Not Again

Thieves hit us again some time recently. Went into one of our buildings and stole air hoses off the big compressor, a broken fan and a bad electric motor, an old axle and who knows what else. The guys went to use the compressor and the hose was gone. Then they noticed the other stuff.

It is getting frustrating. We just can't be everywhere all the time.

Whoever this was had to know us, walked right past our rather fierce dog who was installed by the gate the last time we were nailed. We have so many route men and such and the milk truck coming through it is going to be hard to keep the gates locked, but I guess we will have to. I am almost always home so they will just have to call me to unlock it for them. Everyone will have to pay the price for the perpetrator's dishonesty.

Fencing

Alan and I started today. He cut brush and fixed wires. I carried the bucket of tools and staples and took pictures.

Rinse Cycle

Upstate NY style.

Yeah, March looks like dragging on at least into August.

If you are droughty blame NY. Flood watches, flood warnings, cold, cold, cold, trains keeping us awake all night because the lowering clouds send the noise right up here.

We have your rain.

All of it, or so it seems.

If I could catch it and read its license tags I would call the rain control officer and send it back.

I know you need it......

And we just......don't...

Hey, wait, maybe it is micro chipped!

Bad News for Bees

Again. Looks like this was a rough winter (it doesn't seem to be quite over either.)

I wonder how Matt and Lisa's bees are faring.

How Much Actual Cheese

The "Noses" along the Mohawk River

In boxed Mac and Cheese? You might be surprised.

Sunday Stills...Favorite Recipes

These are known as Aunt Marianne's Butterscotch Cookies. Unbeknown to their devoted fan constituency, the sneaky chef merely replaces the chocolate chips in a basic Toll House Chocolate Chip recipe with butterscotch chips and then makes bar cookies rather than drop cookies (this practice was instituted when there was a busy farm and a bate of little farm kids to deal with and dropping cookies on a cookie sheet and baking for hours was a non-starter as a policy.

Sprinkles are an essential addition. They are not cookies without sprinkles.

For more Sunday Stills.....

Please excuse the sideways cookie photo. It is rotated properly in Picasa but will not stay that way....

What Not to Do

Got out the shorts the day before yesterday. (Such a fashion statement when worn with high rubber boots and heavy sweatshirts). Washed and put away my ancient Brown's Feed winter hat and the fleece vest I won at the Midvale Vet Clinic picnic several years ago.... Which I wear between the several-many turtle necks and sweatshirts of winter and the once-blue, but now sort of slatey-dun over shirt to keep off the snow.

It has been in the upper fifties with sun, light breezes, sometimes a little nippy, but nicely invigorating. There be spring peepers and some new kind of sparrow, which calleth from the mulberry tree when I was working in the yard yesterday. Somebody with a thick, buzzy, guttural call I have never heard before.

Liz's boy friend even rototilled the garden last night. (Thanks, Jade.) Man, that dirt looks like crumbly chocolate cake, all fluffy and black and begging for seed.

Garlic is up and doing great. Becky and I planted FIVE ROWS last fall. (I normally plant about twenty cloves.) I don't know what got into us, but a good third of the upper garden is in garlic.

It is easy to see why the one farm implement I have never driven is the corn planter. I have chopped, I have baled, I have raked and raked and raked. I have cultipacked, and disked a little and driven the tedder for hours. But never the planter...or the grain drill for that matter. Not without reason.

My garlic rows are nice and straight.

Parallel, not so much. Looks like I was writing my initials in garlic, a sort of a smelly tribute to my homemade spaghetti sauce or something.

Alas as I sit here shivering at the computer with that freshly laundered vest on INDOORS plus long johns, and a heavy sweater and a turtleneck and a sweatshirt, I am figuring that it may be just a tad too early for planting anything but lettuce.

And I plant that in barrels.

Ah, well, spring is a firm believer in courtship, and makes us all dance attendance on her.

One step forward and two steps back. It'll get here, don't you worry.

Flight Delay

Coltsfoot blossoms buttering up the ditches

Big old yeller moon out painting on the town.

Bright golden sun bursting down the hallway

Greeting me when I get up.

Dagnabbit...

I overslept!

Those night meetings are just a killer.

One of THOSE Days

After the usual round of morning chores, milking, feeding, stables etc. the boss and I have to make our annual pilgrimage to the accountant to sign and send the dreaded tax paperwork, then off to the National Resources Conservation Service for still more paperwork. Then a Farm Bureau meeting after chores tonight. Have to prepare a short report for that.

I am such a homebody. I have to be dragged away from here kicking and screaming, especially for business nuisances like today. Argghhh Night meetings about do me in...I'm a morning person; my brain shuts off at around 4PM and I get through the rest of the day on auto pilot.....maybe coffee will help with this situation.Maybe a lot of coffee....

The river looks really weird this morning. I wonder if they are closing the locks or something. Right here in front of the house you can still see the stony banks, but a bit to the east and north it appears much wider than it has been and seems to protrude up into the cornfields on the north shore. I am going to ask the boss to look at it when he gets up...he grew up here and knows more of how it normally looks than I do. ***Later, looks weird to him too, he doesn't know what is up.

Despite being dumped back into cold and gloomy weather, the greening up of the fields is proceeding apace. Sure looks good. I am going to pick a handful of grass for the peacocks today and see what they think about that. They are eating better now and ate an apple and half a yam this week along with their usual stuff. They are such intriguing birds. I going to fit up an old dog run so they can be outdoors as soon as it gets a bit nicer.

Dairy Stories We are Keeping an Eye on

John Bunting linked to an extensive story in the Milkweed on yogurt and the standards of identity for dairy foods....which are largely ignored by the FDA. If you are interested in what is going on with the foods you trust it is worth taking time to read the whole article. Yogurt is among the most successful and fastest-growing segments of the dairy industry. What a shame that it is no longer the simple, wholesome product we used to enjoy. (Bear in mind that MPCs and milk fractions are largely imported and not held to any standard of origin or content.)

And, the EPA has backed off on its plan to treat milk on farms as if it were oil or fuel, requiring extensive, expensive, and totally pointless prevention and clean-up plans.

Wordless Wednesday

Jimmy Stewart and a Dog

Jan at Poodle and Dog has a beautiful post with a video of Jimmy Stewart reading a poem for his his dog Beau. I challenge you not to have tears in your eyes at the end....

Senior year in high school on a history class trip to NYC I was privileged to see Mr. Stewart perform in the Broadway version of Harvey. A treasured memory that.

The Calm Before the Storm

I wouldn't call it a calm really, more of a perilous pause. You can't take an eighty-degree day in April in the Northeast and not get something out of it when the evening cool rolls in.

You can surely feel that something coming. The air turns all dense and buttery, thick and thin at once. Like invisible water. Just starting to move. It crowds in all around you as you walk through it, feeling the strength of it and all the energy it has gathered up while the sun thumped down on it all day.

It is still...no leaves to move yet... the leftover grass lies pressed against the ground, the woodpile canvas shrouds the logs in silence. Distant sounds ring like an omen..is that train across the river coming right here up the hill?

Batten down the hatches. Unplug the computers, close the doors, feed the pony, air the doggy. It is coming.

Then a hay string on the dump truck canvas begins to twirl. Just an eddy. A thin little thread poking at it.

A bright pink flash cracks across the valley. lighting up the river.

Snap, crackle, bang, rattle, gust and howl, drip and slash, it is here just at dinner time. We eat our homemade spaghetti sauce dumped over an interesting mixture of assorted pastas that caught Becky's fancy and listen to it lumber down the valley....the first of what will surely be many of its ilk. I guess it must really be spring....finally.

Dawn Walk

This week's Sunday Stills got me thinking of sunrises and landscapes. When the sun started peeping out yesterday Nick and I ventured to the top of the heifer pasture hill with the camera.

There was not a lot going on bird wise..robins, killdeers, crows and assorted black birds, titmice, song sparrows and such.

The mist was rising off the grass though, the river was reflecting softly, the dog was being a good boy, and the sun put on a fine show.

Shadow farm wife with shadow farm dog

Sunday Stills...the Four Points

North

South

East

West

North, South, East and West. Took these while out in the early morning walking down the driveway and waiting for my ride to the meeting last week.

For more Sunday Stills......

Herd of Chickens?

Ooh, he has us all gathered together here....what will we do?

Crow, what else?

Holding

Where the woodcock was

Sorry about the light posting lately. Combination of it is nice enough to go out and work and nothing we are doing is all that interesting. After a long winter with a lot of snow there is much manure to move. Moving it is a necessary and valuable activity, but, let's face it, it is neither pretty nor interesting.

However, this kind of weather takes the curse off almost anything. Until the wheelbarrow broke, I was shoveling horse poo in large quantities yesterday....and liking it. (I kept wondering what those little black parts I was finding on the ground were....hmmm.....then the whole wheel assembly fell off, making the answer to that question perfectly and painfully clear.)

If I changed this to a bird and frog blog there would be much more to report. Alan is pretty sure there is an indigo bunting in the hedge row next to the house. He has very sharp eyes and I trust his judgement. Frogs are migrating nights down on Corbin Hill Rd. He keeps stopping to move them out of the road and I keep praying he doesn't get himself hit. The garden pond is still just a dank, dark pit full of winter debris, but I will be fixing that any day now...just got to dig out the pump and filter.

Meeting was good...another indication of how much farmers care about their critters...lots of good programs to help one do a better job. NYSCHAP is one fine example. NY is lucky to have it. Hope it continues to survive budget cuts.

We are still having enormous bull calf after enormous bull calf. Usually for some weird reason we get a lot of bull calves from bulls we buy from the stud and many more heifers from the bulls we draw ourselves. This year...nothing but bulls. I think we have had four or five heifers all together and we lost one of them. At least Liz's best cows had girls, so we have Bling and Chrome, and Becky has Testify. I will be glad when the brunt of calving is done with though, pasture is up, and the cows can go outside to stay for the summer. Can't wait to build the fence.

More Tainted Chinese Milk

With deaths

Still More Morning

Morning

I take a lot of photos of this big spruce on our neighbor's lawn. About twice a week the boss looks out the window and says, "You know, that tree is just about perfect."

I guess it is and photogenic too. About two seconds after I took this the woodcock blew out of the bushes right at my feet, which made me very glad I walked down the driveway instead of driving.

Spilled Milk

The EPA wants everyone to cry over it.

Farmer Scholars

Farmers are the studyingest and meetingest people you could imagine. Far from the overalls, straw hat, and dangling stalk of timothy stereotype that is usually portrayed about them, they have to know a lot to do what they do. And they have to keep learning all the time. Farming changes as constantly as the weather, new rules, new plant diseases, new production methods are coming along all the time. To keep up with the industry farmers need to keep learning.....I have never met one who didn't subscribe to enough trade publications to cover the living room floor an inch deep every month and they go to meetings too.

There are meetings about growing corn, meetings about when to cut hay, meetings about nutrient management, meetings about every aspect of animal care, crop production, feed preservation and political meetings too. There are meetings about milk marketing, and meetings about regulations, and meetings to go to Albany or Washington to try to explain the realities of agriculture to city legislators.

Nearly all farmers that I know go to some meetings. Late fall, winter and very early spring are the times for meetings in this climate. Once the crop work starts forget about trying to drag even the most studious of farmers out of his fields. There is work to be done.

Tomorrow I am off to a meeting and will have a report for you when it is over. It will be a good one I think and I am lucky enough to be going with someone really cool. There are some great speakers scheduled and I hope to learn more about a subject that needs to be on the list of every farmer, pet owner, or person addicted to chewing and swallowing, as Mike Rowe says....animal welfare.

Waiting on Water

My friend Linda, in Colorado, has an interesting post about waiting on water out in her area. There they rely on irrigation to provide moisture for their crops.

Here we are also waiting on water, but we are waiting for it to go away so we can get going. There are fences to build and muck from winter to clean up and land that is waiting for the plow and disks. At the rate it is raining I guess it will be waiting a while. It was almost dry enough to work before the weekend, but then the monsoons set in.

Anyhow, it sure is wet, and I am glad that it isn't snow. You do appreciate your boots in this weather.

Trying not to be Greedy

For spring. But it is hard not to be. Went out to check cows in a soft, early morning rain, an Irish rain, not enough to even wet my pull over, but wet enough to hear.(The kind of rain that just might bring on the new grass....I look every day at the hill behind the house...is it green yet? No but soon.)

Wet enough to get the robins going out there in the dark.

And going they were, dozens of them everywhere around, north, south, east, and west, and all points in between. Killdeers too, and four...at least four...song sparrows. The phoebes showed up at the creek day before yesterday, but either they don't like rain or they sleep late. They are not calling.

No woodcock either, although we have heard him a couple of times. I like to think of him out there in the short grass part of the pasture, trotting around on his stubby little legs and shouting imperatives to his lady. Then tumbling sky-high, all whistle and flute, only to drift gently back down and do it all again.

Just a couple weeks ago there were barely any birds and they surely were not singing before dawn. I took a little walk this morning though, just my Hall's cough drop and me, listening for more...new...better...different. Who else is back and taking up territory? Yeah, I am greedy for more spring no two ways about it.

No calves this morning and the sump pump the guys rigged yesterday did its job pretty well, so the flooding is negligible. Thankfully.

We are hoping for some decent weather to get some fencing done and some manure on the fields before the serious spring work begins.

One of my goals each summer is to learn a couple new bird songs. I am not good remembering sounds in that fashion so it is a challenge, but one that I much enjoy. Last year I got indigo bunting and Carolina wren......Who will it be this year?

Barnyard Math

Take one pair of pea fowl in a coop near the stove

Plus one bright, breezy spring day. It is really nice out.

Which makes them cheerful and talkative (pea fowl sound just like what you might get if you crossed a provoked pig with an amorous jackass).

Add one boss man splitting kindling so the old lady (who has cleaned out the stove) can build a new fire.....

And what do you get?

Whack....SCREAM....whack..SCREAM....whack..SCREAM.

Every time that ax hit the wood, the male shrieked as if he had been hit. It was funny as heck. Of course when the sun is shining, the air is full of spring and the sky is afluff with poofy clouds, it doesn't take a whole lot to make me laugh.

Breaking up is Hard to Do

Breaking down ain't much fun either. Mom posted a litany of stuff at their house that has recently passed on to its reward on Facebook yesterday. Pretty awful. By mid afternoon we were in the thick of it too. Computer monitor died. Alan moved the office one out here. Broke my reading glasses, which I need for computing, in the process (can't wear the dollar store jobs, mismatched eyes). Then the bathroom faucet threw its shaft out of joint. Thankfully the boss was still up and heard the little Niagara in there. No showers til he gets that fixed. Arggghhhhhh

The boss was buying stable cleaner parts up at Hands one day a year or so ago. He was grousing about it breaking down and costing a lot all the time. The Amishman in line behind him was holding a five-tined fork and said, "Oh, mine broke too, so I just got a new one," and brandished the fork.

Ayyup, you can clean out behind fifty cows with a fork. We didn't have a stable cleaner behind twenty-two of ours for decades. The boss and his dad cleaned them Amish style.You can do it....but it is a misery. Especially on Sunday morning and all.

You can compute without glasses too, if you are a communication and fun with Zuma junkie like I am. But you get a little cross eyed.

Only got one calf out of all the excitement yesterday, yet another behemoth bull. Our calf buyers love them, but we sure would like some heifers. ETrain was foolin' and still hasn't had her baby. We were thinking that Liz's cow, Foolish, who was born on April Fool's day, hence her name, might calve yesterday on her birthday, but she didn't either. Oh, well.

April Foolishness

A bazillion and twelve geese on Summit Lake

Photos do not do justice to the numbers

The boss left early, Alan is at school, everybody else has to work and TWO cows are calving simultaneously. One of them always a milk fever problem. Eating breakfast while I give them time to settle down, then off to the barn.