Wildlife experts think there may be more or less one bobcat per town in NH. This Warner cat stood for her portrait in 2008.

Our bobcat's calling card: just like a house cat, but much bigger.

A bobcat in Faith's drive staring down her dogs in early February.

In 1988, when trapping them was outlawed, there may only have been about 100 bobcats left in NH.

Is it a coincidence that we’re seen our Warner bobcats in February and March? Probably not, because that’s when this last species of wild cat to live in NH goes looking for love. House cats, no matter how tough you think you are, take note.

Local link: Kearsarge Mountain CSA
Last year about this time we talked with Warner, NH farmer Larry Pletcher about his new greenhouse and his ambition to sell winter greens to the greens-starved masses of the Kearsarge area (view earlier blog). And in fact, he’s gone and done just that. Imagine! Buying and eating greens in the middle of winter here in Warner, NH. But wait! There’s more! This winter he’s provided some calorie crop veggies to the shareholders of his winter CSA as well: beets, potatoes and a few other root vegetables.

Now, if you are a dedicated localvore, you know that finding somebody in February who’s got winter storage and calorie crops tucked away (potatoes, turnips, parsnips, squash, carrots, cabbage, beets, onions, garlic, etc.) and who is willing to sell them, is the difference between eating mostly local year-round, or breaking your vows and heading for the supermarket.

For some reason, NH vegetable farmers have been a little behind their colleagues in Maine in terms of producing and selling winter storage crops, but Larry is catching up. We visited him in late January, just days after he finished building a new winter storage barn at his Vegetable Ranch on Kearsarge Mountain Road.

Farm manager Stacey Cooper and part-time farm crew worker Beth Thompson were bagging Chioggia beets for the CSA pickup and moving trays of sprouted greens in from the sun porch for the night. Larry will be planting 14 acres this year with a crew of 4 full-timers and several part-timers.

For the past four years Larry, along with Bob Bower and Jennifer Ohler of Kearsarge Gore Farm (go past Larry’s farm on Kearsarge Mountain Road, more or less until you can’t go any more–in your car, anyway), has been running the Kearsarge Mountain CSA for spring, summer and fall crops. But for the past two years he’s offered shares in a winter CSA as well. And next winter, if all goes well, he expects to grow more storage veggies to expand the winter CSA. And if the town gives him the go-ahead, he’ll run a farm stand at the storage barn. Not really a farmstand, he says, but more like a factory outlet for organic vegtables.

I dunno. Maybe we should grow a smaller garden this year and buy from Larry. Let him do all the hard work. For more info, give Larry Pletcher a call: 603-456-3121.

Thanks to our readers and viewers who’ve emailed to find out just which edge of the earth I dropped off. Truth is I’ve been putting any shreds of extra time into getting the new Curiously Local Corner Stores site up and running. And I think that’s a worthwhile endeavor: the goal is to provide access to online markets for locally produced products.

So, do come back soon…
Upcoming blogs:
–Warner farmer Larry Pletcher talks about his new winter storage facility;
–a mini-documentary on old-time ice-harvesting;
–the weekly column on growing a food garden for beginners will resume soon;
–and, Bobcats in Warner! Faith Minton took a photo of one fine big cat, and I’m looking for a bobcat expert to write the blog.

–George

Jane Packard sent us a note from Texas:
On the way home from visiting family for the holidays, we stopped off to visit Flyman, outside Terrell, Texas. His tagline on the bee blog is “all men are equal before fish”.
After a picante lunch at the Gira del Sol,in a renovated Dairy Queen, he sent us on our way with a bagful of goodies from his bees. He had bragged on the delicate clear honey from the mesquite bloom this year. Yet we were not prepared for the sheer golden transparency when the wrapping fell away from two bottles of mead.

Having been warned that the only sin worse than an unopened bottle of mead was unempty open bottle, we decided to test the legend that mead was what motivated the Vikings to pilage England. The warm glow you see in this photo is not only from the beeswax candle behind it. Click for another post on Texan Bees

In November Joan and I drove her father, Denver, down to McCreary County in southern Kentucky, not far from Bimble, the closest town to the little hill country farm where Denver was born and raised. We spent a few days in the Eagle Falls Resort and RV Park, just a quarter mile from Cumberland Falls, a local attraction which has been described as the Niagara Falls of the south. The comparison, believe me, is in no way based on the relative sizes of the two falls.
But small as Cumberland Falls is, it nevertheless possesses some curiously local charms, one of which is the way the river scoops chunks of coal from the seams along its banks, wears them into smooth black pebbles, and deposits them in wide beds along the shore above the falls. A burlap bag and a shovel will get you enough to feed your stove for a week. There’s a restaurant at the Eagle Falls Resort, which feels more like a family kitchen than a place to get real excited about what might be on the menu. But on a Friday night the (new) owner of the motel came knocking on the doors of the handful of paying guests. “You’all come down to the restaurant! We’ve got gospel singers and free drinks!” Well, the drinks of course were coffee and soda, and the gospel was really mountain music done by the Kentucky Mountain Trio, a little group of teenagers whose playing and singing seemed to be handed straight down from their grandparents. I listened for a while, paid for a piece of chocolate cake, and then fired up my camera.
I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the first day of 2010 then to listen to a few songs by Heidi Douglas (click for Heidi’s youtube site), Israel Clark and Cody Canada.

You can't buy a 100 acre farm for the going rate and expect to make a living.

At 5:30 am the next morning, the hunters came into the breakfast room in groups of 2 and 3, talking about what they got or might get. On the TV an anchorwoman reported on the season’s first hunting accident. A man out hunting with his 12 year old daughter, climbing up the tree stand, dropped his loaded rifle. When it hit the ground, butt first, it discharged. The bullet went through the girl’s hand first, and then…true story…proceeded on through the dad’s hand as well.

Hunters mumbled about the damn fool, and the concierge expressed her opinion while she changed the coffee pots. “I don’t think they should let kids hunt until they are 18.” One of the hunters pointed out that it was the dad’s stupidity, not the kid’s, that caused the accident. The concierge considered the point for a minute, and then nodded her head. “Well, exactly what I was saying. That girl wouldn’t have got shot if they raised the age limit to 18.”

Makes sense both ways, doesn’t it? But the general conversation drifted over to swine flu. Half the kids are out of school, reported the concierge. And in her opinion if there are that many out of school, they oughta just close down the place. But, said one of the hunters, that would make it really tough for all the working parents who would have to find child care for their kids. “Well,” said our mistress of the breakfast room, ” the half of the parents with kids home sick have to do that anyways.”

Like meals left uneaten on the kitchen table, bales of hay sit moldering in these old fallen barns.

Now the room was full of outraged men dressed in orange camo jacked up on coffee and belglian waffles soaked in fake maple syrup. And each of them had a rifle in his car in the parking lot. The mood got ugly. “I tell you,” said the concierge, “Walmart better watch out. People could stop shopping there and that store could disappear in a SNAP!!”

The room empited; not, I think, that our boys were headed to Walmart for an armed standoff with an employee-abusing manager, but off to the woods to thin out the deer population. A task that was already underway with great success due to natural causes, if you count as natural the death-by-collision of dozens and dozens of deer on the highway. My estimate is that through Pennsylvania there’s an average of 1 deer body every 3 miles. And those were the ones I saw.

I was about to head back to the room to get my bag when an old, broke-down man in his early 70s came in with his wife, same age, much better shape. They were obviously farmers. I hooked another cup of ghastly coffee and invited them to my table. He and his wife looked over the available food and chose a styrofoam cup of OJ and a sticky little cinnamon bun mummified in plastic.

We talked about farming, and what emerged was one more Story of Another 100 Acre Farm.

He and his wife are still working the same 100 acre farm near Canton, Ohio that his father bought for $10k in 1947. His parents raised cattle, pigs, chickens, grew corn and vegetables, and made enough money to raise a handful of kids. And my farmer and his wife in their turn did the same thing on the same 100 acres. But none of their children were interested in taking on a farmer’s life. His son, he said, had expressed an interest as long as he didn’t have to do the work or manage the finances. He shrugged, “So what’s left?” But there is the possibility that a grandson might be interested. Might be. In actual fact, our farmer is not really making a sustainable, independent farm living now. He’s raising beef cattle, and growing their feed, but he buys steer calves from local dairy herds and feeds them up on his own farm. He and his wife buy their vegetables from local Amish farmers, and looming over their lives is always the debt they carry for even the minor pieces of equipment they have…tractors, new-fangled hayrollers, and the like.

Only the big guys can afford now to buy the 100 acre farm that raised two generations.

Either way, that 100 acres will never again raise a family.

I guess the final tone here sounds like one of despair. The use of land changes, the dollar economics of the moment trumps the longer-term economic ecology that might somehow find a more productive use for that 100 acres. But for every 100 acre midwestern farm that will no longer raise a family, there may be a 25 acre farm in Kentucky, or New England, or Oregon which might, in the hands of a young farm couple with new ideas about sustainable agriculture and local marketing, actually produce a real income sometime in the coming decade.

I think it could happen. Actually, I believe it is already happening. If you know about a small farm that’s doing well, drop me a line…or make comment to this blog.

Water and Gas: What, me worry?

I walked into the restaurant. 14 surly chickens looked up from their burgers.

Joan's latest tinyhaus affair.

I know, I know. People are asking me, “So where’s Week #4 and Week #5 of the garden blog? Where are the CuriouslyLocal online stores? Where’s George?”

OK, so we’re in Indiana, having roadtripped through Pennsylvania and Ohio. And on the plane tomorrow for Calif. It’s been a week of webcode geeking. Do the letters CSS mean anything to you? Good for you. Don’t let yer children become programmers. It’s only something for us, the aged.

Fern Lampron and Faith Minton signed me up. It took me a while to figure out that this wasn\'t about barter.

As an old dog I don’t learn new tricks easily or without growsing. And so it was with the Time Bank trick. If I give you an hour of my video production time in exchange for an hour of your window washing time, since when is THAT an equal exchange? It took me a while to get it, but when I did, I signed right up. It’s a revelation when you realize that even if you are a barely-scraping-by freelancer not every hour in your life oughta be monetized.

Here’s my Time Bank epiphany: Got a spare hour? Give it. Need an extra hour? Get it.

Joan, my lovely bride of lo these 40 years, was a Warner time banker from the beginning, and as soon as Fern Lampron got the Warner Time Bank up and running last month (timebanks.org charges a fee for local groups to use its online software) Joan signed up. She offered her services as a mushroom hunter, and quickly earned 7 hours in the time bank by taking people out into the woods. And then she began claiming her hours back.

Faith Minton showed up for a couple of hours to help wash windows, thereby adding two hours to her time bank account. And Joan delivered a broken chair to another member, cashing in another of her hours to get the chair (that I had been claiming for six months that I would fix) fixed. Just like that.

The Time Bank site is actually pretty well done...you can browse the list of offers, as well as the list of what people need.

I began to get it. I scratch your back. You scratch somebody else’s. They scratch yet another’s…and eventually I’m going to want to ask yet even some other person to return the favor that may have moved all around the community. My hour is your hour. Mi hora es tu hora. And when I need it, your hour is mine. (Ok, Ok. So yes, I posted a video blog back in April about the Warner Time Bank when it was just starting, and yes, it took me this long to sign up.)

Maybe some Warner time bankers will put share some of their stories via comments on this blog. And if you want to join the Warner bank, or see if there’s one in your town, click here.

It happens sometimes. You think it’s Friday, and then things go awry, and you are set back a week. Curiouslylocal stuttered a little bit today, so I had to go back to backups from Sunday. I’ll get the posts from this week back up tomorrow, including one on the Warner Time Bank project. In the meantime…if you are looking for a webhost that will pull you out of deep water…try mine: westhost.com. With many thanks to Scott, one of their tech guys.

Look at my compost pile. Don't you agree that it is a thing of mystery and beauty? On a freezing morning, it's 62 degrees inside.

It’s the end of Week #3 in the life my brand new food garden. November 21 by the calendar. The compost pile I built two weeks ago on one end of this 5′x20′ garden patch is looking…well…settled. To the casual observer, it is a pile of old leaves and garden trash. To me, its builder, the guy who will badly need compost next spring for this little garden, the pile looks like the future of food. And it makes me anxious. Is it working? Are we making compost here? There is really only one way to find out: measure the temperature at the core, in the center, at its heart, the place where the microbial life, if it is active at all, will be cooking up.

So yesterday I ran the probe from my indoor-outdoor thermometer deep into the pile. And behold! Heat! Yesterday afternoon the temp at the core was 63 degrees. Last night the air temp dropped below freezing. But my compost pile kept cooking at 62. Now, we’re still quite a ways from the 140 degrees that a pile will reach in warm weather, but as Joan pointed out this morning at 7 a.m., as we sat in our living room drinking coffee and huddling under a blanket to avoid having to start a wood fire, it was warmer in our compost pile (62 degrees) than it was in our living room (58 degrees). And yes, people are heating greenhouses and supplementing hot water systems by tapping the heat in compost piles.