We have had some stunning early summer weather this year, the kind that makes one loath to come inside at the end of the day. A few nights ago, the light was perfect so I took off with my camera and Josie, and who would follow but my three not-kittens-anymore, Elsa (the white one), Portia (the true yellow one), and Buttercup (the creamy looking one). They kept up on the whole walk. Just about all of my cats will accompany me on walks from time to time.
The shell-leafed penstemon was blooming everywhere, and I was tickled to discover a little patch of white irises. We don’t have wild white irises, so who knows how these got there, but they were lovely. Whether a bird planted them, or a homesteader’s wife years ago, who knows, but no one else knew about them when I asked Brad and my in-laws. It has been such a wonderfully wet spring, a lot of things that have bloomed that were somewhat dormant in previous years, so it may have been years since these white beauties bloomed.
Wonderful golden evening.
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Originally published in the May/June 2024 issue of Down Country Roads Magazine
First, I fell in love with violets. I called them wildflowers, but Dad called them weeds, and to his chagrin they grew in abundance in the yard of my childhood home. I can remember picking them handful by fragrant handful, stuffing them into tiny vases with pride and delight. Their sweet faces were enchanting, the sleepy-eyed, quiet little things, all shades of dark blue-purple to white, with the delicate striping at their throats and their whimsical heart-shaped leaves.
Then I learned their names. They weren’t just violets, but some were common blue violets, some were dog violets. It is one thing to know a flower by sight, to recognize it in a distant sort of a way. It is another thing to know its name. It is like the difference between an acquaintance and a companion.
Thus began a lifelong friendship with the flowers.
Field guides became a favorite and treasured part of my personal library. I learned many names. Each hike or rambling walk was a treasure hunt, every parting of the grasses a discovery. For each new flower I found, I learned a new name, like meeting a new friend.
And meet them I did, learning to see the uniqueness of the flowers, not just nature’s wild and wonderful bouquet.
As my friendship with them deepened and their names became familiar, wooded rambles no longer were blind treasure hunts, but reunions, each time I wandered into their domain and sought their company. My photographs of them were no longer just photographs, but portraits. Their familiar faces became as familiar as a friend’s face, their presence was eagerly anticipated, the blooming of different flowers marking milestones throughout the year. I learned their quirks and preferences, to know where each little blossoming beauty likes to be, what hollows they haunt, what hillsides they adorn, and when they adorn them. A well-traveled trail is always new, week to week transformed by the adorning flowers, and sometimes day to day.
Columbine blooms quickly in the early summer and is easily missed, tucked away in the cool, damp hollows and ravines, her salmon and yellow blossoms hanging like pendants from her slender stem. A lucky person might chance upon a blue columbine, rare in the Hills, or even a white morph. Lanceleaf bluebells grow on the hill trail above our house, drinking up the splashes of midsummer sunlight from between the spreading ponderosa pines. Finding the hiding place of the sego lily is a reward in itself, reclusive as she is, and rather shy, maiden-white with a heart of gold. Spiderwort, not overly finicky about where he grows, sometimes in the pines, sometimes on the prairie, boasts his clusters of brightest pink and vivid purple, the local varieties almost impossible to differentiate, as they cross-pollinate with ease. Longspur violets grow in the higher elevations west of us, while their sisters, the pale-lavender larkspur violet and dainty yellow Nuttall’s violet, inhabit the more arid country around my home, flourishing on the grass-covered slopes of the foothills. And then there is the magenta gem of the summer, shooting star, thriving in the shelter of trees and ferny slopes, lighting up like her namesake when the sun is just right. Beebalm, almost a weed but not quite, spreads a mist of color over entire hillsides in the later summer, fragrant and robust. Wild roses, sweet and feisty, grow in the sandiest, hardest-packed ruts of trails, forming rollicking banks of brambles when they are undisturbed, leaving behind crimson jewels at summer’s end which, when harvested, make the most wonderful honey-colored jelly.
So many names! Names familiar and enchanting and delightful. Prairie chickweed. Purple virgin’s bower. Prairie smoke. Blue flag. Dame’s rocket. Wild buckwheat. Yellow ladyslipper. Pussytoes. Shell-leaf penstemon. Cutleaf anemone. Harebells and asters and fleabane.
How sweet it is, to be surrounded by familiar, beautiful faces. To peer into the underbrush, to part the tall grasses, to look beyond what many choose to see, to seek and find and learn. To ramble in the woods in the company of so many old friends.
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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.
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Can we just take a moment to appreciate the incredible beauty and diversity of these little baby baldy faces? I have been riding along with Brad when he checks the calving pasture, when I have the time, and it is just too fun to see all the variety and the cuteness overload. I think it drives my father-in-law nuts, how much I love these calves, but that’s just fine.
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Originally printed in the Custer County Chronicle on April 3, 2024
The miracle of life is front and center during calving season. It is amazing to watch a heifer birth her first baby, looking in vague confusion at the squirming, slimy creature that made its sudden, un-asked-for appearance, and then, prompted by God-given instinct, begin to clean the baby off. The baby is up off the ground in a matter of minutes, his little legs wobbly and knock-kneed, and then he finds the life-giving udder and his little tail goes to wagging, just like a dog. What a sight to see.
The excitement of the first calf of the season is followed by weeks and weeks of chaos, confused young mother cows learning the ropes, babies everywhere, unmixing mixups, and the satisfaction of watching maternal older cows do everything on their own.
It isn’t just instinct that drives a cow, but a fascinating melding of instinct and education, and the first-time mamas are kept under pretty close watch for the first few days, and kept in the nearest pasture for the first month or so. These first-time mamas are prone to wandering off and leaving their calves, forgetting they have calves, forgetting which calf is theirs, forgetting where they left their calves, and can often be seen chasing helplessly after a sprightly baby, entirely unsure how to control the unruly child.
The second-time mamas are a little less helpless, instinct and education both more fully developed, but there still is a tendency towards some of those pitfalls of early motherhood. They are given a little more freedom than the first-timers, but are still able to be supervised. Eventually, cows figure out the concept of nursery groups, where one or three mothers are left in charge of a dozen or so babies, giving the other mothers a chance to go in to water or eat. I don’t know how they figure out shifts, but somehow they do, but early on they forget about the need for a babysitter and just wander off, until something jogs their bovine memories.
And nothing jogs the bovine memory like the sound of a calf bawling. Nothing reminds a mama cow of her maternal responsibility like the sound of the baby she forgot about or misplaced. Some calves are obliging, squealing like stuck pigs if you just look at them wrong, let alone if they are being sat on by a wiry rancher, but other calves are stoics, and won’t make a peep, which is inconvenient if you’re trying to identify them.
Thus, the necessity of the fine art of cow-calling. Although ranching is a lot of science, there are a number of things that definitely fall into the “art” category, and cow-calling is one of those things.
I remember being seated behind my now husband, bundled up against the cold, enjoying the view as we bounced around the hayfield on the ATV, looking for unmarked calves to ear tag and vaccinate. The ear tag given matches the one in the mother’s ear, so they can be easily paired up later on and a good inventory kept. The frozen hayfield wasn’t much fun to drive over, but I was having a dandy time, my arms wrapped snugly around my handsome not-quite-husband, and having been granted the official role of keeper of the vaccine gun and ear tagger. Without warning, an absolutely uncanny sound issued from my not-quite-husband’s lips. Seated as I was right behind him, arms wrapped around him as stated, I experienced the full force of this incredible and unearthly sound. It was truly awe-inspiring, unlike anything I had ever heard before.
And I burst out laughing.
I honestly thought the demonstration was for comic effect. Until I saw fifteen mother cows practically stand to attention, heads flying up from complacent grazing like they’d been stung by wasps, then leave their breakfast and take off in all different directions, whichever direction they thought they remembered having left their calves. For the record, they don’t always remember, the telltale sign being a mother cow walking around bawling until she stumbles across her baby, which is (almost) always right where she had left it.
Anyway, the cow-calling had the intended effect and the mother of the baby in question presented herself, the calf was identified, tagged and vaccinated, and we went on our merry way.
Such was my introduction to the fine art of cow-calling.
I have since had my education on this topic broadened and have learned that this useful skill can be employed not only to quickly identify an unmarked calf, but to mostly accurately separate the cows that have calved from those that have not, to bluff a cow into looking around for the purpose of reading her ear tag, or to keep a flighty cow from running off without her young baby. I’m sure there are other uses for it, but those are the main ones I have identified.
Calving season. By turns hilarious or heartbreaking. Life and death are often juxtaposed. It is the sweetness of new life and baby animals that know no fear, the enjoyment of watching them learn to play and take their first running steps in the wide open, crow-hopping on their spindly legs. It is incredible to see a cow looking for somewhere to calve, and twenty minutes later to find not only that she has had the calf but that it is up and nursing already. It is miracle after miracle after miracle.
But cow-calling still makes me laugh.
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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?
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