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.)

Sleepy Sunday

Moose like sprinkers too.

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

Summer skies

Last night the sky was actually this strange red.
I have never seen it this color before.
I didn't think the camera would catch it, but it did.

We are suddenly having a little spell of favorable weather. I saw more hay being rolled up and baled today while Beck and I were driving over to Cobleskill than I have seen so far all summer. I waved to all the farmers dragging rakes and balers and wagons around their fields because I wished them well with all my heart. This has been a horrible summer weatherwise and some clear skies and dry air are long over due. I felt like cheering them all on, especially the elder fellow with the brilliant red umbrella shading him as he tooled along raking up some nice first cutting. He waved back and grinned from ear to ear.

Last night

Anyhow, last night and this morning I took still more sky pictures. I'm sorry but I just can't resist the sky.

Sunrise today

Dairy quiz bowl question

What substance flows through the cow's milk vein?

Mandy's milk vein

Answer: blood of course.

We like to see thick, twisted, gnarly milk veins....they have been associated, at least in our minds, with good production.

Here is a page of dairy quizzes for kids. Here are lots more if you like 'em. Our three all participated in dairy quiz bowl and did well at the regional level. Sometimes Liz even went to state (you have to be in the top ten in the region to go to state). Becky was once put on a team made up of leftover kids from several counties. She was a junior, but the team competed at the senior level. (She had been bumped off our junior team because the captain thought she wasn't good enough.) She came in somewhere along about 4th in the region...fourth senior that is. Finished ahead of our entire senior team...not to mention kinda doing good for a junior that couldn't make the team. We were pretty proud of her!

I ended up coaching our novice team for a number of years and it was an incredible lot of fun. It was absolutely a thrill to start with kids who didn't know the answer to the title question at the beginning and end up with them answering hundreds of much harder ones. They worked so hard studying those pages of questions and learning about cows. One girl, who incidentally was born about ten minutes before Alan at the very same birthing center, won first in the region and she didn't even have any cows, being a horse person.

Fair time marks the end of summer

Mandy is all clipped and shined up.
On show day she will be bagged too, but in this shot her udder is pretty empty
as she was milked a few hours before.

This year it also means that the last of my babies is off to college. Liz has graduated and is staying home to work with us, which is truly sweet. The other two start Monday and for some reason it is bothering the heck out of me. I can barely sleep nights, even though they are both commuting as there is an excellent state college about 25 miles from here. Becky will be continuing her studies majoring in anthropology and Alan will begin in fisheries and wildlife.


Their schedules are just plain nasty, with many days that they will leave at 7 AM and not return until 10 PM. Becky has been the calf raiser this year. Liz and I will be doing that now so it means an extra job. Alan has worked as hard as any man helping his dad and milking with me. We will miss their help for sure. However what I am going to miss most is the comedy and camaraderie we normally take for granted. We have a lot of fun no two ways about it. NapoleON and his appendi and the excellent discussions of all the latest reading material will be sadly lacking in the barn this fall. I am sad, even so far as to feel kind of crushed about it all. I know babies are supposed to grow up and leave, but who knew I was going to like them so much?


On the plus side Liz and I will have lots of good long cow talks and that is a very satisfying passtime. We can talk about cows and feeding and fitting and showing and making advantageous matings all day and half the night if we get a chance. I am sure glad I will still have that.....and weekends.

We love our cows

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?

You go Grandma

Armed 85-year-old makes burgler call police.

We went to the fair

With the camera....and took pictures of jaws.




And of the new Miracle of Birth center...I also interviewed Dr. Lyman for this week's Farm Side

Chickies hatching

The fair sits in a circle of mountains.

Guess what we did yesterday

Choking on a duck

Is what Liz says her dad sounds like when he is snoring in his Sunday chair.

A very strange storm

Last night the boss, Becky and I finished up milking and chores so Liz and Alan could go over to Altamont Fair. We started early so we were in the house by 7:30, which was nice for a change. However, the weirdest thunderstorm was making up just as we finished. It was so strange that I took 51 pictures of it and of how things inside looked in the bizarre yellow light, before it became too dark to take any more.

The sky was an intense yellow color

The crows were getting out of here

The kids enjoyed the fair although cattle entries are down this year over 70 head. I am sure the economy is to blame. Showing is expensive so it is one of the first things cut when farmers are hurting (our cows aren't there for the first time in 11 years.) They brought me home bread pudding from the grange booth, with which I am about to break my fast for today....


The fair has put in a new birthing center where calves are born each day and I guess that is a big hit. If I get a chance to go over it will give me something interesting to write about for the Farm Side this week. (Special thanks to a certain family member who bought us a state fair pass for Christmas so we can go to fairs at all.)


They had quite an adventure on the way home. They both spotted an odd reflectiveness in the road in directly front of them. Alan thought it was a guard rail, but it was in the wrong place. Before he could react, Liz hollered at him to stop and he stood that little blue pick up right on its nose. Believe it or not the thing in the road was a fire truck turning in to someone's driveway! Thank God for reflective paint on the sides or they would never have seen it at all until they plowed right into it. The night was foggy but it appeared to be driving without any lights at all. I wonder what was going on. I'll bet if the tax payers over that way knew someone was driving their fire trucks around in the fog at 10:30 at night with no light they would wonder too.




Anyhow, here are some pics of the storm. I don't think I have ever seen yellow light like this. Every single tree and flower had an eerie glow, but it was pretty in an uncomfortable sort of way. When the wind got up I was watching the bottoms of the clouds I can tell you....and lightning struck so close that although it was blocked from my view by the house, the ground lit up even in broad daylight.

Off to the south


Looking north while the storm was building in the west

Moooooony

***Top one is untouched...added light to the bottom two, to make the photo look like the sky actually did last night when Lizzy and I came home....

Thunder and Parakeet

(alternate title, This IS SPARTA!)


We are in full fair preparation mode here. (And the guys are in full disparately trying to fix the diskbine mode. As soon as they run out of mowed hay we are going to have to feed winter feed...and that is very, very bad.).

Anyhow, Liz and I hit WallyWorld, she for fake maple leaf garland for her cow display (about the fourth trip...they finally came in) and myself to get the photos I am entering printed and put into frames. We also had to get cat medicine but that is another story for another day. When we arrived back at our wild and crazy domicile on the mountain, the boss was just walking over from the barn with a spec sheet for the gear box on the mower. He said, nonchalantly, "There's a parakeet over at the barn if you want to see it."

WHAT!?!?!? We have been excited all summer over the barn swallows, but a parakeet?

I had the camera with me...I always have the camera with me. So I shuffled off my flip flops and ran for the barn (didn't want to get my only good pair of flip flops all mud now did I?)

I arrived to see this:


I took the picture and turned around and trotted straight back to the house to send Becky, who is bird crazy, over with a couple of fish nets. I didn't want to watch. That is my only son there. I am kinda, sorta fond of him and watching him climb the rafters of the cow barn after that little blue bird was not on my list for the day.

A few minutes later they came to the house, him clutching the poor little thing in his wiry (and astonishingly grimy) hands. They put it in this Plexiglas pet thing that some friends gave us years ago. We don't have a bird cage...we don't have any birds...or we didn't until this one showed up in the barn yard.

Of course I had to be regaled with the rafter climbing stories. (They made me shudder in proper mother mode). The bird was kind of shocked at first, but soon settled enough to hop around the sticks they offered him as perches and to drink from a cut-off soda bottle and tear up baby sunflower heads for seeds.

They named him Leonidas.
They want to keep him.....I dunno.....he must have belonged to someone at some point, but he seems to have been wild a while.


****Oops, forgot to write the thunder part. As soon as the kids got Leo into the house another big storm hit. Wonder if he would have survived.


******Tragic update. although he was eating and drinking and climbing around happily in his cage, Leonidas suddenly keeled over stone dead for no apparent reason. Poor birdie.

Working Wednesday **

*** Farm Side deadline today

Weather woes

I guess a good part of the nation has 'em. We were "blessed" with around three inches of rain yesterday, most of it all at once. (We are thinking of applying to become a national park as the driveways resemble canyons.) Up by Vernon, on Sunday, we were traveling just behind a serious hail storm (Liz only went around 45 mph so we could stay behind it. People, of course, were passing her, and in a couple miles we would find them sitting beside the road waiting for it to go away). Corn fields were almost completely stripped of leaves by the hail and pastured heifers were running in circles, probably frightened by the bombardment. The boss just came in from talking to our milk truck driver and he said that he nearly slid through an intersection south of here because there was hail piled so high in the road.

On the plus side we stayed home from Altamont Fair this year for various reasons. Yesterday was truck in. We sat in the living room waiting for the downpour to let up and sent good thoughts to the poor souls who were trying to get animals hauled in to the fair and made comfortable. Altamont is a nice fair, but the fair grounds sits in a little hollow surrounded by mountains. Storms tend to get stuck in there and wreak havoc.

Anyhow, here are a couple of videos from the rodeo Liz took me to Sunday. One is Reese Cates, who eventually won the whole thing and the other is Kody Lostroh, who made some nice rides and is a really nice guy. (Liz has corresponded with him on line for a while and finally got up nerve enough to introduce herself...he was very pleasant.)




Kody Lostroh rides at Syracuse

Kody Lostroh

Reese Cates

Reese Cates

Reese Cates wins at Syracuse

And it was him we saw at Albany

Some errands then home again, home again jiggitty jig

Alan and I went to Fort Plain yesterday to get barn calcite, hydrated lime, chicken feed, vacuum pump oil, beet pulp, bicarb and bread (the only thing that was actually for people.) We saw a lot of traffic of the sort in the photo below. It is scary how hard these are to see from behind if they are out on the highway and pass under a shady tree. they are supposed to have the big orange triangle slow moving vehicle signs affixed to the back so you can see them, but they just use a little orange tape instead. We hustled to get home because I wanted to say good bye to Liz who went to Syracuse for a rodeo. Just made it.





The home again part is always nice. I am no traveler. My folks invited me to go west to pan gold with them this fall and I turned them down.....actually though, I would have taken them up on that one, I am just crazy for treasure hunting and they are going to my utmost favorite national park. However, it is isn't fair to the rest of the crew when I leave them with that much work. My camp vacation is enough for me I guess
.

Geraniums I grew from seed this spring

Rhubarb leaf bird bath made by my aunt and uncle.
Birds are finally using it now.

And all you knowledgeable gardeners, could you tell me what this flower is? It is the lone survivor of a pack of assorted wild flowers I planted ten years ago or so. It grows down by the driveway and blooms every summer. I am thinking of moving it up by the pond.

Dodging BBs

The guys are facing an uncomfortable dilemma. Thanks to endless showery rain interspersed with heavy storms, our harvest this summer is at least three weeks behind.

This spring, as usual, the boss planted barley, oats and field peas as a nurse crop for the new hay seeding. The big burly plants crowd and shade out weeds and are harvested about mid summer, having given the delicate alfalfa, clover and grass seedlings a chance to get growing.

Normally, this is a simple matter of mowing the stuff down with a diskbine and chopping it up for the cows to eat or to store it with our AgBagger.
Enter that three week delay.
All those nurse crop plants are ripe instead of green like they are supposed to be. (You should see the grins on the beaks of the turkeys and crows as they help themselves to the bounty of free grain).

Have you ever gone to the store and seen those pea soup mixes?The ones consisting of little green half-peas that are hard as quartz and just about as tasty? Well, glue a pair of those half-peas together and you have a field pea. When whirled through the spinning blades of the diskbine you also have a not-quite-deadly, but certainly uncomfortable missile. Glue hundreds of thousands of them together and you have a hay field here at Northview.

The other day the boss and Alan were hustling to get the cows fed and some stuff in the bag ahead of yet another rain. The boss was mowing and he was under constant assault from a barrage of field pea BBs. The darned things leave welts. (He showed me.) So he signaled to Alan (driving the BIG tractor to chop. It BTW has a CAB). Sure enough the kid had left a nasty old hooded jacket in that very cab. They met in the middle of the field to pass it over. Then the boss donned it, hood and all, despite the clinging heat and humidity that is characteristic of Upstate NY summer afternoons.
Despite the stink too. Objects left in tractor cabs during summers like this mildew more than just a little. Especially when the doors and windows are off...and it is hot after all.
And despite the enclosed spiders...they love to nest in old coats. And to crawl all over and nip the tender parts of folks who are intrepid enough to put them on.

The boss is nothing if not intrepid. And when he was going against the wind he could stand the smell and the itchy heat...or at least it was more bearable than the BB attack.
Going with the wind he had to take it off. It was so hot his head was spinning (I think this is why most of us don't wear coats in the summer up here, but then most of us aren't being plugged from behind by round balls of petrified vegetable matter). Somehow he managed to finish his mowing just before the next deluge.

Normally I figure that when the men are doing field work and we women are in the barn milking the cows, they have the better part of the deal. Back when I used to chop, despite the complicated nature of the job, I always loved to get out of the barn and into the beauty of the fields. The swooping barn swallows, the perfumed breezes, the gold and green vistas hemmed in by dark green mountains...it is pretty nice out there even if you are working hard.

However, now that they are under constant attack by small stinging missiles, I guess I will stay in the barn and let them have at it...poor guys.

Ethanol and livestock based agriculture

Ethanol makes my car run terribly. I go out of my way to find gas that doesn't have it.

Ethanol makes my grain bill a painful prospect by increasing demand for both corn and corn alternatives.

Fertilizer prices are obscene.

The farm gate price of milk is set by government regulations. Dairy farmers have no way to pass these increased costs along so there is a serious pinch being felt here and at livestock farms across the nation.

Here are a couple of interesting sites with more details about this phenomenon.

Top ten farm expenditures (includes change from 06 to 06

Choices and unintended consequences.

Hyssop

We added hyssop to the herb garden for the first time last summer. It wintered over well and in the contained area by the honey locust it doesn't seem invasive. It has produced a few seedlings though, which I will pot up when I get a chance.....it is too nice not to share. We don't really use it for anything, but it is attractive and we love the scent.
A crushed leaf smells just like licorice.
We give each other leaves sometimes.

When is a peeper not a peeper?

....when it's a sneaky green frog

Monsanto trying to sell Posilac

No, not the drug. They already sell that. They are attempting to divest themselves of the division of their company that produces it.

Even though there is no way to chemically differentiate milk produced from cows who are or are not treated with it, I guess the writing is on the wall. Processors don't want it. Consumers have been convinced rightly or wrongly that they don't want it. If Monsanto is trying to ditch it, it is probably on the way out.

For the record we don't use it for a number of reasons, none of them having anything to do with the quality of the milk resulting. I think it wasn't the best thing in the world for the dairy industry, spurring production in excess of demand. Now a large percentage of milk is again produced without it and there still seems to be some excess production, so either people are still using it (after all it is undetectable) or more likely, other management methods have caught up and are increasing production.

I was interested to read this article though. On one hand I am not going to miss it if it falls by the wayside because we don't use it anyhow. On the other hand this seems to open the door to removing other technology on the dairy, some of which we might use.

Just another day

Knot O' Snake
(He was all tied up...)
(He did this to himself and was soon undone before Becky let him go)

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.

Mountain lions

Are not something I even want to contemplate.
This story of one taking a dog right out of a house, right out of someone's bedroom, flat makes me shudder. Even if the door was open. (HT to A Coyote at the Dog Show)

Right now, even though we haven't seen one, we suspect we have a black bear hanging around the place. Little things have tipped us off to the possibility of something unusual going on around us, such as the behavior of the cattle. Last night the men left us women to milk alone. No biggie; we do it all the time. However, this time it turned out to be simply a nightmare. Cows knocked milkers off. Cows crowded and thumped on us. Cows that NEVER kick, such as little Camry, who seems to appreciate Alan's efforts in saving her life this spring, kicked and kicked and kicked.

Then, when we turned them up the hill, as we always do while we finish up the last few cows, they bolted back down to the barn and all came right back inside. It is is not unusual for one or two to wander back in to look for spilled grain or just to pester us, but my whole south line ran back in at once, jumped into their stalls, then the heifers, which stay outside and don't even HAVE stalls, came in and crowded up between the cows.

It was nuts. We didn't get dinner until almost ten.
They were fine this morning.
If it was a bear, I hope it has moved along. We thought we had one last summer, because of some similar weird goings on, but we never actually saw it. After a while the strange things just stopped happening and the cows calmed back down to normal. As far as mountain lions go, I hope I never, ever see one....especially not in my bedroom. Especially not eating my dog.

And I don't want to see one in my garden either.

New meaning

To the concept of layering

Hay weather (not)

Here it comes

Yep, that's rain

And there it goes again

I am hoping real hard for a couple weeks of precipitation-free weather. For three weeks now, I don't think we have gone two days without a shower, many of them very heavy. In one two or three day period the man we buy straw from said we had nine inches. There is simply no place for that much water to go. You also cannot bale decent hay in this kind of season and we need to get some. The guys are chopping, but even that is hindered as we have acres and acres of new seeding and barley that need to go in the bag, but they don't want to rut the wet fields all up. This could be a rough year if the weather doesn't change.

Anyhow, yesterday, my delicious, wonderful, restful, peaceful, nasty-old-lady-calming morning and mid day off, I needed to pick some squash for dinner....get some laundry off the line...knock down more brush so I can see the long lawn from the big windows (the better to laugh and wonder at the grey foxes). I knew full well and consciously that I needed to do these things. Instead I parked in my Sunday chair with a couple of good books and drank lemon ginger tea. Silly me, I should have gone out and gotten my chores done.

Instead this gully washer arrived. It sloshed the squash, lashed the laundry and beat the brush until all were soaked beyond redemption (or at least beyond redeeming them yesterday). I couldn't believe that the sun was shining brightly half a mile away in town, while we were getting dumped on. Yeah, those are rain drops rolling off the sitting porch roof. (Notice that I will jump out of my chair, dump the book and run for the camera even when I won't do chores.)

It needs to dry up for a while here, but the hurricanes hitting the gulf coast will probably be here in a couple of days. Gah!!


This short video shows just how hard it was raining. We got perhaps an hour of rain this hard in a a series of several storms. Dang! I wish it would go rain like this on the many farmers and ranchers on this continent that need it!


Hay Weather (or not)

Milking video and Elvis

(With apologies to dial up folks.) The first video is of Rebecca using the very latest thing in ultra modern, high tech milking techniques. *Note the strategic product placement. Fight Bac is our teat dip of choice, simply the best we have ever used and well worth the price and the mild hassle of getting it sent to us (and no, they didn't pay me to say that). Sorry about it being so dark and the mud on old Beausoleil. She chose a rather muddy location for her lying in. She is a dear old thing just the same. Even Beck likes her and she is not the world's biggest cow fan.

Modern milking technique




The second is our house cat (OMG a house cat at Northview....watch out for the sky falling, UFOs and other inexplicable phenomena) killing Mike's Bouda toy. As you can see he is quite ferocious and eager and then in typical cat fashion he forgets all about it.


Kill the Bouda..or not