At daybreak a perfect half moon looks as if somebody chopped it off like a slice of silver cheese....A blazing sunrise, colors changing like a cinema, now peach, now tangerine, then cotton candy, clean bright white on to the blinding blue of noonday.
At sunset, pink sheep clouds nibbling their way across the heifer hill horizon, shepherded along towards evening by the tugging of the breeze. It snaps the laundry on the line and ruffles the border collie's fur as it passes. It is the kindest wind of the year, refreshing, sweet, and softly scented, with green earth and cow and clean, smooth water on its breath.
In between the day's bright ends, cleaning pens and moving heifers, fixing and filling and planning the planting. Heifers on Saturday, heifers on Monday. Salesmen and electric fences, shovels, wheelbarrows full of baleage (when is somebody going to straighten that bent axle and find some grease I want to know?) skirling skid steer, singing songbirds, snarling river, snaking brown Schoharie...it is spring in the valley, sit up and take notice.
I was on the telephone with one of the world's best brothers yesterday, our weekly Sunday catching up session, when I saw them for the first time and heard them killeee, killeee, killeee-ing as they fluttered over the yard. They were still there at just about dusk last night when Alan and I were out lugging in the last feeding of baleage. They made my day.
A pair of sparrow hawks...kestrels...the smallest American falcons. When the boss and I were younger, a lot younger, a pair nested each year between the roof boards in the heifer barn. They have always been among my favorite hawks and their presence nearby all summer long was always a delight.
Then West Nile virus wiped out most of the area hawk population (not to mention crows, jays and chickadees, the heifer barn hawk family included, and we never saw them down here by the house again.
Slowly, at least the population up in the fields returned to some semblance of normalcy. There were once again fluttering crosses of bird, hovering over the farm machinery waiting for large insects to be disturbed as the driver worked the land and gathered crops. (If you are a bird watcher a tractor seat is a wonderful place to be. The wild things are quick to take advantage of stirred up insects, mice and voles, or turned up earthworms and seem to be drawn in as if by a giant net when the engine starts. We have been delighted by ring-billed and herring gulls, foxes and coyote pups, swallows and swifts, juvenile red-tailed hawks, so new to the game that they had to walk around the field clutching at prey, and of course sparrow hawks, which take advantage of our actions by catching and stashing dozens of critters in nearby trees for future snacking.)
Thus yesterday I was overjoyed to see a single kestrel winging around the heifer yard peeking between the roof boards, checking out the old nesting site. When he was joined by a second my heart was thrilled. When I looked up late in the evening to hear that familiar call, my Easter was complete.
I have this love affair with lovage. My mom gave me a chunk from her plant several years ago and at first my reaction was mostly dismay. You know...the whole six feet tall and growing like kudzu thing. It smelled so strongly of celery that I was afraid to use it.
Last year I overcame my trepidation and slowly began to use leaves in soups, stews, spaghetti sauce etc. Then we all started cooking meat with it. Soon it became a staple, with dinner seeming downright bare without it. Last summer I froze some (wash it and throw it in a freezer bag) dried some in the oven, dried some on paper towels, left some on the counter to wither until I got around to using it, and we cooked with it all winter.
The last two jars are just about empty. Maybe two or three good tablespoons left. I was beginning to worry about running out and have been skimping the past couple of weeks. Then today I went out to shoot my Sunday Stills Easter pic and look what I found! If I was the type I would do a happy dance.
And on a totally different topic...how would you react, say you were pretty darned conservative and wrote a farm column for your local paper, and included in the text of your column, right at the end, not separated in any way from your paragraph (in a story about goats btw) the powers that be placed a public service announcement for the area Democratic Committee? I am sorta kinda dumbfounded.
Some of these are worth a click to see more detail...
Although there were a lot of thistles and I don't think I have ever seen it as wet as it is now. Liz did most of the thistle stomping, while I carried the hammer (in my handy dandy hammer loop, something which I usually cut off of jeans because of the danger from power take offs. However I don't use them any more, PTO's that is, being an old broad, and the hammer loop was sure handy). We got the field behind the barn up in single strand electric in just a couple of hours. Amazing that the snow and odocoileus didn't take it down worse than it did. usually heavy snow and rampaging deer are rough on fences every winter. This year in places the fence was up for several sections in a row and all the insulators were lying around in plain sight. It was GOOD to get outdoors.
Wish you could smell the maple trees in bloom. You don't smell much of anything outdoors in the winter, as many of us who work out there notice when things warm up and you can again. Yesterday as Liz and I came down after getting the electric fence up, wave after wave of it wafted over us. It was sweet as hot sugar and in fact smells a lot like hot sugar. It was wonderful for me...not so much Liz who is allergic to maple blossoms. (For some reason she won't let me plant any maple trees down by the house.) I have read that it was a poor season for the maple folks, with a short and spotty run.
Joated posted this video arrangement of the weather maps of the last 22 Hell Storms that have nailed the northeast. Wow! I had actually noticed that they looked a lot alike on the weather map but it is something to see them slashing up from Florida or over from the left coast one after another.
Sorry about that stuff yesterday. Things looked awful, scary and bad. We dodged that bullet, thanks to a hard working professional in town. A worry that has been hanging over me since last summer like a big, black blanket, hangs no more...or at least much less. And the grass is almost green. The sun came out yesterday after all that Godawful rain.
To make it up to you for me being such a party pooper yesterday, here are some fun things to do and cool folks to visit. Please pay them a call to get your grins on.
****Update, my extra level of woe this morning was caused by being turned down for some credit we absolutely needed to stay in business. Our banker found another option this morning so for now....and I guess now is all we get to ask for. Thank you all of you for listening to me and caring. It means a lot.
No good things to report. Nothing good on the horizon. As I have written about other dairy farms giving up and quitting and good lifelong farmers ending up with nothing left.....hardworking farmers kidding and not in a funny way about becoming Walmart greeters... our own farm has been teetering on the brink.
The brink may be here. I am sad. I don't know who we will be after we sell the cows, if we end up having to sell them. I hope we can hang on. Green grass is so close...maybe four weeks...maybe less. Green grass won't pull us out of the hole, but it would cauterize a couple of the bleeding arteries.
If we can't last it out, well, we can't. Misery loves company and thousands of farms have folded in the past couple of years. There is nothing so special about our tiny operation to make us any better than the thousands of other farm families who couldn't survive on pay prices that are less than two thirds the cost of production.
For selling a goldfish to an underage piscesophile. You read it right. A 66-year old great grandmother sold a goldfish to a 14-year old, breaking highly enlightened and commonsensical British animal welfare law, which requires that someone attain the far more astute age of 16 to purchase a fish.
John Bunting linked to this live blogfrom the hearing yesterday. I am working my way through it as well as waiting for analysis from NY Farm Bureau to be posted. This is a complicated topic, but if something isn't done soon this country is going to change in a big way but not in a good way. Has the cooperative system been perverted until some coops work to make money from farmers rather than serving them? Will USDA do anything about this? Time will tell, but whatever it happens it is already too late for a lot of farms.
My work hat, from Allied Federated Cooperatives, the company to which we used to sell milk. Back in those days things were sweet. Plus pocket stuff...Swiss army knife and shepherd's whistle. Books....the best of things. Liz 'n' Jack. Bayberry
Teri gave this guy to Liz. I like hearing his crow and he seems to like his lodgings in the new hen house with the striking hens. Hope he can talk them into laying us some eggs.
Every now and then I open Charles Thurwood's 1874 pocket diary and compare his notations of what went on on his family's Fort Plain farm to what is happening on our farm in the here and now. Charles was a young man in 1874, voted for the first time that year. He and his family worked hard at farming, gardening and building around their place, but spent most evenings visiting neighbors and having fun.
"Windy but pleasant and i and til went to Mart Brookmans auction and we stade all day and our father boilt maple sugar 8 pounds got 3 pales of sap and 32 eggs"
Here at Northview, the sap run is about over, but the rest of the crew (excluding Beck and me) are going to Jim McFadden's auction on Saturday. It is windy, but pleasant this morning. The danged hens refuse to start laying...little do they know that if they don't get busy soon they are getting kicked out of the nifty new hen house to be replaced by some pullets, which I will find somewhere. There is no economy in raising your own eggs, but they sure taste good...darn it!
I bought Charles' diary way back when the boss and I were dating as a Christmas gift for him. It came from my dad and mom's bookshop, Tryon County Books. Mom is working hard at making an online catalog...if you are interested in history, hunting, fishing, shooting or any other antiquarian books, take a look. (I had the good fortune to grow up in a bookstore, reading Tarzan, the Hardy Boys and non-fiction animal science books well above my years....it changed my life in many ways)
***Thank you one and all for your excellent guesses. Many of you got very, very close. This is a photo, taken from a distance and cropped like crazy, of the sun shining through the dry winter branches, of a bunch of small box elder (acer negundo) trees. The shiny, flashy things are leftover seeds, called samaras..they are paired and winged a bit like silver maple seeds. I liked the way the setting sun was shining through them in an otherwise completely gloomy atmosphere one dark day last week. Thanks for taking time to have a go at the puzzle and have a great day.
Posts
