If A Tree Falls In the Woods...

In what has become a biennial event, the red oak borer beetle has taken out another one of our oak trees.  It has been weakened for several years.  This spring it gave up the ghost.  It stands a skeleton of it's former glory.  The oak tree to the right of it was subservient to it, leaning over to gain some access to sunlight.  Now, perhaps, it will resume a more stately shape, until the borer beetle takes it out, too.

The dead tree once served as one side of the base of the zip line, or shoot to shoot, as we called it.  Our kids zipped down the cable many times, coming to an abrupt stop at the American flag on the barn.  I think that if the tree knew that the kids were counting on it to hold up the base of the zip line, it might have held out a few more years.  But the kids are grown and the big tree that served as the launching point of the zip line succumbed to the red oak borer beetle several years ago.  Time marches on.

I put off cutting down the tree as long as I possibly could.  However, big limbs started falling out of the tree and onto the barn.  A couple limbs arched precariously over the fence, threatening to fall on their grandchildren's trampoline.  I figured the neighborly thing to do was to take the old tree down.  I called a tree service from my hometown.  The proprietor's sister and I graduated from high school together.  He and his wife do this business on the side.  They came while I wasn't home one morning and put the tree on the ground for a price tag of $500.  I feel like that was a reasonable price.

Compare the photo above with the photo below.  It is a weight off my mind that the tree was felled.  There was really only one direction that it could go, and they put it on the ground in the prescribed location.  With the bucket truck and two chain saws running, it took them no time.  They did seek permission from my neighbor and they accessed the tree from my neighbor's back yard.

As we always request, the tree service laid the tree on the ground.  We'll cut it up ourselves and then I'll split it for firewood.  As the old saying goes, "Firewood warms you at least four times.  One to cut it down, Two to split it, Three to stack it, and Four to burn it."  We use a chainsaw rarely, so I always borrow my Dad's or on an occasion or two, I would rent one for $50 per day and would bring it back the same day.  The hardware store no longer rents them out, though.

Since it isn't very smart to buy a machine with a small engine that isn't used frequently, I was reading reviews for a battery-powered chainsaw.  This one had very good reviews, so I jumped on it.

It's an 80 volt chainsaw with an 18 inch bar.  When I paid the tree service for the work, I asked him his opinion of these saws.  I guess I should've asked before buying, but he told me that they use them in his line of work all the time.  He said you'll be tired out before the chainsaw loses its charge.  He told me as long as I kept the blade sharp and bar oil in the reservoir, the saw would make me proud.  I asked if the saw was too small to cut up the tree?  He told me no.  He said he cut the tree down with a smaller chain saw.

That's just what I needed to hear.  I'll be charging up the battery and will cut up the tree so that when cooler weather comes around in the fall, I can pull out my double-sided ax, wedge and sledgehammer and get busy splitting firewood for the winter.  As bad as I hated to see the tree go, we were smack-dab out of firewood.  And that reminds me, I need to call a chimneysweep.  We haven't had our chimney cleaned in several years.  It's almost laughable that I'm talking firewood and chimneysweeps when it is 107 outside!

I Only Have Eyes For You

I was struggling on the title of today's post, but remembered that cool song by the Flamingos, "I only have eyes for you."  That has to be it, I thought.  A friend from church sent us a funny text that said, "Don't tell secrets in the garden.  The Potatoes have eyes, the corn has ears, and the beanstalk!"

We try to plant our potatoes around Valentine's Day each year.  That means you have to get busy beforehand.  I asked Tricia to go by the feed store and pick up 8 pounds of seed potatoes.  We like the LaSoda variety as it seems to do well in our growing zone.  Well, Tricia forgot.  When she went the next day, the feed store was already out!  The early bird gets the worm.  They were out the next week, too.  Finally, another shipment came in and Tricia came home with 8 pounds.  Now, you have a choice here.  These potatoes would be great boiled and buttered and topped with fresh parsley.  Why, I'd eat the whole pot.  But, delayed gratification is where it's at.  Patience is a virtue.

Later this spring, we'll weigh our harvest and will be able to determine if planting the potatoes versus eating them was a good investment.  Anything more than 8 pounds is good, but we're shooting for an abundant harvest.  We'll see how it goes...

The first step is to get out the pocketknife and quarter the potatoes, ensuring that you have eyes on each quarter.  Some of the seed potatoes were small, so I cut them in half or in thirds.

I arranged them cut-side up on trays and counted them.  Unfortunately, I lost count, but I'll count them again as I plant them.  It was over 110 pieces.  That's a lot of potato plants, if they all come up.

I then placed them out in the sun and wind and allowed the cut up potatoes to begin to heal, or as we call it, scab over.  This is an important step.  If not scabbed over, if you plant them, they are more likely to rot in the ground.

Since then, the weather has gotten cold and it's rained several times.  Being that it is so cold, the eyes on the potatoes haven't done any growing.  I think I'm going to put them in the warmest room in the house and see if we can't coax some growth.  When we plant, in a week or two, I'd like the eyes to show some more growth.

Fresh, new potatoes in the spring.  Looking forward to it!

Two Weeks Until the Spuds Go in the Ground

Then Isaac sowed in that land, and received in the same year an hundredfold: and the Lord blessed him.  Genesis 26:12

There are many verses in Scripture, particularly in the Gospels about the Parable of the Sower, in which the Lord talks about sowing and the multiplication of the seed, resulting in harvests of a hundredfold.  That's a great yield!  This year, we are going to track our harvest in our potato crop.  I've always enjoyed growing potatoes.  I can remember Irish Potatoes was the first thing my grandpa taught me to plant when I was a young boy.  Those are good memories about gardening that I still think about forty-something years later as I put in a garden each year.

I asked my wife to check out our local feed store for Seed Potatoes.  We generally plant the LaSoda variety.  The LaSoda is a red potato.  This variety was developed in 1948 by Louisiana State University Ag Experiment Station.  It is suited for our soils, climate and growing conditions.

Finally, Tricia texted me at work to let me know that seed potatoes were in.  You can see that we purchased 6 pounds of potatoes.  They were priced at $0.50 per pound or $3.00.  We have a whopping 10% sales tax in our parish, so after rendering to Ceasar what is Ceasar's, Tricia exited the feed store.  

I examined each potato for quality and all appeared to be good.  You can see right above my thumb in the photo below is one of the eyes of the potato.  My science teacher in high school, Stuart Buck, used to jokingly tell us that we should plant our potatoes wrapped in a newspaper so they'd have something to read while in the ground.  However, most newspapers today aren't worth wrapping fish in or lining a birdcage with , but that's neither here nor there and I digress.

Now you can plant the entire potato, OR you can cut the potato in pieces, ensuring that you have at least one eye in every potato chunk.  That's what I always do.  Each eye grows a nice potato plant.  I use a sharp knife to cut the potatoes up and then I turn them so that the cut side faces upward.  Then I place the potatoes inside in the warmest place I can find.  This will allow the cut part of the potato to 'scab' over.  I am told that if you immediately plant them without allowing them to scab, then the potatoes would rot in the ground.

I generally try to plant the spuds on or as close as possible to February 14th - Valentine's Day (since we love potatoes).  We'll see if the weather is cooperative.  They will mature in 110 to 120 days.  We know that we will put 6 pounds of potatoes in the ground.  A hundred-fold yield seems like a tall order!  We will track our harvest, though, and weigh it and report back our yield in early summer.