Afternoon at the garden pond 2008

It amazes me how every summer the garden pond looks totally different from the summer before.... even though I don't plan it that way. Some summers, entirely serendipitously, purple and pink will be the theme colors (I plant a lot of mixes and never know what to expect). Other years orange or red will prevail. This season summery yellow, brown, and orange seems to have taken pride of place. The giant brown-eyed Susan sort of things grew from a wildflower mix I planted last year. They just sort of took over, but I like them.
Still I am going to dig some up and put them out in the wilder part of the lawn so they don't take over. A friend gave me the tiger lilies a couple years ago and they really came into their own this year.


In the pond, besides gold fish, guppies and pseudo koi (which seem to be oddly marked goldfish) and the sunfish, there is an odd assortment of wild minnows that we caught at various locations. One of them is a sucker mouth minnow Alan got in the Schoharie two years ago. At the time it was a tiny thread, perhaps 1/4 inch long and barely even visible. Now it is the size of a cigar and the water fairly boils when it surges up after fish pellets.

A guppy, surviving outdoors despite the big sun fish
that we can't catch to get him out of the pond...

Gold fish begging and slurping up fish pellets.

A very welcome visitor.

View from the south.

More Fun with Foxes

Went out on the sitting porch at daybreak to take yet another sunrise photo. I know they all look alike, but I can't resist. It is my favorite time of day and we have a straight shot east to the horizon through the big windows....too pretty to pass up.

Anyhow, I was standing there, camera in hand, when a faint movement caught my eye half way down the driveway.

A grey fox. We have been seeing one regularly, although not getting many photos. It jumped into the bushes and I was lamenting the missed opportunity when another one trotted up the hill. then both of them began to dart in and out of the shrubbery, pouncing and bouncing, like dogs when they get into that "cracker dog" frenzy (that's what we have always called it) racing in circles, mouths open, tongues lolling, tails J-hooked behind them. They seemed spring loaded and light as dandelion fluff. I simply was not quick enough in the low light to get any shots of all that fun, especially since I was laughing so hard. I think these were a pair of half grown pups from the video fox, as they were slimmer and less fluffy than she was (not to mention considerably less dignified).




Suddenly they vanished.
Just that quickly.
Up the driveway lolloped a cottontail rabbit, bobbling merrily along, ears waggling lazily. I set the camera on video and waited to see what might happen. It hesitated, ears up, peering alertly around.
Came a little closer.
Paused again.
Then it whirled and fled willy nilly, scut flashing bright behind it. I didn't see the foxes again...simply couldn't wait for more to happen as it was milking time, but it was a neat bit of early morning drama.
I actually hope the little vulpines catch some of the darned bunnies. It seems like a fair trade to have them to protect my garden for me since they ate all our black caps so we couldn't make jam.

The heifer

A couple or three days ago one of the cows had a calf out on the hill. The boss was the one to find it and reported a beautiful heifer. He left it out there as it was too new to stand. The next morning the mama came down without it, but he saw it was okay so he still left it out there. He is the one who gets the cows most milkings and he didn't want to mess with it so it stayed out there under its mama's eye until tonight.


Every milking and sometimes in between we debated...what to do with this calf, what to do, what to do. You see its mama, Kid, AKA #152 is a total miserable witch of a cow. Her whole family is kind of on the nasty side, but she is the queen of mean. We milk her because she is also an excellent producer, but she isn't at the top of anyone's popularity list. We have more heifers than we need, so selling the calf would be an excellent option. However, we never seem to get market value for our heifers at the sale barn. We suspect that someone who is affiliated with the place buys them for themselves. It is frustrating. When heifer calves are bringing 600 bucks we will get two or three hundred or even less. We thought about trying to sell her to another farmer...or maybe saving up until we have several and hauling them to a sale out in the western part of the state. Finally we figured we would just keep her and see how she turns out. No one was real happy about it though. We have heifers all over the place and no more housing anywhere.


Tonight when the boss went up to hook up the feeder wagon the calf was sleeping under it, right next to the gate to the barn. When it saw him it jumped into the wagon and stood there swaying, legs spread wide. He wished for a camera and wondered if he could just hook up the wagon and bring it on down. However it soon jumped back out.


It was a good traveler by then though and when Liz and I were "being fence" while the cows came down to be milked it trotted right by with its dam. Beautiful calf. Then came the other debate. The cow was bred twice 19 days apart (the normal heat cycle is 21 days) She calved almost exactly half way between her two potential due dates....so was she bred to our own bull O-C-E-C Lindy Fred or Duregal Astre Starbuck? The calf was white and quite sharp around the head so we were leaning toward Astre. Fred throws them strong and black. If it was Astre then this calf is the first one put in there by LIz who studied AI in college and bred the cows while the boss was laid up last year.


Then Liz went out to catch the calf and pull it into the barn. She came back in muttering under her breath.
The muttering got louder.
And louder.
We soon understood why.
After all that discussion, all that fretting, all that deep concern over what we were going to do with that questionable heifer calf, she took a closer look at its plumbing.


And it is a bull!
So rather than deciding what to do with the calf we have to decide what to do with the man.

Mockery from the mockingbird

Spent some time this morning trying to get a photo of this mockingbird flaring his white wing patches to scare insects.




Close, but no cigar. I have been wanting to get some guinea hens to keep the tick population down. However, there is concern over how long birds as bereft of brainpower as guineas would survive with so many foxes and coyotes around. They are pretty expensive to buy just to put them on the menu for the local wildlife. With the mockers on duty maybe I won't have to get any.



And a foggy sunrise, which is about all we have been seeing lately. Word is that it may be going to dry out though. I am ready!



Guess who!

Road trip with tacky treasures

Tires have created the crisis de jour way too often the past couple of weeks here at Northview. Flat ones that is. Yesterday it was the stock trailer that showed up with one. We need to ship a cow next week, so Alan and I were elected to run up to Fort Plain for a new one, as well as to get some lug nuts and an impact socket for the repair job. Always inclined to combine tasks we stopped off to see my brother and his family for a few minutes as they live just down the road from the tire place. He is going to be working out of state for a while so we needed to check in.
Got to see their new garden pond, which is super nice. Couldn't stay long because we had so many stops to make.

Soon we passed a little garage sale. It was right next to a handsome old cemetery, so we grabbed a picture before we checked out the merchandise.The nicest part about this particular sale is that everything was free!




We wouldn't have even stopped but I saw these from the road, just sitting on the table calling my name.



I love cow figurines, but these are the ugliest I have acquired yet..... in such an appealing way. They are so tacky yet cute (of course I aspire to a pair of pink flamingos for the lawn too).

Then there was the dog. We were driving along one back road when a handsome golden retriever cross ran right out in the road in front of us, rendering movement impossible without hitting it. "Ruby!" Alan proclaimed, sure it was one of our friends' dogs, miles from her home. (I had never seen Ruby so I couldn't argue.) He checked her collar....just a rabies tag. No help there. I wasn't about to let him put a strange dog in the truck, Ruby or no Ruby, so we drove on down to our last stop (once she let us move the truck) and phoned home for our friend's phone number (hooray for cell phones). Of course when we got it no one answered at their farm.

Soooooo, on the way home we stopped there too to report the alleged Ruby sighting. Of course, Ruby was right there in the yard, waiting to bark us up the driveway. I have to admit, I could see why Alan thought the other dog was her though. The resemblance was remarkable. I wonder if they were litter mates. I am sure glad we didn't put dog A in the truck and drive her "home" though. That would have required some heavy duty explanations.






Upon arriving at our own home we found this guy lounging in the driveway.
Talk about solid comfort!
He didn't want to move until we were almost on top of him.

Much as I hate to leave the place and as much work as didn't get done in the garden because I wasn't home to do it, we had a great time. Adventure and excitement every step of the way

Homegrown Dinner

This is last night's supper just before it went into the oven before milking. It was done when we came in and, alas, eaten before I thought to take the "after" photo.

Everything involved was homegrown except the celery, vinegar, some garlic powder (didn't plant any last fall) and a dash of Italian seasoning. It was so much fun to assemble that I can scarcely call it work. The first potatoes of the year, two plants worth, were dug fresh from the bed behind the house and the big sheep pen garden the guys made me this year. One plant was started from some leftover sprouting potatoes that we bought to eat from the supermarket. The other was from seed potatoes we bought to plant. Oddly enough the supermarket hill yielded perfect orbs of potato goodness. The ones from certified seed potatoes were covered with potato scab.
Go figure. Didn't matter anyhow; they were all delicious, but I will dig the scabby ones first before they get too nasty.
Digging potatoes is kind of like treasure hunting to me. You never know what will come out of each hill and the anticipation is worth the sweat.

The carrots are rainbow carrots from Pinetree Garden Seeds. They are simply the best variety we have ever tried and I don't bother with anything else now. I grow them in half 15-gallon acid barrels from the milk house, in a mixture of sand, plain old dirt and compost. They thrive. I love the wet paint scent of a carrot fresh out of the ground....kind of fond of the taste too and not all the ones I pulled made it into the dinner. We are speculating about bringing a clean half barrel indoors this winter and trying to grow some like we do the indoor lettuce. Seems like we can never get enough of them.

The stew beef (I bake stew beef this way when I run out of chuck roast...turns out real tasty and tender) is from that Calbret HH Champion bull I bought the boss for Father's Day a couple of years ago....the one who didn't pass his blood test from the Holstein Association because somebody goofed on his dam's sire. Hated to eat such a well bred animal, but we couldn't use him as intended because the maternal grandsire was Ocean View Extra Special, a bull we used very heavily ourselves. (Right now in my first ten cows there are five by him, Bariole, Bubbles, Camry, Junie and Lemonade.) When we draw a bull of our own to use AI, it needs to be at least somewhat unrelated to most of the animals in the herd. This was just too close bred for comfort.

Anyhow, homegrown is kind of a favorite brand around here and the leftovers were pretty sparse. Now I can't wait for an excuse to dig more potatoes.

Slugs love relentless rain

Farmers don't so much. We had a terrible flood here in 2006. It did much harm to the small villages that line the Mohawk River Valley, not to mention making it nearly impossible to grow or harvest crops. I believe it was one of the worst years we have ever experienced, although I am still proud of the reaction of valley folks. People pulled together and stories of courage and sacrifice abounded. Friendships were made that still endure today with the foundation of shared hardship keeping them strong. It feels pretty good to live in a place where folks rise above such a natural disaster and pull their friends and neighbors right up with them.

However, I don't ever want to go through anything like that again. The farm barely survived. We couldn't get enough feed in for the cows and milk prices were at an all time low when it came. We lost a lot of businesses that folks in the valley relied on and roads were closed for weeks.
Now we are getting rain. Serious, relentless, heavy, long-term rain.
And more rain,
And more rain. It is falling on already saturated ground.

Some predictions call for more than seven inches in a single storm expected this afternoon. The last time it flooded our Agway was under about 8 feet of water. There was no power. We had barely enough diesel to run the generator to milk and authorities wouldn't let us off the farm to buy more. I don't want to see it again. As far as direct damage we were comparatively well off. We live on a near mountain. The driveways washed out but the boss is good at fixing them. We lost some trees and farm roads and some corn was ruined. Our town and our neighbors weren't so lucky.

However the slugs are having a regular slug fest out in the yard. I must have picked fifty off two pots of marigolds last night. I put the pots up on a table to protect them from the voracious little buggers, but I think I am going to have to bring some house plants back indoors. That is usually an October chore.
Anyhow, I sure am hoping for some dry weather. Folks need to make hay. I am so sorry for my brother, a part time farmer, who took this week off to bale up his hay. It has rained every single day. We don't even have any green chop left for the cows and may have to open a just finished ag bag to feed them. Pretty counter-productive in terms of winter feed storage.

I am hoping the authorities are paying attention to the dams and spillways, especially Gilboa and the dams at the river locks. There was some pretty harsh criticism of how the canal was handled last time. I wonder if we should buy in a load of diesel even though prices are dropping and it might pay to wait......

Liz got a surprise last night too

I wish you could have seen her last night. Cows are simply not normally affectionate creatures and they like neither an audience nor assistance while calving. Mandy did not want Liz out of her pen. When she left after cleaning the pen several hours before the calf was born the cow followed her to the gate mooing and carrying on. When she was back inside she put her head in the window and begged her to come back. I couldn't believe it! I am sure part of it was just oxytocin overload because the baby was coming, but Mandy and her oldest daughter Blitz really like to be around Liz. (I suppose it is silly to be surprised. I do too.)

***Oops, I forgot to give Liz credit for the video. She will be putting more up on BuckinJunction as soon as I get done writing the Farm Side so she can have this computer.

The nicest part of the season

And a few flowers that are blooming now.







And...what do you suppose Liz has been doing?
(Clue, it has nothing to do with the calf above)

Good surprise

Yesterday I had that impending milk inspector feeling....so I did just a little extra on the everyday tidying and cleaning that that the milk house gets. I even mentioned to Alan that I expected to see the inspector soon. (I have learned to always act on that niggling sense of doom.) Then in a flurry of paying bills and freezing zucchini and making our favorite rice, sausage and fresh vegetable bake for dinner I forgot all about it.

Imagine my surprise when Liz brought that thing up there over to the house. Sure enough the milk inspector had been here, but not to inspect. (Due to personnel issues nobody made it to the cooperative annual meeting so we didn't even know we were nominated for this.)

Not that we haven't won Super Milk before, because when we were in Canajoharie Coop we won several years and have another big sign like this and a number of the smaller signs with the year on them. However since we have been in Producers Coop we haven't won one.
So we didn't expect it.
And a lot of other things have been going very, very wrong.
So this was nice to find instead of the usual note about all the stuff we need to clean up or fix.

*****You can read about Super Milk here.
And see the list of winners from our county here.

I hope you are not bored yet

Common Merganser

Canada goose (begging, although we didn't feed them)

Common loon (not common enough though)

Foggy morning

Better this time than ever

Serenity is a duck

Ducks

Camp week

Last week was simply amazing. One of the nicest weeks we have ever spent at camp. There were birds and wild animals everywhere, the weather was stunning (except for one incredible downpour). We got to see any number of friends we don't get to spend time with very often. Caught a few fish. Took a lot of pictures...


194 in all plus one video. I only deleted a few when we got home where I could view them on the computer. I don't know what I am going to do with all those photos of ducks, geese kids and sunrises but I will think of something.

We puzzled for days over what these geese were grazing out of the trees until we started to find wild cherries floating on the water. If you click you can see the cherries, but we couldn't from where we were.

This beaver woke me up at 4:13 a couple of days ago, gnawing on a bass wood tree that hung out over the lake right under my bedroom window. It took me a long time to figure out what it was chewing and rolling rocks and splashing around just a few feet from where I was sleeping. I had thoughts of bears and other things more ominous than a beaver, until I heard it's signature somebody-throwing-a-bowling-ball-in-the-lake splash when I shined my flashlight out the window at it.

The Porch

Then yesterday morning as I was sitting on the porch sipping coffee, taking pictures of the sunrise and saying goodbye to the lake, it swam by about a foot from the porch. Then it disappeared in the trees overhanging the lake. For some reason it climbed up the hill to the outhouse, then thundered down, sounding like a whole herd of deer crashing through the bushes. It proceeded to swim aimlessly up and down the lake. Beavers are certainly interesting critters, but this one seemed to be operating on somewhat less than the prescribed number of cylinders so to speak. It certainly wasn't much afraid of me....or maybe it couldn't see me lurking up there on the porch. It just kept cruising past the porch...over and over again.





Until somebody said, BOO!

This is what happens when you say boo to a beaver

Who would ever believe that you would have geese eating cherries out of trees and beavers bowling under your bedroom window? Plumb amazing!

Home Again

We left this behind this morning to come home to the heat and humidity. No lie...I miss the lake.

******Lots of pics on the View at Northview

More Barn Blackboard

Here is the latest from the barn blackboard. See you next week, good Lord willing and the crick don't rise.

Those wild cows at Northview

Hattie, bringin' 'em on down. For some reason our lead cows are all Jerseys. Most of the time the herd is moved in and out with either Heather or one of her three daughters taking first position. It is the one time of year that I like the little brown cows.




Show cows have NO flight distance. Move toward them and, rather than moving away from you like any self respecting cow reacting to pressure, they either stand perfectly still and refuse to budge or come toward you. Here is how Liz gets her top cow, Mandy, out of the barn every day (the normal cows walk out on their own). We speculate that Mandy may have been a milk inspector in another life as she has to check everything out every day on her way to the door. Same feed bags, same breaker box, same gate...but different day. If she shows up with a clip board I am heading the other way...



The newest new milker, Becky's Evidence (wait for it, it's worth it) named after the Emerson Drive song of the same name. Evie had her first calf just a few days ago, but she has the routine pretty much figured out already. We have a whole mess of cows named after their songs (Simple Miracles, Drive, Moments, Hollywood Kiss, Lucky (for Lucky Man, my favorite), November, Countrified, Lemonade-Becky's top show cow-heck there are a whole bunch of 'em. I can't remember 'em all) and the girls are working on photos of them to give to the guys next time we get to a concert....hoping to make it to Vermont State Fair to see them. I think I am more excited than they are.





This is for Gumbo
Sorry FC

How about this story

GIPSA Alleges Swift and Company, d/b/a Swift Beef Company Violated the Packers and Stockyards Act

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...

Cats and comfort

It never fails that a cat will find the most comfortable spot available to lie down to rest. In winter you can spot the warm corners by the pile of cats tangled there. In the barn they will even lie in the fluffy bit of straw that collects behind a cow's elbow or on the sunniest windowsill, or even in a cow bed when she is standing up eating. (This can be very unhealthy if she lies down unexpectedly). Some pile onto sleeping calves until they look as if they were covered with a calico and grey carpet. It took Elvis about five minutes to find this lovely rug my brother wove for me........