Category Archives: Days in My Life

I don’t just sit around and watch TV.

A Snowy Weekend

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First snow of the season is just right.

It started snowing Friday afternoon.

It had been forecasted, so I was expecting it and got all my errands done early in the day. There was a sleety mix coming down in town as I headed home. By the time I pulled into my driveway, the sleet was more snow-like. It could have been our elevation — my home’s elevation is about 800 feet higher than town at the river’s edge. I put my Jeep away in the garage, let Penny out, and settled down to an afternoon catching up on paperwork.

First Snow Reading
By mid-afternoon, there was just three quarters of an inch of accumulated snow.

By 2:47 PM, there was 3/4 inch on the ground. Not very impressive.

But it kept snowing. I chatted with a few different friends on the phone, watching the white stuff come down in big flakes outside. Inside was toasty warm and smelled of the ham and cheese quiche I had in the oven. I was sipping a hot coffee with eggnog and milk — a do-it-yourself eggnog latte.

Later, after dark, I let Penny out to do her business. She stood at the doorway just looking at the snow, completely uninterested in stepping out. Later, before bed, when the snow was deeper but still coming down, I had pretty much the same luck with her. I suspected I might have a problem.

Of course, a tiny dog can only hold it for so long. She woke me at 3 AM, needing to go out. I obliged, standing at the doorway while she managed to find a satisfactory spot under the front deck to take care of business. It had stopped snowing and the sky was full of stars with just a few low clouds floating around. The cliffs behind my home were illuminated by the starlight and reflected light from town miles away. It was a beautiful night — perfect for some photography.

Now wide wake, I went back inside and set up my camera and tripod. I experimented with some shots from the deck outside my bedroom door and then the front deck. Although I couldn’t get a satisfactory shot of the cliffs, I did get an acceptable one looking down toward town. (I need to get my camera checked; there’s something screwy going on with exposures.)

Wenatchee at Night
I made this photo of the lights of Wenatchee from the deck outside my bedroom door.

Total Snowfall
Total snowfall was about 4-1/2 inches at my place.

I went in to have coffee, write in my journal, and do some blogging. I had some quiche for breakfast. Somewhere along the way, it got light out. I went back out with my ruler and stuck it in the virgin snow on my driveway apron. Four and a half inches.

The stuff was not wet but not quite powdery. The temperature was right around 32°F and didn’t feel cold at all. There was no wind. And it was amazingly beautiful with all that untouched snow on the ground.

I put on my Sorrels and walked back out to check on the chickens. They were out and about in their yard and looked up at me, as they usually do, expecting food. Their water was free of ice — I’d bought them a heated waterer — and although there was snow in their food dispenser, it didn’t look wet. I threw them a scoop of scratch and checked for eggs. There were three of them, one of which was still warm. Apparently, my chickens hadn’t gotten the memo about cutting back on egg production when the days got short.

First light was just hitting downtown Wenatchee. I went back upstairs and took in the view from the deck outside my bedroom. The light was pink as it touched the mountains and valley to the northwest. I felt as if I could have watched the view change all day, but it was time to get some work done outside.

First Light on a Snowy Morning
First light hits the Wenatchee Valley on a snowy morning.

Although my driveway is quite long, I don’t plan on ever shoveling or plowing it. I have a Jeep and its tires are still good. The driveway doesn’t have much of a slope to it. I don’t expect getting in or out with the Jeep to ever be much of a problem, especially since snow doesn’t usually stick around long here. Even my truck has 4WD, so if I need to get out with that, I know I can. How do I know? I used it to pull my RV out last February after a heavy snowstorm for a two-month trip to California. The Honda? Well, the Honda is in for the winter at this point.

But I also have a concrete driveway apron, which I need clear if I want to get my helicopter out for a flight. I didn’t have any flights scheduled until after Thanksgiving, but who knows what might come up? I had already decided to keep it clear of snow and ice. I had a good shovel and a bag of ice melt. With temperatures expected to rise during the day, I wanted to shovel now, before the snow got soft and heavy.

It didn’t take long and I have to admit that it felt good. That might sound weird to the people who consider snow-shoveling a chore, but I do it so infrequently (so far) that it’s more of an excuse to move around outdoors than any kind of real work — especially when the snow is still light and there’s no ice to contend with. I felt the same way last year when I shoveled the walk at the home I was housesitting at after a snowfall. The whole job took about 20 minutes — the driveway apron is only 22 x 30 feet — and I barely broke a sweat in my fleece sweatshirt.

Shoveled Driveway
My shoveled driveway apron, just in case I need to pull the helicopter out for a flight.

I didn’t spread any ice melt on it. The way I see it, there’s no reason to spread that crap around unless there’s ice to melt. I figured I’d monitor the condition of the driveway apron and, if the little snow left did turn to ice, I’d spread some ice melt to get rid of it. But as the day wore on, the snow melted and the resulting water dried. No ice.

While I was out with the shovel and still energized, I shoveled a path from my front door to the chicken yard. This would give Penny a better place to run and do her business. But she had already figured out that she could stay under the front and side decks to get around the building without having to walk through much snow. In fact, while I was shoveling she disappeared around the back of the building, possibly tracking the scent of a rabbit that had left tracks in the snow back there.

Snowy Home
A look back at my home from Lookout Point on a snowy morning.

Before going back inside, I walked down to Lookout Point, my little bench overlooking the valley. I’d brought the bench cushions in when the weather began changing two weeks ago and the bench looked abandoned and kind of forlorn with its covering of snow. I looked back at my home and liked what I saw: the neat symmetry of the building, the smooth blanket of snow on its big roof, the pine trees on the cliffs behind my home, accented with white. The path back to my home from the bench looked inviting. I looked forward to mornings like this when I could stoke up a fire in the fireplace and sip hot cocoa while looking out over the valley.

And that’s when I realized that I liked winter.

It’s odd because I left New Jersey to escape the cold. That put me in Arizona, which I soon grew to dislike for many reasons, not the least of which was the brutally hot summers. But my home in Arizona also lacked seasons — the only thing that changed was the average daytime high and nighttime low. There were no fall colors, there was no snow, there was no springtime leafing out. The seasons were more subtle, marked by temperature changes, wildflower and cactus blooms, and thunderstorms.

We bought some vacation property in northern Arizona, mostly to escape the hot Phoenix area summers. We went up there pretty regularly in the summer early on, and I spent much of the summers of 2004 and 2005 in my old RV up there. But we also enjoyed going up there in the winter time. How many Thanksgivings and Christmases did we spend in the cabin we built together? I remember waking once to a hushed, snow-covered landscape, cosy and warm under a thick comforter up on the loft, going downstairs to make a hot breakfast of Pillsbury orange danish. We spent part of that day at the Grand Canyon, walking the shoveled rim trails, before dinner with friends at El Tovar. That property, bought for summer use, became my winter treat. The chain of Christmasy red and white stars I’d bought still hung from the loft the last time I was there.

Now I’m back in a four-season place. Indeed, the winter here is remarkably like the winters in northern New Jersey, where I spent more than half of my life. But there’s the added benefit of a wide variety of winter sports nearby: downhill skiing, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, and skating. There’s life here — that’s another thing I’ve been missing for too long.

I didn’t spend much time outside that morning. I had things to do inside before heading out to visit a friend and then participating in a cider tasting outing with other friends. Dinner out came afterward. The temperature rose throughout the day but it got cloudy. The roads were icy on the way home, but I threw the Jeep into 4WD and had plenty of traction.

The next day, Sunday, was even warmer. My garage got up to 50°F before I realized I didn’t need the space heater on while I did my warm glass work. Snow was melting everywhere and my driveway apron was dry. The chicken yard was snow-free — they’d trampled it all down into wet dirt and they were still making plenty of eggs. It was 46°F outside when I left at 1 PM for a football party at a friend’s house. I took my truck because I needed to run my trash cans out to the main road. It had no trouble on the unplowed driveway.

Temperatures this week will continue to rise, with a daytime high on Wednesday expected to be 50°F. The National Weather Service is predicting a warmer than normal winter here and if the cold snap we had earlier this month is an anomaly — which I believe it is — we might not get much more snow at all. Although I hope to get some cross-country skiing in before I head south for a month or two, I don’t really care one way or another. This snowfall was a treat and I’m sure there will be many snowy weekends in my future.

Minimizing Trash

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How I do my part — and how you can do yours.

Earlier this week, NPR did a story about the food waste ban in Massachusetts. It led with the following fact:

Americans alone, on average, throw out about 20 pounds of food a month, most of it hauled away with the trash.

They’re talking primarily about excess food thrown away by institutional organizations (think hospitals, schools) as well as buffet restaurants. But there’s also the food waste that we consumers create, often through spoilage or simply preparing more food than we eat and throwing away the leftovers. The end result of all this is ever more added to our landfills, which are already overflowing with detritus of our wasteful lifestyles.

The article appealed to me because it confirmed that my own personal efforts to reduce what I put in landfills can make a difference if others did the same. I thought I’d share what I do with readers, possibly to give them ideas of what they can do make a difference. And hopefully, they might share a few new ideas with me.

Recycle

First and foremost — and actually required in many places — is recycling. I’m fortunate to have “single-stream” recycling available to me. That means I get a big garbage pail and put all recyclable items into it together. No need to sort or have multiple bins.

I keep a small blue recycling garbage pail in my kitchen, right beside my garbage pail. They’re the same size, but I wind up emptying the blue pail at least twice as often — sometimes every day. I put anything other than styrofoam that has a recycling logo on it into that pail. (My local waste company does not take styrofoam.) This includes the plastic “cans” that Penny’s dog food come in, junk mail, paper waste from bills and receipts, paper and cardboard packaging, cans, newspaper, and plastic bottles. (I save glass bottles, such as wine and cider bottles for art projects; more on that in another post.) You can imagine how quickly this might get filled up at a home that consumes a lot of packaged foods. (I don’t.)

I also get a lot of mail order items for my various hobbies — beekeeping, warm glass work, etc. — mostly because they’re simply not available locally. These items come in cardboard boxes. I cut down the boxes and use them to fill any empty space in my big recycling bin before I bring it out for collection.

Garbage Pails
Yes, my recycle bin is about twice the size as my garbage bin. And yes, I did draw a smiley face on my garbage pail so I could distinguish mine from my neighbors’.

It does cost me an extra $8/month to have my big recycling bin, but I think it’s worth it. The waste management company collects it every 2 weeks, which is about the same frequency I take out my much smaller garbage bin. The big drawback for me is that I have to take both bins 2 miles out to the end of our private road for collection. But I think the cost and inconvenience are worth it so I can do my part.

Upcycle and Reuse

I mentioned above that I save glass bottles for art projects. I will eventually do a blog post about that. But it’s just part of my “upcycling” efforts.

Upcycling is where you take something that could be discard it and turn it into something else that might even be more useful. I’ve done quite a bit of this with pallets, scrap wood, and glass bottles.

I also reuse a lot of things — plastic containers that food comes in and large plastic paint buckets are two pretty good examples.

The trick is to look at an item before tossing it out and think about how it might be reused. Large yogurt containers make excellent scoops for chicken feed and potting soil. The single-serving yogurt containers make great seed starters — I started my avocado plant in one before transplanting it to a nicer pot. They’re also good as open storage containers for small items I need while working on projects around my home. If these things are damaged during their second (or third or fourth) use, so what? They go from that use into the recycle bin.

I also collect packing peanuts, other packing foam, bubble wrap, and air bags used as padding for items shipped to me. I stow them in large bags that I drop off at a local shipping place for them to reuse. I recycle most paper padding, but do save some of it as starter for my beekeeping smoker or fire pit.

Upcycling and reusing make sense not only because they help minimize waste, but they save you money. A search for “chicken feed scoop” on Google, for example, results in a list of plastic and metal scoops ranging in price from $2.69 to $15.93. Mine were free and when they break, I’ll be able to replace them for free.

Compost

If you have a garden, you should be composting. Period.

Seriously, why wouldn’t you?

According to the EPA‘s “Composting at Home” web page,

Compost is organic material that can be added to soil to help plants grow. Food scraps and yard waste currently make up 20 to 30 percent of what we throw away, and should be composted instead. Making compost keeps these materials out of landfills where they take up space and release methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Although I don’t think this page is the best source of detailed information about composting, it does have this two-page, illustrated composting guide that explains the whys and hows of composting, including the all important difference between greens and browns and lists of what should and shouldn’t be composted.

Spinning Composter
This composter can hold quite a bit. With stirring rods inside, spinning it on its horizontal axis aerates the contents.

I’ve been composting rather haphazardly for years. Back in Arizona, we had a compost bin that we’d occasionally throw items into. It wasn’t properly maintained, especially after I started going away for the summer each year for work and my wasband began living at home only on weekends. I don’t consider it a success. But here in Washington, I’ve embraced composting as a source of soil for my garden. I bought a rotating composter and, when that filled up last week, built a new pallet planter to hold additional end-of-season garden waste to compost over the winter months.

Pallet Planters
With two spare pallets from my bee yard, I simply built a fourth pallet planter and filled it with excess yard waste. With luck, it’ll be full of something resembling soil next spring and I can use it as another planter.

What do I compost? Mostly filled coffee filters and vegetable scraps that I don’t feed my chickens, such as onion skins and potato peels. I keep a small plastic container — a used yogurt container, of course — on the countertop and fill it throughout the day. I usually empty and rinse it in the afternoon. And, of course, all that garden waste, including vines, stalks, and leaves.

Of course, when I clean out my chicken coop, all of their droppings go into my compost bin, too. If I had horses, some of their manure would also go in. (Might fetch some manure from a friend’s horses this week.)

The rotating bin makes it easy to mix up the compost — five half-spins seems to do the job. There’s already a lot of rich, dark soil in there.

I’ll likely stop adding to my compost bin in late winter to assure that the entire contents can be used in my garden in spring. Then I’ll start over and build up a supply for the following spring.

Feed Your Critters

Because I have chickens, I also have a place to get rid of most of my salad and vegetable trimmings. Chickens will eat nearly anything — they’ve been cleaning my brussels sprouts stalks and carved pumpkins lately — and turn them into the most delicious eggs you could imagine. They get most of what comes from my kitchen in the evening, after I’ve made dinner. When they see me coming, they all run to the gate to their pen to see what goodies I have: salad trimmings, carrot or apple peels, broccoli stems, tomato cores — you name it.

(And if you don’t have chickens but live in an area that allows them, think about it. They’re extremely easy to take care of and lots of fun to have and watch. And there’s nothing like a fresh egg still warm from the chicken’s butt. And no, you don’t need a noisy rooster to get eggs. Four hens should provide enough eggs for a couple or family of three. I have six hens and get about 3 dozen eggs a week.)

Penny the Tiny Dog gets any fat or skin I’ve trimmed off meat or chicken. I don’t like meat fat or chicken skin — I never have. All this stuff gets trimmed off either before or after cooking. If there’s a lot of it — for example, suppose I’ve roasted a whole chicken or made chicken soup from scratch — I put it in a plastic container in my freezer. Every day, I hack off a bunch of it, chop it up, and heat it in the microwave. I then pour it over her kibbles for her evening meal. If there’s fat trimmed off a cooked steak I have for dinner, I throw it in the fridge and use it the same way for her meals until it’s gone — then go back to the freezer source. She absolutely loves this. And because there’s so little of it — perhaps 1-2 ounces per meal — I don’t think it really counts as giving her “people food.” Most of her nutrition comes from the canned and dry food she eats. (And no, I’m not at all interested in cooking for my dog, taking her off store-bought dog food, or eliminating gluten from her diet.)

Shop Wisely

Of course, what really helps minimize food waste is to simply shop wisely. When I linked to the NPR article on Facebook, one of my friends responded:

I hate wasting food. Drives me absolutely crazy to throw it away. I never stock up on anything perishable and hit the market daily for whatever I’m making for dinner.

I’m with him. This is actually a habit I picked up years ago when I lived in New Jersey. The local market — which also had a real German butcher shop in it — was walking distance from my home. We’d walk over nearly every day after work and buy whatever we planned to eat for dinner. Later, in Arizona, I’d stop at the supermarket — it was on the way home — to pick up whatever I needed for the next day or two. I very seldom fill a shopping cart with groceries weekly (or even less frequently) as so many people do. The result: everything is recently purchased so little of it goes bad before it’s eaten.

But I take this a step farther with how I shop for produce items. I skip those plastic bags as much as possible. Unless I’m buying a bunch of small loose items — for example, brussels sprouts or new potatoes — I just throw them loose into my cart. Do you really need a plastic bag around those two apples? Or that head of broccoli or lettuce? You’re just going to take the food out of the little plastic bag when you get home, so why bother taking it?

Of course, you can also apply that to your grocery bags. Why use the plastic or paper sacks the supermarket provides when you can bring your own reusable canvas or nylon bags? My problem is my memory — I can’t seem to remember to bring them with me. But I’m working on it.

Minimize Waste

That’s just a few of the things I do to minimize waste. Of course, being a party of one with a tiny dog means I don’t generate as much waste as most households anyway. But can you imagine how much less waste we’d all send to landfills if we just made an effort to reduce it through recycling, upcycling, reusing, composting, and shopping wisely?

What can you add to my list? Use the comments form or link to share your experience.

On Last Vacations

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A blog post triggers memories.

On this date in 2011, I wrote the last of three blog posts about what would be my last vacation with my wasband. There was supposed to be six in the series — one post for each day of the trip — but I must have gotten busy or distracted or simply lost interest and never blogged about the other three days. They’re lost in time like so many things I experienced in life and now barely remember.

(That’s why I blog about my life. So I remember things. This blog has 11 years of memories stored in it. So far.)

The vacation was in September 2011, a trip around Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. I’d finished up my last cherry drying contract before my wasband arrived. I was living in my RV, as usual, which was parked across the street from the last orchard on my contract, a beautiful and quiet place overlooking Squilchuck Canyon. The plan was to take a nice, leisurely drive west and hop a ferry to the Peninsula, then circumnavigate it. I think my wasband took a whole week off from work to do it.

This wasn’t my wasband’s first trip to Washington that summer. He came twice.

As usual, he came for my birthday — which I really wish he didn’t do. Back in those days, my summers were usually spent at my computer, revising one book or another. That year, I’d been working on my Mac OS X 10.7 book, which had a very tight deadline. For the previous editions, I’d worked closely with my editors to get the book in Apple stores on the date the OS was released. That quick publication, which required intense, often 10- or 12-hour days at my desk, was partially responsible for the book’s good sales figures. It didn’t matter if my birthday or a visit from a friend or loved one happened when the deadline was looming: I had to work until I was finished.

My wasband didn’t seem to understand this and always scheduled a visit for my birthday. It caused a lot of stress. He seemed to think that my birthday was a special day that required his attendance. I considered it just another day in my life, one that often required me to work. That’s part of the life of a freelancer: you work when there’s work and you play when there isn’t work.

In the summer of 2011, I managed to finish the book before he went home and we had some time together. But still, I clearly recall being in Leavenworth with him, just walking around the shops, when a panicky call came from my editor. I can’t remember the details, but it required me to get back to my trailer, which was an hour’s drive away, and email or ftp him a file for the printer. It couldn’t wait — the book was going to press and that file was absolutely needed. So we hurried to the truck and rushed back, thus pretty much ruining what should have been a stress-free day.

Picnic Spot
Our picnic spot along the bank of a river on Day 3 of that last vacation.

My wasband returned in September for our Olympic Peninsula trip. You can read about the first three days starting here. It was a great trip, possibly one of my Top 10. It was like the old days, when we did long road trips together: Seattle to San Francisco, the Grand Circle, Death Valley and Las Vegas, Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway by motorcycle. We explored back roads, did the tourist thing, hiked, picnicked with cheese and crackers at roadside stops, photographed the scenery, and ate all kinds of foods. We stayed in great places and crappy places. Not everything was perfect, but what trip is?

Sunset over Victoria
On the second day, we took a ferry to Victoria, B.C.

When the trip was over, he headed home to Arizona without me. He had to get back to work, back to a job he hated, working for a micromanaging boss who’d fire him less than eight months later — even after I took him and his wife on a dinner trip by helicopter in an attempt to help my wasband score points.

Based on blog posts, it looks as if I headed back to Arizona with my helicopter in early October. Not sure why I stayed so long, but there must have been a good reason. I suspect I drove the RV back before that, but I don’t have any blog posts with details and my calendar doesn’t go back that far.

Yes, I made two trips to and from Washington each year — once to move my RV and again to move my helicopter. My wasband made the RV trip with me once in six years, taking a vacation through several national parks on the way home. I think he made the helicopter trip with me twice. It was a lot of traveling. The RV move was particularly stressful and lonely, especially if the weather turned bad along the way.

When I got back to Arizona, I started noticing a change in my wasband. He was cold and distant and never seemed happy. I assumed it was because of his job. His roommate had moved out of the Phoenix condo and I moved in. We fixed the place up nicely, with new furniture and my office set up in the guest room. Now we could spend more time together without his roommate criticizing half the things I did or said. But things just weren’t quite right.

It wasn’t until much later that I’d discover he’d been emailing an old friend back in New York that autumn about how I was “driving him crazy.” He never did tell me. I never knew that I was the cause of his unhappiness — even after visiting a marriage counsellor (at his request). I did know that he was making me miserable.

Later, at his mother’s 90th birthday party in September 2012, a few months after he’d ended our marriage with a phone call on my birthday — no visit that year! — as he was introducing the desperate old woman he’d replaced me with to his family and friends, he told a mutual friend that he was divorcing me because I hadn’t told him I loved him when he came to visit me on my birthday in 2011.

Draw your own conclusions. I did.

Anyway, the blog post I published on this date back in 2011 represents one of the last few times I was happy with my wasband. When the man I’d fallen in love with 28 years before returned to do something we loved to do together: explore new places and see new things.

I miss that guy.

Upcycling

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Turning trash into useful items.

Over the past year or so, I’ve really embraced the idea of upcycling to make useful things around my home.

According to Wikipedia, coined in 1994, the term upcycling means

the process of converting waste materials or useless products into new materials or products of better quality or for better environmental value.

Why Upcycle?

I like the idea of upcycling for several reasons:

  • Upcycling really appeals to my scavenger instincts. For most of my life, I’ve wanted to gather discarded items that I think have some use. Hell, back in my college days, I furnished my dorm room with perfectly good items discarded by departing students, including an area rug, lamp, and table with chairs. You know what they say: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
  • Upcycling enables me to have more for less. With my recently limited budget, I have to make do with less money. While that often means doing without, it could also mean building my own solutions.
  • Upcycling reduces waste in landfills and recycling centers. Seriously, don’t we put enough crap in landfills and the ocean? Upcycling is better than recycling because it makes something useful without it first going through a waste stream. That means no transportation costs, no sorting costs, no remanufacturing costs, etc.

First Projects

Coop Construction
A look at my chicken coop under construction.

Pallet Garden
My first pallet planter makes an excellent strawberry patch.

I blogged about my first upcycling project before I even knew the word upcycling existed. In “Chickens Again, Part II: The Coop,” I wrote about the chicken coop I made, in part, from wooden pallets I’d scavenged. Two days later, I wrote “The Pallet Planter,” which showed off one of eventually three raised garden beds I’d built with more scavenged pallets.

Why Now?

All this is pretty new for me. In my old, half-dead life in Arizona, I wasn’t motivated to do much of anything — there just didn’t seem to be a point. And even if I did want to make or build something, I didn’t have tools or a useable workspace.

But here in Washington, things are different. I feel like I have a purpose in life, a reason to get up in the morning and make things happen. I also have a lot of free time on my hands that’s not filled with the need to try (and mostly fail) to make someone else happy.

I began acquiring decent power tools about a year ago — through purchases and hand-me-downs from friends — and have most of what I need to get projects done. And I have plenty of space; with my RV garage still mostly empty and my shop laid out to give me the best access to tools and workspace, I can tackle almost any sized project.

More Projects

As I work on my home to do all the wiring and plumbing — more on that in other blog posts — I take time out to get creative with “waste” materials.

Rolling Workbench
My first rolling workbench is a masterpiece of usefulness, built with a discarded crate and scrap lumber.

My favorite project to date is turning crates into rolling workbenches. There’s a business I pass when I go into town that gets engines and other parts on pallets and in crates. They discard the pallets and crates on a corner of their property near the road, under a sign that says “Free Wood.” If I’m driving by in my truck and there’s something worth taking, I pull over and load it up. (I actually keep work gloves in the truck just for this purpose.)

Small Rolling Workbench
I built this smaller rolling worktable yesterday. The only cost was the wheels, which I bought for about $10.

I picked up two large crates a few months back and turned one of them into a stand for my garden beehive. The other just sat in the dirt for a while, occasionally used as a work surface for cutting wood. When my building shell was finished, however, I got a brainstorm. Why not lay it on one side, add plywood shelves, and put wheels on the bottom? I had all the scrap wood and even the wheels that I needed. The resulting mobile workbench is perfect for woodworking projects and storing my power tools in a handy place. I even made a smaller version just yesterday.

Woodshed
Yes, I did mark the length of each piece on the end and sort them by size. That makes it extremely quick and easy to find just the piece I need.

Because I’m such a scavenger and because I told the builder to leave behind any scrap wood, I needed a place to store the useable pieces. That meant a sort of woodshed. I built one out of pallets (again), scrap lumber, and leftover metal from my building. The result is a 4 x 10 sort of lean-to with shelves that keeps the lumber out of the rain and snow. And yes, I filled it almost immediately — it’s extremely handy to be able to quickly find exactly the piece of lumber I need for other projects. Best of all, it matches my building so it isn’t an eyesore from the road (which it faces).

I’m also working on glass projects, although I don’t have any photos yet. I start with discarded wine bottles which, because of the sheer number of local wineries, I can get in any number I need. I’ll be melting down glass rings in a kiln for use in wind chimes. And I’ve also been cutting the bottles in half and finishing off the cut edges to make drinking glasses and vases. This is time-consuming, tedious work that I’m not exactly excited about doing. But the results are impressive. I expect to make an entire set of drinking glasses for my new home out of wine bottles. I’d also like to melt small glass pieces in a kiln to make jewelry; we’ll see where I go with that.

Creativity Can Be Rewarding

I can’t tell you how proud I am of these silly little projects. Seeing waste turned into something truly useful that makes my life better or easier is extremely rewarding. Knowing that I’m the one who thought up the design and executed it makes it even better.

What have you upcycled lately? Use the comments to brag about it!

Some Things You Probably Don’t Know about Growing Apples

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Getting up close and personal with commercial orchard operations is a good way to learn about real-world agriculture.

Yesterday, I did a charter flight for one of my favorite clients, a company that owns or manages cherry, apple, and pear orchards throughout central Washington state. Throughout the growing season, they often need to visit one or more of their orchards for any number of reasons. Yesterday’s charter flight was to take one of their lead horticulturists around to meet with orchard managers or growers, so I landed in four different orchards.

Helicopter in Apple Orchard
My first landing zone yesterday was a gravel staging area on the north side of an irrigation pond.

I took Penny the Tiny Dog with me yesterday, which I don’t often do. She curled up on a dog bed in the back seat during each leg of our flight and then kept me company while I waited for my passenger to return to the helicopter landing zone from his business elsewhere on the orchard. She also gave me an excuse to go walking while I waited. Together, we walked on the dirt roads around the orchard blocks.

This isn’t something new to me; I’ve been doing this since my first flights for this client two years ago. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about how various fruit is grown, both by observation and by asking questions when possible during flights. I think some of the things I’ve learned are interesting and, after getting some photos to illustrate what I’ve learned, I thought I’d share them here.

Apple Orchards Need Cooling

Food for thought: Apples bought in the spring or summer are not “fresh”

No matter where apples are grown in the U.S., none of them are picked before August. August through October is apple season. Apples grown in the U.S. and bought any other time of the year have been stored since apple season. There are huge concrete buildings all over apple country called CA (controlled atmospheric) storage in which apples are stored until they’re shipped to stores. There’s nothing wrong with these apples — CA storage is used because it works — but don’t think that the apple you buy in May has been picked off the tree earlier that month. Unless it’s grown south of the equator, it hasn’t.

Apples are among the last fruit to be harvested. Long after the cherries and apricots have been picked, the apples continue to grow and ripen. Some early varieties are ready for harvest in August, but most are harvested in September.

Of course, that means that apples are on trees in the hottest part of the summer. And in this part of Washington — the dry side of the mountains — they’re pretty much baking in the hot sun throughout July and August.

Extreme heat isn’t good for apples. To combat the heat, orchards use evaporative cooling — they have sprinkler heads mounted high above the tree tops and turn them on periodically on hot days. This significantly cools the orchard air.

Where do they get the water for this? Orchardists pull water from sources according to their water right limitations and use it for irrigation. Excess water is stored in ponds on the orchards and used for cooling, as well as for warming during frost season.

I should mention that grower with very deep pockets will sometimes erect shade structures over entire orchards to keep apples out of the hot sun. They sometimes also use crop-dusters to spray chemicals on apples to protect them from sunburn. This isn’t necessary for all apple varieties, however.

Reflected Light Helps Evenly Color Apples

All fruit shipped to market has to meet certain standards. Among these standards is color — red apples need to have a certain percentage of their surface colored red to be salable.

Apples get their red color by exposure to the sun. In a perfect world, apple trees would be widely spaced and pruned so that every apple on the tree got full exposure to the sun. But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world where farmers need to maximize profit on their land to survive. As a result, they plant the trees as close together as they can and prune only as much as necessary to get a good crop.

Gala Apples on the Tree
Typical bunch of gala apples growing on a tree in the Ice Harbor area of Washington.

Mylar Sheets between Apple Trees
Mylar is commonly used on the ground to reflect sunlight back up to the bottoms of apples.

To maximize the amount of sunlight on each apple, growers occasionally use reflective material such as mylar or white sheeting. The growers refer to this as Extenday, which is actually the trademark of a company that makes this material. They roll these sheets out under the trees between every row or every other row, anchoring them with piles of soil. This is done with a tractor and specialized attachment, which I got to see for the first time yesterday. The sheets are removed and discarded before harvest.

Spreading Extenday
Yesterday, I got to see them spreading mylar sheets in an orchard using a special tractor attachment.

It’s interesting to note that Rainier cherries also require a certain percentage of red color. Reflective sheets are also used to help get that color during growth. In fact, that’s usually how I know I’m flying over Rainier cherries when I dry them — because they have more delicate skins, I need to fly higher to prevent bruising.

Some Apples Require Cross-Pollination with Other Varieties

Not all apple varieties can pollinate themselves. Delicious apples, for example, require cross-pollination to bear fruit.

Orchardists commonly use different varieties of crabapples for cross-pollination. These trees are planted within the Delicious apple orchards — perhaps every fifth tree every other row — so that during pollination season bees can spread their pollen around.

Of course, after pollination season, crabapples grow on these trees just as Delicious apples grow on the trees around them. But because there’s no ready market for crabapples, they’re left behind at harvest time to basically rot on and around the trees. This is unfortunate because although they don’t taste very good, they can be used to make other products, including hard cider. Unfortunately, because they’re so tiny and yield such a low financial return, it’s usually not profitable to pick them.

Crabapples
Crabapples growing in a Delicious apple orchard.

Again, some varieties of cherries have the same cross-pollination requirements. Bing, for example, require cross-pollination. Some orchards will plant a less desirable cherry throughout the orchard and leave those cherries behind at harvest time; others will plant another desirable cherry, such as Rainiers or Lapins, and pick them separately.

Bees Can Be a Nuisance to Organic Apple Growers

As a beekeeper, I’m always interested in placing my bees in a location where they get an ample food supply. Earlier this year, when I was touring cherry orchards with a new cherry drying client, I noticed a bunch of beehives in a field. I asked him about it and was very surprised to learn that organic apple growers don’t like bees to be left behind past pollination contracts.

During pollination season, all apple growers rent beehives to ensure pollination of their trees. Non-organic growers don’t care how many successful flower pollinations there are. When the bees are gone and the fruit starts to grow, they spray a chemical that forces a good portion of the fruit to drop off the trees. This ensures that the fruit left behind gets more of the tree’s resources and grows well.

Organic farmers, however, can’t spray that chemical. As a result, they try to limit the number of apples on the trees by limiting the amount of time the bees are present. When a beekeeper removes bees from an orchard but keeps them in the area — perhaps a nearby field — the bees continue to pollinate the trees. As a result, there are too many apples on the organic trees and they need to be culled manually at a great expense to the grower.

So organic growers simply don’t want the bees around any longer than necessary.

Grass and Weeds in Orchards Help Bees Survive

Most orchards have strips of grass and weeds between rows of trees. This is impossible to prevent given that the area is irrigated, fertilized, and cleared of pests. The trees aren’t the only things to benefit from this. The grass and weeds can grow quite luxuriant.

This is good for bees, especially when those weeds produce flowers such as dandelions. In late summer, long after the fruit trees have been pollinated and fruit has begun to grow, other food sources such as wildflowers become scarce. Weeds in orchards sustain the bees.

Flower or Mushroom?
I still don’t know if this weird thing was a flower or a mushroom.

With colony collapse disorder (CCD) killing off bee colonies worldwide, growers are encouraged to leave the grass and weeds in orchards as long as possible to help the bees find a food source. Unfortunately, most orchards are mowed before the pickers come in to make it safer and easier for them to move and position ladders and get around the orchard.

Still, yesterday, I was reminded of this as I wandered into the tall, thick grass and heard bees flying all around.

More to Know

If you’ve gotten this far, I hope you’ve learned at least one thing about commercial fruit growing: that there’s a lot more to it than simply planting and watering trees and picking fruit at the end of the season.

When we go to the supermarket — or even to the farmer’s market — to buy fruits and vegetables, we have no idea what the growers did to make that produce grow and get it to market. The next time you’re at a farmer’s market chatting with a real farmer, take some time to learn more about the food you’re buying. If you’re like me, you’ll find it fascinating and get a lot more respect for them and their efforts.