Cider

Gallon of fresh-pressed in the fridge, new picked apples on the table and a jar of soft, sweet honey in the cupboard. The kids took a friend's toddler to the orchard to pick yesterday and brought us home some of their bounty.

What can I say but yay!!

Sunday Stills...in the Dark

This guy was the size of my thumb,

creeping (and creeping us out)

along the edge of the porch step

Sir John

Town to the north east of us

Plow Handles

My efforts are pretty lame this week. Not much of a hand at night photography.

For more Sunday Stills.....

Engulfed

Milkweed for Dani

In November. The air is like taffy, pull off a piece, crisp, bright, sharp, twist it up and enjoy....pumpkin pie flavored maybe. Just breathing is an adventure in brisk.

If I am slow to post it is the absence of usual help and the addition of feeding (and trying to figure out WHEN the boss is going to feed-the man is allergic to routine, won't tell me when he's ready and gets mad as a hornet if I don't show up on time...ten in the morning, four in the afternoon...arrggghhhhh) to my daily chores. I don't mind feeding, but it would be nice to be able to plan.

Most of the leaves are down, but the oaks across the river sport bright gold, and green and russet, layered like an expensive hair cut and shining in the angled sun.

Birds are bright too, hi chickadee from the clothesline, creaky, beaky, blue jays teetering on the tube feeder. Crows on high, very high this fall for some reason, and just a smattering of passing geese. Word is they are off to the west of here, scrounging through the harvested corn fields, gleaning up gold for winter.

Here and there a late monarch. Sometimes a few caterpillars.

Coyotes on the lawn, spooking the horses.

Yowsa! What!

Broad daylight, high noon. No wonder the cows have been acting strange and Wally the blue heeler has been barking all day. I don't like this.We have kitties and hens and beloved dogs, all just menu items to the grey and brown haunts of the hedgerows. They are welcome to around 300 of our acres, but they need to leave the vicinity of the house and buildings.

All week, I have been reading the comments of comfortably-insulated, non animal owning, smug urban folks on a friend's blog on this topic and seething. They know just how we should deal with the proximity of creatures that plot to eat our livestock.And their plans do not include lead projectiles. We should just find a way to get along with the cute little critters kumbaya....

I am not going to link and get into it, but damn Disney anyhow. They have a lot to answer for in my opinion. Once animals started walking on their hind feet, dressing in suits and talking and singing it was all over for common sense wildlife management.

Why would we not want a large predator in our back yard? Hmmmmm.....just can't imagine.

It is Unanimous

Heifer hill, early morning and mid afternoon

All the kids have off-farm jobs now....well, Alan's is off our farm and on another one. Good thing I have been getting in some practice helping feed cows...

The Best Surprises

Are sometimes round and grow on Ida Red Apple trees.

This is the first apple off a little tree we planted a few years ago. I didn't realize that it had set fruit this year, but Alan noticed when we were out taking photos of the pretty morning.

Amazingly, considering that it surrounded by old apple trees with tons of wormy apples, there wasn't a single worm in it.

And it tasted, far, far better than it looks.

Brotherband

Read the first of John Flanagan's new series, the Brotherband Chronicles last night....cover to cover....in three hours. Beck got it at around 3:15 PM and finished it by chore time (less than three hours, but, hey, she's younger.)

Mind you this book has 434 pages.

Yeah, it is really that good.

Beck is kind of a guru of young adult fiction in her spare time. The library consults with her quite often about good stuff to purchase or bring in from MVLA for that section. They also often notice what she is ordering on inter-library loan and buy it. She discovered the Ranger's Apprentice series and she, Alan and I read them...at least twice for each of the books for each of us. Once is not enough and there aren't enough of them.

Then Mr. Flanagan wound up that series and yesterday the first of this new one came out. (It was very hard to say good bye to Halt and Will. Good thing I like to re-read books.) Brotherband is even better than they were.

Flanagan is like the Dick Francis of young adult fiction. (If you read Dick, you know that he did not use a single extra word to advance his plot, yet wrote riveting stories that grab you by the throat and pull you right in...and keep you there until the last page is turned.)

These are adventure stories for young boys that transcend the genre. By miles. I am not young and have never been a boy, yet the spare prose and tongue-in-cheek humor, along with wall-to-wall roaring adventure, simply enthrall me. Lots of bows and swords and building of shelters, lots of sailing, complete with terms and how it's done, issues like bullying addressed, but as part of the story line, all with unfailingly satisfying results.

Kind of like a Middle Ages Gary Paulsen without the politics.

The Outcasts, was like a Thanksgiving dinner for the mind only without those pesky calories.

A small challenge, from your humble farm wife.....if you do read one of the Rangers books, I'll bet you can't stop at one. And if you read this new one, i'll bet you will be panting, as we are, for the release of the next

I envy anyone who hasn't already read either the RA books or the new one. Lucky you to get to enjoy them for the first time!

And no, I am not being paid by anyone, I just love great books.

Our Neighbors

Just down the road a piece. This is where we used to go for ice cream when we needed a summer break and bought sweet corn and peas and honey and met friends and socialized. I loved to sit in the car there and look across the green, green fields to the sandy cliffs along the Schoharie where the swallows nest each summer. It is a wonderful spot but the flood hit there hard.

This story offers a real tribute to the persistence, toughness and heart of this NY farm family. These are good people and I hope the road before them is smoother and easier than the one they have traveled this year.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate

Milk? This is really cool. The gentleman who played Charlie in the movie, Dr. Peter Ostrum, is an upstate NY large animal veterinarian.

I did not know this before I read the article, but Liz has met him. Anyhow, this story is fascinating and the videos are great.

I watched the one about deciding whether or not to operate on a DA in an older cow and it was amazingly well done. That is JUST what a visit to a conventional dairy by a bovine practitioner is like.

Here is a YouTube channel with many more excellent large animal medicine videos.

If you watch the one on pregnancy checking you can see just what we did yesterday, ultrasound and all. Of course we have quite a lot fewer animals, but the management is about the same, just smaller scale.

Vet Check Day

This year's last poplar leaf

Spent almost all of yesterday in the barn feeding cows and letting them in and out. (We used to have a power feed cart, but it passed away last winter).

Now the guys feed with wheel barrows, which doesn't really take that long, but it is tedious. I figured that this year it would get done faster if I "manned" one of the barrows and so I do. Figure in a couple of weeks I will either be pretty fit or pretty dead. So far the trend is towards fit.

Had a relatively new (to us) veterinarian do some preg checking and it went quite well. She was competent and fun to work with. Most of the cows we thought were carrying calves are in fact and a couple we were pretty worried about surprised us in a good way. Dear old Zinnia gets to stay another year, which made my day. Nobody likes her but me, but I like her a lot. She doesn't even belong to me...is Alan's cow...and she steals other cows' calves and guards them even from us...but I just like her.

However, thanks to NY State's exorbitant tax rates for land, somebody has to go to pay some bills (we spend nearly two months income paying county and school taxes on our land) and it leaves us looking for income outside the milk check after we get done being fleeced.

Unfortunately Blink, a sweet old retired show cow and Cider, not so sweet, and in fact downright mean, will go to the auction today. Nuff said.

Halloween Came Early

The house looked like a sneaky old jack o'lantern last night when I came in from evening milking. Bright orange windows like eyes, nose, and toothy smile; dark outline looming large against a starry sky like a creepy, hulking beastie crouching by the driveway... waiting to pounce on me and gobble me up.

Just to add to the atmosphere a black cat twined around my feet .

A little, yellow crescent moon was grinning down from the west and the Big Dipper was holding water rather than dumping it on us.

It was a bright, pretty night for all the spooky stuff to be going on. I liked it fine.

Would have been nice if there had been good weather for the tractor pull, this weekend but Ma Nature hasn't been so very kindly to farm folk this year.....

When I was younger Halloween was my favorite holiday....costumes, spooky decorations, scary stories, things that go bump in the night, candy and apples and popcorn balls. Now that I am much too grown up to trick or treat I guess I like Thanksgiving better, but there is something about the 31st of October that still holds a mysterious appeal.

Happy Halloween!

Charity Tractor Pull is

Still on, never mind the weather. Head on over to the fair grounds for the day. The sun is going to shine and folks are waiting to show you a good time and some thundering metal monsters dueling it out in front of the grandstands.

Too Cold And Miserable

To write or play. Will get back to this when we get enough heat to make typing a reasonable activity. Take care.

Kittens

Over the past few weeks I have written of the perils of Athena's three kittens getting stuck in the wall etc.

Well that was nothing on what happened when they got big enough to run out among the cows when they came in and out of the barn. They are the dumbest ost adventuresome kittens I have ever come across.

It was heart wrenching to watch them getting stomped and rolled down the barn alley every day. Liz wanted to bring them over to the horse barn, which is near the house. "Bringing things to the horse barn" is a euphemism for bringing them to the house for mom to deal with.

Despite their cuteness I respectfully declined. I already have every single barn cat but one coming to the house to cadge food from me and I really didn't want three more.

Then yesterday the boss called me when he was going out for afternoon work, "Get your camera, you have to see this."

He was right.

That green bowl is a plant dish that somehow became the back porch cat food dish, used to offer sustenance to all those "barn" cats.

I think Athena is trying to tell me something don't you? She had to lug or lead that baby through half an acre of boot-top deep mud and muck to get it here......

Ah, well, I know when I'm licked. By evening chore time she had one of the other ones over here too, and I am sure there will soon be three......

Winter Storm Watch

Classic example of red neck engine repair

Noon today, yep the global is definitely warming and fall is lasting longer and ending later......not.....I should have known when everybody got crazy wanting to bake that bad weather was sure to follow. We aren't much different than wild animals when it comes to that, gather in the nuts, fluff up the nest and get ready for the bad news.

And so the scurry to get the barn ready begins. Big job and it is about two weeks earlier than we like it to be. I watched a weather demon yesterday all wink, wink, nudge, nudge about the weather and wanted to take out the TV...(He couldn't say whether it would be mildly cloudy or we would get a foot of snow. Dang, talk about a job where you can be wrong every day and still get paid. They should all run for Congress.)

I didn't though because the guys enjoy it, although how they can is beyond me. I just asked the boss to bring me up a skid steer bucket of driveway sand to bed the stalls with. It is really comfy for the cows, stays where I put it and gives them good traction to get up and down.

At least yesterday was gorgeous. The cows dried out and were fluffy....or fluffy-ish at least. Brought in the last of the water cannas. I was going to let them freeze, and indeed the tops did freeze down to the roots, but when push came to frosting, I didn't have the heart. Thus my kitchen is awash in huge pots of cannas, water cannas and grown-from-seed amaryllis.

It is like a jungle in here....a particularly favorite old friend stopped by for a short chat the other day (is there anything on earth more enjoyable than one of those friends you can not see for months or even years and pick right up where you left off) and remarked at the amount of greenery.

I can't help it. I love plants...and animals....and rocks.....herptiles....birds...I think I would curl up and blow away if I had to live in a city separated from living and growing things. Spent fifteen years in a small town once and it about drove me crazy. And even there I had gardens and flowers and dogs and cats. I think maybe I was born to be a farmer....even though I was born in the city.

Another Farm Side Freebie

A pair of gratuitous Yaks for your Friday enjoyment....the things you see around Upstate NY

You can read it without paying again this week, right here.

Snow Before Halloween

Becky won this yesterday.

To say she was happy is to seriously understate the situation.

So Alan and I saw to it that there was a balanced meal for a celebratory dinner. Above, see the fruit and grain serving, made by ma

The brother providing the vegetable

and dairy section of a good meal (pumpkin bars)

For Becky's big day. We also enjoyed hearty homemade beef stew....actually I will admit the truth here. We didn't even know that she had made employee of the month until evening, but it poured cold rain and then switched to snow all day. The kitchen with the oven going was the best place on the entire farm so everyone spent all the time that they could there. Baking and/or stirring a bubbling cauldron (no eye of newt or toe of dog though) provided a fine excuse to do so).

We kept the cows in the barn last night, so I spent most of last night's milking getting their automatic water bowls working. Some of the cows choose not to drink indoors all summer, so their bowls get pretty gritty. It is a nasty job but someone has to do it....someone is usually me.

The cows were confused at being in, oddly enough. Usually they are delighted to stay inside when the weather gets bad, but last night they were bawling to go back out. It was snowing hard, flakes the size of saucers and sticking to the ground. Dunno what was up with that, but they can go back outside for some exercise today. Maybe that will make them happy.

Time to go to the barn and see what mayhem they have gotten up to in the night. Have a good one.

Old

Photo shamelessly stolen from Liz's blog

Liz had the vet in for her 30-ish years old horse, Tyler, yesterday. It was good to get the old boy looked over thoroughly and make sure that she was doing everything right with his care. Been hard to keep the weight on him.

It was decided that his teeth are excellent, no major systemic problems, getting all the good care that he needs, etc. etc.

He is just old.

The conclusion was that there isn't a thing wrong with him that being young wouldn't cure.

Guess you could say the same thing about me. ...probably about a lot of us.

Both horses got rabies boosters too. The darned fox was in the barn with them, in fact in the stall with Tyler the other night, and Tyler must have kicked him and broke his jaw. So better safe than sorry, although after getting a good look at him we think he was just young and mangy.

Never a dull moment around here.

Pulling for Flood Victims

Here is the latest on on the big benefit tractor pull coming up on the 29th and 30th at the Fonda Fair Grounds. I am praying for good weather for this unprecedented event. It is going to be amazing with pullers coming from as far as Texas.

Our first thought was

A mix of red and black Angus too...but what are they crossed with that gives them those dangly things on their chests?

They feed baleage from the wagons....just put that pic in to show you how many they have although they have a lot more than are in the photo.

Thanks everyone!

West Comes East

The kids stumbled upon a large and prosperous looking beef farm a couple of hours from here. Saturday they took me to see.

Miles of fences, hundreds of animals, an impressive array of feeder wagons. All you knowledgeable ranchers out there, what on earth are these cow? And what are those things? Dairy farmers everywhere want to know.

Sunday Stills...Rocks

Rose quartz on the grave of Mike, my best dog ever

A nice stone wall across the road from the NFO convention

Feldspar from the same mine as the mica below

Mica or Isinglass,

they used to make wood stove windows from this mineral.

We collected this though

Herkimer Diamonds

A cool round rock I dragged down from the field

Our native limestone foundation

This rock and the two below are ones the boss brought me as gifts.

Some girls like diamonds, but I am found of large field stones.

My folks have been serious mineral collectors for quite some while, so some of the rocks around here are really more in the line of minerals. Then there are the other ones, which we pick up from the fields.

For more Sunday Stills

Toast

My computer is. Typing this on Becky's laptop with much difficulty. I think my hard drive is croaking, not quite entirely gone, just mostly, so I got most of my photos backed up and shut it down. Not sure what to do about my music but......

Posting may be light and lame until I save up enough to replace the old girl. Found just the one I would like on the Walmart site, an HP with lots of memory and all, but it will be a while.

Amazingly over the course of several computers since the first little AST, I have never had a hardware failure before. We have only purchased new computers when they became too slow for newer applications. The AST actually still runs as do all the HPs in between. They just won't run today's Internet.

Guess we have been lucky....up until yesterday.

Farm Side Freebie

Every now and then you don't have to pay to read it.

Right here.

And the Winner Is

Sinopa, out on the hills with the cows

Joated, who suggested Corolla. Thanks for all the great names! I still like this baby, although she is a stubborn and flighty as her mother, Camry, and her older sister, Calypso, a daughter of SWD Valiant. It takes a while to calm the ones who are just born wild, but it is worth the effort...after five or six lactations or so.......

Saved from Stupidity

By the Senate. And three cheers for them. Just what this country needs is a regulation limiting the vegetables kids eat. Not.

Word Verification

The topic of the day. Seems everyone hates it. I prefer not to bother with it myself, although I do type in those absurd letters when needed because spam comments are a hassle for me. I figure that they probably are for other blog authors as well. (I mean, I don't even HAVE one of those, so why would I want to extend it? And I wish I could help every Haitian orphan and I'm glad you passed my rhubarb leaf bird bath post on to your esteemed colleagues and all, but some things are just outside my frame of reference....)

However, this is about your enjoyment more than mine, and I hope you keep visiting and sharing your thoughts, so I shut the silly things off.....for a while at least....

No more alphabet soup, just type and enter .

That being said, I have sometimes saved the best ones that I have stumbled on, just because of the sheer serendipitous-ness of the words. Some of them seem too appropriate to be truly random.

Anyhow, have a good one. Your visits are valuable to me...especially the comments.

Now I know

Seems last year's grey foxes have moved on.

How the fox ears look. From very close. Much too close. This week's Farm Side, should you choose to read it on Friday, deals with a visiting....or maybe permanent resident....red fox. He ate my yellow rooster, incidentally my favorite alarm clock, just the other day.

I had no more than finished the column and gone about other work when there he was again. Same place, next to the old horse trailer.

Different day.

He was gone as quickly as he appeared, but later when I went prowling with the camera, I heard the pea fowl alarming. They can only see outdoors through a window under the woodshed so I crept up there.

Quieter than I thought I could because I walked right up to the darned fox. Maybe six feet away.

He was snuggled down between Liz's bales of straw, staring at my poor beauties and making them honk. I raised the camera to take a shot (wishing that I had shells for my .22 and had brought that instead) but before I could click he was gone.

Bold bugger coming out in daylight like that.

Light as a puff of wind. Thistledown. Feather fluff. Air.

I am not pleased with him although I don't think he can get into the coop. No wonder the last old hen is being so careful when she comes out of wherever she is hiding.

Meanwhile, Nick, who was loose in the house, along with the cat, and who had come in for some bragging in the same column because of his general good behavior, had just cleaned the litter box for me.

What a lovely dog! I am all in favor of a working dog keeping busy but......damn, just damn

By the way, fox ears are fuzzy, black and gold, with little white spots to break up the outline.

What to Say on a Gloomy Day

One of our life goals, elusive, and hard to brew

Not much. Cold, damp, muddy. Cows ditto and not liking it much. Leaves left, or mostly. Trees black with the heaviest crop of riverbank grape I believe I have ever seen. You could make wine I'll bet, tasting of summer and bittersweet fall, sunshine versus moonshine, fine, dark, blackbird wine. They surely like them anyhow and set up a din as they pick and squabble.

One of these days the men are going to limb some branches off the Winesap tree so the repair truck can get in to deal with our non-functional furnace. Then maybe I will get the tame grapes for jelly, oh so far above my head even with our tallest ladder. I am thinking about maybe adding in some of those wild riverbank critters for just a spark of different.

Meanwhile, it is cold, indoors and outdoors. Alan is attempting to build an outdoor boiler contraption that will heat just a little water to send through the pipes to make just a little warm in here. I am eagerly cheering him on.

On the bright side, it is warm in the barn, thanks to the cows' hearty metabolism. Five minutes after they crowd through the door it is toasty, and by the time the grain is gobbled, we are shedding polar fleece and rolling up our sleeves.

Is it time to milk yet, I wonder?