A WILD GARDEN TOUR: Bricks, Watermill, and More! — Ep 018

at one of the local meetings saunder caught wind of a guy who supposedly had some really beautiful gardens not too far from the homestead so we decided to check it out and we gave them a call and they invited us onto the property but when we got there we soon realized it was going to be way more than we had anticipated and we'll show you why it's my brick collection these are all red building bricks here and then these are fire bricks on this wall this wall on the back side of this wall are furnaces and kilns and that kind of thing and then on the other side are all paving bricks from streets and they go on around the corner and the ones on the fence are sidewalk pavers essentially street paper but thinner and i'm assuming you painted some of the i highlight all the letters so some of them they're hard to read if you don't when and why did you start collecting bricks i worked for a mobile home company and we had to move a 14 wide or 12 wide off a lot in our park cleaning up the lot there was some bricks underneath it i never paid any attention that they were marked but we had a salesman by the name of joe hayes h-a-y-e-s and i noticed some of the bricks that were picking up said hey you just run on them and you maybe get a couple of those for joe and maybe put him on his porch or whatever and then i found some salinas so i i saved a couple of them and started paying more attention then and found some other ones and and yeah this might be a stupid question but i haven't really seen many marked bricks in my life so you see the more the more you look okay there's a lot of them especially in rural areas that aren't marked and it's the marking is basically an advertising thing and the unmarked ones were made in small towns and so on that didn't have to advertise their bricks they were used locally because bricks were very hard to ship early on because of the weight it's not uncommon for letters to be printed backwards because it was easy to flip-flop a letter in the bottom of the mold oh yes yes it was backwards in the kishkoi i tell people the h is backwards too but they can't tell the difference and the a yes this one's right uh this is a cush car brick two so are these are these um worth more because there's no it's just an oddity it's just weird it happens quite often yeah i don't know if the guy that set the letters in the mold still had a job or not but now is every one of their bricks advertised like okay and some of them have like these lugs are different this has square lugs that have and the prints different on some of them this is actually a cushco sidewalk brick and it's got the k and the q incorporated in the design that's neat i mean some of these are really beautiful well these were printed with a a uh a non-skid surface that's why they're done that way and years ago they put a couple of those don't spit on the sidewalk bricks on each block when chewing tobacco days yeah now with the cobia maybe they'll do it again bringing back some of those vintage bricks yep now do people print on bricks anymore or is this oh yeah okay but there's very few brickyards anymore yeah there used to be literally hundreds and hundreds of brickyards uh the uh hudson river valley was said literally hundreds of brickyards by itself because all the bricks that the buildings in new york city were built out were easily barged down the river and they had a good clay supply upstream to the bricks with so much history in one brick i love that you have everything in alphabetized here i have the red bricks alphabetized and then the fire bricks alphabetized and the paving bricks alphabetized just so i can find one if i'm looking for a specific one the only drawback is when i get a new one i have to rearrange every shell i was going to ask but i try to do that only once or twice a year when i get enough ahead of time yeah you almost need to have something modular you know what i mean i'm imagining you started off with one wall and then you just like built that just keep adding things the trumpet i added the archway there over the top this this brick was found in the catatonic creek down between candor and a weego by one of my friends who's actually became friends when his daughter got married here but uh this was laying that side up in the creek and gravel and water had washed the back side of it off and he just thought it was a very square rock and he picked it up it's a freeman brick that was made in the 1860s in virginia so how it came to be from virginia up to here is another whole story that we'll never know probably but that's kind of a neat where are some of the last brick making areas around here uh the last local one in new york state was uh horse heads and i have they made seven or eight different varieties at least and are they still in operation or no they went out in 56 i believe uh but that was one of the larger brick companies around there's actually an apartment complex called the brickyard con apartments in horse heads now now i don't know who made this one this h was made by horus somebody that had the last name of h in cortland uh you'll notice the bar is off centered these are all horse edge bricks and the bar is all in the center there they made an h and hh and hh with four bars on it and hh with eight bars on it hhds with periods hhds without periods and bars there's actually one that's only to my knowledge two men found that actually say horse heads sprinted out on them these are horse hedge bricks the numbers don't seem to correspond with any years or anything we believe they're batch numbers they probably put one number on pallet that they did or whatever after sharing his brick collection wayne took us to see some of his gardens i read a couple books of garden verses back in august of 2004 2003 1004 during the winter and uh i so when i got done i made up my own garden verse and hand chiseled it into the back of that rock over here a garden should be a delight for the eyes a solace for the soul and fuel for the imagination exercise for the body is merely a fortunate byproduct there's 12 hours worth of chiseling into that with a half inch cold chisel this was my what i refer to as my mother's memorial garden and when i was going to cornell and so i lived here alone with my mother for 10 years and she died of cancer at age 54 and made this or the last year of her life [Music] did you like black-eyed susan yeah and plox and there's iris we're one of our favorite and actually down the steps there's 48 different varieties of iris wow but we're not in season for iris but with the perennials i've got something out year-round this year the gardens don't look as good uh these aren't too bad but yeah one's down back it was so dry a lot of the two-thirds of my blossoms just blasted it was very dry this season and all our rainstorms seemed to go part of what went north and farther went south yeah so this was one of my earlier sculptors that i did i just do them for my own enjoyment so that's ferris the pruner beaks fade back found only in the wilds of michigan hollow i love your sense of humor here i think that's like an important thing too with your garden you have uh an element of uh of humor just to get people to smile i think you have to yeah if you go through life without it you're gonna live a sad life this is my deer proof garden i actually had deer hair stuck to the shasta daisy four springs ago where they scratched themselves on it during the winter oh okay well it's not that deer proof then they didn't need it this is the rarest fossil ever found in central new york probably one of the ten rarest fossils ever found in new york period this is a colony of glass sponges and there's only been 26 to 30 individuals of these ever found wow they're only found within a 50 mile radius of ithaca this variety there are other types of varieties of glass sponges and this was a sea sponge in the ocean 360 million years ago it's made of a silica type material there are probably 10 or 12 different varieties of glass sponges from back then that occurred over a wider area so they're more readily found but this mesh when they're alive they're flexible and don't break up but when they die it's become very brittle and they break apart and don't fossilize these were all buried alive they go all the way through that rock was this uh found in the quarry or nearby right down back next to that ash tree wow i moved the creek in 1939 the town of danby did and this was in the berm i had plowed out the small piece which probably broke out of that piece already yeah and a hump that was in the lawn down back well that halfway is about 800 pounds and it's half about 1100 so we got up about a 45 degree angle he could kind of lean back and look into it and and we managed to get it flipped on over and i could see what he was seeing and he just sat down on a creek bank and he says you have no idea what we just found he says this is one of the 10 most important fossil finds ever in new york state probably the most one important one ever in central new york and definitely the most important one ever in tompkins county says i've been to museums all over the world and i've never seen a fossil this rare preserved in this quantity and quality any place by the time you said all that hair on the back of my neck was starting to stand up it almost looks like the the base of a colander you know what i mean which is with the geometry i asked paul i said how did these things grow when i found the first piece they had rings like a tree or what he said we don't know they have been many of them found based on what we found here we can't tell a number of rings even in this one there's still a couple rings that are buried in the sand there but you see this little one how small the bands are and how close together this guy here he would have been approaching 20 inches 24 inches in diameter and you can see how wide the bands are so apparently the bands just grow the interesting thing is every one of them here that's visible has 32 radii which makes sense because the cells divide they go from one to two to four to eight sixteen to 32 so we're assuming the number of rings are all the same but we don't know exactly what that number might be next up on wayne's tour was his interior garden beds when i built the fossil house the garden on the side hill went to the long straight stone wall along the top of the hill and the lawn went up to it and we run the fossil house where people could see it readily so i designed these two gardens to tie in to the entrance and i ended up with a bell-shaped entrance in the grass kind of by accident oh yeah but it tunneled my vision from the house made the garden look 100 miles away so i added this structure which is the clapper and the bell if you look at it from above and that brought everything visually closer to the house it's a nice little succulent garden his garden variety fossils and some of these are museum quality pieces but he terms as garden variety and he can tell you the genus and species every one of these here i know some of them but i don't know if you've seen the uh the lucky stones as they're called with the holes in them i've found a couple in pennsylvania okay but very shaped kind of thin i got it and i was like oh i can make a necklace out of this well people say the indians made them for necklaces and weights on their sinkers on their net but they were made 360 million years ago it was a fossilized crinoid stem in the rock and there's a piece of one there and when the glaciers came through it broke off pieces of bedrock and they washed around in the finger lakes in the great lakes and the fossil material was a softer material than the bedrock so he rode it out leaving the hole and the bedrock remained on some of these particular you can actually see the ribs inside that from the crinoid stem this is actually a side view of a crinoid stem they usually exude themselves as little donut-like structures you'll see them over there some are laid down sideways but some look like a little donut yeah like vertebrae stacked on top of each other they're actually an animal that grew up from the bottom of the sea earmark fossil the devonian period they grew up with stems like limbs on them and on the end of each branch there was a soft tissue calyx kind of analogous to a fish gill and i love how this is uh like kind of like a faux chicken coop yeah you know you see my cow on this one yeah you know if you notice there's a cat chasing the mouse and the other one though i love the look of it i love even the the roof overhangs yeah i built it to look like a barn to kind of blend in with it it's like a hollywood this is my sundial here but uh there's roughly 56 tons of stone in this structure took a year and a quarter to build and i know every rock personally i hand sifted when i made the side bank garden here i hand sifted every bit of soil there to a depth to 8 to 12 inches down to subsoil all the rocks that came out of there went in the center of this for phil the wall is six feet thick at the bottom on this tapers up to about four feet thick and then on up with a 26 inch railing and over the fill stone in the middle i put a layer of number two stones and a layer number one stones and a layer of grits at the top stones are laid in some of the top stones are eight six eight inches deep some are an inch thick the sundial the gnomon came out of a creek down in lockwood which is the piece that casts the shadow each long rock represents an hour so this is six in the morning or the roman numeral six and white marble chips that's the only expense i had in this was a bag of white marble chips so smart like look at do you see the six but that's six and then seven eight nine the roman numeral nine ten eleven twelve now this is set for standard time so this time of year you have an ad an hour for daylight savings right uh they had two weddings and one renewal of bows on the sundial they were the only ones that were on time sorry but in sync this is louis the lobster i made last year oh he's cute look at his little wrenches yep those are called alligator wrenches an old style wrench this almost looks like uh the shell of a turtle yeah and that's made from mud that dried like in the bottom of a mud puddle yeah and then it was filled with a mineral that fossilized oh my gosh that's so cool and then look at this one yeah that was a piece of limestone that paul found up to moravia i was hanging out of the creek bank in the spring after rain and the limestone had had a water washed a hole through it and the root had grown through the hole unbelievable and it was dangling off the creek bank so he cut it off about four years ago i'm amazed that that hasn't gotten broken out of there oh so beautiful and you have some this is a koi pond well goldfish goldfish yep i uh think about putting koi in but i get blue herons that stop buying fish periodically and employ our expensive bird food yeah and the goldfish will spawn up to three times a year and i started out with eight and there's probably 60 of them in there now i've had over 100 in there are there are they cold hardy in the in the winter months yeah it's 42 inches deep out here so they just go down hibernate wow but uh there's 14 14 different varieties of water lilies in there do you ever have to remove some because they get they're all planted in pots okay and you have to repot them every couple years yeah all the plants are in pots the cattails have actually outgrown their pots but that doesn't matter but again you'll see fossils every description around here uh when i built this the water comes you know there's a 620 gallon concrete septic tank essentially underneath my spring house that pumps a two inch line up around and out five ports out the wash limestone up here when i built it i was afraid that this waterfall being 18 inches high would overpower the sound of that but up there you can't hear this one because it's in a stone canyon down here you can't hear that one so it balances out i love how you even planted some of the sedums here and in with the fossils prickly pear cactus yeah it does fine here oh it's great because it becomes like a rockery and stone like stone there are pieces of uh curved stone at the college throughout i had three pieces for the same curve because they were set on edge in the street around the curve i had three pieces but they were all three of them are just too too big a scale for the size of the creek so i just used two of them who has the pleasure of mowing the lawn i do oh i enjoy it how long does it take i can mow the entire six and a half acres in about four and a half hours if it's not tall i got a six foot uh zero turn radius ferris but i enjoy mowing lawn i'm thinking about making a new flower bed i get to look at it from different perspectives while i'm mowing and i'll a lot of times mow the shape that i'm thinking of and you know after a couple weeks if i don't like the looks of it i'll change it and i and i make it so that i can mow around it without backing up because with this much spawn you have to do it efficiently so and if i decide i don't want it there i just mow it off altogether further down into his garden wayne told us the story behind the creation of his water mill so i worked for jim ray mobile homes i said for 37 years and my boss bought the albright feed mill in newfield which was ultimately part of the new field depot train station we went in to clean the building out in the old feed milling equipment was in there so i had the mill site and the milling equipment i had to build a mill so i cut my own timbers off the side hill helped saw him out in the sawmill the canister saw mill down in north sought out everything up to 20 foot he had a 20 foot carriage on his mill so he couldn't get anything longer than that in the mill and i needed 6 30 footers so i hand hewed those with a chainsaw and a single bit of dax i hand mortise and hand tenoned every joint i made my own wooden pegs and actually i had a mill raising when we put that up there are no nails in that structure until the rafters on the rope that is absolutely amazing tore down two old barns one in newfield and one in infield that were falling down for the barn lumber to skin it with i laid up all the loose-laid stone foundation never saw a picture of the mill that was there until after i built this then i got a picture taken from the end of the field looking up across and i've tried to blow it up but it gets so grainy you can't but it was about the same size building but i had a straight roof instead of the gambrell drop that i've got i love the gamble roofs i think they're so attractive and the fact that you made it without nails up into you know the last part just something i wanted to experience you know and it was a small building compared to what they used to do back then and even just i mean look at the fence posts how you did it in like an old-fashioned kind of way yeah i made all those uh they're set in pvc pipes that are set into the wall so if one rots out i can just pull it out and set another one in what would you make these locus black locusts yep i made my pegs for the barn out of black black locusts i read several books and they used anything for heart pine oak to chestnut whatever was available in their area and locus is readily available here and it's as durable as anything so that's what i used so there's an area in trumansburg known as podunk yes i'm familiar with it there's actually a podunk road yes you know where the name comes from well when i think of podunk i think of like you know kind of back country yeah partially right comes from the sound of water running through a wooden water wheel which you'll hear when i turn the pump on and start this up it goes i never knew that i had vent of the steel wheel which was more efficient than the wood wheel but it didn't make that noise because of the different material had curved buckets but it was more efficient so the bigger mills that could afford to put a steel wheel in put the little wooden water wheel mills out of business so if you came from a has been milling town you came from a little podunk town now almost every state in the union has at least one sometimes two or three villages still called podunk to this day but uh yeah i'll start this up and you can hear the uh dunk noise now this uh this freewheeling i just leave this on idle because if i turn it up to higher speed number one it makes more noise number two it runs the wheel too fast with it not hooked anything it just doesn't look good i got to build a new water box that's been in there for 20 years and it's developing a few leaks but it doesn't really hurt its operation at this point [Music] you'll start to hear that noise now i just had this going this morning but when you first see it a little bit it's a little out of balance yeah when you stop a wooden wheel the water drains out of the top portion of the wheel into the bottom and it becomes out of balance so in a wooden wheeled mill you had to keep the wheel running 24 hours a day seven days a week to keep it equally balanced mine being ten foot wheel it doesn't affect its operation but it wasn't uncommon to have a 30 or 40 foot diameter wheel and if you did that uh stop that at night the next morning when they started the mill up it would physically shake the mill apart so the miller had to stay in the building or building close to the mill and get up every couple hours you could disconnect the equipment they had to keep the water wheel running so he had to get up every couple hours and oil originally wooden bearings and later on debit bearings keep the wheels going and easily soak so i actually have a miller's quarters upstairs a little more elaborate than he would probably enjoy but gives me a place to display other stuff any idea what this is this looks like one of those things that you do put the fence posts in no no this is an ice breaker to break ice on the ponds and water troughs so animals can get drink in the winter for ice fishing can you do that yes i got it a in a box a lot of tools and an auction i couldn't figure out what the heck it was but i finally found out this is a barbed wire handler the coils of barbed wire are very difficult to handle so you put this in and you can handle your barbed wire very easily so you bought it without knowing what it was and i love to find stuff like that and again that was in a box a lot of stuff that i got and then research it and figure it out wayne has been undergoing chemotherapy for cancer and i had to ask what that meant for him and his property what do you envision your property to be you know after your your past i it's a big conundrum right now yeah i would like the stuff to stay together i've got a daughter and a son who would both love to live in the house but i don't want to saddle somebody there's a lot of work to take care of this i enjoy doing it and i don't want to settle somebody with that responsibility for the rest of their life to maintain my collection if it's not really what they want to do yeah my son has some interest in it my daughter's little boy he he can name every tool down here and what it was used for he loves antiques but it's you know it's not a cheap operation i don't know if my son or daughter could actually afford to pay the taxes on the place at this point in time so is it something that like the historical society or something i would i had considered giving it to the spencer and danby historical societies jointly but they don't have any manpower or money to take care of it even the big museums don't have any money at this time to take care of stuff my grandfather had a hercules gas engine which was a stationary engine mounted on a cart that you took around from one piece of equipment to another i never saw it he'd sold it years before i came along but when i cleaned out his shop i found the instruction repair book for the hercules gas engine this has got a picture of the engine it's got every nut and bolt instructions how they cost repair instructions how it worked everything in it this reminds me of a little book that i got from my grandfather that is um over 100 years old and it's a lumber book yeah yeah bound the same way it looks uh about that size actually i've got a lumber book here no female equipment that's it that's it that's it i was going to say that it looks like i think this is exactly it the scribner's lumber and logbook i'm told if i took this to one of the steam engine shows that i'd probably get three or four hundred dollars for that's so funny yeah my grandfather's is from like 18 something or other this one's 1882 so this one's a little older his is in really good shape um but it's so funny because it had like a note in there where it's like one of the best-selling books of like the decade or whatever oh fantastic but i have a donation book here that hopefully i've got everybody that's donated stuff over the years i've probably missed somebody but this is all stuff that's been donated to the mills and buildings so you run this as a non-profit oh yeah i'm not making just my backyard yeah not a business at all just my playground [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Flock Finger Lakes

Views: 115,583

Rating: 4.9606261 out of 5

Keywords: Flock, Flock Finger Lakes, Finger Lakes New York, homestead, homesteading, how to homestead, start your homestead, find your homestead, permaculture, permaculture farm, coliving, communal living, ecovillage, intentional community, upstate New York, agroforestry, summer rayne oakes, how to start a farm, farm life, market garden, gardening, outdoor gardening, gardening Zone 5, Myers Gardens, Myers Gardens New York, weird gardens, Garden Tour

Id: DIebhWL1mog

Length: 29min 27sec (1767 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021