March 12, 2012

Spring’s here! The light is lasting longer as the earth’s wobble tilts us closer to the sun.

Today the bees were bringing in pollen – grey, yellow, white, and red – from crocus, daffodils, etc, and from trees, especially the swamp maples that are bursting with petite red flowers. Some bees were fat with nectar as they landed; a sure sign that honey is starting to be made, and brood is being fed.

The chickens are laying more eggs each day now. The 25 chickens average about 18-20 eggs every week in the winter and as the days get longer, laying increases each week. Chickens are scheduled by the sun. Last week we were up to about 50 eggs, and today alone we collected 11. (I guess for 25 chickens it could be more, but not all of them lay eggs anymore because they are up there in years. I let my chickens live out their life here…I figure that they’ve provided for me and it’s only right for me to provide for them in return.) By early summer, we might top out at about 70 eggs a week, and then a little less as the heat slows the girls down a bit.

It’s also the shedding season. Now, when we groom any of the hippos, the brush gets so full of hair in just a few strokes that it needs to be cleaned out. Same is true when I brush Snoops. Small birds swoop down now and then to pick up what hair lands on the ground and use it for making their nests. Nature doesn’t let much go to waste. It’s almost as if it’s all planned out and everything timed to fit together…

The wild turkeys are putting on shows each day – in the back yard and front pasture, males are strutting with their feathers all puffed out. Wooing the hens…the guys look like mummers without the banjoes. A lot of people complain about all the turkeys these days, but I like them. Years ago there were no turkeys in the county, as they had been hunted out. The state department of Fish and Game reintroduced them, and coupled with new hunting laws, the turkeys have flourished. It is a success story that in some areas has been too successful, and these areas are over run with them. Not so here. At least not yet. We have two main flocks – one of 39 and one of 23 that move through here. Soon the hens will be nesting and the flocks will temporarily break up. Come June the females will band together and raise the chicks. By late summer the flocks will re form and roam the woods and fields. I have never tired of watching this cycle. Wild turkeys are so cool!

March 4, 2012

Boy did it rain the other night…the thunder and lightning seemed to go on forever. It stayed over us for so long that it seemed the storm somehow got stuck to our house. The rain just pounded and the thunder shook every window and the lightning snapped and lit up the dark like rapid strobes.

I walked out to the field the morning after and the water was laying everywhere. Everywhere I looked was ponded with water…just a mess.

By the afternoon much of the water had begun to drain back into the earth, and I noticed that the pastures had a new green tint to them. The grass had greened up a bit. It wasn’t the rain that caused it, but the nitrogen that was produced from all the lightning. Lightning energizes the sky and causes nitrogen to combine with oxygen, and that makes nitrate, which is one of the forms of nitrogen that a plant can use. (I am no chemist - my brother is the one with the PhD in that – but I really do know this!) I have seen this greening so many times after a storm that I have pretty much come to expect it, especially in the spring.  It’s one of the ways Natures feeds plants…

*****

I planted turnips back in August right before hurricane Irene hit. Somehow this one survived the beating rain and didn’t get washed away or broken down. It was a strong seedling. A few others survived the hurricane but never really got going, and only produced very small bulbs/ roots. But something told me that this one was special. Something told me not to pull this one. Something said to just let it grow. Here it is, a little over six months old and still growing. The best I can measure her, she is about 9 in diameter and has a 26 inch circumference. I’m just going to let her grow as long as she will. I even named her Irene, after the storm! Only a farmer would have a pet turnip….or maybe just I would.

*****

Way back in January I bought a used greenhouse. I should capitalize USED to describe it! The hoops were twisted, some bent, some broken at the apex; anchors were broken; the plywood front and back was a bit rotted. But the greenhouse had a few good things going for it – a huge shade cloth, four year plastic, an older fan that was in good condition, benches, and thermostats. The other thing it had going for it was that I had time on my hands and I needed something to do.

Friends of mine, my son, his friends, and I traveled thirty miles to Buena with a borrowed trailer and over a few days, disassembled it and hauled it back to the farm in pieces, all of us knowing that it would never go back together the same way that it had come apart. The first week of February I began salvaging the good hoops and other parts and began putting it up – because not all of its pieces could be reused, I settled on putting up half of what was the original. I am happy with that.

It’s almost finished. In another week I hope to have the plastic on and I might even begin growing stuff in there. My real plan though is to use it as a high tunnel in the fall/ winter, planting directly into the soil underneath. With double plastic it should stay warm enough without using a heating system. I am sure this, like everything else I have done here, will be a learning experience that will build upon itself year after year.

February 12, 2012

Patterns and loneliness...

February 6, 2012

I am not yet sure of all the effects that the warmer than average weather we are having this winter has had on the bees. Normally in the winter the colony clusters around the queen to keep her warm. The bees are restful, conserving energy and food. Yet with the temperatures being so warm, the bees are not settling, and the colonies have been active and sending out foragers.

With all this activity the bees use up in more honey to sustain themselves than they would have had if they were in a cluster. With reserves dwindling, and no sources of nectar, starvation is a concern.

So I have been feeding a bit. On warm days when the bees are active, I have been opening the outer cover and spreading granulated table sugar on the inner cover near the vent. I have been trying not to overfeed, as this may start the queen to begin laying eggs, using up even more reserves to feed the pupae and the added population as it hatches. It’s hard to tell though if that’s happening because although its warm enough for the bees to be active, its still not warm enough for me to open up the hive, smoke it, and pull frames to see. For now, I am guessing how much to feed, based on how much activity I see and how much the bees are taking in. Each hive is different.

Two day ago I was very surprised when I checked the hives. Bees were coming back to the hives loaded up with pale yellow pollen – not just a bee or two, but many. I am not sure where they are getting the pollen. There are dandelions in flower, and some people are saying that their crocus and daffodils are up. A few rouge forsythias have scattered blooms on some of their branches. It could be any of these sources, and probably others I don’t know of or haven’t thought of.

If the bees are getting pollen, they are also getting nectar, and so I have to guess that egg laying is probably going on in a few of the hives.

I am not sure where all this will lead. On one hand, because they are active, I know that all my hives have made it this far through the winter. On the other, I don’t know how much all this activity will help or stress the colonies.

In the end, Nature will decide, and I will have learned new lessons.

January 19, 2012

Probably not the biggest story of the year….but yesterday I ate a beet. Not the whole thing, but a bite of one that I pulled from the hoop house bed. This would be no big deal, and it most likely still wouldn’t be, except that I haven’t been able to look at a beet, let alone touch one, since kindergarten. And for those persons who know my age, that was a very, very long time ago.

Beets are one of those “bad memory” foods! I think that everyone has one. Some people can’t touch liver. Some people cant touch peas…

My bad food memory is of an ugly, runny red pile of chopped, cubed pickled beets on the side of my kindergarten lunch plate. I took one bite and reacted with a sudden spit that lobbed over the table and hit the wall on the other side. Even so, a kind and matronly lunch aide who whole heartedly believed in “waste not” stood over me and helped me force down that whole pile. I didn’t want help. I wanted to run away.

The taste and fear of that lunch time still haunts me. It’s ingrained in me. It’s a bad movie re running in my brain.

Last year Karen asked that I grow beets. Just the thought of a beet in the garden started my stomach to quiver, but I relented, saying that I would plant them, but the rest was up to her. I wouldn’t pull them and I wouldn’t eat them. I didn’t even want to smell them!

Turns out that the beets were the hit of last year’s CSA. I didn’t understand it – how could  they be so popular? Couldn’t figure how anyone could get excited over something so red and vile. But people were excited, and people asked for more. So I kept planting. And in the fall, I planted some in the hoop house.

These in the hoop house didn’t grow very big. The soil I think got too cool too soon. But I didn’t want to waste them (remember what the lunch aide taught me?)Every so often I pulled one or two and gave them to Snoopie. She wasn’t thrilled with them, but when she realized that nothing better was to come, she reluctantly nibbled at them. Same with the chickens. They pecked at the red bulb, but more out of curiosity than with relish. I got to thinking that if they did go crazy for them, I could end up with red yolked eggs, and that probably wouldn’t be too good. So maybe it was a good thing that they didn’t like them. Some blessings come as failures.

After Snoopie and the chickens there was only one other animal I had left to try feeding the remaining beets to -  the hippos.

We had been feeding Zippy dried beet pulp for months to put some more weight on him, so it seemed natural to offer him a fresh beet. I was cleaning the stalls when Zip came in from the front pasture to see what I was up to. He looked at me and gave me a throaty snicker. (I have no idea why this sound is called a snicker because it’s more of a growling sound.) And I thought, “what the hell, lets give it a try…”

So I walked to the hoop house and lifted two small beets from the raised bed inside. I scraped off the skin with my pocket knife, much like peeling a carrot, and cut off the roots and then the leaves. Red water seeped from the cuts onto my hands. I walked back to the stable and offered the first beet to Zips. He sniffed it a bit. He backed up to get a better look at what was in my hand and what it was that had that smell. He sniffed it again, and gently picked it off my hand with his teeth. And then he crunched it in his back teeth and suddenly his eyes lit up and he looked to my hand to see if another was coming! He began to shuffle his feet in anticipation that another might appear.

And then it came over me like an epiphany. I gotta see what’s so good about these things, and I took a small bite of the second beet. Not a big bite, but just enough to take off a shred. It tasted pretty much like a carrot – a bit crunchy and a bit sweet which turned slightly bitter as I chewed. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t enough to convince me that I had to have any more. But it was a start. I gave the rest to Zip, and realized that I had just eaten a beet...

And then I realized that it took a horse to get me to try a beet after all these years…

I guess the lunch lady would have been proud of me.  But then again, maybe not.

December 28, 2011

I don’t tell this story too often, but today a conversation I had with a friend got me to thinking about it again. My friend felt she just couldn’t give enough presents, or a big enough present, this Christmas to be loved…

The best present I ever got was a lollipop.

Once a year, each summer for a few of my childhood years, my mom would get all us kids to dress up a bit – tie our shoes, comb our hair, find our cleanest pants, tuck in our shirts – and load us into the station wagon for the trip down the mountain, into town, and then to the railroad station.

It was small town. The buildings were made of brick that was clothed over with years of black soot from the paper mill’s smokestacks. The streets were of a grey, cracked concrete, framed by sidewalks. There were small stores: a five and dime, a news agency, a candy store, a pharmacy, clothing stores, a hardware store, etc. All the stores had displays in the dirty windows that tempted passersby’s to come inside.  The town wasn’t so small that everyone knew each other, but it was still small enough that everyone recognized each other.

Mom would drive to the center of town and at the crossroads of the two main streets make a right to the train station. The street sloped upward, crossing over a steel grate bridge that spanned a small creek, and ended, literally, at the dirt lot of the train station. There were the tracks running sideways, and beside them was an empty, long clapboard shed, also clothed in soot, that served as the station.

At sometime during my growing up years, the train station got its fifteen minutes of fame. Fighting the towns dying economy, the town leaders hired a PR firm to lure new businesses to town. The PR idea turned out to be a picture of all the townspeople gathered on the street below the tracks. The paper mill and stores closed that morning so that everyone could gather for the picture. School children were marched from classrooms to the station. There was what looked like a rolling sea of smiling people when the fire truck raised the photographer above the train station to take the picture. The picture ran as a full page ad in the New York Times with the caption “Town for Hire”. I don’t remember if anyone hired the town. But the town had fifteen minutes of fame just the same. Andy Warhol was proud of Tyrone.

But that’s not the story I am trying to tell.

At the station, while waiting for the train, my brothers and I would play on the wooden benches that lined the shed’s walls.  My brothers and I would jump from one bench to the other, as if we were jumping from ledge to ledge through some imaginary landscape that would swallow us into some bottomless chasm if we missed. My sister didn’t play. She was the lookout.

She stood in her dress on the platform looking down the tracks for a whisp of far away train engine smoke, anticipating the vibrations that the heavy train would make as it came toward the station.

My sister was always the lookout.

She was the one who would have been on the bow of the Titanic while her brothers were dancing downstairs…and had she been on the Titanic, it wouldn’t have hit that iceberg. My sister didn’t miss much.

As soon as she felt that familiar quake rolling through the platform boards, she would come get us. “The train is coming!”

My grandmother always stepped off the train in her Sunday best, even if it was Thursday. Her silver grey hair was always done up. She always wore a long, loose, billowy dress of plain color. Her lips were always dressed with red lipstick that would mark everything they touched – cups, napkins, our faces….And she always wore perfume. She wasn’t fat, but I remember her as being big, with an arthritic walk. She had long fingers covered with wrinkled skin that had been aged by years of knitting and housework. They were fingers that had never been out of work. And she had a New England accent that made me know that she was from somewhere different; a place where life was lived differently than how it was in my small, grey and sooted town.

And each time she came, she brought with her a small plain white box. A box from that far away mysterious place that I had never been to and so I could color with my own imagination in any way I wanted.

In my imagination I could picture Gommie putting on an overcoat and walking down the stairs to the street from her apartment. At the bottom of the stairs she would turn and walk up a street to a candy store and go inside where she would approach the counter. There she would look through the curved glass case that held handmade lollipops, and after a bit of hesitation, pick out lollipops for us kids. The store owner would wrap each one in white wax paper, and lay them carefully in the white box….

I am not sure if that’s how it really happened. But…

…I do know that each of us kids, now a bit unkempt from playing in the station, would get to pick out a lollipop, just steps from the train.

They weren’t round lollipops. They were sorta pillow shaped. And they each were made of many different colors twisting and flowing and sometimes tangled together, that gave each lollipop a very unique taste. They weren’t lemon or raspberry or grape…they were well, they were all kinds of flavors that melted together into a taste that was undistinguishable but original…and they were lollipops that I could get from no one else, but Gommie.

My mom, after each of us kids picked one out of the box, would ration us to one lollipop a day. Gommie didn’t buy in so much to that and would always let us sneak another when my mom was down in the basement doing laundry. When the lollipops ran out we kids knew that it would be at least another year before we could taste them again.

These lollipops became my favorite, and are one of my most favorite memories.

Lollipops. They didn’t cost much – maybe they were penny candy if they were that at all. They didn’t have sounds or flashing lights. They had no expensive wrapping. They were not big or huge or heavy. Gommie didn’t wait in line all night with frantic others for the store to open. There was no such thing as a televised Black Friday back then that proved that she was a successful shopping warrior. And the lollipops were so simple that they didn’t come with any instructions.

But then, if one really gives it some thought, any thing that is given with love doesn’t need instructions….

I tell this story to say that the present doesn’t really matter…it’s the experience that someone loves you that matters. It doesn’t take money or a holiday to show someone that you love them….all it takes is heart.

Those lollipops were my grandmother’s heart…and they were the best present she could ever give.

December 18, 2011

While we were sleeping….

On November 18^th of this year President Obama signed a bill passed by congress that funded jobs for horse meat inspectors, opening the door to horse slaughter in the continental US. Horse slaughter was never illegal, but because there were no inspectors for horse slaughter houses, it couldn’t be done.

It still went on.

Most unwanted horses were packed onto livestock trailers and shipped to Mexico for death and processing. Others were left uncared for and starving in abandoned barns, backyards, and pastures. In the downward spiraling economy, affording a horse became too much burden for many.

Yet breeders keep breeding, hoping the next foal will be the next Secretariat or Dan Patch.  Perhaps the foal will sell and bring the farm income to pay the bills….

But just like kittens and puppies, what doesn’t go to a good home still has to go.

PETA supported this bill. Their thinking is that it’s less trauma to quickly end a horse’s life in the US rather than to ship it across a border where it may get worse treatment in travel and handling before its slaughtered. If it has to be, doing it here would be more “humane” than doing it there.

Others feel it’s better to have a slaughter option than none at all; a much better option than abandoning a horse to be left sick or starving. Slaughter would translate to be a lot less suffering horses.

And it could create jobs. Shippers, packers, processors, and on and on. Maybe there could even be horse cafo’s someday, providing even more jobs and giving foundation to a niche industry with its own pac and lobbyists. (I am probably wrong to think that they don’t already exist.)

I just don’t like it. Any of it. 

My argument is a moral one, and moral arguments are hard to win.

I’d rather see less breeding. I’d like to see a more responsible racing and show industry. I’d like to see less backyard operations. I’d like to see more horses spayed or gelded. I’d like to see education. I’d like to see compassion for a life.

Horse slaughter is another symptom of our use it and throw it away culture. As long as there is horse slaughter, breeding can go on unabated and without any need for breeders to take responsibility or have respect for the life that was created. Slaughter won’t address the problem of too many horses, but it will enable too many horses. It’s the wrong thing to do. And two wrongs don’t make a right.

But a lot of people think they do.

It happens a lot when we are sleeping.