the Walnut Diary

Home for more food.

Feeding the woodlot team out of the farm kitchen has gone well so far. Food and access to the tools we need go a long way toward keeping morale high.

The Ez-Go conked out (electronic/electrical component) on the first afternoon, so since then I’ve used a 4-passenger Club Car from the motor pool. It’s a very effective people-mover, much more so than the many Raptors, Mules and Gators, all of which are hot, noisy, and carry too few passengers for our needs.

The woodlot tours are set up to handle six circuits per day with twenty passengers. Yesterday we had to cram a bit, because 260 people lined up for the tours. Today it went up to 469. By the end of the day the standby guides were rounding up groups and walking them around the course, delivering the pitch. Scott and Martin, the forestry guys, have refined their presentations until they are pretty fine, by all reports.

Neil Thomas and his walnut processing machines are getting lots of attention, as are my poor little trees. I’m finding a surprisingly large number of people who like black walnuts and who don’t seem to find my obsession all that weird.

The woodlot’s a refuge from the hubbub of the fair ground, and everybody loves it.

Saturday will be a big day. Get there early if you want to check things out. Don’t miss the Canadian Raptor Conservancy Show. It’s next to the woodlot and the one presentation which gets unanimous excellent reviews. It’s just one guy with a microphone and four birds, but it earns its billings. One hawk who steals hats off the heads of audience members keeps kids of all ages mesmerized.

I’ve spent a bit of time driving taxi. A couple I picked up late yesterday afternoon seemed ready to drop. The old guy was running on one bad knee and a cane, and the cane was dragging. She wasn’t much better off. I hauled them to Gate 2 and offered to take them on to their car. “We don’t want to go to our car. Will you take us to the helicopter ride?”

A gentleman hailed me this afternoon and asked for a lift to the exit gate at the west end of the property. Turns out he’s in the RV park, so over his objections (“It’s too far out of your way!”) I took him the extra mile to his big motorhome. He’s by himself at the match, having lost his wife two years ago. New Polaris 350 ATV sitting beside the motorhome. A retired farmer from outside Merrickville, 91 years old. I suggested places he could ride his machine, but he admitted that there’s lots of company in the park, and he has a lot to do. No wonder they come for a week, 1850 units so far and counting. Come to think of it, Lloyd Stone’s field grew a couple of dozen on unserviced spots yesterday afternoon. That’s overflow.

This is some event.

Oh yeah, I keep running into Sue Pike and Vicki Cameron around the site. Sue’s editor of a recently-published collection of stories set on the Rideau Waterway. Vicki wrote two of the titles in the book. Turns out Bet had brought a copy home from the Smiths Falls Public Library a week ago, and I’d read Vicki’s stories and most of the others. It’s a dandy little book whose heart is in Chaffey’s Locks, as it should be.

Sue Pike, Ed. Locked Up: Tales of mystery and mischance along Canada’s Rideau Canal Waterway. Deadlock Press, Ottawa, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9780561-0-0