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Fall in Carlisle is coming – no leaves are turning yet but you can feel it in the air.  The weather this weekend is fantastic and that crisp mid-60’s feeling that New England gets around Halloween.  One of the things I missed while living deep in the city in San Francisco is the smell of Fall.  Hay being brought in, leaves turning, the wild grapes ripening on the vines.  Two weeks ago, when I was mowing the lawn on the swamp side of my parent’s house, I could definitely smell the wild grapes ripening.  The same while I was installing the mailbox – there are small wild Concord Grape vines in both locations.  The smell is one of harvest and is something I am really looking forward to as things go on at my new place.

I promised, in return for taking out a line of ratty white pines on the property line between myself and the Kimball’s, that I would place obvious property markers along the property line.  We agreed that I would put in grape arbors – and also plant some trees on their side of the property line – type to be determined, but hopefully apple?

My plan is  to use the big boulders remaining from blasting to periodically dot the property line and then mount vineyard equipment and plant native Concord Grapes  (see the link to Ephraim Bull’s story on how he developed the Concord grape.  His original vines are still growing a few miles down the road).  The University of Maine has some great videos on Youtube about how to grow and manage grapes – but there is a really fantastic person who does work on Youtube – Dr Tom Zabadal from Michican State University.  He produces very interesting and watchable videos.  The intent is that I will produce a very defined property line and have some visual blocking of the old dairy barn and structures – but not block the sun coming in from the south.   And wonderful harvest smells of course!

My parent’s and I took a ride over to the house yesterday and just hung out in the living room enjoying the quiet – it is a very, very quiet space.  Sitting on the window seat was wonderful.  Then we took a walk from Kimball’s parking lot down around the other side of the old mill pond from my property and over and around Bates Pond to see how much of the house you can see from the dirt road into the pond and the trail.  Right now the answer is ‘not much’ – but that will change a little as the leaves fall.  But still, it is very private.  Walking around Bates Pond on the Carlisle Trail’s Committee trail, we were surprised to see signs of active beavers – there are a few trees felled by beaver around that are pretty old – but this is brand, brand new sign.  Pictures below.

Fall and Harvest – Welcome!  Winter – feel free to get a slow start 😉

A very decrepit and quite unbelievably still alive butter nut tree along my parent’ driveway blew down yesterday evening.  I noticed it while cutting back the pernicious Bitter Sweet vines up near the street.

Also – my dad and I noticed a very large widow maker blocking half of South Street up near Heald Road – a smallish Oak tree snapped about 40 feet up and is still attached but collapsed partly across the street impeding flow.  Definitely will need a bucket truck to get that one out safely

I am having coffee on Sunday 7/24/16 at 6:30am while I write this and it is a very mild 60 degrees on the porch.   Yesterday was very hot and I believe set a new record – something like 94 and humid.  We had an absolutely cracking rain storm zoom through around dinner time proceed by about 3 minutes of really violent winds.  I heard a wooshing sound like the winds through the mountain pines in the High Sierra and looked out at the 100′ maple trees on the other side of the field – their tops were being whipped 30′ or more from side to side.  I would guess the gusts at that level exceeded 50 mph.  Then it rained hard for about 15 minutes with really large heavy rain drops that sounded like hail but were not – just really, really large drops.

No lightening or thunder though.   About 30 minutes after that blew through, we had a sunset that was pure melodramatic MGM – think Wizard of Oz or Gone With the Wind over the top color.  So quite a day of contrasts!

This past week, I have been super busy – for our office in San Francisco, I have been working on extending our lease (along with BNY Mellon’s Real Estate team fortunately) for 3 or 4 years – it is all a blur now.  Finally it got signed on Wednesday – but we have a ton of stuff to do in order to move folks off one floor by 10/31, demo the floor and give it back to the building owner (we have been moving people around the globe and don’t need all the SF space any longer that we currently have).  Big burst of activity finally on the project – finally moving into the do phase!  I have been juggling a bunch of other stuff due to a number of my manager’s being out on medical leave so I was slight bit caught flat footed.  Pulled together a 830 line project plan/task list on Wednesday / Thursday and presented it to the Bank – it went over well which was great.  Now next week I just have to put together a move matrix for 100 people – who will start moving on August 1st!

On the home front, scheduling is coming together.  The electricians have been onsite wrapping things up and doing their usual fantastic, high quality job.  The final exterior wall sconce lights surrounding the garage / shop door were installed.  Also there is a new red fire-bell under the eaves – I am guessing this is part of the sprinkler fire safety system??  The generator is electrically connected to the house now as well.  Paul Hebert and I were talking and he is reasonably sure that his site guy will be there next week to move all the piles of dirt and rock around to their final locations.  That includes raising the grade for the car port, driveway etc…  and smoothing out the area where the concrete pad for the propane tank is going to be added.  Finally, the driveway lighting and motion sensors are coming along too.  We decided instead of fully installed driveway light posts, that we would do 10″ concrete posts with electrical outlets installed on the far side from the driveway.  Two reasons for this – one I am afraid of plow damage.  Second, I really have been unsure of what I want for lighting.  The driveway lighting was a suggestion of the electrician and was an add-on.  I basically came to the decision that I will make my own lights and plug them in.  Probably some sort of sculptures – maybe even seasonal 🙂

The project this weekend for my Dad and I is getting the tackle materials to hoist and mount the space shuttle experiment that currently hangs over my Mom’s sewing table (the experiment deserves its own full post – I am working on that with my Dad).  We went to West Marine yesterday and bought a number of Harken Marine 10mm single sheave blocks, jam cleats and cleats.  Plus 100′ of line.  Today we are going to go over to the house and try and plan it out on the ceiling for exact mounting (which will be easiest done with the scaffolding Paul has onsite once the kitchen lighting is complete?)

On a final note – the bridge is out!  But this time, it is because they are replacing it.  The old colonial era stone bridge (not an arched stone bridge – it was an old school set of stone slabs stacked on a rock foundation – workable but not capable of holding a modern heavy truck) was built on what we suspect was originally a ford across Spencer Brook on what is now Westford Road.  This is downstream Spencer Brook from my parent’s house and the shortest driving way to Concord from their house.   The old bridge was limited to 5.5 ton vehicles (which seemed like everyone ignored) and had a fair amount of problems with flooding and other issues.  It has been prepped for work for a LONG time.  This summer they actually are doing the project – they used a very large excavator to remove the road surface and the original, really, really large slabs of rock (probably 1-2′ in thickness, 12×6′ square) that were the actual bridge structure and have put in a new pre-stressed concrete bridge.  It looks to be significantly wider than the old bridge – which was several feet more narrow than the road – as the new bridge looks to be a few feet wider than the road itself.  They are currently facing the concrete with river rock.  It looks pretty good and it should be safer and function better during high water.  Tentative thumbs up – since it is fenced off, we didn’t go too close yesterday – but it it looks pretty good.

Now onto the pictures

But not really making a lot of consistent forward progress.  Most of this week it has been below freezing or very close to freezing when I got up for work – but then moves into the 40s-50s and yesterday up to 60.  I did see two mosquito’s yesterday so spring is definitely on the horizon!

Leaves are starting to come out – on the weedy bushes (buckthorn) leaves are pretty well developed but for the trees at our end of town, nothing really.  In other parts of town that are not quite as cold at night maybe?  they are leafing out a bit more.

Lots of activity at the Clark Farm Stand in the greenshouses (now plural this year) and planting.

At the house, Paul and his son Tim are doing odds and ends like working on the shelving for the pantry and the closets.  Nothing really to take pictures of at this point.  Bathroom tiling and countertops are still pending – but the wall oven, cooktop and dishwasher are on site.

Paul suggested that I convert some utility lighting at the front of the garage/shop door to the same Hubbardton Forge exterior wall sconces (two).  My Dad and I took one that was already onsite outside on Saturday and held it up.  We decided that he was totally correct – so I went to Wolfer’s lighting and order two more of these babies.  To give you a sense of scale – they are 16″ inches tall.

At my parent’s house, we took advantage yesterday of the annual hazardous waste day at the dump/recycling center and took a Subaru load worth of old spray paint cans, exterior stain etc… over.  Lots of stuff that had been sitting in the woodshed for decades.  Because we were originally scheduled to have the roof replaced last fall, my Dad and I emptied all this stuff out onto the lawn – then nothing happened (Dave Ohlmstead got busy I guess) and everything sat in the snow over the winter.  Messy!

More Saturday stuff was that I went over to the house again with a Verizon and an AT&T cell phone and mapped out wireless signal strength – by walking around doing near the Kimball’s ice cream stand and then back along the trail to Bates pond, around it and beyond.  What I wanted to do was to get a good picture of where cell signal strength was in terms of direction around the my house.  Turns out that AT&T has one extra bar pretty consistently and the signal strength is higher to the north of the house.  I am still trying to figure out how to get internet and it looks like ‘cord cutting’ wireless is the only way to go.  If I do go this way, I will need an antenna booster and it looks like putting that near the computer nook will be the place to do it.

While I was walking around, I “discovered” that some very serious earthworks are involved with Bates Pond.  I always thought that Bates was a glacial hole – and it may be that – but it is pretty clear that someone went to a LOT of effort to enhance it.  On the uphill side is my property – on the downhill side is a wetland swamp that wanders off through the Greenough Conservation land eventually to the Concord River.  However, the land between the pond and the swamp is totally flat, about 30 feet wide and faced with really large rocks.  It very clearly has been shaped.  I mentioned this to my Dad and he recalled that the pond was man-made – and I think very clearly that it either is a total artifact or was enhanced heavily.  The question is why go to the effort?  Maybe it was Herb Bates creating a pond for water storage for cows while this was a working dairy?  I think some archival digging in the town library is in order – with my brand new library card I also got on Saturday!

Speaking of books and maps – I also bought two copies of the Carlisle Trails Committee map book (one for inside use, one to sit in the car for emergency ‘let’s go for a walk’ decisions :-).  I got an ice cream soda (vanilla of course) at Kimball’s while I was testing wireless reception strength and while I was looking at it, I noticed that the 1975 Bicentennial Map had listed six (6) mill sites in Carlisle.  This is two more than I was aware of based on the couple of histories of Carlisle books I had read.  A project I want to undertake is to document the mill sites – since one of them is on my property.  Now more to too look at!  The mills are:

1. George Robbins Mill
2. John Barrett’s Mill
3. Adams’ Mill
4. James Adams’ Mill  (two different locations)
5. Robert Bloods Mill (this is on Pages Brook and is the mill site on my property)
6. Solomon Andrews’ Mill

And finally, to round out a busy Saturday, I finally got to try out my new Axe (California Berkeley Bear fans can now be heard chanting – “We want the Axe, We want the Axe!”  – sorry, had to throw that little bit of Bay Area lore for you)

My good friend Tom McGillvray gave me an axe as a gift last year as I was preparing to leave San Francisco.  It is from a company called “Best Made” – which is an artist/artisan shop in New York.  Despite what they may say on their website, it is not a felling axe, as it is a bit too light and small for that – but it is a perfect limbing axe.  What is a limbing axe?  It is a sharp axe that is nimble enough to make its way around a felled tree and remove the small and medium sized limbs from the trunk.  It doesn’t sound like much, but it is actually an important job – otherwise, it is usually very difficult to approach the trunk itself or at least difficult to do that safely.  This new axe really, really made short work of some of the trees that fell due to storm damage over the winter.  As you can see below in a before an after.  Thank you Tom – a REALLY, REALLY nice gift!

Have a great weekend everyone!

postnote update:

When thinking about felling axes, they are a bit of a rough and tumble game.  In my personal experience, you want something that can take a beating but also be sharp – so a double bitted axe is in order – one side is very sharp for when you know you are not to bang into the ground or off a rock – the other side is less finely sharpened for trying to get in low and get at roots and things.

A few weeks late, but some photos of winter storm damage.  Today (3/13/2016) is now fully spring.  I was in NYC late last week and it was 81 degrees on Thursday down there AND in Carlisle.  Things are not kicking into gear in terms of spring growth – but you can see it out on the horizon.

I am going over to my property today and I am going to spread around some wild flower seeds from American Meadows (a special mix of native wild flowers – both annual and perennials designed for New England).  It may not work since I am just going to be doing it the natural way (tossing things around by hand) and the final site landscape work has not been done – but it shouldn’t take long either.