Making a case for banning all bread

Here

Happy Big 6-0 to the boss

Liz worked, literally all day yesterday, producing a birthday feast for her dad....chicken and biscuits from my birthday chickens, green bean casserole from my aunt and uncle's green beans, mashed potatoes from the garden, southern biscuits, and this amazing three-layer chocolate cake with white chocolate chips.....I have only one thing to say...Hooray for leftovers!!

RCMP Musical Ride

An unexpected benefit of our Vermont visit was a chance to see this incredible drill team perform. While we waited for the concert to start they did their various maneuvers right in front of the grandstand. We took pics and video of course.





This video is very short

RCMP Musical Ride


It was interesting to learn that all the riders are full fledged police officers who rotate into the ride for three years, with one third leaving each year and one third beginning their stint. We had great fun watching them. In some formations the inner horses would be barely moving, merely pivoting in place while the next rank trotted and the outer horses cantered. Truly impressive.






This one, taken by Liz is both longer and better

A Marriage 57 Years Young

Happy fifty-seventh anniversary to my folks, who chose to spend this benchmark in their marriage panning for gold quite some little distance from here. I hope when we reach that milestone, if indeed we do, that the boss and I have that much sense of adventure left. Right now dragging myself over to the fair seems like more than I want to undertake. Anyhow..... Congratulations Mom and Dad on making it work in a big way!' Love, from your oldest "kid".

Moose like sprinkers too.

HT to Windyridge who saw it first. I found this video too amazing to pass up

Amazing Balancing Frog

Trained using ancient methods discovered and perfected by the Honorable Order of Hibernian Herpetile Handlers and brought to Northview Dairy Farm for your amazement and pleasure.





***Or, wouldja believe he was sitting on the net float my mother gave me and the frogs have become so tame this summer that he stayed right there while I ran for the camera?

Old Cars, Rednecks and Stone Henge

This farmer fielded some new neighbors' complaints by being outstanding in his field...or rather by having some old cars outstanding in his field for him.
There is simply nothing wrong with having a sense of humor.

Folks who move next to farms have to understand that farmers...well, they farm. This can sometimes result in odors, dust, noise and things non-farmers would rather not see, hear or smell, but they are part of the job. I am grateful that NY has right to farm laws and Ag districts to protect farmers' ability to do what they do. Thus we probably won't need to build our own Stone Henge out of old demolition derby cars.

I also like the reasonable way farmer Rhett Davis spoke about his actions.

"I respect that they're here and spent a lot on their homes, but on the other hand, give me a little bit, too," Davis said. "I've been here since I was 7 years old."

He said he doesn't intend to keep the cars up permanently.

"These can come out just as easy as they went in," he said.

The corn is high as an elephant's eye

(Or at least we wish it was)

And the giant sunflowers are taller than the moon.

Maqua-kil Blitz Neon Moon that is.
LIz's summer yearling for this year.

Playing with Picasa's collage tool

Cow-lage

Anti (cat) matter

Peace and quiet

I am so ready for some.
(Which is fortuitous as next week is our vacation.)
Camp
Ahhh......





In the past week the guys have blown a piston on one tractor (Case 930, 43+ years old and the absolute standby for mowing, baling and running loads), killed one forage wagon dead as a doornail (it was a terrible wagon right from the get go and we will certainly never buy another New Holland), scored the shear bar on the chopper and spent about half their time running around after parts and looking for another wagon and at mid-sized used tractors. Nobody's fault but....
It has not been fun for those of us on the sidelines. (They did manage to find a John Deere forage wagon that was both cheap and functional after some minor work.)





I have sustained my sanity by day-dreaming about loons and hemlocks and the soft rippling of water against the dock. I have gently packed this and that that I can live without until the weekend. I have lamented the loss somewhere in the course of changing computers of my "camp list" with important things like a can opener and a colander detailed on it. For once I have the noodles in the pile for the trip...the floating noodles that is. I am perfectly capable of swimming and snorkeling and do, but there is nothing like pulling your feet up so you don't get them in the bottom goo...and just drifting among the sun sparkled waves. I have forgotten them the last two years in a row.

To get to the weekend, I have to finish out today.
Function through tomorrow.
Get serious about packing on Friday.
Go crazy on Saturday with last minute packing (after milking the cows one last time in the morning) and shopping for perishables, getting through check in and unpacking.




Then on Sunday morning, while the folks in the other cabins sleep off their carousing from the night before (the only real draw back to camping where we do is raucous parties all night every night...I relish every hungover minute the next morning though because it is dead quiet), the loons and I...maybe a rock bass or two....and the sun and the lake will commune in peace. The loons will have minnows and I the first cup of coffee, binoculars, camera and a good book. I can't wait.




***Photos are from other years...

Back Yard Recipe

First: take one disgruntled, elderly barn cat visiting the house (where she doesn't belong).

Add: two nesting mockingbirds with a strong sense of territory.

Stand back: with the camera and click like crazy

Vanquished

Going, going, gone.

The winners

Happy Birthday, Baby Brother

Birthday barter

Matt, Thanks for the chickens both warm and breathing and frozen solid. Hope all the plants grow and thrive, especially Grandpa Lachmayer's rhubarb....

For reference, they are snow in summer, borage, pink and/or white sedum, bee balm, wall pepper, ultra-sweet tomato, cobweb hens and chicks, water lettuce, hornwort and, of course, the rhubarb. Love you kid



****Update, my mama just sent me this lovely old photo of the bouncing baby boy himself. Can you guess what he is doing?

Welcoming the birds

Robin at the bottom of the wren porch steps (through the screen door)

There was a wren here just a second ago!

This morning on the sitting porch

The boss's folks were farming one of these two farms when he was born just a couple months shy of sixty years ago. I have been helping him for well over a third of that. However, we have only lived here as a couple since his lovely mother passed away on my birthday seven years ago. We moved up from town then.

She always fed the birds and had a nice array, including red-bellied woodpeckers back before they were known to range here and a goshawk that liked to kill pigeons in the heifer barn yard.

However, I have never seen anything like the assortment we have begun to have in the last three or four years. There are probably a lot of factors in play. We have let some areas grow up to brush and wild plants, not so much to attract birds as because of lack of time and energy to keep it down. Alan has mowed out a number of paths that wind among mullberrries and old plantations of flowers. We have also planted some things for birds...lots of sunflowers, bee balm, rudbeckia (Peg had it, but we have encouraged it). We let the black caps flourish (mostly because WE like to eat them). We put in the garden pond, so there is the sound of splashing water....bird baths...feeders....

On the way over to Coby last week...our favorite swamp with pileated woodpecker holes

Anyhow, what a summer this has been for birds... If I was faster and he was slower, my early morning sitting porch photo would have included one of the mockingbirds. He wanted to get onto that porch for some reason this morning and gave an irritate chack!! whenever he tried to land on the railing and found me there first. Meanwhile the wren was singing his heart out on the other porch. A short list of what we have seen over the past week (not all of them right in the yard or very welcome either, but visible from the house or yard) pigeons, sassenachs (English *^&%$$ sparrows) starlings, mallard ducks, grackles, chickadees, gold finches, turkey vultures (sharing something nasty with a coyote out on the hill) red-tailed hawk, red-winged black birds, barn swallows, chimney swifts, kestrels, robins, savanna sparrows, song sparrows, chipping sparrows, several catbirds (the mockingbird is cussing on the wren's porch as I type this) indigo buntings, cedar waxwings, a mother Baltimore oriole and family, ruby-throated hummingbirds, blue jays, crows, killdeers, pileated woodpecker, cowbirds, phoebe, common yellow throat warblers, downy woodpecker family with lots of demanding kids, at least four families of cat birds, house wrens (two families), song sparrows, cardinals, great blue heron and more...these are just what I can think of off the top of my head, and just what we have seen in the past week.

It is unfailingly entertaining just to hang out in the yard. The birds figure that it belongs to them and make their feelings known. When they are not nesting, the chickadees come right to the back door to demand seeds. The mockers fly down at our feet for some reason known only to them and flash their wings at us. They are the most companionable of birds and seem to like us.

Taken a little while ago right next to the house

The wren sings to us every time we go to the front door to drive away the starlings and sassenachs that want to steal their nest.
The hummingbirds pitch a fit if the feeder gets empty.

I like having them around.
(It is part of why I never go anywhere if I don't have to.)

Lykers pond...see that thing swimming in the water? Liz and I think it was a young otter. It certainly swam like one. Some middle-aged idiot, during one of those miserable senior moments, forgot that there is a perfectly serviceable, if slightly battered, pair of Bushnell binoculars in the car. ...so we will never be sure...but it sure looked like an otter

Happy Birthday America

And I WILL get even*****....that is all I am saying (today is mine too)
Please excuse the boss commenting very rudely in the background. He didn't know Alan was making me this video and it was about the fifth attempt and he just wouldn't make me another one so.......If you turn the volume up loud enough to hear his reaction...well it is pretty understandable as the movie making was going on about three feet from his chair, and he was inspired by the music and all.....





*****with the senders of this card that is....

For rent

Upstairs apartment. Downstairs is occupied by noisy wrens so bring your earplugs. I was taking this shot of the robin (I think, since no one lives there any more) nest atop the pillar where our house wrens nest when the mockingbird stopped by for a short serenade. He landed right on this old chair, but he saw me and flew quicker than I could click.




I think I have seen a major benefit from the occupancy of the wren family. (Besides the delightful all day serenade that is.)
Wrens makes nests of assorted short sticks.
They nest in cavities.
They don't like company.
Thus they fill all the cavities in the area with sticks to keep out riffraff neighbors. Although this shifted our favorite chickadees from the sitting porch to the honey locust I think it also shifted all the starlings out of the eaves. Before the wrens they found every little crack or crevice and built their messy nests and raised their raucous babies there. This year there are none for which I am very grateful.





How about this thing on my sitting porch? It popped up over a very short time...like one day it wasn't there and about three days later it was. It is right over my lake chair where I like to sit when I get time. Liz is allergic to various vespids so it has got to go. I am going to bring the garden hose down from the calf pens and get it taken care of soon.


Here is a video from last year of the wrens feeding the kids. Liz took it and I posted it then, but I think it is worth a revisit...and the little ones haven't hatched yet this year.....

Strawberry rhubarb 3.14159

Another good thing about June...
(It's Dairy Month, but it is also berry month)

And....does anyone have any idea what this flower is? Alan's best friend's mom gave me one years ago and I shared with my folks. Mine died a long time ago but I liberated this one from their lawn last fall. It is finally in bloom and I am hoping you can help me with an identification. Otherwise I am going to have to keep calling it **their last name** flower...which confuses folks mightily.
Thanks in advance.

Recipe for

Summer

Wish we were here...but we were just at the station pumping gas
when this pretty boat went by on the river

We were going here instead...the three Northview girls can pick like crazy. Eight quarts in under an hour.....just four miles down the road with three left turns . I was gonna make jam, but ran out of time, so I froze most of them.....except the ones for strawberry shortcake. We couldn't get any whipped cream over in town, they were out.
So we had Philadelphia vanilla ice cream instead....oh, and we didn't have the ingredients for the sweetened biscuits that go so well with the berries...so Becky made these little shortbread cookie things......wish you were here.

From the key drive

More vintage Farm Side from 07. I called this one...

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Dances with Barn Cats

Here in tropical Fultonville we have discovered a phenomenal new reward activity— taking the kids to the movies. It’s astounding. They can milk the whole string, feed the calves, scrape the floors, toss down hay, take out the feeder wagon and get showered and dressed in under two hours if we tell them we are going. I love it.

After a highly enjoyable viewing of Pirates of the Caribbean (The Black Pearl) about a week ago I had a revolutionary idea. What if movies were filmed with farmers in mind? For example, Kevin Costner might star in Dances with Barn Cats. Our hero could be struggling through his milkhouse door, calf pails on one arm and a half a dozen nipple bottles dangling from the straining fingers of the other. Suddenly a calico cavalry would arrive to twine around his legs, yowling melodically. The resulting shuffle-stomp, as the farmer strives to maintain his balance in a veritable sea of cats, would be poetry in motion (especially from the viewpoint of his chortling children). We could watch in fascination as man and feline stagger along the almost endless prairie of the aisle behind the cows, until in final triumph he manages to pour some milk in the cats’ dish, ending hostilities and silencing the howling horde.

In the farmer-friendly comedy/thriller, Pirates of the Cornfield (the Black Squirrel) we would find handsome Jonny Dep battling for possession of thousands of ears of sweet corn. Instead of the horrible fleshless zombies from the real movie he would be facing raccoons (with rings around their eyes, just like his own), turkeys (with beards to match his), white-tailed deer, and a rare mutant black squirrel, who leads them all with a sort of depraved charm. His trusty John Deere would give new meaning to the word, “swashbuckling”, as he races to pick corn faster than the varmints. Instead of falling dramatically into the ocean for a grand finale, he could disappear into the corn stalks like the ball players in….

Field of Sheep. In this rustic attraction, we will observe our hero trying to build a sheep farm near a large town in Iowa. He will be ridiculed and harassed by his urban neighbors as he fences pastures and builds a lambing shed. His family and his banker will scoff at his efforts. Instead of Moonlight Graham, his county extension agent will help save the day by demonstrating that sheep make good neighbors. His local Farm Bureau will take the place of the antique ball team in convincing his opponents.

Agriculture will prevail as he overcomes restraining orders, animal rights protesters and the Environmental Protection Agency to build a farm near a town. In the triumphant ending we will see him delivering lambs in his brand new lambing shed as his neighbors, won over by careful public relations work, watch in awe. If you build it they will come.

Our next farmer friendly movie will be Lord of the Strings. This three-film epic will gradually reveal the many ways that bale strings can be both the bane and saving grace of the farmer’s existence.

The first section of the story will find our faithful farmer repairing fence with a length of pinkish orange plastic twine that he discovered after tripping over it where it was buried in the lane.

During the second portion of our action thriller he will save hours of time bringing a new calf in from the field with a bit of hay rope, rather than going back to the barn for a halter or the calf crate.

This Christmas the third segment will be released and we will discover what other revolutionary use he has found for this ubiquitous farm tool. Rumor on the Lord of the Strings website says that it may be erosion control on creek banks.

Here in the real world of Northview Dairy, far from Hollywood’s glittering lights (but real close to those of the Speedway), we recently had a close encounter of the marsupial kind. It is still causing wrinkles in the fabric of our family life. Last Saturday along about nine PM, Liz’s dog, Gael, began to yip in her crate. I roused myself from a piteous stupor in front of the TV (I was sick) and ordered our eldest to take the darn dog out.

Suddenly shrieks erupted from the area of the back porch. The rest of the crew raced to the kitchen. They found Liz on the porch standing on the seat that the boss bought last spring for the skid steer (no, it hasn’t been installed yet, something about having to take the whole cab off to put it in). The seat was on top of a trashcan where the kids keep ball gloves and the tie chains for the show cows (don’t ask me, I’m not a kid). Liz was sort of hovering near the ceiling in a gibbering frenzy, so incoherent that it took several minutes to discover what had happened. Seems that just as she stepped outside a possum that had been raiding the cat dish ran over her bare feet. To hear her tell it the wretched thing was the size of Moscow. “I could feel its claws right through my socks,” she wailed.

That was about the last time she spoke to any of us because we had the audacity to find the whole episode funny. The more we laughed the madder she got.

She then turned to her friends at school for a bit of sympathy over her traumatic experience. Surely they would understand. Of course they did. Now whenever she walks down the hall, someone is sure to point at her feet and cry out, “Possum.”

Redneck traffic jam

In upstate New York

Dreamroad Extreme Heather
the lead cow