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!

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.

HHH

Too hot for words....

Mockingbird Magic

We had some high drama here last night, involving someone outside the family who said some things that caused much emotional uproar. Those words had nothing to do with the farm or the family directly so I won't detail them here.

However, there were tears and pain, not mine, but when it is your family sometimes they feel like they are yours, and no one slept very well.

At three AM I woke up, wide awake, trying to remember if I had turned the compressor that cools the milk on or not. The tanker picked up yesterday and it is always shut off while the washer cleans the milk tank. It is arguably my job to turn it back on every other day when we start to fill it up with fresh milk. Normally I make a point to think about what I am doing when I do it so that when I wake up at 3 AM I can say, yeah I turned it on and go back to sleep.

Yesterday I forgot to do that.

So, I got up, threw my barn boots on with my bathrobe and hiked to the barn. The moon turned the yards into a ragged chiaroscuro of light and dark, so bright it seemed as if you could see a faint tinge of green among the greys and blacks. There was the least hint of skunk on the air and it was almost as crisp and cold as fall, truly a beautiful night.

As I tugged the cold rubber of the boots on over my cold bare feet a faint sound came from the field. At first I thought it was a cricket. With the Thruway devoid of travelers there was silence except for that vague call. It came again, not a cricket...just ....something.....

Then suddenly the air filled with opulent sound as the pasture mockingbird (not to be confused with the house mockingbird) burst into gay and glorious song. His notes were round and full and fluent, the calls of all the other birds combined together, each more melodious than the one before.

I just stood there, soaking it all up, the breeze, the light, the magical song, even the distant skunk. There are people who have more fame and fortune than my most bedazzling moments could conjure, but I wonder how many of them get free midsummer serenades in a theater as beautiful as a late June night in the country. If I was counting blessings I would surely have run out of fingers and toes before I even got started. The hike to the barn, usually an onerous misery at night, was a treat indeed, not a mosquito to be had and that glimmering song trailing behind me like a train of stars.

The tank was on. River, who had twin bulls yesterday and was left in the barnyard to recover, was fine. When I went back to bed, the singer was still pouring out a sweet stream of secret music with no one to listen but him and me...and maybe mephitis mephites.

The Roof is Done

Which means a lot to me. A couple of years ago we lost a couple of sheets of roofing steel. Couldn't seem to find any contractors that wanted to bother with it and the boss can't climb so...we just lived with the leak. then a severe storm early this year peeled off a good third of one section. The leak became an indoor water park, so much fun in a rainy season like this one. Once again we called contractor after contractor to no avail. Most of them promised and promised and promised, but were simply too busy to be bothered to actually show up.

Then the boss called a few Amishmen, got estimates, and within less than two weeks the job was done. I wish you could have seen them work. They were like squirrels. Really fast moving squirrels. Where I suspect "English" contractors would have erected scaffolding on the main barn where the damage was...very high in the air btw...the Amishmen put a ladder up by the milk house and scurried over the lower roofs until they reached the junction with the big roof and went up that way. I could not stand to watch them. They sauntered around on that high roof like it was the barn floor, no hands, no ladder, no nothing.

I would never have believed the job could be done in a day, but they arrived around seven in the morning and by four in the afternoon the tools were packed away and the new steel was shining in the late afternoon sun.
It was awesome.
They used lumber we had stacked in the heifer barn against just such a repair and had to tear the stacked pile apart to get boards long enough to fit their needs. When they finished, despite the boss telling them not to bother, they re-stacked the whole pile...for which we are grateful.

Hopefully the new roof won't leak (although we certainly don't need any more rain to be testing it) and it will stand up to the ferocious winds we seem to get every few weeks now. Time will tell.

I had to laugh this morning when I came down the stairs. I always pause on the landing to see what it is up out in the yard. This morning Mr. and Mrs. robin were lounging around under the big blue spruce. For the past few weeks their single young one has been following them around like a fat, speckled beggar, importuning them for food all day long. Apparently he finally went out on his own and they were loving it. The male was lying on his side in the driveway, for all the world like a barn yard chicken at its leisure. The female was popping around self-importantly, chasing English sparrows away from him. It was hilarious and I wish I could have watched all morning. Alas the cat was howling for his breakfast and if I don't get the old dog out promptly in the morning she makes me wish I had.....

Have a great day!

Weather and Amish Machinery

Amish hay loader

Must hurry to make full use of the weather we are having...just about the first good weather of the summer. The boss is baling.
Chopping.
Working on machinery.

Not this machinery...this is a horsedrawn hay rake some Amishmen
left parked near here. They are hustling after hay too.

Yesterday Liz and I cleaned calf stalls and led calves. The last part was fun. I love training them to lead, even if they will never be show cows, like Northstar. They are so much nicer to handle when they are older if they are handled when young. I got to do something I have always wanted to do...lead an own daughter of SWD Valiant. I always wanted one, back in the day, but could never afford to buy one. Last year the kids went to the OHM Sale and bought some semen, and I got a heifer calf off old Beausoleil. Her name is Bastille, but I am calling her Tilly. (For you old time Holstein folks, we also have daughters of Straight Pine Elevation Pete (milking and calves) Citation R Maple (ditto), a milking Cal-Clark Board Chairman and two Whirlhill Kingpin daughters. I'll bet we are one of very few herds that do.)



Then I froze some beets. Kept on catching up on the laundry I couldn't dry all summer...no dryer so it is the line or the bars.
Did books.
Built a new fire (thanks FC, you are still helping me with that job.)
Helped unload a wagon of bales.
Milked without the usual compliment of helpers....fair week, vacation week, folks away at college.
Today more of the same, but with zucchini this time.
Not complaining though. If I could bottle this weather and stretch it out I would do it.

Ain't Complainin'

About the weather that is. Oh, I could. The first half of the week was blazing hot. Nineties. Sticky humid. Then Tuesday night we got a pop up thunderstorm that did just that.

Pop up I mean. When we went to chores it was gloomy and a little windy. Maybe a rumble of thunder in the distance, but no looming threat. We prepped the first set of cows and got the machines on and since the thunder was getting just a tad more emphatic I walked over to the house to unplug the computers. (Which Becky had already unplugged.)

By the time I walked to the office, via the dining room, which is where they are, and back to the door the wind was howling, laying the bushes and shrubs right down and lashing the trees like crazy. The rain began to pelt down so hard it made a din you wouldn't believe. And the Thunder Rolled.

I collected an umbrella and some hats for me and the girls and waited on the back porch wondering if I should try to get back to milking. Usually whenever someone is stranded at the house by bad weather we all figure they should stay there until it lets up. Still, they had just started milking.
And Alan had gone up to the thirty acre lot to pick up a tractor and a forage wagon. He wasn't back yet when I left.

So I decided to run for it.
I don't do run you know.
Not built for it.
Bad knee.
All the usual excuses. However, I ran that night for all I was worth. It was raining so hard the umbrella was completely useless. Lightning was flashing on all sides. It was quite an incentive to hustle I'll tell you. I kept wiggling the umbrella trying to convince the lightning that it would be too hard to hit a moving target for it to bother.

It was a big relief to make it to the barn and find Alan had arrived safely. I was completely drenched but unfried. We got back to work, watching a torrent building in the roadway and the heifers trying to walk on water in a new puddle. It isn't a lot of fun to milk in a thunderstorm, but we have surely seen worse.
So please understand...I am NOT complaining

It is hot. It is humid. It hasn't exactly been the best summer ever and all....However, we really shouldn't complain about the weather.

Really we shouldn't

Wren on the Front Porch

Chitter, chitter, chittering. There is an English sparrow that loves to torment him by sitting right next to his second nest. I chase it away a dozen times a day just to shut him up. (I hate the darned things too.) I suppose I should get up now and show my scary face at the door but I am feeling too lazy and privileged just now. The thing which we are 99% positive is a willow flycatcher is coming right onto the other porch now to tug at some yarn on a trellis I grew moon flowers on the past few years (they froze in June last summer so I decided not to bother this year.) It is thrilling to see the little thing but it is too leery for me to get a photo.....yet....

Dog in the food bag. Guess he got tired of waiting. Becky, sleeping beauty herself, has taken to getting up before me, turning on my computer, taking the doggies out and making me a cup of perfect coffee, which is steaming gently, awaiting my arrival each morning. I feel as if I have somehow entered an alternate universe.......a very nice one. But I should go feed the dog before he eats the whole bag. He may be blind, deaf and tippy, but he knows how to take care of himself.


Sun up and shining, praise the Lord. The guys filled over forty feet of bag yesterday, more than they have been able to do for weeks. The girls and I milked all the cows so they could stay in the field. We sold one that was terribly mean and nasty this week and I sure didn't miss her when I had to milk my string alone last night. I wasn't thrilled with the price but after talking to folks who were at the sale, it looks like we got lucky and topped the sale with her and two heifers we sent over. I am grateful for that. The latest thing at the cattle auctions is to call a "no sale" and take the animal anyhow. Somebody sure as heck is doing all right at that!

Got the hot sheet from DHIA and our weighted SCC average was just over 100 thousand. Been having some challenges in that area so we were delighted. Nothing bad mind you....it is just that premiums are about the only aspect of our price we can do anything about and we pursue them mightily.

Liz is off to Countryfest today. She won a ticket from WGNA..... so...if any of you local folks are over there and you see her, please keep an eye....that is an awful brouhaha for a young girl to attend alone.

Sunday Stills...Wild Flowers

For more Sunday Stills....

Good morning. Sorry about yesterday. It dawned clear and sharp and bright. The air was clean and fresh. It didn't rain. So everybody in the family worked like a dog with two tails to take advantage before it starts pouring again. (This afternoon by all accounts.) Between grabbing a good day when we could and Frontier being down most of the day, I barely even looked at the computer. We cleaned the barn and Becky swept the whole house. I weeded the small garden patch. The guys chopped haylage. We cleaned mangers. We moved heifers up on the hill into the big heifer pasture.

They are a bunch of big ones we really wanted to keep right by the house for the summer, as we are breeding them AI. We need to see when they come in season and be able to catch them to do that. There are self-locking stanchions there we can use for the latter job. However with all the rain the mud in the yard became ridiculous. They just couldn't stay in it any longer. Now they are in a huge field with no headlocks, where it will be hard to see them in heat let alone catch them. We had to think about their health and comfort though.

Unfortunately it is also the field where we are holding the dry cows and calving some of them. Liz goes out every day and walks that fence and checks for new calves or new problems. I will worry more now as some of the big heifers are aggressive and others are overly friendly. (When something weighs well over a thousand pounds, cuddly is bad.) She takes a cell phone and a big stick but still....it got pretty western yesterday moving some of them. One of them, a big, ugly beast named Armada, was downright dangerous when we were trying to get her up the lane. (I am too old to dodge charging heifers, I have to say.) I think she may have sealed her fate and be looking at an auction-bound trailer ride next time we handle them. I need money to pay bills and we don't need dangerous animals. This was the second time she has caused problems.

Today we get another good weather day before storms are expected for tonight. Liz and I need to set up a couple of calf hutches as we have more calves than we have places to put them. We need to get strawberries before the season ends. Rain and frost have made that a big problem. Becky needs to get taken to Walmart for going to Potsdam supplies.

We lost one of our best heifers to bloat Saturday night into Sunday (one of those in the barn until ten thirty nights). I for one still haven't gotten past it. If you have them you will lose them, s**t happens and all, but she was a Silky Cousteau out of an Ocean View Extra Special, a really, really special animal. It was just a freak thing. We treated her and had her coming around good, but she was still pretty weak. Sunday morning Liz and Ralph milk. She was okay then. They came in from the barn for breakfast and while they were eating she rolled herself over on her head and probably suffocated. Only heifer her mother ever had and she is gone too so.....

Just a lousy weekend overall.

Strange Sky

A Bigger, Better Bird Feeder

The yard is alive with birds.




More than usual, even though there have really been a lot of them this summer. I went out yesterday to check on a yellow warbler that hit the big windows. (He was fine.)






And found that the mulberry trees are loaded with fruit. Cat birds, mockingbirds, cedar waxwings, robins and just about everybody in the neighborhood are in full holiday mode. I hope they stay away from my laundry.

Liberating Lucy

As longtime readers may know, we received a while back the unlikely gift of a turkey hen that is imprinted on people. Her name is Lucy. She is tame, sweet, and staggeringly stupid. She is a lovely sort of slate blue and turkey brown. She walks around the yard, beak pointed upward, chirping in a soft, melodious voice that sounds like a mother tenderly cooing to her babe. You can walk right up to her...except when you need to put her in the hen house. (Did I mention that she is about as smart as a lump of butter.?)





Who knew that when we decided to let the hens, absurdly multitudinous roosters, and good old Lucy range free during the day, getting her back inside would be so darned hard?

The first night Becky went out to close the door on the hens, as farm bird care is nominally her job. She returned much scratched and not too happy, ranting and raving about how hard it is to catch and carry a turkey. Yeah right. She is such a drama queen.

Then last night she wanted to watch some special TV show and the sun sets kinda late these days (for which I am everlastingly grateful). So I said I would put the birds away when it got dark.

A quarter to ten. The sky to the East and North is still glowing peachy gold, with puffy dark grey clouds, like fat smoky cats littering the horizon. I take my trusty flashlight and revel in the fact that it is still lightish at ten at night. I love the long days. Just love them.

A swirl of the light through the hen house reveals sleeping hens and roosters, like feathered fruit, on every high place.

No Lucy.

I find her sitting alone in the middle of the driveway looking very sorry for herself. When she sees me she starts to walk quickly away so I grab her tail. Everyone who has ever captured poultry knows you never grab the tail. The grab-ee turns into an instant self-propelled windmill, whirling on frantic wings until the tail feathers all pull out. The bird runs away, less fluffy in the rear perhaps, but free from your clutches anyhow. Well, if you think grabbing a chicken that way is exciting, try a turkey. Her huge, heavy, wings drummed on my arms and smashed my face. Her tail didn't pull out but I let go....just couldn't hang on.

So I herded her through nettle and burr, up almost to the door of the hen house. She obviously wasn't going in so I grabbed her again, this time by the base of her wings. What a powerhouse! When she flapped, I flapped. She doesn't look very big but I felt like the little dog that finally caught the car. I staggered over to the coop, threw her inside, and slammed the door.

Turkeys are strong. All that thick breast meat? Pure muscle. Schwarztenbirdie personified so to speak I am not sure I want to do that every night so I am thinking of closing dear Lucy in the caged part of the hen house and letting only the hens run free. I am not so sure that I will win the next time.

Air

We finally opened the big front doors yesterday. Normally this is a job for late April. I hate having plastic up over the beautiful windows so I pull it down as soon as I can bear to. We have no choice but to put up plastic as the old doors are drafty as a bat cave and the wind beats against the front of the house all winter like the devil's angry fist.

However, last fall the guys managed to put plastic over the outside instead of inside where I have to staple it up...so we could see the windows all winter.

Then there has been this cold, wet, unforgiving spring. I didn't WANT to take the plastic down. It has been that cold.

Yesterday dawned sticky and breathless. No air. No breeze. Drawing breath was a conscious job and the valley smelled like a wet mop. I tried to pry the plastic off, but I am short and turning into a worse wienie every year. Liz had to do it. As soon as it was down and the doors were opened, the house took a deep breath and finally, finally, shuddered off winter. Soon a breeze popped up and the laundry began to snap on the clothesline......and within an hour the wren was on that porch. Despite nesting in the box on the other porch. Despite spending weeks swinging from the camel bells there and chittering all day long, he moved the minute the doors were open.

Somehow the birds seem to know that if they sing in front of the door on that porch, the two-story, ten-foot ceilings front hallway will serve as a birdie Carnegie Hall for them, amplifying and strengthening their voices until they sound like the biggest birds on the river. I wonder how long it will take the mockingbird to show up....and the great crested fly catcher...phoebe....cardinal....I wonder if they have been doing this since the house was built so very long ago..

Sunday Stills...Tri Color

For more Sunday Stills......

Sunday Stills....Silhouettes

Did we have fun with this one?
Oh, yes, we really did.
At first I thought I might not even try....so busy this time of year. Then once we got started I had such a great time that we ended up with a lot of them.
For more Sunday Stills, go here.

Saturday Morning Special

The best laid plans

Last night's sunset

Of mice and mothers...gang aft agley.
Or to put it more plainly we got everything done that we undertook yesterday except any corn. The weather men sprang a frost warning on us so the afternoon was spent dragging house plants indoors and finding canvases......oh, and saying hasty prayers that the corn would be spared so we can finish freezing what we can and giving the rest away to friends and relatives.

A Mennonite conveyance

We did run up to the Farm Progress Show for about an hour. It is so close it is hard to resist.

A not so Mennonite conveyance

In the end I don't think it froze or is going to between now and daybreak. A fuzzy, wet fog came in and the crickets are still chirping vigorously. I hope I am right! The "new" tractor, which is actually second hand is quirky in its starting. The dealer came down yesterday morning and got it going....just tightened a loose wire. Then yesterday afternoon after starting up fine all through mowing hay and drawing down loads it froze up again. Going to call them as soon as they open this morning. I am sure they will make it right, but it certainly is a pain to be stalled again. Haying, between breakdowns and horrible weather, has gone very badly this summer and we are way, way behind.


Some farm land....taken through the windshield while going about fifty, excuse the lack of clarity

Froggie pause

During the great laundry epic.....

College starts today

The fair starts tomorrow. No zucchini so I will be skipping that class. I don't think I am going to cut down my giant sunflowers either......so I guess I will be just taking over some photographs....of frogs and toads, amazingly enough.

Hoping to get time to help Liz get her decorations up today. She was out in the barn until about 10:30 last night clipping heifers.....guess she is done with them anyhow. Figuring on missing Becky and Alan a lot today, but I guess I have to get used to it.

And all I have for you is this little sneaky snake Beck caught yesterday. I have never seen as many garter snakes as we have this summer. This one is slimmer than a pencil and about as long as the worn off stubs of them that I keep finding in Alan's pockets when school is in session. As little as they are they will hiss and spit and strike at you just as if they had something to back it up with. (The snakes, not the pencil stubs...the latter just make a lot of noise in the washing machine if I miss them.)