the driveway was created, and a beautiful deer fence in the works, crafted out of 200-lb fallen logs.
I've planted two dozen tiny bayberry seedlings on the remaining half of the bank (which is outside the enclosed bit), and some day I hope to be able to see them without a magnifying glass. Ron built a large framed screen out of old 2x4s and some hardware cloth, and we have poured every shovelful of soil through this contraption before mixing it with compost and manure, resulting in beautiful fluffy, rich rose beds - as well as a hip-high pile of gravel-sized rocks, and a shin-high pile of REAL rocks.Speaking of real rocks, I came home from work one day this week to discover that Ron had artfully laid some enormous rocks between the front porch of my cabin and stowaway hill, making the steps I'd cut into the hill a lot more useful and less dangerous to boot. It's too small to call a stone terrace, but it's too well-crafted to call it anything else.
I'd call it a miracle if it hadn't been so much hard work.
May 21st, 2009: Socking in for the holiday weekend
Commencement is this weekend, and all the smarter and wealthier locals take the week off,
rent their houses out to the onslaught of visitors, and flee.After last weekend, though, we're looking forward to not leaving the house this weekend. I have THREE whole days in a row off with no obligations whatsoever! The weather looks to be perfect for working outside, and we plan to dig, plant, haul water, sand, paint, hammer, and haul rocks all weekend. The photo at right gives some idea of what's left after sifting our "soil" through a frame of hardware cloth, so there are always plenty of rocks to haul.
May 25th: 2009: A perfect Memorial Day weekend
What a perfect weekend: I feel as if I'd been away from town for a month. We shopped carefully on Thursday to be sure we wouldn't need to go to town for ANYTHING, and then spent three luxurious days trying to kill ourselves and enjoying every minute of it.
Played a little music down at Tod & Sarah's Saturday night, but that hardly counts as leaving home, since they're all of two miles away. Sunday, Esther stopped out for tea and birdwatching, and we had a delightful time catching up with her. But mostly, we did exactly what we'd expected to do, which was to dig and dig and DIG. I added nearly 150 myrtle plugs to surround the 25 bayberry seedlings on the bank, and we have heeled in at least more than a dozen roses, forsythia and hydrangea shrublings. I moved ferns, irises, roses, lilies, and peonies out of the temporary bed which will eventually be a vegetable garden. Ron finished digging out a well surrounding the oak tree that had been buried by rock and rubble when the driveway was created. Unsatisfied as usual with the merely functional, created a beautiful bit of stonework to hold the soil in place.
We outlined the borders with orange construction tape, and there are now three small sections ready for planting, plus one which looks as if it's had irises and lilies growing around the birdbath for years. I pumped the 55-gallon water barrel about half full, and if I keep the garden well watered, I should have "Michelle Obama arms" by the end of the summer.When suppertime rolled around, Ron built us a new fire pit between two 'sitting stumps', and we cooked up the most wonderful meal, deliciously smoked in the cherry wood he's been hauling up the hill all winter long. Of course sitting there, I had a vision of an arc of Russian sage spanning from stump to stump, so now I suppose I'll have to find some.
June 2009
June 8th, 2009: Tupper Irises
Katherine's "Tupper Irises" began blooming today, and they are real beauties. A delicate shade of violet, they're fragrant, which I hadn't expected, and even the fragrance puts me in mind of violets.I was just starting to wonder if maybe I'd been greedy in taking so many of those irises, since this new garden is really very tiny. But now I can't wait for them to need dividing! Deer don't like either irises or peonies, so I needn't confine them to the enclosed garden, but can put them anywhere there's a patch of sun. What a wonderful gift from a garden that's been on this road for nearly a hundred years.
Speaking of violets, I have succumbed to one of the gazillion pleas that have flooded my mailbox in the last two weeks from plant nurseries begging me to take their overstocks off their hands. I understand that when faced with Hard Times, normal people cut the chunk of the budget reserved for plants BEFORE adjusting the dinner menu to include thrice-weekly appearances of tuna noodle casserole. I guess it takes all kinds.
Anyway, both Greenwood Nursery and Bluestone Perennials have tempted me past my endurance with unimaginable markdowns, and I have unrepentantly spent the shocking sum of $26.00 for the following:
- 10 2-year seedlings of Carolina Allspice
- 5 2-year seedlings of good old fashioned non-messed-with Mock Orange!
- 1 Syringa vulgaris ''Fiala Remembrance', a lovely double white variety named after the remarkable Father John Fiala
(and perhaps saving the best for last...) - 3 Viola odorata 'White Czar'!
So I'm waiting anxiously for the UPS truck, and looking forward to a splendid, commitment-free weekend, which if the National Weather Service is to be believed, should be sunny and mid-70ish. We have a pile constituting about two thirds of the necessary cross-pieces for the "lattice" part of the log enclosure, and most importantly, two fully functioning chainsaws with which to cut them to size, so it's just possible that by Sunday night - after a lot more scrounging, hauling, leveling, cutting, and hammering - the hortus will be at last conclusus.
June 8th, 2009: Hortus ConclususAnother action-packed weekend. Saturday morning we finished the exacting and exhausting work of hauling, placing, leveling, trimming and attaching the huge, heavy horizontal logs to the upright posts, then took a break for lunch before finally starting the fun part - attaching the small uprights.
I could not be happier with the results, especially the cool, curvy endpiece. My bright idea, it took longer to fit and trim that piece and get it into place than to complete the remainder of that entire 9' section. It was worth the trouble.
I have changed my mind hourly about what to grow on this
structure. The original plan was simplicity itself: sweet autumn clematis, and lots of it, with five rosa rugosa 'albas' sprawling in front, as a backdrop for a mixed border of roses, hyrdrangeas, lilies, irises, etc. Nothing but calm, soothing, green and white visible from below, including the bayberries and single white peonies on the bank.The sturdy splendor of the real thing, however - 36 feet of blank canvas - has crowded that simple plan with a dizzying array of possibilities. It would be difficult to improve upon the vision I had, three years ago, of wisteria, fronted by pure white rugosa 'Blanc Double de Coubert', with masses of 'Johnson's Blue' hardy geranium and chartreuse lady's mantle foaming at its feet. That particular vision is about to become reality at Esther's, and it's all being moved up to our place soon anyway.
But of course every day I confuse the issue by going to work at a place which takes its 'Ivy League' label literally. Aside from the endless vertical acres of Boston ivy and Virginia creeper (which is growing wild and FREE in Esther's woods), there are two magnificent climbing hydrangeas growing up the clock tower across the plaza from my library, and I've always loved them...why not grow a climbing hydrangea up the oak tree? It's 75 feet straight up before there's any branching.
And then I start thinking of autumn and winter interest, since after all winter here lasts seven months at least. Hemlock would be beautiful, native, hardy, and free... but risky with wooly adelgig perpetually threatening, and in any event much too big eventually. Still, surely there's room to intersperse a handful of evergreen somethings...my favorite Chamaecyparis, or Pieris, or Ilex glabra, or something among the rugosas?Oh, but then a message from Fred arrives. How to resist the temptation to plant half a dozen mannerly climbers with an elegant array of clematis twining through?
On the other hand, this is a wild place - who needs to be mannerly? And then I begin reciting the beguiling names of every rambling rose I've ever dreamt of over the years...'Rambling Rector', 'Bobbie James', 'Ghislaine de Féligonde' ...hell... 'Kiftsgate' (the original of which was, when last measured, 80' x 90' x 50' high)!
Now this is my kind of dilemma.
June 13th, 2009: Still more windows, and the cabin is christened
Yes, I know I'd sworn off windows, but they're quite addictive, you know. And when we saw a couple of brand new tall narrow windows that would fit perfectly on either side of the window seat,
on Craigslist, for $35 - well, even Ron said "do it."So, coffee in hand, we left before 7:30 this morning, drove to the next town south of here, and about $100 later our car was full of stuff - not just the windows, which would have been more than worth the trip and the money, but also a really beautiful maple french door, and a lovely little chair with a cane seat that's the perfect height for making music.
Just what every 8'x8' cabin needs...a porch, a window seat, five windows and a massively windowed oak door, gleaned from four towns in three different counties and two different states! I finally got around to sanding and painting one of the great little windows Carole gave us last year, and Ron has installed all three of them, making the inside of the cabin cosy and bright.
Which was particularly welcome when Peter and Tod and their respective banjos, fiddles, mandolins, etc stopped over to practice for an upcoming gig. It poured rain the whole time they were here, but there was plenty of room for the four of us in our nice dry well-lit cabin.
June 14th, 2009: An impromptu garden party, and a heart-stopping arrivalA delightful afternoon, during which the Bills dropped in on their way back to Cleveland from the Boston Early Music Festival, and spent the afternoon hanging out in the garden, catching up, sampling the well water, photographing wildflowers, and just generally having a lovely time. (Well no, this isn't a wildflower; it's my 'Blue Moon" wisteria, just coming into it's first really big bloom down at Esther's, and soon to be transplanted into its permanent home.)
Speaking of wildflowers, perhaps the most astonishing event of the weekend: I was
pumping a bucket of water on Saturday morning, and suddenly, there appeared ten feet in front of my face, a five-foot tall FOXGLOVE, in full bloom.This, the only foxglove I have seen for miles around (although I suppose David Hirsch may grow them in his garden half a mile down the hill), was nonchalantly springing up out of the rock, rubble and tangle of brambles left behind after the last bout with the excavator, like a dandelion in a sidewalk crack. That area is so rough (and destined to be dug up again soon), that I never even noticed it until it bloomed right under my idiotic nose!
Rest assured that after rooting out all the undesirables surrounding it and two much smaller compatriots, I dug them up carefully and moved them to more commodious accommodations, where I expect they'll immediately pout and languish and peter out. Isn't that amazing, though?
June 17, 2009: The first peonyFour days before the summer solstice, 23 days after being moved into the new bed, and more than a year and a half after I rescued them from the castoff pile at a local nursery, Mons Jules Elie has bloomed at last.
Worth the wait, I'd say.
June 18, 2009: 'Blue Moon' Wisteria
Some three years ago, during our first summer here, Ron built the prototype of our log garden fence down at Esther's, just about three feet wide. I had a vision of my 'Blue Moon' wisteria growing on it, with 'Blanc Double de Coubert' in front of the wisteria,
and a lot of Alchemilla mollis (lady's mantle) and below. Well, this is the third year, all three have 'leapt' as the old saying promises ("First year, sleep; second year, creep; third year, leap!"), and the blue, white, and chartreuse is even more wonderful than I'd imagined.Unfortunately, it's been pouring down torrential rain since about 23 seconds after the first wisteria blossom opened, so not only is the light wrong for a really good photo, the poor rose is becoming more bedraggled by the minute. Oh, and the forest tent caterpillars, which are also having an exceptional year, have virtually defoliated both the rose and the wisteria.
Still, I can imagine 36 feet of this...
July 2009
July 5, 2009: the fence is finished, for real.
Another satisfying and productive holiday weekend, during which we finally finished the easiest part of the fence: attaching the small uprights. This "little" project, interrupted a few weeks ago, turned out to be a lot more time-consuming than we would have
imagined, since of course the materials aren't anything like straight, so endless rearranging was required to ensure they'd actually make contact with the cross-pieces in at least two or three places.It was more than worth the wait and the effort, though. It's literally stopping what little traffic there is on Tupper. No kidding - people actually stop their cars at the bottom of the hill and gawk. The mailman actually braved the toboggan run to come up and make a delivery in person so he could get a better look at it. And one particularly brave soul parked on the road and hiked up to ask Ron where he'd gotten the plans for the fence and for my cabin. He was awfully disappointed to hear that the plans exist only in Ron's head.
July 10th, 2009: a blank slate
For a certain sort of demented gardener - me, for example - this photograph is irresistibly enticing. A blank slate, with perfect, double-dug, richly amended beds, ready to plant. We finally finished the last of the uprights for the fence last weekend, so I was finally able to dig beds right in front of it.
While I was in town replenishing the supply of manure, I accidentally picked up a couple of 'Endless Summer' hydrangeas and a lovely little Mountain Laurel, which turned out to be a dwarf variety, and so will add a much-needed evergreen touch to the garden. As the house site begins to make itself more and more apparent, it's clear that the garden is going to be more visible during the long upstate NY winters than I had imagined, so I have a feeling the fence will end up lined with hemlock, and the roses will be interspersed with a few broadleaf evergreens. We shall see.
July 13th, 2009: Both cabins shingled, and the garden overplanted
From a note to Fred:
Well, this morning we can scarcely crawl out of our chairs to retrieve a coffee pot some two yards away, so you know we've had a great weekend. Ow. I said I intended to plant, and plant I did. And Ron said he intended to roof, and roof he did. My cabin is now completely and entirely shingled, and only needs some finishing work on soffits and around windows to be fit for bug-free habitation. And, of course, decoration.And the garden...well, the garden is no longer a holding tank with a fence around it. And I'm here to tell you that unless you have a LOT more restraint and common sense than I, all your hard-won years of gardening wisdom would not prevent you from overplanting a brand new beautiful blank slate, as alas, I seem to have done.
I tell myself that once the cottage is finished and the deer fence can encircle the whole perimeter, I will move many things and enlarge the garden, etc, etc. But you and I know the truth, and the truth is that as soon as the cottage is finished I will order two more wisteria and 30 roses and you'll give me half a dozen lilac seedlings and heaven knows what else and in five years we'll need machetes to find the front porch.
What I have learned over the years, I've learned too well:
1) starting with snowdrops and daffodils, then digging post holes for fencing and
adding large evergreen shrubs seven years later is very silly; and
2) tiny shrubs and trees grow faster than great big ones, and are easier to
transport, plant, and of course much cheaper to boot.
These are good lessons. I also have somehow acquired the patience (and, let's face it, poverty helps a lot with this) to believe that my three-inch sticks with four leaves a piece will one day become a bank covered in fragrant and hardy bayberry bushes. That is, if said bank doesn't all wash down the toboggan run before the bayberry roots spread enough to hold it together.So THIS time, determined to exercise restraint, I was smart enough to start with infrastructure, follow it with hardscaping, progress to thorough soil preparation (this little garden has sucked up 20 cubic feet (and counting) of composted manure and nearly 6 cubic feet of peat moss, and has produced a really impressive mountain of driveway-sized gravel -at least 10 barrows full - and enough rock to replicate the great wall of China), and when I finally got around to planting, to begin with shrubs.
Probably only you can imagine the amount of thought I've put into the shrubs, and in the end I have gone against my better judgment and planted a row of 2-year hemlock seedlings about a foot away from the fence, mostly (aside from the unfortunate fact that I adore hemlocks) because we HAD them. We bought them as 1-year seedlings from the County Soil & Water Conservation District sale in 2008, and overwintered them in a kitchen sink surrounded by a scrap of deer fencing. They have grown and thrived, and they deserve to have a chance. I know, wooly adelgig...well, it isn't here yet, and the nearest large stand of hemlock is nearly a mile away. And I must be the Queen of Denial.So, those will make a lacy, native, appropriately wild-looking evergreen backdrop, very easily hacked back to a reasonable height (I'm not going to think about width right now), exceptionally well-suited to keeping the edge of the garden from sliding down the bank, substantial enough to distract the eye from the driveway without completely obscuring the fence, and hardy enough to serve as a wind block in an exposed area without also creating a cold wall at the base of all the roses.
And then - heaven help me - I really, really wanted just a handful of my favorite broad-leaf evergreens to serve as bones, to make for lovely winter photos during our seven or so months of winter, and I suppose also as a consolation prize for no longer living in zone 7. Enter pieris, inkberry, and mountain laurel. The pieris is the only one that isn't a dwarf variety, and it's placed so that it shouldn't (quite) impede access to the rose beds in ten years. Well, not too much...you know, like your boxwoods. And hydrangeas, which I love nearly as much as roses, but which unlike roses, are only marginally hardy here...what to do? Try 'Endless Summer', that's what.Okay, so let's just pretend all that was the reasonable act of a seasoned gardener who really should know better and move on to Sunday, when it was at long last time to begin moving all the herbaceous things which have been growing and GROWING at Esther's for three years. See "ow", above. We seem to have a chance at getting an excavator out there today or tomorrow, which meant that everything had to be dug up and moved yesterday, or else be sacrificed.
"Everything" included 'Blanc Double de Coubert', who has grown to a lovely, gnarled, seven feet tall. The six little pots of lady's mantle I planted under the living room window have exploded into monsters 3' wide and knee-deep...I have NEVER seen lady's mantle behave in so unladylike a manner, even in England. The 2-gallon pots I'd foolishly assumed I'd drop them into for moving were laughably inadequate, and I ended up using six heavy-duty contractor's garbage bags, which were the only containers stout enough to support such girth and unbelieveable weight. These were no ladies, I assure you.
One pot of 'Biokovo' cranesbill/geranium has spread to FILL a bed three feet deep and four feet wide. I dug some up last month, but half of it remained to be moved, and I've learned that while it spreads like nobody's business, it has a fragile and upredictable root system, is rather delicate out of the ground, and does not take kindly to moving. So that was rather nerve-wracking.
I was quite surprised a couple of weeks ago that the lavender I expect to grow as an annual here was blooming like mad; further investigations revealed exactly one half of the plant to be stone dead - like sticks of straw, while the other half was leafed out and doing its thing. Must have been the full sun and close proximity to Esther's concrete foundation. No such amenities exist on Upper Tupper, alas, so I cut off the dead part, plopped the rest into a nice blue ceramic pot, and I'll enjoy it while it lasts. I don't know...maybe I'll try to overwinter it in my cabin.
A 3" pot of balloon flower that I'd frankly forgotten was there (until a photo from last summer reminded me) emerged from beneath a couple of behemoth lady's mantles and turned out to require the 2-gallon shrub pot to transport. Ditto the various snips and starts of wild violets interspersed here and there, which had grown to fill a couple of 2-gallon pots previously occupied by inkberry bushes. Oh, and three asiatic lilies, heavily budded and - I kid you not - also seven feet tall. If they recover and bloom after this indignity, I will be astonished.
I'm saving the best for last, of course. I dug out all of the above, all by myself, without too much anguish, thanks the the perfect soil that Ron created for them three years ago. Nary a rock that I didn't put there on purpose myself. I even filled (and I mean FILLED) the CR-V myself, with only a single one-inch scratch on my wrist to show for coaxing Blanc Double into the floor of the back seat (and out the window!).
And Then There Was Wisteria. This message is already long enough for several, so I will refrain from detailing theordeal, but I'm sure you can imagine the root system of a three-year-old wisteria in such soil. I finally had to give up and ask Ron for help - and it took him the better part of an hour to liberate this thing from the cement footer of the post it was growing on. At some point it seemed likely that it had perhaps fused with the cement. Unbelievable.
So up the road it all went, and now I have a garden. A beautiful and very crowded garden.
Psst...hey, buddy... wanna buy some lady's mantle?
July 14th, 2009: Excavator.
I didn't want to jinx this by talking about it too much beforehand, but thanks to Esther and her pal Roger, we seem to have a full-size backhoe today and tomorrow, AND the weather is even supposed to be cooperative. As far as I can tell, Esther knows everyone in this town, and one of her many old friends is a man who owns a company that rents heavy construction equipment. Honestly, at least for us, it's not so much the internet which makes the Yellow Pages obsolete as Esther's rolodex!
Anyway, Ron is spending today digging holes for the foundation for Esther's addition, and if all goes well, he'll spend tomorrow up at our place. Cross your fingers for no further calamities, please.
July 15th, 2009: Groundbreaking.
An auspicious day...no, not Russell Rucky's birthday, momentous as that is. Barring catastrophe today goes down as the official groundbreaking for our new house. The REAL house, the one we'll actually live in. Stay tuned...
July 17th, 2009: Houston, we have holes in the ground
Well, it's official: despite a glitch with the tractor on Wednesday, the ground is officially broken!
It was a lengthy glitch. After a very productive few hours, the boom suddenly locked up at about 10:30am - in an extremely precarious position, as you can see, and no amount of fussing, fiddling, or cursing had any effect. Poor Roger - we called him to tell him what was going on, and he said he'd be over as soon as he could get there..from Albany, a mere four hours away!The thing sat there stubbornly for four hours, with four days of hard rain forecast to begin that evening. Feeling helpless, we idiotically worked off frustration, anxiety, and flashbacks from last year's excavator disaster with picks and shovels until we were completely exhausted.
You can, no doubt, guess the rest. Exhausted from digging, we staggered down the hill for
lunch, then hauled ourselves back up, praying that the monster hadn't yet rolled over. Threw ourselves down on the front porch of the cabin, and then started wondering if it would do any good to just give it one more try. Fired up the engine, and of course, it inexplicably leapt back into action.I had just gotten down to Tupper Road on my way back home to look up Roger's number and let him know the tractor was working again when he called from home to let us know he was about ten minutes away. Argh. He decided to come out anyway, and it was really nice to get to meet him in person. Since we'd lost half a day's work (and especially since we were friends of Esther's), he kindly "forgot" to pick it up the next day...and the next, and miraculously, the rain wasn't nearly as bad as what had been predicted.
So no lives or limbs have been lost, the site is now level, there are 16 four-foot deep holes for foundation footings and piers, and the tractor has been picked up. And it's only taken us three years to get here.A friend wrote to assure us that it's all downhill from here. It certainly will all be downhill if we get the two inches of hard rain they're predicting for tonight. I'm thinking we should maybe throw a couple of bags of Quikrete in each foundation hole and stand by with 5' sticks. Wait for rain, stir well, and presto, tomorrow we'll have footers! Ron seems unimpressed.
July 18th, 2009: A beautiful bench!Will you look at this? This is half of a very large ash tree that Ron split for me a couple of years ago. There was a bench, along these lines but nowhere near as artful, at the base of a fir tree at Little Wolf, and I loved it so much that he's been planning to make a couple of them for our place just as soon as there was a place for them.
Oddly enough, the stack of bundled shingles that's been sitting in the garden path for a couple of months turned out to be perfectly located, and had become a favorite perch and indispensable sideboard. Now that the shingles are on the roof, we were missing this very handy spot, and Ron decided the time was right for the first bench to happen.
Of course I imagined the log, as cut, plopped on top of a couple of stumps with wedges cut in them - like the one at Little Wolf. Possibly a bit of sanding, but mostly rustic and functional. I don't know what I was thinking...Ron doesn't really do functional. At least, he doesn't ever stop at functional.So the next thing I knew he was hand-chiseling out a mortise in the bottom of the log, which fit perfectly into the rough tenons he'd carved into the stumps. He knocked it all together with a
sledgehammer, leveled it perfectly into place, then sanded the top smooth as silk and slathered it with three coats of marine varnish.The splendid result, as you can see, while rustic, looks as if it belongs indoors, not out, and feels as if it's been there for centuries.
The other half now seems destined to become a pair of boot benches on either side of the front door of the main house, and I can't wait to see them.
July 22nd, 2009: Foundation materials
We stopped at a favorite locally-owned lumberyard today and were delighted to hear that
they had all the materials we'll need for the foundation piers, at the same or better prices than Big Blue and Evil Orange, and better still, they'll deliver anything over $300 for free.So a whole load of cement mix and rebar is on the way in a week, as well as a 20' ladder that would have been a bit much for the CR-V. It looks as if they'll have all the plywood, etc that we'll need for the next few phases of the project, too. We'll spend the next week readying the holes for the footers... so don't be looking for any pretty pictures, unless you have a thing for pickaxes and mud.
July 25, 2009: The first lilies - and another bench
I got home from work yesterday to find yet another bench in place of the makeshift cinder block-and-board contraption I'd set up next to
the cabin. Ron split, sanded, finished, installed, and leveled this one, which is perfectly sized to fit under the eaves of the cabin, all before leaving for town to teach this afternoon's batch of students. Hmmm...it looks remarkably like a daydreamy scrawl in my garden notebook. Isn't he amazing?And Saturday, those intrepid seven-foot asiatic lilies that I dug up and moved in a bucket from Esther's place two weeks ago actually bloomed, as if nothing had happened. The fragrance is intoxicating, and travels all the way down the driveway.
July 27th, 2009: The first foundation pier!
No, really. This is IT. There are no words to describe the amount of work and anguish this photograph represents. And just so we didn't get to thinking it really would all be downhill from
here, the night after Ron had dug a foot below the excavated hole to level and place the footer - by hand, mind, four feet down in wet, heavy mucky clay, amid clouds of blackflies and mosquitoes - we had yet another hellacious thunderstorm, which washed about half of that muck right back into the hole.But he's got it in place, and the rebar and cement and mortar mixes are coming at the end of this week, and he's had a nice chat with our wonderful town building inspector, who seems as interested in helping us beat the deadline for that $8,000 tax refund as we are, and he's got the paperwork for the building permits for both projects (our house and Esther's addition), and it really feels like this is happening at last.
UNDATED UPDATE:
Okay, okay, I hear you - all of you. Long, long overdue for an update. The thing is, how many clever ways can I say "it's still raining"? And honestly, how many pictures of foundation blocks submerged in mud do you really want to see? So let's see just how quickly we can get through the next six months:
August, 2009: Rain.So remember that part where I wrote:
the night after Ron had dug a foot below the excavated hole to level and place the footer - by hand, mind, four feet down in wet, heavy mucky clay, amid clouds of blackflies and mosquitoes - we had yet another hellacious thunderstorm, which washed about half of that muck right back into the hole.? That was August in a nutshell.
September, 2009: And still more rain.
September was...rainy. We released a new CD, won an award for another, did a couple of radio interviews and a bunch of concerts. But digging holes was not in the cards.
We did, however, manage to find a good hewing axe on Ebay, and Ron has been teaching himself a wonderful new skill. So we have a steadily-growing pile of these beautifully hand-hewn beams, and an even more steadily-growing pile of ideas about how to use them.
Autumn 2009
October 16th, 2009: four inches of snow.This wet year has one thing going for it at least: the leaves are spectacular. See them there, under the four inches of snow?
November 4th, 2010: Good news/bad news
Well, if the weather ever cooperates, I will have quite a bit more time to put the garden to bed and help Ron with the foundation. Today turns out to be my last day at work - at least for few weeks. I'll be coming back for a day or two just before Thanksgiving to wrap things up for real, and to find out whether the wonderful folks there have managed to scrape up another project while I was gone.
It could happen - they really want to make it happen - it's been happening for the last 17 months - but I'm really not holding my breath this time.
November 27, 2009: last-ditch effortRon spent all day yesterday shoulder-deep in holes not quite wide enough to bend over to tie your shoes, prying cold hardpan mud and rocks out of the bottom with whatever implements he could press into service after the second (third? I don't remember) pick axe handle broke. There's no room to swing a pick axe anyway.
Scraping hard, cold clay out of the ground a handful at a time, then hefting it out to above your shoulders - some guys just know how to have a good time. Once he got each hole as deep as required and as flat as necessary, he hauled two chimney blocks (probably 70-80 lbs each) across the building site, which looks very much like a mine field, with sixteen 4-5' deep holes punched at 8' intervals, then pumped a bucket of water, hauled that to the edge of the hole (just getting the bucket to sit without toppling over required more grubbing), then hiked halfway
down the toboggan run to the the pallet of tarped concrete mix. Hauled an 80-lb sack up, up, up (probably the equivalent of two or three flights of stairs), dumped it in the mixing tray, mixed it, then climbed back down the hole, checked and re-checked to be sure everything was still level, then gingerly shoveled the concrete neatly into the chimney blocks (with a shovel handle that's too long to fit sideways in the hole, remember), inserted a length of rebar and carefully plumbed it.It wasn't nearly as much fun as this sounds, especially with the looming anxiety of the knowledge that our annual 5 or 6 months of snow is already long overdue. But he persevered, and finished the entire south wall of the house-to-be, which would normally have been a good two days' work or more. So, six foundation blocks down and (ugh) ten to go...
I can't WAIT until this foundation work is finished - it's utterly nerve-wracking,
and there's virtually nothing I can do to help, aside from pumping and carrying water, and handing him things. Which I'm sure is a great help when you're in the bottom of a hole and can't reach the level without climbing out, but feels a lot like useless when you're out of the hole and wish you could REALLY help. This is such precision work, though, that he won't hear of help from anyone at all - which isn't as unreasonable as it sounds, since the inspector, nice as he is, will make him tear it all out and start over if it's not perfect.So I work off my anxiety by cooking, cleaning, taking care of post office runs & laundry (two chores Ron hates), working on publicity, searching fruitlessly for gigs, and of course planting bulbs. Our local feed & seed had those gigantic sacks of mixed daffodil bulbs on clearance and I stupidly picked up several, which are now surrounding the big oak tree above my cabin. I generally don't like the spotty effect of those mixed sacks, since everything blooms at different times and you don't get the big splash you imagine as you're planting, but the extreme bargain turned my head and overwhelmed my better judgment, so I'll have to live with one spotty corner - or just call it the cutting garden, and possibly dig out the more hideous varieties that appear and unload them on Freecycle.
I guess I'm carrying a bit of daffodil baggage after having been forced to plant a huge lot of the most loathsome daffodil ever devised at the place we were caretaking our west - a lurid variety called, appropriately, Fortissimo - one which puts me in mind of traffic cones and fast food restaurant booths. The owner of the place adored them, and ordered 500 or so from my favorite bulb catalog. So of course my worst nightmare is that after all that work this bargain mix will turn out to be 85% Fortissimo and the rest duds. Next year I will order my favorite varieties, from Van Engelen, in July, like the thoughtful, seasoned gardener I am.December 1st, 2009: The concrete pour
A very big day. The footers are ready at last, and thanks once again to Esther, we were able to bag the ridiculous idea of mixing 135 sacks of concrete by hand, and we actually hired a truck to pour our piers!It's very important for the tube forms - which are after all just made of heavy-duty cardboard - to remain perfectly dry before the concrete is poured. This, as you might imagine is easier said than done, since they also have to be perfectly plumb and securely braced before the pour, a painstaking operation which takes time. The trucks (there's a pumper and and mixer) were due to arrive at 1pm, and Ron & I just about killed ourselves to get them all ready in time without allowing them to sit out collecting moisture all night.
We were relieved and grateful when our good friend Tod (see "the stump", above)
showed up during his lunch hour to lend a hand in the last hair-raising moments of this ordeal. The trucks arrived early, but they had a LOT of work to do just to assemble the hose and run it up the 150-foot toboggan run, so that bought us a bit of time. With Tod's calm, competent help, we were able to get everything braced and ready without making the guys wait - which would have cost additional money, of course.So the pour began. It's difficult to describe the amazement of watching seemingly endless cubic feet of perfectly mixed concrete spewing like magic out of that hose, after having mixed and hauled so much of it by hand. Miraculous what money can buy.
Not that it's easy, mind. That huge hose weighs a ton, and is extremely difficult to maneuver, even without another two tons of concrete in it. Maneuvering that hose among sixteen
lightweight cardboard tubes perched in a muddy minefield without knocking them out of plumb is nearly impossible. But with three strong, smart men working together, they managed remarkably well.Until tube number 8. Fourteen of the tubes were a brand called "ecoform" and the other two were sonotubes, just because the supply yard ran out of the ecoforms. We had noticed that the sonotubes were a lot lighter, and not waxed, but didn't think much about it. We set them all up identically, braced them all identically, identical footers, etc.
But while the guys were pouring the 8th tube, the two sonotubes behind them, already full of concrete, dissolved. Just melted away, leaving a huge pile of shredded cardboard and wet
concrete. Sickening...and of course, expensive.Thank heaven there were two carpenters in attendance. Ron & Tod rushed to turn eight nice siding boards and a bunch of scrap into impromptu forms. As they say, haste makes waste: one of these burst apart when half filled. Long about this time I asked Tod if he didn't need to be getting back to work, and he laughed and said said "are you kidding? I gotta see how this turns out!".
It turned out just fine, fortunately. The second built form was a lot stronger, and held together. We ended up using 3 cubic yards of concrete, which was certainly more than we expected, but not as much as it could have been. The 14 ecoforms are just fine, and the other two are unsightly, but will do the job. The tubes were installed on top of rather massive chimney block footings, but we weren't supposed to backfill until the inspector got up there. We called him and told him what was going on, and he said he'd seen Ron's work and was sure everything was fine. We're very grateful to have a reasonable inspector, good friends, and a pile of wood at the ready, which is the only reason that we now have a foundation rather than sixteen big piles of concrete.
But shoot - what a lot of panic, hard work, and expense! I've never heard of this happening to anybody else, but the guy running the pumper truck assured us that we had done everything just right, and that this happens with sonotubes - the brand specifically - all the time. He wasn't a bit surprised, and rattled off a litany of spectacular failures he's witnessed that made ours look like small potatoes. He also regaled us with hair-raising stories of the huge commercial and government project he has seen this year utterly ruined by the extremely wet weather. Bridge footings and skyscrapers with the exact same issues we've had on our little scrap of land. Oddly comforting, that.
December 4, 2009: Unemployed
Well, I got the official boot from my employer yesterday afternoon. It's almost good to have it over with for certain, rather than feeling that every paycheck was sure to be my last for years on end. I haven't had a paycheck in a month in any event.
No time to worry about it today; we have 16 gigantic concrete foundation piers up the hill exposed to the weather, and a 24-hour rental of yet another earth-moving machine with which to cover them up. This isn't a big excavator, but a "Dingo" - a small stand-behind (like a souped-up forklift) trackhoe kind of thing. Very high hopes here.
December 7, 2009: 17 degrees and 21 tons of gravel to push around
Lots of snow out there, and it was 17 degrees last night. Which means the ground is a bit difficult to work with. We got almost half the piers backfilled on Thursday before it got dark, but the rest need to be buried pronto, before the frost starts throwing them around. So this week we're working on Plan B, which involves backfilling the rest with gravel. We had 21 tons of gravel (that is neither a euphemism nor a typo) delivered this morning, and the little skid steer is arriving again any minute. And a winter storm on the way...December 17, 2009: Winter for real
I guess we're done building for the year. Winter, big time. Overnight lows in the single digits, and about seven inches of snow this morning, still coming down heavily. Looks like a Christmas card. Ah, well...it was fun while it lasted.At least the propane guy is being punished for tucking a $217 bill in our door a minute ago. He's out there in his gigantic truck on Tupper Road, spinning his tires like mad and succeeding only in sliding further downhill. He started off on the uphill side of the end of our driveway, and if he keeps this up much longer, he may have slid far enough down the hill so that Ron will be able to get in when he returns from his lessons this morning. Of course there are two deep ditches on either side of the road, so this is probably not the wisest course of action. Guess I'll suit up and hike out there to see if he needs anything...
~2010~
Winter 2010
Winter in upstate NY. Let's see...I could post the photo of the ruler buried 24" in the snow, or just say "see Winters 2009, 2008, and 2007". It certainly is lovely, and there's a LOT to be said for not needing to leave the house to get to work in all this.
As usual, we've spent much of the early winter focusing on music, with some very nice results, including a good start on the next CD and several great gigs in our very own town for a change. And we've had over 1,600 downloads of our music this year via iTunes, Amazon, CDBaby, and various others, which means we're getting out there.
February, 2009:
After a bitter January, during which we, um, enjoyed wind chills of -15 and below, in late February we were treated to predictions of near-hurricane-force wind gusts of blinding snow falling at more than an inch an hour. 35 mph is considered a blizzard, and they were telling us to expect gusts up to 74 mph. It turned out not to be quite as bad as all that, but it certainly was exciting for a while, and we did end up getting about 28" of undrifted snow. They called it a 'snowicane', among other ridiculous things. Naturally we had a short-notice gig about 30 miles south smack in the middle of it, followed the same day by a further 60 mile-drive (then 90 miles back home in the dark). Let's hear it for four-wheel drive.
Right about that time, we started ripping out the bathroom at Esther's place, where we live - another little project to help raise funds for materials for our own place. The cast iron bathtub made it safely and uneventfully down stairs (yes, the two of us did it ourselves), and the floors, walls and some ceiling have been torn out. Predictably, the usual atrocities were discovered behind those walls and floors, and much, much MUCH rewiring and replumbing has been done. Ron is swearing off remodeling projects forever, and if you wonder why, here's a snippet of a message to Fred about what "installing a new toilet" actually entails:
In plumbing news, Ron worked until 10:30 PM last night to get the new toilet installed (which required removing the old toilet; getting it downstairs; cleaning up after that process; tearing out the old flooring and sub-floor; hauling THAT mess downstairs; rerouting the electrical lines that are literally millimeters away from the water lines; cutting and fitting a new plywood subfloor very precisely; scouring the black mold off the the wall where the old tank was, then sanding, priming and repainting (that was my job); smoothing the subflooring with filler and waiting for that to dry; painstaking sweeping up of all the sawdust and filth from the old floor before applying adhesive; putting down new flooring under the toilet (and cutting around the round pipe, of course); hauling the new 100-lb one-piece toilet (a special one, two inches higher than normal, for handicapped accessibility) upstairs; assembling same (it is, of course, nothing like a normal toilet installation); then re-attaching the water supply lines.
WHICH NO LONGER REACH THE TOILET, SINCE IT'S TWO INCHES HIGHER THAN THE OLD ONE.
This discovery was, of course, made at 10:30 pm, hence the early morning voyage to town for a new length of supply line. And of course, the snow plow just closed in the driveway that I spent an hour clearing when we got home.April 5th, 2010
Argh. No more remodeling!
March 2010
March was consumed by more work on the bathroom, many many rehearsals and performances, and a lengthy battle with bronchitis. And wild swings in the weather: from unspeakable wind chills and 28" of snow to 60+ degrees. Which, of course means gardening season is upon us, whatever the calendar says.
Today I managed to schlep 400 lbs of manure up to the
garden, which is exploding in a most gratifying manner after the unseasonable heat. I will have to spend the next two months fretting about every cold snap and tucking in the hydrangeas, which have LEAVES on them. Fortunately, aside from that, and the poor snowdrops - which are of course fried - it seems to have cooled off just enough that it's still pleasant to work outside, but "Fred's Scillas" are in suspended animation, and the tulips that are up won't go much further for a while.So I got all the beds raked out and manured, and rearranged some stepping stones, and generally putzed around. I still can't believe there is actually a garden there - I have a garden!! My little seed order has arrived - a whole bunch of nigella, and some Fr. Cupani sweet peas, and a pack of white four o'clocks.
We had our first cookout last night - on Easter Sunday, can you imagine? - and we just kept adding wood to the fire until the songs of the robins had given way to the hooting of the owls and it was completely dark. It's really miraculous that if you stand in our driveway facing south at night, there is not a single light on the distant ridge. Not a cabin, not a trailer...nothing. I can't believe how fortunate we are to have gotten this lovely little piece of land.
April 9th, 2010The garden is utterly splendid - completely packed with three inch high tulips which I was an idiot to plant in the woods. All the roses are leafing out, and I was thrilled to find a listing on Craigslist Wednesday for someone nearby with seedlings of hybrid rugosas Delicata and Belle Poitevine for sale. I about killed myself excavating a tiny little bed for them, carving it out of what looked like hardpan right up against my little cabin. The soil beneath the layer of construction debris turned out to be very nice, and better than that once I'd sifted it through the big frame sifter that Ron built us last year and added a bunch of peat and manure. Of course the inevitable by-product was yet another shin-deep pile of rocks.
That done, we took a longish and lovely drive out to pick them up yesterday, and found not
the seedlings described in the ad, but rather big hefty plants with really well-developed rootstocks, happily overwintered in a mountain of sheep manure. The only hitch was that the two varieties had intertwined to the extent that the seller had no idea which was which, so I am now the proud owner of a mystery rugosa. I hope it's Belle Poitevine, but Delicata is nice, too, and for (!) $4, I wish I had space for a hedge!I'm completely obsessed just at the moment with building a tuteur worthy of Father Cupani's sweet peas, and I have hit on what I consider to be a brilliant solution involving 6' sections of rusted rebar and grape vines. I'm convinced that this is a stroke of genius, especially since the beautiful iron ones I had in my old garden are going for upwards of $150 each these days, and they'd be too fancy for this garden anyway. Go ahead and laugh - I think this is going to work!
Off to tuck in the hydrangeas before it dips down to 27 degrees, as they're predicting. If a rose required such heroic measures I'd chuck it out and plant something hardier...
April 13th, 2010
I had planned to treat myself to a little road trip (it's only 23 miles, but country roads, so c. 45 minutes) to a very nice nursery up north tomorrow, but today Ron & I were coming back from town when he realized he'd forgotten to get a lime for the guacamole he wants to make tonight. So we stopped at a largish farm market on the way home to see if they might have one.
Well, he got two lemons, a lime, and a grapefruit for $1.25, but that was not the best bargain to be found. Every once in a while this place picks up cartload of shrubs from a farm auction somewhere down in the Susquehanna valley, and when the stars are favorably aligned, Finds Can Be Had. Today I found three good-sized, healthy Thuja occidentalis 'Elegantissima' which don't look to have been out of the ground for more than a couple of days. They have that lovely, graceful laciness that the ubiquitous Wal-Mart Arborvitae never do, and they remind me of Myrtle Hill Cemetery, where I spent many happy hours as a child. Hardy to zone 3 and $7 each.
Add to that, an exceptionally well-grown (and venerable-looking) Rhododendron, 'Roseum Elegans'. Hardy to -25, this one is a good 3' tall and so remarkably graceful and symmetrical that it called to me from 50 feet away. It's attributes are evidently limitless, as the mere fact of its inclusion in the RareFind nursery catalog attests.
Hang on to your hat...Ron parted with all of $15 for this lovely thing, which is destined to spread its branches under the shade of the oak tree anchoring the new 'winter garden' that I've been working on. This is an enormous curving border about 30 sprawling feet wide, on a very steep slope, visible all winter long from the window over the kitchen sink in the kitchen-to-be. It will be the home of my treasured Chamaecyparus obtusa 'Nana Gracilis', as many different kinds of ferns and mosses as I can convince to grow there, a nice clump of Solomon's Seal from our friend Peter, and all the snowdrops and daffodils I can stuff in. And some day, my impressive Hellebore collection. I have none yet, alas, but I just love them, and some day...
The little iron bench that was our first furniture (we carried it up there the day the land transferred) sits next to the big oak, and the Thujas will eventually be the start of a nice hedge behind it, interspersed with fragrant Daphnes and Clethras. The stone circle that I refer to as our summer kitchen is right in front of the bench, and will eventually be mere steps away from the real kitchen, as well as the veggies and herbs.
So that's the big news here. I don't know when an expenditure of $36 has created such excitement.
April 14th, 2010Well, the earliest tulips are up and there's no more postponing the deer fencing. I will get used to this...
April 18th, 2010
I rustled my first peony this morning. Named it Paeonia 34/96.
April 20, 2010
It's lovely, but somehow I didn't expect Apricot Beauty to be so...pink.
April 27th, 2010
Song sparrows are back!
April 29th, 2010
I hauled a lot of rocks today, but I think the borders are looking considerably more intentional. If the background of all my photographs is going to have to include deer fencing, at least the foreground will look better.
May 3rd, 2010Temperatures in the mid- to upper- eighties over the weekend just pounded the dickens out of the daffodils and tulips, but we had a cool rain last night and this morning, and what's left is to die for. I know this tulip is one of about 12,000 such photos taken by me and every other idiot with a close-up lens, but it makes me happy. I told Ron that we can't reasonably expect to see another year like this - with early and late daffs AND early and late tulips, AND rhodies, AND four types of violets all blooming at the same time, together with the starflowers and trillium. Maybe once in a decade. Or not. The sky is so blue it's almost painful to look at, and the trees have fully leafed out since Friday, so the light is beautifully dappled even at
high noon.And new birds are arriving daily. Today we saw "the Dude" (Rose-Breasted Grosbeak) back at the feeder. Somehow he seems so much less obnoxious since one of our neighbors told me that he spends as much time sitting on the nest as the Missus. Missus was having a terrible time trying to figure out how to work the finch feeder, since the perches are a little too short, and it's a tight squeeze for her to get to the holes. The Dude managed to figure it out first, and reached down to feed her! Awww....
May 9th, 2010
And this morning, there's snow on the roses.
May 13th, 2010
Still having 25-degree overnight temps, but thankfully no casualties, thanks to the old bedsheets draped attractively over the hydrangeas every night. Frost is a fragile thing, and it doesn't take much to stave it off. I'm so grateful that I don't have an orchard to fret over.
I went for a walk in our woods this morning and ended up lingering in our little Moosewood grove, alongside the old logging road that borders our land. The light was perfect, and the trees are blooming. More photos on FaceBook.
Ron's been working way too hard on Esther's addition, and it has gone from bare framing exactly a month ago to an actual room, complete with an actual roof, three splendid picture windows and electricity. Saturday I learned how to be a roofer's assistant. We got all the shingles done during sunshine, blustery wind, HAIL, rain, and sunshine again, with the forecasters assuring us that Armageddon was upon us, to be followed by a week of hard rain and hard frost. What an exhausting day.
But it's done, and it's dry. The insulation and flooring was delivered yesterday, so that's coming up once the electrical work gets inspected. It shouldn't be too awfully long until we're working on our own place!
May 12th, 2010
Indigo Buntings are back...dozens of them, it seems, flitting through the grass all around Esther's place.
May 14th, 2010
Wood Thrushes! I wandered through our woods this morning, oblivious to the most appalling humidity. The Wood Thrushes sang, the honey locusts perfumed the forest, and I found that our patches of Trillium and Mayapples had both increased considerably since last year. Photos on Facebook.
May 16th, 2010
I heard a hummingbird buzz by today. Uh-oh...there's a whole new hunk of house where their feeder was, so we're going to have to figure something out - soon. Don't want to get on the wrong side of a feisty hummingbird!