Lehman's Country Life

This is my favorite time of year in Ohio. The leaves put on a glorious show, the sun seems to shine a little oranger (is that a real word?) and the air smells a little sweeter.

The best part for me is that I get to pick my fruit trees. Fruit trees are a great example of delayed reward: You prune in the bitter cold of February, you start spraying dormant oil before the buds even form to prevent bugs. Then you wait…

Besides the perverse pleasure of looking forward to delayed rewards, we grow our own fruit to avoid all the pesticides commercial fruit growers use. One respected website says, “Most pesticides are poisonous to humans and animals, but when properly used they are not harmful.” Somehow, that’s not too comforting!

The cornerstone of our method is to spray twice with Dormant Oil in the spring. But, I haven’t been able to get worm-free fruit without resorting to some heavy duty chemicals about one or two times. We’ve found if we use them at just the right time of the year, we can go pesticide-free the rest of the year and only have about half our apples come back wormy.

“Half wormy” doesn’t meet grocery store standards. But, at least I know where my fruit came from. It hasn’t seen chemicals in at least two months (which is several times the safety margin for “proper use”). Best of all, my fruit isn’t coated with artificial wax or shellac (yum!). (Commercial growers coat their fruit with wax to “seal in the freshness”. My experience is that it’s very hard to remove and I worry that it also seals in dirt left after improper washing and any chemical residues.)

I’d love to hear your ideas on stopping fruit worms without resorting to chemical pesticides.

Galen Lehman, President, Lehman’s

Bookmark it:

Hide Sites

Just purchased the newspaper log roller from Lehman’s and gave it a try. My kids have a paper route so it seemed a good idea….

The instructions to assembly the roller and then burn the log leave a lot to be desired! It took over 30 minutes for my daughter and I, plus my drill to figure it out and get it together, but that’s a different subject, and I digress.

When we tried to burn our first log the outside layer edge caught but quickly went out and the log just smoldered. I would light it over and over, but the only way for it to burn was for me to sit there and unwrap it as it burned. Very unsatisfactory. So I did a Google search on newspaper logs and found all bad news! Seems they won’t ‘burn’ on their own. They need a real-log to burn them, and then the extra ashes made from the paper can interferer with the wood coals causing the fire not to maintain it’s self as well as it would without the added newspaper log – Oy!

We burn in a Fireplace for a few hours at night to help heat the main room of the house. I do not run a fire overnight so I don’t need a slow burn.

I haven’t found anyone who has ‘Mastered’ the burning of these logs, taming the problems and making them worth one’s time -

So I’m making a plea…. for someone with a ‘good-experience’ at newspaper log burning to share your tips! Or I just wasted $47, and now days that is very painful for a mother of two.

Thank you,

Bookmark it:

Hide Sites

I have rattled off to so many customers our plans for The Buggy Barn at Lehman’s I was somewhat surprised this question didn’t come up sooner. I was asked last week while painting the murals in The Buggy Barn, ‘What is a buggy barn?’ Its understandable that English people may not be familar with buggy barns. English, by the way, is the term the Amish use for anyone who is not Amish. Since I came here to post updated photos of the Buggy Barn murals I thought I would answer this question. A buggy barn is the Amish version of our garage. Not only does it keep the buggy dry but it may house some chickens or other small livestock. The horses would be close by, as well as their harnesses, lead ropes and halters so when you needed to hitch the horses to the buggy they would be near. Buggy horses need to be shod or have horse shoes put on by a farrier to protect their feet on the roads so it would be likely some farrier tools and horse shoes would be handy. If your horse threw a shoe you’d want to be able to reshod them so the horse could be driven on the road again. Horses and livestock need to eat of course, so a grain scoop and feed sacks would be found in a buggy barn.

I could list all the possibilities of what you might see in a buggy barn but that would probably get long and boring. Why don’t I just show you instead?
Read the rest of this post »

Bookmark it:

Hide Sites

Part I: Art Meets Science 
       If I were to tell you I spent the weekend arranging for the reversal of esterification, or more succinctly, hydrolysis of esters by a base, would you know I was talking about saponification? For those of us who promptly forgot everything we learned in Organic Chemistry as soon as final grades came out, none of these terms are exactly household words. But for as long as people have been making soap, combining fats or oils with a base such as lye, they’ve been employing this amazing chemical reaction and have, over time, turned what was once a basic, no-frills cleaner for everything from bodies to laundry, into a lovely and infinitely varied luxury.
Read the rest of this post »

Bookmark it:

Hide Sites

Autumn is here, and the herb garden is getting ready for a long rest. You have carefully tended to your herb garden throughout the growing season. Now comes the time to reap your harvest to get you over the winter until the garden awakens in spring.

You have a variety of choices to preserve your herbs. For fresh herbs all winter, you can dig some of the plants up and pot them into containers to make a garden for your kitchen windowsill. Or you can dry or freeze your herbs.

Harvesting Herbs
Most homegrown herbs should be harvested before the plant blooms. The exception to this rule is herbs from the mint family – mint, dill, and oregano, for example.
Read the rest of this post »

Bookmark it:

Hide Sites

I saw a glorious sky this morning. I tried to keep my eyes on the road long enough to get my kids to school so I could capture it in the photo above. As teens and pre teens my kids find it embarrassing to have a mom who goes running off into cornfields looking for the perfect angle in which to see the play of light and shadows thru the corn stubble with a camera! Such is life when your mom is an artist!

I find the beautiful scenery and Amish farmland in the Kidron area to be so inspiring! Today was one of those days in which my inspiration tank got filled to the brim. The ‘big sky’ started the day off. Then, while talking to a carpenter at work, my eye caught the intriguing wavy patterns of the wood grain in the slivers of lumber left on the ground while the crew built a garage. (I saved them to use later in a mixed media landscape collage!) Inspiration can come in such strange forms sometimes! I have stopped making excuses for getting excited over these kinds of finds and instead am grateful to be able to find treasures in the unexpected things in life. It does make it hard to stick to a schedule, though! Who would understand being side tracked by wavy slivers of wood? Maybe that’s why I am writing this so those of us with our heads in the clouds aren’t always told, “Hurry up! What are you looking at??? Come on! Do you know what time it is???” Likely not since I am enthralled with visualizing and planning out my next art project while looking at this pile of odd shaped pieces of wood! Who thinks of schedules and time when being inspired? That’s worth something, isn’t it?
Read the rest of this post »

Bookmark it:

Hide Sites

Time to feed and tidy up

The air is cooler. Clouds are darker. Plants are losing their summer luster. Fall flowers are beginning to bloom. Now is the time to get ready for spring! Right?

Getting Ready
Perennial plants are always getting ready for the next season. In the spring, they are getting ready to grow and flower. In the summer, they are in full swing with blooms and leaves. By fall, they are storing food in their roots, getting ready to go dormant. In the winter, perennial plants are reading gardening books to find out who their new neighbors will be.

You can help perennials get ready for spring by feeding them in the fall and doing a few maintenance tricks. This advice is for all perennials – flowering plants, shrubs, trees and even lawns. For specific instructions on exotic plants, contact your local nursery or county horticultural extension agent for help.
Read the rest of this post »

Bookmark it:

Hide Sites

I don’t know where the summer went, but it’s gone. Never mind that the temperatures are still on the high side and most leaves are still on the trees, we’re looking forward to pumpkins and warm sweaters and cocoa – rewards for a busy summer.

There are a lot of things we need to do to prepare for cooler weather. Or I should just spit it out: Winter’s coming! 

• Cleaning out the coat closet should be a family affair – and soon. Have your children try on last year’s coats and cold weather gear, then make a list of what needs to be replaced. There’s little more frustrating than discovering on the first snowy day that Junior’s snow boots don’t fit anymore.
  Read the rest of this post »

Bookmark it:

Hide Sites

Instant insulation for $20!

When I was little and my grandfather was building our home “up in the sticks” of rural Massachusetts, we lived in three rooms plus an enclosed porch while the second phase was being added onto the back. It would become another two bedrooms and a bathroom, but for one winter I recall, it was enclosed but not insulated or finished, so an army surplus blanket hung in the roughed-in doorway at one back corner of the kitchen.
Read the rest of this post »

Bookmark it:

Hide Sites

Lehman’s recently sent out an email to members of the Countrylife.net forums and the LehmansLife email list introducing an exciting new Forum. Here is part of that email.
Read the rest of this post »

Bookmark it:

Hide Sites