Category: Eric

Notice the cows in the field below our garden.

Continue reading “A Perfect Maine Autumn Afternoon” →

Besides black flies, Windswept Farm is plagued with Colorado Potato Beetles (CPB – Leptinotarsa decemlineata), whose larvae will chew a potato plant like a dog chews a smoked pigs ear, and almost that fast. They don’t touch the tubers underground, but if there’s no plant to feed the tubers, you don’t dig potatoes in October. They are a scourge not just here in Monroe Maine, but around the world despite originating in Colorado. The Wikipedia article mentions that they may have been used as a crude form of biological warfare against Germany in WWII, and the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
Continue reading “Potato Bugs” →

Alison on the Hunting Island Beach

Alison and I just got back from a nice little visit to Alison’s parent’s place on the South Carolina coast (with apologies to the Traveller’s Rest crew, who we probably flew over twice on our way in and out of the Charlotte airport). Her parents are retired and live beyond Beaufort, SC, which is pronounced “Byoo-fort” and you will be corrected on the spot if you mistakenly use the NORTH Carolina pronunciation of “Boh-fort.”

“When you like the way something looks, you don’t say it is “BOH” -tiful, do you?” The natives will point out with a smug smile at their unassailable logic…

“BYOO-fort” is a “BYOO-tiful” small city that reminds me of Belfast, Maine because it features many restored period buildings in its walkable downtown, it’s right on the water, and it’s the ‘step-child” of a nearby famous resort town (Hilton Head), which means that it has been spared many of the unappealing aspects of wild growth. The Berards live beyond Beaufort in a non-famous resort community at the end of the state highway heading east through a clump of islands amid the picturesque brown and green spiky estuaries (think The Big Chill, Prince Of Tides, and Forrest Gump — all of which filmed scenes around these islands) bordering the Atlantic ocean called Fripp Island. Alison’s sister Leslie and niece Tait were visiting at the same time to make it a full Berard family reunion.
Continue reading “Back from SC” →

Omnivore’s Dilemma via Library Loan

Alison wanted to read Michael Pollan’s latest book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. When she went to the Belfast library, they didn’t have it, but they showed her how she could order it over the Internet via the state’s library network. That night she browsed through the entire card catalog of the Belfast Free Library, as well as libraries across the state until she found one that had it, and she was able to ask them to send it to Belfast for me to check out. When she was done, she told me: “I can see every book in every library in the state on my computer — that’s pretty amazing!” And now Alison has the book.

(click for larger version)

Spring on our Maine farm also means ‘shearing the sheep,” job I truly dread since it requires hours of my time hunched over a squirming fragrant animal when both of us would rather be elsewhere doing other things. (We used to hire someone to do this for us using the more efficient electric shears, except there are very few professional sheep shearers available these days, and those that do are reluctant to travel and set-up for two or three sheep…) As a result I often put off the job until the black flies begin to appear, which turns an unpleasant job unbearable (these flies, which I promise to describe in detail soon for those unfamiliar, fly in clouds and naturally gravitate to your head and face to land and begin biting… if you don’t inhale them first…). This is one of the biggest reasons we now use cows to mow our fields instead of more sheep.
Continue reading “Spring Chores” →