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.

Feather ID

Does anyone recognize these feathers? They were stuck to the big windows in the living room one morning. Thanks

Changing of the Guard

The boys modified an old brooder into this nifty structure for baby chicks.
The kids also managed to find a lot more than these.......

I guess Peggy had a rough night, going to sleep just in time for her daddy to go to work and her mama to catch a few winks before the day begins. Cutting molars at just one year old is tough stuff!

Thus paths just missed crossing on the way to daylight. I get up early to work on the Farm Side while it is still quiet..... and just because I am a morning person.

This is often time for private joy. Lonesome sunrise, early bird song, the whistle of a passing train.... It can be nice to be alone in the earliest part of the day. Sometimes there are issues though.




This morning walking the dog with leash and flashlight, rather than just opening the door and mixing the dog food, showed discretion rather than valor, thanks to our ever present wildlife.

The past couple of early mornings and late evenings have offered us the fragrant aroma of Mephitis Mephitis wandering the neighborhood in search of love, grubs, stuff in the compost bin, or whatever it is that brings skunks out in late winter. (And way late this year...we usually notice them in January.)

Dogs that want to live in the house with the folks must beware. Skunk is not a popular bouquet among the denizens of den and parlor, thus pups must not sport it, no matter how appealing they might find it.

Kinda like rolling on fresh cow patties or random dead things. People just don't get it.

Anyhow, with Alan home, and spring on the way, things are moving and shaking around the place. He refurbished an old fish tank, so we have guppies, glow tetras, and neons, brightening up the living room, a newly reconstructed brooder full of chickies in the heifer barn and all sorts of other projects starting or in the planning stages awaiting better weather.

Never a dull moment around this place!

First Bird

I keep track of the first bird I see or hear every day, just for fun. Usually it is an American Crow or some other common critter, but today it was something unusual.

Over the past few weeks the boss and Alan have been finding turkey carcasses all over the old pasture and even right down in the barnyard. They think they have been torn up by coyotes or eaten by owls or something, but at any rate they are getting eaten.

This morning when I stepped outside I saw some of them, up on the hill behind the house. I wonder if they moved because of the killing or because the snow is going down.

At any rate, first bird was a turkey.

Sunday Stills......Clouds

Had to hit the archives this week. It was overcast most of the week and then not a cloud in the sky....

For more Sunday Stills.....