Rambling through Seattle & heading for Alaska!

Trip to Alaska - Day 2 (September 16th)

Here we are, another day's worth of pictures from the trip to Alaska. I visited the Space Needle and the Science Fiction Museum, then walked down to Pier 66 to board the Norwegian Pearl.

It takes a while to sort through pictures and make a slideshow, so continue to bear with me!

Working my way through my recent ramblings...

Trip to Alaska - Day 1 (September 15th)

I'm working my way through the pictures I took on my trip to Alaska. I've been slowed down by a "filled-up" hard drive, and having to take time to clear some space. I think it's time for a memory upgrade for the computer - too bad I can't get one too!

Here's some more pictures from my flight out to Seattle, Washington. The pictures aren't as clear as I'd like, but remember, they were taken through two panes of glass in the airplane's window!

Stay tuned ... I'll get more pictures up as I have time!

Bear with me please!

I'll add some more pictures soon. For now, please bear with me!

(Bears native to Ketchikan, Alaska.)

Cruising Glacier Bay

Awe-inspiring. Stunning. Wondrous. Magnificent. There aren’t enough adjectives to describe Glacier Bay.

Did you know Glacier Bay is a national park? Further, it is a World Heritage Site, “the principal recognition given to natural and cultural areas of universal significance.” It can only be reached by boat or plane. When a cruise ship enters Glacier Bay they take on at least one Park Ranger, who gives a running commentary on what there is to see.

Obviously, there are glaciers. Since these touch water, they are all “Tidewater Glaciers.” The park includes around 12 that calve into the bay. Unfortunately, though we sat in front of a couple of them for half an hour or so, we didn’t get to see that spectacular phenomenon.

We saw birds and seals,

but otherwise, it was a landscape on a grandiose scale.

The mountains of the Fairweather Range are huge.

It’s hard to get a perspective on how truly monumental they are. We got a clue when we got close to one glacier, saw a cruise ship that was still a mile away from the glacier and it looked dwarfed, and were told we were still 7 miles away.

Wow.
As you can see, it was a big ship. It just looked small next to the glacier.

Glacier Bay is truly natural beauty on an awe-inspiring scale.

A Whale of a good time!

Tuesday we went on a Whale Watching and Wildlife Quest. In a word, it was AWESOME.

We barely got out to see until there were Orca Whales diving around the boat. (Of course, we know Orca Whales are really dolphins, so why are they called whales?) The naturalist on board the boat declared they didn’t usually see Orcas, so we were quite fortunate.

Further out to sea, we saw humpback whales. LOTS of humpback whales.
There is a big difference between low and high tide, generally 15-25 feet. This activity stirs up the nutrients in the water. Also, there is a narrow channel that further compresses the food in one place, so the whales like to congregate there.
The only disappointment was none of the whales actually came up out of the water. We just saw a lot of backs and flukes.

We also saw an island positively covered with Stellar Seals on one end. Making lots of noise! On the same island, there were 2 eagles perched, one on a sign, and one on top of the hill.

It was so cool to see all these animals, and the scenery was breathtaking. Mountains and snow and glaciers and clear blue skies. Phenomenal.

It was hard to choose which pictures to use – all you had to do was snap the shutter and you were bound to get some beautiful photos. But most of them will have to wait. Internet service is mucho expensive on board and it takes a long time to load photos.

So more to come… but probably not until I’m home again!

Rambling in Alaska

We can see Alaska now. Lots of fog and clouds and hills right now.

I'm taking pictures and more pictures. I will post more as I can. However, the internet isn't always reliable, and it costs money to use it, so the more I'm on it, the more I'm spending.

Of course, time is also a factor. We're staying pretty busy.

So, Faithful Readers, sorry, but it may be a while before I'm able to post much. I'll be sure to put a lot of pictures up when we get back!

Rambling Far Afield

Yes, the Rural Writer has become the Intrepid Explorer for the next week or so. Yesterday The Farmer and I drove a couple of hours to get to the Nashville, TN, airport. From there I went to the Minneapolis St. Paul airport, and then to my final flight destination, Seattle, Washington.

Here are some pictures I took along the way, between Minneapolis and Seattle. Just bear in mind I was taking them through the two panes of glass in the airplane's window. They're not as sharp as I might have liked.

The crop land looks really neat from way up in the air!
Crop Circles!

And remember, we had to fly over the mountains to get to Seattle!

I had a hard time choosing pictures. There was a lot of fantastic scenery along the way. And I'm just getting started, because next... I head towards ALASKA!

Stay tuned!

Hay, Hay, Hay!

We’ve been trying for some time to find a good source of hay this year. With the drought conditions here this summer, the price of hay is going through the barn roof. Some places we called wanted $8-9 per bale! Thankfully, we don’t need near as much as we used last year, since we sold the biggest part of the animals.

It’s been difficult to even find any hay to purchase at whatever price, though the big round bales are easier to come by. However, we don’t have the equipment to handle those, and certainly not enough muscle power to move such a huge thing. I don’t like to use them with our sheep anyway. I personally know of two people who have lost sheep due to the huge bale collapsing down on the sheep while they were eating.

The smaller bales work much better here. I can break them into even smaller flakes to scatter around in several places. There has to be lots of piles available, or the goats commandeer all the hay and the sheep don’t get any.

We finally found a place with the smaller square bales at prices that wouldn’t require the loss of an arm or leg to pay for it. I don't really know why they're called square bales when actually they're rectangular, but they're not round, and I guess 'square' is quicker to say.

At any rate, yesterday The Farmer went and picked up our hay for the winter. It took a couple of loads, and a lot of listening. The guy is bought it from is a TALKER. He’s always interesting, but don’t go there expecting a quick get-away!

That’s one less task done in preparation for fall and winter!

Thanks Farmer!

Is your food safe to eat?

In my last entry I mentioned a blog featuring the Robinson Farm on Prince Edward Island. However, I should clarify that the blog is not just for the Robinson Farm, but is an offshoot of the FoodTrust website, an organization that provides a link between consumers looking for high quality food and the farmers that produce it.

There are currently about 30 to 40 farms qualified for a FoodTrust license. These farmers must follow strict standards for production, with crop rotation, field buffer zones, Environmental Farm Plans and Integrated Pest Management.

Shoppers can buy a product with the FoodTrust label and be assured of the quality of food, and that an effort was made to grow it in an environmentally friendly way.

FoodTrust provides something akin to the “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” for farm produce. Along with looking for local growers and Community Supported Agriculture, it’s another way to look for a safe food source. It would be great to see more of these types of organizations, and more options available that allow a person to trust their food source.

I think everyone could agree we want our food to be safe to eat!

Do You Know Who Grows Your Food?

I’ve wondered who’s going to grow food if the farms are all turned into subdivisions. I’ve thought about Sustainable Agriculture, and trying to maintain a positive balance with the ecology.

I’m more and more convinced that the more food you can buy locally, the better off you are.

Why bother? What does it matter where your food comes from? Well, have you listened to the news lately? How many food items have been recalled in the last year?

The USDA’s Food Safety & Inspection Service has about 38 items listed on their recalls for this year alone, and the year’s not over. The FDA also has several food items on their recall list, along with pet foods and pharmaceuticals. The food recalls are made for reasons varying from mislabeling and undeclared allergens, to some serious pathogens like e. coli, listeria, and Staphylococcus aureus.

When growing food becomes big business, and food is coming from world-wide sources, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain quality control, to know where exactly the food came from, how it was handled from start to finish, and what exactly is in it, not to mention the impact on the planet from whatever production methods were used, such as high pesticide use.

Buying locally doesn’t guarantee good food, but it does give you an idea where your food came from and a person to question about how the food was grown.

That is not to say buying local is the only answer. There are some big farms out there growing quality food, trying to lessen their impact on the environment, and building a trustworthy reputation with their customers. We need more of these!

An example is the Robinson Farm on Prince Edward Island. They have a fascinating blog about the potatoes they grow. I was especially intrigued with the “Smart Spud,” a sort of genius electronic Mr. Potato Head. It’s put through the process with the other potatoes, and the data from the Smart Spud tells them where the potatoes are getting banged up and bruised. Cool, huh?

I’m sure most people would have trouble right now buying all their food from known and trusted sources alone. Hopefully such products will become more widely available as the market for quality food grows with more and more people becoming concerned about what they consume. We need farmers, big and small, who are willing to balance their need for profit with a stewardship of the land, and growing food that nourishes, not sickens, people.

It’s just good to know if your food came from a source you can trust.

Guineas Galore - The Continuing Population Explosion!

We had another surprise this morning. A couple of guinea hens showed up for the morning feeding with eight new little keets bobbing along behind them. They are obviously recently hatched, and easily lost in the tall grass - which is why I took a picture of them while they were on bare dirt!
This is the fourth batch of keets to hatch out this year. The first two only ended up with two survivors from each group. The third group has three adults watching the keets, instead of the usual pair. They’ve managed to keep all fourteen – so far at least!

They were out in the front yard dust bathing this afternoon.
They have a pretty good system, with two adults watching the little ones all the time, while the third stands guard.
They were enjoying themselves immensely until Spot the cat came too close, then the Guard Guinea screeched it was time to move on out!

At this moment, we have 14 adult guineas, and 26 keets, for a grand total of 40 fowl! Oh my! I don’t think we really need that many. If all these newcomers survive, we may need to sell off a few guineas. They’re great for eating bugs, especially ticks, but 40 guineas???

It might be just a little too much of a good thing.

The Farmer Turns Lumberjack

I mentioned a few days ago that The Farmer bought a new chainsaw. Naturally, he had to test it out. He chose a tree in the front yard as his first victim. This tree had gotten progressively worse for a long time. Every year there were fewer and fewer limbs with green leaves as the tree got deader and deader.

There were a few problems with this project, however. On one side of the tree was a fence. Behind and to the other side were more trees. Most importantly, our house was in front of the tree, and worse, the tree was leaning in towards it. Therefore, the problem was to get the tree down without smashing the fence, or inflicting damage to the house.

The Farmer thought he had it all figured out. He put one rope on the tree he wanted downed, and another rope on a second tree behind it, then connected them with a winch. The theory being, of course, that once he had the tree sawed almost in two, he could tighten the winch and make the tree fall AWAY from the house.

Of course theories don’t always prove out exactly as expected.

The Farmer turned lumberjack had the right idea. He cut a wedge out of the tree on the side he wanted it to fall.

Then he sawed almost completely through the other side. Next, he started winching (not the pirate type of wenching, mind you, but the cranking a handle kind of winching).
Here’s where the trouble began. The ropes had stretched out, so even after all the cable was winched back onto the spool, the tree wasn’t leaning far enough in the right direction to fall down. However, if the cable on the spool was loosened to allow the winch to be repositioned, the tree leaned dangerously towards the house.

A pretty problem indeed!

Being mechanically minded, The Farmer decided to go get his tractor to keep the tree propped up long enough to loosen the ropes and shorten the length, then reattach the winch and start cranking the cable tight again.

Unfortunately, the tractor didn’t cooperate. It had a dead battery, so naturally wouldn’t start and couldn’t be moved to where the tree was. The Farmer was in a fix all right. It takes something pretty big to hold a tree in place.

At last, The Farmer decided he didn’t have anything to lose by finally trying his assistant’s suggestion. (It’s an unwritten rule that men cannot act on a woman’s suggestion until she has repeated it at least three times, and they have tried at least one idea of their own, and preferably two or three.)

The suggestion? Connect another piece of rope to the anchor tree, thread it through the loop at the end of the rope attached to the sawed-upon tree, then secure it back to the anchor tree, thereby keeping the leaning tree from falling on the house. That allowed The Farmer to attach the winch to a shorter piece of rope so he could tighten it up more and get the tree falling in the desired direction.
Once all that was accomplished, the project moved forward again. The tree started to fall in the right direction, but the upper branches caught in the tree beside it. The branches were dead, but still fairly sturdy.

Finally, after a little more judicious sawing, and some resounding thumps with a pry bar, the tree fell in a serious of crashes of trunk, then several big limbs.

I stopped the camera just a little too soon and missed The Farmer saying,
"At least everything missed me!"
The Farmer was lucky to survive his lumberjack experience, as one of the dead limbs caught in the tree barely missed landing right on top of his head when it finally dropped. You can see the force of the landing by how the log is driven deep in the dirt.

I don’t think even The Farmer’s head would have been hard enough to withstand that! I guess his guardian angel must have been looking after him, allowing him to walk away unscathed.

Just another day in the life of The Farmer turned Lumberjack.

Community Supported Agriculture...

… Or more about “Buy Local Now!”

Having been a proponent of organic farming, sustainable agriculture and such for years – I practically teethed on Organic Farming and Mother Earth News magazines! – I often forget that not everyone is familiar with such things. Sometimes it’s due to a lack of exposure, such as people who have always lived in cities and never had the opportunity to garden or farm. Sometimes people have just flat out never heard of such a thing. Other times, it’s just a lack of interest.

However, as more and more people become educated about the importance of the food we put in our bodies, they are taking an interest in where their food comes from and learning more about these things, including Community Supported Agriculture.

This great idea has been around for some time. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is defined on the USDA’s website as “a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes, either legally or spiritually, the community's farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production.

Typically, members or "share-holders" of the farm or garden pledge in advance to cover the anticipated costs of the farm operation and farmer's salary. In return, they receive shares in the farm's bounty throughout the growing season, as well as satisfaction gained from reconnecting to the land and participating directly in food production. Members also share in the risks of farming, including poor harvests due to unfavorable weather or pests.”

In some implementations of CSA, people why buy a share also do some of the work on the farm. In others, people pay for a season’s share of produce, but the farmer does all the work. Either way, it’s a good deal for both sides. The farmer gets a guaranteed wage for a season’s work, while those who support him get fresh produce on a regular basis.

If you’re interested in participating in a CSA, ask around in your local community, or search online. Places like Local Harvest have a map with farms marked that participate in CSA in the states. Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association has listings for both the United States and Canada.

When you find one, hopefully close to you, ask questions. There’s a lot of variation on how these programs are implemented. If you have the opportunity, give it a try! CSA is a great way to support local farmers and get some great food at the same time.

Fresh food is good for everybody!

Busy as a Bee!

Bang, bang, bang! I can’t decide if I feel like I’m sitting in the middle of a shooting gallery, or it sounds like someone shooting off fireworks. Dove hunting season began at 12 noon here, and there are obviously LOTS of hunters busy taking advantage of it.

According to Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency, the mourning dove is the most hunted migratory game bird in North America. I believe it, and I think every possible hunter is out there for the start of the season. The dove may be the symbol of peace, but they’ll be in pieces if they show a feather today.

While hunters are busy terminating doves, here on the farm we’re hoping for new life. One of the peahens is sitting on 4 eggs. It sure would be nice to see some little peachicks running around in the aviary. It just hasn’t been our year for peachicks. So far, zilch, nada, none.

While the hunters were after doves and the peahen sitting on her eggs, The Farmer was busy mowing the back yard today. This is news because it’s the first time he’s done it in years. We sold off the majority of our sheep and goats, and don’t have enough left to keep the grass eaten down like we used to.

He also tried out the new chainsaw he bought today. His previous chainsaw expired from old age. He sent it to the shop to be fixed and the bolts fell apart. Yeah, you could say it was extremely old.

While The Farmer was busy checking out his new chainsaw, some old trouble showed up to see what was happening. And what’s the biggest source of trouble on the farm? Why, the ornery little goats of course.

The one busy chewing Farmer’s pants is his special pet, a cashmere goat named Tom Thumb. He is the rare goat that would rather be petted than eat cracked corn.

And while the hunters hunted, the peafowl sat, and The Farmer sawed, there were bees and bugs busy gathering nectar from the newly blooming Sedum ‘Matrona’.

All around the area today, people and critters were busy as bees!