Foxes and a Flood

Yesterday...two young foxes around sunrise just over in the tractor yard.  They noted my presence on the front porch with my cereal and coffee, appeared to shrug and then went back about their business.  One trotted across the road to my side and then continued casually around the trucks down toward the west pasture.  Not a worry.  I am glad that I do not worry foxes much.  

Two weeks ago I found another young fox, stretched out dead in front of the tractor shed.  I imagine it was part of the same skulk as the pair yesterday and perhaps was struck by a car while goofing around in the carefree manner of its siblings.  It was beautiful and--except for being dead--appeared healthy.  It was well fed.  Its tail was full and lush.  I would be so lucky as to have such a tail!   I stood puzzling down at it, wondering how something so marvelous could just stop being.  After a bit I picked it up and took it out behind the wood barn where I laid it in the tall grass hoping that some other creature or creatures might make good use of it.  A few days later it was gone.    

The foxes I saw were out wringing a little sunshine from an otherwise soggy week.  Our valley saw almost seven inches of rain in fewer days than that, two of those inches in 24 hours.  It was a sight to see.  We lost power for two days.  Back in town some of the lower streets along the South Umpqua became fully submerged.  The road closed for a while.  Out at our place, water flowed freely up over the carport.  New streams formed in all of the pastures...not just standing water, but actively flowing sheets of water dozens of feet across.  The creek rose more than eight feet and was clearly throwing a rager.  I'd never experienced it like that.  The creek roared like a train.  From beneath the waves I could hear large rocks tumbling at a brisk clip along the hard granite creek bed.  Their rumble warned me away from standing too close to the mad flow.  Every once in a while a log careens down and crashes with a loud thud-crack into some of the Red Alders sticking up from what used to be the north bank.  The force of it is awe-inspiring.

When Nature behaves in an utterly unconstrained fashion as was the case this week, it's a good time to be out there watching.  You see the actual range and scope of things, things that are mostly missed or more likely actively avoided by us most of the time.   The watching of it gives lie to the narrow band of normal that we mostly understand to be reality.  Things acquire context.  Plus it's just fun.  I put on my best raincoat and my rubber boots and head out in a vigorous half sleet and half rain to see what I can of it all.  After taking in the spectacle of our main creek from the bridge, I also trek down to the swimming hole which had developed a terrifying standing wave about five feet tall.  To get a closer look, I pick my way down the bank taking extra care not to lose my footing.  A fall into the water would be game over for sure.  Two massive holes with corresponding eddies had formed around the standing wave.  The whole thing--an angry brown boil--moved along at perhaps 15 mph toward the river and then the sea.  I would guess that the creek itself was probably pushing about 1500 cfs down it's narrow course, which is about the same as a summer flow on the McKenzie.  After gawking for a bit, I retreat from the swimming hole and loop back up the hill to the south to check out the little spring fed stream which feeds our domestic water supply.  Normally about a foot wide, it was now something I might have tried in my kayak at one point but not without trepidation.  Our water catchment was utterly buried under a couple feet of fast moving, muddy water.  It will require attention once the flows subside enough for me to have a look.

I walk down off the hill, across the bridge, and back to the north side of the creek and then over the road to the small pond on the north slope.  The pond has also shucked off its constraints and is fully flowing over the road.  A sheet of water twenty feet wide is coursing over the bank and down into the field below where it seems to become confused about how to make its way across to the creek three hundred yards to the south.  It spills out in an unruly fan that threatens to make a lake of the entire bottom.

Twenty four hours later, the waters have receded six feet or so.  The pond it using its normal overflow channel.  I have not ventured up to the spring yet because that will mean work I'd rather put off until next weekend.

2025 Orchard Update

This year we start our fourth growing orcharding season at the farm.  Our big push this trip around the sun will hopefully see us get another 75 trees into the ground in a new orchard on the south side of the creek.  We'll also graft another 250 trees and establish a "stooling bed" for propagating rootstock on our own going forward.   

The first of our apple trees went into the ground in early 2021, about 80 in all.  We chose a spread of mostly old-school cider apples on several different types of dwarfing rootstock.  Ambitiously, we also grafted more than a thousand trees for planting in subsequent years.  A year later in 2022, we started a second orchard down near the creek and populated it with 60 trees or so, this time on semi-dwarfing rootstock.  In 2023 we followed up with another 50 trees in the Creekside Orchard--also on semi-dwarfing rootstock--and put in a third orchard of about 40 trees down on the west of the farm, mostly crab apples which were the mainstay of the American cider industry prior to prohibition.

As with many adventures, these first efforts were all about trial and error.  In order to take the sting out of some of the learning, we tried to find locals with strong apple growing knowledge.  But there are no longer any commercial growers or even sizeable amateur operations in our valley.  The only nearby old-timer we found had recently retired from the Ag Extension Service.  I reached out to him, but he was happy looking toward retirement and offered to refer me to a younger colleague, one without much actual growing experience hereabouts.  So, we mostly set forth with some experience with apples in general, an enviable collection of books about apples, but no strong sources of local knowledge on the subject.

We laugh now--not without smarting a little--at the profusion of rookie errors we committed...wholly unforced errors in the service of a few hundred trees and a whole lot more education.  A lot of our early goofs were simply generic bad practice.  There were a lot of evenings working out in the orchard when we stopped to wave at folks going by on the road  next to us and were pretty sure they were smiling back at us and shaking their heads about whatever it was that the city people were up to out there with those apple trees.

Looking at things more kindly, a number of our missteps were pretty specific to this valley and would have been hard to preempt.  Most of all we took a beating with our early grafting by losing control of the aftercare.  Our grafts themselves took.  But as we struggled to figure out effective fencing and weed control, the young trees fell under attack from deer, cattle, wild turkeys, and then a profusion of bindweed that I'm pretty sure moved faster than either the deer or the cattle.  We anticipate bear trouble.  All in all, after three iterations of fencing and some trench warfare with the weed situation, we ended up with about 75 brilliantly healthy grafts from that first big push, a sorrowful success rate of about 7%!  The wildlife out here (which do NOT feature in our city orchard) make it a pretty rough neighborhood for succulent young trees, especially in the middle of the dry season when everything else is brown and scratchy.  Western Oregon's seemingly bi-polar relationship with water (too much six months of the year, none for the next six months) add undeniable slope to the learning curve.

We have learnt some important things about growing apples here on this ground.  For example, we now know to scope out the varied soils in the bottom land to find the good stuff.  Topographically, it all looks the same.  But, it's not.  The ancient riverbed which is the valley features alternating flows of clay loam and hard cobble.  There are generally outstanding soils at the mouths of the sub-canyons running north-south.  Some sub-irrigation is available from the many small springs coming in from the east.  Blissfully unaware of most of this when we started, we laid out our initial orchards mostly in geometrical shapes.  Easier to fence, plough, etc...or so we thought.  A more observant and adaptable grower would likely have followed the soil types and planted in patterns which trace along the old geology of the valley.  We were also delighted this past year to identify G890 as a clearly superior rootstock for our farm.  It does well with our acid soils and seems to be good at finding water even during the protracted dry season between July and October.  Landing on G890--which we are using in all of our grafting this year--was something that only became possible after we had the opportunity to trial about a half dozen different rootstocks and compare the results over a couple of seasons.  Similarly, we're also zeroing in on scion varietals which seem to really want to be here.  Some--like a few of the Spanish cider apples we were so excited to try out--seem prone to difficulty.  Unsurprisingly, our strongest performers (for now at least) appear to come from cuttings we took from old existing trees on the farm that have thrived for decades.  These "natives" now share company with another fifty or so heirloom varietals we've brought in.  We continue to watch how things unfold.

This fall--if the stars align--we will also likely set about prepping about 10 acres of ground for what we intend as our main orchard on the west end of the farm where we have an established water right.  This will involve significant effort:  ripping, ploughing, disking, amending the soil, and probably digging some swales to help eliminate standing water.  We'll also have to install about a half mile of 8 foot game fence to keep the orchard out of reach of deer, elk, and all the rest.  In the spring of 2026--again, as long as the stars align--we'll be pleased to get irrigation setup and then plant out the 250 or so trees we're grafting this year.  Eventually this new "main" orchard will hold about a thousand trees if we're lucky.

It's gratifying to join this ancient procession of trial and error.  Every apple enjoyed by a person today came from a tree that only exists because some person cared to graft it, understand where and how that tree would be happy growing, and then took care of it for several years without reward as it grew to bearing age.  Necessarily--because apples are only reliably reproduced via grafting--the patient process of growing an apple also has to be reproduced again and again across generations in order to preserve the varietals we know today.  You can't plant a Granny Smith or a Braeburn or a Honey Crisp seed.  They must be grafted.  Because of that longitudinal gauntlet, each resulting apple tree likely represents an untold number of other trees which for one reason or another didn't make it.  Moreover, beyond the tree itself, the perfect apples most of us see in the supermarket represent only the top 20% or so of what the source tree or orchard produced.  In fact, the large majority of apples grown never make it to market.  Instead they wind up discarded, cast off owing to some bump or blemish or bruise that might wrinkle the noses of shoppers.  

  

Farm Stay 2025!  

Interested in experiencing what life on a farm is all about?

This year we're excited to extend an invitation to a few students to come and share the experience of life on a budding farm.  This is a first-time adventure for us!  We're eager both to share our place and to learn how we might make it more welcoming as a venue for aspiring farmers in the future.

Our farm (Twelve Mile Ranch) is a wonderful place.  We landed here in 2020 after nearly two decades of searching.  Twelve Mile Ranch is about 300 acres situated in the foothills of the Cascades twelve miles east of Myrtle Creek, OR and runs along about a mile of South Myrtle Creek.  The farm is still very much a work in progress, but right now our main focus is on getting heirloom apple orchards going.  We hope to make cider one day.

This season we'd like to welcome 1-4 people to come and stay at the farm for 1-3 months as individual schedules allow between April and October 2025.  

Here's what we're looking for:

• Active interest in agriculture and an introduction to what life is like on a farm.
• Appreciation for a long-view approach to land stewardship: good for the land, creatures who live there, and for people.
• Ability and interest in helping out a (very) little with some regular chores like watering trees, keeping the yard under control, and tending a vegetable garden that helps feed the farm.
• Desire to connect with quiet places, natural processes, and beginning adventures in self-sufficiency.
• Willingness at the end of your stay to offer thoughtful written reflection and feedback on what your experience meant to you, how we might best continue to welcome others to the farm in the future, and what especially promising futures you might envision for a place like ours.
• A commitment to respectful, drama-free, and responsible co-living.

Here's what what we're offering:

• A place to stay consisting of one of the two extra bedrooms in our very modest farmhouse.
• Shared kitchen access and a pantry stocked with basic staples, like rice, bean, pasta, etc.
• Internet access.
• Informal knowledge sharing around "real farm stuff" like rural water systems, irrigation, safely operating machinery, orcharding, resident plants and animals, using tools to make and fix things, heating with wood, fire safety, etc.
• A world class swimming hole!
• A nice grand piano to play if your inclined.

To explore further, please contact us directly and include a short note sharing why you're interested, when, for how long, etc.  We're happy to answer questions!