Happy Mother’s Day

from all the mamas and their offspring at Farm School!
Callie the calico cat and some of her kittens,

Laura’s 4H cow-calf pair, Bunny and Benny,

Oreo the Speckle Park calf,

Hopefully

“To plant a seed is a hopeful deed.”
– unknown gardener
It didn’t take more than a week, living with the new enormous south-facing window in the master bedroom, to realize that what I had was not a large sunny window seat but the perfect seed-starting greenhouse. I planted some seeds in early April — from [...]

Nine is fine

Today is Daniel’s birthday and it’s a fine sunny Spring day.  The frogs are singing, the birds are twittering and making nests, and the gophers are poking out of their holes.
One of Daniel’s presents this morning was the Marty Robbins CD Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (1959) which we listened to with breakfast (pancakes, bacon, [...]

Call of the wild

One of my Google Alerts picked up this article, “German Tots Learn to Answer Call of Nature” from The Wall Street Journal earlier in the week. From the article,
Each weekday, come rain or shine, a group of children, ages 3 to 6, walk into a forest outside Frankfurt to sing songs, build fires and roll [...]

Early Spring snaps

The only thing green things in my garden (where the snow has melted) — nice young stinkweed. And oh what a healthy crop already. It figures it would be a weed!

The farm team (so called because they’re in their coveralls and tractor dealership gimme caps):

Sadly (ha!), the box of ice skates has [...]

What we’ve been up to

I feel as though I’ve been missing in action so here’s a general overview of what’s been happening around here:
Calving season started on Friday, with the arrival of a little bull calf Davy has named Frank. Frank was joined Saturday by Ricky. Right now (just before 11 pm), another heifer is calving, and [...]

Learning in the Great Outdoors

Terrell at Alone on a Limb is celebrating his 61st birthday with the 10th edition of the Learning in the Great Outdoors carnival, marked by 62 terrific posts (one for each year and one to grow on).
Many thanks, Terrell, for hosting such a splending carnival and many happy returns!
By the way, the Great Outdoors home [...]

Now this warms my heart, if not my feet

It’s still cold here, so cold the mercury is in hiding

(of course, you can run but you can’t hide with the newfangled digital technology)

but the good news is the snow has stopped falling and the wind has quit blowing, so it could be worse.
Worse as in as bad as it was on Monday, in fact, [...]

Speaking of cold blood,

cold hair, and cold skin, this is what 46 below zero C looks like.

An arctic ridge blew in yesterday, bringing the cold, blizzardy winds, and more snow. The wind and cold are supposed to stick around til the end of the week. You can get an idea of the general blizzardyness here,

And here are [...]

Backlog: Winter fun 3: Toboggan party

The kids had a toboggan party after Christmas with some friends at the nearby provincial park, which has great big hills. Davy made it just to the edge of the (frozen) river at the end of the toboggan run, considerably past the end the of the hill.
Davy (red hat) and Daniel (dark jacket with [...]

Backlog: Winter fun 2: Christmas Eve

The kids went skiing and tobogganing at my inlaws on Christmas Eve afternoon. Tom and the kids groomed the ski hill and cleaned out the chalet at the top of the hill. I arrived around four, just as the sun was setting; I believe that’s one of my children on the way to [...]

Backlog: Winter fun 1: The magic of hoar frost

Most of December and early January saw very foggy nights and mornings, which resulted in hoar frost everywhere, including power lines (we got off easily with only one short outage, while friends and neighbors sat in the dark for considerably longer).
Some scenes from around the yard,

Trio of mad trappers

I’m not sure what the matter was with my digital camera, or why it didn’t like the new batteries I fed it.  Maybe it was feeling overworked and in need of a holiday.  At any rate, I tried the darn thing again this morning, with the very same new batteries as last time, and wouldn’t [...]

The Learning in the Great Outdoors Carnival is up

The New Year’s edition of the Learning in the Great Outdoors Carnival is up, hosted by Terrell at Alone on a Limb. Terrell writes,
Learning in the Great Outdoors is intended as a trading center for those who use, or want to use, the environment as an integrating context for learning. If you are a teacher, [...]

Poetry Friday: Poems for late December

An old favorite, and something new, at least to the blog.
I Heard a Bird Singby Oliver Herford (1863-1935)
I heard a bird singIn the dark of DecemberA magical thingAnd sweet to remember:
“We are nearer to SpringThan we were in September,”I heard a bird singIn the dark of December.
Time, You Old Gypsy Man by Ralph Hodgson [...]

Paddle your own canoe

Shooting the Rapids, oil on canvas, 1879, by
Frances Anne Hopkins
We were doing farm chores and driving around in truck the other week with the radio set to CBC, as usual, when I caught a bit of music and Shelagh Roger’s comment that it was based on the Caldecott Honor book by Holling Clancy Holling — [...]

Poetry Friday: the week that was

Harvest started this week with swathing (cutting the crops — the row they fall in is called a swath), and the first killing frost arrived Wednesday night. The second one, last night, and the furnace kicked in for good measure. Goodbye tomatoes, cosmos, and zinnias, and hello, happy pantry and busy days. Or [...]

Big sky country

On of the only benefits of the sun setting earlier is that I’m still up and about with the camera. I took this the other night, while Tom and the boys were hauling bales, and Laura outside in the garden with me.

The tree tops at the bottom are our “Hundred Acre Wood”, really more like [...]

More from the garden

Eggs from the duck nest in the backyard, not 10 feet from the house. We watched over the duck and her nest for almost a month, mostly from a distance and not too often, and despite the nearby marauding magpies, the duck managed to hatch out all 10 eggs. We checked on the nest on [...]

Cool runnings

Though we don’t have any sledding hills near the house, I’m told by those in the know that our snow-filled but otherwise empty silage pit at the corrals makes a dandy sledding hill and bobsled run. It also for some reason is amazingly effective at making the kids whiz through chores faster than usual. [...]