Fall madness
November 23, 2009
The trouble with fall is that one is pulled in a dozen directions at once as the calendar ticks down to freeze-up. That’s what fall is: a mixed metaphor. It is also the season which defines us as Canadians. Our smug claims to winter hardiness are just the result of a fall of anticipation and hard work.
Despite the balmy weather of the last two weeks, snow is coming, and everything has to be covered up. Six months of moving to a smaller house underlines a basic principle of physics: everything has to be somewhere. We are now moved in and the old house is sold, but three utility trailers still sit in the yard loaded with stuff, and I can’t think of what to do with it.
We dubbed the new greenhouse the Crystal Palace the first evening Charlie turned floodlights on inside it. White plastic glows rather well when illuminated from within. Now that the wiring is complete, maybe I can just screw in green and red light bulbs and write off the Christmas-decorations chore.
But all of the space is committed to boats and cars. There is no place for surplus chairs, an extra laundry hamper, the remains of twenty-five years of socket sets, even the half-finished lapstrake dinghy Charlie and I planked as soon as he grew big enough to do his side of the rivets. It has spent the last twenty years hanging on the wall in the garage in Smiths Falls.
Before I surrendered the pram to the pigeons in the haymow I took some photos and put them up in a scrapbook on the Net. Yesterday produced a flurry of messages from a guy in Boston. He wants the hull as a project to complete with his ten-year old son who wants to be a boat builder when he grows up. The only problem is getting a nine-foot boat to Boston.
Advertisers have convinced us that we can’t drive a car past the first of December without new-fangled tires with bits of walnut shell in the rubber and lots of slits to enhance wear. But that means new rims as well, and that’s expensive, so I consulted Kijiji ads for a week and then set off on one of my wild-goose chases. In the pouring rain I explored a Kingston suburb – do you know they count by fours when assigning lot numbers nowadays? I finally broke down and knocked on a door. The occupants directed me two houses down the street, laughing about the numbering system but apparently on good terms with their neighbours.
Now in the correct driveway at the appointed time, I discovered nobody home.
Princess Auto was only a couple of blocks away, so I drowned my sorrows in Friday-evening retail therapy for an hour or so, and arrived back at the tire place just as the young couple returned.
The tires and wheels were as advertised, and the owners recovered just over half what they had paid to equip their leased Camry for three months of winter driving last year. The moment of truth will come this week when I bolt them onto Bet’s car and take it out onto the highway.
But that doesn’t help the three trailers in the yard. What’s more, I no sooner get the fishing boats tucked neatly away in the Palace than Tony comes along to take his out for one more fishing trip.
At least the fall plowing’s done. But Bet wants her garlic planted before freeze-up…
A visit to Lostwithiel Farm
November 9, 2009
When agronomist Neil Thomas is not on assignment in Africa for CIDA or helping his wife manage a vineyard and winery in southern Pennsylvania, he works on the family property near Lansdowne where they tend to acres of grapes and the area’s largest black walnut orchard.
Everyone agrees that the black walnut is the gourmet nut of choice: it has a smooth, rich flavour, complex and nuanced. Nutritionally it scores off the charts on all indicators of desirability. The only problem is getting the kernel away from the shell.
The lack of affordable processing machinery has prevented the growth of a market for black walnuts in Canada, but over the last two decades Neil has used his contacts and reputation to arrange for the development of technology to fill this need.
The latest machine to emerge from a collaboration with the Engineering Technology Department at Algonquin College is a continuous-flow nut washer.
“This invention replaces a set of five hand operations based around a cement mixer, a large screen and a pair of rubber gloves which gave me an extremely sore back last year. When Brad Thompson and a team of fellow students confronted the problem, they designed a big, shiny, three-quarter-ton beast which looks a bit like a jet engine on a test bed. So far it has not thrust me out of the barn, but we haven’t used it yet.”
Today was to be the day for the test.
First up was a trailer load of nuts from Westport. Planted in 1937, Dr. Goodfellow’s black walnut trees have proven a reliable and abundant source of fruit, and current owners John and Delcy Marchand sought Neil out as the only processor in the area.
My job was to dump the bags and tubs of walnuts onto the conveyor and regulate the feed up a stepped belt adapted from the potato industry. At the top the nuts drop into a huller, a noisy machine consisting of a large cylinder with a series of rubber pads inside set up to remove the gooey outer hull of the nuts. The hulls are forced down through a grate at the bottom as the cleaned nuts make their way out the end, down a funnel, and into a flotation trough which tests each nut’s quality. If it floats, it is discarded.
Eager to try his new toy, Neil waited impatiently as I ran the nuts through and into the trough. With a large plastic shovel he scooped the hulled nuts out of the long trough and into the hopper of the washer. He turned it on and away they went, without fuss.
The washer consists of a large, perforated, rotating drum with a slowly counter-rotating auger inside to feed the nuts along through the machine. An electronic control panel provides infinite adjustment to the rate of feed.
In five minutes John’s crop of walnuts had been washed and deposited in the rack for moving to the dryer. I commented to Neil, “Your guys certainly did a good job. That thing runs as smoothly as a Honda.”
Personally, I fancy tools that keep me on my toes, demanding all my alertness and ingenuity just to keep them working. The new washer seemed discouragingly competent to me, but Neil and his sore back just beamed.
While he prepared lunch I subjected my host to the third degree on the walnut business:
What does the black walnut tree offer to Canadian food shoppers?
Black walnut is the truffle of the tree-nut world. The nut meat is rich, with a creamy texture and often pungent flavours. This means that far less can be used in cooking and you get a lot of taste for a few calories. There is less fat and more protein in black walnuts than in other nuts. Pastry chefs cherish them for their outstanding contribution to fine cuisine.
People are prepared to pay far more for black walnut products than for other nut types.
Why don’t more people plant black walnut trees?
Farmers in this area have spent two hundred years removing trees from their fields, and don’t want to put them back. There’s also the long product cycle. In fact, though, ordinary black walnut trees should produce nuts by the time they are twelve years old, a far shorter interval than growing trees for timber.
Can you make money from black walnuts?
I believe you can, because we have test-marketed kernel at $1.00 per ounce, far more than consumers are willing to pay for other nut types. We couldn’t keep up with the demand.
What will it take to make black walnut production a successful industry in this area?
It will take a critical mass of rural landowners establishing plantations so that we can sustain production with locally-produced nuts.
Separating out the edible kernel is really the challenge. Nobody wants chunks of shell in their muffins or their ice cream, so most of our technology development emphasis is on the machinery to crack and separate. In Missouri the Hammond Company uses a very expensive optical sorting operation which nobody can afford at the farm scale. So we need to find the trick of separating kernel and shell by a cheaper mechanical means and this is where most of our emphasis goes.
Free building II: erecting the trusses
November 8, 2009
The first afternoon I assembled seven of the eleven trusses. By that point I was exhausted from all of the bending. A couple of days later my body had adjusted and things went easily. Basically the truss consists of three interlocking sections of 3″ oval pipe and a long brace running across its width, reinforced by a triangle of shorter pipe sections at the centre of the truss.
Bolting things together with 1/4 X 3 1/2″ carriage bolts was not difficult, though I discovered a light rope and a sliding hitch helped with the fitting.
How I was going to support/hold down the trusses? A gravel pad is fine, but a light building could easily blow away. I explored two junk yards in search of inspiration, but found no solution which would not 1. cost the earth, 2. leave a lot of expensive steel rotting uselessly on the ground and 3. still require anchors.
I asked Peter Myers. My neighbour is a machinery expert and has a lifetime of experience with things related to metal work. “I wonder if that building could sit on steel fence posts?” Laconic as ever, Peter merely pointed to a piece of heavy pipe leaning against his bench. “A pipe driver? No, I thought I’d push them down with the loader.”
Peter broke his silence: “Take this. It works better.” On my second attempt I managed to lift the thing to my shoulder and transport it to my truck. The one my dad had I could at least lift. It was a piece of 2 1/2″ pipe with a plug welded onto one end and some weight inside. This one was much heavier.
My dad used to cache valuable scrap metal in and around the base of an old silo. Less valuable scrap made its way back the lane, its proximity to the silo an indication of my dad’s perception of its value and/or the likelihood of its eventual use.
Fortunately for me, steel fence posts seemed to be at the top of my dad’s scrap-iron hierarchy, because I found several dozen of them in perfect condition on my first peek into the silo pit.
Time for Peter’s pile driver. I grabbed it out of the truck and immediately it overbalanced and dropped to the ground. No damage to the truck. Ten toes still intact. Strange centre of gravity there.
The first post is the only one that won’t be wrong in some dimension, so I enjoyed driving it. The heavy pipe made short work of the packed limestone, even the coarse material underneath it. It just powered the steel t-bar through until it finally hit a boulder and would go no further, leaving about 40″ above ground. I wondered if that would do. It was certainly sturdy.
I quickly laid out a 20 X 40′ grid, using little green flags on wire posts to mark the location of each post. These markers work well on sod, but much less accurately on gravel. Nonetheless I persevered, and drove a few more posts before the driver overbalanced and crashed to the ground once too often and I called it a day.
By next morning I had thought the situation over and used the driver to start the remaining posts, but then pushed them down with my loader. This was more to my liking, even though it meant freezing my hands on the hydraulic controls while the loader did its thing, and I still had to finish each off with the hand driver, sitting down on the job was a welcome relief from jamming poles into the earth with a thirty-pound pile driver. Soon I had 23 posts neatly lined up as the foundation for my free garage. 23? Uh, the first corner turned out to be wrong, so I drove another post, but it didn’t go in very far before it hit a boulder. So I eventually decided to use the original post, 6″‘ too close to the other end, but firmly grounded. I would explain to Bet that the angled entrance is a feature to make parking easier in winter.
The moment of truth had come. I eased the loader over to the pile of trusses and balanced the horizontal part of one on the teeth of the loader. Up the assembly went until the tails hovered just above the grass. Here goes! As my wide load oscillated overhead, I eased the tractor onto the foundation pad and stopped at the far end. Now what?
The tractor’s bucket formed a “V” in which the support brace for the truss rested. It wasn’t about to fall down unless I did something drastic, so why not experiment? I hopped off the loader, grabbed the right tail of the truss, and lifted as hard as I could. Up it came and settled over the top of the post. The truss seemed to have eaten about a foot of the post and it didn’t look as if it would fall, so I tried the same thing on the other side. As soon as I lifted the left tail, the right slammed down as far as it could on its post. Another lift, assisted by a step ladder, and I was able to position this end over its post, as well. The trusses are quite flexible at this stage. Counting my fingers, I let it drop, only to have it stick a foot down, as well.
That’s what sledge hammers are for. A series of gentle taps on the post and the truss, and it was time to get the loader out of the way and let the thing thud into the gravel bed on both sides. It stood there, unwavering, without other support. Good stuff in those fence posts. Another six trusses went up before the novelty wore off and I realized I’d better put some braces on before the wind came up.
Those three great blue herons* are still around.
November 6, 2009
While eating my lunch I just watched them glide past the kitchen window in tight formation, circle the field to the north, and eventually glide right in to the shelter belt of immature pines at the north of the property. They rode the breeze like vultures, not flapping their wings until within a jump of the ground.
What amazes me about these three is the way they always travel and move together, in formation. Even when walking across the field they are a tight group, as if they think as one. And what are they doing in a field, in November?
NOTE: 11 November, 2009
Queen’s doctoral candidate Martin Mallet just suggested in an email that the trio are most likely sandhill cranes. He saw them in the area last week. The Wilkepedia description of the birds’ behaviour is very much in line with what I have observed.
Unfinished lapstrake pram needs new owner.
November 4, 2009
http://picasaweb.google.ca/rodcros/UnfinishedLapstrakePram#
This is a winter project which will outclass any other dinghy in the harbour, guaranteed.
The first pram was appraised at $2800 and was a boat show winner. It never lost a rowing race against a hull under 15′. This one’s more elaborate.
I’ll provide clear walnut for the seats and floors to go with the kit. $800. or best offer.
Post a comment here or inquire at
rodcros at gmail.com.
(The “at” above is to discourage spam-generators).
How much does a free building cost?
October 31, 2009
This all began early last summer when my friend Les Parrott suggested that I should acquire a 20 X 40 portable shelter which was sitting unassembled in Richmond. At the time I was overwhelmed with renovations on two houses and had no time for further confusion.
But things change. This week I visited Lorna Hyland and we loaded the pieces of the building onto my trailer. It was a whole lot of galvanized truss sections, some long pipes with strange triangles in the middle, and two very awkward rolls of white plastic. It made a good load for my new trailer, and I happily hauled it home.
After determining a location for the edifice, I decided that the grade needed to rise a bit, as I had no desire to have the floor covered with ice all winter. The lady at the Sweet’s/Tackaberry quarry listened to my tale and recommended a triaxle load of 3″ crushed limestone, most likely followed by another of 7/8″ to make a smoother floor.
I remembered the guy on the triaxle truck from his last visit to the farm during the runup to the Plowing Match. He led a fleet of trucks into the woodlot to construct a road for the tour wagon. Apparently among the Tackaberry staff “The time we backed into all those maples” is the stuff of legend. “They all said we couldn’t do it, and we did,” he told me proudly.
It had been a tight fit working the trucks backwards out of brilliant sunlight into a very dark, forbidding wood among the towering maples. At some points the clearance between the truck’s mirrors and the trees was no more than a couple of inches, total. And there were turns. Then, of course, they had to unload the gravel, and a triaxle dump truck needs at least 20′ of clearance for the box. Fortunately we had lots of overhead space, the canopy hovering at about 90′ in this area with few lower limbs.
I had dumped quite a few trucks while working on construction during my student days, and I figured we could drop the aggregate on the work site and save an enormous amount of work by eliminating the need to carry it in with a front end loader from a central pile.
The worst part for the drivers was backing out of the sunlight into the dark. They were blind for about fifty feet and had to trust my directions until their vision recovered. Then they discovered that the footing was indeed solid, if irregular, and that there was space for their mirrors and even space to turn, if they were careful. They were careful, indeed. Nobody touched a tree. The mirrors of all of the trucks emerged intact, and a couple of hours with the scraper blade behind my tractor and we had roads over the mud holes for the IPM tours.
Anyway, this time the guy came in heavy and was concerned about driving across the sod to the dumping location. Turns out the ground was pretty firm and he made the spread successfully and went on his way. That left the task to my tractor to grade the pad. A serene morning with the Massey left the 3″ limestone level and packed. The lady at the pit was right. I would need finer stone to provide a smooth floor for the garage, so I ordered another load. The 7/8″ material was very nice to work with the scraper, so I spent another hour playing in my sandbox.
After completing the pad (45 tonnes of crushed stone) I asked Bet to park her car on it and then to return it to the house. She landed the Lexus in the spot and then backed out awkwardly onto the driveway (nasty little upward slope there) so I started cutting into the bank with the bucket of the tractor. The loader is quite strong, but old Massey Fergusons only have one hydraulic line, and I needed to switch it from three point hitch (to hold up the scraper) to the loader each time I lifted something. This is not a precise process, as sometimes the pump loses its prime and must be encouraged with adjustments on various levers on the right side of the seat. The loader works really well for individual lifting jobs around the farm, but it’s no bulldozer. For any real work in the future I definitely need a backhoe.
The cost of the free building continues to rise.
An interview with Mary Slade, Leeds-Grenville Green Party candidate
October 26, 2009
Why is the Green Party important?
Neither the Liberals nor the CPC have a real vision for where they want to go. The NDP do, but it’s a very narrow vision. I’ve been a Green Party supporter for a long time. Many of our ideas have been tried in Europe and around the world. The North American model of big business is unsustainable. Everybody has the jargon, but they’re just using it to win debates. It doesn’t translate into meaningful action.
Kim Sytsma is a director of the Ontario Cattleman’s Association. Kim claims that the car industry is 2.1% of the GDP of Ontario while the cattle industry means 1.4% of the GDP for Ontario economy, and yet no one is helping the beef or pork farmers. It’s fascinating that whenever the price of crude oil changes it is reflected immediately at the pumps, but when wholesale beef prices crashed during the mad cow scare, there was no change to beef prices in the stores.
Last election’s Green Shift Plan looked like a good policy, badly sold. Now your party has relabeled it and made it part of your platform.
While there were some communications issues associated with the campaign, the Green Shift Plan was basically sound. It should be. Dion and the Liberals stole it from us.
Why are you running as a candidate?
Over thirty years my husband and I have noticed a decline in the vibrancy of the area. Our young people aren’t staying. Those trying to create small businesses are strangled by government.
The cheese operation at Upper Canada Village was forced to close because it didn’t meet modern requirements. You don’t know that there’s anything wrong there, but the big business model doesn’t allow for traditional methods of production.
I know of local people involved in a small business promotion program, a federally funded, provincial government effort to help small business startups. October 9th of this year a letter came from Toronto which abruptly cut the program. It said they are putting money into the colleges for retraining adults and that was it.
So what’s wrong with the big business model?
Why bail out GM and Chrysler? They have already proven that they are not running companies worth investing in. We’re throwing bad money after bad. It’s a short-term solution to a problem we have known for years and years. We’re maintaining jobs in failing industries and not looking to jobs that provide a viable and sustainable future for Canadians.
Factory farms? I’m against them because they’re dependent upon herbicides, pesticides and antibiotics and are not good for the environment. They are ripe for contamination and economic blips and transportation complications. Small and local is tasty and beautiful.
So what do you think of food in Canada today?
We should produce as much food for our own population as we can. For one, we have a fairly good regulatory system within the country but we’ve had some catastrophes from things coming across the border. For another, we have a problem with obesity right now, and fresh fruit, vegetables and meat all taste good, even if you don’t like brussels spouts. I’m not about to legislate the Doritos-and-Pepsi lunch out of existence, but good food’s not as available as it used to be because of the distances people have to travel to get it and of course the distance the food has to travel, as well.
The papers are full of the locavore movement.
We’re just going back to our roots. It’s a fad which isn’t going to pass. Food is a necessity. You are what you eat. If you want to stay healthy, eat well.
What are your goals for the next six months, and how do you plan to achieve them?
To promote the Green Party from Gananoque to Kemptville, from Cardinal to Westport, and give voters an alternative to the other, more traditional parties.
So the Green Party is a fad?
Oh come on! It’s been a long time coming and it’s not going away. Food sustainability and water quality are ongoing issues. Carbon emissions are a world-wide problem. Social issues like child care, early childhood education and pensions are not going away.
A Green Party proposal is for the elimination of income tax for individuals who earn less than $20,000 per year.
Where is the Green Party on the political spectrum?
It is neither right nor left wing. It is for people and sustainability. It is pro-business where business is good for the country. It is pro-people because people are our future.
So is a vote for you a vote for a Stephen Harper majority?
No. A vote for me is a vote to have a representative in Ottawa to espouse policies which are not simply short-term solutions to problems created by falling polling numbers.
What we really need is proportional representation. It’s a fantastic idea because the first-past-the-post-system we have now does not allow a voice for new ideas in parliament.
Instead we have bad ideas like the current wave of stimulus spending which has simply given Stephen Harper a bottomless war chest with which to play politics. That’s not good government. It’s the Conservatives becoming the Liberals, throwing away money.
Harper broke promises to veterans and their families. His flip-flops on clear and open government, income trusts, and four-year terms show that this man is not a conservative.
So much for The Sun’s credibility
October 21, 2009
Ottawa Sun Walter Robinson recently wrote a column condemning the cheque scandal as pure posturing by the opposition. He backed up his argument with a variety of examples from Ontario to prove his point. It was a good, convincing column.
Turns out the guy’s a registered lobbyist for the PMO. He didn’t mention that.
The First Annual Tired Iron Tour
October 18, 2009
There we were, cruising along the shoulder of Highway 15, weekend traffic buzzing by, when the Massey’s engine faded and died. Burt managed to get his McCormick stopped before punting me into the traffic, but there we were, stalled. I could already hear the comments at lunch: “Nobody but Rod can foul up a three-tractor parade!”
I bailed off the tractor, seized the offending battery cable and twisted it to within an inch of its life. A touch to the starter and the thing was running again, so I gratefully remounted and rushed to catch up with Peter’s Deere.
Our leader, Peter Myers, seemed unaware of my nerve-jangling delay. Two minutes of full-throttle vibration and the Massey was back in position in the convoy and I cut back the throttle before the engine grenaded.
Burt and his grandson Rick followed in my dust, a bit slack-jawed at the burst of speed from the antique. Of course I guess in this crowd a 1947 isn’t all that old. Burt Mattice’s ride, a 1939 McCormick-Deering W30, and Peter’s 1951 Model B Deere are both so carefully groomed as to make my Masssey Harris 30 look like what it is, a trailer-puller invited to a tractor show to make the others look good.
What’s more, the Massey’s a cranky beast. A loud growl from the starter is its trademark scare tactic. Another favourite is to throw off a spark plug wire just when you need full power.
The Tired Iron Tour began when Peter finished work on Lloyd and Grant Stone’s massive old Minneapolis-Moline. Someone suggested a road trip around the township would be a fine way to introduce the western tractor to the hills of the Rideau Lakes. Word went out and various passers-by were drawn into the plan, but a family reunion took the Stones out of the tour. In the end Burt and his grandson Rick joined Peter and me on this first attempt. Grant showed up to see us off, and my pal Tony Izatt took charge of photography, deftly working his way through weekend traffic as he documented our passage.
I read somewhere that you can’t enjoy scenery while trail riding on a mountain bike because almost all of your attention is needed to control the bike. “But a tractor is plodding along down the shoulder of the highway,” you say. “There should be plenty of time to relax and enjoy the splendid autumn scenery.”
You haven’t driven between Peter Myers and Burt Mattice. Without instructions, I tried to position my tractor properly in the parade. Burt lagged way back. O.K., we leave long intervals along the highway. I did my best to fit in. But then Burt would come racing up behind me, setting off a concertina effect (not easy with a three-tractor convoy). I would speed up and then slow down to avoid collision with Peter, but then he would forge on ahead, and I had a hard time predicting where he would drive. I would check back, see Burt in the driving lane of the highway, look back ahead and there Peter would be on the shoulder. I would adjust and then Peter would be out on the lane as well, adhering to some system which made sense to the experienced, but was Greek to me.
Then they began to speed up. As illogical as it may seem, the tractors were surprisingly difficult to keep at a constant speed. My throttle boasts the “Dual Power” feature. That’s a hand throttle set up so that the cogs end at ¾ power in favour of a flat area on the throttle plate, and only provides full revolutions if I push it through this “gate” and onto the upper set of cogs, at which point the whole machine begins to feel rather like a seat on a jackhammer. Peter’s preferred speed nestled my throttle firmly on top of the gate where it was loathe to stay. The engine would run smoothly there for a couple of minutes, and then cut the power without warning. All I could do was hold the throttle in place. That left one hand for steering. The Massey is no Porsche in the steering department. It handles pretty well if I have one hand on either side of the wheel to pull in the direction I want it to go. Controlling the Massey’s directional urges with one-hand steering is less precise and a lot more tiring.
And this was all in the first half-hour. We made our way to the Gananoque turnoff by way of Jones’ Falls, joining our pit crew for lunch. On the return trip we toured Lyndhurst and enjoyed the golden maples of the Beverley hills.
It was a beautiful fall day. A pair of eagles courted high above our heads. Drivers were quite tolerant of our presence on Hwy 15, though more inclined to risky passes on the Lyndhurst road.
Next year we’ll have to invite more tractors along on the tour, design a set of instructions for driving in convoy, and perhaps reduce the cruising speed a little so that my poor Massey doesn’t have to give 110% to keep up.
the Walnut Diary 