Morning light can be harsh.

After a long night’s work on predator patrol, a dog needs his sleep.

Someone should find him a doggie sleep mask.

The turkeys have a different perspective.  This Blue Slate tom particularly likes basking in the early light, displaying his speckled fan, chortling to the hens.  Most mornings I find him perched on [...]

Another sign of spring’s approach - flats of seedlings growing under lights.  On the left are tiny petunia seedlings, which can be a challenge to grow.  I start with pelleted seed, which is more expensive, but worth it since I get much better results.  Pelleted seeds are covered with a coating that dissolves in water.  The [...]

The daffodils are nearly ready to bloom.  These sprouted right through the snow, and their tips have been nipped by several hard freezes.  In years past I worried that they wouldn’t bloom, that the damage would be so severe that they might wither and die away.
Silly me.  Daffodils are tough, and these old heirloom types [...]

I’m not going back into the soap business.  I don’t miss all that lifting, mixing, and pouring that goes into the process of making a couple hundred pounds of handcrafted soap in a day, and I don’t miss all the weekends away selling soap and teaching classes at fairs and festivals.  I don’t miss the [...]

There I was, driving down a blacktop road on the way home to the farm — and driving too fast, too.  The sun had sunk low in the sky, and in the glare I nearly missed seeing them.  My brain first registered ‘Canada Geese’, which is a reasonable quick assumption because that’s the type of big wild [...]

It’s no secret that I love bread.  I could live on bread.  Probably.  Definitely.    I love to make it, eat it, write about it, and I love to smell it . . . oh my goodness, nothing in this world smells better than freshly baked bread.    I love to teach people to make bread, too — [...]

There’s not much better than tender, meaty barbecued short ribs.  It can take a lot of tending to cook them just right  so they’re mouth-melting tender, moist, and with just the right level of smoky good taste.   If you toss those meaty slabs straight on the grill, you’ll get tough meat.  That’s because the meat [...]

Somewhere there’s an alien cow barn missing a calf.

Look, the alien calf’s big sister came to visit, too.

It’s an alien cow family reunion.
P.S.  Don’t take your camera flash to the barn.  Just don’t do it.

The office cat loves snowy weather.  She sits at the window for hours, though not because she wants to play outside.  She’s there for the influx of wild birds drawn to the feeders.   Granted, the birds come other days, too, but just a few, now and then.  When snow blankets their world, hiding much of [...]