Plain Dirt on the High Plains, Wild Sockeye, Roasts, Hanging Tenders, and Sausage Flash!
Dear Friends and Partners,
Welcome to Alderspring’s weekend edition newsletter!
In this letter is Glenn’s weekly story, a suite of pics about work on the ranch this week, and an update on this week’s featured cuts!
Want to follow along more day-to-day? Find us on Instagram and Facebook.
And, as always, if you have any questions, observations, or comments, just shoot us an email to Kelsey at help[at]alderspring[dot]com.
Next shipping day is March 28, 2022!
Place your order by Sunday at midnight on the 27th to get it shipped on the 28th.
Looking for this week’s featured cuts? Head to the page below. Scroll on down for Glenn’s story and other newsletter stuff!
This week’s cuts include Wild Sockeye Salmon, Eye of Round Roasts, the Hanging Tender Steak, and pre-shaped Ground Beef Patties!
Also, a weekend flash deal on rump roasts + 2 of our sausage flavors!
That’s Melanie yesterday afternoon with the little red dun mare, Jimmie. Here, she’s just put a saddle on Jimmie for the first time. You may remember several weeks ago, Glenn’s newsletter story described 8 young horses that would be becoming our partners on the range this summer…after growing up feral on a range next to ours. Jimmie here is one of those 8 that Melanie and some of the other girls are working with.
The 8 new horses, plus a few friends we’ve thrown into the bunch that are also currently being trained!
Quote of the Week
“For that pony had got tangled up in the cowboy’s heartstrings a heap more than that cowboy wanted to let on, even to himself. He couldn’t get away from how he missed him.”
―from Smoky the Cow Horse, a children’s classic about cowboys and horses, by Will James
Plain Dirt on the High Plains
This story is one Glenn wrote several years ago, but it still holds true today, as the pocket gophers have reemerged just in the past few days!
A faint trace of green covers the ranch on this lovely March day, a break in the spring storms that caroused through the Northern Rockies this past week. Despite the weather, Alderspring’s resident gophers (aka Columbian ground squirrels) showed up this week after being underground for nearly 7 months (what do they do down there for all of those 200+ days? They don’t have internet, iphone or a flatscreen). The fact is that our version of the prairie dog hibernates over half the year. Stacked up on top of each other like cordwood in their underground tunnels, their respiration rates slow to barely perceptible, and they live off the fat of their bodies for months.
Then spring comes…and they emerge, famished, and again begin the work of rebuilding their burrows, harvesting feedstuff, and feeding their families. Their engineering projects occasionally become problems for us on the ranch, with burrow excavation holes large enough to swallow a horse hoof. An occasional badger will make those holes even larger, in search of a tasty prairie dog t-bone. We have to pay attention on horseback, or risk broken legs of our mounts, and perhaps a rollover after if we go flying over the horse’s head. My ribs still ache in remembered pain from a squished and shattered ribcage when a 1200 lb mare rolled over me in that pockmarked area that we call “gopher heaven” on the ranch.
All that aside, gophers, like the voles and field mice on the ranch, do an incredibly important service of providing aeration and translocation of materials vertically across the soil profile. This is critically important for us on Alderspring as we add no outside chemical amendments to our soils, and all of these soil biotic organisms, from bacteria to badger, do the work of creating and maintaining a highly mineralized soil profile.
Read the rest below!
Featured Weekly Cuts
A quick summary of this week’s featured cuts:
(As always, only you newsletter readers have access to these discounts)
This week (until Sunday the 20th at midnight MST) you can get 10% off on the following cuts:
- Weekend flash deal on RUMP ROASTS + some chorizo and garlic sausages!
- Sockeye Salmon also 10% off this week (we almost never put this on sale)!
- Pre-Shaped Beef Patties…time to break out that grill for spring!
- The Hanging Tender Steak. Beautiful flavor in this little-known cut!
- Eye of Round Roast…a lovely sandwich meat roast or dinner centerpiece!
That’s Annie, 6th daughter, at the wheel of the new big green tractor! We have never liked having a lot of machinery around here (we’ve made do for years with a 1965 backhoe–literally one of the first backhoes ever made). But it was simply time to get a tractor that could load and handle hay a little more efficiently and pull off a few other heavy-duty tasks. And we are excited to load hay with the tractor instead of the ancient backhoe, which was becoming a bit of a safety hazard!
And here you have daughters Emily and Linnaea yesterday, standing in their ski boots nearly at the summit of Taylor Mountain, which actually is directly adjacent to our summer range. The girls went with Glenn on a father-daughter ski trek!
And that’s it for this week!
Thanks again for partnering in what we do!
Glenn, Caryl, cowgirls and cowboys at Alderspring.
We’ve been crafting our pastured protein here in Idaho’s Rocky Mountains for nearly 30 years and delivering it direct to our partners for nearly as long. This is wild wellness, delivered from our ranch to your door.
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