Barn Babies

It is warm enough now for our Miss Peggy to visit the barn sometimes.

The babies in the brooder are getting big.

As are the lambs.

The air this morning is simply seething with birds, enough Red-winged Blackbirds to awaken me from a sound sleep just before dawn. Grackles. Brown-headed Cowbirds. 

Their calls are ringing all around even now. 

And the barnyard was full of Robins when I walked over.

Now if only they can get that weasel.

Check out this fox in the barnyard. Bold huh?

Divergent

Talking on the phone this morning to our boy who drove off to work a few hours ago. He was sitting in his car on a street in Harlem waiting for someone to open the gate to the job site. I was in my room waiting for morning....which was actually kinda, sorta, here.

He was struggling for air...I could hear him breathe...and we  talked about it. How thick it was and hard to breathe down there. Up here, with this cold rolling down from Canada, the air is like cold water or some amazing magical elixir that inspires and invigorates. I find myself dragging in great lungfuls when I take the doggy out or go for a short bird walk.

It's as if you can feel it all the way to your toes. 

I asked him what it looked like where he was, so he texted me a photo. Tall buildings, a scattering of construction equipment, Christmas trees of lights clustered here and there. 

I could hear buses grunting and puffing and he mentioned a blond in airplane pants walking past.

We talked about the Latin names of trees..don't know how we got on that...the fact that the sap is finally running I guess...and got through some Acers and Quercuses before the subject changed....

A few minutes later Daisy and I were outside the back door, with a mango sunrise popping over in the old horse pasture, oh so delightfully farther north than just last week. Inky outlines of the trees in the hedgerow stitched a pattern in dark and light against it.

Red-winged Blackbirds were singing for the first time this year. 

A Northern Cardinal pumped out a song so frantic I wondered if he ever stopped to draw a breath. And, oh that air...

It isn't quite nine degrees here....8.6 in fact. Down there it is 22. There the light comes from security fixtures, here from the rising sun. They have cruddy air, we have air so clean it squeaks, I swear. They have blonds; we have blond coyotes. Buses or bird song, take your pick.....

It's all NY, but what a divergence...and in much more than temperature.

I am grateful that we get to live on this side of the divide....

Happy Birthday

To my favorite Renaissance Man....

Love you, kiddo, hope you have a wonderful day and many, many more.....

Good Reads

Saw this blog post on a friend's Facebook wall and was delighted. Although we showed dairy, not beef, so our animals came back home to the herd, most of these were true for our kids and their friends.

The family that shows together.....

Can't say enough about fair friends...our kids formed lifelong friendships with the kids they met tying cows together at the fair...and we formed friendships as well. Even with the folks that we only see on Facebook, or hear about from mutual friends, there are always those memories.

Of great cows, good judges, and ones with judgment that was strongly questioned in muttered conversations back at the barn. Of grand champion ribbons and coming in last. Of fair food, fair football games, unfair cows who liked to step on kids' feet in the show ring, and then push until they fell over, foot still pinned under that hoof....hundreds of stories, decades of fun......the post brought it all back for a minute or two.

Oh, and if you see Ralph congratulate him on being invited to the Holstein Convention as a 40 year member of the Holstein Association. He got a note yesterday, but he says since he was a junior member earlier, he has been a member even longer than that. Cool

Fourteen

Garden pond ice sculpture

And shiverish out. But lovely, just lovely.  Bright and sunny, with not too much wind. The ground is frozen again. No mud. Nothing left behind by the doggies in the snow all those months of cold and ice.

There was a little snow on the woodshed

Some kind of blackbird, probably a grackle in the tree above the clothesline. I am freeze drying blankets and sheets out there in hopes of clearing away some of the ugly fug of winter and sickness and misery.

Just a little....

No one is really quite well yet, but everyone seems to be ready to move again at least.....Have a good one. 

Chikin

The kids built another new hen coop over the past few days. With Alan laid off for a few weeks things got DONE.

Added to the new brooder,

 Lots and lots of new chicks....

It all equals.....eggs! Present and future

My Maserati Does 185

Peggy is feeling much better...talking to her other grandma on the phone

I lost my license. Now I don't drive

Not so true, but life has surely been good to me so far.

However, we've all been sick for the past couple of weeks, with the plague starting with Becky and toppling us all like slow motion ten pins.

 Guess I am on the mending side of the equation, but I sure have felt better. so I will finish up my weekly writing chores, listen to some good old music that was revived during the Florida trip, and gasp like a guppy all day.

It's hard to leave when you can't find the door.

Sunday Stills.....Agriculture

For more Sunday Stills......I had to stop myself at these.....

Pruning

Yesterday was deliciously puttery. The air was warm and forgiving and even the wind lacked bite. The boss and Alan sold a little hay, and then Alan and I set out to clear the area in front of the wood stove and get a better fire going so the evening would be warm and cozy.

While we worked I heard a sort of guttural croaky sound, and thought, ah, a blackbird. I looked up and sure enough a pair of Common Grackles flew over. Like the Cowbirds the other day, by midsummer they will not be favorites, but the first ones are always welcome.

For some reason we walked up where the guys took out that old apple tree and Al glanced at my little Ida Red and his Grandma's old dwarf Red Delicious.

The Ida Red had never been pruned and needed her leading branch lopped out and some grapevines sheared off. The other tree had been pruned by me...maybe twenty years ago or so...and it was planted too deep so suckers had come up from the graft. It looked like a witch's broom on a bad hair day. He cut and cut.....

"Enough," he said....I looked and pointed. Onward and pruneward! More, more, more.

There is much less tree left now, but the big sucker the size of the main trunk is gone, some of the top has become bunny food....and lo, it looks like an apple tree again.

Then this morning I discovered some more pruning. Just for fun I partake of what might be called torturary.....topiary being far too tame a word. The little Honey Locust trees that spring from the seeds of the big one get twisted, tangled, tied, and knotted into interesting shapes each summer. Thus they stay small and don't have to be ripped out of the flower beds by the back door, where big trees can't be allowed.

 My favorite looks like an old fashioned carpet beater.

Anyhoo.....over the winter they were under the snow right up to their chins. Down underneath the bunnies had been busy...snip snip here. Snip snip there....they don't exactly look like they did last fall.

But no big deal. They grow like weeds and there will be plenty of new twigs to turn and tame once the weather warms up. Maybe I will train the two of them together into a bower or something....

A Dog at My Feet

My own dog, Daisy, lies at my feet sometimes...if there happens to be something comfortable upon which to do so. With her though, it is about soft and fluffy, not companionship. She is perfectly independent as only a dachsie can be.

However, when the kids' dog, Ren, lies beside me, I know that it is because she is a dog and I am a dog person and so she is comfortable there.

She is here now.

No pillows needed.

Kinda Pasty

As you may know the kids have been working toward a sideline in poultry and poultry products. They have a small flock of layers, they raised turkeys on grass last summer, and now they have chicks.

Lots of chicks from a number of sources. Word has it there are 80-some in that nice brooder the boys recycled.

Some of these chicks arrived with pasty fannies and others, after all the stress of moving several times, developed them.

Thus yesterday was baby chick butt washing day. Some of them received this lifesaving attention in the kitchen, before the operation was moved to the barn.

I retreated from this affair. Not that I haven't had chicks in the house. I used to raise them in a 20-gallon aquarium with a light bulb when we lived down in town. At least we had an enclosed porch for that enterprise. I raised many broods and had a substantial flock at one time....maybe a hundred or so birds, and certainly 75 guinea fowl.

And I have tended to pasty chicken fannies more than once.

It was just that I didn't have to.... so I didn't. 

That torch has been passed.

 Have fun kids.

Winter Week on the Farm

Bunny banquet....or cottontail cuisine

Brown-headed Cowbird

Could this crow be counting?

Gold Finches

Framed

For Great Grandma M

The Birthday Girl

Not so much

With mommy and daddy

 

Uncle Alan, Uncle Alan, get offa my airplane

That's better. Now can I ride both at one time???

As requested, Peggy's first birthday pics.....I have many, many....did I mention many....more.