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Now THAT’s COLD.
At Sunrise (8:17), I threw on a wool coat, insulated gloves and boots for a one-minute outdoor job of opening the chicken door so my flock could get out to their heated water reservoir and food supply.
Whoops. My young back-saving helper yesterday did not close the double gate into / out of the chicken yard after blowing a foot of snow off their scratching yard.
So I did that while I was out there – to keep them in and predators out.
By the time I was back inside, my legs were […]
I have no love for meat bees. They invariably figure out that I am meat.
I can share my spaces with honey bees of all stripes and persuasions. If I don’t attack them, they don’t attack me. That is the essence of Libertarian relationships.
I have employed various tools to minimize the meat bee populations in my area of operation, including baited traps and hired killers.
With the leaves gone from our local trees the very large hornet population around here was explained by a mongo nest high in a tree above the corner of our house.
[…]
Epic snowfall for the Darby area with 15 inches on Sunday followed by 6 inches on Monday. A bit much for the equipment we have here to deal with normal snowfalls.
In the video at the bottom I show how to read the weather satellite clips and what they tell us.
[…]
The chickens squawked urgently – a loud and clear threat alarm.
I dashed to the window.
Holey smokes! Looked like an eagle standing in their yard.
I scrambled into the chicken yard to watch him fly away. (Him, her, I have no idea. I’ll just use the generic male terminology for simplicity’s sake.)
Yep, BIG … REALLY BIG. Blue flashes on both shoulders and a patch on the tail.
He landed in a tree 100 meters away. I took several photos with my Canon camera zoomed in quite a bit. I figured one or more of them would […]
With four days of rain predicted and reasonable certainty that both the summer and the Indian Summer are history, I saw this morning as my last chance to seed the areas my construction projects this year laid bare.
I have been trying to buy or borrow a real harrow to work the seeds under cover, but nothing worked out. So I made my own along the lines of cheap, scrappy farm yard stuff. Old boards. Fence scrap. Screws. Chain. Ingenuity. It worked just fine.
It has been almost a decade since I sold off my 20-year business, The […]
Today is the summer solstice. Celebrate it. Go dance in the sunshine… Or walk… Or play… We are in it, but few know, having been disconnected from nature and the real world. For most of human existence, people knew seasonal cycles from direct experience. They paid attention because summer, winter, spring and fall mattered.
Today experts tell them what they need to know, there’s an app for that covers much of their research, and food comes from grocery stores completely disconnected in their minds from farmers, agriculture, seasons and shipping technologies. In our location, today is the longest […]
The moon over Montana will be full on Thursday, May 7th.
Bob Cannard, my organic gardening mentor encouraged us to plant on every full moon. He did not touch on whether or not he believed it cosmically favored the plants themselves. His expressed reasoning was that it organized us to do regular plantings whether that was seeds, starts, bare-root, or transplants. Get something started every full moon and you will always have a good garden. From long before there were computers, televisions and electric lights, people on nature-driven cycles have called the first full moon of May, […]
I enjoy my carnivorous plants a heckuva lot more than flypaper, to understate more than a little. The wonderful folks at California Carnivores provide insect control for me year after year.
My honeydew from a couple years ago is still among the living – and presumably happy campers in my home.
Officially known as drosera capensis, my honeydew is highly photogenic and wonderful for keeping little flying insects in check.
Peter D’Amato, founder and principle at California Carnivores told me the little dewdrops at the end of the leaf hairs are ounce-for-ounce the stickiest substance known to […]
My organic gardening mentor encouraged us to plant on every full moon. Not so much that it favored the plants themselves, but because it organized us to do regular plantings whether that was seeds, bare-root, or transplants. Get something started every full moon and you will always have a good garden.
In Montana that assumes you have a greenhouse. We simply have too much winter cold to allow year-round outdoor plantings. What a blessed place I grew up in where we could. Lovely Nature was unfortunately taken over by lazy minds.
Today, March 9th is a full moon. That […]
This view of the Earth is so informative that I keep it programmed in Firefox as my Home Page. Unless I’m rushing off somewhere specific, I get this image of our area from a cosmic perch every time I fire up my Internet browser.
In my video below I go over some of the finer points of what can be learned by looking down at our segment of Earth from The Heavens. Obviously we can see moisture and major storm activity, but thoughtful study reveals so much more.
For decades they denied this activity. Recently the geoengineers […]
Beagle Brain, aka: Scooter, our Beagle/Lab cross, the BLAB, inherited the beagle willingness to follow her nose wherever it leads, whenever she can. Our containment fence was not up to the task.
She would challenge it. I would fix it. Rinse and Repeat.
FINALLY I shut her exit down while the rented backhoe was available with a dam and its backwater flooding where the fence crossed the creek.
Yay!
Success!
BUT
The tiny dam I rebuild every spring to enable my irrigation to draw from what little bit the upstream irrigators leave in Bunkhouse Creek posed […]
I have been a weather watcher since I began working outdoors a lot about 35 years ago. It was also around then I studied meteorology in college. Nowadays we have much better tools readily accessable to anybody. We also have geoengineers working the weather over on a massive, global scale.
One of my favorite tools is geostationary satellite GOES 17. Geostationary means it stays in a fixed position relative to our planet. I check this daily. It is, in fact, my home page.
Learn to read it and The Weather Underground regional infrared satellite image and you can […]
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