June

My favorite month, all sad now, for missing Miss Daisy. So much dog for such a tiny package..... this is utterly true about Dachshunds.... 

So yesterday was a day of reflection. We only had her for three years, but it certainly felt like more....Today, well, life goes on and Mack comes in for a lot of extra pets and playing,

However, such a month as June will not wait by the wayside while you get your feelings in order. The sun simply WILL come up around five and fling gold and orange and red banners all over the place. And it will set in blazing glory or a gentle waving of delicate clouds.

The birds will bring their babies in to learn the ropes of coexistence with this big artificial structure plopped right down in the middle of the wild. This morning I was awakened by the strident, shrill monotony of a baby Eastern Phoebe, like a two-year-old asking, "Are we there yet?" over and over and over.

Not my buddy from last night....his mother maybe

Last night I shared the porch with that young male Ruby-throated Hummingbird. He wanted to sit on the strings across the opening where the plants hang and tank up on sugar water.

Believe it or not you could see him getting fatter and fatter as he drank, until his belly hung like a pendulous grape. Every few minutes he came back for more and more and more. I finally went inside, even though I really wasn't ready, so he could get fueled up for his overnight torpor undisturbed by my movements. 

It is also the season of stepping outside the door to pick dinner. At this point only herbs are ready, but what flavors! Garlic scapes, Orange Mint, Parsley, Thyme, Lovage, and fresh Egyptian Onion tops all wait for the scissors. We had stir fried beef with green beans from last year's garden last night....with all those good tastes and scents mixed in. It was nice. And if the woodchucks are willing, in a few weeks there will be fresh beans.....

In the depths of winter when we are eating out of the freezer and freezing ourselves in the gloom, it is hard to believe in June, or even remember what it offers. However, now we must seize the summer, grab the glamour, live life for all it's worth.....June is here in all its glory and it isn't going to wait for us.

RIP little Brave Heart

June is Dairy Month

Here are a couple of stories I used for the annual Dairy Month Farm Side.

Floating farm planned for Rotterdam

Northeast Dairy Settlement

Also talked to some good people, including our favorite veterinarian who stopped by to do some rabies vaccinations.Besides talking dairy, we discussed birds and speculated about a future Montezuma trip....hey, Alan, we figured you into the equation if you want to.....

Meanwhile it has been cloudy and cold and so windy the petunia baskets have been like cats, in and out, in and out. So far I have kept them from being beaten to death, but it takes persistence. The boss mowed part of the 30-acre Lot and it has rained nearly every day since.

This female Rose-breasted Grosbeak is rushing the mulberry season'
They are NOT ripe yet, but she comes in with her beak covered with red pulp and juice.
She and her buddies got all the wild strawberries before I even saw one.
Good thing I like birds

The dining room has resounded night and day, first with the strident screechy screaming of baby quail, and then with the much more dulcet tones of chicken babies.

I can ignore chickens unless they sound distressed, but those quail...fingernails on chalkboard doesn't begin to describe the sound they make.

Over the weekend, since the weather was not conducive to running up to Montezuma to see the Garganey, Alan and I redid the bathroom. I thought he was nuts, but you can indeed remove old tile from the floor, paint it and paint all the walls and ceilings in a few hours if you have a dedicated dervish on your team. It looks so nice! Glowing, and bright and inviting. 

 And I was delighted to go to the store for yellow paint and manage, fifteen years after the bathroom and kitchen were first painted that color, to be able to find the exact same color. Without a paint chip and a different brand.

The guys also put an upright under a sagging beam in the cow barn. Talk about a caber toss. I was quite impressed.

Anyhow, as always, never a dull. Stay tuned, stay warm, or cool, as the weather may demand in your neck of the woods.

And, the CamCam is back and looking good

Like a little Border Collie

And a really nice outrun too.....

Anyone who has owned a Border Collie is probably familiar with the way they like to gather things together, sheep, cows, ducks, family members.......

If they can herd all of anything or anyone into one spot and hold them there, then all is well with their world.

Peggy is just like them.

She wants all her people together all the time.

If she gets up in the morning and someone is missing she wants to know why.

"Aunt Becky?"

"She's working honey..."

"Why?"

"Because..."

This morning, "Where's Daddy?"

It's as if she knows it's Saturday and he should be home.

But.... "He's working honey."

"Why?"

Last night I was talking to her Uncle Alan as he drove home from Washington. (Yes, on speaker.)

She trotted up and demanded the phone....and being an indulgent grandma I handed it to her. Then I told her it was Alan.

"You coming home?" she asked insistently.

And then again, "You coming home?"

"Yes, I'm on my way...."

She thrust the phone at me and ran away to dance and dance, whirling and twirling and giggling with glee......

Yep, just like a BC, happiest at gatherings of her flock.

Lounging on the Lightning Rod

And how blue is that?

No messing with the color...he is just that blue

The Quail Connection

I have always had a soft spot for quail....Bobwhites that is. First of all when I was a kid, I loved Trixie Belden books. And the kids therein called their club the Bobwhites.

And then there was the time we lived just down the road from here and there were Bobwhites all around and they would whistle back to us, "Bob-bob White!"

And....now there are quail in my dining room. Tiny, itty bitty teeny weeny quail that just hatched in the incubator.

They make noises like squeaky machines.

They are not Bobwhites, but rather Coturnix, but still......

Summer in Retrograde

Waited out a thunderstorm on the sitting porch with this little guy the other day.
I think he is a first year chick and not so very afraid of me.

We are slowly, two years in, getting used to life without dairy cows....except for the hay business, you could call it retirement. I scramble to send the Farm Side in days ahead of deadline so I can play outdoors the rest of the week (and the house clearly shows my preferences, believe me. It's bad enough in winter....but now...well, just don't look and we'll all feel better.)

Brome grass in bloom, but too wet to cut and too cold to dry

This means finally slowing down enough to match the rhythm of the garden and other assorted plants and giving them the attention they deserve. Gardening has been a real pleasure for the most part this year, except for the part about waiting for the cold to go away so we felt safe to plant.

And now, the weather is going backwards towards the cold again, with that big hatchet of icy air showing on the weather map, chopping down from the nation to the north, and making the beans and radishes shiver. Polar Vortex redux.

It is hard to know what to do....I had a nice routine of watering things in the morning before the rest of the world bestirred itself, and then weeding and maybe planting in the afternoon.

Now I heft each flower pot....light enough to be dry enough to water? Hmmm....hard to be sure. I don't want to get any nasty fungusy things going so I wait.

The boss ventured into the dark maw of the cellar last night to divert the hot water from the boiler, from just heating our bathwater to warming the house again. Feels good too! After all, they predicted snow for the High Peaks last night. 

Seriously? It's June. Honey badger don't care though and neither does the weather. As one of the stubbornest wearers of shorts I know (Except for Scott and Alan) I am in sweats and my favorite red flannel shirt.

The boss also unplugged the big freezer to thaw it out, as we sent the mean steer to freezer camp. To give you an idea of how nasty he was, I am still filled with trepidation about going over to the barnyard and he's been gone over a week......

Ah, well, I planted squash yesterday in the howling wind and the kids put the pumpkin and Zucchetta plants in the ground up in the back garden.

And today an Indigo Bunting sang just a foot or two from the office window, early, early, with only me to hear. I watched him for a while too...out-bluing the Bluebirds like it's his job.

I'm sure it will soon warm up, but for the past two years I have never turned on the little air conditioner upstairs.....anyone care to bet on making it three?

I wouldn't be surprised.

The Show must go On

Plantin' taters

This morning will be a hard act to follow. Before my eyes were really open channel one was showing a Ruby-throated Hummingbird that was visiting every single flower on the Cigar Plant found at Sunnycrest a couple of weeks ago.

It was a soft blur of motion, then rattled like a moth against a window as it entered the center of the plant and its wings hit the leaves.

How nice to know that it does attract hummers, as advertised.I found a different member of the same family this week....coincidentally...and I am sold on Cuphea. Very nice plants.

Then I went out the other door for some reason and a female American Redstart was flitting around the new flowerbed Alan and I built this weekend. She has become so tame! she flies right up to see what I am about and tugs at every bit of string and fiber around the yard, looking for nest linings I guess.

It is sweet to see the old cows and the heifer out on the hill. The grass is up to the heifer's back. All you could see of her last night was a dark line above the green. Of course if we kept the deworming program running right, back in the day, this pasture would feed fifty heifers for the season...or at least most of it. 

Three isn't much of a strain. They need their salt block though....so I am nagging at the salt block moving people to get 'er done.

Before and After

Revenge of the Lawn

I running!

It is never dull out on the Northview lawns. An endless panoply of birds and wildlife and little critters galore flows by all day and probably all night.

Please excuse the bullet holes in the big windows...

We see cottontail rabbits and whitetail deer and woodchucks and birds of all sorts.

Sometimes they all come together to give us a really good laugh.

Yesterday we saw a young buck, just in the beginnings of velvet, when we drove away. Mid-evening he strolled onto the lawn through the gap and began to merrily chase birds.

At first it seemed a coincidence, but soon it was clear that he was actually pursuing the starlings that were grazing on the bugs and goodies.

He spent several minutes at that silliness and then came up next to the porch. The boss managed to sneak the door open so I could slip out with the camera and he never even saw me.

Then he stopped....frightened of something going on on the other porch. I thought it was the kids scaring him, making a mechanical noise.

Scares you? Scares me too!

Then I realized that it was a chipmunk.

I went around to that door to find that the munk was alarming at the deer and the deer was alarmed by the rascally rodent.

It was downright absurd as they scared one another out of two week's growth. Finally the deer was scared right away. The chipmunk seemed every bit the victor as he went right on chick chick chicking.

This morning the pump and filter were at the bottom of the pond instead of on the bricks where they belong. I'll bet I can guess who put them there.

Seems like that's what you get when you live in the country....free entertainment on every channel all day long. 

I'm outta here

You can get away with a lot of things

But deliberately poisoning Bald Eagles with an illegal chemical isn't one of them.

In Bloom in June

The Things you See

The cottonwoods are spawning hard...so many fluffy seed floats that they drove me in from the sitting porch last night. I couldn't breath without drawing in a snoot full. They feel like cat hair.

Out of focus shoals along the driveway

However, before I gave up on the pleasantry of the breeze, I got to observe a flock of goldfinches slipping in silently (can you imagine QUIET goldfinches!!!) and nibbling with great dedication on cottonwood seeds. 

Every little while they would lean over to scrub the resulting fluff off their beaks.

Who knew that anything ate those pesky seeds? I sure didn't. The warblers love that tree as well, and peruse it for insects all day long.

Trapped in the spikes of a blooming Orchard Grass plant

I know it is going to have to be cut down in the next couple of years, as it volunteered right in the Y of the driveway, where in a bit it will impact vehicle traffic....but for now, I like it.

How very glad we are that the Black Walnut tree does not distribute
its seeds in the same manner

I'm All Right, But.....

That phone call you hate to get. Well, I got it yesterday. Seems a tractor trailer in Pennsylvania swapped lanes entirely at random with a whole line of cars and trucks beside it.

Guess whose car got hit. Run over really, by the back wheels of the trailer.

Yeah, it will be a while before the Camaro takes us any more cool places.

However, it is probably going to be okay after some serious repairs to door, fenders, skirts, wheel, etc. ......and most importantly, our boy is okay.

There are simply no cars that matter more than that.

That being said, he loves that car and has invested a lot of time in keeping it looking like it just came from the factory....now it looks like it just came from a NASCAR race.

The other side is still nice and shiny.