Calling all Garrison Keillor Fans…. This isn’t a farm tale, but since the Back-Up Farmer (that’s me) has been SO preoccupied with this lately, this post is showing up here. (And I’m on the road a lot in September being Author Girl, so I don’t have a clue what’s going on here at the farm! […]
Bird Dog Molly is a Wire-Haired Pointing Griffon. This breed is considered a ‘versatile’ hunting dog, so can be trained to point, flush, retrieve on land, and retrieve in water. The one thing this sort of dog isn’t supposed to do is kill and eat a bird. Yes, well. Molly missed the memo on this […]
Big Sissy Boy Here’s the black steer (half Holstein, half Jersey). He’s all alooooone, and is most unhappy. Here are the three Jersey steers. Why is the black guy alone? Because he’s a big sissy boy. We were out of grass on the south end of the farm, so needed to move sheep and steers […]
Beware Composted Sheep Manure The Farmer and I planted a garden earlier this spring. Here’s what it looked like: I worried that I’d have to weed a lot, but we used newspapers and cardboard as mulch, and we only had to pull a few weed between plants. I dove into my busy summer, happily picking […]
Rocky Mountain High The Writer and the Farmer are back from a 9-day trip to Colorado. We left the farm in the very competent hands of Bonnie, our ‘farmaholic’ friend. All went well until the sheep, tired of eating hay (no rain—no grass), decided on the second-to-last day to find a spot where the ground […]
Parking the Sheep Once again, it’s mid-July and we’ve had no rain for weeks. Some finally fell this morning, and a major storm is brewing as I type, but it’s too late for us. We’re leaving in 3 days for an actual trip, and there’s not enough grass for the sheep/cattle/llamas to eat while we’re […]
Airing My Creative Laundry Okay, here it is. Time to air my dirty laundry, as Mama Pea suggested in an earlier comment. Time to disclose the deep secrets, my quirks, my irritations,…. Here I go: WE STILL DON’T HAVE A NEW CAMERA. There. Now you know. A farm without a camera is, well, sort of […]
From Our FilesYesterday the Farmer took our digital camera outside, snapped some photos, put the camera in her shirt pocket, then bent over for some reason, thus dumping the camera from her pocket into a puddle of muddy water. The camera’s been banged around for five years, but it decided the muddy water was just […]
Muy, Muy, Caliente* *very, very hot It’s a long story, but we currently have 6 sheep on the farm who missed their March shearing. And since it’s so &^% hot outside, we gotta get that fleece off. They’ve been living in and around the barn so they can get out of the sun, but it’s […]
An Actual Garden We, being country dwellers, are constantly asked about our ‘garden,’ as if it’s a given: live in the country, grow vegetables. For fifteen years I have rolled my eyes at this question and tartly replied, “We don’t have time to garden.” Not only that, but I hate to weed, and lack the […]