These photos are a few weeks old, but I wanted to post one last look at the ruminants in their wooly winter coats. They’ve been on grass for a week. The first grass since November. Already they are gaining weight and slicking out, shedding their teddy bear fur. Now the pressure is on to mend [...]
With the appearance of tulips, spring morphs from pastels to jewel tones, and the grays and browns of winter are finally crowded from the landscape. My electric orange tulips are the mark of warm days on the farm. Before they arrived, when I needed to be reassured of the end of winter, I purchased a [...]
Here on the farm we’ve been looking for Earth Day inspiration and we found it in Texas where Governor Rick Perry yesterday proclaimed three “Days of Prayer for Rain in Texas” as a way to mitigate climate change. I guess if you’re going to kick a problem upstairs, you might as well kick it all [...]
I am trying to go with the flow. I thought it would improve my technique to know the origin of the phrase. According to UrbanDictionary.com “go with the flow” was first known to be used by Marcus Aurelius who ruled the Roman Empire from 161 to 180. I remember my Grandma Best, a lifetime school [...]
These photos appear in consecutive order, all taken within a half hour at dusk this evening. The difference in lighting is the camera flash on or off. That brilliant orb in the sky is the moon rising in the east. Tomorrow is the official full moon, 7,000 km closer to the Earth than in the [...]
Cinco, named for Cinco de Mayo 2008, gave birth to Seis, a girl, on Sunday, March 6th, 2011 at approximately 7:00 am. Seis’s father is the hunky Norman. Cinco and Norman have the same father, a pure-bred Devon from Foxhill Farm named David. Cinco’s mother was half Red Angus, half Devon. Norman’s mother was a [...]
It is still deep winter on the farm. A few feet of snow surround the house and it’s raining sideways this morning coating my world with ice. It’s raining inside, too. The collar around the wood stove chimney is dripping noisily on the heat shield and the floor. I have the whole area wrapped in [...]
A report this week from the Disassociated Press reveals government and industry consternation at the public outcry over tomatoes bio-engineered to thrive on animal and human urine. One lobbyist said, “All these years we’ve been bio-engineering vegetables to thrive on poisons that pollute the water and soil and may cause cancer, and the public has [...]
After a couple more blizzards, rain on snow, a sand storm of sleet, and an accumulation of three feet of snow with a hard ice crust — the charm in my last blog post is completely gone. There will be no photographs of my lovely farm here today. I don’t want to confuse beauty with [...]
A snow storm from the midwest and a rain storm from the Atlantic collided over the farm during the night, and this morning it’s a complete white out. There was no sunrise, just a cross-fade from black to murky grey to silent white. I started morning chores early because the cows and the goats were [...]