Clawhammer versus Bluegrass

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As many of you probably have, I always assumed that banjo was banjo - with many sounds but one essential method of playing.  Not so!  As it turns out, there are two major schools of "banjo thought" (though the actual amount of thought involved may vary) - Clawhammer and Bluegrass.  There are many names for both, but those are the seemingly most common right now. 

Bluegrass is the Tony Trickshaw kind of stuff, with lightning fast finger work and a rolling series of notes, each played independently.  Clawhammer, the style I'm currently learning, involves something called frailing.  It's a peculiar method of strumming in which you use your fingernail to strike the string, followed by a quick strum of three strings and then a pluck of the 5th string (the shorter one) with the side of your thumb.  This is nearly IMPOSSIBLE for someone used to the guitar as I am.  It isn't the motions that are difficult, I've learned similar strum styles on the guitar.  But I find my brain getting screwed up because I want to play the notes as I expect them to sound, but the strings seem all out of whack.

See, a five-string banjo like mine isn't like a guitar where each string going down is a higher tone.  On a banjo the 5th string (the one on top) is the highest tone.  The next string, the 4th, is the lowest!  Then it gets progressively higher like a guitar.  To my guitar-mind it's like someone took the high-e string and placed it under my thumb by magic.  Very confusing.

That said, I'm simply loving this instrument.  The rhythms are fun and endlessly variable and once you get frailing under control, you can play all manner of tunes without having to learn many new skills.  It's all patterns and knowing when to frail and when not to.

Of course, my family sincerely wishes I would learn some more songs so they wouldn't have to listen to the two I know played over and over, but that comes later.

P.S.  Wanna learn how to play clawhammer banjo?  Check out Banjo Equinox on Cold Antler Farm.  Jenna is walking us through the process and we're all sharing our experiences, our victories, and our setbacks.  Come on in and play, son!

Is It Planting Time Yet?

I was describing a typical Spokane spring to a friend who is contemplating a move to Spokane this summer.  Through my lengthy description he listened intently and then said, "So, it's a two steps forward, one step back kind of thing."

Exactly.

Saturday broke warm and sunny with a piercingly blue sky and my favorite white puffy clouds just cresting the hill over the pastures.  I was at our friends' farm solo that day, my wife held up at home with spring cleaning.  The animals were positively reveling in the sun, laying with their long necks and gangly legs spread out along the grass, snoring away.  I have to say, between the work and a little banjo practice, I did a little sun napping of my own.

And then, Sunday came, wet and cold and windy.  The clouds had moved in during the night and the rain and grauple began to fall early in the day when we were not yet done with the daily chores.

Spring is start and go, intermittent, and sometimes infuriating around here.  But it is also often beautiful and full of the promise of longer, warmer days, green grass, and shady maple trees.  I can't wait.

Our garden will be limited this year, due to the good possibility that we will be moving to larger property and the prospect of changing this urban farm to a more traditional (if we could be called that) rural setup sometime in the summer.  But we will plant potatoes, green beans, carrots, and broccoli at the least.  We have to grow something.

I can't wait.

Spring Has Sprung

Spring has sprung,

The grass has ris',

I wonder where all

The flowers is?

Horrible.  I know.  You can blame my grandfather for that one. 

Spring has arrived for sure here in the northwest.  Does that mean the flowers are blooming and the leaves are budding?  Heck no!  Spring is more subtle here.  More intermittant. 

It still snows now and then, between bouts of rain, but the hard frozen ground has turned to soft clay mud.  The grass is overridden with moss that will soon give way to the grass proper as the ground slowly dries.  The bulbs are just starting to push up through the soil, the first tentative green leaves beginning to show outside our laundry window.

There are the more traditional signs as well. The birds are definitely back, as my daughter's cat can certainly attest.  Rows and V's of ducks and geese have begun to fly overhead, returning from whence they came six months earlier.  The duck ponds at the City parks are full again, only this time with leaner versions of the autumn-fattened birds we saw leave. 

And really, only one thing truly screams "Spring!" to me in Spokane, and like the real harbinger of autumn, it's human in origin.  Often the first sign of real spring around here is the sprouting of oddly clumped blooms on my mailbox and in the seam of the storm door.  These brightly colored missives are the annual inundation of cheaply-xeroxed flyers for yard service, hauling services, handyman services, and something that triggers unwanted visions of Richard Simmons in overalls, a service called "power raking."  (Incidentally, don't do it.  It's HORRIBLE for your grass)

Spring has definitely sprung.  Now it's time to recycle the unwanted flyers and get to the business of waking up the ground.  Planting here we come!

Play That Old Can, Son

I have to say, for an old computer geek (okay, former computer geek) I have some rather musical proclivities.  I play the guitar, the piano, I sing (when I've had a few), and every single day I listen to some sort of music, lately a lot fo indy stuff and bluegrass.  However, given the range of musical instruments avaialble, I would not have thought the banjo would be on my list.

But then, one of my favorite homesteader/writers, Jenna Woginrich (Cold Antler Farm), decided to hold a Banjo Equinox, free online banjo classes.  I tried, along with many others, to win the brand new banjo from Banjohut.com she was offering via her blog, with no success.  Then it happened that my father's old stickpot, unplayed these last twenty years, popped into my mind.  Lo and behold, I will shortly have a banjo to play - whenever he gets the chance to mail it to me that is and once it gets some tender loving care from a local strings repairman.  In the mean time, my neighbor and good friend has graciously loaned me his.

And here I am, dropped, rather surprisingly, into the world of clawhammer banjo.  First class is Sunday (the equinox, appropriately).  More to come, I'm sure.

Something New

We arrived at the farm early today to do our share of shoveling pellets and pitching hay.  As my wife opened the front gate and my daughter and I drove Angus up to the barn something new caught my eye.  There, among the just-greening grass and old wrung out wooden posts, was a flash of blue and a new whistling song I hadn't heard in a long time.  The blue, of course, materialized into the form of a small bluebird perching on one of the fenceposts, singing his little heart out.  Then there were two, and three!

The ground is soggy, not frozen hard.  The pond has thawed completely, leading the neighbors to oil their ice skate blades and pack them away until next winter.  Even the bulbs are poking their first tentative green shoots through the now thawing soil, ready to spring up into fantastic shows of color any day. 

Spring is soon.  Very soon.  The air is filled with birdsong this morning, a first in many months.  We can't wait.

Fighting, Always Fighting

I apologize for the lack of posts of late.  My day job was intruding yet again on what I want to be doing.  I imagine this to be a common affliction. 

Today was a day for fighting with technology, let me tell you.  Sadly, there was nothing so romantic as the engraving accompanying this post.  Both my cell phone and my connection to the company network decided to call it quits on me all at once - leaving me without the ability to work while simultaneously robbing me of any method for communicating my problem to the home office. 
Sigh.

Paca Pellets and Chicken Splats

Ah compost.  Proof that in the end, even poop has its uses.  In the case of alpaca pellets, more use than some.  We've had chickens for a couple years now and I can't say enough good things about their manure and its effects on the garden.  As an example, adding chicken manure to the soil around radishes gives them a (slightly frightening) crisp spiciness that elevates this humble root from an oft' ignored salad garnish to a real flavor-packed little pocket of crunch.

The drawback of chicken poop is, unfortunately, a REALLY high nitrogen content that will burn the dickens out of any plant you place it next to, unless, that is, you compost it first.  Add to that the fact that chicken manure smells worse than any other livestock manure (including pigs, if you can imagine it), and you can see why it isn't the ideal fertilizer.

'Paca pellets (aka llama lumps), on the other hand, are almost odorless and contain a great mix of all three key fertilizer ingredients.  You can put 'paca pellets right on the soil without worrying about burning the fragile seedlings.  Compost the stuff and you have an amazing soil amendment that people will pay top dollar for (well, top dollar for a manure anyway). 

We spend a sizable amount of time every weekend pulling piles of straw and paca doo out of the barns. While the ever-increasing pile by the barn is growing by the day, every time I climb on the tractor and stir the pile the rich, black, steaming soil that is exposed screams "grow something with me!!!"  I can't wait to take my share of the pile for the veggies this coming spring.

Why the mental ruminations on manure?  Yep.  It's coop cleaning time again.  It better be, or the biddies won't ever speak to me again.