Rants from the Hollow

Big Max pumpkin, 62 pounds.

Saturday July 24, several waves of severe storm crossed Lake Chautauqua.  At 5pm, a tornado warning was announced. The view from this dock in Jamestown, at the southern end of the lake, was impressive. A huge wall cloud, miles across, blew across the sky to the north.

The picture of the wall cloud below is a panorama, stitched together from 9 frames that I took handheld with my Canon G9. If you click on it, you’ll get a much larger image (hint–click on that image to see it full size–you’ll need to scroll back and forth).  My guess is that the nasty gray knot at the far right is whatever is left of the F2 tornado that crossed the north end of the lake, touching down 10 minutes earlier, 15 miles beyond the sail boat in the far left.  Somewhere in this wall cloud is the remnant of that twister.

From our vantage point on the dock, we had a perfect view of the squall line, watching the wind, rain, and white caps approach from 5 miles away. It hit hard, with strong winds and heavy rain.

A local television station has some impressive video footage of the actual tornado and map from the National Weather Service.

Here’s a statement from the National Weather Service with more details.

Edited video by Jim Grimaldi on YouTube showing the tornado and some of the damage.

If you can’t view my video, here’s a version in Shockwave.

Driving down Whites Ferry Road on the Maryland side of the ferry, it was clear to us that this was an exceptional storm, which had made a huge amount of damage. We carefully picked our way from side to side of the street to avoid fallen limbs and trees. One large branch fell down in front of us.

Our original plan was to head west towards 15 to look for a place to eat in Frederick, but all the roads were blocked by fallen trees.

We tried 2 different roads towards the west, but couldn’t get through.  We saw a transformer explode.  Finally, we reached a point where Whites Ferry road was blocked, too, so we decided to cut our losses and head back across the ferry.

The Potomac was calm again, but covered with floating leaves and branches. We chatted with some of the other people on the ferry and learned that River Road was partially blocked, but probably still open.

I was concerned that we’d be stuck on the other side of the river. Although there were some trees down, which slowed traffic, the road was open. The traffic light at route 15 was out, but we waited it out, and finally ended up in Leesburg for a late lunch, about an hour and a half after the storm came through.

[an alternative version of the River Road video in Shockwave.]

Kirk had never been to White’s Ferry, so last Sunday, I thought he’d enjoy the short trip across the Potomac on the Jubal Early. I knew that some storms were blowing through, and I’d been watching their progress on my iPhone, I’d lived through a squall and tornado warnings the day before at Chautauqua Lake, but I was still surprised by the ferocity of this thing.

It was very calm when we pulled onto the Jubal Early ferry. The Potomac was almost mirror calm.

The imminent arrival of a storm was clear to anyone looking up and seeing the gust front.  Within a minute or two, all hell had broken loose. The wind hit hard and fast.  Overhead, everything was churning, with sycamore trees writhing in the gale and countless bits of leaf, stick, and stuff not just blowing through the air, but churning in it.  The wind seemed to be blowing every which way at once.

The ferry, which is tied to both banks by heavy steel cables, stayed fairly stable, but the cars were buffeted by the wind. The waves in the Potomac were breaking over the side of the ferry.  A stack of red canoes that had been neatly piled along the bank had been blown all over the place (probably hitting some of the cars waiting to cross from Maryland to Virginia.

Although it continued to rain and blow for awhile, the heaviest winds were gone by the time Kirk drove us off the ferry on the Maryland side.  As you can tell from the video, we were mightily impressed by both the suddenness and the violence of the thing. It would turn out that the storm damage was much worse than we expected.  Sitting in the car in the middle of the river, we had ringside seats when the squall blew through, but it still didn’t prepare us for what we would encounter next.

(If the above video didn’t work, or if it shut off before we completed the crossing, a Shockwave version is available here.)

I didn’t quite make my goal of a May tomato, but we’ve been in pretty good shape for the last 6 weeks, and there are still some varieties that haven’t contributed to the salad bowl. The photo above shows Early Girl, Glacier, Dr Carolyn, Grape and the big one on the right is my first Brandywine.

I started my seeds indoors during the first week of March. I planted half my seedlings, including a purchased Big Girl, about April 10, and then planted the rest a couple of weeks later. There continues to be a significant size difference between the ones that were transplanted so early, and the ones planted later.  As it turned out, the last frost date was very early this year, and I could have planted them earlier. The unseasonably hot weather over the last 6 weeks slowed down product, resulting in some fruit drop long before some plants were close to having ripe tomatoes.

Early Girl: To get fruit as soon as possible, Elizabeth brought me a very solid and healthy seedling from Merrifield Garden Center.  It has been a solid producer of tasty fruit since early June. I’m guessing that the seedling was planted in February, because it was significantly bigger than my seedlings.

Dr. Carolyn: This lemony-tasting (and looking) cherry tomato has consistently provided handfuls of tasty tomatoes since mid June.

Grape: I bought this one from a local nursery as a replacement for my only fatality. Pickings were slim, and this plant was much too leggy when I bought it. It has provided a small amount of fruit, but looks to be almost tapped out at this point.

Glacier: This is the earliest-fruiting of the heritage tomatoes that I started from seed. It was the 2nd plant to provide ripe fruit, but the small and solid fruit are not as tasty as the Early Girls.  The first fruit were quite watery, although taste and texture has improved. Lately, it has suffered from a lot of split fruit.  It doesn’t seem really comfortable with the hot weather.

Brandywine: Reputedly one of the tastiest varieties, this heritage tomato hasn’t impressed me, yet. The first seedling I planted is the only plant in the garden to suffer from blossom end rot.  I mulched all the early fruit from this one because they were obviously not turning out well. The plant is doing better, but I had to throw away another very large fruit today.  The 2nd plant, which has a lot more sunlight, is ahead in fruit production, with no sign of end rot.  I think Sheryl harvested 1-2 during the second week of July, but I didn’t get one until July 18. It was tasty, but not noteworthy.

Mortgage Lifter VFN: I didn’t get one of these planted in the first batch.  A huge tomato is almost ripe, but it is so close to the ground that I’m concerned about rodents.  Looks like there is more to come.

Long Keeper: I planted two of these with the idea that we’d be able to store some of them in the Fall.   There are a few fruit, and I expect them to ripen over the next couple of weeks.

Old German: Hello?  What are you waiting for?

Instead of watching the fireworks in Millersburg, Elizabeth and I spent last Saturday watching 118 future Jeff Gordon’s compete on the oval dirt track at Killbuck’s Hilltop Speedway.

Including the Mini Wedges, a go-cart sized vehicle driven by 14 and unders, the 3 hours of racing included 6 different classes, first running in heats of 6 cars or less, and culminating in lengthier main races with almost 2 dozen participants.

Each class has its own personality. The Super Late Models are my favorite. Custom built brutes with 800 HP V8s, they smoothly drift around the turns and then roar down the straights (although we are several miles away from Hilltop as the crow flies, you can easily hear the Supers when we’re at the Hollow).

Like the name says, the Street Stocks are modified versions of production cars.

The Tri-State Modified has open front wheels, which makes them more likely to be taken out by minor bumps that wouldn’t slow down the other classes. Although they are based on production models, you couldn’t prove it by me.

You can gain some insight into this fiercely competitive class by taking a quick visit to the rule book. The first sentence of Rule A:1) reads “There will be no Fighting or going to anyone else’s Pit Area to cause trouble. There will be no causing trouble, arguing Calls, Rules E.T.C. with any of The Track Officials, or any of The T.S.M.A. Officials.”

The Mini Stocks were the biggest contrast to the honking big super lates. With narrow stock tires and relatively small engines, they sound like hornets. Buzzing unsteadily around the corners, they don’t make the dusty powerslides that the bigger classes do.

An article on dirt track racing can be found on Wikipedia.

The valley in front of Heiser Hollow has always been farmed, but in our time, the family across the valley has always planted corn or soybeans. Whatever the relative economic merits of the different crops, from an aesthetic point of view, a scraggly looking field of hairy little soy plants can’t compare with a golden field of ripe golden wheat.

The field, which hasn’t been planted with wheat since the 60s, was harvested over a period of several days, mostly with a late model Deere combine. It trundled up and down the field, raising huge clouds of dust, leaving behind neat rows of golden straw, more than filling up a semi-trailer.

The Moore family has farmed this valley for generations, and they’ve still got some of their original farming equipment. Sporting a new coat of orange paint and Allis-Chalmers decals, this pre-war AC tractor took a nostalgia tour across the wheat field, pulling an equally old, and equally authentic AC combine.

Summer, which came unusually early this year, represents a shifting of gears in the vegetable garden. The delicate tastes of spring greens are replaced by the more robust impact of hot weather reds and yellows. Both through more carefully planning and the accidents of weather, this year’s garden managed to simultaneously provide lettuce and tomatoes.  I composted the last of the lettuce and spinach this week.

Although my wall of peas continued to flourish, June saw a significant reduction in sweetness and flavor. I pulled them down before they’d completely finished flowering, and planted Waltham Butternut and Green Striped Cushaw winter squash in their place.  Those have sprouted, and I’ll put up a couple trellis for them tomorrow.

I’ve been surprised by how some plants have flourished, while others have struggled. Before summer had even started, it had become clear that I’d ended up with a tomato thicket.  On the left of Kirk, you see the tomatoes I planted in early April, 2 weeks earlier than normal. The set of tomatoes on the right side of the photo were also started from seed in early March, but I planted them 2 weeks later.

The Early Girl, which Elizabeth bought for me at Merrifield, has done phenomenally well, with the first tomato arriving during the 2nd week of June. At this point, its providing a couple tasty fruit every day. Glacier has started fruiting, but I don’t think they have much taste. Both Dr Carolyn’s have started providing a small but steady supply of delicate yellow cherries with an almost lemony overtone.  The Brandywine on the left should have had ripe fruit by now, but they all suffer from some sort of end rot. The other Brandywine looks to be in good shape, but its 2 weeks later, so its hard to tell. Radiator Charley is still a week or two from ripeness, and the two Old Germans have pretty flowers, but I’m not sure if they’ve even set fruit, yet.   Its been so hot lately that all of them stopped setting fruit, which doesn’t usually happen until a couple months later in the season.

I’ve got 2 kinds of lima one of which is well over the top of the trellis, with the more delicate Willow Leaf tentatively topping it a couple days ago.  A hybrid bush lima and a bush green bean are both doing well now, after withstanding a couple weeks of grazing.  The Cornfield green beans have turned into a leguminous green wall, but unlike the Christmas limas, show no signs of flowering.

I’m mostly finished with my first attempt at potatoes, an exercise that was mostly successful.   Digging up taters is like finding Easter eggs, a form of mystery lacking with most other vegetables.  I plan on starting a fall crop next month, but the left over seed potatoes, moldering in a cool dark corner of the basement, are looking tired.  Some of the potato tubers I dug this week were trying to start new plants, so I just stuck them back into the ground, and maybe they’ll do better than the well-sprouted seed potatoes I’ve been saving downstairs for the second planting.

I’ve had mostly positive experiences so far with the squash family.  We’ve picked about 6 pounds of yellow crookneck, a favorite courgette of ours that we never found in Europe.  The vine borers have been out in force, though, and I’ve had to pull out several squash plants, and perform surgery on some of my pumpkins.  Pumpkin patch #1, taking over the former mulch pile in a clearing where a pine tree was downed, is mostly thriving, in spite of the occasional groundhog attack and some insects.  Big max has set several of its distinctively pale and ugly fruit, and one of the others, I’m not sure if it’s Jack O’Lantern or the pie pumpkin, has multiple dark green orbs that are approaching the size of bowling balls.  Patch #2, a pair of Big Maxes, is struggling, and has only set one pathetic little pumpkin. I try to remain organic, but a neighbor gave me a bottle of some sort of insecticide powder that I’ve liberally sprayed all over the base of the pumpkins.

This week I planted some more corn, fall cabbage, and, because you can never have too much zucchini, another yellow crookneck. I’m not confident that the 3 remaining plants, 1 of which has had borer removal surgery, will make it through the summer. Making up for 10 years lost time in my garden, I’ve sifted a dozen bushels of composted manure into the garden.

Apparently to no purpose, I had spread about $25 worth of imported Swedish pigs blood around my garden in the form of pellets. To be fair to the manufacturer, while they did claim to repel mice and moose (elk), the package said nothing about the American member of the Marmot family.  Hopefully, the cucurbitae and pulses will no longer have anything to fear, with today’s capture of Little Chuck in the charitably named Havahart trap.  I can’t imagine why he even wandered into the thing.  I don’t even remember when I last baited it with pear slices and peanut butter. After some debate over the most discrete way to euthanize our little weather forecaster, Elizabeth volunteered to treat him to a $25 permanent visit  to the pound, leaving with the smelly thing chattering away in the back of my Subaru.

In 2001, we moved from Vienna, Virginia to Vienna, Austria, followed in September by a move to Virginia Water, England. The result has been perpetually confused mail, and a variety of summertime experiences.

As I sit here in 91 degree weather, thankful that the humidity is only about 60% (both expected to rise this week), I can’t help missing the incredibly mild and pleasant English summers. Of course, if you want to lie down on the hammock some Saturday afternoon, reading a novel, you need a blanket.

The insects in America are very different from the ones in England. While I complain about the squash vine borers sabotaging my cucurbits, I really enjoy the fireflies. Elizabeth and I have sat on the back deck, watching the twinkling twilight show. The other American bug I’m glad to see again, and this is a taste that she does not share with me, is the cicada. I love the sound of the cicadas up in the trees, whirring away in unison, and then suddenly going silent. The evening sound of crickets is another one that feels like home to me.

After the biggest snowfall on record, and a last frost date that came at least a month early, last Friday brought the gnarliest-looking hailstones I’ve ever seen.

They were described as ‘quarter sized’ by the weather service. It’d be an exaggeration to say ‘golf ball sized’, but a number of the stones were flat and bumpy, and about the same size as sliced golf balls. The spherical stones were smaller, about the size of shooter marbles.

The storm made a huge racket, and lasted for several minutes, leaving the yard littered with ice balls and fallen debris.

Outside of a couple tomato and potato leaves, the garden came through the storm intact. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about my Subaru.

We’ve seen some unusual weather since returning to the US, and the unseasonably hot & dry spring probably accounts for the failure of the lambs lettuce and spinach crops. Presuming that the mild spring would last, I planted some tomatoes and squash two weeks early, and as it turned out, I could have planted them a couple weeks earlier than that.  This being my first year back in the garden, it was too much of a mess to start planting the first week of March (my excuse is that I was waiting until the pine trees came down), but even if I’d wanted to, there was still snow on the ground.

I wonder what summer is going to bring.