sarvice berry update!

Evidently they need to be frosted on. At least we went to get more apples and there were still sarvice berries and we got more of those too and they are sweeter, milder, and the seeds seem softer. The trees have lost all their leaves on the branches with berries so that the harvesting is easier too . . . at least with two people -- one to hold the bag and one to milk the berries (and I don't mean that literally, that's just the motion). The berries are still among the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

in no particular order

Things that made me smile today

blue and black bunnies

this is Snowflake in her summer plummage -- and doesn't she have great "Chicken Run" legs going on?

my boy and his summer dapples

this image took my breath away

girls on the side of the hill

because I'm contrary -- and I loved such a tight shot including at least three types of flies and a drop of blood

the state of her dehorn repair -- and ain't she just the cutest thing!
and this image likewise continues to take my breath away

Day of Snakes

First I was at the barn. When I wheeled the big double wheeler wheelbarrow into the sawdust bin, I thought there were mushrooms or something growing what with all the recent rains. A closer look, however, revealed they were not puffballs or some other fungus but snake eggs. With snakes partway out of some, all the way out of others, and lots of them. The sight made me jump a bit first, and look way more closely. I hollered to my friend who was riding in the arena asking if she’d seen them earlier. No, she hadn’t. They were dead . . . but how had they gotten there? I tried to remember my snake physiology -- I was sure that copperheads were viviparous (born alive) and so fairly sure these were not poisonous dead snakes, which are not as dangerous as poisonous live snakes but still. Personally, I think all snakes are worthy to be handled with caution. And respect.

And so it was that a trip to the sawdust bin turned into a science class with the other people who were at the barn at the time. We looked and talked and poked and finally threw them over into the neighbor’s field to finish rotting. It turned out that they had been found buried down in the old sawdust the day before and left out for me to find. There was also a squished toad frog in the driveway entering into its maggot phase which by afternoon had entered into its dried up phase.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, err, farm . . . well, how I found out about it was when I got home and younger son ran to the vehicle to greet me as he always does, he said, “Nakes! Nakes! Cat’s killed a nakes and the chickens ate it!” He is very funny in that if you try to get him to say “Snakes” he will, but then he will say it like this: “The Scats Skilled a Snakes and the Schickens sate it!” But he’s also the kid who will turn to you and say, totally on his own and plain as day, “You know, my English is not so exact.” Anyway, what happened was that younger daughter found a baby copperhead and after she found it, the cats found it. They surrounded it and as fast as the snake was, the cats were faster. Then when the cats found it, the chickens found it too, and it went back and forth a few times. The snake did not manage to bite a cat but did get at least one chicken:
Looks like she's got a chaw of 'backer, don't it? Luckily, snake bites, even poisonous ones, don’t generally affect animals as severely as humans. You might remember the dog getting bit a couple years ago.

So that was our day of snakes.

On other fronts, well, we had a very decent spring garden, and the fall salad garden seems to be coming along, but in most respects the summer garden was wimpy. The hard corn was puny to begin with and then we’ve had to trap raccoons out of it or we wouldn’t have had any left. On the good side though, we’ve got plenty of good hard corn still from last year, and I think we still have some from the year before too. And we’ll probably get a years worth anyway out of this crop. So that ain’t shabby by the sufficiency standard. We also seem to have a more than decent potato crop, and a husband who has sworn that this year we’ll dig and cache it so that we can plow the rectangle garden in the winter and have it better prepared when planting time comes. A new crop for us this year that seems to have done well is Jerusalem artichokes, or sunchokes, so now the challenge will be learning to incorporate them into our regular diet.

We still haven’t gotten a new cow and the management plan is always a bit flexible. Like we could get a new cow and put the old one in the freezer. Or we could get a new cow and find a bull for the old cow to run with to see if she’d get pregnant if exposed more although that would almost certainly be a beef bull rather than a milking bull so we wouldn’t be passing her most excellent genes on to the next generation of homestead milk cows. Right now we’re still getting by on her production and, well, it just hasn’t gotten on the front burner. We’ve also had goat milk until this week. The girls milked her this year and did a fine management job and now she's obviously pregnant again. We’re putting the babies up at night still but mostly to protect them from the bear potential. How we’ll manage that probably depends mostly on how many nanny goats the mamma has in her next batch. Right now we’re thinking we'll keep the girls and may look toward a new billy come next year. I really like our current billy though. But I’d rather have nannies we’ve raised ourselves.

This year has been a very good year of independent to the farm exploration. Our interests, individual and collective, have born sweet fruit. And the farm and a basic subsistence lifestyle has allowed us to be able to do that -- and sustained us in the doing.

May Means

chicks

and locust blossoms (fried)

and spinach (and salad from the garden)

From October Actually

Look what I found! The software to re-size these so I could upload them! Here is what else is funny: I recently exchanged e-mail with someone I took a class from way back in college. One of the things I most remember him doing was absolutely rasping us for taking "snapshots" instead of "photographs". We were hiking across the Grand Canyon -- and according to him we were not to take snapshots. Well, baloney. I am not above taking the artsy craftsy photograph, that's for sure, and there are images that will stick in my head that I want to take, but snapshots, those are the staff of life, really.

And all places are sacred. Just sayin'.

So like I said, these are from October.

Every October there is a draft horse auction. It happens to be my social event of the year, and there is a man I see there every year who I grew up with: Billy, and he was the cutest thing back then. When I left home, he was a coal truck driver. When I ran into him again, he was a horse logger. When I ran into him this year, he said he'd quit logging since it had become just trading dollars back and forth (that is, it isn't something that you can make money at right now with the price of logs being what it is). So at least one of the other things he's doing is making harness. This one was his, for sale at the auction. I can't say that his taste is my taste, honestly. His dimples are still cute though.


I just liked this shot of three young horses sharing a stall, waiting for the auction.

This is a billy goat. Quite a magnificent billy goat. I also like this image. It was raining that day.

And finally, a tree full of turkey buzzards. They make the most amazing sound when thirty of them take off from the same area at about the same time. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Poachers had left a deer carcass to rot was why they were there. A little six point buck. My dog always brings the bones home.

Ok, photos on the blog again!

Bear Medicine

It started several months ago. "Have you see [this or that] goat today? [He or She] wasn't with the herd tonight." And we'd all try to recount when was the last time we'd seen that particular goat, and then we'd all spend time on rounds trying to find it or its body.

To no avail.

We had too many goats. More than we like to carry on the place. We only had them because we'd been too lazy to slaughter and hadn't needed the meat. Since they cost us nothing, are meat on the hoof, why not? Well, there are lots of reasons why not actually, but anyway. They started turning up missing.

And I went through everything. What about my management of these goats was killing them? For surely they were dead, even though we weren't finding bodies. Could it be worms? I wormed everyone. Could it be selenium? I bought a block with extra selenium and put it where only goats could get to. Never mind that we'd never had these problems. What else could it be?

When they continued to disappear, my mind went further afield. When you hear hoof beats, it just might be zebras, after all. Those crazy neighbors down there -- could they have something against us and us not know it? Job Corps kids with nothing better to do? Teenagers who bust up mailboxes decided to get more ambitious? It wasn't hunting season and besides it would take an awfully drunk hunter to mistake a goat for a deer, especially more than once.

We walked the perimeter. We studied the goats who were left. We searched for clues.

To no avail.

When Hotsauce went missing, I knew something extra ordinary really was up. He wasn't at all sick with anything, he was big and healthy, he wasn't stupid, he wasn't too young or too old. But what was it? No body. No clues.

The goat who had gone missing before him, the kids had found the body, in the creek. Which I thought was an awfully odd place for him to have died. But a few hours later, when the adults went to check it out, there was no body.

So it could be coyotes. Everyone around here blames everything on coyotes it seems. We haven't ever seen or heard coyotes or any evidence of them. Doesn't mean they aren't here, of course. Our biggest predator problem is people’s loose dogs, but we usually catch sight of them before the mayhem and dogs wouldn’t have been able to get rid of the body like that. They are usually too stupid to actually eat what they kill.

Then one of the twins was there when I milked at night but not there the next morning. As soon as the regular morning chores were settled, I went looking. I took the dog with me. Quite often, if you watch the animals, you can get clues as to what is happening around you that you are otherwise ignorant of. So if you are in a field and you see an animal looking in a particular direction, chances are there really is something in that direction to look at. So I took the dog with me knowing that if she went off in a certain direction that I would want to look in that direction.

I went all through the woods. A goat can just be asleep behind a tree and be nearly invisible so I looked pretty hard but didn’t see anything at all. Well, I did note the likely route of getting firewood out of that particular area. I scanned the back field. I walked up to the rise there so I could see the entire breadth of it. It is hard to describe how you look for something that might be dead because it is just noticing something a little out of place usually. Something dead is close to invisible until you are right up on it usually. Unless the vultures have come already but there were no vultures yet.

I walked down to the creek. I so enjoy our creeks. Someone once said I laughed the way a creek laughs. I hope so. In October in this fourth year of droughts the creeks are low but still delightful and full of life. The creek is rocky so I walked up it. Then I noticed the dog had disappeared. I called for her. She came from the direction of the long flat through the woods just off our property and into national forest. She had a goat sized backbone in her mouth. I knew that wouldn’t be the backbone of the recently disappeared but one that had disappeared previously. I kept moving in that direction.

Then I saw it so suddenly it startled me. There in the creek. Exactly where the kids had said the one they found had been, with a bluff on one side and an open retreat through the woods on the other side. A fully intact goat except that it had a hole in its flank and all its innards were laying about two feet away from it. And all the delectable innards, the liver and the heart in particular, were gone. What was left was all the light colored stuff -- the lungs, stomachs, intestines.

Coyotes would never leave that. Dogs wouldn’t do that. Bear. I hadn’t really thought of bear, but we do live in a bear preserve and we’ve seen them and experienced some loss from them before when they ate our bees. There is plenty of mast for them this year, but since they are fattening up to hibernate right now, small fatty goat livers must have proved quite the temptation.

Our neighbors had complained some time ago about property damage on their place and I would now bet it was this bear. I’d bet he is a young male and I bet his territory is getting crowded up on the mountain. I did find a track, and a trail, which was pretty exciting. We talked to the kids about how to get home if they were out somewhere and ran across the bear -- to not run away but to not challenge him either and basically try to get home and I think mostly they’ll be hanging a little closer to the house until he goes to sleep this year. We will probably need to put an electric wire up along the creek to discourage him from coming onto our property and eating our animals. We hadn’t done that since our animals are not tempted to walk off into the woods. I’m not sure what else we could do. We can’t legally shoot him or trap him and the wildlife people are, well, shall we say, yet more stupid government bureaucrats. The donkey should be a deterrent. A guard dog would be a better one perhaps. A fold to put them inside before dusk should work.

Meanwhile, we still have our biggest strongest goats and they are really the only ones we should have had anyway.

the title has a link to a little information about bear energy if you are interested but trust me, living with it is a holy [sic] different proposition than meditating on it

The Secret Orchard

I happened to have the local news on and found out that the price of potatoes has gone up. I hollered out to husband, "Hey, we just got wealthier!" Because, you know, we've got potatoes.

We also have these apples. Now, these are from a secret place that I hope only we know about. Well, us and the bears anyway. At first we wondered why there were no apples on the ground. Then we saw one way high up bit in two. With teeth marks. And these odd looking piles of poop. The occasional branch ridden down. And stomped down areas. At first we were thinking other people knew about this secret place but then we thought about the bears. It is, after all, in the bear preserve. We live in the bear preserve. So we hope the bears won't mind too much sharing these apples with us.

Now, each bag you see there represents apples from a different tree. There were a couple more trees whose apples were not anywhere near ripe yet. We plan to go back. But right now this is enough to process. And pack out. The trees are not near anything, including the road. That is a good bit more than a hundred pounds of apples.

We will keep the perfect ones and store them in the cool, probably in sawdust although you could use clean dry leaves. Those will be some eating apples and some of them will likely keep until Christmas or after. The less than perfect ones will become what I grew up calling "apples". Or "cooked apples" if you had to specify. It was also known as "fruit". Anyway, it is just cut up apples, usually fairly sour ones, cooked, with a little sweetening added. And usually a dollop of butter. Just enough water in the bottom of the pot to keep them from sticking. Just stewed. Depending on what kind of apple you start with, the end product differs. My grandparents used "horse apples" that were very sour and sweetened retained a rather sweet-tart flavor and cooked to mush. My mother had three trees with some Winesap sort of apple on them (they were 5 in one trees) and those kept their shape and had a full bodied flavor. I love all of them. I remember my grandparents, sitting under their big double birch tree, with wash tubs full of salt water, peeling, quartering, coring, and slicing the apples. When I'd take my hand to dunk the slices into the water, I could see my grandmother's hand doing the same thing, still holding her knife. After the salt water, you just take the slices, shake the water off them, and put them in freezer containers and freeze. To cook, just put in a pot on some low heat. This is a great breakfast side. Great anything side actually.

We'll also dehydrate as many as we can. We're dehydrating onions and tomatoes right now too.

Oh, and we'll be trying this this year to see if it works or not -- taking the peels and the cores and cooking them with water to make apple jelly. No waste that way.


These are Jacob's cattle beans, dried on the vines before they were picked off. The thing sitting on the handle is a giant sunflower head drying. Tons of those this year too. I'm determined to not let the birds have all of them -- there are plenty of other things for the birds to eat!

it's the simple things in life, like when and where

I’m old. Sam Elliot is hot but that’s not the only thing that makes me old. Oh no. It takes more aspirin now to get me through a day sometimes but that’s not really it either.

What it really is is that I give directions by what used to be there. The new Virginia post office? Well, that’s where Rose’s used to be. Oh, Rose’s hasn’t been there in thirty years? Well, then, remember where Kroger’s was? Same place and at least that wasn’t quite so long ago. The new Kroger’s? Where the hospital was before they tore it down. How do you get from there to here? Turn left at the blue store. Except wait, they painted it white fifteen years ago and it’s named Green’s but it’ll always be the blue store to me.

My gawd, they changed the exit numbers on the Interstate in 1990 and I still know them first by their old numbers and I have to think to figure out their new numbers.

That’s why I’m old. It’s ok. I really don’t feel bad about it.

Like the other day, I got to reminisce about when I was 20 years old. About how we used to shut down the bars and ride the mechanical bulls and drink a lot too much and get up and go to work the next morning. Well, the same morning it would have been. And the people I remember, the people I had these adventures with, it is extremely possible that if they remember me at all, they remember me with ugly sorts of names because it definitely was a wild child period for me and a lot of times people like to remember the other person as worse then they were. Me, on the other hand, I probably was that bad. No wonder I didn’t accomplish much of substance. But I’ll tell you this; I had fun. It was a whole heck of a lot of fun and I remember those people with nothing but fondness.

I’ll tell you what else; I don’t need to go back and do it again. I wouldn’t be that stupid again for all the world, I sure did have fun, there are very few things I actually regret, and I don’t need to hang on to it. Or to wash my hands of it.

I was a privileged child, an outraged teen, a wild young adult who life came down on hard, like a pile of bricks. So then I was a very serious young adult, earnest young married with the highest ideals. I was a totally immersed mother while my children needed a totally immersed mother and now when a totally immersed mother would be harmful to them I have managed to take my seriousness and idealism, my motherhood and wife-hood and person-hood, my outrage and my privilege, and create this cowgirl’s current life.
Yeah, being old ain’t bad, ain’t bad at all.

many thanks to my cowgirl friends Cathy McG and the Divine Ms. D for the photo of me and Dollar and to my husband for saying, "you are so cute dressed up like a storm trooper" and to Kidd Rock for the song from which I get the title, a great song, All Summer Long

100 Species

ok, so my friend La started an unschooler's network and I came upon this idea there. It came originally from scsours (is that enough links for you yet?), inspired by a not quite quote stating that few people can name 100 species growing in their neighborhood. I bet that's true, that few people can do it.

Well, I can do that and I can do that off the top of my head. And these are all wild or at least naturalized and not planted by us.

Trees
oak (then there's white oak, red oak, black, etc)
maple (hard rock, sugar, etc)
hickory
poplar
holly
pine (white, yellow, black, etc)
hemlock
wild cherry
sourwood
cedar (Virginia Juniper)
locust (white,black, honey aka thorn tree to me)
gum
beech
pine (white, black, yellow)
willows (common, weeping, etc)
ash
walnut
buckeye
butternut
redbud
spicebush
dogwood
sassafras
mulberry
wild plum

Fungus (one's I've positively identified)
jack-o-lantern
dry land fish
anamita
algaric
puff balls

Grass and weeds and flowers and herbs
fescue
black eyed susans
yarrow
queen ann's lace
butterfly weed (pleurisy root)
poke
milk weed
iron weed
stink weed (aka thorn apple, jimson weed)
joe pye weed
jewel weed
nettles
solomon's seal
false solomon's seal
golden rod
rag weed
rag wort
all the docks (burr, yellow, narrow, speckled etc)
all the plantains (english, common, etc)
dandelion
chicory
poison hemlock
cat tails
wild blackberries
wild raspberries
dog roses
poison ivy
ferns (many types)
fairy pine (ground cedar)
lady slipper
tennessee iris
indian pipe
squaw root
pennyroyal
whirled loosestrife
triliums (birthroot, brown and white)
blood root
clover (red, white, ladino)
virginia creeper
possum grapes
comfrey
agrimony
ground ivy
smart weed
purslane
wild mustard
wild ginger
pipsissiwa
tea berry
mistletoe
water cress
upland cress
nightshade
horse nettles
horse mint
peppermint
spearmint
anemones
wild strawberries
cinqfoil
huckleberry
thistle (milk, blessed)
passion flower (maypop)
mayapple
jack-in-the-pulpit
violets (purple and white)
pearly everlasting
lobelia (siphilitica)
cardinal flower
lobelia inflata (indian tobacco)
mugwort
boneset
mullein
green briar
wild lettuce

I think that is more than 100, and I didn't count the various kinds of a thing that I can distinguish and which often have different uses -- well, except those lobelias there, the inflata, siphilitica, and cardinal. I'm guessing we could do 400 or 500 if we took a notebook and kept a list and counted domestic things we plant and maybe more if we did it through a whole year so that you get the early stuff and the late stuff.

Of course, I have an advantage in that I live in an incredibly ecologically diverse place, and I've lived here forever. And I've paid attention and am very present to my environment.

I bet a few people I know can do this off the top of their heads too -- including thingfish, Wayne, and Jim. Cielo and Alecto -- how about you for the girls? It isn't that I doubt the rest of you, but, well, maybe I do doubt you. So put me in my place and show me what you know! And any of you who want to learn 100, or play by scsours rules instead of mine, have a lot of fun with it!

Ear and Mushroom Sandwiches

In our herd of Nubian mix goats, there is one without ears. If you ask me what happened to her ears, I'd ask if you didn't know that fried ear sandwiches were a delicacy in these parts.

Today, we had more ear sandwiches.

mom & babes
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

(hint: she's a LaMancha)

With mushrooms.


morel
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

(hint: that's a morel, aka dry land fish)
I was on my way out to hang laundry when younger daughter, with Peterson's Guide in hand, asked me if I wanted to go check out a mushroom with her. "Naw, I don't think so," I said, but I did ask what it looked like. She said, "Like a raisin on top."

"Did you hear that?" I hollered to husband. "What?" he said. "She's found a mushroom that looks like a raisin on top." "I'm getting my shoes on," he said. Daughter said, "I'm so glad I found something that makes you laugh with delight."

It took us a minute to find them again. They are tricky little devils, and yet so obvious when you do see them. We've found about a dozen in that little area and find another one or two every time we go to marvel.

Carnivores

The family was getting up, making its way around, when elder son said, “There’s a wildcat out there.” I wondered if it were a wild cat (like, a neighbor's cat, or one someone had dropped off) or a wildcat (which here would either be a bobcat or a panther). I’ve seen a bobcat here, not too long ago and boy was he beautiful, but I’ve only ever heard tales of panthers. They were the scariest tales of all tales when I was a child -- how a panther screamed like a woman, and of course it was always eating a woman right after that. When we first moved out here we actually picked up a hitchhiker, an old and fairly drunk man, who at dusk was standing in the middle of the road flicking his bic, over and over. He said a panther was after him and he sure was grateful that we’d picked him up.

When I heard husband calmly say to son, “Yep, that’s a wildcat,” I fairly knew it must be the bobcat. And sure enough we could stand in our living room windows and look out and see him as he relaxed amongst the trees. He was just like a cat on the back of your couch or something. He’d wash himself a bit, lay down, look around. We watched and watched to catch a glimpse of his tufted ears, he tail-less hind-end. When he sat up you could see how big he was -- husband and I both estimated he weighed at least 40 pounds. I commented that he’d weigh forty pounds until you tried to hold on to him and then he’d weigh a lot more.

Finally I had to go milk. The cow is only so patient and she doesn’t care a thing for bobcats. The cats on my porch didn’t seem to care that the big cat was only ten yards away if they were even aware of him. I walked down and he sat up, tall, and took a good look at me, and me at him, and it was a magnificent protracted moment. Then he turned and walked, did not run, did not even hurry, the same path that I’d seen the other bobcat take. I was wondering just how close he lives to us.

When I was milking, the whole goat herd came up. We’ve been meaning to kill the biggest wether but one thing or another has delayed it. I sent word by a daughter that the herd was here. With the drought they sometimes wander far and wide. A couple are skinny and while the wethers looked to be in good shape, there was some concern that we’d be killing them in a weight losing cycle which could make the meat tougher. After breakfast husband went out with the gun and sure enough, in a few minutes a loud bang to let us know the white weather was history.

Now, this goat, the white wether, was one of three born spring two years ago I believe but am not certain of. When that set of boy triplets was born down in the woods, the horse was very curious as to what this was and went up and sniffed a lot. In his sniffing he stepped on the white one’s back leg. The baby goat didn’t put the foot down for a week but when I examined it, it didn’t seem broken so we just left it, and sure enough, a week later the goat put the foot down and used it normally ever since. I remember holding that baby and his brothers. We’ve known him all his life. We’ve loved him well, although he was not a tame goat and would not come to you even for corn in a bucket. And so that bang was a bittersweet goodbye.

We have usually hung meat carcasses before skinning and cutting them up but we’d decided to do this one a bit differently. We’d kill it, and pretty much leave it laying. All the good parts would be cut off -- the loin, the ribs, the quarters -- but the offal and the rest of the body would just lay there. The cats would eat their fill. Then the buzzards. And within a couple days it would all be gone except the bones.

So husband got to dismembering it and the girls brought the ribs and loins to me. When the first girl came in holding a loin she said, “It’s twitching.” And it was. I rinsed it and put it in a little brine in the fridge to age. When the ribs came I rinsed them, cut the whole into two pieces so it would fit in the pot, and put it in water on the stove to cook all day. It really twitched when I poured hot water over it. And they were fat -- no worries for tough meat with them. Husband took the legs and put them in a freezer to cool, and from there they will be put in a cooler, then back in the freezer, back and forth for 3 or 4 days to let them age. Then they will be cut to roasts and stir-fry.

I do not know what the bobcat had for supper. I don’t believe it was one of our chickens although that might have been what he was after. But we had barbecue goat ribs with (freshly dug turning to sugar spring) mashed potatoes and a pot of red beans for supper. Husband got a taste for chocolate cake so I made that while he made the butter with which to make the icing.

Oh man, the opulence of country life.