When Ordinary is all you Need

New York Soybeans and the Auriesville Shrine

Yesterday was.....just a day.....the sun came up. People went to work or went out for chores. Things were dug from the garden and brought in and animals fed and watered. It was hot and humid....just a day....

Except that any day can be amazing if you watch closely and get lucky. 

 Alan is on a job in this state and can drive home at night, at least most nights. Means I can feed him up on good farm food and sleep better at night knowing he isn't in the dangerous big city. The garden is full of stuff, which I really need to get into the freezer, but we sure don't eat like this in the winter....

More NY beans

 I was doing dishes, for all my life one of the jobs i hate the most. At least I finally have a window over the sink, something I aspired to for many years in other houses.

I was grumbling through a LOT of them from two families living together, when a bird landed a couple of feet from my face in the arbor among the scarlet runner beans. 

I knew, instantly that it was a new one to me....so beautiful, so brilliant, so incredible a yellow, barred with black with a sort of penciled triangle around the eyes.....a Prairie Warbler!

It was a life bird for me. I know the woods warblers are everyday for a lot of people, but I am only slowly getting them on my life list....I literally got cold chills.I think the girls thought I was having a heart attack.

A short time later the dogs tuned up like they meant it. I looked outside to see a truck, out of which a young farm man was climbing. He is one of only two or three people whom we let hunt here and a good friend of Alan and the family, one of those fine young folks you can talk to with no generation or culture gap.

Turns out he was carrying his petition to run for town council. We were happy to sign and to get a chance for a nice visit. I was delighted to see a young farmer, a well-educated and well-raised young citizen, looking to get into area politics. 

Young matters because we need young folks to take an interest and take the world into the future. Farmer is important to me, because most farmers are common-sense, practical, business people, who get how the world works. Far too few people  realize how much ag drives our area economy, how necessary profitable businesses are to keep that economy healthy, or that tax money comes from people's hard work, not from the bottomless coffers of a benevolent government. I can't wait to vote for him if he gets on the ballot.

Dipping her hair in the river at dusk...

Then, come evening; both young guys were home early enough to actually get a hot dinner, roast beef, potatoes, and beets, all grown right here and cooked by Liz and me. We watched a movie together...Wild America....and had a nice gathering.

A good time was had by all. Now I am going to do the dishes with hopes that something else interesting will show up in the arbor.

Sunburned Serenity

After taking us to breakfast at my cousin's delightful restaurant, our boy suggested renting a boat and going fishing for our Sunday. I am not inclined to say no to a spot of lake, and even though the boss is a bit intimidated by water in large quantities he came along too.

We only caught a handful of fish, but some of them were downright exciting...little bass that leapt out of the water, wildly shaking at the hook...sometimes successfully...a rock bass for me so I could feel all successful...and lots more little bass that seemed to think the boss was the mostest and had the tastiest bait.

We let them all go of course, and took home the memories we reeled in instead ....dark blue denim water sparkling with wind-tossed glitter, all tied up with wakes of silver ribbon, knitting itself neatly back together in our own wake as we gently motored the entire lake, end to end and back again, trolling, drifting, swinging quietly at anchor. Spray flicking our faces, cooling the heat of the sun with water so clean it left no spots on my glasses.

It was truly a fishing day, with more boats on the hunt than I have ever seen before. We laughed over the way the waves surged up inside an old stump and then sprayed out a hole in the side for all the world like those little boy stickers guys put up in the back windows of pickup trucks...I'm sure you know the ones I mean.

We came home in time for a movie together and then our boy had to get some sleep for back to work today. The sun found all the places the sunblock missed, but the little sting is just a reminder of a really great day doing what we love with the ones we love.....and I think the boss may have lost some of his fear of the water too...

Speaking of movies....a few seconds of peace...turn up your sound for the best of it....

Sunday Stills....Clouds in Black and White

For more Sunday Stills......

The Wind Beneath your Wings

Eastern Phoebe intently hunting a foot from the window

It is a calm and foggy morning, utterly still, barely a breath of air to be found. Everyone is asleep but me, which is fine...I like this quiet time....

Yesterday the boss finished first cutting, which should have been cause for great celebration. However, a series of pop-up thunderstorms, which did just that, popped up, seemingly out of nowhere, certainly out of a clear blue sky, hit just as he was bringing the wagons down. No time to even put canvases on them.

They just got wet. 

It ate a lot of spiders....hey Phoebe, come again and bring your friends.

 Very wet. Some bales were certainly turned from a salable commodity to mulch or insulation for the foundation.

Anyhow, sitting here at the kitchen table in my late mother-in-law's spot....I will probably never fill her shoes, but I do use her chair....noodling through the morning's news of friends around the world...when moving leaves on the scarlet runner beans on the bird feeder arbor caught my eye.

Yeah, Yeah, I seriously need to get a ladder and do something about this dirty window
but I never left my seat for any of these photos except the turkeys on the bottom

I watched for a minute...no breeze at all you know...and there she was, a tiny Ruby-throated Hummingbird perusing the red blossoms for nectar.

I am so glad the kids brought that arbor down and gladder still that we grew the beans on it. Next year I will plant them thicker, but it is like a little play house of green and red, soon to be followed by blue when the morning glories finally get their act together....there are buds!

What a lovely little wind moving the flowers in the stillness....what lovely company the window brings....

Lookin' out my back door

Family Farm, not Factory Farm

Bama Breeze

We drove past one of the biggest farms in the county last night.... a number of barns, dozens upon dozens of calf hutches in long white rows, lots of feed and bedding storage, hundreds of cows, some new construction projects, corn fields, ponds, and all.

I am sure that activists and those not in the know would have been horrified. OMG, it's big! It has barns! It must be bad!!!!

I was instead quite tickled. The calves were obviously contented...happy even...out in their little individual yards, schmoozing with each other or prancing around. They were fat and clean and healthy. Their coats were sleek and fluffy and nice.

The cows were having supper, heads reaching through their feeders to piles and piles of lovely total mixed ration, or TMR. They were clearly contented too, just doing what cows generally choose to do, eating and hanging around together.

Everything, and I do mean everything, was spotlessly clean, and neat, and tidy. That is saying something right there. Animals make a mess and cows are particularly messy as creatures go.

Yet this place was tidier than my living room.

And it smelled good! There was no odor of manure at all, despite the large number of cattle house there. All you could smell was the corn in the ration, which by the way smells tangy and delicious, and the warm bodies of the cows....which to me is a wonderful smell.

It is sad that people who have no idea what they are seeing perceive farms like these as less than ideal. Instead this is a business built by a farming family who care for their animals and their land and take care of things with state of the art equipment. Hats off to them.

Update, here is a link I save about how cows feel about pasture vs housing in summer. 

Do Apples Portend?

Or pears prognosticate?

Does it mean anything that I have heard from both Washington DC and Alaska over the past couple of days that the geese are already on the move?

Samaras anyone? No ash borers in this tree yet I guess

I don't know, but I was out on the sitting porch yesterday and SMELLED fall. The weedy, harsh scent of crushed goldenrod and dying leaves was blowing on the stiff, chilly breeze. The male honeylocust is turning golden already and you should hear the cottonwoods chattering their leaves.

I am in no way ready for this, but I don't think it cares out there. Early winter? Hard winter? El nino like the experts are saying?




 If only I could read the future in the fruit......

Harbinger?

And so

The rain is flouncing down, dampening everything including everyone's spirits. After the hefty weekend work everyone is kind of tired anyhow and the rain just makes us all want to sleep. 

Working on a Farm Side about retaliatory trade protections by Russia against the US and EU and some of the ramifications thereof.

Some folks are pretty creative in their reactions.

 I would love to take advantage of this sleepy day.....however.....have a good one. 

Hay There

The weekend was all about hay, all hay, all day, on all the screens of this wild rural cinema.

The clack and the rattle of the elevators was nearly constant, driven in their duty by electric motors and the sassy "new" Massy, which works the nuts as the guys say.

All was punctuated of course by the usual run of flat tires and wonky elevators jamming up and all that sort of stuff.

The mows are getting high, making it harder to unload each one, but for all the extra effort involved, that is nothing but a good thing. One more field of first cutting, then a short break to give the equipment a little shakedown, and back at it with second cutting.

Having our boy home moved it all at Caesar speed...if you read the old Mary Stewarts you'll remember that term. In fact on Saturday everybody got into the act, including Peggy and her whole family.

You should have seen her tromping back and forth to the barn in her little rubber chore boots. She was cute for sure, but mostly she was determined. Stomp, stomp, stomp, over to see Unca Alan and Pop Pop. Back to the house to check on Nana. Back to the barn. Back to the house. I think she wore her mama out. 

Me, I fed them. With my messed up thumbs I'm not much use in the haymow, but I can still cook. The good earth here generously provided beef, freshly dug potatoes, newly picked green beans, squash, onions, garlic, and the herbs with which to prepare them. I fed the hay crew sandwich steaks with peppers and onions (frozen a couple of weeks earlier from one of Alan's grill extravaganzas) on Saturday and beef stew on Sunday. 

A big thumbs up on the thumbs thing. They have hurt for years...since I started milking cows when I was twenty-something. I laid it to milking cows...who wouldn't? They take turns ouching and between that and decades of guitar playing I have become pretty much ambidextrous. In fact the left one is worst just now because I've been babying the right, and I miss it because the right one made me something of a lefty if you get what I mean.

 I was whining to my dear aunt who brought my dear uncle to visit one day last week....or maybe it was the other way around.....but they came anyhow and we had a great visit. She told me it was probably tendinitis, instead of the arthritis I'd been blaming it on for decades.

I read up on that, saw there was a brace for it, and Alan got me one on Saturday before the dew was off the hay so they could work. It worked. Stupid things still hurt but there is a lot of relief involved. Yay! And maybe it would help if I avoided pulling amaranth that is higher than my head and nearly as thick as my ankles....that was dumb and I knew it when I was doing it, but what the hey...the onions are all harvested.

On Sunday afternoon, when the elevator quit clacking and the sun began to sink over the heifer barn, our boy headed back to a different kind of wild...that of the dangerous, lurking swamp of a certain big city. Peggy pressed her nose against the screen door, waving bye bye and was sad. We all were......but  he was gone, leaving behind a trail of hay dust and good coffee.....

Pony training.....

Today, even though I covered the curing onions and brought some of them in, it isn't raining, so maybe the boss can get the last load, which they canvased last night, off the wagon. Then the last field....

Deer's Ears

In the driveway......as seen from the sitting porch.

Sunday Stills....Muscle Cars

The muscle car that lives in our driveway

And has taken us all over the East Coast

It runs away to Washington DC every week

'Cuse 4 life....that was typed by the owner and driver
I was just going to say that this is my least favorite view of it....
heading off for the big city.

For more Sunday Stills.......

Tiny Magic and a "New" Tractor

 This is Hummingbird feather stuck to the cord where the feeder hangs among some flowers. One of the females sits there all the time guarding the feeder from all the other ones. I was astonished to see this tiny thing, no bigger than the scale of a bass, stuck there flipping back and forth in the breeze. It only stayed for a few minutes and then was blown away on the wind, but how cool to see such an iridescent little thing.

And this is the "new" tractor. The guys went out last week to purchase a small power tool for Alan's job and/or maybe some suitcase weights for the big tractor, which came without any...not a great plan on these hills.

Instead of getting either Alan bought this tractor at an area dealership. They plan on running the hay elevator with it or and maybe raking hay. One less thing to hook up and unhook in the rush to finish first cutting. It sounds pretty good when they start it up.

Putting A Face on Agriculture

Ten years ago farm organizations were just beginning to encourage farmers to take to social media to tell the farming story. They wanted everyday farm people to talk to our neighbors and customers and put a face on farming.

Activists were certainly telling stories, half truths, untruths, and downright outrageous whoppers, trying to end modern agriculture as we know it. Folks figured that farmers had better get on board with that before they missed the whole darned train.

The Farm Side was seven years old by then, but its reach was and is mostly limited to local folks. This is a farming county so it probably tends toward preaching to the choir.

I thought I'd give blogging a try, maybe talk about farming with some new and different people and do my share to promote farming. 

The folks around this house are a pretty vociferous lot so it was also a chance to get a turn to talk.

That was ten years ago today. If you've been around for the whole ride, you have seen a small family dairy farm prosper, struggle, and fall.

Talk about a train wreck. Selling the cows sure felt like one.

You've seen it do a small scale phoenix act with the hay business and maybe even grab a little toehold on hope for a different but positive future.

I hope you have enjoyed it. I sure have.

It has been the most amazing trip that I could never have imagined, before I hopped on that agvocation train. I found friends from Colorado to California and from Canada to England. From Tennessee and Indiana and Florida and Texas. South Dakota, Minnesota, North Carolina and South, Oklahoma, Arizona and nearly every state you could name. East, West, North and South of here and places I had never heard of before this..

People whom I've never met and most likely never will are as close as talking over the back fence with a neighbor. They...you... have become very dear to my heart.

I've actually gotten to meet a couple of you and enjoyed that a great deal. I've lost a good friend and wondered how you mourn somebody you didn't really know, except that you did.

It's been great. Thanks for riding along. 

Today dozens of bright young farmers are doing a spectacular job of putting a face on farming and telling our story. I salute them for the connection they are making with people everywhere.

Meanwhile, I guess I'll keep on too, because, let's face it....this is fun.

Here is something I rarely share....the actual face that I have turned toward agriculture for the last few decades.

A little Throwback Thursday...
Guess I still look as stubborn as I did in Kindergarten 

And I still hate having my picture taken

A Great Visit

I love to talk gardening, flowers, plants, and birds and all. It's my kind of gossip and there are never enough opportunities for same.

Thus a late morning visit from a favorite aunt and uncle of mine was spectacular in every way and way, way too short.

 I am making refrigerator dills out of the cukes they brought us, and soon I will freeze the zucchini.....ours has been pretty sad this year.

I already potted up the lovely coleus...what amazing colors!!!!

Now to savor memories of all we talked about and to look forward to the next time we can get together. How sweet it is to have such family all around us.