About

The last revision of this introduction occurred in 2019, so it is about time to bring the Walnut Diary’s author into the second decade of the new century.

First of all, Rod’s obsession with black walnuts remains intact.  Charlie and Rod made a film entitled For the Love of Black Walnuts (2021) for the Ontario Woodlot Association as part of their ongoing Woodland Walks and Talks series.  It is now available on YouTube.

A new role for Rod emerged in the summer of 2020 when granddaughter Ada announced that she wanted to learn to fish.  Regular expeditions to lock stations and in the fishing boat have dominated Ada’s summer visits to the Farm from that point on.  Bet comes along on these adventures to make sure everyone wears a lifejacket and to provide peanut butter and jam sandwiches for lunch.

The Porsche Cayenne went to the junk yard in the spring of 2022 and the 2002 Tacoma returned to service.  After a bit of welding to the frame and box by a talented auto restorer, it has remained a remarkably undemanding vehicle, though the hybrid Lexus ES300 does the majority of the highway work.

As the trees on the Croskery farm mature, they offer an increasing return on investment, as well as justification for the purchase of more toys, including the trade-in of the Ranger on a Kioti Mechron 2200PS, a diesel-powered  hearing-destroyer  which runs up a lot of hours on chores around the farm, and which is legal for use on township roads due to a local ordinance.  In the spring of 2022 Rod also found a larger version of his beloved Bolens G174 tractor.  This one is a 1989 25 hp 4WD CaseIH 254 with a heated cab and loader.  Its small body allows work around the trees impossible with the larger tractors, especially on rainy days which are ideal now for bush hogging.  With 4WD it should handle the five foot snow blower effectively this winter.  Another Promethean innovation on the farm this year was a gas-powered Echo pole saw for trimming limbs off trees.  It was time for many of the walnut trees to be trimmed up ten feet to enhance their timber value.

In the winter of 2020-21 we invited a contractor to remove the diseased and dying beech trees from the woodlot as part of a scheduled improvement cut.  Greg Beach did the logging and Brian Raison cut most of the logs into firewood for his customers in the Athens area.  At Rod’s request Greg also hauled out a large black walnut tree which eventually sold to a Cornwall area lumber dealer, along with a couple of thousand feet of basswood from the improvement cut.  Some smaller cherry logs were cut up locally for material to build a copy of an English garden bench which became a memorial to Rod’s mother, Edna, who passed in January of 2022 at the age of 95.

Summer of 2022 featured the work of Heritage Home Restoration on the stone and brick wings of the house at the farm.  Proprietor Luc Hanna and his crew did necessary maintenance to basement walls and exterior brick and stone.

And that’s about it.  Celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary on August 19th 2022 with a visit to Bet’s eye doctor and lunch in Gananoque, Rod and Bet are much less active socially than they used to be, and find there is plenty to do around the farm (especially with blazingly fast cable Internet) to keep them healthy and active, though they tend to live for weekend visits from their grand-daughter.

The original introduction to this blog:

Rod Croskery’s been obsessed with black walnuts ever since he couldn’t convince anyone that he had found them growing on Young’s Hill, Leeds County, Ontario, Canada, back in 1973. “Walnuts don’t grow that far north. They must be butternuts,” said all of the experts consulted, including the veneer company representatives.

Considerable research proved Rod to be correct this once, so he decided that these walnuts would be his retirement project. Then the Leeds Stewardship Council suggested that he plant some trees as a demonstration plot for the International Plowing Match 2007 Conservation Display, and it seemed the perfect time to begin a walnut orchard on the fields adjoining the Croskery Woodlot.

By fall of 2007 the excitement of the IPM had died down and the Walnut Diary entries began to diverge. Howie Crichton came across the blog and offered Rod a column in his weekly newspaper, the Review-Mirror. It ran for four years.

In response to what he felt was a need, Rod has maintained a Newboro-Lake-Ice-Report page in the blog. It culminates each year with a guess-the-ice-out-date contest, the winner of which is entitled to bragging rights on the lake until next season’s winner is crowned.

During the summer of 2016 Rod belatedly settled upon his midlife-crisis car.  The little-red-Miata dream gradually  morphed into an early Porsche Cayenne S, a 5380 pound SUV which his son Charlie found for him in Vancouver and shipped home by rail to take up residence in the well equipped auto shop at the farm.  The family named the truck “Ruby” and its repairs have figured prominently in 2016 entries.

The blog went quiet for a couple of months in fall when a prolonged session under the dash fixing Ruby’s air conditioning pinched a couple of nerves in Rod’s neck, nixing the ability of his left arm to type.

The arrival in September of Ada Grace Croskery has given new focus to the family circle, and “the Ada Virus” has increasingly monopolized Internet bandwidth as virtually every photo or video is repeated in real time among the competing grandparents and relatives.

Rod’s considerable restraint in keeping this blog free of the Ada Virus had to crack at some point.

July 30, 2017

Rod and Bet await the call from Kingston General Hospital for Rod to go in for a valve replacement and triple bypass surgery.  Rod spins this slightly risky reset as a solid investment insofar as it offers an additional couple of decades of pension income to the family financial plan.

February 23, 2019

Rod has started the renovation of the brick wing of their home in Forfar.  A contractor put on a new roof last summer;  another contractor built a massive septic system for the two wings of the house, so there was no reason not to go ahead with a renovation.  First up is the re-wiring.  This involves a lot of bending and work on the floor, but so far the renovated heart is holding up much better than the aging joints and muscles

“This is a subject of but small importance and I know not whether it will interest any readers, but it has interested me.”

Charles Darwin on Earthworms, 1882

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“Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.”
– More Maxims of Mark (Twain), Johnson, 1927

On Porsche websites contributors refer to the ownership of a Porsche Cayenne without warranty as “going naked” and buying a 2004 Cayenne as “cliff diving.”  So far Rod has found the experience entertaining.

Things get interesting when “social license” and “consent” turn up in the same sentence.  I guess neither word indicates satisfaction but both offer enough wiggle room for a lawyer to get the user out of trouble.

You may contact Rod by email at: rodcros at gmail.com