News from Alderspring Ranch, with an occasional rant about American agriculture
Christmas Dinner. Just those words evoke images of red and green table cloths, sparkling china (the best) and candles amidst greenery at the centerpiece. Maybe a turkey, ham or prime rib roast with all the trimmings as the main course.
What about on Alderspring?
This year we had Christmas dinner at our older friends, Gordon and Auntie [...]
Alderspring Ranch is a wheat-free zone. Most of us in our family of nine are gluten-intolerant, and so we have a completely wheat-free kitchen.
We really don’t miss wheat much anymore. Our 11-year-old daughter has risen to the challenge of recreating the snacks and desserts we used to make with wheat. She is very intense and [...]
Last week I had a town trip planned. Town trip days are a big deal because we live over an hour from town, and a town day pretty much shoots the whole day.
I like to plan ahead, but Glenn often can’t…so, as happens not infrequently, he told me the night before the town day [...]
You might think running Alderspring Ranch is about rural bliss: kicking back with a tall, cool lemonade, watching kids play in the spring sun, listening to bees buzzing in the apple trees. Unfortunately, we don’t have much time to kick back in the spring! Here’s what we did last week:
Started up the [...]
Spring on the ranch is the busiest time of year! Fields are being readied for spring, fences being mended, irrigation systems are upgraded, and new calves are being born daily (we are averaging 5 new babies a day). They take a large amount of time as we carefully monitor their health, as well [...]
Nine year old Mae likes to make muffins on Saturday morning. As those beautiful corn and buckwheat muffins rolled out of the tins, I had just come back from checking cows (had two new babies before sunup) and fixing fence (they had gotten out and were eating my brand new crested wheatgrass seeding). [...]
We have goats in the living room. Kid goats that were just born a little weak and cold today in this cold, windy, wintery blast we are having in April. Kid goats and 7 kid girls on the living room carpet by the wood stove with the kid girls trying to coax the [...]
Got home real late from Salmon, ID, which happens to be our shipping location for UPS. I drove an hour one way down the twisty Salmon River canyon to get those boxes on the truck only to find out that the grocery store, our dry ice supplier, does not have enough to fill our [...]
Here is a poem that Marie wrote about night feeding:
Feeding
At night,
When the stars are bright
And light is most gone from the hills
We get in the truck Me and Dad
And with hay from the stack,
Dad will fill up the back,
Of our two ton with everlastin’ will
No need to go fast, But, Boy am I glad,
When feeding [...]
My 12 year old spotted the cow first. Down near the bottom of the meadow, now underwater with overflow from Lawson Creek, swollen with spring snowmelt. The cow was standing on a little island along the field edge in the rain. I looked vainly for little ears, any sign of life at [...]
