Pearly Gates

I have some wonderful aunts....and really nice uncles too. One of my favorites in the aunt department sent me this.


A woman arrived at the Gates of Heaven. While she was waiting for Saint Peter to greet her, she peeked through the gates. She saw a beautiful banquet table. Sitting all around were her parents and all the other people she had loved and who had died before her They saw her and began calling greetings to her. "Hello - How are you! We've been waiting for you! Good to see you."
When Saint Peter came by, the woman said to him, "This is such a wonderful place! How do I get in?" "You have to spell a word," Saint Peter told her.
"Which word?" the woman asked. "Love." The woman correctly spelled 'Love', and Saint Peter welcomed her into Heaven. About a year later, Saint Peter came to the woman and asked her to watch the Gates of Heaven for him that day. While the woman was guarding the Gates of Heaven, her husband arrived. "I'm surprised to see you," the woman said. "How have you been?" "Oh, I've been doing pretty well since you died," her husband told her. " "I married the beautiful young nurse who took care of you while you were ill. And then I won the multi-state lottery. I sold the little house you and I lived in and bought a huge mansion. And my wife and I traveled all around the world. We were on vacation in Cancun and I went water skiing today. I fell and hit my head, and here I am. What a bummer! How do I get in?" "You have to spell a word," the woman told him. "Which word?" her husband asked. " Czechoslovakia ."

Upstate Shopping Trips

Can be a little different sometimes. What with detours and traffic and all.

Cow Girl of the Northeastern World

Her Grandpa Delbert gave her her first cow when she was three. She could always pick her out of the herd even though she was just an ordinary black and white grade cow. She would pick her grass and dandelions and could lock up her stall from the time she could reach high enough to close the stanchion.

She and her sister and brother worked in the barn and fed the hens from the time they were four or five.

First show cow, Sonora, at six.

Milked her own string from 13 on.

4-H dairy judging, dairy quiz bowl, local and regional teams and several trips to state competition. They took her to state when somebody else couldn't make it just to fill out the team. She placed in the top ten. Dairy ambassador. Years and years of band and and select chorus.

Eighth in her high school class.
Dean's list every semester of college.
Valedictorian of the animal sciences division at SUNY Cobleskill when she got her bachelors in animal science.

Right hand. Left hand. Long since gone beyond helper to partner in the barn. We decide by committee and everybody has a voice. Calving administrator. Calf raiser. Ration planner. Hard working Farm Bureau board of directors member and newsletter co-editor.

Rodeo blogger. The kid who takes me to rodeos and makes it all fun.....The one who stays home from camp so the rest of us can play....we love you kiddo.


Happy 23rd birthday Liz, thanks a lot for being you.

Memorial Day Salute

We heard this in the barn this morning just before the tape deck ate my tape....it seemed like a fitting song for this day of celebration and somber remembrance.

Sunday Stills......Yellow

For more Sunday Stills.....

Bump on a Limb

I was weeding.
The oriole was singing.
Right over my head.
He flew away, but I looked up anyhow.
And there was this little thing, still as if it were a bump on the limb.
It never moved even the tiniest bit.
Until its folks came back.
Lotsa baby robins this week!

Wow, Just Wow

One of the finest farm bloggers and a great columnist in a number of farm papers, Melissa Hart, of The Knolltop Farmwife, recently asked Liz to write something about her mother for a slightly belated Mother's Day column.

You can read it here.

And all I can say is wow.......
Oh, and thanks, Liz.

More Money Well Spent

I am glad that somebody is looking into the budget at the National Institutes of Health, because they are doing things with our tax dollars that are irresponsible bordering on criminal in my opinion.

NIH spends $178 thousand to study still more foreign prostitutes.

Dairy Check Off to be Applied to Imports

And about time too!
Read about it here.

In the past 10 years alone, the value of dairy imports sold in the U.S. has expanded from $800 million, to nearly $3 billion.

Dubya, Dubya

Wordless Wednesday that is.

Growing Carrots Indoors

Long time readers will know that three years ago we started growing lettuce indoors. The first crop of the leafy stuff was grown in a cooler, but we have since discovered that you can grow an incredible crop in a medium sized flower pot. All that is needed is dirt and a good, sunny window.

Thus this winter in my burgeoning garden-deprivation-induced boredom, I decided to try growing carrots indoors. I took a large, five-dollar flower pot from Wally World, which I had purchased for a Norfolk Island pine (which STILL needs repotting) and set upon the carrot experiment. My preparations included nothing more than filling it with potting soil (since it was the middle of the winter and plain old dirt was unavailable), sprinkling carrot seed on top, watering and waiting.

Yesterday I pulled this baby, about a five inch rainbow carrot, from the crowded pot.
The verdict is in.
You CAN grow carrots indoors

Tasty ones too.

Rigth to Farm

Here is a story that ran in Michigan about a New York farm's nine-year struggle to stay in business.

Where the Wild Things Are

They are here. With us. On the farm, in the fields, in the yard, in the trees, sometimes even in the buildings.
Sometimes they make our jobs harder. There was something under the grates in the milking barn last week...We didn't know it until we were bringing in the cows and they started flying through the air like Pegasus or maybe really, really big popcorn. It was probably a raccoon that came in through the stable cleaner chute. It chattered and rattled and terrified the cows, especially Blitz, who jumped a gate into the manger almost on top of me and Alan. It was adrenaline pumping, running and jumping ourselves time for a while....

Now we have to have a big, high gate in that spot, because even though there is nothing under the grates now Blitz is terrified to pass that corner and wants to escape into the manger...twice a day...every day...so does Licorice!

Most times though the wild things bring us immeasurable joy and delight. They add so much to the daily experience of living outdoors in a beautiful and natural setting, while working hard at growing food for America. We actively protect and encourage most critters. For example, I won't let the grey fox family be harmed, even though they eat ALL our berries, as long as they leave the hen house alone. They live right in the three bay shed quite near the house. The boss likes wild turkeys so he leaves out a few rows of corn most years for them and the deer.

However, we can't let them eat or kill everything we own. So we have loosely defined rules and guidelines for dealing with the wild things.

Coyotes should stay out of sight of the buildings and away from the calving pasture. There are 320 acres here of wood chucks, rabbits, a virtual plethora of fat, grain fed (yeah, there was a whole field of our corn that we couldn't get in last fall, that they ate all winter) turkeys, and an almost infinite number of small rodents for their dining pleasure. And deer. If they want big game there are deer. They are welcome in the ag bag field where they eat rats and mice that tear open the bags and spoil the feed.
However, if we see them harassing pregnant cows we will shoot them.
Simple and it seems to me quite fair. We are keeping a huge chunk of land open and welcoming to things they can eat. We know where all the dens are, but we leave them alone.

We ask in turn that they leave newborn babies and birthing mothers off the menu. And they are smart adaptive animals. They can learn. If we quit farming this farm, which borders directly on several housing developments, any new owners will probably not offer them quite as good a deal.

And our farm is kind of a wonder in this modern world of border to border, single crop cultivation. We have woods. We have small fields with thick, brushy hedgerows. They are not a glory in the eye of the extension agent, but the wild things love them...food...corridors for safe and secret travel over our acreage..rocky places for dens and trees and brush of all kinds for nests and hiding places. We could easily bulldoze them all out and grow more corn, but we would rather provide a barrier to erosion and a place for trees and tanagers.

I don't think when we shoot predators that are taking our livestock that we are doing anything immoral or wrong in the natural scheme of things. They protect their own as best they can and we are merely doing the same. We don't go out and wipe out dens or kill things that aren't bothering us or the stock. However, the Eastern coyote moved into this area in the late 70's filling a niche left vacant when wolves were wiped out long before I was born. They are much bigger than Western coyotes and much more eager to eat large animals. In some places they have decimated deer populations. We can't let them kill our cows and calves. And they would.

Around here in recent years they have maimed an elderly pony just down the road and disemboweled calving cows belonging to neighbors, eating the emerging baby as it was being born and killing both mother and baby. (Didn't turn out well for the coyotes either, as the farmer saw them and went for his gun). However, that is simply not something up with which we are going to put.

We personally have had them eat a downer cow that we were nursing back to health...pretty much alive.... in one night..and take probably ten or twelve calves over the years. Not to mention one poor little bull calf, whose ears they ate off. He lived, but...They grew so bold at one point before we lived here that a pair stood on the back porch growling at the nurse who had come to tend to the boss's late mother during her final illness. The nurse had to call us to come drive them away!

So we coexist with the wild things, feed some of them, like the wild birds, leave corn out for the turkeys and deer most years, leave the coyotes alone at the back of the farm but do not welcome them in sight of buildings or in the calving pasture.
The cows are under our protection.
We remove their horns and keep them inside fences and breed them for quiet temperament.
It is our job to protect them.
So we do.

Sunday Stills...Eyes

For more Sunday Stills.........

Not Welcome Here

When we came in from milking last night Becky, who was cooking dinner for us, showed me this picture on my camera. It is a bit blurry because she was in a hurry, but that thing up on the hill is an Eastern Coyote. I thought it was a deer, it is so huge. It had been harrying Liz's pregnant show cow, Blitz, but Blitz ran it off. Guess we will have to start shutting springers in the barn yard or get out the 243 or maybe both.

This is Liz

I am posting this for Mom. I'm sure she would want to share it with you guys. The Farm Side is back up on the Recorder's free website. So here you go!

Baltimore Alarm Clock

This woke me up this morning...quite some time before bright and early.
He was right in the locust outside the window. Alan says you can put out a cup of jelly and they will come to eat (oranges work too, but I don't have any of those.) I will have to try that tomorrow as I have a meeting today.

He was loud but I liked him.

This REALLY Makes Me Feel Good

$2.6 Million Study to get Prostitutes in China to Drink Responsibly


I had the crazy idea that there was a financial crisis going on here in the USA. That the carefully negotiated 2008 Farm Bill was being gutted to save a tiny fraction of the amount being spent willy nilly in Washington. That we are getting universal (and mandatory) health care crammed down our throats one bottle of heavily taxed soda at a time.

And yet we can spend millions to research what is very, very clearly someone else's problem! Come on now....pull the other leg.

CWT Herd Retirement

I don't think much of this program for a number of reasons, but here is the latest news on it.

Wordless Wednesday