Mud-lucious

And puddle-wonderful. The woodcock is back. I had been staying out after chores every night, leaning on the car hood and listening. It is so sweet out there when it finally warms up enough to BE out there...to listen, smell, savor the arrival of spring with all it brings. Ducks shuttle by unseen, but clearly heard, and geese are back on the river. No woodcock though.

No peent.

No wingy whistle turning the empty night into a whirl of wonderful music.

Then yesterday morning, just as I stepped onto the back porch in the still dark, not morning yet except by government time change standards , I heard him.....close too. I wonder if he moved his peenting grounds or if it was just so quiet that he sounded closer than other years.

He usually starts his sky dance up by the horse pasture pond. This year it sounds as if he is right down under the apple trees by the garden. He showed up on the 15th last year and the 27th in 08
March 29th in 07 but not until April in 06

Another waited for event had taken place as well. When I got to the barn in reindeer bathrobe, barn coat. and high rubber boots, Armada had finally had her first calf, another amazing red surprise, but, alas a bull. She was feeling sorry for herself and wouldn't even try to stand up so I came back to the house to get the boss to give her a bottle of calcium, which perked her right up. I CAN give bottles if I have to, but she was lying half under another heifer and I thought that someone bigger, stronger and with longer arms was called for. Both baby and mama are fine btw...

I am so grateful she finally got around to having him. She was due the 13th. We started doing barn checks a couple times a night about a week before she was due to calve....which adds up to a lot of 0-dark-thirty walks to the barn...in the mud...which is actually drying up just a tad.

Although E. E. Cummings found mud to to be a source of inspiration and delight, I personally find it to require me to sweep the kitchen floor about fifteen times a day in a cycle of endless futility, unquenched by ceaseless boot scraping..the outdoors just wants to come indoors during mud season.

**The photos above are an update of things at the pond in Lykers...still pretty frosty and not much around but a few chickadees. Just a few weeks and that will change.

Walking on Water

Hurry on over to Compass Points to see the photos Joated took at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge yesterday. He actually got a really good shot of a muskrat walking across water on top of a school of carp!

Michigan Meatout Makes Many Mad

The State Senate

A Facebook group

Farm Bureau

And even me. What on earth possessed the governor of Michigan, where agriculture is the number 2 industry (to the tune of 71.3 billion bucks a year) to declare Saturday the 20th of March (not at all incidentally National Agriculture Day) Michigan Meatout day? I can't imagine.

I hope she wakes up and rescinds the proclamation. In the meanwhile, even if she doesn't I suspect that most Michiganders will ignore her ignorance and munch on meaty meals this weekend.

Doing Instead of Writing

Waiting to be potted

All this nice weather, I just can't help myself. Moving wood...spring clean up...and repotting this absurd fox tail fern. I grew it from a seed of the plant we inherited from the boss's mom, who in turn grew it from a seed at least thirty years ago...probably much more.

RIP

It broke the clay pot it was growing in and for a long time I had nothing else to put it in. Then it got warm enough this week to take the plastic off the sitting porch door...and out there were empty flower pots and lots of earth....

The roots

So that job is done. I still need to plant some peppers, somehow find some patterns for painting wooden yard animals. I seem to have accidentally acquired a job painting them.....anybody know a website that has pictures of them....decorative chickens, bunnies, cows, ducks etc.?

Writing the Farm Side

My first contribution to the Farm Side newspaper column in the Amsterdam Recorder was published on March 20th 1998.(Coincidentally this March 20th will be National Ag Day.) That first Farm Side was entitled, "Raising the most important crop," and was about bringing up farm kids to be productive citizens. At the time one of our dear friends was the main author of the column, which he started and his wife named.
He asked me to take over one column per month as their farm was demanding too much of his time to keep up with all the columns. Later he bowed out completely and left me doing it alone.
Twelve years worth of thousand-word-a week rants, tirades, and spring, fall, summer and winter poems to farm life have taken print and flown..... or failed. I have made friends and ticked folks off. I have been lectured and I have been thanked. Incidentally I have also been paid....I will never get rich writing but the Farm Side used to pay for my vacation back before times got bad and nowadays it makes a meaningful contribution to the grocery situation.

It has been fun.
It has been miserable.
Some Wednesday deadlines have been a cinch to meet.
Others have been pure Hell (I am always really tired after I finish the final putting together of the thing. I am generally not worth much on Wednesday afternoons).

One of the best aspects of researching for the column is how much I have learned about American farming and farm folks. There are so many kinds of farms; each is different in some way from others of its kind, each industry within the industry has bazillions of fascinating aspects to be learned about and new ideas pop up every day. I have surely loved the learning. My mind after all those years is like a farming trivia fun house. From popcorn to potatoes to how many miles a bee flies for honey...there is a lot to learn about agriculture.

Here are a couple (or so) websites I used for this week's column on National Agriculture Week, which just happens to be going on right now.

Ag Day Food Fun Facts

Ag Day Fun Facts, flora ad fauna

And a letter to our President from Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe

It amazes me that, after so many years and so many columns, there is still so much to be learned about agriculture.

Happy Ag Week to all my friends here at Northview Diary.

First Killdeer

Was heard last night, just after dark, when I was dragging bedding over from this side of the creek to bed up for the night. I used to keep the round bales Matt gave me over by the barn, but now we have four cows going outside and they tear the bales all up...so I have to lug it a lot farther.

It was sweet to hear the cry of the killdeer while I was doing the lugging though. Seems as if it is early for them. I will have to check back and see.

It is amazing to me how migration, which had barely begun just three or four days ago, is in full swing now. I went with Alan to get a load of hay yesterday and the roadsides were black with assorted black birds....funny how the red winged black birds and grackles flock up with the local starlings to form massive mobs that set the air ringing with their calls. They were settling over the long-harvested corn fields and then swirling up in black clouds only to settle again a few yards away.

We also saw a neat thing, a pileated woodpecker clinging precariously to a spike of stag horn sumac, tearing it up with its big chisel beak. It looked at first like a plastic toy, stuck in the branches and I did a double take as we whizzed by on our way home with sustenance for the girls....speaking of which, I cannot wait for green grass, which is our only possible savior this year. You don't have to buy it and they can eat as much of it as they want to. Praying for an early spring here with great sincerity.

Weekend

Liz set up and manned the Farm Bureau booth at John Deere days on Saturday. I helped her for a couple of hours, got to talk to a few area folks and Matt and Lisa who stopped by with their son. It is always a very nice program with wonderful food and very welcoming, friendly folks, but this year we heard enough bad news to last the whole year.

An area icon, familiar literally since my childhood, is gravely ill and missed the affair for the first time ever I guess, there has been another self-inflicted death on the edge of the farm community, someone we knew a little, and some dear friends, of whom we are terrifically fond, have had enough of this ridiculous price situation and are selling their cows. All such sad news...none of the stories we heard were mine to tell, so I won't, but they were pretty awful. I wish the anti-trust investigations that are supposed to be going on now, would get it in gear and actually stop the market manipulation that is driving prices down artificially. I don't think the big processors are a bit afraid that anything is really going to happen to them, as manipulation on the CME goes on apace....

And for you dairy farmers who wonder where your money is going, here is a link (caution, pdf) from John Bunting's blog, to a story in the Milkweed, that will probably floor you. (Take time to read it all if you can.) It sure shocked me. Dang, here we dairy folks are losing our farms and wrecking our credit and letting our families go without stuff that would probably surprise you if you knew about it and these "promotion" execs and "cooperative" execs are making money that would look good on Wall Street. There is a skunk in the woodpile, I'm telling you, and I hope they smell it in Washington soon.





Alan is no longer studying fisheries and wildlife over at Coby. He realized that jobs in the field are nearly non-existent and switched into the ag-engineering program, which is mostly a study of diesel engines. He has always had an amazing aptitude for mechanical work and is doing very well so far.

I took a couple pics of this gigantic tractor Saturday, because it is one of the ones he is learning to work on over at the college..(it was just visiting Hudson River Tractor for JD Days and the FB booth was right in front of it.) People actually stopped to ask us (we must have looked as if we would know) what farmers do with such huge tractors.....we told them that they work huge fields.

Sunday Stills...Sun Rises and Sun Sets

This is an oldie from the archives...sunset behind the heifer barn. Alas, since this was sunrises and sunsets week, it has been cloudy and grey all week.


For more Sunday Stills......

John Deere Days

Maybe Liz and I will see you there. We are manning the Farm Bureau booth looking for new members.

Finally Friday

Spring break just began so we have our boy home for a week...I am liking that.
The critters are liking the sunshine...

(Please don't mind Gael's semi-bareness. She is a very old lady and has become quite fur challenged these days.)

This Quote is Completely Insane

"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy," she told local executives."

This was reported to have been said by Nancy Pelosi speaking on the health care bill.

Food companies are required to put nutritional information on packages of food so people don't have to buy them without knowing what is inside. You can't buy a cracker without a calorie count. Most folks won't buy them without a price tag either. Why on earth would anybody be stupid enough to buy into a potentially life-changing bill like this one without knowing what is inside? Or having any clue what it will cost?

I am ashamed of our so-called leaders in Washington and appalled that my fellow citizens aren't standing up and screaming about this outrage.

Rumors

About the demise of the snow here.....are a bit premature....alas


My favorite rose quartz, which now adorns Mike's final resting place


And my former favorite Herkimer diamond specimen, which a certain someone broke with the lawn mower.



But we do have pretty rocks....er.....mineral specimens.

Dean Foods Buyout

Maybe or maybe not. Dean Foods is huge, handles a large percentage of American dairy products and is looking at anti-trust lawsuits. What will it mean if it is in fact bought out by a French company?

Cows that tweet.

An outstanding editorial on Hollywood and food activism

New York's new organic guidelines

Dawn Chorus

Kind of thin, but it is out there. Yesterday I heard the first tentative robin song from up behind the horse barn. (And my heart swelled to twice its normal size.) Around noon the first song sparrow tuned up (although there have been a few silent visitors at the feeder all winter).

This morning I went out at first-pink-dawn to attend to yet another barn check (no babies this time). There were at least four distinct robins caroling all up along the back of the yard. Two cardinals down by the neighbor's house. Song sparrows. First red-winged blackbird of the year singing down by the road. First grackle hiding among the starlings in the dead elm behind the heifer barn.

I know we still have winter left. Only one year since I have been at this farm (and so far there have been almost 28 of them) were we able to get out and build fence and get on the ground in March...and it is still EARLY March. However, the early bird gets the worm...or in this case the best nesting site...and it looks as if these guys are ready for spring....although probably not quite as ready as I am.

Brand New Chicken House

Sunday Matt and Lisa presented us with this nifty free-standing hen house. Liz and I moved the girls in yesterday and they seem to approve quite heartily. Nick showed the border collie's roots and origins by pointing it like any good setter might. He looked pretty funny out there on the lawn, front paw curled to his chest and tail gently waving. He is so fascinated by the hens that I have to remind him what he is out there for.

Update...we have lots of snow, it just doesn't show in this photo

Sugaring Off

t


These days of cold, moon bright mornings, and sunny-windy-blustery days, with hard, sharp frosty nights are perfect for making maple syrup.I am always excited by maple sugar weather! Yesterday, standing out in the yard with Matt and Lisa, buffeted by a wild, west wind, it was easy to tell that it was sugar time. (They brought us down a wonderful little chicken house which will be featured soon.)

Back in the day my dad, brother and I tapped some trees and made a little syrup every year. I used to walk my tap line on snow shoes, dragging a plastic toboggan with buckets on it to hold the sap. Keeping the buckets upright was a cuss-worthy challenge. Later I acquired a fifteen-gallon barrel, which worked better, but was still heavy and hard to handle. And it still managed to roll off the sled about fifty times a day, no matter how I tied it.

Now we let a man who runs a local sugar bush run a tap line in our maple woods and he gives us syrup at the end of the run. He has tubing instead of spiles and catches more sap in a day than we did in a year.

Less romance, but I don't miss the sled.


An old milk bulk tank our maple guy has converted to catch sap at the bottom of our maple woods. We almost never see him, but can tell by the appearance of tracks and hoses that he is out working the woods.

Sunday Stills...Numbers

Pi

(And crow pi at that...or maybe pi in the sky)
For more Sunday Stills

Happy Sunday, Mom and Dad

Seeing Red

Got a real surprise yesterday. My Holstein heifer, Bama Breeze, was bred last year to our milking shorthorn bull, Promise, and finally calved. Not only did she have a lovely little heifer calf, but it was bright, carrot red. We have never seen any red in her family before, not a single sign of it, although she is sired by our O-C-E-C Lindy Fred bull, who is out of C Stewart Haven TT Fallon, who was a Triple Threat daughter (he carried black red). Not sure where it came from as the gene for red coat color is recessive and can hide for generations. Anyhow, she was supposed to be sold along with a package deal of several other shorty and Holstein calves, but all that red makes her a keeper.

Springishnenss

Banks of ice pile up along fast-flowing freshets of frigid melt water. Early on they took the form of fancy fans, frozen flat above silently gushing streams, but with the sun comes strength. The water undermines and smashes them, then piles them up for later melting. By mid-afternoon all evidence of their existence will be gone, only to form flat fans again as night comes down.

This is a season for getting up early. In the almost-morning, before the sun began its carving and cutting of lingering snow, the moon tangled itself in the branches of a straggling spruce, pulled free then sailed off toward the silvery horizon.

As early as then the chickadees and cardinal were calling, and not long later the white-breasted nuthatch tuned up with a sound as jungle-like as Tarzan. It is teetering on the edge of migrant time;Alan saw a robin and a bluebird yesterday on Corbin Hill Road, and geese are gathering in dozens, hundreds, soon-to-be thousands. They stop in all the un-gathered corn fields to glean and gobble before heading on for the tundra...or for the banks of the Mohawk, depending. I can't wait until the river thaws enough for them to sleep in the cove across from the house at night. They giggle and whisper all night like a lullaby in wild-part time and my sleep is smoothed by dreams of flying.


And it is good to see the sun.