For one brief moment during shearing last weekend, I thought the world was ending, via earthquake or bombardment.
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Mark went downstate for a few days beginning last Sunday, to help his mom and sister. As always, the farm noticed he was gone and did its best to thwart us.
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In the wake of last week’s nor’easter Mark called just after sunrise to say I should hurry out with the car and pick up a calf he’d found in the beef herd.
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Mark’s father, Dan Guenther, died suddenly and unexpectedly on Monday night at his family home in New Paltz. He was 77.
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I’m writing this an hour before dawn and the thermometer at our weather station reads 1 degree with a wind chill of -17.
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How could the new year be three weeks old already, with no farm note to mark what has happened? Sometimes it feels like we live in a constant stream of stories here, and if I stop catching them, they zip past and get lost.
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There’s so much to be grateful for now, as we pass through the darkest part of a strange dark year. The big storm went south of us, leaving just enough snow on the ground to hush the sounds of hooves but not enough to make walking difficult.
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I’ve been out with a bad back the last two weeks, so have been observing the farm from a slight remove. It’s a good thing to do every once in a while.
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In the soft lacuna between deep freezes this month, Mark planted 25 acres of rye as a cover crop, in the fields known as Monument and Superjoy.
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An unsettled week here, as in the rest of our country. We’ve had snow, wild fluctuations in temperature -- from a low of 18 degrees to highs in the mid-sixties -- and several days of strong gusty winds.
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There are two very important harvests every year, both dictated by the weather.
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I roamed out of New York State this week for the first time since February, to pick up a new livestock guardian dog in Maine.
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I love this time of year. The energy of harvest is different from that of planting or weeding.
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What a snappy end to the growing season, just as summer turned to fall. We had a first light frost two weeks ago, but most plants survived.
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The cold mornings have shoved me hard into food preservation mode. This week, I had a leftover flat of paste tomatoes to turn into sauce.
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Nobody can blow up a kitchen like our family can when we are all cooking at once. Friday morning, before ten, we had every dish and pot in the house in use, and a project on every surface.
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The rains were so localized this week, some parts of our farm caught a downpour and some got nothing. But we’ll take it, anywhere.
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Rain, at last. 2.9 inches, gracias a Isaias. It reminded me of that magic trick where you pour a glass of milk into a cone made of newspaper and it all disappears without a drip.
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Welcome, August, and the dog days that come with you, and the simultaneous repulsion and attraction we feel for the coming frost, for fall, which is suddenly within our meager grasp of time.
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Three meager tenths of an inch of rain over the last seven days. Vegetables would prefer an inch per week, but still, on a normal year, three tenths would be an acceptable amount.
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