Cropping up all Over

Crocus

Squill

Anise Hyssop! I am so happy to see this fragrant little delight

Ice Follies...been naturalizing them
since we moved here and they are finally coming into their own

Finally! A warm spring day. Winter has been digging its claws in, refusing to loose its hold on the ground or on our hearts.

Ask any farmer and they will tell you...these crop up anew each spring as well!
For Grey

Planting History

NOT Datil pepper seeds. Leftover milkweed.....

I have been reading this blog pretty much since we got on the Internet...certainly most of the time that I have been blogging. From its author we have learned a great deal about all things Florida. He is the science teacher the rest of us only dream of...field trips out into the Gulf, snake excitement, birds, gophers of the reptile kind, exotic plants and all, with a friendly pack of incredibly literate Labradors thrown in as well.

Florida simply fascinates me. You know, from out of the far far north and all....They have different birds and plants and critters. Pure Florida feeds that.

For years FC has been offering Datil Pepper seeds for sale...He grows them himself; pure heritage, heirloom in the most literal sense of the word, seed stock.

This year we finally ordered some.

I planted them today, along with a bunch of assorted sweet basil. Now I am crossing my fingers for success. If they come along all right, all you Northview people who drown everything I cook with the hottest hot sauce you can buy are in for a treat. 

He sent recipes too. You should go to Pure Florida and search "Datil peppers" to learn how the tradition of growing them has been passed down in the family for generations.

Thanks so much FC. This planting history business feels like a fun project.

Sunday Stills.....Cows

Neon Moon

A wee skirmish over who is going to stand where

Cinnamon

We wuz only foolin'

Seriously

Thanks, Ed, for this fun challenge.

For more Sunday Stills.....

Shooting Bison in a Barrel

I wish I could tell all the people who milled around terrifying the loose bison yesterday that they probably contributed to the problem. Bison are wild animals.They wouldn't run up to a lion or tiger waving cell phones and taking selfies would they? 

Maybe they would.

Liz actually saw a post from a  news channel urging people to go get photos and selfies. It has since been taken down....

But maybe if people had stayed home and not run around chasing them waving cell phones they might have calmed down enough to be captured. Or maybe not.

Meanwhile, reading the comments on various news stories raised my blood pressure beyond the safe point. All those instant experts damning the family that owned the animals, the police, and anyone who dared make an intelligent comment. 

Wow. Do they talk to their mothers that way?

I saw suggestions that the owners should be shot too. That they were Nazis. Monsters. Bad business people. Liz went to school with some of the family members and none of those awful things are true, but all of them are hurtful.

There were lots of urban fencing experts too. Obviously in the utopia where they live, trees never fall on fences. Animals never panic and run through fences that would normally stop a train. I have seen a German Shepherd dog eat through the wall of a HOUSE!. It weighed a lot less than a bison. 

I had to stop reading. I mean, who you gonna trust? Cornell experts? Farmers? People who work with bison? Or people who never stepped in manure, but sure know how to pile it?

We once had a valuable, but overly nervous....kinda crazy really...Holstein heifer, jump a fence and head for the Thruway in the middle of the night. The same Interstate the buffalo were on. Call us monsters and/or Nazis if you will, but we consulted with the state police and together decided that if she got on the Interstate she would have to be shot.

The officers went out on the road to look for her and do the deed if necessary.

Luckily she was found and brought home before she got on the highway, but it could have ended very differently.

I don't care how good you build your fences. Trees fall in storms. People open gates. Stuff happens.

However, I fear that social media will soon remove our ability to keep animals at all, no matter what our motives, no matter what our methods. When the people who equate uninformed opinions and cliches with actual knowledge use comments as a courtroom, much damage is done. Common sense isn't going to help. It is too hard to find. 

Oh, and in NY, if someone had been injured by those animals, the farmer would have been liable......so preventing that from happening was probably a good business decision.

On the Land

Road trip yesterday. We needed to go to Sunnycrest to get some Slendrette bean seeds. Although we grow half a dozen varieties of snap bean, Slendrette, or Slankette, its other name, is my favorite for filling the freezer. It is an easily picked, prolific bean, that comes back all season, over and over again. 

Becky found a little filet bean last year that bore right up until frost as well. That one was not a freezer-filler, because of the tiny size of the pods, but oh, so tasty. Alas I don't remember the variety, so I am going to have to have her look it up for me if I want more.

For a gardener, Sunnycrest's greenhouse is like a visit to a spa for a girly girl. What feels like miles of vivid geraniums flanked by smiling pansies and hundreds....thousands...of other sunny, happy flowers. Herbs. Succulents in little dishes.

Honestly I couldn't wipe the grin off my face. It has been a LONG winter, and really it is still hanging on. Cold and clammy this morning, with snow all around us. I came away with a nice spearmint plant and a yellow and brown coleus that caught my eye. Of course we also got a half a pound of bean seeds and a bag of Yukon Gold seed potatoes.

Then we toured down little country roads, some of which we had never seen before. I guess the boss was happy to get his hermit down off the hill because he obligingly stopped at Bowmaker Pond, where the Canada Geese and Tree Swallows were whooping it up.

I tried hard for some photos of the amazing hill country down between route 20 and Cobleskill, but the rain made it impossible. Tried for duck ID in Bear Swamp too, with the same problem. No light. Lots of water falling on us.

We drove well over fifty miles, through what has always been dairy country and saw three viable dairy farms. Three. And all three were pretty down at the heels. Of course nobody looks their best in April, especially after a winter like this past one, but still....you could just feel the hard times rolling off them.

It is easy to recognize farmhouses that date back to Revolutionary War times. This is a historic area after all. However, far too many of these stately former farm homes were surrounded by five acre lawns, a few tumble down buildings, and brush. There were a few farmers on the land, more Amish than English. It was sad.

Earth Day

On farms, large or small, they are all earth day. Whether it is the biggest corn producer in the Midwest or the smallest organic farm on a rooftop in NYC, farmers live with and care for the land. Even the crop protectant products with the most complicated names are intended to do a better job of producing food sustainably.

Here at Northview Earth Day is peepers in the horse pond and Killdeer in the heifer pasture. Baby birds and animals everywhere. Green just peeking through on the hillsides and the first daffodils...Ice Follies....down along the driveway.

 It is a small farm in the grand scheme of things, but hosts over 70 species of birds each year, many of them breeding in our woods and fields and hedgerows.

Tomatoes are up in the spare bedroom. Over a hundred of them. By the time I get them planted I know I will be wondering....what was I thinking!!!

But we love tomatoes and I love gardening, whether on the scale of vegetables for the house, or helping out with miles of acres for cows, or nowadays hay fields for our customers. I even miss driving the chopper and raking hay for the boss back when we had the cows. There is no place like the seat of an open station tractor on a sunny July day, with Barn Swallows swooping in to scoop up the insects from the wind rows, and Kestrels stooping to grab field voles. Wind in your hair and sun on your shoulders...that's Earth Day indeed!

Anyhow, Jade has one garden ready to plant so I'm thinking peas maybe? It may be warm enough.

This Apple

Didn't fall far from the tree

And she's the apple of her grandma's eye

Still Kicking

We are. No one is really 100% yet, but we are on the mending edge. Despite the plague  we had a productive weekend. I got to spend Saturday with the guy above. Always a lot of fun. 

From 7-County Hill

He took me riding around the farm on his quad, something I had never done before, and I am sold. A lot like a horse, without the hay and attitude. Not that I don't like horses and all.....

A little White Pine grove

Then we finished emptying the garden pond and cleaning it. Up until last summer it was a wonderfully balanced, self-sustaining little ecosystem. I didn't touch it except for algae killer now and then for years. Then the extreme cold froze all the wild and tame plants in it and it went to heck.

Shagbark Hickories on the back of 7 County

Smelled bad. Looked bad. Became a boring old chore. So I pumped it out and bailed it out and shoveled it out...it was STILL frozen in the bottom btw....over a couple of weeks, and he helped me get it dumped, cleaned and refilled. We...or should I say they...it took Liz, Jade and Alan to lift it...took out a large yellow iris that was the only thing left alive... and chucked all but a small pot full. It filled half the skid steer bucket.

The view north, for which the place is named

Now comes the fun of recruiting new stuff to get it balanced again. Anybody know any stores that sell hardy water lilies? The old ones came from Wally World and they don't have them any more. Speaking of which we found lily roots the size of your arm in there (!!!) No wonder we had so many flowers every summer.

Then on Sunday a new chick brooder/transitional house was built. The chicks were rapidly outgrowing the original brooder, and what with the weasel/mink/Sasquatch that has been killing hens they didn't dare put them out in the big coops they built.

Anyhow, it was a busy weekend...we still feel pretty cruddy...and our boy is off to the nation's capitol today....back to normal programming for us I guess. Take care.

Something pointy this way came

Sunday Stills....Cups

For more Sunday Stills.....

Ring o' Robins

Much earlier than this....in the still dark, really

Went out way early to look...or listen really...for Timberdoodles. Alas, not a single Peent! no matter how distant, to be heard.

However, there was a fine dawn chorus, echoing through the early fog and bringing the morning alive with wild music.

Only four species though. Only four. Robins, Song Sparrows in every direction, a distant White-throated Sparrow, most likely one of our own winter survivors, as they hang around the feeders, tame as ever, all day long, and a lone Killdeer, stitching the songs together with a strident staff to hang the notes upon.

There will be more, and probably soon. By the end of May it will be hard if not impossible to pick out all the threads of the morning symphony...but for now it is a Wing Quartet, lovely, but promising so much more and soon.

And hopefully a Woodcock!! Just for me.

Please send condolences, a prayer, a soft shoulder in time of need, or just a moment of silent thought, to my sister-in-law, Lisa, my brother, and their whole family. She lost her dad yesterday....never easy, but especially hard this time....and they need all the love and support we can give them.

Sorry also for the absence of posts. We have all been laid low, yet again, by a plague that found its way home from an Easter party with poor little Peggy. It spread through the family like a fungus. The boss has been very sick....wife thinking about the hospital and waiting on him and bringing him medicine sick....Liz has been nearly as ill....and the rest of us have been pure D miserable. I sound like an asthmatic VW with a clogged air intake.

This could all clear up any time now if I have my way, but it probably won't. At least Peggy is significantly better. Anyhow, have a good one. 

Speaking of the White-throated Sparrows....one was singing the other day in the stunted Elm across the driveway when I took out a few seeds, fairly begrudgingly, because, chipmunks you know... He saw me coming and flew to the Honey Locust still calling for Old Sam Peabody as they do.

And then, wonder of wonders, he landed about two feet above my head and just poured out his song as I stood there. I could see every feather in his bright, white, throat and yellow lores, and stripey everything else. It was like standing under a waterfall of Heavenly music. I think he would have sung as long as I stood, but I went inside so he could enjoy his breakfast in peace.

Common Core Mammal Math

Take two deer

Add one deer

Take away one deer

Take away four deer

Equals four deer

Wherein we visit Middle Earth

See, we found a Hobbit!

An Ent, peeking out from behind a Hawthorn

Fair Gondolin

Dancing at the eleventy-first birthday party

The Eye of Sauron

More on Dairy Markets

Here is a letter from an outstanding ag writer that explains amazingly well what is going on with farmers in the Northeast and surrounding states losing their milk markets. 

It has NOTHING to do with too much milk being produced on local NY farms and everything to do with manipulating federal rules to make big bucks, with no concern for what the local economy loses when farms go under.

If you are interested in how milk marketing works, you need to read it. Heck bookmark it, as I did, for future reference. The way our food is handled matters.

Just Make Yourselves at Home

And I don't mean on my rosy red lips

Sunday Stills...the Color Yellow or Wild Flowers

Look closely, there's a Goldfinch in there

Do you see him now?

Not much in the way of wild flowers around here, yet, although the daffodils are coming up. There was plenty of yellow and lots of flowers around last summer though

For more Sunday Stills.....

The current state of Upstate NY spring flowers, alas

Siblings Day

Was yesterday or so they say. I kind of missed it being caught up with poor little Peggy being sick and all.

However, I have the best. Siblings that is.... a brace of wonderful brothers, who are truly good men. Got to give my folks credit for raising gentlemen who choose to do good in the world...to be honest, caring and giving people. They have true compassion and are both much better people than I can claim to be.

I am grateful that our son is growing up so much like them.

I know I'm lucky to have them but I don't tell them so often enough no doubt.....

Love you Mike and Matt....you are the best.