Pictures of grandma

The boss's late mother and her younger sister. He visited his aunt today and she sent several photos home with him (which we were thrilled to have and will certainly treasue.

They were true farm girls. Grandma Peggy used to cultivate the corn with the old buckskin horse when she was about this small. She always said no one wore shoes in the summer and he was wonderful about not stepping on her feet. When her dad died and the farm was sold she wanted so much to keep the old horse....

This one's for Steve

Every now and then we revisit the barn blackboard to see what is evolving there. Steve was asking so.......




Most of this one was done by Alan...with a little help from me....and the verse was written there by Becky..."The cloud that took the form when the rest of Heaven was blue of a Demon in my view"...her favorite quite from Edgar Allen Poe

SPRING

For a few minutes anyhow. There was a robin proudly proclaiming his presence in the yard by the car this morning. First one for the season here on the farm. There were dozens more of his kin, plus another blue bird, plus probably a hundred red-winged black birds foraging the roadsides on the trip over to the school this morning. Also to be seen was an amazing amount of tree damage from the ice they got night before last. We were lucky and didn't get a single bit, but there were trees and branches down all over on the hilly parts of the trip. Lots of firewood for somebody, but they sure are going to work for it. One family lost about half a giant maple in their front yard....fell right on a bunch of little spruce trees...what a shame.

There was still ice on some plants and trees on the west side of the road. It glittered in today's blazing sunlight like the walls of a Herkimer diamond mine after a rain. It was dramatically lovely, but I couldn't get any pictures because of heavy traffic. I did get a hurried shot of flood water gushing out of a huge culvert though. That particular culvert serves as drainage for the huge beaver swamp where we sometimes get a few plants for the water garden. I have never seen so much water rushing through there and it made me a bit nervous about driving over it. They replaced all the culverts on Corbin Hill last fall and there is a big dip where this one sits. With so much water against it and inside it I worry about it washing out. I will be watching closely on night drives!

Anyhoo....I am going to enjoy as much of this lovely day as I can, after I get the bookkeeping out of the way. ANOTHER storm in the forecast for tomorrow.

Good Iditarod information

The Apple Doesn't Fall Farm From the Tree has several pieces on mushers in the great race that are new to me and very interesting! She has a cousin in the race so she really knows what is happening! She also tells about a woman musher from upstate NY who is in the race as well. Jeff King has been my long time favorite, but I guess I will be rooting for some other folks as well.

As far as I can see leadership in the race is fluctuating faster than I can keep up with it. A lot of earlier leaders are in McGrath. Looks like right now Mitch Seavey is in the lead with Hugh Neff and Zack Steer next in line.

Day two

Got to go milk, but I'll steal a minute. I had to get Becky last night after milking, which meant driving home after nine. There was no traffic, which was fine. A few yards after we got on Corbin Hill Road, there was this tiny, silvery-pewter colored thing standing on the road side. I passed it, but since there wasn't a headlight to be seen for miles, backed up for a better look. Of course I hadn't brought the camera because it was dark out and I didn't think I would see anything, but it sat quite calmly and let us have a goodly look. It was a little silver eastern screech owl. When Becky stepped out her door to make sure it was all right, as it stayed right there, it fluffed into the air like an impossible cotton toy and ghosted silently into the woods. Beautiful!


(I will not leave my camera at home...I will not leave my camera at home...I will not leave my camera at home...)

****Update-today's "reward birds" for my stormy drive over to Coby were a blue bird that flashed across the road right in front of the car down south of 20. He was simply glowing as he pumped the air.... indigo-cobalt, indigo-cobalt like wild blue neon in motion . Then there was a red-bellied woodpecker in a Norway Spruce on a neighbor's farm as I was driving home.

Changes

Liz started her internship working at another farm today. She is home at night to sleep, but gone much of the rest of the time.
It is going to be a long four months, but we will get through it somehow. Becky is going to grain the cows, working from a list Liz set up. I did it this morning, but I really need to stay and help the boss milk the last few cows as there are two strings going at once on opposite sides of the barn and one person has to hustle to keep track of them....so we decided that Beck can do it. Becky also thinks she can learn to milk Liz's string of milkers so when spring's work starts up the men don't have to come in until the end when the Hell cows need to be milked. I have yet to milk Soir and I simply ain't a gonna.


Driving Beck to college stinks. Frankly. It is too far, takes too much time and eats up my breakfast eating time. She has GOT to get her license. Anyhow with the farm one person down and that person being a real key person posting will probably later in the day for a while...might even get a bit sparse. Time will tell I guess. Liz is having a lot of fun anyhow. The folks who are taking her under their wings are about as nice as they come...and come June she will be back to stay I hope

Window on the (bird) World

The view from my Sunday chair

Sunday morning...I get to sit in my Sunday chair and read a Dean Koontz book, which gave me nightmares last night. (You can kill wild pigs with a Swiss Army knife you know...if you always carry one...if three of them have your husband down on the ground savaging him...if only in your dreams.) It is on the opposite side of the house from the bird feeders, but the birds are bringing all the drama of their lives right to me. First a phalanx of pigeons swoops by, blown sideways by the wind. They look anxiously in through the window, all facing me, all unable to fly forward as the wind tosses them around. I hate what they do to the roof of the steeple, but they sure are beautiful fliers.

Then a crow drives a red tailed hawk right past and down to the road, dive bombing his back, bringing him so near I can see the fluffy, white feathers around his tail. It seems strange that the much larger bird is so harried by the smaller, but that is always how it goes. If I were red tail I would just eat crow.

Next two chickadees bounce off the window fighting over a wasp's nest. If I didn't already love chickadees this wasp eating thing of theirs would endear them to me. Our monster huge wooden house is always festooned with all sorts of nests of stinging insects. This time of year the chickadees hunt them out and eat the larvae they contain. (Since Liz is allergic to stings I cheer them on.) In a few minutes one of the combatants is back picking off the next to last nest on the big living room windows. I hope he comes back for the other one.

Dyeing Easter Eggs with Onion Skins

The main ingredients...eggs, dried onion skins, stockings and pieces of plant

Wrap raw egg in stocking with bit of plant arranged snugly against the egg and fasten. You can use rubber bands or tie them like I did.

Next put all the onion skins and wrapped eggs (and plain if you like them that way) in a pot with a tablespoon of white vinegar. Then hard boil the eggs. I brought mine to a boil slowly then simmered for ten minutes and let them cool in the pan. Then I rinsed and dried them and coated them with just a touch of vegetable oil.

My mom happened to call when I was working on these and told me that her grandmother, Julia Lachmayer, used to bring mom and her brothers and sister eggs that had been dyed this way for Easter. It was a new bit of family knowledge for me, as I learned to make these years ago from a magazine article. I like these better than the gaudy, glittery sort that are more usual and start saving onion skins along about Christmas to make them. It is unfortunate that the selection of plant material for decoration is just a tad sparse at this time of year in the Great Northeast though

Summer has come to Northview

If only in our dreams....meanwhile a short photographic reprise of other times, when the world was more welcoming.

This is the day to wish Alan's old show cow, Balsam, Happy Birthday. Balsam is indeed an old cow, but having been born on leap day, she has had very few birthdays. She was just turned dry yesterday and is expecting a calf by Silky Cousteau in a few weeks. (We would all love it if you would hold good thoughts for a heifer.)

It was weird having a leap day calf back in Balsie's show days. March first is the cut off for junior heifer calf so we entered her in Intermediate where she would have competed against all the calves born between December 1 and February 28. She would have had an uphill battle there, as they naturally would have been a lot bigger then she. However, (much to our delight), the show superintendent pointed out that the rule book actually read "Calves born before March 1" and moved her back to junior heifer calf (where in any other year she would have belonged). She went on to win her class for Alan, which is quite a feat as Junior heifer gets a lot of entries. She is retired now, but is a big, sweet, pet and one of my favorites.


****Update, several hours later.....the sad reality of sunrise this morning

Having someone flip your senator for you

Amounts to nothing more than flipping off the voters who elected that senator. It infuriates me to hear about our governor cheerfully going around the state looking for someone willing to betray the folks who elected them by changing parties in return for whatever payback he has to offer.


Sorry if this is confusing to readers outside New York State, but it REALLY gets to me. There is much cheering going on over the upset election of Darrel Aubertine to the state senate, making the Republican majority there easily destroyed by the flipping of just one person. However, I believe that Aubertine was elected because he was the better candidate, pure and simple. I don't think toppling senate leadership had anywhere near as much to do with it as is being claimed (although word is that Spitzer's 2010 election campaign headquarters in NYC ran a phone bank in his behalf).


I heard Aubertine speak at a dairy meeting when he was an assemblyman and I was pretty impressed. He had a decent grasp of rural issues and the realities of farming and seemed sincere about wanting to fix problems. If he ran around here I probably would have voted for him.

However, I have not and certainly never would vote for someone who flipped...even if they flipped to a party I preferred. Let them do it when they are out of office rather than offering voters one position, then choosing another.

And how people can continue to hold our trusty governor, Elliot Spitzer, up as a shining beacon of change when he has spent most of his short tenure in office pulling such tricks, is beyond me. It certainly doesn't say much for the moral climate in state government today.

Laugh until it hurts

HT to Apple for this story of some young gentlemen who found a really, really creative method of getting into some very serious (but hilarious) trouble.

Go
Read
Laugh...you will be glad you did.

Snow for the mushers

The new Cabela's official Iditarod site says that the trail this year is quite snowy so far. (Take a look at the photo of Jeff King's team in 2006...amazing.) I like the new combined site so far. You can find profiles of dogs, blogs about the upcoming race, videos and discussion. I am not sure if they will follow the same format once the race starts, but so far it has been an interesting way to read the pre-race news. The Dennis Ranch offered this link to an article that says that the snow cover isn't just better in Alaska either. Could it be that global cooling looms right around the corner? (Around the corner, heck, see yesterday's hawk picture for the Northview version of global cooling.)

More BSE in Canada

Another case of so called mad cow disease has been found in Alberta. This comes as no surprise as most cases have been discovered there and both governments have predicted there would be more. As far as actually contacting an illness, BSE is not a disease I worry much about. There have still been fewer than 200 known victims world wide. Many things are more dangerous and more likely to happen to us.

The problem is more one of perception because the disease has been hyped all out of proportion to the likelihood of contacting it. What does upset me is that officials seem to ratchet back the numbers every time there is a new case. I have been writing about it since it first appeared and there is always an announcement of lower total numbers then were announced at the beginning. Somebody, somewhere got it wrong.....

Coopers hawk...on bunny watch maybe

What a difference a day makes

***Photo by Liz with her big camera

Tracking the not-a-bunny

We received a truly sunny day yesterday. It felt like a spring sunny day too, not one of those anemic, sun-through-high-clouds with wind-flinging-grainy-snow-in-front-of-it sunny days, (which are about as warming as the light from the refrigerator), but a real icicle stretcher.




It called to me. It has been nearly impossible to walk outdoors around here for at least six weeks. Ice storm after ice storm has conspired to lock the ground down against the intrusion of questing feet. We went where we had to and stayed inside otherwise.

But yesterday, lovely yesterday, the ice was soft, the snow crust would still hold you up and there was a buttering of soft, squashy snow to keep you from slipping. It teased me away from indoor chores for a walk up to the heifer pasture. There were tracks lacing everywhere, melted like wax under a candle, but still clear for the reading. Last night's bunny tracks, edges higher than the track itself from the sun's intense gaze. Skunk or possum tracks noodling down the fence line in search of something only he recognized. Crow tracks, fresh as newly embroidered stitchery, all over the pasture. (Wonder what they were looking for.) The spots of bare ground called the sparrow tribe away from the feeders too...I didn't see a junco all day and only one white-throat.

Next came the tracks of the elusive not-a-bunny. He walked out from the old brown three-bay shed, crossed the page wire fence into the horse yard, then into the horse pasture proper, back to the yard and then off across the heifer pasture. He was clearly on a quest for something, from the looks of his last night tracks, but I have no idea what it might have been. Maybe mice and voles, as I suspect that the not-a-bunny was a midnight red fox.

Then larger tracks of the old, but still impatient, border collie who accompanied me began to blur the text of the last night's travelogue. Reluctantly I returned to my work. Today and tomorrow it is back to the two-storms-a-week pattern that has plagued us for at least a month, but I am still warm around the edges from yesterday's sun. I tried to photograph the pattern of the tracks, but with the blinding light on the snow, all my pictures were pathetic. A squeaking, peeping patch of chickadees obligingly posed to make up the deficiency.

Doug Swingley retires

One of my favorite mushers called it quits this year as far as the Iditarod goes, although he will still continue to raise dogs for the great race and still races in other venues. Swingley blamed his age for not running in the Iditarod any more saying on the official race news site, “I’m just too old to compete at the level I want to compete at,” he said. “It’s an awesome group of dogs, and I don’t have the ability to keep up with them anymore without getting hurt.” He sustained some serious hurting last year and is almost as old as I am so I can't really blame him. As a four time winner he has sure got the tee shirt.

He is also taking up horse endurance racing.

Hooray for robins

(File under "finally".) Seems as if everyone has seen robins but me and I have been feeling kind of left out. Usually making the run down to Cobleskill this time of year will provide one or two, but Liz and I took Becky down to school this morning and didn't see a one on the way in. Then we did a little grocery shopping as this weeks midriff is going to feature yet another winter storm and we were worse than overdue for stocking up. On the way up the mountains back to our colder and more wintry home we saw one...then two...then thirty...then at least a hundred.

Yay robins! That's all I gotta say.

East meets West

Or at least they holler howdy from the living room windows to the dining room windows.

Twins and tough calving

A couple of years ago we had an amazing spring with not one, but three pairs of heifer twins born here. (Guess the nutrition situation was especially good). Twins are not exactly aspired to by cow farmers as it is tough on the cow to carry two and the babies are smaller as a rule and less hardy. It came to me yesterday that this had been proved out by the six born that spring.

The last of the six calved for the first time yesterday and had a terrible time of it. The calf was by the shorthorn bull...we have had very few problems with his babies, but this bull calf was big and FAT! Liz delivered it and it was pretty compromised by the time she had it out. The poor heifer was just exhausted. The boss got a bottle of calcium on board and we got her on her feet, but she just didn't want to stand up and lay right back down. She was eating good though so maybe she will be okay...no way to be sure yet. She has a beautiful udder and is out of an exceptionally good cow so I am hoping.....

Anyhow I realized that only two of those six twin heifer babies are still here at the farm. One was injured kicking the skid steer bucket and although we kept her, she never bred so we beefed her a while ago. Another freshened with no openings in two of her teats...kept her too, but she never bred so she is also gone. Twin Rex daughters from my good cow Eland both were sold to pay taxes because they were absolutely insane and kept attacking the kids and the boss (can't really blame that on twinning but neither of them bred up quickly either). The only ones left here are the one that calved yesterday, Frosting, and her twin who has been fresh a few weeks, Poptart. Neither of them is particularly hardy or tough acting or looking. Guess I would rather get one healthy heifer calf than two not so rugged individuals.

Is there a relationship

Between the state of the rural economy and giveaway pens? I might be crazy, but I think so. (If you aren't an aficionado of farm shows, many dealers offer advertising pens to passers by as a way of getting their message out.) For the past few years milk prices at the farm level have been horrendous. 2935 dairy farms went out of business last year alone and we actually had pretty good prices then. However, many people just couldn't dig out from under the debt of the previous years, particularly 2006, which was a perfect storm of bad weather, low farm gate prices and high costs for inputs. During those years, exhibitors at the farm show became kind of sparse and hardly anyone had pens to hand out to visitors.

This year, after a few months of record milk prices, the farm show was back up to its original five buildings full of farm equipment and supplies. I also came home with a handful of nice pens that folks gave me as we wandered through. There is more to this pen thing than whether the pussy willow cup where we keep pens is full for the moment (a certain high school student feels that the pens there are fair game and it will soon be empty) or whether we buy a bunch of Bics at Wally World. In rural areas and even the cities that adjoin them, when farmers are prosperous, so are the many businesses that depend on them. When they are hurting so is the rest of the rural economy.

This doesn't just affect implement dealers and sellers of farm supplies either...farmers buy the same stuff everyone does.......except when they can't. I think the "gimme" pens, the crowded exhibits and the "sold" signs on a number of implements indicate a welcome up tick in the farm economy here in upstate New York. Sadly, milk prices are predicted to tank again this summer; fuel and fertilizer are at an all time high price. Corn seed is limited. Fertilizer supplies are limited. I wonder what the pen situation will be next year at this time.


When I asked to photograph this sign the lady in the booth graciously allowed me to and even put some peppermint oil on my hands for me. I smelled like a stick of gum all day. I thought Mrs. Mecomber would get a kick out of this.

Prototype Bobcat Skid steer from way back when

You have to look closely at this sign and use your imagination, but docking tails isn't the only thing you can use this intimidating device to accomplish. I missed it myself, but I guess the guys were all cringing and clamping their knees together as they edged away from this booth in a hurry.

Select Sirepower, the service we use most often

***See if you can pick out the baby goat in the top photo. Her owner said mama tucked the baby in under the hay feeder and lay down beside her when they first got to the show. Then she kept her snug and hidden all day. I wouldn't even have noticed her if she hadn't pointed her out.