[mitchmaine]

hey josh, penny and i attacked the ice cakes yesterday and got the horses into one sugarbush and spent the day tracking it up with the scoot. and today we hung 360 buckets out there. running fairly well. tomorrow we’ll finish the other side with another 100 or so over there. anyway, were in the game. thanks, mitch

[mitchmaine]

i got an idea the three of us would be on the “group w” bench

[mitchmaine]

hey erika, i hear what you are saying. penny reminds me often that i may be the worlds most cinical person. i just wonder if maybe the genie is already out of the bottle.
we pass personal information back and forth with each other all the time on the internet. and its out there for all the world to see. each time i make a purchase at some store i’m being asked my phone number. that kind of thing. facebook. we tried that for a while and it was fun but i couldn’t understand what it did or how or why to use it so we gave up. even here on dap, we trade ideas and information without thinking to hard about how it might be used with or without our permission. i tried to buy something a while back on credit and wes told i have no credit score. and that that was worse than a poor rating. and the fellow was telling me i should go out and buy something on credit to get a score. i tried to point out the irony of his remark but he lost it. over his head. just a few thoughts on “being out there”

[mitchmaine]

Sweet. I can smell it from here. Not so lucky here, ed. Last week brought us 5-6” rain in two storms. Knocked down our three feet of snow, that was a good thing. But put it all in our brook separating the fields from our woodlot which wasn’t so good. Dropped two foot ice cakes on our bridge which really sucked, but I got across on them with a drill and spiles and tapped about half of it which ain’t so bad. Sap running pretty good but no way to catch it. Spent the day chopping up the ice cakes on the bridge. Got the horses in that far. So maybe tomorrow we can get some buckets in there. The neighbors with “roadside” taps aren’t doing that much. They Haven’t collected enough yet to fire up, so maybe we aren’t that far behind. Cross your fingers. We’re still trying.

[mitchmaine]

any friend of john is a friend of ours.
hi liz. milk this website for all the advice you want. its free and plentiful. regardless of what kinda critter you hook your load to.

regards, mitch

[mitchmaine]

erik,
it’s four towns in a block downeast on the coast in hancock county. sedgewick voted unanimously, brooksville didn’t get it into the town report in time, but blue hill and penobscot may actually vote today.
i don’t represent them in anyway except i talk with paul birdsall frequently about the matter and the townspeople are pretty serious about what they are trying to say. time will tell how it plays out. as i said before, the ag commissioner here in maine seems sympathetic to the natives but he’s caught right in the middle and will probably have to go with the power folk.

[mitchmaine]

hi lanny, that thread about the snowball hammers was more bout the hammers than the “technique”. pick the hoof up and with any hammer, strike the horseshoe (not the snow) on the turn halfway between the toe and heel about the second nail head. one good crack and the snowball will (should) pop out slick as a whistle. good luck, mitch

[mitchmaine]

Jim, having trouble moving this document around. Four pages. Still trying.
However, I did get a chance to meet our new commissioner of agr. At the governors tree tapping day. Nice man and a farmer. Not enthusiastic about the results of the town meeting votes. He said if they sent people over to speak from the state, that the vote would have been worse. Guess he didn’t know that the vote was unanimous. Anyway, he was sympathetic and made a few good points.
One, was that some of the people he has to talk with on most hot button issues are from out of state and debate any farm issue. And move on to another state to do the same about another issue. Most are not farmers but people who need public attention.and that makes the job difficult.
And also that the state in his words was bending backwards for the small farmer, and if perceived too lenient by the feds, usda can pull the states right to inspect and they will come in and do it. Doesn’t sound like personal freedoms to me, but puts a lid on states rights. In guess the civil war did that all on its own. Anyway, there are still bills in the house addressing the same issues and my guess is that the voters in town meetings down east aren’t going away. Attorneys general office is talking with those towns about legality concerns. That’s the news from mooslookmaguntic.

[mitchmaine]

I read a story about digging up this body at jamestown plantation. They started studing the guy and took a tooth and ground it up and discovered he came from wales in England. The soil where he came from was the same mineral makeup of his tooth. They went on to say if you lived on the same land your food grew on and ate animals that ate grass from the same place, and you came from parents who did the same from the same place, you didn’t have to go back too many generations before you became the same as the topsoil you came from.

You are what you eat.

And when you die, if they just laid you in the earth and let you decompose the proper way, you’d turn back into the very soil you came from.

…..dust to dust.

My dad used to rub dirt together between his thumb and forefinger and put it up to his tongue. Even after he’d just harrowd in two loads of cow dung. Wanted to know if it was sweet enough. Don’t remember him ever getting e coli. My grandmother did the same thing with her biscuits up in the house, and she never got e coli either.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

marine hardware? galvanized dock rigging supplies? bath industrial sales, bath maine, handles some pretty rugged chain, dead eyes, swivels and ring bolts and so on. sometimes salvage from the iron works. might be worth a look.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

hi chickade,
welcome to the group. the city of portland (maine). not one of the worlds big cities, but a city none the less, just passed ordinance allowing residents to keep six hens. it was a fight, but the small farmers took the day. glad to have your imput. mitch
a couch potato is still a vegetable, right?

[mitchmaine]

[ATTACH]1680.jpg” />

[ATTACH]1681.jpg” />

[ATTACH]1682.jpg” />

Found those hammers. The old one is on the right in the top photo alongside the new one and a hammer for scale. The new one with the double wire handle was made about twenty years ago by a local blacksmith. Gerry galuza from woolwich. He’s a big man with a big voice, and most things he makes are oversized. Normal size for him. He’s a pretty interesting man and very talented, and everything he makes is solid. But these hammers were just neat. delicate for him. I rubbed some sawdust into it to show its eyes and nostrils. supposed to be some kinda bird.

[mitchmaine]

I’ll try and see if I can find them. Not much to look at really. Just a heavy hoof pick.
Carl, I wonder if it might be regional. You guys have your cold dry snow up there and we have wet heavy snow a lot. Just a thought. The 90 year old man who gave me the old one, mentioned rolled glazed hard packed town roads for teaming, and we don’t have them anymore. But our snow would ball up and freeze tight in their shoes, and when they came in on the plank floor of the barn, they’d go down with crash. I loved that hammer.
Those old men would see me coming. Mid-twenties with long hair and you’d think you had leprosy. When they found out you had hosses, they’d warm up a little, and after you told them about your first runaway, you was in the kitchen with coffee listening to tales and stories and how-to’s for as long as you wanted and before you left you would be out in the barn piled high to the chin with harness and eveners and irons as much as you could lug. Best tastin’ coffee I ever drunk.

Mitch

The hay wagon was beginning to show about a foot out of the snow, but yesterday covered her back up.

[mitchmaine]

hey andy,
all smoke and mirrors. it’s not about the quality of food and vitamins as much as it is about control and access to the same gmo foods and then the foods that have the conveinient patents applied, until its all food and feed, and its you and me and geoff and the canadian farmer on the outside and monsanto holding the patents and the price, decision, ownership, and control.
imagine a quota on how much food you can grow this summer. hard to imagine? canada tells its maple producers how much maple syrup each producer can make in a season. trying to keep a lid on surplus and prices. supply and demand. i can see it happening.

[mitchmaine]

Failure is not an option. Can’t remember if that was a football coach or a nasa scientist coined that phrase, but we should have run him outta town for that.
Two generations of kids have grown up with that motto, trouble is when failure isn’t an option neither is success. Risk is out, too and all you get is mediocrity.
Remember the films of those old guys jumping off barns with wings strapped to themselves, falling in a heap at the bottom. They didn’t know failure wasn’t an option. And it was on their mountain of debris of failed flight attempts that the wrigtht brothers jumped off that day they taught us all to fly.
Leave it all to dep and usda. Trained officials looking out for our wellbeing, who grew up fearing to fail, putting their names in the upper left hand corner, never raising their hands and rubberstamping everything, so they could get a check, go home and shop online.
Meanwhile some kid wants to know how to make butter. His parents would show him but they’d break the law.
We should have a special award for failures. Whether they lead to success or not. And curiosity, too. The nosey, hyper crazy kids in my classroom would all pass with flying colors.

[Author]

Posts