Blue

Indigo blue
Indigo bunting
In a cottonwood tree

We Don't Need No Stinkin'

Yellow jackets. This has got to be the worst year ever. The tractors are full of them. I swear we are going to buy Hand's right out of wasp spray. The men have been finding nests the size of dinner platters everywhere.

Yesterday I found my share. It was only one, but it came boiling out of the barnyard gate and dug into the upper curl of my poor ear, buzzing ferociously.

And stinging too. It hurt so bad I could barely stand up. The kids sent me to the house with ice cubes and pain reliever and milked without me. I couldn't believe how pale it made me...white as the proverbial ghost. Nasty darned things!

We have been opening and closing that gate a dozen times a day all summer....even earlier in the day....without a sight or sound of the vicious things. Suddenly in one day there are three nests in it, with hundreds of the buzzing abominations.

Alan got them gone, but somebody is going to have to get some cans of Great Stuff and seal up all the holes on tractors and gates. I don't care to have that experience again any time soon.

How Much

Wood plastic could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck.....?

I was sitting here at my trusty computer yesterday when I heard a weird rattling sound from the front porch. There was a lusty breeze bending the sumacs so I thought it was just the plastic that was on the door in the winter rattling in it.

However it went on and on so I got up to go look. Elvis was staring out the door in his grab-the-robin pose, only different. Kind of hesitant and nervous-ish.

Well no wonder! In place of the robin was a fat young woodchuck gathering plastic in its mouth like a gerbil collecting tissue for a nest. It was perhaps six inches from his face. It was so darned bold that it let me take its picture. Then when I clapped and shouted to make it leave the region it ignored me.

The cat ran away but not the road rat. Dag nabbitted thing anyhow. It just looked over its shoulder in an irritable fashion and sauntered away.

A much better encounter of the wild thing kind came later on the other porch. I was watering the plants when I heard an unfamiliar bird call. I looked up and the speaker came right to my knees...right there a foot away from me a lovely little Carolina wren. It hopped all over the porch looking right at me, completely unconcerned, then flew down below the driveway. How cool is that?

Sold on Milking Shorthorns

If you've been reading here a while you know about Checkerboard Magnum's Promise, a milking shorthorn bull we bought to breed heifers for calving ease a few years back. We had used Angus, Hereford, Jersey etc. and had complaints about all. Mostly temperament but calving ease on the Herefords was no better than Holstein bulls. We don't have access to the kind of genetics you find on ranches....

I had hoped to sell some matched steers for oxen, an option which has not materialized. However, we were astonished at how typey the shorty calves are. I think that is partly that we were very lucky in the bull we got, but they are just so correct and sharp that you can't stop looking at them. Dense, strong bone, lots of dairy character and tough as nails. A little bit of attitude in every one of them, but it is not meanness, but a strong will to prosper.

We raised one shorty steer and the processor we took him to ruined the meat so we didn't get to find out how we liked it. Then this week we finally got a shorthorn beef back from a reputable place. When the boss picked it up our man said it was the best we ever brought in. I took that with a grain of salt, as he is quite the salesman....but....

It is! The ground beef is very lean like we like it, but tender and succulent....so good. And last night Becky broiled us some steaks. Flashback to Missouri where we ate at a really nice steak house. They have a lot better beef out there where they grow it and this was like that. Fork tender, juicy, very flavorful. I am delighted, partly that we have a freezer full and partly that we have a heifer all raised up that we can process at any time, plus two more steers of various ages. After a long winter of venison, goose, chicken and vegetables I am such a happy little camper.

Music

Stumbled upon some wonderful music on Facebook yesterday...real traditional country sound.
We are fans of the Texas singer, Todd Fritsch, and have him as a friend on FB. He "liked" RW Hampton, so I checked out his music on his page.
I liked it.

Even bought one song with part of the Amazon gift certificate brother and sis-in-law gave me for my birthday. (Thanks guys, my iPod is a much happier place because of you)




Here is RW"s Facebook page....give the song, "Donny Catch a Horse" a listen...wish I could buy that one, but alas, it doesn't seem to be available on Amazon.

Nation's Oldest Farm for Sale

Read about it here.

Wordless Wednesday

What's Up with The Milk Numbers

According to all those dairy situation reports you read in all the farm publications, production is up from last year despite the loss of so many farms. According to a source close to the industry (who shall remain unnamed) plants are scrambling for milk and taking loads they turned away a few months ago.....hmmmm......

While We Were Gone

Nothing daunts a border collie.

If there are no cows to herd, a lake will do nicely, thank you

The bull calf tide continued....very few heifer calves this summer. Alas Spruce had a really nice boy, tall and dairy, Balsam had a Silky Cousteau son of fine proportions, and Bonneville (Balsam's daughter) had a Keeneland Astre Pat son too (same sire as Spruce's).

No more calves expected for a few weeks...However, fair preparations are in full swing. The health work is finished on Lemonade, a Holstein veteran of the show ring of Becky's, Rose Magnolia, the milking shorthorn daughter of the Select Sire Power bull, Poker(pdf) and my Broadway cow, and Gypsy, the Roylane Jordan daughter of Lizzie's retired show cow, Mandy.

Lots of clipping and washing going to be going on, which may be a challenge as Liz has started her new milk inspector job and is at least half past busy. We also have to hustle up and get Rose Magnolia and her mother, Broadway, registered, not a small feat as we have never registered a milking shorthorn before. Liz will be taking the three of them to Altamont Fair this year while the rest of us hold down the fort here at home. Maybe you will see them there.


In the meanwhile, the garden is beginning to produce, I have more lawn cows to paint, we are getting a steer back from the processor and haying is continuing apace. Although I miss camp, as I always do, we came home to glorious weather, which makes it all seem fine.

Noticed

These stories might be of interest to North-viewers....I was thrilled to learn the results of Web Moo.O, an agricultural social media contest, (which I had incidentally forgotten that I entered) (although no one has contacted me yet). I discovered it through the stats on Site Meter and did some happy dancing etc.

Northview Diary is a lot of fun for me...I love getting to know all of you....and it is so nice that the folks at Nutridense liked it too.

That's Just Ducky

I am going to be putting more camp pics up here

Sunday Stills....Rule of Thirds

For more Sunday Stills

Best Photos of Camp Week

This week was the first time I ever saw a loon chick....and this young eagle was very obliging.

Our Dangerous Southern Border

Affects unexpected people in places we might not normally imagine......

I Want It

Side A

and Side B
of the same screen door

Gimme, gimme, gimme.....rowrrrrrrrr

A fat flock of fledgling robins can be frustrating


If you are a house cat and they are inches away on the other side of the screen

Rain on Sumac

A sudden thunderstorm one hay day afternoon.

Catches the men unready and unawares, way back up in the fields.


Almost catches the laundry out, but I outsmart it by ten minutes.

The drops plink on the sumac fronds, depressing the leaflets one by one, like hot green piano keys played by ghostly hands.

A sumac player piano. I like that.

Blessing

Standing on the sitting porch in the mid day sun. Suddenly, a breeze on my arm, an eager buzz and I am being investigated.

Closely, bzzz, bzzz, bzzz, tiny jet bead eyes staring into my eyes as if wondering what I am. Pausing finally for a quick nip of sugar juice, back feathers glowing fire coal green, then back to buzz bombing me again.

Soon there are three of them, whirring around my head like airplanes on a baby's mobile. Sometimes it is a very fine thing to be the center of attention.

I think the hummingbirds have children.

Curious, glorious, bright green children.

I like them

Sunday Stills....Summer

The epitome of summer for me.....

For more Sunday Stills.....

Camp

Some among us are off to camp for a week. Fishing, swimming, canoeing and hopefully, lots and lots of sleeping. See you next Saturday, although I scheduled a few posts for the week.
Have a good one!

Strange Things in the Stats

Don't you just love

I am sure most of us who use traffic meters see some pretty strange search terms now and then. I get a kick out of watching what lands folks here and sometimes wind up scratching (or shaking) my head (although I rarely get any that are as funny as the ones Jeffro gets.)

Anyhoo, now and then Googlebot shows up in the results ...maybe five or six times a week...and it is always interesting to see what sent it here....usually calf names and growing lettuce indoors and such. However, last night it stopped by and stayed....and stayed...and stayed.....for over an hour and a half. To the tune of thirty pages.

Photos that have

Anyone more knowledgeable than I who knows what's up with that?

And what are the funniest searches that bring folks to your neighborhood?

Nothing whatsoever to do with the actual post?
(Or maybe I found the Googlebot out on my porch
and grabbed pictures of its head, paws and fur....)

Second Nesting

(Not unlike second breakfast, only with birds). In all my years here I have never seen anything like this one for birds. We keep remarking about it. Phoebes have chosen the house yard for their second nesting and they are right in front of the windows all day long. And I do mean right in front. You can see every detail of feather color, even the shading between charcoal neck and dingy grey breast feathers (they should really do their laundry.)

Now that I know the call of the indigo bunting I am awakened by them several times a week. The baby robins on the porch have shown phenomenal growth this week. From the bare ugly skull heads of last week to cheeky fat robin faces complete with the little white markings in less than three days. They still sound exactly like the bearings on the washing machine when it is spinning off balance and thus still drive me crazy thinking I have to fix it.
Earl will probably remember the killdeer baby we saw in the opening to the thirty-acre lot when we walked up there. All week long the guys regaled me with stores of how it would jump in front of the tractor when they passed and run before them all the way down to the ag bags. It slowed them down a lot but they got a kick out of it just the same. Anyhow yesterday it finally figured out how to get out of the road.

Saw the sparrow hawk streaking for the heifer barn like his tail was on fire. In hot pursuit behind him, the house mockingbird. You wouldn't think a fast little falcon would be intimidated by a clown like the mocker, but he was really moving.

Saw what I thought was a new warbler right at the window yesterday too. Warblers are not usually so obliging and are hard to identify. This one was just feet from my eyes, picking insects off the cow parsley. I looked her up in Peterson's first after getting out my lovely stack of field guides and there she was...a female yellow. We have had yellows all along the driveway all spring,,,,but just were seeing the males.

And then there is the gold finch picking larvae out of the wasp nests at the big windows (excuse the lack of clarity...I will wash them later) and grabbing spider silk, evidently for its nest. It is a bold little critter and let Alan get these pictures.

High Tech for Everybody

But us. Ag columnist Chuck Jolley shared a link to this well-written piece on Facebook. Mike Barnett man tells it like it is and I wish I could walk up to him, shake his hand and thank him for it."

Wordless Wednesday

Four

AM that is.

Got up a while ago to see Liz off on her trip to Cornell. Cat and dog are cared for and water heating on the stove for kitchen clean up...hint to the boss...I am out of firewood. Warm showers are good. Cold ones are character builders, but not so pleasant.

Another hay field about cleaned up yesterday. Cows are back in the heifer lot and liking it there. And when someone drops off a shopping bag full of beans, you rejoice and freeze them.
So that is what I did.



In the afternoon I worked on this guy. Need to get him done so he can go to his new home wherever that may be. I will miss him I think.

The porch robins...taken through the screen door, sorry.

More Melamine in Milk

Yet another reason to keep it local when it comes to buying dairy products.

Middle 'O Summer with Frogs and Fogs

Gratuitous green frog, just because I can

The mist is lying soft on the foothills this morning and tossing scarfs of itself all across the heifer pasture. It is creeping down across the old horse pasture as I type this, fading the trees to shadows of themselves and dewing up the grass.

Indigo bunting, cat bird, robin, mocker and who knows who else are singing up a dawn chorus as bright as the first of June. Last night the mother robin actually slept with the nestlings instead of standing on guard all night. Must be it was cool enough to brood upon them rather than over them. Chickadees are back from wherever they have been hiding and Alan rescued a baby yellow warbler from the path the other day. We have been blessed in the bird department this year.

No cows in the heifer pasture this early morning. They spent the night in the old day pasture. The grass is good and Bonneville had her bull calf there yesterday. She came down to the barn at milking time, but we wanted to let her go back to him so, despite wanting the cows to have a wagon of green chop in the heifer field, we sent them north and west instead.Sky is pink and gold and orange and it is still cool enough for comfort.

That makes two bull calves this week, one a fat, sleek, milking shorthorn cross and the other BV's Keeneland Astre Pat son. As time goes on we are not losing our liking for the good crossbred shorty calves. We sent a steer one to the processor for our freezer last week and I am much looking forward to having our own beef again. We raise it much, much leaner than store beef where there are high allowances for fat content. Ours has a very good taste and I love cooking with it. We have been without home-raised beef all winter, mostly eating game with an occasional store bought hamburger or hot dog thrown in. The menu is about to get a lot more extensive.

Liz starts her new milk inspector job today, with her first training trip with our regular inspector. Tomorrow she will be off to Cornell University for some formal class work. Most of that will probably be review as she did study in the field in college. I know this is going to be a challenging task, (the inspector comes to tell you what you are doing wrong, which is usually not anybody's favorite thing) but I suspect she will do it well. Meanwhile we will feed the pony and get the cows grained while she is gone and hope she has fun down in the other half of the state.

Enjoy the day!

PS, the boss heard a man on television last night, who said that there were detailed ingredient lists on cow feed long before they put them on foods for human beings!

Sunday Stills.....Shadows

For more Sunday Stills.......

Craig's List

A never-ending source of free entertainment (and strange, yet effective, spelling)(and no, this is NOT my ad...I just found it this morning and thought you might enjoy it too.)

FARM EQUMENT FLAGER - $888 (I KNOW YOU!!! TOWN)

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FLAG ME AGAIN ILL SET YOU UP AND KICK YOUR JACK ASS AND THROUGH YOU IN MY SEPTIC TANK WITH THE REST OF THE ???? THINK ABOUT IT SCUM MAGGET

For Sale..Roy Roger's Trigger

This is truly creepy,
I'm sorry.
There are some things I am just glad that I can't afford to buy.

Hotter Day

First sound- the baby robins chinking for food a-sound like someone chipping away at a musical stone. The proximity of their nest to our activities...right outside the front door, under the edge of the porch, gives us a chance to see what robin folk do at night.

Stand guard is what they do. Literally standing on the side of the nest, bill thrust upward in defiant defense of their small brood. They are suffering so from the heat, adults and chicks panting all day long, or the babies just hanging their heads over the side of the nest, drooping sadly. I feel about the same way.

First sight- the phoebe that has undertaken a late nesting somewhere in the yard. It either awaits on the wire just outside the landing window and looks me right in the eye or guddles around in the driveway jerking its tail as phoebes do.

First outrage- The %^&&** deer mowed the tops off my entire crop of green beans.
And tore down the foil pans I hung to deter them.
I was hoping they wouldn't find them.

Moved Sadie dog from the barn to her lounging dog house under the tree nearby. (She normally does night duty in the barn due to barking issues.) Don't know if that will keep them at bay, but it is worth a shot. A lot of hard work in that garden.....most of it mine. I was looking forward to some good meals out of it.

First scare-Becky kept asking me if the scrap man had bull dozed my rhubarb...grandpa's rhubarb really...I am just the guardian of the line. I kept wondering what the heck she was talking about. See she does the chores in the heifer barn and I don't. I couldn't see that he had inadvertently, while doing some work for the boss, cleared out all of my old garden fence and driven the bulldozer right through it. I gave up on that garden because me and my hoe couldn't outfight the nettles. However, my pink lilac and my big rhubarb bed are still there, surrounded by a wall of reed canary grass, but still much loved. When I walked down I was sure that my heirloom plants were gone, but he missed both bush and bed by about two feet. I am grateful. Guess I had better start moving them up closer to the house.

So in a world where there are murders right on the street, in the town where I was born, arson fires, heat waves from Hell and a flood warning, not watch, out in the other end of the county, I will go to work, aggravated by the deer and grateful for the grace that saved the rhubarb that I hold in Grandpa Lachmayer's honor.

July 4th Milk Dump Protest

This story resonated with me partly because of the photo. That is how our barn looked up until the Amish fixed it not long ago. I wonder how many roofs are going without patches, how many pieces of machinery are being cobbed together in hopes of just one more season, how many visits aren't being made to doctors because the health insurance is too expensive these days.......

Cows Before Folks

Sat down with a nutritionist today, a fellow with whom we much enjoy working. He brought his new boss along and in between swapping stories we worked out some new ideas for better feeding the cows. There is no question that we humans could probably use some nutritional advice too (although I don't suppose we would follow it) but the cows come first at least in that respect.

Learned some good stuff about putting up the Sudan grass we planted too, which will be useful I am hoping.

Happy Birthday to my Other Handsome Brother

(I have a brace of them, fine men both and much beloved).

I can remember when Mappy was born...sleeping at Grandma's house and hearing about the new brother. Now he and his family are among the finest parts of my life.

Love you brother. Hope the heat isn't treating you too cruelly these days. Welcome to decade five where the rest of us have been flitting around for quite some time now!.Love you little brother.

Arson and Hot-ittude

The baby robins on the front porch spent yesterday panting...their little beaks gaping as if they were seeking a handout...or should I say a beak out..from the folks. The nest is shaded by big cedars and small lilac bushes and tucked well under the eaves of the porch, but there was no escaping the hothothot. This morning the birds are going crazy getting their chores done before it really gets warm, hummers at the bottle, the gold finch that is picking spider webs off all the windows to make a nest, swinging from the hanger it dangles from right at the same time, robins crisscrossing the porch with tiny insects to stuff in those red and yellow beaks.

We lost an older hen to the heat, even though I propped the hen house roof open with bricks and cooled her off with water. Just too much stress for the poor old thing I guess.... Had to move Scooter to a place right in a shaded door way so he could catch what breeze there is. He is so small and it appears that his temperature-controlling mechanisms have not caught up yet. He was happy by the door anyhow and danced around like a little sprite.

All we can do is make everything as comfortable as we can and wait for the heat wave to end...oh, and continue doing everything else we normally do. The crops aren't going to wait for cool weather so the haying must go on. Yesterday was a nightmare of flat tires for the guys. Bad enough to chop all day, but changing tires in such heat is a misery. They did it anyhow.

Meanwhile boredom is being blamed for the alleged arson, which took out the building where my parents used to have their stores. Boredom! We have rules about boredom here...do not mention the word lest some evil parent find you a job to alleviate your problem. No one gets bored here.....(Maybe if somebody gave those three little alleged firebugs some farm work to do and they wouldn't have either the time or the energy to whine about being bored, let alone use a path of destruction to keep it at bay...poor babies.)

My folks were as bothered about the fire as I was...it wasn't our building or anything, but so many memories roosted there. I couldn't drive by without thinking.....

I was seven or eight when the folks opened the shop there and an adult and out on my own when they closed the antique store and moved the book shop to Johnstown. I think back on sitting on the steps with my brothers, sticky and orange with Popsicle juice, pretending to be pioneers in the horse-drawn sleighs the folks used for window dressing, antique lap robes and all...going out back in the wood-working and refinishing part of the shop, where dad and mom worked over the furniture they restored, to beg some scraps and nails to build boats to float in the creek that runs under where the library is now. My brother's boats were always worlds better than mine...his engineering talent showed up early. I did learn how hard it is to drive a nail into hardwood though and to pass up that pretty cherry for pine every time though. I drove the mud puppies and salamanders in that tiny creek crazy trying to catch them without much success, but they were always there to tantalize me to another trek down there...and the minnows, darting silver flashing in the murky, shallow water. I couldn't' catch them either.

During those hard young years we were always changing houses and moving here or there, but the shop was a sort of center of everything in our lives. The folks were open seven days a week and we kids were always there, underfoot but kept close. We learned to watch for shop lifting and to treat customers with courtesy. Got paid commission on our sales (oh, the Popsicles ten percent would buy).

I feel an odd resentment toward those poor allegedly bored little alleged arsonists even though all they killed was a long-empty shell. Maybe I shouldn't but I do.

Fire in an Icon in my World

When we were kids Dad had a bookstore/antique store combination on Main Street in Fonda NY. I have an amazing array of memories of those times, from reading through the merchandise to melting my boots on the kerosene stove. Many of my most prized possessions today are bits of history that served as toys...things that I picked up off the cluttered tables and begged to be allowed to keep, like the button in last week's Sunday Stills. I can remember sitting in Dad's chair in the alcove one freezing winter day and finding a book with a fancy Victorian lady on the cover on the shelf beside the chair. I picked it up, opened it and discovered Black Beauty......My brothers and I spent so many hours there in the days when we were young.

Dad moved the business to its current location in Johnstown many years ago, but I will never forget growing up in "The Shop" or Montgomery's Antiques and Tryon County Books. The building eventually became a video store and then just another empty place on an almost empty Main Street.

Last night it burned.

Fire has changed the face of the village so much in the past few years...

HHH

Too hot for words....

This Got me Thinking

From John Bunting's blog...something which I had never thought about but it has me thinking now.

"Today, we Americans celebrate July 4th without any apparent questions about the meaning of freedom. At the time of the American revolution 90% of the eligible voters, granted they were male and white,were self employed.

Today, most Americans are employees and I would hold that is an important thought to give pause as to the meaning of freedom"

Farmers on the Internet

One of the farmers I love the mostest

This has been making the rounds on Facebook, which is great, but what really tickled me was to see it listed on the Kim Komando news this morning.

That is about as mainstream as a story can get. Kudos to the farmers who take time from their busy and challenging lives to interact with their customers...the food consuming public...about what they do and why they do it.

Sunday Stills...Frame it

For more Sunday Stills

God Bless the USA

Why am I Thinking of Ice Cream?

Doesn't this look a little bit like a scoop of ice cream? Vanilla, of course, still the most popular flavor...

With a few of these sprinkled on top. What a terrific treat for the holiday weekend!

July is Ice Cream Month!

Cross Country Blogging

I meant to ask to take a proper picture,
but got so interested in talking that I forgot....

It is pretty cool when a fellow blogger rides a motor cycle across the USA and writes about his travels. Cooler still if he stops by for a visit. Today we got to meet Earl, and it was a fine experience. He is even more well-spoken than his blog would have you think, (which is saying quite a lot) and he didn't seem to mind the warts-and-all experience of visiting the wilds here. (And what with the lawn mower languishing by the honey locust, hood-deep in uncut grass and the usual general shagginess, there are warts and wilds aplenty amid the good parts.)

We toured the mostly empty barn, as the girls were out to pasture (any other day they would have been on the hill right behind the house but today they decided to wander way to the back.) We checked out the ag bagger and the self unloading wagon, which coughed up a beater yesterday, but is all fixed today. Then we walked about half way to the way back fields and stopped in the Thirty-Acre lot to look north toward the Adirondacks. NY was putting on a gentle show of fluffy white clouds and stark shadows against the green of the mountains (instead of the usual rain, rain and more rain) so the view was worth the walk.

We had a nice talk, and I got to satisfy my curiosity about the Appleseed Project, which is something Earl participates in regularly.

It is pretty neat to me how blog folks are on one hand complete strangers and on the other so familiar and friendly. Thank you Earl for taking time to stop and talk. Hope the rest of your trip is safe and beautiful.

New Job

Our milk marketing cooperative has hired our oldest kid to be a milk inspector...a demanding job, but she will be using her degree and in this job market it is pretty exciting. She sure is going to get to know a lot of farmers!

University of Vermont Selling Dairy Herd

HT to John Bunting's blog

Read about it here

Our milk inspector keeps telling us that dairying is about done in this country. Is he right? All I can tell you is that the whole industry is in a world of pain and this is probably just another symptom.

"Vogelmann said UVM would be the first public institution in the country to shift its dairy research to an “on-farm” model with private partners, and other fiscally strapped research universities are paying close attention. “It’s something we’re pretty excited about,” Vogelmann said. “This is a very challenging time for all land grants. At the heart of the issue is the status of university farms. They’re very expensive to maintain. It takes quite a lot of operational capital just to keep the doors open and the lights on.” "