A Rainbow

For Linda

Who likes them....

Look at all the Happy Creatures

Becky called me to see this wild turkey hen right on the lawn behind the house

These ladies went NUTS!

Get off our lawn, you varmint, you!

And then the boss called me over to see this one and four others,
which got away before I got to the camera

Dancing on the lawn. There are eastern cottontails and woodchucks too. I shudder to think of the beating the garden is going to take, should it ever dry out enough so we can actually plant it.


The wild things are on the move....new migrants showing up every day too. It is cold. It is grey. It is windy. But it is spring and there is no denying it.

Sunday Stills......Ed's Picture

For more Sunday Stills....... our challenge was to manipulate Ed's photo. I only made a couple of changes...HDRish and Pixilate, but it is certainly different. 

Ed's original photo

Two Bears

This is a long ago, but very fine dog, named Two Bears. She liked to jump and play so much that those pics show her leaping for a tuft of grass. Photos were probably taken on a very long ago trip to Colorado, which encompasses many of my favorite memories. Ah, to be young and s̶i̶l̶l̶y̶  confident enough to travel a good half of the USA camping in the back of a pickup truck with two dogs along.

This is a somewhat more recent story about two bears. I shuddered when I read it. They do not make guns big enough for me to face that kind of bear. go, read, be glad you weren't along on this camping trip.....

Not the world's fanciest camper, but a great companion...Brandy.....there on the hood.
And travels from NY to Florida to Idaho, Montana, Colorado, and many more states to remember.

Like a Compass Needle

Drawn true North, Daisy's pointy little nose is directed at the door at the bottom of the stairs. Somebody open that please....her boy is home.

And so, soon, will be everybody else. I must ask you please to excuse the lack of posting. Things are changing, people are moving, the telephone is out of order, and repairman expected, and life seems to be moving along, as crazy as ever...or crazier.

True smiles from tiny Peggy yesterday, golden coins of laughter and joy. She finds the world an interesting place and lying in the living room kicking an interesting activity.

We find watching her grow to be interesting as well. So many years since there was last a baby here....the other most recent baby drives a Camaro now and is of great interest to a certain little dachshund.

Have a great weekend. I've got to go move a few hundred recycled soda bottles so the repair guy can get to the modem.

Traditional Wisdom

Suggests that the mothers of infants nap, shower, or indulge in a little "me" time while their babies are asleep.

Or, if you are a Northview girl, you could tear the vacuum cleaner apart and repair it.

Just sayin'......

Suspended

Before the rain..sunset reflected

By the rain. Our spring plans that is. You probably can build fence under the pouring sluices of the cold, lonesome rain. Maybe you even should.

So far we haven't. Thoughts of throwing Bama and Moon out into this weather after long labors on our own part aren't all that appealing.

Lots of babysitting going on though. A minute here, half an hour there. It's well enough for now....but she is a real mommy and daddy's girl and the grandparents are pretty much chopped liver in her lexicon.

So we do a little book work and we do a little barn cleaning, and we wish the rain would stop. Soon.

We moved the last two little ones up into the "new" part of the barn night before last. Thor and Vigo now are housed where the better of the two stable cleaners can help keep them clean and warm and dry. The other barn cleaner was a factor in parting with the cows. It was worn so thin that a few extra hours of valuable organic dairy cow by-product would actually snap the big, formerly-thick, Patz links right in half. A new one would have cost six grand. And the drive unit is pretty tired too.

Now there is just one cow on that section, old Bama, and she doesn't stress it too badly.

It has rained a lot this week. The sump pump in the barn clicks and whirs every couple of minutes. I shudder to think how badly the barn would flood without it. The barn was always dry...those old timers knew how to site their structures and how to build them right....until the new road went in in the late nineties. Blasting must have disturbed a vein of water somewhere because it's been kind of soggy ever since. but then, we have also had a lot more rain since then...

If it ever dries out the boss is looking to start chopping hay as soon as the grass gets a little taller. We are still buying feed, and, although nineteen head are a lot easier to keep supplied that over three times that many, much larger critters, forage is scarce and expensive this year. We have been seeing cows and heifers out on pasture since mid-March....

Anyhow, if spring ever comes, you are going to see farmers flying to get ground worked and corn and seeding planted. Across the nation planting is lagging way behind

.

Singing

Grandpa is singing to Peggy.

Daisy is singing to Peggy.

Well, really, she is rolling around on the floor begging for attention, but you can't have everything.

Favorites

The nice young man who bought Broadway and Rosie put up a video of them going out to pasture with his herd for the first time, on Sunday, on Facebook.

It was wonderful to see them. I don't permit myself to linger in memory, but try instead each day to focus on forward, ......but...it was wonderful, wonderful I tell you, to see the red and chocolate roan of their bright spring coats, as they romped with their new herdmates, drawn by fresh green grass like filings to a lodestone.

I cried. 

All fifteen times that I watched it. Could have been twenty as far as that goes. Or more.

 I can't help it. I still think of myself as a dairy farmer. Do two cows count?

Sunday Stills.....Trash

The photos above were taken by our son-in-law, Jade, who drives one of those great big trucks to various landfills. Thanks Jade!!

The "trash" below was found on our lawn the other day. Did a cowbird raid a robin nest? Or maybe it was just a failed egg that the robins tossed out themselves.....

For more Sunday Stills......

For My Husband

On one of his biggest days.

Thank you, Robert, for reminding me of this.

Bright Eyes

Peggy Ann has graduated from staring at the photos of my grandparents and great grandfather, the railroad conductor, on the kitchen wall, to watching this picture.

Liz drew it in seventh grade. I have always liked it, so I framed it and it also hangs in the kitchen.

The baby finds it utterly fascinating. 

And I think she smiled at me today.

Sprout Brook Auction

Is today and starting soon. Don't let the rain slow you down. Grab your umbrella and galoshes and head over to watch them sell.

Rumor has it that there is a record, or near record amount of stuff, from milking equipment, to antique machinery, to modern farm machines ready to roll. Not to mention all sorts of interesting odds and ends.....

And if all else fails, you can watch my significant other put his Missouri Auction School training to the test as he and another fine fellow sell one of the many rows of stuff.

Agriculture...ever Changing

John Deere horse drawn cultivator

The other one...over at the sale

 Although they look the same, there are two different horse-drawn cultivators here. The top one is an old John Deere set, the lower something else, a bit more complicated.

The top one, after who knows how many decades sitting up in the barn, can still be adjusted to open and close and work at different depths. With a little WD-40 and elbow grease that is probably also true of the one in the other photos.

The boss kept the JD set and took the other over to the auction to sell. He also took over a 16...or 18...there was some discussion on this...foot wide set, also made by the famous green and yellow equipment company, of field drags, which perform somewhat the same job. 

Except that instead of a single horse hooked to the singletree, which you can see in the third photo pretty clearly, it needs to be pulled by a pretty darned big tractor.What would take days with the little ones, and a lot of sweat, and grunt, and misery, can be done, literally in minutes with the big one.

See the singletree?

So many activists want to see ag go back to the days before big fields and big tractors and big farms....but how many of them would like to hook up a horse at dawn and struggle all day long holding on to the handles of this device, shoving it through the rocky, bumpy, hard, hard earth, and then have only a little bit to show for it at the end of the day? After about the first hour's worth of blisters and bone-busting work, I'll bet not very many of them.

And I'll tell you a secret about the Amish guys....they love nothing better than a chance to get up on an English guy's tractor and control all those horses and rip up some dirt.

Our logger friend came over with his rollback truck and hauled the big drags and some other stuff over to Sprout Brook for us...and I thank him for it. With only Alan's little S10 and Jade having to work, so he only can come now and then with his bigger truck, it was a huge help.

Pretty Bells

Turn up the sound to enjoy. ***Thank you Becky for being my bell ringer....note the Dr. Who nail polish for Impossible Astronaut Day

In a One Horse Open Sleigh

I had always planned to clean up this cute little cutter and put it in the parlor in front of the windows. However, we could never get the second big door open and it languished up in the building.

It doesn't look like I am ever going to get around to that job, so the boss took it over to the auction to sell this Saturday. If you are interested, get there early....

It belonged to his dad...he is said to have bought it for ten dollars from some people he did grounds keeping for.

We kept the bells, and if I can get somebody to ring them while I take video, you will soon get to hear them. They are the mellowest, most sweet-sounding sleigh bells I have ever heard. I have them in the kitchen right now and I jingle them several times a day just for the sheer enjoyment of it. 

I can just see it spanking down a snowy road with a little bay horse in front....and those bells making merry for all who could hear as it passed by.

Lost or Strayed

Cat fruit

My direction that is. My every single day has been bracketed by cows since I was roughly 26 years old. Maybe even younger...I don't quite remember when I started milking a hundred and fifty twice a day at Hollenbeck's and actually had cows even before then. That was a very long time ago. 

Now, without them.......

I help with the meager helping of chores, what with the few animals we have left and then polish off all the other stuff I have always done, laundry, housework to my admittedly low standards, a little bookkeeping and filing. It takes maybe twenty minutes or half an hour to pick the stalls, milk Moon, feed hay and grain and feed the four bucket calves their milk. There are three of us to do it....

And then....what? I have been accustomed to a constant, unrelenting, and generally unreachable goal. And now, eh, it really doesn't matter. No milk inspector, no quality premiums to pursue.

Can't wait for it to be warm enough and dry enough to at least get some garden planted. Can't wait for the auction to be over, as the boss is going all day every day getting ready for that. Can't wait to figure out what comes next.

That blasted wild, grey Tom, has poor Jetsam up a tree again.

What the Heck?

I usually get up at or near, or on days when I have a lot of writing to do and need some peace and quiet, well before dawn.

This is one of those days so.....

First of all I got to stand in the center of the dawn chorus. Wow. We have an absurd number of robins around this spring and one was singing about ten feet from me when I walked Daisy by flashlight. Dozens of others warbled from every hedgerow and hillside. In fact they still are.

Nice. I think it may be going to rain because they are crazy loud.

Then as I sat here imbibing the first cup of coffee and putting off calling up this week's Farm Side and getting my act together, I heard this sorta familiar, but semi-out of place song.

Just faintly.

What the heck? 

And then it dawned. Last night just before we went to bed certain people who had been wheeling and dealing poultry showed up with three guinea hens and put them in the small chicken coop.

Yep, that is what I hear. Guinea fowl.

Now if only I could explain as easily the huge boom from off to the west that rattled the plates and shook the windows.

Gratuitous Peggy Pictures

Lemee alone, I'm sleepin'

Not sure about this bath stuff

I know, I'll pretend it's a spa

I want a pony, a bunny, a lambie.......

Pretty feet

He is Risen

Happy Easter to All