Howell Farm

In 1984, Howell Living History Farm had its grand opening. It had been donated to Mercer Co., New Jersey, 10 years earlier, with the stipulation by its last owner, Inez Howell, widow of NJ Congressman Charles Howell, that it be used as an educational facility. So the county went through its governmental red tape and hoop-de-doo and turned the farm into a county park. It's operated as an 1890-1910 working farm, with work horses and oxen providing much of the power. Actually, oxen weren't used so much in New Jersey at that time, but a program to train interns to use them was put into place at the farm. Pete Watson was hired, though I'm a bit fuzzy on whether he came on as intern trainer. You see, Pete had gone into the Peace Corps some years before, and being an English major, naturally he was trained to work with oxen. You see the connection, don't you? Oh, well, anyway, Pete was trained right here in Tennessee by Ben Ellingson out near Nashville. He later went to Africa (I don't know which particular countries) and trained farmers over there to use oxen for field work, rather than using hand tools. So when he came to Howell Farm, he put his oxen expertise to work. Here's a picture of the yoke of oxen the farm had when I started volunteering there in 1994, Lyon and Giant.

Giant, the black one, is an Angus steer. Normally, Angus steers are destined for a trip to the slaughterhouse at about 15-18 months old. But the year Giant was born (sometime between 1984 and 1994), there was a football game between the New York Giants (who play in New Jersey, of course - ??) and the Denver Broncos. The governors of NJ and CO made a friendly bet - if the Giants won, Colorado would pay with a steak dinner. I don't know what NJ would have payed if the Broncos had won. A pair of cement shoes, maybe?? Well, after the Giants won (hence the name), the guv of CO sent a whole steer, fer goodness sakes. Rather than treat his cronies in the State House to steaks, the NJ guv did the right thing and gave him to Howell Farm. After they got a teammate for him - that's Lyon, the red and white one, a Hereford steer - they were trained to work together. Those things on their faces are to keep them from grazing when they're working. Here are Frank and Jesse; they were the farm's oxen in 2002.

They are Milking Devons and were trained in New England, where there are a lot more oxen still doing farm work than in NJ.

More later.

Fibery Stuff

Wow, it's been over a week since the last post. I guess nothing earth-shattering has happened around here.

This weekend is Alpace Farm Days, when alpaca farms around the country have open houses. So I took DGD and visited two of the four alpaca farms here in our county. The owners of farm #1, Silver Thunder Alpacas, are former spinning students of mine. I see him around once in a while because he works at our local Tractor Supply. Her I don't see but once a year or so. It was nice to see how their farm is coming along, with new gates (can never have too many gates), a new little farm store building, and a new cria from this spring. Baby alpacas and llamas are called crias. They're building their herd up slowly and have 8 females and at least 5 or 6 males (though not all the males are used for breeding, some are just for fiber).

The second farm is Appalachian Alpacas. I did a spinning demo and display there two years ago for Alpaca Farm Days. The first day was very windy and blew all my display stuff all over. The second day it rained just sideways enough to get my stuff wet (I was in a gazebo). So that was a flop. Today was much nicer. A friend of mine, the hostess of our local fiber guild, was weaving on a small triangle loom and a man, who I knew from a local weaving guild, was spinning (yes, men spin too, for you non-spinners out there). This farm has a bigger herd than the other one because the daughter and SIL of one owner lives next door and keeps their alpacas with mom's. So they had 8 crias, all fairly young, with their mothers, plus a few females with no baby. Didn't see where the males were.

While I was there, our guild mom told me about a new fiber fair that will be held in Charlotte, NC, next June. They have a website, but there's nothing much on it yet. I hope to go, if I can save up enough spending money. Charlotte's about a 3 1/2 to 4 hr. ride, so I don't know if it warrants an overnight stay or not. Depends on how much walking around I do. There's another show next month, SAFF, or Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair, just south of Asheville. That's only 1 1/2 hr. away, so that's easy to do in one day. I have a couple of fleeces (sheep) that were given to me that I desperately need to have processed (since I don't want to wash them myself). I don't mind carding, but can't stand washing. Which is why it's taken me about 3 years to process another fleece that I bought. I still have about 2 pounds left to do. So, anyway, I absolutely MUST take those 2 or 3 fleeces with me and drop them off with the fiber mill that will be there as a vendor. They're in Missouri, so they'll then ship back a box or boxes of nice clean roving (long continuous strip of carded wool).

In keeping with the fibery vein, I need to wash yarn this week. The yarn I've spun for Howell Farm needs to be washed, measured, weighed, and labeled before Thursday. That last half pound of wool that still needs to be spun? Yeah, well, I guess it's not going to get done before we go, unless I get ambitious tomorrow. LOL

Musical Conglomerate

I've been thinking about some of the stuff I put on my profile. There's just not enough room to elaborate. So here are some of my eclectic musical tastes.

Big Band and other 30s/40s - Glenn Miller was my first big band "love." I still like Miller, but now like Benny Goodman, Harry James, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, and others. I also got my first taste of the Andrews sisters from some old movies. They're still my favorite singers from that era. I've gotten most of the Time-Life Big Band CDs and Your Hit Parade CDs from 1940 through 1959.

The 50s were kind of lost for me, since I don't remember anything much before 1955. My mother would play the radio in the morning, so before school during the week I'd hear Eddie Fisher, Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, etc. I guess some of them are OK, but I don't go looking for them. On Saturday morning we'd listen to Bernie Kosnoski's Polka Show. If I need a hit of polkas now, I see if the Big Joe Polka Show is on RFD TV. LOL We watched the King Family on TV, Frank Fontaine was on the Jackie Gleason Show, Judy Garland and others had their own shows, and Annette and Frankie sang on the beach. I never heard the new rock and roll at home, except occasionally on TV, like Elvis or Chubby Checker. Overall, I can take or leave that decade. Which is why I don't listen to those Your Hit Parade CDs from the 50s too often.

The 60s and 70s kind of overlap. I didn't ride a bus to school until Jr. High, but I lucked out with a cool bus driver who played the radio. I remember the whole bus singing along with "The Name Game," and the boys in the back would always try to do "Chuck" before the driver caught them. My first 45 was Petula Clark singing "Downtown." I like the Beatles, but never got an album, only a couple of
45s. I have 5 or 6 Simon and Garfunkel albums (and when I say albums, I mean LPs, not CDs), 5 or 6 Billy Joel albums, 3 Monkees, 3 Paul Revere & Raiders, "Tommy" by The Who, plus a few that make me wonder why in the world I bought them. I collected about 300 45s, too. I had a transistor radio (remember them? it took a 9V battery) that I'd turn on and put under my pillow so I could listen to the radio at bedtime. The battery lasted forever. I listened to either WABC in New York or WFIL in Phila. Then when I had some extra cash (not often), I'd go over to Korvette's (dept. store) and get a couple of 45s or occasionally an album. Folk songs, Mamas and Papas, etc. made their way into the mix along the way.

Classical - My mother had bought a few of those multi-record compilation albums of classical music, where you get one movement of this symphony, a snippet of that sonata, a whole piece in some cases, if it was short enough. And then there were Looney Tunes. They used a LOT of bits and pieces of the classics in those cartoons. And "The Rabbit of Seville" and "What's Opera Doc?" use almost whole movements from The Barber of Seville and The Ride of the Valkyries. So I contented myself with those until I started working. There was an older man in the office next to mine who was an opera and classical buff, so we'd get talking about music. He introduced me to a lot of pieces I wouldn't have bothered with otherwise. When "Fantasia" came out, I was in hog heaven. So, the CDs I have now are Beethoven, Copland, Gershwin, Grofe', Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Strauss, Verdi, and Vivaldi, plus one of Fiedler and the Phila. Orchestra and one of different marches.

More later.

Birds of a Feather

Why do chickens molt when the colder weather starts? I have one that started last week, which isn't bad. By the time it freezes, she'll be refeathered. But there are always a few who are still rather threadbare when we're getting some frosts, or even downright freezes, at night. I knew before getting chickens that they molt each year, but the first year it happened I thought one of them had exploded! LOL There are a LOT of feathers on those girls. I haven't actually seen any of them losing any (our house is about 100 ft. from their pen), but it looks like they shake and fluff their feathers and lose a bunch in that spot. Then later, when they're in a different spot, they shake again and lose more. Some of them get really pathetic looking and with others, you'd never know they were molting except when they spread their wings and some flight feathers are missing. Here are some of the girls.

Short 'n' Sweet

BIL and his oldest son have arrived; they'll be here a week, I think. Put a hurtin' on that pot of chili I cooked up, then sat on the front porch for awhile and watched puppy Chloe play with neighbor Bill's dogs. Then after I closed the chickens in for the night and collected eggs, I came in and caught most of America's Got Talent. I was rooting for Poplyfe, the young band, but Landau Murphy won. He's a really good singer too. You don't expect Frank Sinatra's voice to come out of a black guy with long hair in braids.

We started some zucchini and yellow squash about 9-10 days ago and bought some cabbage plants, so some of them will be going in there. Don't know if the squashes will do anything, especially with 49 degrees forecast as an overnight low tomorrow night, but the cabbage should do OK. We have some lettuce in the raised beds too. We'll see if we get to eat it or if it's just going to be chicken food.

Stinky Dogs and Hungry Horses

I'm back after a few days. MIL had to go into the hospital on Sunday afternoon, via ambulance, for a medical problem. The ambulance was because she couldn't walk and there was no WAY DH and DD could get her out of the house and into the car. Soooo, we had her two dogs at our house from Sunday night till this morning. They have never been leashed trained, the old one doesn't come when he's called, the old one also paced the house almost continuously, even through the night, until DH got out of bed and went and slept in the recliner. I'll bet you can guess why. Yup, MIL sleeps half the night in her recliner, then goes to bed around 3 or 4 in the AM. They also stunk, so they got hose baths this morning outside. Since her house was empty yesterday, DH took advantage and went over the carpets with our shampooer while DD and I cleaned house real good, the stuff the cleaning lady doesn't get.

One of the BIL's is coming down from NJ tomorrow, so I'm making a crockpot of chili for supper. Put it together, turn it on and forget it.

Other than that and cleaning up the house, I have no idea what I'm doing tomorrow. What I SHOULD do is spin up the rest of that stupid wool or at least wash what is already spun. I've been doing some genealogy searches on rootsweb and have found a few people, but I doubt I'll be able to get back to that for a few days.

All in all, a pretty boring blog today.

Can you smell it?

Smell what? Why, the cinnamon and apples, of course. The 4th apple walnut bundt cake was put in the oven at 7:30 pm and the first two are ready to go out to the freezer. We stopped at the Friday Fair market yesterday and one guy had one small bag of Jonagold apples left. So I figured I may as well get started on fall baking. Some of those apples are huge, so I still have 4 left. No, no more apple cakes. But I'm not sure what yet. I'll be doing cookies, I'm sure, but not with apples, and pumpkin and apple pies around Thanksgiving. I use Granny Smiths for apple pie because they stay firm when they're cooked.

Welcome, Tina and Linda.

I belong to the Limestone Creek Fiber Guild, which started as an informal get together of fibery folks about once every other month. This was about 4 years ago? Maybe 5?

* * * * * We interrupt this blog for an important bulletin. Just tasted cake #3. As I suspected, I forgot the white sugar. I did put the brown sugar in, so it's not totally yuck. I had added the white and wheat flours to the mixing bowl, then stopped to make supper. Mistake! When I went back to it, I skipped over the white sugar. I thought the batter was a little different, but couldn't put my finger on it. Drier, maybe? I wondered about the sugar. Now I know. Now back to your regularly scheduled blog. * * * * *

Now Limestone Creek meets pretty much every month. The "den mother" is a llama owner, as are some of the other members. Then there's a new every-other-Tuesday group nearby - the name escapes me at the moment - so I've started going to that once a month. It forces me to get some spinning done. In fact, most of that farm yarn I talked about was done at the Limestone Creek meetings.

End of Two Tunnels

I supposed I'll slow down to posting once a week or so once all the newness wears off, instead of almost every day. I just finished yet another major branch of the Fisler family. Just one smallish branch to go.

I have a Family Tree Maker program that I enter all the informtion into. Then I can print out ancestor trees, descendant trees, etc. with whatever data I want to include. Some of the popular (and, therefore, annoying) first names on the Fisler hit parade are, for the guys, Samuel, Joseph, Benjamin, Charles, Jacob, Lorenzo (believe it or not!), Wade, Felix and Leonard. For the gals, it's Rachel, Elizabeth, Mary (no surprise there), Hannah, Henrietta, Sophia, Sarah, Ann/Anna/Annie, and, believe it or not, Euphemia. Yep, there are 3 or 4 Euphemia's just in one branch. At the other end of the spectrum are the "Your parents named you WHAT?!!" names, like Euphemia (LOL), Lynnton (male), Elbert, Mulford, Luberta (female), Thorn (male), Vestina (female - not a blood relative, thank goodness), Athalan (female - that's what it looks like on the actual census page, too), Kesiah (female - I've come across this name in a totally different section of the family, too), Barzillai (male - also unrelated to the Fislers), Gilden Elvin, who married Ola, the previously mentioned Oarmel/Armel/Armol, and one woman who also had three different versions of her name - Lorene (not bad), Lonzene (bad), and Alonzene (worse). There are a couple of names that I like, but would never name my kid that - like sisters Arabella and Isadora, and distantly related Cornelia. And one woman married Clayton Moore! No, not the Lone Ranger. He was a RR Express agent.

And then there are brothers who marry sisters, which isn't too bad, or the guy whose first wife dies, so he remarries . . . her sister or cousin. Got a couple of those. Or the guy who marries a distant cousin with the same surname. ACK! And THEN when he remarries, it's to her sister/cousin with the SAME NAME again. I think the only situation I haven't come across (yet) is where multiple wives have the same name, at least the first name.

Is there a gene for farming? I haven't actually counted, but at least 75% of my father's side of the family, up to 1930 anyway, were farmers. My mother's family were more city folk. I'm glad I don't farm full time. Just trying to get the garden to grow vegetables, not weeds, is a chore.

I'm also almost at the end of a spinning project. When in NJ, DH and I volunteered at a living history farm for about 8 years. Each year, after the sheep are shorn, they get the wool processed into roving (washed, dried, and carded into a long continuous strand about 1 inch in diam.). A spinner would then spin the yarn from the roving. We visited the farm last September and I learned that there are at least a couple dozen bags of roving being stored. The two employees there who spin don't have time to do it. Since I spin, I offered to bring one bag home and spin up some yarn that they could sell in their gift shop. I picked a bag of medium gray that's an amalgam of several sheep; it weighed about 8 lb. I'm now on the last half pound and expect to finish it in the next two weeks. That includes making two-ply yarn, winding it into skeins, and washing the skeins to set the twist. I also made some labels for the skeins with farm's logo on them. About half of the yarn has already been sent to the farm and the rest will go next month. So pretty soon I can get back to spinning for myself. I have a wool/silk blend that I think I'll work on next.

I am determined to get to bed at a decent hour tonight, so buh-bye

Dogs and ancestors

Had the house more or less to myself yesterday. DH took MIL to the doctor this morning (a 6 hr. ordeal counting that he has to get up at 6 am) and then went to work on BIL's tractor this afternoon. I say more or less because we have two dogs - a 15-year-old rat terrier-type cross and a 3-month-old retriever-type cross. The old dog is a piece of cake . . . now. In her heyday she could be a real piece of work. The pup, on the other hand, is a handful when she's between naps. I never had a dog who liked to chew and eat stuff like her - random scraps of paper, cellophane, fuzz, toy stuffing, dog bed stuffing, the dog bed label, , used dryer sheets, the bathroom rug label, leaves, cat s--t (ewww - trying to break her of that REAL fast), chunks of old dry grass from the mower, chair legs, cedar chest legs, the wooden handle of a flag, horse hoof trimmings (yes, you heard me right - dogs LOVE horse hooves). At least she seems to be catching on to housebreaking OK.



I've been working on the genealogy stuff again tonight, to the exclusion of most everything else except seeing who got to the finals on America's Got Talent. Some of the main family names I'm working on are Lamb, Fisler, Inman, Heisler, Houlroyd, Richter, Cooper, Carmody, McChesney and Barton. The LDS search site has a lot more census info on it starting this year, with transcriptions of US censuses from 1850 to 1930, and actual images to look at for 1850, 1870, and 1900. Some birth and marriage records go back farther. And fortunately for me, most of the family were homebodies. I can confine my searches pretty much to NJ, PA, and NY. There are very few (considering how many there are total) that moved out of the tri-state area. I have a few notebooks that I'm putting my copies of records into, but I think I'll need more, or at least bigger for the Fislers. Note to self - buy some dividers for the different branches so I don't have to flip through to find the descendant printouts I've been following.

Another late (for me) night - 11:25. Still have to give old dog her pill so she doesn't pee in her sleep.

Bleary eyed

. . . from looking up genealogy records on the computer for the last 4 hr. Currently working on my father's mother's family. Holy cow, what a prolific family! And why, oh why, does everyone name their kids after uncles, aunts, cousins, so there are dozens of people with the same common names. I, at least, skipped back over three generations (me, my mother, and my grandmother) when naming my daughter, who is named for her gr-gr-grandmother. Even the names that are unusual, aren't THAT unusual in this family, except for maybe the guy named Oarmel (or Armol or Armel, depending on which record you look at). And amongst the hundreds of folks in NJ and PA, there was one, at least, who moved to North Carolina and was in Mars Hill in 1910. That's just about an hour's ride from where I am.

Linda, you might not have wanted that nice wind this morning when Lee blew through. It was raining sideways. Then it's been on and off (mostly on) all day since then. Where was this rain back in July when we could have used it?

Gotta hit the sack.

Day One: Continued

Three hours later. OK, so it's actually more like 4 hr. later because when I hit "Publish Post" before, it stayed as a draft. Thunder and the couple dozen drops of rain we received have gone for the moment. Never did actually see any lightning.

The back story: I'm a retired secretary who worked for NJ Dept. of Transportation for 34 yr. Twenty of those years was as a medical secretary, which I really enjoyed. Every once in awhile the State would offer retirement packages and one came up that I (and DH, who also worked at DOT) couldn't pass up. BUT, taxes and auto insurance being sky high in Jersey, we knew we couldn't stay there after retirement unless we moved to the "projects." Since DH's mother was already living in TN since 1977 and we had been around much of East TN over the ensuing 20+ years, we decided to move. So in 2002 our house in NJ finally sold and we found a place in Greene Co., TN. We got 7 times as much land (2.87 A) for 1/9 of the taxes (yeah, I figured it out). Our car insurance dropped in the hole.

The name of the farm, Cherokee View, came from the glimpse of Cherokee National Forest we get between some little hills by our place. The view is better if I walk up the hill to the north, but I rarely go up there. The view from the house is much better during the winter when the trees are bare. Here's a summer view from a few years ago when the close trees were shorter.



Our lot is a double flag, that is, a 50 ft. frontage goes back about 400 ft., then widens out on both sides. Most of the left side flag (southeast) is a downhill pasture, about 3/4 acre or so. One of the neighbors has 5 horses that they were rotating between their half acre pasture, our pasture, and another neighbor's half acre pasture. WAY too much horse on WAY too little pasture. They give them hay too, but, boy, do they beat the ground up. Now their little pasture is gone because they've taken the fencing down so they can sell their house. They'll be moving within a month or two to a bigger property with several acres of pasture, and none too soon. These same folks seem to accumulate dogs too. They started out with 3, all good sized. Then a stray beagle (probably had basset in her too) had puppies at their house. They kept two of the puppies, but once they were too big to keep track of when let out to potty, they let them run the neighborhood all day. So if a car doesn't get them, a farmer with a gun might. And if they don't take care of business soon, there'll be MORE little beagle/bassets running around, since it's a brother and sister and they're about 7 months old now.

The right side flag is uphill toward the north (the highest point of the property) and gradually slopes down along the northwest side. The garden is along that side and counting several raised beds here and there, is about 6,000 sq. ft. total. More on that later. At the back of the property, toward the southwest, we adjoin a semi-wooded lot that used to be a pig farm, according to the locals. There's no remnants of the smell left, thank goodness. The chicken coop and pen and a storage barn are down there along the fence. Right in the middle of the property is the house, which the builder skewed slightly from the lines of the property so it faces directly east, west, etc. I'd compare the builder to the builders of the pyramids, but I've met the guy and I wouldn't insult the Egyptians like that. And I doubt he's even heard the term "feng shui," so I know that's not why he did it. Last but not least, the one story, cobbled together "barn" is next to the pasture. It was built by a committee, apparently. There's a stovepipe to nowhere that drips during rain, so a 5 gal. bucket sets underneath. The starlings have inhabited the spaces between the roof and ceiling of the one, completely closed-in room that is a workshop. And then we went and built yet another room onto it for storage. LOL

Have to go gather eggs and close the chickie girls in for the night. Which I did about an hour ago, after failing to figure out why this post didn't post.

Nighty-night.
Chris

OK, Here we go

OK, let's try this thing called blogging. I suppose I'll switch between subjects such as genealogy, gardening (and the related selling-of-the-produce - see also greenegrown.blogspot.com, started by Greene Grown originator and all-around good guy, Butch Larkin), reading, chickens (we have 18), dogs (we have 2), cats (also 2), and probably some other stuff that doesn't spring to mind right now. I think I'll like the freedom of being able to just ramble hither and yon between subjects, not like answering an e-mail, where I have to, more or less, stick to the subject.

I hear thunder outside right now, which means the electric may blink off for a moment, just enough to reset the computer, which doesn't like to be reset when it's in the middle of an online session. So I think I may just cut this short and pick it up again later after said thunder and accompanying lightning (the REAL culprit) has stopped.

Oh, heck, add spinning and the related wooly details and fiber shows and occasionally weaving, embroidery, and needle felting, to the list in paragraph one. Sheesh, how could I forget that?

Bye for now.
Chris