Cracker dog days

Brandy
Lord of all he surveyed and very fond of my truck
(You knew my first car was a pick up truck, right?)

Florida Cracker's post and hilarious video of a Bear transporting (or was it transponding) a chicken got me thinking about some dogs we used to have....back in the day...... I don't talk about them much any more as we have been border collie people for most of the last few years. And that was a different part of my life.

However, a long, long time ago I worked in a veterinarian's kennel, as a generalized dog holding, cat box cleaning, dog doo shoveling, porcupine quill pulling, kid of all work. While I was so employed a yellow dog was brought into the hospital with major injuries. He had supposedly "fallen down stairs". (He sure broke a lot of stuff for just a little fall. We always sorta, kinda thought that something else just might have happened to him. Something involving feet and kicking.) Anyhow my boss patched him up and for some bizarre reason I fell for him.

Two Bears, Airs above the ground

He looked amazingly like a border collie except for the yellow part. He was also a hog and messed his cage and kennel run up in horrific fashion every single day. And I cleaned it every single day. He was loud and active (giving deep meaning to the word hyper) and a pest, but I liked him a lot.

Because of his many broken bones he was with us a long time. His vet bill, even in the days before pet vets as neurosurgeons, reached staggering proportions. Finally the day came that the casts came off and the pins were pulled and his owners were called to come get him

And to pay that massive bill. They didn't show.

The boss kept calling them. They kept not coming. Weeks went by.

We never heard from them again....or least not until a number of years later when a similarly damaged kitten was brought in to be put to sleep. That was back before animal rights was a big deal and there was nothing we could do....couldn't have proved anything anyhow.

Who would want a crazy dog like that? All he did was mess up the cage and bark. Although he grew up pretty he was a homely pup and not much liked by anyone but me. The boss decided to put him to sleep.

Enter 18-year old me. There was just too much dog there to just erase as if he never had been. I begged my boss to let me have him rather than put him down. He thought I was nuts and wouldn't. Finally on the last day before what would have been his last day my employer relented and I took him home. (Fortuitously my folks were at camp or our relationship would have been quite short. He was a very bad dog in those early days. For the most part he got over it.)

Thus began 14 of the best dogs years I would ever have. I took Brandy, as I named him, through several levels of dog obedience. Let's just say that he got it. He would literally do anything of which he was physically capable if I could communicate to him what I wanted. Anything at all. My obedience teacher scorned him because he was a mutt, but he aced all his classes. He beat labs and goldens at Frisbee. He would dig if I asked him to, where I asked him to (He and his daughter Two Bears actually helped us lay water line at our camp. They would dig frantically around large rocks until we could get a hold of them to get them out. No lie.) He would climb a ladder and walk around on the roof of the cabin and then climb back down if I asked him to. He walked scaffolding. Jumped to the roof of the cap on that orange pick up and back down if I waved my hand. He wore clothes and was the funniest ham you could imagine when dressed.How he could strut. He just loved clothes. (He also bit people, but he never bit anybody that I wouldn't have bitten were I a dog.) And was he shaky about the house training thing. And stole parsnips and hid them in the walls.....quirky you might say....chewed stuff up too...a lot of it.

Bobby, one of the few dumb ones (but lovable...very lovable)

I could brag him up all day and probably sound like a fool, but my little bro who reads this will remember all the crazy things he did and can vouch for the veracity of the tale. We loved that dog so much that (what with our irresponsible youth and all) we mated him to a dog we met along the way, named Sparky, who was part coyote and his exact duplicate in brains and ability. (Not to mention destructive bad dogness.)

We called the resulting pups "Cracker Dogs" after the little dog that went cracker dog in the James Herriot books. There were several generations of them. They all had this way of tearing in circles radiating joy and vigor that we just loved. Like their parents they were hellions. Besides being trainable they got bored easily. And destroyed things. I was poor. No dog crates.

Two Bears, Capriolle

We loved those cracker dogs. At one point I had five of them. (Somewhere I have a picture of all five leaping off our garage roof into ten-foot snow drifts.) Two Bears, perhaps the best of them, (except Brandy, of course) would catch any chicken in my large flock that I pointed out to her and fetch it to me...handy....they all would have herded stock for me if I had a clue how to train them.

Two Bears, thinking, "Take me to the chickens, boss".

After Brandy died, Two Bears used to drag poor Bobby, one of her sons, off to the hedgerows to dig out woodchucks. She would bark. He would dig.

The last cracker dog was a second Sparky. When we discussed her intelligence, a box of rocks often entered the conversation. However, she adored the kids and would not bite them. She raised them all through their dog learning years and never did one thing wrong. (Or at least until she met Mike, the first of the Northview border collies, who showed her that there was food on the table and treasure in the trash.) Once someone stole her out of our backyard and dumped her in another city. (Thank God she had tags so we got her back. Believe me when I say that they would not have stolen Brandy or old Twoie.)

Sparks died just a few years ago when cancer entered her spinal cord. Thus ended an era that lasted decades ....the cracker dog years. I love my border collies, but dang those homemade hounds were fun.

Send this rain south

Or anywhere they can use it.









What we need are more days like these .

Like a rockstar....

........I have an entourage. However, mine does not include a manager in reflective sunglasses or a clutch of roadies with do rags around their heads..... mine is more low key and countrified.

Everywhere I go, indoors or out, I am always accompanied by anywhere from one to three black and white dogs. Supposing I sit down in the creaky old chair here at the computer. Thump, thud, clunk, three sets of border collie elbows hit the floor. Heads curl into tails and a chorus of snores begins. (Okay I know I am boring, but come on guys....). I don't know what they think I am going to get up to if they let me out of their sight, but they sure are afraid that they are going to miss something.

Someone always has one eye open under all that snoozing fur. If the washer stops cycling and I rise to hang up laundry, it's a three-dog stretch, then they all lumber after me out to the pantry. And into the parlor where my five (count 'em, five) sets of laundry bars reside. They all stand in the door way watching me hang up towels and blue jeans, tails gently waving, until I head back out to the next thing.

Nick is youngest and good about staying out from under my feet. Not so much the old dogs especially Mike. They have discovered that if they hem me in with slumbering bodies they will not, despite all those blindness and deafness issues, be left behind when I move on. Oh, they may get stepped on. They may hear some language not fit for tender canine ears, but they won't miss the mommy train.

On one hand it drives me crazy and causes me to miss a lot of phone calls (hard to get to the phone through the scrimmage of awakening canines.) On the other hand, it feels right to be surrounded by dogs...I am after all a dog person, through and through. A canine escort is thus not a bad thing right?

Of late my road crew has a new member. He can only be out of his personal dog crate when Nick is outside in his run, as Nick likes members of his species.
With ketchup.
But when Nick is out he is free to prowl.

Elvis is a cat (AKA Mr. Kitty, or Monsieur le Chat ).
However, he seems to have decided that he is a dog.
He fetches.
He catches things you throw to him.
He hunts and eats flies (one of Gael's favorite pastimes in younger days).
He understands words (especially the word "can" in reference to ones full of cat food).
He stops doing bad things when told to. (He even knows when he is doing a bad thing and stares at me slyly while extending claws ever so tenderly toward my chair. If he sees me look up he withdraws the claws and grins.)

He also follows me from room to room, plopping down among the dogs with just as loud a thump whenever I stop. I find that I enjoy his company as much as I do theirs. This is puzzling to me. I have not liked cats much since I was a kid when anything with fur, feathers, scales, claws or warty skin was wondrous fine and fair to me. I tolerate them, but you won't catch me picking them up to pet them. Feeding them. Talking to them. Or any of that mushy cat person stuff.

However, as we speak he is lying near me ( on an antique chair he knows full well is off limits), just a little away from the dog-rug surrounding the chair. I swear he isn't a cat...he is a dog in disguise. I mean, I voluntarily buy those darned cans he loves so much....somebody stop me.

Marrow Man

When your pumpkins don't grow, but other vegetables do,

We found this cute little blue-eyed blond sunbathing in our flower bed the other day

Ag prices 2007 vs 2008

If you feed corn and sell beef this little chart will document something you already knew.

Tornado video

(Or, you can find anything on the Internet...anything at all.)

Sunday afternoon the younger two early adulthood persons in the family and I trekked to Schenectady to the public library book sale. It was bag sale day so you could get all the books you could stuff into a paper grocery bag for two bucks.

The sale was insane. Full NFL gear would have been a useful option in the book stuffing scrimmage that occurred the instant the floodgates opened to admit the throng waiting in line. The outside of the library looked like the gate to a rock concert. We came home with five bags of treasure but we wrestled for every page and dust jacket.

One of the treasures I purchased was Big Weather by Mark Svenvold. It is about the author's adventures in 2004 chasing tornadoes with famous storm chaser, Matt Biddle. Although Mr. Svenvold is fond of using challenging vocabulary and convoluted sentences it is a fascinating read. In one chapter he described a video of a tornado in Attica, Kansas lifting a house entirely off its foundation and tossing it to the ground.

There is a certain fascination in big weather....so I entered the search terms, "Attica Kansas house tornado video."
The top link offered connected me to the video described in the book.

You can see it here if you want to.



This tree has nothing to do with books or tornadoes, although2006 summer's almost tornado passed right over it....and I suppose you could make a book out of it if you really wanted to.

Country of Origin Labeling

Is the subject of this week's Farm Side.

So here is an oldie for you while I work on that.

As I was dragging yet another snarl of tangled, soapy hair out of the drain in the bathroom sink I wondered. What do you suppose would happen if I went on strike and never again did any of the taken for granted nasty jobs that fall to mothers? I’d call it Momstrike, and what a fascinating notion it could be. You see I am blessed by not one, but two, long haired daughters who would never contemplate such a bizarre act as cleaning out the drain. I am also confounded by a long haired son, whose housekeeping proclivities are much overshadowed by those of his female siblings. He has a dandelion mane of yellow hair that gets pretty outrageous sometimes. He calls it his “’Fro”. (I wonder where he got the idea that pouffy blond curls could ever constitute a ‘fro.) Their combined efforts at shedding are worse than a dozen border collies. Supposing I stopped cleaning out that dratted drain whenever I noticed that it needed it. Would they clean it themselves? Or would a hairball form in the sink that would rival the sort of bezoar an African bull elephant would develop if elephants groomed like barn cats? Or would they think that it was a rampant opossum and call the dogs?

And then there’s the wastebasket under that selfsame sink. If I didn’t empty it every now and then would little cardboard tubes and puffs of bedraggled tissue mount toward the ceiling until they spilled over to form a paper mache carpet in the puddles around the tub? Or would someone else do it? How about the other appliances and furnishings in that particular room? What would happen to them if I struck?

You can see that it would be an interesting experiment to go on Momstrike. Obviously I can’t give up milking my share of the cows every twelve or so hours. Calves must eat; shovels must shove and bills must be paid in a timely fashion, but what would happen if nobody carted out the paper plates from the TV tables in the living room? Would they just pile up until they cascaded to the floor and the dogs chewed them up? Would the accompanying forks and spoons snuggle together to create a free-form metal sculpture, or would someone get stabbed in the toe and bleed all over the carpet? Would they notice that since the carpet is bright red? Would anyone but the stick-ee even care?

How about the dishes? If nobody did them for a week or so, would anyone care when they ran out of silverware? Would they spelunk that same living room carpet in order to find the missing pieces among the scattered plates and injured family members? Would they offer triage to the folks dancing around the living room with forks sticking out of their feet? Or would they merely dig around the cupboard under the cereal and find the plastic ones we use for camp?

Laundry is another ignore-it-and-maybe-it-will-go-away nuisance. Liz does hers. Everyone else doesn’t. If I just walked past the socks huddling around Alan’s chair, with my nose in the air (way, way in the air in fact) would he pick them up and wash them? Or would they coalesce into a funky sort of dog bed and offer Mike an odoriferous but comfortable lounging spot? (Then he wouldn’t have to pull the Afghan off the couch to curl up in front of the TV on it.) And all those jeans and sweatshirts draped so gracefully on the furniture and floor. Would they turn out to be a new art form that the kids could sell to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art? Or would the Guinness Book of World Records arrive with measuring tapes and scales and offer us a mega bucks prize for the mostest messiest motleyest house?

I dunno, but I think I will try it. I will spend all my sink cleaning, laundry round-up, dish rodeo, housework, time either planting bulbs for next spring or reading a nice trashy novel. For a week. All you other hairy-sink-plagued moms out there want to join me? Do you think anyone will notice if we join forces and strike?

What a fickle fall this has been. After weeks of weather that felt like August we had that extraordinary rainy spell. Then a warm, soft period arrived. Imagine, even here along the river, not having the inaugural frost of autumn until the first week in November. Fall colors have been subdued indeed, but we have enjoyed an exceptionally long spell of their blushing beauty. Last Saturday I sat out on the swing in the side yard throwing the roof of a plastic birdhouse for Mike and Gael. (It made a perfect Frisbee and was handy.) I had a cup of warm, sweet coffee and a good book to fill in the spaces when the old dogs got too tired to tear down the driveway after their improvised toy. The temperature was nearly seventy. The sun was comforting and the air as fragrant as June. Across the river a lone maple, with leaves as red as a summer sunset, tossed its branches above a grove of dull green pines as if shouting, “Hey, look at me.” I like that little tree and look for it every day when I go outside. Most of the other maples around the area are just a drab sort of yellow.

The valley reverberated to the rumble of trains across the river and small planes crisscrossed the sky. At the water garden the frogs were out. They are half hibernating and look like they had a rough night when they claw their way through the vegetation to lie in the sun. Summery weather is not normal for November but I will take all I can get. By the weekend it is supposed to be cold and dreary again. I guess that is to be expected in the next to the last month of the year.

****I wish the old dogs still had the gumption to chase things like the roof of an old birdhouse. Mike couldn't even see it any more and Gael has just lost interest.

Thinking about the bailout

Farm wives face similar challenges everywhere

Erin, at Raising Country Kids, has an excellent post about some of the phrases a farm wife hates to hear. Although we have milk checks instead of calf contracts, I can identify with these so easily....especially the dreaded, "How much money is on the check book?"
(To which the universal answer is always, "Not enough!"

The mouse

A large percentage of farm work is repetitious and indeed often downright boring. Even a responsible job like milking is largely routine and done exactly the same way twice a day.
Cows like routine.
Farmers try to give it to them. Driving tractor can be fun when the weather is nice and the scenery fine, but it can also be monotonous. Round and round and up and down hour after hour. I have known folks to fall asleep driving and only wake up when they bumped up against the stones in the hedge row.

Enter the mouse. I never heard of this mouse before tonight, but both of the men, who routinely do the field work, were aware of it. I guess over the past couple of years it has offered them a little entertainment when they were out doing field work. You see, for quite some time it has lived in the dash board of the White 2-105 tractor. There was a gauge dial missing in it leaving a handy hole and sometimes it would peep out at them, clinging by its little claws to the edge. Other times it would come racing down the tractor hood when they were driving and dive below the dash before they could swat it. Some days there would be little mousie foot prints on the hood next to pools of dew where it had been drinking. It wasn't an exactly welcome guest as it once ate a hole in the air cleaner, but they were never quite able to catch up with it.

Then last week we traded in the White. It was time and past time for it to go and the "new" tractor is a huge improvement over it even in its better days. Still they had a grudging affection for the old thing. After all it had been here longer than I have.

Since it was raining and spitting drizzle today the guys went over to Jim McFadden's auction (that is who we traded with) to see it go under the hammer. The crew there had cleaned it up so it looked pretty good too. Imagine Alan's amazement when he glanced over and there was the mouse sitting on the tire. (He actually (believe it or not) looked around for a soda bottle or something to bring it home in......) As he watched it jumped off the tire and ran around the feet of the folks in the crowd, terrified by all the commotion. Then it raced up an unsuspecting farmer's leg, reached his fanny and jumped to the ground again. The man never even noticed it! (And Alan didn't tell him either.)

After a few seconds it vanished under the tractor and wasn't seen again. However, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if sometime next week someone heads out in the field on their new White 2-105 and has a heck of a surprise when a little grey mouse peeks out of the dashboard at them.
Alan was sorry he couldn't catch it. Me, not so much.

Dead Cow

Another old Farm Side for you today. Dead Cow actually left us several years ago, passing away in her sleep in her stall one night. She lived to be a very elderly cow, despite her perils of Pauline sort of life.

Born in 1992, and a little on the small side, she was an ordinary black heifer. We called her 403, the number on her eartag, although her name is Frieland AE Dandy Vanity. She quickly faded into bovine obscurity, merely another in a barn full of heifers.

In 1995 a horrible strain of pneumonia swept through the milk cows. 403 was milking by then, a little on the kicky side, but not bad, just another bovine in a barn full. She stood in a stall way back by the calf tie-up, about as far from the barn door as a cow could get.

When I went into milk her one night during the epidemic she seemed hot and sluggish. There were funny little bumps on her rib cage. I poked at one and it crackled like cellophane. “Oh, boy,” I thought, “this is real bad.” Crackly lumps on a cow’s body indicate air under the skin, which emanates from lungs that are somehow pierced. The poor cow had a temperature of 105 degrees too.

We called our vet, who examined her and pronounced her very seriously ill. She had pneumonia and one of her lungs had begun leaking air. He treated her with a new antibiotic and instructed us to move her to a stall near the door. According to his reckoning, she would most likely be dead by morning. She could barely stagger around the barn to the first stall and once there stood with her head down and ears drooping, ignoring the tasty second-cutting hay we offered her.

We felt lousy about it, I’ll tell you. Half a dozen other cows were sick by the time we finished milking although none as bad as 403. We injected them with the new drug, fed them the choicest feed we had and went to the house, debating where we could find a chain to drag the dead cow out with in the morning.

She didn’t die. When we nervously peeked in from the milkhouse the next morning she stood in her new stall with a huge mouthful of hay, chewing eagerly, eyes bright, ears up.

It took several weeks for the air under her skin to dissipate, and she didn’t milk all that great that year, but she surely lived. When we moved her back to her old stall, she had earned a new name. She was now known as “Dead Cow”. Decent people would have been eternally grateful to the vet for saving her and exultant that such an effective new antibiotic was available. Brats that we are, we instead teased the poor man unmercifully and pointed out the dead cow, happily chomping feed, every time he came to the farm.

The next spring Dead had another bout of pneumonia, but once again survived. She kept right on surviving until last February when, at nine years of age, she had a huge bull calf. She pinched a nerve in her back giving birth so both hind legs knuckled over at the fetlock. When she tried to stand up she would panic and scramble frantically, injuring herself worse each time. Our current vet took a look at her and, once again, predicted a grim outcome for the old cow. With both hind legs bent and her body bruised and battered from her frantic struggles, it looked like she was going to be living up to her name. She still stood in the same stall, where Liz milks now. The stall is narrow and Liz was afraid Dead would fall on her, so we moved her again, over to a wider stall on my side of the barn. We tied a 2 X 4 to the dividers in the new stall so when she tried to get up, she could get a good grip with her injured legs and filled the stall with sand and straw. The vet gave her some anti-inflammatory drugs.

Thus Dead Cow and I began a long course of working together to get her healthy again. Despite her injuries she was milking well and the same determination that got her through her other illnesses was evident again. She learned to dig her toes into the 2 X 4 to get up and stood, swaying precariously, while I milked her. By summer she was staggering out to pasture with the rest, never left behind, just frog-hopping along to keep up. There was a problem though. She had stood all her milking life in the stall by the calf tie up and, by heck, she was determined to keep standing there. Liz was still afraid of her so she had to stay on my side. In the hurly burley of cows racing into the barn to get their grain there was no way to turn her north without causing a pile up, so we reached a compromise. Dead ran into her old stall and gobbled down a scoop of grain, then, when all the other cows were locked up, she teetered back around the barn to her new stall for another scoop. It was late last fall before we finally got her weaned to going straight to my side of the barn.

She had more adventures this year. A cat scared her one night during milking and she broke her stanchion out of its moorings and galloped around the barn in terror, with it banging around her neck. It finally fell off and she ran outdoors, where she spent the night, refusing to even approach the barn door. Next morning she came in as if nothing had happened. She lost a pregnancy too and it looked like curtains for her then. She bred right back though.

Lately there’s been talk among upper management of selling her before she comes up with another way to kill herself.

Over my dead body. D C and I became good buddies over the last couple of years. She doesn’t fall on me and I don’t get mad at her for running around clanging her stanchion and scaring the other cows. She can walk right now too and she’s due for a new calf in May.

Besides she gave 19,000 pounds of milk last year.

Not bad for a dead cow.

Friday is when the Farm Side runs

This ran several years ago

What do you get when you put three harried women in a Wal-Mart parking lot on a really hot, humid day and give them two sets of car keys and two sets of errands to do? You get a disaster of unprecedented proportions that’s what. Even the time the sliding door on the side of the minivan fell off and the kids and I had to tie it on with dog ropes so we could get home couldn’t compare.

On this fateful day we were two days to camp week and counting. Things had already begun to get crazy. If you don’t think removing three of the five workers at this place for seven days doesn’t create difficulties, just try it sometime. Everyone was spending the week trying to get all the normal work caught up, digging worms in the off hours, marshaling fishing poles and life preservers during spare moments and planning, planning, planning all the rest of the time. The guys were chopping hay that day so the girls and I rushed off to purchase two cans of coffee and two packs of bathroom tissue and two of just about every other staple you could imagine. We were hoping that the younger kids and I could go to camp and Liz and Ralph could stay home in comfort, supplied with all the essentials. I was still gathering extra dog food and paper plates when the girls got bored and asked to go to the car. Because I have been known to lock my keys in the car I carry two sets of car keys. One is the big set marked with a cow neck chain tag that we actually use to drive the car. The other is a little ring with a car key and a house key that I keep in my pocket. Always. I gave them the little set because it was handy and went on shopping.

By the time I got to the car, I was hot, tired and footsore so I asked them to go back inside to pickup the photos I had left for one-hour developing. With all the ambition that is normal for teenagers, they whined and refused. I dragged myself back out of the car, leaving my purse behind.

It is awful heavy.

Naturally at the last second they decided to come too and jumped out of the car, locked the doors and ran to catch up.

Leaving both sets of keys in the car, one in the ignition and one in my Conservationist Magazine commemorative tote bag.

The fun began. One of the windows in the back of the van was open, you know, the big one that just springs out from the side of the car about two inches. Could we stick an arm through the crack and tug a lock up? Nope, those darned engineers must have planned it that way. Liz went back for some metal coat hangers. Could we twist three of them together and snatch the little key ring out of the ignition where it dangled so temptingly? Nope, three coat hangers just bent and twisted and hooked everything but the keys. We caught plastic bags and seat belts; we snagged the steering wheel and newspaper, but no keys. Could we get the dangly handles on my tote, which sat so tantalizingly close between the front seats. Nope, not that either. The coat hangers were just too wimpy to stay straight.

I went down in the woods alongside the lot and found a long skinny poplar stick. We all had our hair tied up in braids or knots, so we sacrificed our hair ties to fasten a coat hanger hook onto the stick and tried using that to get the elusive purse handle. It didn’t work. People pointed and laughed. Little old ladies offered advice.

Finally in disgust I stomped off toward the store to try to buy a nice straight (and hopefully cheap) fishing pole for our key fishing expedition. We figured Alan could fish with it after we were done. If we ever actually got the keys that is.

Just as I reached the door Becky came racing up. Liz had hooked the purse handles. Naturally, the ungainly thing caught under the edge of the back seat and the hook in our hanger threatened to straighten out if we pulled too hard. Of course the stick wouldn’t quite push it out from under the seat.

Finally after an hour and a half of guddling around with two coat hanger hooks, the bag was hauled up against the window in weary triumph. However, no one could get their fingers into the side pocket where the keys resided. I pulled the edges flat against the edge of the window with just the tips of my fingers, since that is all there was room for. Liz wedged her arm between the glass and the frame and dropped the various items her fingers contacted in the pocket onto the floor of the car.

Suddenly, success. She caught the very tip of a key between the ends of two fingers and fished the whole set through the window.

We danced around the empty parking space next to our old minivan singing, “Boo yah, farm girls rule.” We did it and we were darned proud of it.

Why didn’t we use the cell phone Liz had in her pocket to call the guys back home? It would have been easier.

First they were most likely out in the fields and wouldn’t even know we had called for hours. Second, asking for help from the guys doesn’t come all that easy to us country girls. We are used to dealing with our own flat tires, doors falling off the car and other such catastrophes. And third, we were just too darned embarrassed to admit that we had done something as stupid as lock, not one, but two sets of keys in the car at the same time.

****This is one huge advantage of being privileged to write a weekly column for the local newspaper. When you do something staggeringly dumb you can make a joke of it and actually get paid for your pain......

Yesterday on the Farm

Click to see the geese coming in and the huge number of feathers floating on the water.

One of the swamps along Corbin Hill Rd.

Goose feathers floating by

Mirror, mirror on the pond.

Cat tails

We did so much stuff yesterday and took so many pictures I could get a week of posts and still not get em done. As you can see we stopped at the pond on the way home from grocery shopping.




We checked out the culvert where we saw so many fish this spring. Someone had been busy filling it up. On one side of the road humans had removed the sticks. On the other they completely blocked the entrance to the tube. There were fresh drag marks where this busy little _________ had been hauling sticks just before we got there. We spent some time wondering what had made those marks, but I woke up this morning knowing the answer.

Morning was pretty.

A hawk caught something in the barnyard and ate it in the dead elm tree over the heifer barn.

The Jersey girls

Hillbilly Deluxe,
never still for a moment

and her sister (not to mention cousin) Moments

Grain we want grain!!

Pet us, please, please please






Wild Alien Jerseys

This post is in part published for Knolltop Farm Wife, whose family recently entered the clan of Jersey owners. Don't ever let anybody tell you that Jerseys are just Holsteins in little brown suits....they are not your average cows in any language.

Match-o-Matic

Compare statements by presidential candidates to see whether you will vote for Obama or McCain.
This is a lot of fun...accurate at least in my case, and there are some statements that will surprise you I'll bet.

Another one to gitcha mad

5-year old mistakenly put on bus and dumped in the middle of NYC. Talk about egregious! It is lucky a decent person was the first individual he approached so he made it home all right.

JBS Swift fires Muslim workers

I was really surprised by this development. Companies seemed to be bowing to worker pressure to change the rule in the workplace, then this popped up in the news yesterday. Swift is a Brazilian-owned mega company, one of five-ish that controlls most of the beef in this country. It is attempting to buy out two of the other major players, a deal which, if completed, will concentrate sales in very few hands.

A look at Sundae on the Farm 08

Haunted mornings

This fog seems to be keeping first frost at bay. It is as if the earth has its feet in different seasons now, one firmly planted in summer and the other slipping over the edge into fall. We get freeze warnings and watches every evening, but so far, at least down here by the house, it hasn't frozen yet. Days the temp goes up near 70 and the sun is like a comforting beacon. It feels good to go outside and soak up the warmth.




Alan, our resident fisherman, is catching the gold fish from the garden pond for me....one by one. They are ellusive little beasts and don't seem to want to join us in the house. However, the past two winters I have kept them outdoors with a heater in the pond. First winter the heater failed and all but one froze. Second winter, heater worked fine and they all wintered over only to succumb (all but one again) to bacterial infection caused by stress in the spring. Enough already. We have a twenty gallon tank and a ten. They can join the guppies and the Betta and see if that works better.




We keep harvesting more sweet corn even though it is getting kind of tough. I am glad Agway keeps a record of whatever variety we buy because whatever this stuff is it is really good.Ike knocked a lot of it down but it is still easy enough to pick a couple of dozen ears in a few minutes. Tomatoes are ripening nicely. Some year I will realize that one or two plants of each cherry tomato variety is enough. I think I planted about ten currant tomato plants and discovered that even if you eat all you can stomach every time you go to the garden there will be hundreds (and hundreds) left. The grape tomatoes from last summer volunteered and produced well too. Never thought I could get sick of tiny tomatoes, but there it is.



Wish I knew more about harvesting sunflower seeds. I have been cutting the heads one by one (when they get low enough to bonk me on the head when I am digging potatoes....they remind me of giant showerheads. You wouldn't think it, but a sunflower head can deliver quite a thump). They remind the blue jays and chickadees of lunch counters. As we speak a whole flock of jays, silent all summer, are careening around the house, shrieking and beeping and barking.....I'll bet they are scarfing seeds up in the garden too. They will be welcome as soon as I get enough seeds saved to grow more next summer... I am hoping the ones I am picking are ripe enough to dry and plant. Some of them are the most amazing deep purple color...which rubs off on your fingers if you pick out seeds. It amazes me how much of our produce never makes it in from the garden. They are sure tasty.

Can you guess what this is?
NYV probably knows.

Amazing vegetable marrows

Last winter I won a small contest on MySpace given by a guy named Jesse. Jesse grows and sometimes sells seeds from giant plants. He was kind enough to send me seeds for sunflowers, sweet basil, watermelon, amaranth and vegetable marrows. We got one marrow early in the season, then the plant went wild, sending vines thirty feet or more in several different directions. As the vines were threading themselves through tall grass on a steep bank behind the house we didn't pay too much attention to them.

Yesterday there were serious frost warnings out. Liz and I spent much of the day picking, covering, and moving tender plants. We also began taking down the plantings in the garden pond and continued the absurd saga of trying to capture the gold fish to bring them inside (they seem to like it out there).

Just for the heck of it I clumbered around on the grassy bank to see if there were actually any marrows out there. I was so amazed to find these that I hollered loud enough for Liz to hear me from the house. She came out and dragged them down the hill for me and here they are.




Vegetable marrows are a sort of a vining zucchini-type thing. Big as these are....and they are the size of watermelons...they are still tender to the fingernail test. I am kind of nervous about eating them....but aren't they cool?


***Update: I cut the neck of the little one up and put it in a potato, bacon, corn and squash casserole I made last night. It was okay but the regular zucchini had a much nicer flavor.