Picking and Grinning

Well, we made a trip up to northern Indiana to try to catch the last of the peach harvest. I hadn't been able to get up to Michigan (and the Lorenz hospitality) in July, our usual peach-picking location, so I was a little worried we'd missed the season all together. But Catherine got on the internet and found a u-pick place near LaPorte. So we loaded up kith and kin and drove a couple hours, spent 30 minutes picking 100 pounds of beautiful peaches, had lunch at Arby's (at Rachel's insistence - one thing she misses in Germany), and drove a couple hours to get back home. Ellis was a big help- he made sure, by carefully sampling, that we were getting the best fruit on the trees. Now, he selects the ripe ones off the table so we can "put up" some peach halves, make some fruit leather, and have peach pie with Aunt Lucy's homemade ice cream.

E. M. Schek takes over the farm...

He came with only a few days warning...now he has everyone and everything wrapped around his LITTLE finger and eating out of his hand! Ellis Merle, my grandson, is visiting and as the photos attest, he has made the place his own...he's only 14 months old!









He also has us humans eating out of his hand, too. Of course, being his grandmother I HAVE to let him do anything he wants to do, play with anything he wants to, and eat anything he wants to...but his two aunts are spoiling him something awful!


I just wish his cousin, Silas, were here to share in all the activities - I know he and his old pal Eli would have a good time together. Thanks for letting me gush a bit...I didn't know being a grandmother would be so much fun!

This is how I felt last night...

My daughter Bridget is knitting things...lots of things...and one thing is a little sweater that has a front panel that can be removed, rather than just a single placket for the buttons and corresponding holes. Anyway, we thought it would lend itself to two or three DIFFERENT panels for different times of the year - autumn, holiday, snowy January days, etc. As an experiment towards that end, Bridget knitted a gold panel and felted it in preparation for my needle-felting class. The class was last night and here is the finished panel - though I think I need to "needle" it a bit more, and I may add a few more long leaves. I had a great time at the class and will soon be felting everything - no sweater is safe! Purses, slippers, headbands, beware! The instructor also showed me how to make 3-dimensional felt sculptures - we did a fish and a jelly-fish. She told about a woman who will needle-felt-sculpt your dog from a picture you send her - and she gets $80 per 6-8 inch felt rendering of the pooch! what a way to make a living!

Birthday Cakes

This is a Bridget, in a first time guest post at Prairie Rants. We spent last week here at home and we're home for a little one day encore before going back to Orrin's family on their island in the Tippecanoe River for a couple days. But before we did we made some little bug birthday cakes for Silas and his cousins. When Mom visited Lucy in Colorado they stopped in at Williams Sonoma and bought this pan. So here's a little photo essay of mixing, baking, and decorating the birthday cakes. Stop by here in a few days (ok, maybe a week, I'll be jet lagged you know) to see more pictures of eating, smearing, and throwing birthday cakes.

Doing it with (a) Stile...

At last,
I have my very own stile
for crossing
the aforementioned
(and feared)
electric fence!
I just love this stile!

Where did this come from?

Born today, a little miracle - but a very odd one on this farm!
Yes, I know recessive genes manifest themselves occasionally - but I have never seen a calf like this on our farm in 30 years of breeding! Maybe it's Shorthorn? That's the only Non-Red semen we have ever used to AI our Hereford herd. And usually that appears as just an odd spot of white on the legs of the normal Hereford markings. Even odder, I did NOT AI cows last summer - we let our bulls do things the way nature intended. I thought both our bulls were full-blooded (or nearly so) polled Hereford. What do you think is going on here? Well, at least this little one will be easy to spot when his mama has hidden him out in the pasture - and doesn't remember where she put him!

Udderly Easy

This is a long-overdue account of the new milking aid we purchased in January. An article in a farm journal made us aware of this wonderful little tool. It was origianlly designed to help gather colostrum from mares who wouldn't nurse their foals - or for foals who couldn't nurse. But in typical farmer fashion, we try to see more than one use for every implement. I don't think it was ever intended for dairy cows, but it is absolutlely great for milking dairy goats.
Since I have arthritis in my thumbs, hand-milking was not so easy some mornings. With this device, all I need to do is squeeze the handle a few times to start and maintain the suction, and the milk flows quickly into an attached quart bottle. What's even nicer is that the milk stays very clean - no goat hair or bits of hay or insects dropping into the fresh milk as it often did with an open pail. I just unscrew the full bottle from the device, cap it, and take it in to the house for pastuerizing and chilling. The device is called Udderly E-Z. According to the literature, it is actually gentler on the doe than hand milking. None of my does complained a bit while I used it. And it certainly was gentler on ME! Here is a photo of the morning's milk - can you tell which bottle has the colostrum?

Ridiculous!

Ok, I know snow in April is an oddity. It might be expected, or even desired in some places (ski resorts, for instance). But to have three inches of this crystaline precipitation pile up over the new ryegrass seed in my freshly-tilled garden plot on April 14th is RIDICULOUS! Here is a photo of my garden at 2:00 pm on Saturday. The next photo is just an hour later! And it is still coming down - what I would call heavy snow. I guess I should just throw out the calendar and let Mother Nature continue to dictate, willy-nilly, when spring (i.e. planting time) actually arrives in northern Indiana. After 30 years of trying to understand her, cajole her, appease her, bend her to our will, you would think I would know better than to try to out-guess her. Oh, well, if life gives you snow, make snowcones!

Do fence me in!

Since it is still too wet and too cold to put corn or bean seed in their fields, we have turned our attention to our fences. The last time we built fence, I was a newlywed, nearly 30 years ago. We use all high-tensile electric fence around our pastures and lots. In the long run, it is easier and cheaper to maintain this type of fence, and when the charger is working correctly, the livestock - including my wiley goats, respect it. Me, I fear electricity, but I have only a rudimentary understanding of it (and a great repect for it), so my husband takes care of the switches and the circuits and the volt-meter testing. I just make sure the chargers are turned OFF before I do any fence work.
This week, we purchased 50 new fiberglass posts and special stainless steel "clips" that fasten the wires to the posts. This is a new system of fencing that we could easily incorporate into our existing fence wires. We un-clipped the hi-tens. wires from the old splintered fiberglass posts and pulled the old posts. Then we drove in the shiny white 2/3" diameter posts into the soft ground. Next, we slid 4 new clips onto the post and then slid the hi-tens. wires into the clips. Voila! revitalized fence!
We set 45 new posts (that includes installing 180 clips) and we put them along the roadside - we always want our neighbors to appreciate our efforts. It really does look a lot better, but more importantly, it should make for a more secure enclosure - and with our animals, keeping them securely enclosed is an ongoing challenge. Now, if these post last 30 more years, someone else in the NEXT generation will be replacing them in 2037!