This is a splitting maul that probably went through a piece of wood and into a rock or something else very hard. When cutting it is very important to put wood to be split on top of a larger log and avoid hitting the ground. Every time there is a big ding in a cutting tool like this it is less effective at cutting, but every time you have to sharpen you have a tiny bit less tool on the end of your stick. Over time I will work this ding out of this axe’s blade out by sharpening it back beyond the flattened portion.

Above is a picture of a stump that was in the way of one of the barn doors that I chopped back. After spending part of a morning removing damaged spots from tools I immediately glance off of the stump and into concrete with my own axe. The irony was not lost on me. During this I get a phone call and during the call I start puling down dead wood along an old section of fence.

The amount of dead wood is impressive. Limbs have been falling for some time now. All this materiel will be used in some way be it erosion control or mulch, all of it will be used somewhere on the Homestead.

    Some trees have been dead so long they are held up by the fence that they once helped support.

  This appears to be an ash that has been killed by infestation. I see other dead standing trees on a walk around measuring future fencing purchases and will have to inspect them more carefully.

                                This former cow was not likely killed by emerald ash borers.

The Catalpa tree to the left is not dead I just couldn’t resist posting this picture. On a very short walk of part of the homestead I found many different animal tracks, bones and frightened about eight does away from this pond. The Kolb Homestead is a vibrant lively area even in the winter. Spring will be very exciting.

This series of photos is from an experiment I tried to see if i could use plain old sand as a reusable rooting materiel. I started several types of cutting from plants that had not yet frozen to the ground for the season about a month or more ago. The plant I am holding and making cuttings from is a chrysanthemum.

                I selected a piece to root then remove the dying flower and any newly opening flower to stop the plant from using up any stored energy on flowering rather than rooting. Then I remove several leaves to both expse the stem for planting and to limit water loss through transpiration.

Then I dip the cutting in rooting hormone, during the growing season I will use willow water instead of rooting hormone. Willow and cottonwood trees contain auxins that aid in root formation acting as a natural rooting hormone. Once I have made all the cuttings I can out of one branch I label the different colors of mum I am taking cuttings from.

If you don’t have any old plant tags I just split a stick and write on them as a label.

  Tah Dah! Plant label.

Later to fill this flat up a bit more I added some cuttings of sage and petunia. When  transplanting the cuttings a month later I find that only one of the sage has rooted in the sand. Most of the mums rooted well enough and the petunias as well. The sand is very hard to keep moist so I kept the flats somewhere cool to keep it from drying out which inhibits rooting a bit. Every other time I went by the flat I just misted them down with a spray bottle.

     Here are the flats of cuttings a month later. 

Petunia roots, not much growth but that’s all it takes.

         The sand worked! Here is a rooted mum plug in nothing but sand. I washed off the sand and collected it in a bucket for reuse. This method would not be practical on any larger scale without an automated mister to keep the sand from drying out or possibly watering from the bottom by filling the tray under the plug flat with a bit of water for the roots to reach for. No nutrients were added to make sure that the sand worked without help. If I did this again I would water with the leachate from my worm bin in a very diluted solution.

Nicholas Nehring,

MONDAY! The sun is just about to come out and play.

Time to scoop the poop! Today I kick the day off with some manure shoveling. Later on I will discover that I will be closing the day with manure shoveling. With a brand new solid rubber tire that will never go flat on the trusty little wheelbarrow I am ready.      All the nitrogen and bacteria in the manure composted any of the barn beams that were once submerged in the mess.

Just look at how much of the beam has been eaten away.

The color of the waste is different where wood once was.

Where does the day go? When I wasn’t looking it became evening!   One can never know what the next day holds, unless one adds it to ones work schedule the night before.  This flat is a small fast maturing Romain lettuce variety, some other long season plants are going in flats today as well. I may be quite early on the long season plants such as eggplant, peppers and okra, but if they stay healthy we will have a month jump on getting those items to Farm Bloomington!

Nights on the homestead are either perfectly quite or filled with a coyote chorus accompanied by a great horned owl. Judging from all the animal tracks this place is quite the hub of activity while I am sleeping.

The unusually warm weather has made for very pleasant work days. Today I decided to take apart this pile of soil and debris.   Little did I know the pile brought it’s A game.

Not quite buried treasure, but definitely a surprising quantity of twine. The soil covering the debris is fantastic rich black stuff. Once separated into piles the heap was almost all wood metal and twine. I hope no one working on the house next door could see me as I struggled to pull the twine out of crumpled up old fencing. I would have laughed at me.

Another day scraping out one of the barns, this time the space is not as tight and the manure is coming up in great big clods. In the middle photo the clod on the left has a recognizable manure layer on top. The photo on the right shows the nice clay floor under all that material.

Later on, over at the compost heap fungal mycelium is thriving in this balmy cool weather. I had started to turn the pile but chose to let the fungus do it’s job. Fungus breaks down the material that bacteria can not, but it is more sensitive to disturbance than bacteria.

With no compost to turn I pushed over a dead tree in the drive way and brought it to where I hope to have a hugelkultur raised bed. I may be easy to please but rotting would just makes my day. Down the road I will post a blog showing the entire project from start to finish. During the growing season check in to see what’s growing on the bed and how it is doing.

Have you ever had one of those moment where you wonder when the last tetanus booster you got was?

 In one month I have managed to tear holes in three pairs of pants, a glove and both my wrists on these little rusty devils.  So this week I am taking some time to remove or flatten down all the old nails and fasteners that held electrical conduit at one time.

  In the daylight it is easier to tell just how many jagged rusty metal items have been left in beams for one reason or another over the many years these barns have been standing.

  This is one of the wood piles the are to become an experiment in hugelkultur. Hugelkultur is a technique of burying wood to retain moisture with out irrigating. Some fun videos are available on the web, just type in hugelkultur and see what comes up. The experiment is to create a hugelkultur raised bed that remains attractive as it breaks down. This pile is just the beginning of some of the limbs that have piled up along the margins of the yard here on the Homestead. I like to let much of the fallen wood stay where it landed and the rest of it will all find it’s way back into the soil whole or reduced by mechanical methods. Sir Albert Howard used to lay old branches out in the road to let wagon wheels reduced wood to be composted while developing the Indore method of pit composting. I don’t think people would be as happy today if I put my wood out on State Road 65 to be reduced. For any one interested in Albert Howard , the book An Agricultural Testament is an interesting window to the early development of contemporary composting methods.

   Today as I walked all 100 yards to work I tried to remember the last time I had what you could call a ”typical” Monday.

  The largest barn on the homestead has a an earth floor somewhere under this possibly forty year old manure pack. I plan on finding it. With the bucket loader on the tractor and a few tools to clean around the walls it should be a breeze right?

  Here is the first attempted scoop. The super peppy little Kubota tractor was defeated by the “night soil”.

Look at how white it is under the surface, that is all salt. To much sodium is bad for your body. Soil is the body and soul of the farm, sodium is bad for the soils body also. Salt kills or repels every beneficial soil organism I can think of . Salt can reverse the osmotic pressure in root cells pulling the moisture or even contents of the cell out. Salinity raises the electroconductivity, or EC, of soil. If the EC gets high enough the plant wont be able to uptake as many nutrients, that along with salts damaging effect on humus many more nutrients wash past roots and receptor sites on your formerly polarized humus and into our groundwater and rivers. So now not only is the material harder and deeper than I expected but it is also so saline it needs to be leached for a significant amount of time before it can be used on a growing area.      This is going to be really hard, now I am excited.

  I have a plan. The tires spinning as I tried the first scoop loosed the stuff under the tractor. I dig down to the soil.

Here is my maximum clearance for the tire. It’s the same on the other side backing out. I have operated heavy machinery in some tight spaces, but never in an unlit historic building made of wood.

More fuel.

The hard blowing wind kept the barn breathable and free of fumes.

  The tractor and I have had a real bonding experience this morning.

My plan worked. The tractor is now facing out and the bucket is on the soil layer under the old waste material. I can just push everything out of the stall.

Until next time…

  Let me introduce myself, Kolb Homestead’s new farmer.

Nicholas Nehring.

In preparation for the next season I am here at the Homestead getting things ready. I will write blogs and post pictures about everything I am doing over this winter to turn a sleepy old farm house and  into a buzzing little farm. For now though allow me to bore you with how I got here.

I grew up in North Manchester Indiana where I learned to garden against my will. How many years it was from the point I began to enjoy the work to when I admitted that I enjoyed it I do not know. As it turned out I was unusually good with plants for a child. I did everything intuitively “thinking like a plant” paid off. With the money I made caring for yards I bought a drum set that proves significant in shaping my future.

I moved to Bloomington Indiana in the summer of 2000 as the drummer of a garage punk band. After doing all the horticulture I felt I could in B Town I drove to Arizona and worked at the Phoenix Zoo for four amazing years. The Phoenix Zoo gave me the ability and freedom to practice horticulture on an almost unlimited scale. Every non toxic plant at the Phoenix Zoo is farmed for animal consumption, even some of the cacti. This gave a difficult new dimension to designing landscapes.  By the time I was good at it I needed to come home and grow food. I had no idea how to do it, so I gave away everything I owned, left my hundreds of friends, turned away from my career and drove to Philadelphia.

Five months later I am living on Jade Family Farm in Pennsylvania’s Juniata Vally growing the finest produce I have ever seen on the side of a mountain. I lived in the basement of a house outside of a town where the county seat is the middle of nowhere, I spent my nights looking for the next job.

Exactly 365 days after leaving the Phoenix Zoo I moved into the Brick House on Kolb Homestead Farm.

(My drums are in the living room.)

The Tractor

So today marks the addition of eight new wheels added to the Kolb Homestead; one truck and one tractor. There were a lot of projects put on hold for want of a transportation device, but once those were obtained the flood gates of work opened. In the last post we were working on some preparing some garden beds to over winter and a chicken tractor. Well now they are firmly on their way to completion. The truck was something that we had been after for awhile and we had gotten it a few days before the tractor. It was an amazing purchase; cheap, reliable, and our dog loves to ride in it. But for all that the truck is it was the tractor that gave me that false sense of “Oh Man I’m totally a farmer now”. It is pretty amazing how quickly I felt graduated into the ranks of the experienced farms as the delivery person was standing on the tractor rattling off words like PTO, crank drive shaft. I didn’t really know what they meant but I knew that they were manly words; so I would just nod with agreement as he spoke.
Still, despite all the unwarranted confidence, and a pretty in-depth explanation of the tractor, my survival instinct took over and I will be spending the majority of the evening curled up with the operator’s manual. There is a lot of reading involved in farming, but it is always for the better. Some else’s experiences and knowledge can carry you a good distance before the sometimes inconvininent lessons of your own experiences set in.

Along with the first for wheels (the truck), came two pairs of hands. Mary Lu and Tom Orr stopped by the farm to help out. In two days of work we weeded some old beds from what looked like the civil war days, created a bed around the shed, cleaned out the shed, organized that very shed and created a massive anaerobic compost heap (AKA: the biggest compost heap in the world). I’m sure that’s an exaggeration but this pile was at least 16 ft by 4 ft. The anaerobic pile is much slower to decompose when compared to a more often turned aerobic pile, but the key factor is that it is waaaay easier to build. Throw down the cardboard, throw down the grass, throw down the hay, put some water on, and back away slowly. By this time next year we should have a real nice pile of soil to help feed the plants. As the farm grows we are going to need a lot of organic matter to add to the soil and the easier it is to get that soil the better.

  The next few weeks will be filled with organizing the filing, finishing the last bed, finding material for a hoop house to start seedlings in anf putting that up.

         It has been a month since we first stepped on to this beautiful vista over- looking the vast fields of a small farming community in Princeton IN. We were incredibly lucky to have met the Orr’s. Well, more correctly, we are very lucky that my friend Cody Hall met the Orr’s and recommended us for the job. It is because of our relationship with the Orr family that we have been given this opportunity to live and work on Kolb Homestead, and we are very grateful for that fact. This will be our first attempt at farming and a real chance to try and live a dream. Amongst the many things that Caitlin and I had in common when we met was the desire to practice the art of farming as it once was no more the sixty years ago. I remember Caitlin saying, “Humans did not fight their way to the top of the food chain to sit in a cubicle for 50 hrs a week”. It was love at first auspicious moral declaration.
          Given the immense amount that we need to learn about running a farm it is by no means going to be an easy task to start one. However, if we are successful then there is comfort in knowing that success is more than likely available to anyone.  For us there is more to farming than Horticulture and Animal husbandry. This country is in dire need of some cultural adjustments and the planet as a whole is long overdue for some real respect. We need simplicity, but simplicity is not something that you tell other people to do without first attempting it yourself. If there is to be any hope of real lasting change in the world it will not be accomplished by any amount of didactic commands on anyone’s part. It will be accomplished by an individual’s emersion in the ebb and flow of cultural fluctuation, and the formation of communities around common principles. I can’t say that we will be successful in accomplishing all the things that we set out to do, but in like manner, neither can I deny it. With all the uncertainty about the future there are a few simple things that I know for certain we have accomplished.
           After more consideration than was probably warranted, Caitlin and I got around to planting two plots 20 x 55 and a 15 x 40. In the beds we put: carrots, onions, kale, spinach, arugula, radishes, broccoli, beets, chard, mesclun, cilantro, garlic, and six types of lettuce. Most everything has come up and we think a lot will survive. We had a brief assault from some flea beetles but they flocked to the radishes and left everything else alone. I would be more concerned but it appears to be the end of the season and colder weather works as a great pesticide. So they are starting to taper off. We did some research and found out that flea beetles love radishes. Many people use them as trap crops. They plant them in the garden for the expressed purpose of diverting flea beetles away from other crops. Score one for beginner’s luck. I think we’re gonna be naturals.
            Aside from the plants we have started building a chicken tractor. It is basically an 8X8 square raised to three feet. That cube is further broken up into a 3×8 coop and a 5×8 pen (will have pictures soon). It will be used to cart the chickens around the farm for pest control and pasture management. Among the long list of skills that I simply do not have; carpentry is clearly one of the top five. But, we learn as we go.
            In the coming weeks there will hopefully be chickens occupying the tractor and a cold frame over the crops. We are off to a good start. Now if we can just keep the momentum.

We have started an organic farming operation on Kolb Homestead near Princeton, Indiana. We are conducting a tool drive to put all those old unused garden tools back to work. We are looking for old rakes, shovels, hoes with or without handles or an old lawn mower or small tractor anything that a vegetable and small livestock operation might be able to use. We are also looking for more traditional tools like hammers, screwdrivers, pliers and wrenches to build chicken tractors and other structures. 

If you have anything that you are no longer using and would like to donate, please reply and we will arrange to pick up or you can always drop it by the house at Harrison Lake.

The Orr Family (Mary Lu, David and Daniel)

Cody Young and Caitlin Carlson (Kolb Homestead Farmers)