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That is, if you are a cat in the catnip patch. He’s lying ACROSS the bush!
Miles Away Farm Blog © 2011, where rather than lazing in the catnip with a good buzz on, I’m out in the garden installing irrigation line.
This is how the “hive” of bees arrives. The can is full of sugar syrup, with small holes at the bottom, to feed the colony. The queen is in a small box hanging from the top. You can bet that when this arrives at the post office, they call you right away!
On April 16th, we hived an order of Carniolan honey bees. It’s good to have bees again.
I love the idea of keeping bees. What’s not to love? The ultimate in a “local” sweetener, the increased yield from fruit trees and garden plants, a source of wax for making lip balms and hand salves, not to mention the pure fascination of having this colony of insects living in harmony with humans. Bees are just amazing! Read the rest of this entry »
I could not wait for spring. It’s been a long cold wet overcast winter…since, like, mid November. This Colorado girl was having serious seasonal affective disorder (SAD) sunshine withdrawal. By April, I figured we were out of the woods. And we HAVE had more sunshine. We even had one day where there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It felt like the governor had called in a death row reprieve.
So I broke ground and planted seeds on April 7th. And several rows of chard, spinach, lettuce, spicy greens (mustards), onions, peas, beets, Chinese cabbage, potatoes and radish later, I have a total of four, count them, four mustard greens coming up two weeks later. Read the rest of this entry »
As I’ve mentioned before, this old farmstead was likely established around 1904, long before the days of indoor plumbing. So on the property was an old outhouse (or privy, as my father would have said). Long since abandoned to its original purpose, the back supports had slid down the hill, and what was left of the structure was being held up by a Douglas-fir tree.
Clearly not worth trying to save, we dismantled it when a friend of mine came out to visit. She was celebrating her 50th birthday, and has had a tumultuous last two years. She thought it was highly appropriate to be “tearing down some shit” for the start of her 50th year on earth. Read the rest of this entry »
OK, I was a pretty small kid, but this chicken is seriously huge. She was my buddy for sure.
Confession. I have always loved chickens. When I was just a toddler, my parents moved to a farm in the Missouri Ozarks, and my father promptly bought chickens, geese and ducks. I remember picking the day old chicks up at the post office in a big flat box with holes in the sides (yes, I have memories that go all the way back to BEFORE I was two – crazy but true). Read the rest of this entry »
It’s been a quiet week. According to the Johnny’s Seed Catalog, once you reach 10 hours of daylight, you can plant cool season greens in a cold frame. My favorite sunrise/sunset calculator says that for my latitude, this occurs on February 15th. Alas, while that may be true on paper, we have a nice sized hill to the west, so even though sunset yesterday was supposed to be 5:01 pm, we actually lost sun in the yard at about 4:15 pm. We ARE gaining about 3 1/2 minutes of extra daylight a day right now, so it IS coming.
In the meantime, we do our best to take full advantage of the sunlight we do get. The best thing about February? It’s NOT January.
Miles Away Farm Blog © 2011, where we’re sucking it up, one photon at a time.
This pheasant was a recent visitor to my feeders, cleaning up the spilled seed, along with the Junco on the right.
I have a background in Ornithology (the study of birds) almost by accident. When I went back to school in the mid ’90’s to get a degree in Biology, I was determined to come out of school with experience I could put on a resume (with my first degree, I had failed to do this, and I had learned my lesson). While looking for a summer job, I saw a posting for field research with the Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit, in the mountains of Arizona. The job was “nest searching”, that is, looking for the nests of birds, and monitoring them to see if they were successful. It paid a whopping $500 per month (it’s gone up considerably in the last 15 years) and we worked 12 days on/two days off (still the case today) while camping and living in tents. But most importantly, no experience was necessary. Sign me up. Read the rest of this entry »
Our recently plowed field is now tucked in for the winter.
In the past, I have always loved snow more than I have hated snow. I love the way it transforms the landscape. I love the way it blankets and shelters the earth and all its growing things. I love that there are animals that are so well adapted to snow that this is the season when the thrive (I saw a great Nature special the other day on the Wolverine. What a wicked cool winter loving animal). Read the rest of this entry »
I woke up this morning and listened to a report on NPR about how the long-term unemployment numbers have not been this high since the great depression. Our house in Colorado has not sold. Our income is down considerably. I left a good paying job that I loved to move to the Inland Northwest to farm, but getting the farm going is slow due to limited cash. It’s cold and rainy. My husband is in Walla Walla most of the week. Was I nuts? Read the rest of this entry »
Salem, the first cat of our marriage.
We have a new kitty. We’ve named him Malcolm.
I attribute a lot of my “back to the land” ways to my father. He loved to cook and garden and had a deep curiosity about how things worked and a willingness to experiment. But my love of cats? That I definitely get from my Mother. She was a cat lover, and taught me to be, early on. We almost always had a cat growing up, despite seven moves before I was 12.
My husband and I have now owned 8 cats in the last 13 years, not counting the kittens we found good homes for after adopting not one but two female cats who turned out to be pregnant. Salem, a big black beauty, was our first. We adopted him from the humane society in Parker Arizona shortly after we got married. Salem had climbed into someone’s RV in California, and accidentally ended up in Arizona before being discovered. Read the rest of this entry »
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