Once again, these early spring months fly by too fast for me to keep up! How is it already almost May? The sandhill cranes are already done migrating north, and the meadowlarks are home for the summer. Bluebirds are plentiful, another sure sign of spring. Finally the pasques are popping up on Potato Butte, the best place on the ranch to find them, and after getting frostbitten multiple times, they are finally gracing the greening slopes in the Calving Pasture. My perennials are coming up vigorously, in spite of multiple freezes and frosts, and I saw the first few asparagus spears yesterday!
We have already done the first bit of our cow work for the year, vaccinating our replacement heifers, calving is wrapping up, and branding is just around the corner. The chicks from the beginning of March just got moved into their kindergarten coop today, adjacent to the big girls’ coop, and Posey had her calf last week. We have been shuffling cows around today, so we’ll be ready to work them through tomorrow and get everything vaccinated.
Between Posey being back in milk, the chickens picking up their egg-laying, and my new found love of baking bread, the kitchen is a busy place, and the simplest and best of things are plentiful.
Winter gets long. It just does. Spring can be slow to start, and calving season can either be an exciting and enjoyable time, or a heartbreaking time. This is one of those great years. And a great time of year.
Support Song Dog Journal and share to social media!
So I really don’t know what March Madness is, other than it has something to do with sports, I think. But March is a crazy month. The winter sleepiness is shaken off and everything wakes up. All at the same time. The garden, the cows, the weather, the schedule, the chickens, everything.
There are babies everywhere, and I mean everywhere.
A little cold snap over this last weekend accentuated that, with little baby calves and their irritable mamas stuffed in every corner of the yard, with all available indoor space occupied by doubles and triples, and cows with slightly older calves getting shuffled into sheltered corners of the yard to keep them out of the wind and driving snow.
So far there have been two sets of twins, and both extra babies were shuffled successfully onto two cows who had lost calves–Good saves, on both counts, and the two lost calves were just part of the percentage of unavoidable losses, rather than the rather staggering losses of last spring, due to a collision of weather and luck of the draw. Posey got to try being a nurse cow for a week with one of the extra twins, until a mother needing a calf turned up. Posey was not impressed. Some nurse cow. We’ll see how she does when she calves, I guess.
Seedlings are going nuts in the brightest window in the house, around 120 tomato seedlings, some herbs and greens, and of course my elderberry cuttings. Bread baking and some jelly making and some sewing projects and some continuing ed for my paramedic license and a dive into spring cleaning have kept the days full. They seem to end as quickly as they start. And yes, that is a seed starting mat under that bowl of dough! Another use for those handy things, especially when you keep the temps low in the house!
And then yesterday happened. Or rather, Yellow Cat happened yesterday. We knew she was ready to have kittens at any time, and I complacently assumed, this being her second litter, that she would be competent. Boy, was I wrong. I went down to do chores yesterday morning and found a pile of three kittens that appeared dead, in just about the worst place Yellow Cat could have had them. She was unconcerned. I honestly thought they were dead and rigored, and when I picked up the two that looked the most dead, they were unresponsive and stiff and cold to the touch. She didn’t appear to have really cleaned them, their fur was matted down, and I really mean it when I say they appeared dead, and I have seen plenty of dead animals to know what I’m talking about. This isn’t an “I’ve never had chicks before and one is stretched out luxuriously under the heat lamp and I think it is dead” situation. They looked dead. Very dead. One of the kittens, though, moved a little and made the tiniest sound. It looked pretty hopeless, but I can’t stand to walk away from something like that. I almost left the two most dead looking, but gathered all three up, stuffed them inside my vest and ran up to the house with them. In the back of my mind was the paramedic mantra, “They aren’t dead until they are warm and dead,” and after a mere few minutes under a heat lamp and on top of a (you guessed it) seed starting mat, they came alive.
Baby animals are incredibly resilient but also incredibly fragile, a strange dichotomy, and even as they warmed up I felt that it was probably futile, but I gave them a little milk replacer laced with corn syrup, enough to wet their dried mouths, and two of them did try sucking it off the cloth I was using. I finally rounded up Yellow Cat from down by the barn, who was sauntering around like she hadn’t a care in the world, and locked her up with them. Long story short, the three kittens all nursed, she had two more, and all five survived the night with their mother in the bathtub and are doing just fine. I am still pretty mad at that cat, though.
It is hard to believe that April is just around the corner. April, the first month of long days in the saddle pairing out the calving pasture, the first real month of springtime although snow is always a possibility. There is always something going on!
Support Song Dog Journal and share to social media!
So here’s the thing. I love to garden, but I can’t say I really enjoy babying temperamental and finnicky plants. It is hard enough to grow anything in the Black Hills without having to contend with plants that just want to die. There are some things that just aren’t worth it to me.
So when it comes to planning my garden and picking what to grow, the things I enjoy growing are the things that will do best without me helicopter-mom-ing them. Because the problem with helicopter-mom-ing a garden is that no matter my best efforts, the hail still might wipe it out. Or the grasshoppers might. Or a very late or very early frost. Or, or, or. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy cultivating or the challenge, but if I have to sweet talk a plant into living, then it just won’t do well in my garden.
Also, I really (really, really) don’t want to give something space in my garden (space is a commodity) and only end up with one of something. Unless it is a really big something. So whatever I grow has to be a good producer. Part of the reason I garden (a large part of it) IS self-sufficiency and seeing the grocery bill dwindle to next to nothing during the summer months, and feeling the satisfaction of meals cooked almost entirely from food grown by us.
That’s why zucchini is one of my favorite things to grow. For real. Those weeds of plants can be totally wiped out by the hail and it will STILL come back and produce massive squash before the end of the season. And really, I do love growing zucchini. If you hate zucchini, don’t grow it, but it is incredibly versatile and such a great addition to salsa, sauces, soups, is a delicious snack dried, and I love it lightly sauteed or grilled, or even cubed and put into salads and pasta salads. And those massive zucchinis that get found in the late summer? They keep almost as well as winter squash, and are excellent grated and put into something, or even selectively sliced or diced and sauteed. Not quite as delicious as the smaller, tenderer zucchinis, but it is a widespread misconception that large zucchinis are inedibly woody and good only for zucchini bread. This poor veg gets a bad rap, probably because people in general lack the imagination to prepare it more than one way, but it is arguably the most versatile thing a person can grow in the garden, and one of the easiest. Consider it the gateway vegetable.
Hubbard squash is another favorite of mine. I grew it two summers ago (last year the hail wiped it out), and ended up with easily probably 100-150 pounds of great-keeping squash that we slowly worked on over the winter. Hubbards can get up to 40 pounds–The biggest I harvested was about 25 pounds. It can be used like a butternut or even a pumpkin, with bright orange, mellow flesh that bakes incredibly well. I loved to roast it and spice it up with some savory seasonings, and we’d eat it like mashed potatoes.
Basil is an herb I’m particularly fond of growing. It is very prolific, pretty disease resistant in my experience, and it is so easy to preserve it by chopping it finely with a food processer with some oil and freezing in ice cubes. The flavor is incredible.
As far as tomatoes go, Amish paste tomatoes are one of my favorites. They are great producers, especially in my greenhouse using strip-pruning to encourage fruiting, the texture is great, and they are so versatile. Big enough to slice for sandwiches, but fleshy enough for salsas or just eating straight off the vine, these have quickly become my go-to tomato.
Chard, cress, arugula, and lettuce blends are also incredibly easy to grow, and once you’ve tasted a fresh-picked salad with spicy cress and arugula, a few sprigs of fresh dill, and a variety of lettuces, it is just hard to go back.
Some new things I’m excited to try are some different pumpkin varieties, including “Jarrahdale”, as well as “Fairytale” and “Rouge Vif d’Etampes”, for some color. These will all get planted at the edge of the garden so they can sprawl without having to corral them. I’m already looking hopefully forward to some fall decorating with a rainbow of pumpkins! I stumbled across a squash called a scallop squash, and decided to try those as well. Fortunately there are as many ways to eat squashes as there are squashes.
Radishes are another vegetable that will be a new addition this year–I discovered how delicious radishes are sauteed! They’ll be the kind of thing I can stick in here and there wherever there is a little space in the garden. A friend came by a bunch of extra seeds and passed a bunch to me, including a few different radish varieties.
And, because I’m a sweet little wife, I will be giving watermelons another try. I have a failed record at growing watermelons, but that and cherry tomatoes are basically the only things he specifically requests that I plant. And so I plant. And hope for better luck with my watermelons this year. Any tips would be gladly appreciated.
What are you growing this year?
Support Song Dog Journal and share to social media!
Garden planning has been underway basically since the last tomato was harvested in the fall–Anticipation for the spring begins well in advance of springtime, and even in advance of winter. Gardening is an inherently optimistic and forward-thinking occupation.
I began ordering seeds in January, sticking with primarily (actually exclusively, I believe) heirloom varieties of vegetables. I’ve never quite had the wherewithal to really save seeds and I intend to change that this year! Consequently the selection was made for varieties I wished to continue to cultivate!
My absolutely favorite tomato varieties are the paste tomatoes, Amish Paste and Roma, both for flavor and texture as well as use. I love the meatier texture and honestly eat a lot of them straight off the plant! I actually have successfully started a lot of tomatoes from seeds left from last year that were wildly incorrectly stored, and I’ve still seen about an 80% germination rate, which seems really spectacular, given how poorly the seeds were stored. I also started a handful of Black Krim tomatoes, leftover from last year, though I wasn’t overly impressed with how they performed. They weren’t great producers by any stretch of the imagination, and it was actually really hard to tell if the fruit were ripe, because of their odd color. They were delicious, though. I’ve started some Mortgage Lifters, Comstock, Amish Paste, Roma, and a few varieties of cherry/grape tomatoes for fresh eating. Some herbs are going as well, with more to come.
This year, I opted to use dixie cups and solo cups instead of paper pots for seed starting and, boy, it has made things easier. I may roll some paper pots as I get more herbs going, things that will grow quickly and be transplanted quickly, but I’ve been happy with the switch. They hold up much better to jostling and watering, are much easily to fill with dirt, and they’ll provide a deeper base for root development, especially on things like tomatoes. A drill works great to make drain holes in the bottom, easily putting holes in 100 cups in, oh, three minutes. It really speeds up the planting. I’ll be able to save them this year and reuse for next, so that’ll be a nice time-saver.
The grow lights and seed starting heat mats I bought last year are working great still, and I actually bought two more lights and another set of four mats for this year. Tomato seeds have been germinating in 5 days! If you’re wanting to start seeds indoors, I’d definitely recommend these.
Remember the elderberry cuttings I got in January? They have absolutely flourished, and all but one rooted. They’re in dirt now and doing great. This will be the continuation of the little orchard we started in 2022, our “wedding trees.” Hopefully that will see an expansion as well. Menards has great prices on fruit trees, so I’ve been eyeing those.
I’ve been out in the greenhouse and garden a fair bit, getting some walking onions divided and put in the ground in the greenhouse, cleaning up, pulling weeds, and turning the dirt in all my tomato pots. As soon as we’re past this cold snap, I hope to get some greens and root veggies going. It has been gratifying and exciting to see what survived over the winter–Strawberries, rhubarb, chives, garlic, walking onions, and lots of perennials are already emerging. A peony I planted from bareroot last year has come up, catmint and verbena and English daisy and bee balm, yarrow and black eyed Susan…It is so good to see green!
Support Song Dog Journal and share to social media!
It used to be a custom of mine to do a “favorite photos” post at the beginning of a new year, and I’d like to bring that back….This last year was one for the books, and as I look back over my photos from 2023, the first thing that strikes me is how beautiful life is. The second thing that strikes me is how much joy God has brought to my life…my photography tends to flow from that joy, as I try to capture moments of happiness and wonder. The third thing that strikes me is how the color palette changes over the course of a year, with each season having its own colors and textures and flavors, from the gentle, muted tones of the winter, to the emerging greens of springtime combined with the rustic tones of leather and denim during branding, to the rambunctious chaos during our green summertime as the landscape into into a wild array of colors and wildflowers bloom, then settling into the rich, warm tones of autumn, as each little bit of sunlight is reflected in the ripening fruit and golden leaves and the flame-colored jars of canned jams and jellies and whatever else.
How beautiful life is. 2023 was a beautiful year.
Support Song Dog Journal and share to social media!
Winter really gets a bad rap. Too cold, too dark, not enough to do. But that is just our insufferable modern American way of thinking, too reliant on recreation and not enough on creation, too caught up with thinking ahead to have time to think back, yet somehow too caught up in today to think to tomorrow. We are too addicted to being constantly occupied, too addicted to having something constantly vying for our attention, too addicted to convenience to be able to appreciate slower, quieter, and the sweetness of inconvenience.
This is really a wonderful time of the year. Harder in some ways, of course. Easier in other ways, because the short days and cold temps out of necessity weed out a lot of things that just don’t need to be done (or can’t be done) when it is this cold or so dark at 4:30. But the earth is resting. So why can’t we? Our modern conveniences have taken away the necessity of building our lives and daily rhythms around the seasons and the lengths of days and seasonal tasks. But we still are fighting against nature. Frankly, I think that is bad for us. I don’t think that is how we were made.
So it makes sense, then, that winter just becomes a frustration for so many people.
But I truly love this time of year. A little forced lull in the busyness of spring, summer, and fall. A chance to dream. A chance to make plans. I love envisioning my garden, and ordering seeds, and having time to bake and cook and be busy in my kitchen, and to put things up for later, especially with a milk cow giving me more milk than we can use! Mornings are often occupied making butter and yogurt and bread and cheese, and there is now about 15 pounds of butter in my freezer, and plenty of frozen milk for when Posey is feeding calves and I’m not getting much from her. But right now, even this late in her lactation, she’s giving me close to two gallons a day!
I have been happily watching some elderberry cuttings put out little leaves, sitting there in the sunniest window in the house, and I’m anxiously waiting for roots to sprout. They will be a wonderful addition to the garden. I made fire cider recently, and will be making some elderberry syrup and tincture with dried elderberries from Black Hills Bulk Foods.
It makes my husband chuckle a bit to see me leafing through my field guides, and I have been poring over books on growing and using herbs and making herbal medicines, something I have long been interested in, and my excitement grows for the spring and summer, for planting and harvesting and wildcrafting. Soon it’ll be time to roll a bunch of newspaper pots, and the picture window in the living room will become the designated spot for starting seeds. It is invigorating to see something green and growing thriving in February, or March, while the world outside is inhospitable.
The chickens are looking beautiful, in spite of the cold. All the extra protein and calcium and other wonderful nutrition they’ve been getting from the leftover whey after making yogurt and cheese, has made for some brilliant plumage and a great recovery after their hard molt. Egg shells are hard with the extra calcium, and egg numbers are slowly increasing already (when the eggs aren’t breaking from the cold, that is).
Long, dark evenings are a good excuse to read and write, and I love the chance to catch up with old literary friends, or make new ones. Spring is right around the corner. There is a lot of winter left, a lot of time for plenty of cold and snow and hard days, but spring will come. And it always comes faster than we think.
Support Song Dog Journal and share to social media!
Song Dog Journal 