My favorite flower

Or at least in June it is. Doesn't look like much does it? However in this season the wild grape flowers perfume the whole valley. I can't describe the scent. It is sort of sweet like you might expect the air in a candy factory to be. Yet it doesn't just smell like hot sugar. It is...well.....flowery... too. I wait all year for the first breeze laden with it to come floating through the milk house window. We could be miserable with roaring heat, drowning in humidity, worried about fifteen different things and the wild grape flowers will wash it all away in an instant. Nice......

Dansville Tractor pull

Mr. Determination

Alan came home tired and sunburned but grinning and happy with his big outing. This is the only picture he took for some reason, but it catches the action of one of the big rigs I think.

Milk snakes and gorgeous mornings

We have gone from frost nine days ago to temps in the mid nineties. It takes some getting used to. so I guess we will just get used to it. The corn loves it anyhow, and what with all the frigid weather, it needs it. Cows don't like it much. We have been keeping them in nights and feeding them hay, because the pasture they are on has temporary fence. (Not to be confused with permanent fence, which is, in theory at least, more reliable.). However, last night with every fan in the place running full speed they were panting and hanging their heads. We took a gamble and let them back out. I went over with the boss and Liz this morning, to help get them back in even though it is my morning off, because the two-year-olds have yet to learn where their stalls are. They didn't bother much though, for which I was most grateful.

Yesterday must have been milk snake day. Liz caught the itty bitty one above yesterday out on the bridge between the farms. It was so cute and perfect, right down to the egg "tooth"
Some of the photos I took actually show the tooth, but are otherwise blurry, because I was in a big old hurry to get Liz to let the little thing loose again. The boss thinks he turned a nest of them out when he was moving earth getting a lane ready to put cows in another pasture.


Then last night, while we were finishing up Alan caught a great big one in the same spot. The second one was as long as my leg from knee to ankle and as big around as a finger. When he let it down and it poured itself away over the ridges and bumps in the barn yard its beauty was amazing and indescribable. Milk snakes are my favorite of the slithery clan. They remind me of the Oriental carpets my dad used to get in the antique store sometimes when I was a kid. Wish I could have photographed the big one, but we were getting done real late last night (dump run, house work, fence building, Liz made spaghetti and homemade bread and garlic bread, shopping for a new string trimmer to get weeds out of the fence...all in all a long, busy day) and I needed to finish helping with the cows.

Then this morning the sun came up amid solid HHH. The weather is going to be a major source of misery for the next few days, but it is still pretty. Alan has gone to the big tractor pull in Dansville today with his big brother. I will worry...it is my job. He will have fun...that is his job...and he took the little camera so hopefully he will have some nice pictures of the big rigs for you tomorrow.

Got water?

Weather fellas say two or three inches yesterday morning. I say I hate it when it thunders when we are milking. So much metal around. And nervous cows. It knocked the power out for a while, which is why there was only a wimpy post yesterday. When the lightning started making the lights flash on and off I just unplugged everything and went to the barn...




I am having algae problems in the pond so I changed the fountain. We have been hearing toads every night and I thought they were here.


However, thanks to having to reset the bedroom digital clock late last night....by guess and by gosh......


And getting it wrong........ so I got up half an hour early and went out with the dog in the not quite dawn.


I discovered that they are instead down in the heifer barn watering trough. Chlorinated water. Emptied and refilled every couple of days. Heifers snorting around in it.....Hmmm.......




They don't know what they are missing.

Argentine food crisis

Kinda, sorta big news, but I don't see anything about it in the mainstream press.

Revenge of the Lawn

It is funny where online research will take you. I am always on the lookout for ideas for my weekly newspaper column, the Farm Side. After over ten years of writing it, sometimes not repeating myself is a challenge. Lately I have been mulling over the recent upsurge in home gardening and massive sales of garden seeds and trying to think of a way to get a column out of it. A post Nita wrote on the topic, which reminded me or WWII Victory gardens, was all the stimulus I needed. This week I actually got busy with it and it will run Friday (unless the editor vetoes it or something).

I learned so much while writing this one! I was constantly calling in to the boss, who was reading in the other room. Things like, "Did you know that Sears sold 325,000 pressure cookers in 1943?"
Or, "Did you know that we in America plant three times as much ground in lawn as in corn?"


Here are some of the places I visited in my search for data to back up my positive thoughts about gardens and my somewhat less than positive feelings about lawns.

Victory Garden

The Murder of a Garden

Landscapes and the Law

Garden on Trial

Lawn Nation (if you click any of these, click this one...amazing!)

And, last but not least, Revenge of the Lawn (which will tell you something about my reading tastes in college.

Tai Chi for cows

I'm sorry, but this is just nuts. If we started doing Tai Chi in front of our cows, I'll bet they would run for the hills....and I wouldn't blame them one bit!

And something I have learned after years of living in the country.
No matter what
No matter when
No matter how
If you think you are alone and you do something silly
Funny looking
or just plain stupid and wrong
Somebody will see you....even if you are in your farthest, remotest, plumb hiddenest field..
They will pop out of the bushes or come up the driveway or fly over in an airplane taking pictures.
(We have Murphy's Law out here in the boondocks too you know).

Tai chi! If I tried it, I'll bet it would be all over town in an hour and not because the cows told on me either.

Iris

At sunset

Road trip

.The Mohawk River from Dunkin' Donuts

Ran errands again with the girls while the boss spread fertilizer and disked it in. I don't know if he is going to plant corn tomorrow or try to bale some hay or both. We barely see him since Liz is home and he can do field work whenever he wants to.

Making cheese at Palatine Valley Dairy (where we stopped to pick up a Semex Jersey stud book....(don't ask).
Naturally we bought some cheese too. How could we not?

Nifty tool

See how your blog looks in other browsers.

Fun with French Fries

Note to boss...never bet against the cheap help (who are the same folks who spend the week at the fair with the show calves every year).

Yesterday Liz just had one of those feelings....something wrong with the heifers and dry cows. She went out to the pasture where they are stationed and sure enough River had had a calf and had pushed him down in our deepest ravine (which has a creek at the bottom.) Liz got them both out and came on down to report. Calf was a week early, tiny (you can pick it up under one arm) and a bull. Oh well.

Anyhow, while we were bringing him and his mama in to the barn we decided to bring all the close up dries in too and get them up to speed on grain feeding. (We have a serious selenium deficiency in the soil in this area and they can get some in the cow grain we feed. Selenium is a major aid to successful calving and the passing of the placenta afterward.)

After that nifty little rodeo concluded we were admiring last year's show heifer, Blink, who was running with them. Liz and I were joking about how she probably could walk right up to her and feed her French Fries. She loved them SO much last summer. The boss thought we were nuts and bet that she couldn't.

Well, now, it just so happened that we had French fries with our party dinner the night before. And it just so happened that we didn't eat them all., So....nothing would do, but Liz run over to the house and grab a handful to test the theory.

Blink was a little hawky after running wild since last fall. She let Liz get semi, sorta, kinda close and then stretched her neck out very, very long to sniff.....very long, giraffe neck...standing on tippy hoofs, ready to bolt away with her tail up.

And then she scented the French fries. Out came the tongue, down went the heels, and she gobbled them all up like the fair was yesterday instead of last year.
We roared with laughter.
Too bad we didn't put any meaningful stakes on our bet though.

Thunder boomers, koi and calf relocations

The first right while we were milking last night. Nothing serious, just got us wet with a good rain. We needed it. One upshot of that was a toad serenade last night. (I think they were partying down in the garden pond.) Amphibians, except for red backed salamanders, have been mighty scarce this spring. Dry weather I guess. Anyhow, it seems wonderful to me that something as homely as a toad has such a lovely song.

Actually right from the get go we had an amazing day yesterday. Thanks to Teri at Farm Life we discovered Craigslist. Now we check the local farm and gardens listings several times a day. Thus we discovered that someone over by Mariaville Lake had baby koi for sale for two bucks each. We all made the trip over and bought seven. However, the nice lady whose front yard pond is apparently teeming with little orange, silver, white and black fishies, threw in three extras.

Now if they will just stay IN the pond. We have had a terrible time with koi jumping out in the past. I am hoping they grow and thrive.

Only four of our old gold fish made it through to warm weather, although they all survived the winter. They contracted a terrible bacterial disease just as the weather warmed up though and died in droves. I am sure we would have been fine, but the spring fed watering trough where we have kept most of them for the past twenty years or so dried up and we had to put all those fish in the garden pond last fall. Not good. Way too crowded.

This is Carlene. We needed to get this door open for ventilation
so we needed to move her to a big stall

Then we went out to help the boss clean the barn. We took calf registration photos, cleaned stalls and moved some older calves into regular stalls. One the was tied in front of a door we needed to open to get some air into the barn. It was so much more comfortable last night with it open.

Carlene's other side. These photos will go on her registration papers

At night we had an "end of internship and two kids graduating" sort of party with pizza, calzone, grinders, French fries and the new National Treasure movie. (Grumpy old party pooper mom read a John Grisham novel, but stayed in the vicinity.)

It was nice. A really great day. I feel lucky. Maybe it is was the koi

This is the herb garden, honey locust tree
and part of the flowers around the garden pond...which you can't see.

World Milk Day

Is today. Kicking off June is Dairy Month! Yay!

James and the Giant......

Errr.....I mean Becky and the giant......egg. This egg was laid by Chick Pea, Becky's Buff Orpington hen. She only lays about one a week, but these massive double yolkers max out our old fashioned egg scale. On the electronic scale they each come out to 3.7 ounces, a full 1.2 ounces larger than a jumbo egg.

Song Sparrow Saturday

The internship is over. The kind folks who hired Liz for it had one of their official farm sweat shirts made for her, so now she can represent two farms, as her big brother made her a shirt for our farm for Christmas. I know she will miss them, but it sure will be good to have her home. Regular mornings off this weekend and next week we tackle our calf placement issues.

Rippling grass and chilly temperatures

Yesterday the wind was rippling the grass in the old horse pasture like hair on shaggy dog's back. It whirled and swirled and changed colors until it was almost iridescent as the grass showed its pale green stem sides and then its purplish seed heads. I spent a few minutes on my sitting porch (a very bare and bereft sitting porch as the plants are still all indoors due to threat of frost) and watched the wind tease and tug at it. It was a never ending spectacle punctuated by the zig zagging of the mockingbird and a few passing starlings and I liked it. So I took some pictures and you can kinda sorta see what I mean.



Alan says we did have frost in spots night before last so I am glad the plants were tucked into the living room or covered with towels and doggie blankets (I even put my favorite polar fleece work jacket around Grandma Peggy's old snake plant and then put that on top of the scion of Grandpa Lachmayer's old snake plant. I should have brought them both in but it was getting dark and I was getting about done with what I could do in a day. Anyhow they are both fine as is the ancient burros tail, which spends every summer in the honey locust, which I completely and entirely forgot (smart, real smart).



***Update, Alan was right about the frost. One of the water cannas on the garden pond took a hit. Just the edges of the leaves were burned brown, but it sure must have been cold to freeze it inches above the water. Wow!

In just one night

Liz was home to milk last night because of a day off. With an extra person to milk the north string we were able to let the boss have the night "off" to use the skid steer to clean the yearling pen. (It is bedding pack, but it was pretty bad). Alan milked the east and part of the west strings so the milk line didn't flood out and drop all the machines on the floor half way through. We have an inch and a half pipeline and cows that need two inches. In summer when they are on grass and really milking heavy it is a nightmare getting the milk through the line. Becky was able to just feed the calves and go cook dinner for us.

Thus we were done half an hour early. So we put Bama Breeze and Chevelle out in the pen with the six already there. That cut Becky's calf watering work load a bit. And dinner was ready when we got in from chores.

It was very, very nice!
(And I look forward to more of it, greedy old me.)

Anyhow, it was still daylight when we got in...to find a freeze warning had been issued. I have been checking the forecast several times a day as I have all my house plants out and much stuff in the ground. At four in the afternoon two stations were calling for about 44 for the overnight temperature. And then they changed their minds. Anyhow everybody pitched in to help me get stuff in and covered, but of course, I forgot stuff. Don't know if it actually frosted, but it sure tried. Crazy weather. All my life and I suspect all my parents' and grandparent's lives (after all they are the ones who taught me to garden), Memorial Day has been considered a safe last frost date here in upstate NY. Now last year we had a freeze June 8th and it is this cold the last week in May this year. Global warming is making it darned cold here is all I can say.

Two more days

I can't resist the way the sun hits this door and mirror every morning...
just at this time of year.

On Friday, Liz will be done with her internship and finished with college....except maybe they want her to fill in on Sunday (we hope not) and she has to do a presentation in the fall. It has been a long three months. Our corn planting is behind because the boss has to milk when she doesn't. If he is in the barn milking he is not in the field planting. (That and he broke the gang bolt on the disks yesterday, which doesn't exactly help.) She and I are eager to get some calf housing units built and to move some babies around, get things cleaned up and just generally take a hold and do better.

Anyhow, I sure can't wait. This will be the first fall in many, many moons that somebody has actually not had to go back to school. Every year we get a great routine going over the summer. We work well together and play a little and end up with a great sense of satisfaction at how life and work and family are going along. Then comes school, everybody leaves and it is down to me and the boss and whoever can fill in when they aren't in class.
The fun kind of goes out of everything then and it is all work and no play.
This year Beck and Alan will both be in college, but at least Liz will be staying home.
I think it will be nice.
Heck, I know it will be nice....now if we had them all home, oh, heck guess I shouldn't get greedy.

Been saying this all along

Foot and mouth plan used flawed study.

I have been writing in the Farm Side about this since the short list of possible sites was first announced and they were all inland. So have some other bloggers and a few news folks. I still can't believe that our trusty government wants to put a lab exploring deadly and highly infectious cattle diseases right in the middle of cattle country. Can anybody say disaster looking for (and finding) a place to happen?

Blog friends and poultry

I can't tell you how much I value the online community. Folks that I have met through blogging and other online activities have offered friendship, a sympathetic ear when things are hard, perspective when things seem hard but really aren't, and a never ending wealth of humor and great photography every day of the year. The whole family has had the opportunity to get to know what every day life is like all over the USA and Canada and to enjoy wildlife, ranch life and ordinary life of all kinds. Folks I have "met" here at my desk in the dining room have been kind enough to help me with every kind of thing from starting fires with wet wood to doing a better job of taking pictures myself (I found the button, Steve).

However, I have never, until Sunday, actually met a real live blogger. A while ago though I mentioned that I was having a hard time finding chickens. Since Empire Livestock closed the small livestock section of the Tuesday auction it is hard to just pick up a couple extra hens. When I said something about this phenomenon on a blog I regularly read the owner offered to give me some chicks.

I didn't have the slightest trepidation about saying yes. You can tell from her writing that this is a very special lady and I couldn't wait to meet her in person. Sunday I dressed in my best farmer chic (blue cotton work shirt and jeans worn so thin and soft they feel fuzzy) and Alan, Beck, the boss and I headed out. We met at the Tractor Supply near the kids college. There we found out that Teri is every bit as nice in person as she seems on her blog. And the chickens are the cutest things you can imagine. Becky has taken right a hold of caring for them and keeps them in this cage in the hen house days and in a box in the kitchen nights. They are probably fledged enough to be out all the time, but with chickens being such a scarce commodity we are taking no chances with them. It is interesting to sit in the kitchen at night and listen to them twitter to themselves as they fall asleep. With papa wren on the front porch singing his babies to sleep and them in the kitchen it is sort of like surround sound with birds.


So thanks, Teri, for the poultry, it was super to meet you. And double thanks for the introduction to the local farm version of Craig's List....(now there is an addictive pastime! The boss and I went through all the ads yesterday morning and just had a ball...) It was real neat to actually meet another blogger. Maybe someday I will get to see others in person....you never know.