More Melamine in Milk

Yet another reason to keep it local when it comes to buying dairy products.

Middle 'O Summer with Frogs and Fogs

Gratuitous green frog, just because I can

The mist is lying soft on the foothills this morning and tossing scarfs of itself all across the heifer pasture. It is creeping down across the old horse pasture as I type this, fading the trees to shadows of themselves and dewing up the grass.

Indigo bunting, cat bird, robin, mocker and who knows who else are singing up a dawn chorus as bright as the first of June. Last night the mother robin actually slept with the nestlings instead of standing on guard all night. Must be it was cool enough to brood upon them rather than over them. Chickadees are back from wherever they have been hiding and Alan rescued a baby yellow warbler from the path the other day. We have been blessed in the bird department this year.

No cows in the heifer pasture this early morning. They spent the night in the old day pasture. The grass is good and Bonneville had her bull calf there yesterday. She came down to the barn at milking time, but we wanted to let her go back to him so, despite wanting the cows to have a wagon of green chop in the heifer field, we sent them north and west instead.Sky is pink and gold and orange and it is still cool enough for comfort.

That makes two bull calves this week, one a fat, sleek, milking shorthorn cross and the other BV's Keeneland Astre Pat son. As time goes on we are not losing our liking for the good crossbred shorty calves. We sent a steer one to the processor for our freezer last week and I am much looking forward to having our own beef again. We raise it much, much leaner than store beef where there are high allowances for fat content. Ours has a very good taste and I love cooking with it. We have been without home-raised beef all winter, mostly eating game with an occasional store bought hamburger or hot dog thrown in. The menu is about to get a lot more extensive.

Liz starts her new milk inspector job today, with her first training trip with our regular inspector. Tomorrow she will be off to Cornell University for some formal class work. Most of that will probably be review as she did study in the field in college. I know this is going to be a challenging task, (the inspector comes to tell you what you are doing wrong, which is usually not anybody's favorite thing) but I suspect she will do it well. Meanwhile we will feed the pony and get the cows grained while she is gone and hope she has fun down in the other half of the state.

Enjoy the day!

PS, the boss heard a man on television last night, who said that there were detailed ingredient lists on cow feed long before they put them on foods for human beings!

Sunday Stills.....Shadows

For more Sunday Stills.......

Craig's List

A never-ending source of free entertainment (and strange, yet effective, spelling)(and no, this is NOT my ad...I just found it this morning and thought you might enjoy it too.)

FARM EQUMENT FLAGER - $888 (I KNOW YOU!!! TOWN)

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FLAG ME AGAIN ILL SET YOU UP AND KICK YOUR JACK ASS AND THROUGH YOU IN MY SEPTIC TANK WITH THE REST OF THE ???? THINK ABOUT IT SCUM MAGGET

For Sale..Roy Roger's Trigger

This is truly creepy,
I'm sorry.
There are some things I am just glad that I can't afford to buy.

Hotter Day

First sound- the baby robins chinking for food a-sound like someone chipping away at a musical stone. The proximity of their nest to our activities...right outside the front door, under the edge of the porch, gives us a chance to see what robin folk do at night.

Stand guard is what they do. Literally standing on the side of the nest, bill thrust upward in defiant defense of their small brood. They are suffering so from the heat, adults and chicks panting all day long, or the babies just hanging their heads over the side of the nest, drooping sadly. I feel about the same way.

First sight- the phoebe that has undertaken a late nesting somewhere in the yard. It either awaits on the wire just outside the landing window and looks me right in the eye or guddles around in the driveway jerking its tail as phoebes do.

First outrage- The %^&&** deer mowed the tops off my entire crop of green beans.
And tore down the foil pans I hung to deter them.
I was hoping they wouldn't find them.

Moved Sadie dog from the barn to her lounging dog house under the tree nearby. (She normally does night duty in the barn due to barking issues.) Don't know if that will keep them at bay, but it is worth a shot. A lot of hard work in that garden.....most of it mine. I was looking forward to some good meals out of it.

First scare-Becky kept asking me if the scrap man had bull dozed my rhubarb...grandpa's rhubarb really...I am just the guardian of the line. I kept wondering what the heck she was talking about. See she does the chores in the heifer barn and I don't. I couldn't see that he had inadvertently, while doing some work for the boss, cleared out all of my old garden fence and driven the bulldozer right through it. I gave up on that garden because me and my hoe couldn't outfight the nettles. However, my pink lilac and my big rhubarb bed are still there, surrounded by a wall of reed canary grass, but still much loved. When I walked down I was sure that my heirloom plants were gone, but he missed both bush and bed by about two feet. I am grateful. Guess I had better start moving them up closer to the house.

So in a world where there are murders right on the street, in the town where I was born, arson fires, heat waves from Hell and a flood warning, not watch, out in the other end of the county, I will go to work, aggravated by the deer and grateful for the grace that saved the rhubarb that I hold in Grandpa Lachmayer's honor.

July 4th Milk Dump Protest

This story resonated with me partly because of the photo. That is how our barn looked up until the Amish fixed it not long ago. I wonder how many roofs are going without patches, how many pieces of machinery are being cobbed together in hopes of just one more season, how many visits aren't being made to doctors because the health insurance is too expensive these days.......

Cows Before Folks

Sat down with a nutritionist today, a fellow with whom we much enjoy working. He brought his new boss along and in between swapping stories we worked out some new ideas for better feeding the cows. There is no question that we humans could probably use some nutritional advice too (although I don't suppose we would follow it) but the cows come first at least in that respect.

Learned some good stuff about putting up the Sudan grass we planted too, which will be useful I am hoping.

Happy Birthday to my Other Handsome Brother

(I have a brace of them, fine men both and much beloved).

I can remember when Mappy was born...sleeping at Grandma's house and hearing about the new brother. Now he and his family are among the finest parts of my life.

Love you brother. Hope the heat isn't treating you too cruelly these days. Welcome to decade five where the rest of us have been flitting around for quite some time now!.Love you little brother.

Arson and Hot-ittude

The baby robins on the front porch spent yesterday panting...their little beaks gaping as if they were seeking a handout...or should I say a beak out..from the folks. The nest is shaded by big cedars and small lilac bushes and tucked well under the eaves of the porch, but there was no escaping the hothothot. This morning the birds are going crazy getting their chores done before it really gets warm, hummers at the bottle, the gold finch that is picking spider webs off all the windows to make a nest, swinging from the hanger it dangles from right at the same time, robins crisscrossing the porch with tiny insects to stuff in those red and yellow beaks.

We lost an older hen to the heat, even though I propped the hen house roof open with bricks and cooled her off with water. Just too much stress for the poor old thing I guess.... Had to move Scooter to a place right in a shaded door way so he could catch what breeze there is. He is so small and it appears that his temperature-controlling mechanisms have not caught up yet. He was happy by the door anyhow and danced around like a little sprite.

All we can do is make everything as comfortable as we can and wait for the heat wave to end...oh, and continue doing everything else we normally do. The crops aren't going to wait for cool weather so the haying must go on. Yesterday was a nightmare of flat tires for the guys. Bad enough to chop all day, but changing tires in such heat is a misery. They did it anyhow.

Meanwhile boredom is being blamed for the alleged arson, which took out the building where my parents used to have their stores. Boredom! We have rules about boredom here...do not mention the word lest some evil parent find you a job to alleviate your problem. No one gets bored here.....(Maybe if somebody gave those three little alleged firebugs some farm work to do and they wouldn't have either the time or the energy to whine about being bored, let alone use a path of destruction to keep it at bay...poor babies.)

My folks were as bothered about the fire as I was...it wasn't our building or anything, but so many memories roosted there. I couldn't drive by without thinking.....

I was seven or eight when the folks opened the shop there and an adult and out on my own when they closed the antique store and moved the book shop to Johnstown. I think back on sitting on the steps with my brothers, sticky and orange with Popsicle juice, pretending to be pioneers in the horse-drawn sleighs the folks used for window dressing, antique lap robes and all...going out back in the wood-working and refinishing part of the shop, where dad and mom worked over the furniture they restored, to beg some scraps and nails to build boats to float in the creek that runs under where the library is now. My brother's boats were always worlds better than mine...his engineering talent showed up early. I did learn how hard it is to drive a nail into hardwood though and to pass up that pretty cherry for pine every time though. I drove the mud puppies and salamanders in that tiny creek crazy trying to catch them without much success, but they were always there to tantalize me to another trek down there...and the minnows, darting silver flashing in the murky, shallow water. I couldn't' catch them either.

During those hard young years we were always changing houses and moving here or there, but the shop was a sort of center of everything in our lives. The folks were open seven days a week and we kids were always there, underfoot but kept close. We learned to watch for shop lifting and to treat customers with courtesy. Got paid commission on our sales (oh, the Popsicles ten percent would buy).

I feel an odd resentment toward those poor allegedly bored little alleged arsonists even though all they killed was a long-empty shell. Maybe I shouldn't but I do.

Fire in an Icon in my World

When we were kids Dad had a bookstore/antique store combination on Main Street in Fonda NY. I have an amazing array of memories of those times, from reading through the merchandise to melting my boots on the kerosene stove. Many of my most prized possessions today are bits of history that served as toys...things that I picked up off the cluttered tables and begged to be allowed to keep, like the button in last week's Sunday Stills. I can remember sitting in Dad's chair in the alcove one freezing winter day and finding a book with a fancy Victorian lady on the cover on the shelf beside the chair. I picked it up, opened it and discovered Black Beauty......My brothers and I spent so many hours there in the days when we were young.

Dad moved the business to its current location in Johnstown many years ago, but I will never forget growing up in "The Shop" or Montgomery's Antiques and Tryon County Books. The building eventually became a video store and then just another empty place on an almost empty Main Street.

Last night it burned.

Fire has changed the face of the village so much in the past few years...

HHH

Too hot for words....

This Got me Thinking

From John Bunting's blog...something which I had never thought about but it has me thinking now.

"Today, we Americans celebrate July 4th without any apparent questions about the meaning of freedom. At the time of the American revolution 90% of the eligible voters, granted they were male and white,were self employed.

Today, most Americans are employees and I would hold that is an important thought to give pause as to the meaning of freedom"

Farmers on the Internet

One of the farmers I love the mostest

This has been making the rounds on Facebook, which is great, but what really tickled me was to see it listed on the Kim Komando news this morning.

That is about as mainstream as a story can get. Kudos to the farmers who take time from their busy and challenging lives to interact with their customers...the food consuming public...about what they do and why they do it.

Sunday Stills...Frame it

For more Sunday Stills

God Bless the USA

Why am I Thinking of Ice Cream?

Doesn't this look a little bit like a scoop of ice cream? Vanilla, of course, still the most popular flavor...

With a few of these sprinkled on top. What a terrific treat for the holiday weekend!

July is Ice Cream Month!

Cross Country Blogging

I meant to ask to take a proper picture,
but got so interested in talking that I forgot....

It is pretty cool when a fellow blogger rides a motor cycle across the USA and writes about his travels. Cooler still if he stops by for a visit. Today we got to meet Earl, and it was a fine experience. He is even more well-spoken than his blog would have you think, (which is saying quite a lot) and he didn't seem to mind the warts-and-all experience of visiting the wilds here. (And what with the lawn mower languishing by the honey locust, hood-deep in uncut grass and the usual general shagginess, there are warts and wilds aplenty amid the good parts.)

We toured the mostly empty barn, as the girls were out to pasture (any other day they would have been on the hill right behind the house but today they decided to wander way to the back.) We checked out the ag bagger and the self unloading wagon, which coughed up a beater yesterday, but is all fixed today. Then we walked about half way to the way back fields and stopped in the Thirty-Acre lot to look north toward the Adirondacks. NY was putting on a gentle show of fluffy white clouds and stark shadows against the green of the mountains (instead of the usual rain, rain and more rain) so the view was worth the walk.

We had a nice talk, and I got to satisfy my curiosity about the Appleseed Project, which is something Earl participates in regularly.

It is pretty neat to me how blog folks are on one hand complete strangers and on the other so familiar and friendly. Thank you Earl for taking time to stop and talk. Hope the rest of your trip is safe and beautiful.

New Job

Our milk marketing cooperative has hired our oldest kid to be a milk inspector...a demanding job, but she will be using her degree and in this job market it is pretty exciting. She sure is going to get to know a lot of farmers!

University of Vermont Selling Dairy Herd

HT to John Bunting's blog

Read about it here

Our milk inspector keeps telling us that dairying is about done in this country. Is he right? All I can tell you is that the whole industry is in a world of pain and this is probably just another symptom.

"Vogelmann said UVM would be the first public institution in the country to shift its dairy research to an “on-farm” model with private partners, and other fiscally strapped research universities are paying close attention. “It’s something we’re pretty excited about,” Vogelmann said. “This is a very challenging time for all land grants. At the heart of the issue is the status of university farms. They’re very expensive to maintain. It takes quite a lot of operational capital just to keep the doors open and the lights on.” "