The Snowy Day Finally Comes

Yesterday I was bemoaning the lack of snow, and somebody must have heard me. Today it has snowed since early light, and now at midafternoon it's still coming down. Big flakes pelting down, little flakes flung horizontally in a stiff wind, flakes hissing against one's coat, fat flakes clinging to the dogs' fur. The Stanley Homemakers Club meeting is cancelled for this afternoon; we have too many people who would have to drive snowy back roads, and a few others who would have to drive the even more terrifying Interstate. So it's just as well.

We need it, of course. November was just another dry month in a dry year (actually, November is more often dry here than not), and we've been impatiently waiting for the promised El Nino moisture. Five inches of fluffy snow is a start, though. The weather guys keep promising us "A Parade O' Storms." We'll see.

Running a farm isn't all that much fun in a snowstorm. If you have stock of one kind or another, they still need taking care of, and they need you out there. Normally we water all the birds in their respective pens and paddocks by hose, but in this weather the hoses are of course frozen. If the temperature had gotten above freezing some time during the day we could possibly have gotten by with breaking the ice in the water dishes, but not today. In the deep dishes the ice was several inches thick, and the smaller ones had frozen solid. So we filled gallon juice jugs with warm water and pulled them down to the birds on a new sled we bought recently for just this purpose. This was, of course, after dressing in long underwear, boots, gloves, furry hats or hoods--cold weather gets so complicated! But the birdies are all fed and watered and have enough shelter to be reasonably happy. Okay, maybe not happy. They won't be happy until spring comes.

Reading Gene Logsdon

We are now safely past Thanksgiving, replete with the usual mashed rutabagas, a new and wonderful recipe for sweet potatoes, and a very tasty small turkey (one of our own, so yes, I'm bragging). Suddenly the weather has decided it's time to remind us what winter is all about, and the temps don't seem to want to get over 36 degrees today. And windy. No snow for us, though--just morning frosts to prove that there was some moisture in the air, diminishing as the days go by. There was supposed to have been a storm sloshing its way up from the south and meeting a cold front diving from the north, but the storm changed its mind and stayed down in Mexico before heading off toward Texas. So it's just cold.


I suppose I should be doing housework, or making bread, or making soaps, or doing something useful, but my favorite thing to do when it's too cold outside to make work seem like any kind of fun is to read. What I'm reading now is Gene Logsdon's Small-Scale Grain Raising. Sounds fascinating, no? Actually it is, because Gene is a good writer with a sense of humor which shines through like the sun burning off the early cold clouds. He really makes it seem important, and even fun, to get out there and plant some corn, milo, beans, peas, and wheat, even in small patches and rows. And then feed it to your turkeys/chickens/other livestock, as well as feeding yourself. Okay, we will wait until it stops being winter before we start planting, but I'm already designing a rotation scheme which will incorporate heavily fertilized (organically of course) corn or milo followed by a grain and clover, then vegetables, and finishing with iris for a couple of years before going back to corn/milo. This crop rotation would take 5 to 6 years, all the time building soil fertility better than my hit-or-miss methods. This could work! But oh, why didn't I understand this before I was quite so Old? I promise to report back on the results.
Here's a sample of Gene's writing (from the current second edition, published by Chelsea Green Publishing, for those of you who might want to look it up):
"Beans can be drilled carefully into finely worked seedbeds, no-tilled directly into mostly undisturbed soil following cotton or corn, broadcast by hand and disked roughly into the soil, even dropped on top of the ground from airplanes into standing wheat with no tillage at all. In all four situations the beans sprout and grow more or less successfully, although broadcasting them from airplanes is risky. The point is that if you make a mistake with soybeans or any dry bean, just say you did it on purpose."

Meanwhile, I had bad things happen with my computer last week, but I had a professional fix things for me (I'm a farmer, not a computer person). So far the only repercussions have been with this blog. I lost all the blogs I had been following, plus I seem to have lost my three deeply valued followers. Oh, no! Or perhaps everybody took issue with my last post, written in the pre-Thanksgiving dumps. Come back--it's safe now!

Mid November, and the Giveaway

All the usual weather changes have gone on for the past month, but with a seeming vengeance. The last week of October was record cold, and the last outdoor market in Los Alamos was an experience I'd rather not repeat. Not without a down parka and gloves, long underwear, and insulated boots, anyway. As soon as Halloween passed, the next week had record highs, so it all averaged out to, well, average. The range, which had finally turned green at the end of September, is back to muted duns and yellows, stitched along the edges with silver winterfat, now rapidly disappearing as the seed heads crumble off or are eaten by the birds.


We've had a little snow, too, but not enough to cause any problems other than the continuing drought--we really could use a storm or two with a foot of heavy snow. We are prepared to be snowed (or mudded) in this winter, with nonperishable food stockpiled over in the shed, but we still need to lay in more bird feed and firewood before the middle of December.

What keeps us busiest right now is doing in turkeys for Thanksgiving. Wendy does most of this really hard work, with a little help from me, our wonderful neighbor Judy, and Wendy's sister Jane, and then Wendy and I will do all the deliveries next week (so let's hold the big snow storms until after that, please). I am also spending a lot of time making my signature rainbow soaps (chunks of transparent colors, glitter, and fragrance embedded in a soft white matrix) for upcoming craft and holiday markets. So we are forever fighting over the sink space, Wendy to clean out the birds and me to lay out soap molds; it's a time of year when the kitchen space is a little too tight.

We are still getting visitors to the farm as well. Last week it was a family from Zuni Pueblo to the west, desperately seeking bronze turkeys for a giveaway. I've known about the the traditional potlatch ceremonies of some of the Northwest coast Indians, in which people give away basically all their wealth, but I didn't know the Zuni people at least have their own equivalent. This woman's father is a member of the Mudhead Society, and every four years the family gives away things of value to each member of the Society--and in this case, that's 400 people! The goods involved are traditional, mostly livestock--horses, cattle, sheep, turkeys--and also blankets, pottery, jewelry and the like. The catch is that these days many of these people are no longer living as traditionally as in the old days, so they end up having to purchase most of this stuff in order to give it away. My brain, raised on western ideas of wealth and prestige, is boggled. In our culture it's the guy who manages to accumulate the most who ends up with the prestige, but with the Zuni it's the other way. It's the person who gives away the most who wins. And the culture itself ends up winning, as wealth is periodically redistributed, and the have/have not gap is narrow, and maybe doesn't even count. Nobody becomes rich, but nobody is absolutely destitute, either.

Maybe this concept is too foreign for our greedy, grasping culture. It seems once we own something we never want to give it up, and the richest of us don't seem to care a lot about how the less fortunate are doing. Right now our government is trying to level the playing field a bit, but I don't expect that to last any longer than the current administration. The vultures have been shoved off the field for now, but they'll be back.

Wonderful Blustery Fall

I notice that the last time I made a post to this thing was August 25th or so. No!!! Cant be! Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago? Well, evidently time is still running away from me, and I simply don't notice it.

Fall is always my favorite season, partly because it's a relief from the heat and nonstop work of summer. Not that there's any less work, really, but it's easier to do in the cool. I spend a lot of September into October planting the newly-divided iris rhizomes, and then if the weather's not beastly yet, I plant garlic and maybe a few flower bulbs in middle to late October. Then it's on to Turkey Season in November, plus the making of lotion bars and soaps for the holiday markets. Things don't let up much until January, when we might be able to plan on being snowbound for a little while, and then mudbound for a longer while.

This is also pretty much the end of produce season here (except that a lot of us now grow winter crops in cold frames or unheated greenhouses, so in some ways it never ends). Our first frost was September 22nd, and the first hard freeze was the next morning. The dynamics of the farm changed right away, of course--goodbye to the summer squash, and the beans, and the tomatoes. And the hens slowed down gradually, so that now we're only getting 4 to 6 eggs a day from our 50 or so chickens. That's okay--we believe our girls need a vacation, too, so we don't force them to keep laying all year (you can do that with supplemental heat and light, but ours need to make new feathers for winter instead of putting all that protein into making eggs). They'll start again, slowly, a couple of weeks after the winter solstice.

The apples have been terrific! I have one tree each of seven different varieties, and I'm finding that when I planted them ten years ago I cleverly put in apples that ripened sequentially rather than all at the same time. Too bad I didn't label them somehow, though, so I would be sure of which was which (I really thought I would remember, you know). I've now identified the Royal Gala and the Fuji, but I'm not positive about some of the others yet. Still, I know that I'm really lucky--we're so isolated that so far none of the usual apple pests have found us, and something in our soil or water or weather is giving us incredibly flavorful fruit, which has been a boon, as everybody has apples this year, and the markets are glutted (so are the turkeys, which no longer come running when an apple hits the ground).

So the adventure continues, in the wind, on the plains, in the Fall.

Coming Back

Ah, this is what it takes to make me come back to writing--three drizzly days in a row. This is all the monsoon we've had this year, and we need every drop, so it's welcome. But it's so unusual to not be able to go out and plant/dig/weed, so my creative energy needs this outlet. The alternative is house-cleaning, and I'm not that desperate yet.

It's been four months since my last post, and the sad thing is that this blog was meant to be a chronicle of life on the farm out here in the dry. Well, I've been busy. And it's not that things don't happen, or that stories don't enter my head as the weeks go by; they do, indeed. A friend once asked me, "How do you write?" I had to think awhile before I could say that stories show up in my brain, title and all (and in fact, sometimes the title shows up first, and then I have to find the story to go with it). Then it's just a matter of cleaning things up a bit, adding a few things here and there, and of course searching for the appropriate photo. Or taking the appropriate photo.

Here are a few of the titles to stories that never got written down:

Pooping Season (a philosophical discussion of manure and composting)

Meet the Dogs/Cats/Birdies

Antelope Butts in the Dawn (wildlife on the roads)

Cows (more wildlife on the roads)

Weeds and Their Friends (don't give me that "a weed is a flower in the wrong place" stuff)

Where Is My Monsoon?

Fog on the Barrow Downs (oops--wrong book--should be Fog on the Plains)

The Coming of El Nino (getting ready for winter)

Clunkerizing the Astro Van

Two Squashes and a Cucumber, and Lots of Sunflowers

If any of these appeal to anyone, let me know and I'll take a stab at filling in the story. Plus, I have pictures for a lot of these, too. I will make the effort to come up with new stuff, too. It's nearly time to get the rest of the irises planted, the garlic in October, and then time to watch all this glorious green turn to withered memory.

From the farm in the middle of nowhere,

Barb

Colors of Spring: Eclipsing Venus

This morning's sky was practically apocalyptic. I've been watching Jupiter, the crescent moon, and Venus for several days now, getting up in the dark pre-dawn, checking out their changing positions in the east, and then hopping back into bed before it got cold. But this morning was the moment it's all been building up to. The moon's been sliding down the sky toward the sun from Jupiter's position a quarter up the sky since Sunday, and now it reached Venus--what a show! When I first saw the moon and Venus rising through a band of haze, they were brilliant but rusty, quickly changing to a pure white crescent with Venus' bright splinter about a moon's width below and to the left. Over the next hour the moon sidled closer as the sky lightened and the multitude of stars vying for attention faded (if you ever find yourself needing to know the time, and you can't see your watch, watch the moon--it travels about its own width eastward in around an hour. Of course that's approximate, but most people using the moon for time don't need things to be all that precise.) The low band of cloud on the horizon caught fire, and the two were close enough to kiss, and then as the first rays of the sun speared into the sky, the Venus splinter, much brighter than the now fragile-looking moon, suddenly was gone--blip! Show over, back to bed long enough to warm up the feet.

As if all that wasn't enough, the Lyrid meteor shower supposedly peaked at around 5:00, when the constellation Lyra was directly overhead. But I'm never good at meteor showers somehow. Oh, Lyra was lovely, and I think I saw a satellite, but never a meteor. Maybe it's just that they're so quiet.

I did try to take some photos of the moon/Venus conjunction, but here's where these little digital cameras fail totally. It's always interesting how something that can look big and impressive to the eye, but the camera shows how tiny in the face of the universe things really are; I suppose it's a matter of attention. I imagine real astronomer photographers have taken lovely photos, and they will appear shortly. But I'm including a couple of mine just because they are interesting in their own funky way

Colors of Spring: The Return of Peeping Season

Things are getting busy on the farm, even with the usual questionable spring weather. Our batch of new chicks arrived in the mail about a week ago, so we have now around 75 baby chickens in the brooder in Wendy's bedroom. There were 150 when they arrived, all yelling at the top of their little lungs (and you wouldn't believe how loud one chickie can be). It took them several hours to realize they were now in a warm place with food ("What's that?") and water ("What's this?"), and the noise level dropped by several decibles. Of course it went back up when we turned out the light for the night ("Oh, no, the sun exploded, and the world is ending!"), leaving them in the dark on their their heating pads. We have farmed out, so to speak, about half of them, and the ones we have left seem happy and are growing. They still object to the disappearance of the light at night, but in about half an hour they've all dropped off to sleep, with the exception of the one that gets lost and can't figure out how to find its friends. Peep, peeeeep, peep! Peep.

The weather is, yes, questionable. We've been getting one or two storms per week, mostly wind and mostly dry. The routine is to get temps in the low 70's the afternoon before, then wind, wind, beastly wind for one to two days, then clearing at night so there's nothing to hold in the heat, followed by mornings in the teens and cold breezy days. This is hard on the plants which are trying to come up, and of course the blooming trees have quit blooming and are thinking hard about whether it's worth trying to put out leaves. A few of them just give up ("No, I can't go on, call me when it's June"). The chickens and other birds look like feather puffballs in the wind, but they do okay, and the pigeons like to do wild pinwheels together in the gales. I'm glad somebody can enjoy this, because we humans tend to get depressed on really windy days.

Others have it worse, I know. These storms come down the western side of the Rockies, hit us here at the end of those mountains, hang a sharp left and barrel out into the plains, where they run into warmer, moister air and then all Hell breaks loose. No use feeling guilty for living where those storms whip around the corner, gaining energy, and you people out there in the midwest know about the tornadoes, so just a warning: Hunker down, and may you come safely through.