Back to school
December 6, 2010
Last summer Roz suggested that the course of Dr. William Newcomb, known as “Dino Bill” to his students, would be a good fit for me. Trees of Canada, Biology 529, is a seminar offered to fourth year Queen’s undergraduate students.
During the introductions I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that this was my first university course since 1980. The comment led to the first of a series of blank looks from the seven women and three men in the class. They appeared to have no way to comprehend a creature from this era.
What’s more, this artifact insisted upon making comments in class. Perhaps no one in the room was more discomfited than Dino Bill. When my prof told me he had his own portable saw mill, I reasonably asked him for the make and model. His mouth dropped. I don’t think one of his students had ever asked him that. Same thing happened when he mentioned his skidder. I had seen one of that model for sale on Kijiji that morning.
Dino Bill assigned a short seminar on tree-cutting rules in their home municipalites, so the students reported from Montreal, Winnipeg, the Ottawa Valley, Ottawa, Bermuda, England, Australia, and three boroughs of Toronto.
Unlike graduate students who seem to have quite a bit of flexibility in their schedules, these undergrads seemed very pressed for time. When I invited the class to the woodlot for an afternoon walkabout, a couple of members of the class did the math and came up with a total time commitment of five hours. They reluctantly concluded that it couldn’t work this semester. There just wasn’t enough time.
The 8:30 class had perfect attendance. The only slightly-late arrivals were those who had seminars that day, who often came in showing the effects of very little sleep. But the handouts, graphics and oral presentations were of the first order.
After three decades of trying with limited success to teach students how to write good point-form outlines, I was delighted to see the quality of the outlines these guys produced. I asked Eric how he learned to write this way. “Uh, I sorta watch what the other students do, and then try really hard to match it.” Well try they do, and they succeed. Over the course of a full semester of written materials, I did not notice a single error of spelling or grammar.
I told Eric and anyone within earshot that in the outside world their writing and presentation skills alone are a very marketable skill, regardless of their scientific knowledge.
As Roz anticipated, the content of the course proved highly interesting to this veteran tree-hugger. The chemistry was way beyond me, but the rest was just fine. The big surprise was the lack of a textbook for the course. Most of the seminar material came from Internet websites devoted to tree cultivation and biology.
For the most part this worked well. The only weak spot in the data seemed to be the trap of a popular map marking the range of each tree species: it must have been designed by a politics major, for it painted the whole province or state green if that particular tree was found in it.
At 8:30 on a Tuesday morning it is hard to look at an illustration of the entire province of Ontario painted green to describe the range of the sugar maple. This error made its way through most of the seminars, which illustrated that while these are bright young people, they have little real-world experience yet. The image of maples growing on permafrost along the shore of Hudson’s Bay — I just can’t get it out of my head.
But the students were in their element on the biochemistry of cancer-fighting compounds extracted from British Columbia yew and red cedar. The history of the willow tree parallels the evolution of modern medicine.
Bill assigned me a seminar on the managed forest, a program for privately-owned woodlots in Ontario. I showed up with a 16-page handout of our management plan and a reprint of a Review-Mirror column on the subject. I started off by asking the students the following question:
“Assume you have been put in charge of a substantial woodlot. Please list in order of preference the following benefits you would like to receive from the property:
ecological benefits, recreation, wildlife habitat, money, wood products, aesthetics.”
A glance at their papers showed money at the top of almost every list!
Another surprise came when I finally realized that these were not English literature students. For years I have observed print-fixated English majors in meetings latching onto the first available thing to read and rudely ignoring the speaker. I thought my current classmates were extremely polite to resist the temptation of the printed page in favour of the talking head, but I gradually realized that reading is work, not fun, for biology students.
The best thing about the course, undoubtedly, was the young people in it. Dino Bill said they are an uncommonly good lot, and I would have to agree. If they are Canada’s future, we’re in pretty good hands.
A visit from Joe and Christian
November 27, 2010
My grandfather loved his axe, and throughout his long life he wielded it with skill and pride. He heated his home with wood he split himself until it made sense to put in an oil furnace. Then he retired his axe and adjusted the thermostat.
My father never thought much of oil heat because it relied upon too many outside factors and might someday let his family down in a crisis. From the time I was big enough to lift a chainsaw I worked with my dad cutting firewood for heat. Much of the time we spent together over the year was devoted to this vital task. By the seventies it made sense to switch to oil heat, but he still insisted upon having a wood stove in his living room.
But during the ice storm it wasn’t the stove that allowed Mom and Dad to stay in their home, it was the generator that electrician Les Parrott bestowed upon them on the first day of the storm. From that time on my dad cherished his 5 kw Honda and the stove sat unused.
It turns out in the last year my sister and I have separately looked into the feasibility of buying solar equipment. As peak oil approaches it just makes sense to have an alternative energy source lined up.
Then realtor Allan Earle sent me an email this week asking me to meet with his clients who would be in the area for a day, so we set up an interview. I wanted to hear what they had to say and possibly get a column out of it.
I had done some reading about Northland Energy, a solar company developing three projects in the Newboro area, and I just assumed these guys would be representatives of this company. No. Joe’s from Tenedos Energy, of Toronto and London. Christian represents JCM Capital of Toronto, which provides funding for Tenedos.
They haven’t bought any farms in the area. That’s another company again. By now I had figured out that they have nothing to do with Renewable Energy, the developer of several projects just outside Smiths Falls.
So my first question was, “Why are you interested in this area, and this property specifically?”
Joe Lasko responded, “Tenedos Energy goes out and locks down sites. JCM provides the money to do that. We identify areas which are the most suitable. This location is of interest because it offers Class 4 land, and a spot close to a transmission station with capacity available.”
Rightly or wrongly, eligibility for Feed In Tarrif funding under the Green Energy Act is contingent upon locating the solar fields on land which is not classified as Class 1, 2, or 3.
The first thing I had done after Alan Earle visited the farm a couple of weeks ago was locate a soil map. Surely enough, on the Canada Land Inventory Agricultural Capability Map (31C9) the area around Young’s Hill is coloured white, indicating Class 1, 2, or 3 land, but Young’s Hill itself is brown on the map, and thus is eligible for FIT funding, regardless of the soil’s fertility. You can find this map quite easily on the Internet.
The Green Energy Act has produced a gold rush in Ontario. The Feed In Tarrif Program has succeeded in attracting world attention and companies such as Tenedos have sprung up to take advantage of the development opportunity. Tenedos personnel branched off from Greta Energy where they had specialized in wind power installations over the last five years in Bosnia, Estonia, Russia, Germany and Vietnam.
The rush is to secure access to class 4 land and a dwindling supply of unused capacity on transmission lines.
I asked Christian Wray what his firm brings to the table. “JCM Capital helps to fill a funding gap in Canada. European capital is cheaper for us because solar has a track record in Europe and there’s just more money available. Germany and Spain have had FIT programs for a decade now. They’re familiar with solar energy and not afraid to invest in it. There are solar farms in Germany that have been operating since the sixties.
“At JCM we have deep finance experience and are able to raise financing in the international markets through a deep network of relationships in this region. We understand what makes renewable projects bankable and can help smaller developers get to this quality threshold.
“Tenedos uses polycrystalline panels, not the new thin-film panels that use less silicon. These have various environmental issues. They’re not as green as the polycrystalline panels which are a proven technology, around since the 1960’s.
“Each developer has its own philosophy: we are focused on using green, proven, financeable products in our projects.”
I fired off a much less theoretical question: “A home generator usually produces about five kilowatts of power per hour. Assuming an hour at mid-day on a sunny day in July, how many sections of solar panel would it take to match that output? How many of these would be mounted on a single pole? Per acre?”
Christian responded, “Canadian Solar on the Internet will give the specs. We use a 230 watt panel, so that would be 21 panels. Various combinations of them get put together, depending upon the engineering of the site. We work with the engineer to determine the best solution for the site.”
Joe and I branched off into an animated discussion of Hunter Thompson’s writing. He did his master’s thesis at Brock on the guy. Allan grew quite restless at this, pointing out that they had other meetings scheduled, and they’d better get under way.
So away they went. Joe and Christian, two bright young guys. Smooth salesmen or business leaders of the future? We’ll have to see.
It’s the faces of the kids!
November 21, 2010
On a November day in 1905, a man wearing a white beard and red suit stepped off the train, met Timothy Eaton and his wife, and walked to their store through downtown Toronto. This marked the beginning of a tradition which outlasted the Eaton corporation and has become an important part of our Canadian culture: the Santa Claus parade.
In 1908 a truck and a band joined Timothy Eaton’s annual procession. By 1924 Gimbel’s in Philadelphia, Macy’s in New York, and the J.L. Hudson Company in Detroit had picked up on the idea as a means to kick off sales for the Christmas season.
After watching this year’s Toronto Santa Claus Parade on television, I found the only thing which rang true was the comment by Santa in answer to an interviewer’s question. What did he find the most interesting thing about the parade? “It’s the faces of the kids!”
As a veteran of three Santa Claus parades, the last two this weekend, I have to agree with this Santa’s assessment. I’ll never forget the girl in the T-Rex outfit who followed us last year in Westport. This year in Prescott and Kemptville I found it hard to believe that there are that many kids in the country.
Families love a parade. People of all ages come out simply to enjoy the spectacle and the company of others. Despite the department store hype, it’s not so much about Santa, or advertising, or the other crass aspects of consumption. From what I have seen in these parades the magic of Christmas is about parents celebrating an idea of a world they can make work for them.
Each community has a distinct identity. Prescott emphasized lots and lots of lights on Friday night. My first impression of the parade came when I parked beside the only other truck in the marshaling yard when I arrived at dusk. The back of its trailer opened and out backed a golf cart loaded with great gobs of lights driven by a straining generator somewhere under the dozens of strings of decorations. The driver in a clown suit stopped, made a few minor adjustments, then flicked a switch to inflate an 8’ clown on top of the cart. Then he turned on the stereo and his tiny float was ready to roll. It looked good.
Marjory went over to talk to the guy. He’s been attending the parade for ten years, adding a bit to his cart each year, and getting better at keeping the thing operating until the end of the route. We followed him back to his trailer after the parade. At full speed for a mile down the highway his inflated clown was still hanging on and all of the lights still worked. Apparently the only problem was his chilly feet and hands.
Prescott’s evening parade may be a victim of its success. Huge numbers of floats entered. Many heavy trucks wheeled in with trumpeting air horns and gleaming chrome. One minor hockey float had a rear-lit projection of hockey scenes. As we lined up my heart was in my mouth: a very young boy wearing a hard hat from a utility company I did not recognize was perched alone in the cherry picker on top of a large service truck.
The way Federal Liberal Candidate Marjory Loveys operates in parades, I drive my Ranger, decorated with wrapped gifts and carrying the candy larder. She walks or jogs the route, meeting as many people as she can. Her growing entourage of volunteers dressed as elves pass out candy canes to the kids and generally look supportive.
In Prescott the elves panicked when they saw the vast number of kids. Four kilos of candy canes disappeared in the first quarter mile. What to do? Elf Shawn spotted a likely store and dashed ahead, soon to return with another five kilos. With care the elves were able to make this supply last for the remainder of the parade.
Everybody was astonished and a bit stressed by the sheer number of faces at the Prescott parade. Though there were lots of people there as well, Saturday afternoon’s outing in Kemptville was a more relaxed affair with some time to chat with fellow participants and spectators. Kemptville merchants spoiled us with hot chocolate and cookies, dashing out from their stores to hand the goodies to us as we passed. The COGECO master of ceremonies parked himself squarely in my path while he had an on-air chat with Marjory. And there was the sandwich shop owner who adorned three young women (her daughters, I suspect) with exceptionally creative costumes depicting her wares. The veggie-sub costume I immediately understood. The others were a little trickier, but amusing to see. Mom pulled a wagon loaded with mini-sandwiches and the girls handled distribution. They didn’t have any trouble giving them away.
And then there was the huge, pink, propane truck. I had to ask. The driver was happy to tell his story. Superior Propane bought two $400,000 Kenworth trucks painted pink in support of the Breast Cancer awareness program, one for Ottawa and the other to work out of Guelph. A portion of the revenue from every litre each truck pumps goes as a contribution to the fund. On a busy day, “As much as a couple of hundred dollars from each truck goes to breast cancer research.” It takes a real man to drive a pink truck, but the guys at Superior seem proud to do it.
Next week is the Brockville parade, so wish us luck.
Gearing up for the wood stove
November 14, 2010
I’d been cruising kijiji.ca for a block splitter, and on a whim I changed the language of my search, typing in “wood” instead of the more American “log.” Fifteen minutes earlier someone had posted a short ad for a 3 pt hitch wood splitter, so I was off on another wild goose chase to Harrowsmith, an hour and a quarter to the west.
Unlike the wreck the day before in Oxford Mills, this one turned out to be a solid, Mennonite-built unit which Gerald Emmons, a former Forfar resident, had bought at an auction only to discover it ran too slowly on his Kubota. Seems the dealer wanted $2000 to install a set of remotes on the new tractor, so he hooked it to the loader. Small hoses impeded the splitter’s performance, so Gerald decided to go with a gas-powered model.
I didn’t know if my TAFE’s rear remotes would do any better, but I decided to try. It has a three-way diverter valve for hydraulics which has quite a learning curve, but Peter’s testing gauge said the pressure was fine once we found the correct settings. To produce a continuous flow to the splitter he locked the “tipping lever” open with a chunk of scrap metal and I tore into a pile of elm rounds with my new toy.
Peter has the same model of splitter and he thinks it runs pretty slowly on the TAFE but it works for me, and without breaking a sweat I split my way through a significant pile of firewood in an hour.
The next day the thing wouldn’t work. I racked my brain in an effort to puzzle out the hydraulic settings, but I couldn’t get pressure to the back of the tractor. Peter came back with his gauge and solved it in an instant. Turns out the three-way diverter valve is really a two-way with an OFF setting. The same setting provides pressure to both the loader and the splitter, and I’d been trying to use OFF to run the splitter. Sometimes the manual isn’t right. Oh. Feeling stupid but relieved, I got back to work on the pile of soggy elm blocks.
As the wood made its way to the stove in the garage, I came to realize that wet elm doesn’t burn very well. In fact it was all I could do to incinerate the first two trailer-loads, so I turned my attention to a pile of maple chunks left over from the removal of the huge tree which overhung the parking lot in front of the house until last winter. It had taken me three days with the loader to haul the stuff away.
Much of the wood was too large for Dad’s little Husquvarna 51 to cut, but it chewed away at anything up to about two feet in diameter. The splitter got a workout on the gnarlier blocks, and one hose sprung a leak, but in general it worked very well. The visit to Princess Auto for a replacement was a revelation in how hydraulic hoses are assembled, as well.
In the meantime Alahan Kandasamy had arrived to inspect the chimney installation. He took one look at Mom’s little box stove sitting on a stand above the garage floor, and uttered, “What the….? Who installed this?”
Alahan seemed a bit worried about the steel structure underneath the patio stone on which I had set the stove prior to hooking up the pipes and chimney. “What if I gave this a good kick?” Apparently he thought that the 16” wheel I had bought at the junk yard was unstable. It wasn’t, just a bit narrow-waisted. The wide wheel provided the lift needed to get the firebox above potential fumes on the garage floor and I drove in little wedges to keep it stable. The stove looked top-heavy, though, so I promised to mortar something in place to enclose the steel “foundation.” I had left room for brick around the perimeter of the slab.
An hour’s work with mortar and a pile of bricks from Grandpa Charlie’s furnace and the stove looks a lot more stable with its red skirt. The wheel still does its work supporting the slab, but there’s no further risk of kicks from passers-by.
Running out of maple small enough to cut, I hooked the timber winch to the little Bolens on a whim. It could in fact lift the thing, and though skidding logs with the unit would be impossible, it could certainly pull the cable with the power take off and the winch has the weight and geometry to anchor itself. Apart from a clean-burning engine and exhaust which vents forward, the short tractor can get into places the old Massey Ferguson can’t. For example I have repeatedly parked it across the logging road to pull out previously inaccessible timber left over from the improvement cut in the woodlot in 2006.
Most of the ironwood is still sound enough to burn, so I have spent mornings this week tidying the woodlot, dragging cordwood out to the edge of the road with the winch, cutting it into blocks and splitting it into firewood with my new toy. It’s heavy work, but a wonderful time of year to be out in the woods.
Movember
November 8, 2010
Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario, has a new buzz word: Movember. For the last two weeks hirsute students and staff have faced levels of apprehension on campus I haven’t seen since the American draft in the seventies. Even the clean-shaven guys asked themselves the question: “When I am called, will I go?”
PhD. candidate Martin Mallett filled me in: “One in six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lives. 4,400 in this country die each year from it. The disease is fairly treatable, though. This whole Movember thing started in Australia when a bunch of guys brought moustaches back as a fund raiser for research and it caught on. There’s a huge Movember in Australia, Canada and the U.K.
“The tagline on their website reads: ‘Changing the face of prostate cancer.’ Guys register on Movember.com, then start November clean-shaven. They grow it out and collect donations throughout. At the end of the month a series of Movember galas occur where everybody showcases his moustache. It’s pretty amazing what some men can grow in a month.”
Martin went on: “This is the first time since grade 11 that I have had no facial hair. I feel I have been instantly taken less seriously. I feel I don’t project authority as well. This can only get worse as the moustache goes into the intermediate stages.
“When she saw me without, my wife was dismayed. Days later I would be talking to her and she would stare at my face as though I was a different person. And all of these sensations I’ve never had before: cold outside, sudden warmth on my face when I enter a room. But I’ve already raised over $100 in the first week. I think people donated just to see me shave my beard.
“The first night I went to a co-ed water polo evening. All the girls on the team were lined up against the wall. They started to squeal. That was the first time I have had that reaction from a large group of women. I don’t know if it was shock or what.
“Charlie’s making a video of my moustache growth over the month. I go to the studio every day, sit on a stool and do a full revolution in front of a fixed camera. He’ll stitch that all together and make a thirty-second video of the moustache-growth process. We’ll try for a twisted version of one of those David Attenborough time-lapse nature films.”
Like Martin, I have worn a beard since I realized the need to put some distance between my baby face and my older students. I was teaching grade 8 at the time. The moustache came a bit later, though, as my upper lip seemed to defy adulthood.
I still remember an encounter with a security guard spurred by my lack of a passable moustache. Some of you will remember Dr. Robin Staebler, the genius/gadfly who founded the Newboro Medical Centre. After Eastern Ontario, Robin became Head of Family Medicine at the University of Minnesota. Visiting the Staebler household was always interesting. One day we installed lights in his horse barn. The next he asked me to sit in on interviews for the fresh crop of resident physicians to staff his department. Of course Robin went on ahead and expected me to catch up with him. How would I do that? “Don’t worry. I’ll find you.”
So I drove the half-hour into Minneapolis, parked my Beetle underground, and wandered out onto the quad to take in the sights of the lovely campus. A security guard shortly walked up to me. “Rod?” I nodded. “Dr. Staebler will meet you in the conference room in his building. If you’ll come with me I’ll show you the way.”
“How did you pick me out of the crowd?”
“Dr. Staebler gave us a good description.”
The interviews were a highly interesting experience. Robin didn’t pick one brilliant young woman who would have been my first choice, but then I’ve never felt particularly threatened by students who were smarter than me. As we met for lunch I had to ask: “What description did you give campus security that let them zero in on me so quickly?”
Robin looked at me, savouring the moment: “I told them to watch for a young Abe Lincoln running to fat.”
It was time to grow that moustache.
I forget why, but once in my thirties I decided to shave it all off. My first day at school went smoothly enough until in my home form a fifteen-year-old named Rachel noticed me sitting at my desk, shrieked, ran up, wrapped her arm around my head and pinched my cheek. This astounded everyone in the room, including Rachel, I think, as she was normally a relatively undemonstrative kid.
Word got out and the rest of the students took it easy on me. That evening was a party, though, and my principal, J.R. Johnson, kept bringing staff members over to introduce me as “Clair Kelso, 1956!” Apparently without the beard I bore some resemblance to my friend and department head of the time.
Twenty years later I shaved again, perhaps looking to rediscover that baby face which had caused me so much grief in earlier decades. This time nobody reacted. Nobody even commented. So there didn’t seem to be much point in shaving every morning and the thing grew back by itself.
The Second Annual Tired Iron Tour
October 31, 2010
I’ll never trust the Weather Network again. Oh, they were correct, all right. For Portland. Not for Westport. But of course I didn’t think to ask if there would be a difference.
So on the Second Annual Tired Iron Tour, Peter Myers, Burt Mattice, Chris Myers and I drove our tractors into a sleet-and-snow squall just outside Westport, and it stayed with us through lunch and well down the North Shore Road on our way back to Forfar.
The morning had started out pretty well, though a few tractors had owners with better weather information than we four had, and they stayed in their barns. Tony Izatt was along in a chase car to take photos. He stayed with us until Newboro and then rushed back to Ottawa to set up for Hallowe’en.
The cattle and horses in the fields were frisky in the frosty air, and they all seemed delighted to use the noise of our little convoy as an excuse to boot it around a bit and get their blood warmed up.
Things went pretty well through Newboro and up to about the golf course. Then we came over the hill and saw a dense white cloud where Westport should have been. Into the maelstrom we drove.
Sleet mixed with snow is not the thing for a pleasant country drive on an antique tractor. Peter later quipped to my wife: “Some of those snowflakes were so big they were like to knock you off your tractor.”
At Steve’s a dark angel seated us by the fireplace and brought us coffee, then lunch. What else could we call her on Hallowe’en? She wore a dark, feathered mask and black wings and she brought warm food. We all ordered dishes with fries and gravy. It was that kind of day.
A few years ago I wrote a column about riding a bike to the top of Foley Mountain without dying. Things didn’t go so well on the return leg of our tractor jaunt. The Mountain claimed two of the four machines.
The guys had razzed me all morning about the slow pace I set for my Massey Harris 30. The trouble is that the gears on a 30 are set for the 38 inch wheel option. Mine has the 28 inch size. This gives great torque, but not much speed in road gear.
As we approached the bottom, I didn’t know how the old Massey would behave. The McCormick W30 and the two John Deeres took a run at the hill and away they went, though the W30 started to die back half-way up. I saw my chance. The Massey was holding its own just fine on the steep slope. Burt hesitated. I yanked the throttle through the gate and gave my 30 full power. Out into the passing lane and around the W30 we went. My suddenly-eager steed blazed up the steepest part of the hill without a hint of lag. Chris gaped as I blew by his “B.” On I flew over the first hill, and then…. everything shut down. No more ignition. Nothing.
Peter had stopped to keep an eye on Burt on the hill. He sized up my situation and backed up to the front of the Massey, uncoiled the tow chain, and after we’d established that it wouldn’t be firing any more today, hooked me up for a tow home.
Away we went. Getting towed by a John Deere A is not an unpleasant experience. Instead of the rattle-rasp of a straining Massey engine, there’s the remote putt-putt-putt of a huge, two-cylinder gas engine with those mesmerizing fly-wheel-like brake drums turning backwards right below the driver’s feet. It’s a serene sound and rhythm, and as long as the route was uphill, nothing remained to do but steer and enjoy the view. The interesting thing about the massive torque of the slow-turning engine is that when an “A” labours down almost to a stall, the front wheels bounce up and down an amazing amount with each piston stroke.
Of course on downhill stretches the Massey wanted to catch up to the chain. My readers at this point naturally divide into two groups: those who have been towed, and those who must imagine what happens if your front wheel runs over a chain dragging on the road, pulled by several tons of hurtling green iron. Had time to think about that? Now you’ll both know why I put so much careful effort into feathering the twin brake pedals of the Massey on the many descents of the North Shore Road.
But it worked. Then Burt’s tractor grew impossible to drive. The exhaust manifold had grenaded during a fit of backfires on the climb up Foley Mountain. My Massey was already hogging the only tow chain, so Burt abandoned his wounded mount and climbed on with Peter for the ride home.
As we crossed at the Narrows Locks we looked up the lake and there was the snow cloud still hanging over Westport. Peter dragged the poor old Massey to a stop in front of my garage. Charlie and Martin happened to be standing there. Martin’s jaw dropped. Charlie just shook his head. We retreated to the kitchen for coffee and warmth. It had been a cold expedition, though not without its adventures, this the Second Annual Tired Iron Tour.
New Toy Gloat: wood splitter
October 30, 2010
I’d been cruising Kijiji on a quest for a block splitter, and on a whim I changed the language of my search, typing in “wood” instead of the more American “log”. Fifteen minutes earlier someone had posted a short ad for a 3 pt hitch wood splitter, so I was off on another wild goose chase with trailer and navigation system to a community an hour and a quarter to the west.
This one turned out to be a solid, Mennonite-built unit which the current owner had bought at an auction only to discover it ran too slowly on his new Kubota 35 hp. Seems the dealer wanted $2000 to install a set of remotes on the tractor, so he hooked it to the loader. This particular loader has very small hoses, which impeded the splitter’s performance. He decided to replace it with a gas-powered model.
I didn’t know if my TAFE 35DI’s “tipping lever” would do any better, but I decided to try. It has a three-way splitter for hydraulics which has quite a learning curve, but my neighbour Peter Myers has a testing hose and the pressure was fine once we found the correct settings. To produce a continuous flow to the splitter he locked the tipping lever open with a chunk of scrap metal and I tore into a pile of elm rounds with my new toy.
Peter has the same model and he thinks it runs pretty slowly on the TAFE (he’s a John Deere man) but it works for me and without breaking a sweat I split my way through a significant pile of firewood in an hour.
The piston moves slowly, but there is no hesitation and it does a great job.
What it really means to have a Managed Forest
October 24, 2010
A couple of weeks ago I noticed something had broken a number of the white pines we planted just before the Plowing Match back in 2007. I suspected something had knocked them over, but when I examined another tree that looked sickly, it tipped over at my barest touch, severed neatly across the trunk about half-way up. With lots of sap around the wound and evidence of insect activity, I figured some sort of weevil had hit, so because these trees are part of a managed forest under the MFTIP plan, I dashed off an email to Martin Streit, Leeds Stewardship Co-ordinator, and asked for help.
Resource technician Donna O’Connor responded to my plea, combining the visit with a survival assessment of the new seedlings planted last spring as part of the Trees Ontario program. She listened to my theory that somehow the western pine weevil had made its way east and vectored in on my trees, then suggested that this looked more like white pine blister rust, a common affliction in white pine stands in Eastern Ontario. It’s a fungus which settles in on the trunk of a pine and causes a series of little holes to appear in the bark. The holes, of course, fill with sap. Secondary insect infestations likely account for the boring through the trunk.
While there’s no real treatment for blister rust, it’s not a new problem and the stand will generally survive it. Donna will definitely report the problem to Martin for further investigation, though.
Then she moved over a couple of rows to the new seedlings the crew planted this spring. I’d kept them mowed quite carefully all summer, so they looked pretty good. She was pleased with the survival rate, which she placed at 98% in the first field she examined. It seems that pine seedlings in good soil are pretty resilient: until I bought a narrow tractor and mower, I had stubbornly tried to mow the plantation with my 5 foot Rhino. This produced several rows of seedlings just as lively as the others, but several inches shorter (oops!).
This summer the Roundup ran out long before the grass quit for the season, so I had to mow the new trees out of overwhelming vegetation a couple of times. By this time of year, though, the 5000 young pine, tamarac and hardwoods were clearly winning on the north side of the property.
Donna applied the same survey method to the five-acre walnut/pine patch on the south face of the drumlin. The survival rate for the white pine seedlings there was considerably lower, almost entirely due to my mowing habits. A walnut field must be mowed both down and across. I avoided all the pine seedlings I could with the narrow mower on the cross cuts, but the walnuts came first. To my credit, Donna admitted that the pines still standing are in excellent health. “Mind you, if you couldn’t grow trees with the climate this summer, you can’t grow trees.”
She checked the progress of the butternuts. The hundred or so viable trees from the 2006 stand are doing very well, with good growth on the trunks. Of the thirty blight-resistant stems I planted three years ago, all but two remain healthy but most are in serious need of pruning. “These butternut have excessive lateral bud growth due to twig borer attacks on the branch leaders, Rod. Butternut don’t normally have the kind of sprouting that yours are showing.”
Because these are test trees Donna suggested I contact the Butternut Lady, Rose Fleguel, for further instructions about a pruning regimen for these valuable young trees.
Back in the woodlot Donna wanted to see the cherry and red oak we planted four years ago to see how they are doing in the clearings we created for them within the canopy. Red oaks are easy to find at this time of year because they retain their dark red leaves. Most of the oaks are hanging on, but could use more sunlight, so she suggested cutting some of the tall ironwood and basswood to allow more light into the two cleared areas. The young maples in that area are fine trees and we should be able to work around them.
Donna found a group of young cherry which have grown much taller than the others. She used them to illustrate how the seedlings will grow if they get the correct amount of sunlight. Some of the little bushy ones will either need more sunlight or perhaps relocation to the front lawn. “They grow outward looking for the bits of light instead of upward. We use the term ‘umbrellaing’.”
A quick lesson on pruning the double-stems of some new spruce seedlings, and away she went to meet with another landowner. These visits from Donna O’Connor and Martin Streit give me much of the support I need to look after the property, and to my mind they are the biggest advantage of the Managed Forest Tax Incentive Program.
The Potato Digger
October 13, 2010
We were keen to plant things this spring and I had two garden plots all worked up, so in one we put lots of corn and then finished it out with last year’s Russet potatoes cut up as seed.
All went well until we began to worry about a raccoon attack upon the corn. There was nothing for it but to put up the electric fence. It clicked away and we relaxed. No raccoons attacked, even though I noticed some weeks later that the end of the wire attached to the fencer was hanging down behind the generator, grounding against it. So there never was a shock in the line, but the raccoons stayed away anyway.
The unintended consequence of this was that the potato patch was protected not only from raccoons, but also from the roto-tiller. The weeds joined in with the rampant growth of potato plants to make a thick, green mass.
It all came to a head last weekend when my wife announced that it was time to plant the garlic. “Uh, there are still four rows of potatoes in that space.” Bet waited until I was away and had at it with a garden fork. She made good headway, filling a wheelbarrow with a frenetic morning of digging. Then she could barely move for the rest of the week.
I decided to grab a fork and dig the things and be done with it, but I didn’t last as long as Bet before my back showed signs of giving out.
There’s nothing like a lame back to make a man think.
When I was little, my dad used a walking plough behind Old Jess to furrow the potatoes in and then dig them up again. He and Old Jess would roll them out neatly, and Glenda, Mom and I would scramble to pick them up before the next pass.
First I tried and discarded the furrower attachment for the tiller because it didn’t dig deeply enough to root out the potatoes without making gritty French fries out of them. Removing the tiller’s tines would be a lot of work, and the purpose of this procedure was to save labour, not increase it.
Internet research suggested that garden tractors don’t do well on ploughs. For example the leading maker of garden ploughs uses a 33 hp, 4WD tractor to pull the little single-bottom 12″ unit in demonstrations. Turning the soil requires weight and traction.
But I have two 35 hp tractors. Why fool with a toy when I can use the real thing? Out I went to the pile of weeds by the barn. My first plough, a 3 pt. hitch 3 X 16″, lay mouldering there, easily the worst implement I have ever bought. It was so poorly balanced, bent and awkward that I put a hole in the floor of my trailer just loading the thing. Later I tried removing one of the moldboards to see if that would help. It didn’t, but my friend Tom ended up with a brutally effective anchor for a floating dock from the left third of the plough.
I resolved to build an adult-sized, single-bottom plough from the remaining scrap iron and use it as a potato digger. An hour of fruitless grinding at the bolts at least allowed enough time for the penetrating oil to work, and after a few satisfying smashes with an eight-pound sledge the nuts turned right off. I dropped the right third of the assembly and put it back together with just the centre section remaining.
The only way to keep the thing upright while I hitched it to the TAFE was to hold it off the ground with the Massey.
Away I went to experiment on the potatoes. Down went the plough point. Ahead surged the tractor. A magnificent furrow appeared behind. Perfect, except that I didn’t see a single potato.
Maybe I missed the row. Tried again. Now I had two, almost parallel furrows, and no potatoes. Now what? Keep trying? A third pass between the others and a few fractions of potatoes appeared.
I walked along the row. An occasional potato fell out at my kicks. Before long I was digging through the debris by hand, looking for survivors. Most showed grievous injury, though a few small tubers had escaped.
More passes with the plough and the garden took on the appearance of a compost heap after a good turning. But the potatoes weren’t coming out of the ground the way they did for my dad and Old Jess.
So I gathered up the pitiful survivors in a large plastic pail and set it in the loader for the ride to the house. Started off. Heard a “crunch.” Somehow the pail had fallen out of the loader and I had crushed it under the tractor. Once again I rounded up the dwindling supply of potatoes and trundled them up the hill, ruing yet another session with this last remnant of the sorriest of all possible ploughs.
“Try to live near a subway entrance”
October 10, 2010
Over his career author Douglas Coupland has playfully changed the way North Americans think. In 1991 with Generation X Coupland became the spokesman for the lost generation sandwiched between the aggressive Baby Boomers and their overly-entitled progeny, the Generation Y kids.
Coupland will deliver this year’s series of Massey Lectures, reading a series of five excerpts from his novella, Player One. Saturday’s Globe and Mail ran a set of his notes entitled A Radical Pessimist’s Guide to the Next 10 Years. The ideas were too good to resist, so here are a few of his suggestions:
“Try to live near a subway entrance. In a world of crazy-expensive oil, it’s the only real estate that will hold its value, if not increase.” Coupland riffs on the end of oil for much of his lecture. If you stop to think about it, our current way of life is entirely dependent upon cheap oil, and the only thing keeping it cheap is our collective belief that prices can’t rise much or the whole economy will collapse. It’s hard to bank on that assumption, so…
“Enjoy lettuce while you still can. And anything else that arrives in your life from a truck, for that matter. For vegetables, get used to whatever it is they served in railway hotels in the 1890s. Jams. Preserves. Pickled everything.”
To think we threw out a trailer-full of jumbo Mason jars when we moved to this house! Then we started buying them back to hold maple syrup. Now with hydro bills passing $200 per month, the freezer is becoming an expensive luxury: perhaps canning will come back as an efficient way to store food. The garden has progressed from “another one of Rod’s projects” to a useful and reliable source of food. Maybe it’s time to allow some chickens and a sheep or two onto the property, as well.
“North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989. Quebec will decide to quietly and quite pleasantly leave Canada. California contemplates splitting into two states, fiscal and non-fiscal. Cuba becomes a Club Med with weapons. The Hate States will form a coalition.” Notice how Coupland sneaks changes into the language? Hate States. This one’s going to stick.
“The future of politics is the careful and effective implanting into the minds of voters images that can never be removed.” This is truly frightening. Does this mean that democracy is doomed to become a shell of itself, manipulated by incumbents with the budgets to buy the latest in mind-control technology? What can we do?
Mobilizing citizens to get out and vote may be the best antidote to this decay. First step? Take the cameras out of the House of Commons to eliminate that daily mud-wrestling display they call Question Period. It disgraces Canadian politics and discourages potential voters, particularly the young. It feeds the politics of division where a solid voting block’s power is leveraged by the systematic reduction of overall voter participation.
But the anti-prorogation rallies last winter came as a surprise to most everyone. Thousands of Canadians looked around and simultaneously decided that enough was enough and hit the bricks on a cold winter day. Coupland assumes Canadians won’t take the initiative to save their system of government, and the only direction the elevator can go is down. He’d likely be delighted if we proved him wrong on this one.
“You’ll spend a lot of time shopping online from your jail cell. Over-criminalization of the populace, paired with the triumph of shopping as a dominant cultural activity, will create a world where the two poles of society are shopping and jail.” I guess we deserve our lumps for our fondness for shopping, but I hope that the mania for building more prisons goes away in the next year or so.
“Getting to work will provide vibrant and fun new challenges. Gravel roads, potholes, outhouses, overcrowded buses, short-term hired bodyguards, highwaymen, kidnapping, overnight camping in fields, snaggle-toothed crazy ladies casting spells on you, frightened villagers, organ thieves, exhibitionists and lots of healthy fresh air.”
This is an interesting one. Roads are dependent upon oil. Asphalt needs constant upkeep. Distances are vast. Railways are few. This vision of a new medieval era sandwiched between sci-fi connectivity and political breakdown may emerge as the new model for the future of Canada and the world. I hope not.
“You’re going to miss the 1990s more than you ever thought.” Hey, we miss them already, but Internet is way better now. Coupland suggests finding a place to live on a west coast so as to avoid the blazing heat and “cryogenic cold” resulting from climate change. But this was the first summer in my memory that vegetation has remained a constant green through to Thanksgiving. Young trees had a great season. Corn crops in the area are unsurpassed. The hay was pretty good, too.
Coupland’s prediction that “Stupid people will be in charge, only to be replaced by ever-stupider people,” takes on some currency with the current mayoral race in Toronto. And energy shortages are a worry. But all in all, on this Thanksgiving Sunday in 2010, as I look out the windows through crystal air at the brilliant maples and the emerald turf below them, the world doesn’t seem such a bad place.
the Walnut Diary 