Sandhill News By apple
It is spring. Not just a warm spell, but spring. Mornings are loud with birds, nights are loud with frogs and toads. The fruit trees are flowering, the bluebells are out, the bees are bringing in pollen and nectar. There's six baby chicks from the Dog and Gun peeping from their cardboard box down in Dharma living room.
Two of our three seasonal garden interns have arrived: Sara from St. Louis, and Owen, who spent some time here last fall. They've been working with Gigi and Emily, getting the brassicas and alliums out into the raised beds, and planting potatoes. Today they spent a lot of time spotting out tomatoes in the greenhouse. We've also had lots of other help in the gardens from a crew that visited from Eastwind Community, and an old friend Geoff, who spent a week or two here helping out.
We've started working some of the fields. The oats are coming up, and we're cultivating in preparation for sorghum and mustard. Stan put some ashes (from woodstoves here and at Dancing Rabbit) on the fields today to bring up their potassium levels. Last week Stan celebrated his 30th anniversary of living at Sandhill! He's been farming, loving, and caring for the land here for a long time.
Yesterday we started some bees in our new top-bar hive. We keep most of our bees in Langstroth hives, the common style of stacked rectangular boxes. Top bar hives work a little differently, and they're getting popular among hobby beekeepers in the US. Stan and I were curious about them, so I got some plans off of the Internet and spent a day with Owen in the woodshop making one. We will probably harvest less honey out of it than our Langstroth hives, but we are hoping the bees will be more docile and easier to show to visitors who come through. Almost everyone who visits is interested in the bees, and we like to share the experience when we can.
Last week we worked on getting some saw logs out of the woods. We felled two large white oaks this winter, to make into lumber, but it's been too wet until recently to retrieve them. We took the most powerful of our three tractors down to the edge of the field, put a choker on the biggest of the logs (30 feet long, 4 foot diameter?), and couldn't budge. We rolled it (with the tractor) to a better position and trimmed some limbs closer. We tried to pull it again and our chain popped. We gave up and called Irwin Zimmerman. He made time in the evening for us, drove over with a machine that made our tractor look pretty small, and pulled it right out and up the hill. Thanks!
This past weekend Sandhill hosted the Communities Magazine "Summit." The staff of the magazine, who primarily work together over email, came together on our front porch for their yearly meetings. Some of them were meeting each other for the first time! They all seemed to hit it off, and reported productive meetings.
And the last bit of Sandhill news that comes to mind is that we purchased a new (used) truck. The ranger just kept developing more and more problems, and it was time to replace it. We had to get some work done on the new truck (if I remember right, it's a one-ton Toyota longbed from the late 1980s), but it should be coming home tomorrow and legal to drive by the end of this week. Anybody who wants an inexpensive truck with some mechanical problems, let us know, we might have one for sale soon.
Until next time...