NOAA Weather Forecasting on the Farm

Here's an email I sent to my pal, MikeB in Great Falls. A great way to start the day here on the farm.
______________________

Mike:

I fooled Lyn this morning, it was funny. Funnier cuz I was fooled too.

I woke up the computer and had saved my webpages last night to come up automatically this morning. You know so the emails and the weather home page would load up and be ready when Lyn and I sat with our breakfast at the window to watch the cows move out of the shelter to the hay and we could chat about the day ahead. Sure enough all the expected web pages came up ready for our morning reading and comments.

A list of a few emails popped up and NOAA Local Weather is our homepage, so that was up. When we sat down to look; weather is always first for Lyn, we were so surprised to see temps rising into the 40s for a couple of days and even the 50s next week. Lyn was going crazy projecting her day and tomorrow with chores all the way from digging a walkway out into the garden to immediately dressing up a little and running outside to let the chickens out of the coop into that early morning sun that must be blazing away already. I was eating a little faster than usual too. With the melting snow we could see being projected for the next few days, I was sensing a need to start the tractor and spear a round bale to be moved on our ice road across a strip of marsh to the heifers favorite winter feeding area' This, before the marsh crossing thawed later this morning in the forecasted heat wave. The narrow lane across the marsh is too slippery for the tractor to make the crossing with a bale hanging on the front loader bale fork.

As we were cleaning up our plates, (good old farm fresh eggs and locally cured bacon, hashbrowns from our potato stash in the cellar and a piece of Great Harvest Bread from Fargo), my head was grinding away at those temperature forecasts and something wasn't computing right. So, I sat down and looked at the weather site again and sure enough, I had saved the Great Falls, MT site instead of my Callaway, MN NOAA homepage last night when I put the computer into sleep mode. Ha, ha on us. Bad, bad, bad for me when I pointed this out to Lyn. I got smacked, harassed and nearly beaten for the "trick" I had played on her. "Crapola man", I had to readjust too, "what the hell, over". Anyway, we had a great laugh, Lyn completely abandoned me to the housework and headed outside recommitted to a couple more weeks in the 20s, but shaking her head in disgust that she had not double checked my math to see what city those NOAA forecasts affected.

You folks in Great Falls are going to have a nice week as far as we are concerned, even though MikeB will be off to maybe warmer weather yet in lovely Rocks Springs, Wyo. to be with the grandboys. We Callawegians will stay below but near freezing and that ain't so bad. We hardly ever get real pumped up for the weeks of mud we get here as the snow load melts and riffles though the yard and driveway and walkways bringing all our of our clay-loam soils to sticky, gooey life again. We'll be sunny and in the 20's above zero though. For us winter hardy farmers that kind of day is a really happy day in any February "up north" on the Blue Moon Farm and Ranch.

The green side is almost up, again.....

Ron and Lyn and the Critters

Grandpa and the chickens: Not a Christmas story

This post from my cousin, Bill Quick is some history worth passing on. He writes to his siblings born after Bill's mother died and his father moved to St. Paul, MN and married their mother circa 1943-44. He responded to my request to post it by telling a little more of the story involving my mom, Rita (his aunt), our aunts Roseanne and Josephine (all sisters of his mother) and our uncles (Jim and Gene, both rather squeamish fellows) and their gender opposite interests in their brother-in-law's chicken escapades.

Thanks Bill.
Cousin Ron.


Bill Quick, Olympia WA, February 21, 2010, at 8:24 PM

(Ron:) Please feel free to post it, even on the fence post at the next farm. I wrote this shortly after my father died in 1995. Reading it again brought back more memories. When we butchered chickens Rita an/or Roseanne might walk down the road and help scald, pluck, and gut chickens. When Josephine and jack lived across the road aunt Joe would sometimes help. I can't remember Gene or Jim ever volunteering. Clear evidence of superior male intelligence.
Those nail clippers that are made for dogs work great on chickens, but, you know, my Dad felt that those game cocks should be authentic.
Let me tell you, a four pound hen or an uppity rooster on a light fly rod is a real experience, but that is a different story.
Bill


Bill Quick, Olympia, WA Feb 20, 2010, at 1:53 AM

(Ron:) Reading your Blog reminded me of something I wrote when a set of caponizing tools was found in my father's things. The younger kids in the family never experienced W(hite) B(ear) L(ake) (,MN) and had no idea of Dad's one time fascination with chickens.
It follows,

Grandpa and the chickens: Not a Christmas story


Don, Janice, et al.

Finding the old caponizing tools in the house brought back all kinds of memories. We lived at White Bear Lake from 1939 to 1943. Dad worked at 3M, but raised chickens on the side. Any of you old enough to remember the gladiola and dahlia periods can imagine the chicken episode. Dad didn’t go into hobbies halfway. I’m sure it was done to make a bit more money, but it was also a hobby. We had hundreds of chickens.

Most of our chickens were Leghorns or White Giants. A Leghorn can go from chick to a pretty good fryer in ten weeks or less. They are a great meat chicken for market and I think most of the “fryers” in the market today may still be Leghorns. They used to go to market between three and four pounds. The White Giants were chunkier chickens with heavier breasts and were pretty good layers. They would reach five or six pounds, but took longer to reach weight and more feed.

Both of these varieties could be good layers and Dad kept as many as he needed to produce all the eggs he could sell. Every morning Dad would take a stack of egg cartons to 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing) and sell eggs on the side. During the war any kind of supplemental food production was encouraged. Eggs were hard to find in the market. I think all of you have heard the story of me getting in trouble with Dad for feeding the chickens fresh cut grass. Anyway, it turned the whites of the eggs a delicate green and customers really complained. The chickens loved fresh cut grass, but I didn’t enjoy the consequences. I don’t remember any of you kids getting seriously spanked-I think Dad softened with years and more experience. As for me, he spanked and used a switch. Of course, I may have provided somewhat more reason.

At that time raising chickens wasn’t nearly as controlled and mechanized as it is now. Our chickens roamed free and had a shed where there were laying boxes and rows of perches for at night. In really cold winter weather the chickens might be shut into the hen house. A lot of chickens produce enough heat that they can cluster up and survive if they have water and adequate feed. The hen house was totally unheated-poor chickens! Eggs had to be collected several times a day in winter or they would freeze. Occasionally a hen would get “broody” and decide she wanted to sit on her eggs. They could really develop an attitude. They would fight tooth and nail to resist being removed from the laying box and showed no hesitation about attacking 5-9 yr. old little boys-or anyone else for that matter. If one were really slow and sneaky you could sometimes slip a hand under a hen and slide out a nice warm egg without risking loss of your arm.

Dad candled all of our eggs. We are talking about dozens a day, or at most a couple of hundred, not thousands. If held in front of a strong light one can see double yolks or other defects. A box of double yolks could bring a premium as a novelty. They were few enough that we usually ate them. I always thought it was a treat to get a double yolk egg fried sunny side up.

It was during this period that Dad began to develop his talent as the only guy around who could make a flawless twelve egg omelet. He used a big cast iron skillet that was fairly deep. I cannot remember when he stopped doing that. He would occasionally do a big omelet even after we moved to Lake Phalen. Keep in mind that with hundreds of eggs there are always some with cracked shells, distorted shells, or odd markings that made them unmarketable. We ate our failures. We ate a lot of eggs. Dad experimented a lot. We made our own mayonnaise. There are a lot of ways to use eggs!

A hen may begin laying eggs at just a few months of age. After a few weeks of laying “pullet eggs”, a good hen would lay almost an egg a day for two or three years. The size of the eggs depends upon the breed of chicken, the maturity of the hen (they get a bit looser with wear), quality of feed and relative tranquility of their life. When their productivity begins to wane the faithful servant is rewarded by becoming a stewing hen or pet food. In modern egg production facilities each hen has it’s own pretty sterile cage and every egg is counted automatically. Dad had his own technique for checking a hen’s productivity. If the oviduct would admit only one or no fingers, the hen wasn’t laying eggs. If the oviduct would admit two fingers she was producing pullet eggs. Three fingers indicated a productive hen. I really don’t know if this technique had any validity, but Dad seemed to prize it and it fascinated our neighbors.

Now, mind you, we butchered our own chickens. I still don’t like cleaning birds or contact with a lot of wet feathers. We would have a big bucket full of boiling water by the chopping block. Dad would catch and chop. My mother and I and whoever else in the extended family who could be persuaded would pluck and clean. After a few minutes in a bucket of boiling water the wet feathers would strip off pretty well. Once naked a chicken could be gutted pretty quickly. Visitors would sometimes inquire about the white stake stuck in the ground somewhere in the vicinity of the chopping block. One of us would casually say that was the distance record. Then, in response to their puzzlement we would explain that Dad turned each of the chickens loose after cutting off it’s head. You know the expression “like a chicken with it’s head cut off”? Well, if you kind of threw the headless chicken onto it’s feet it would run wildly off; bouncing off things, changing directions, and flopping wildly. The stake marked the farthest any chicken had reached.

A ghastly sight, but to a young boy, and apparently to his father, it added amusement to a pretty unpleasant task. We butchered fryers regularly and they, too, went to 3M for informal sale.
We raised chickens, the people to our southeast raised chickens, and my great uncle Henry, my maternal grandfather’s brother, lived directly behind us, shared a fence line with us, and also raised chickens commercially. There were always loose chickens around. Part of this time we owned a Springer Spaniel named Ginger. She hunted and killed loose chickens with a passion- never penned chickens and never our chickens. That was the rub. She somehow could tell our chickens from Uncle Henry’s and the neighbors. The adult chickens were all banded and their owners could be identified. Protocol was that stray chickens were returned to their owners. They preferred the return of live chickens and took exception to Ginger. She had to go. We gave her to a farmer who thought he needed a dog and raised chickens. Really, there was no malice in this.

Now, back to Dad’s hobby habits. Since we raised chickens we had to enter the chicken world. We hung out around hatcheries to see how they functioned and to see what kind of chickens they were brooding. Even in those ancient days there were commercial hatcheries and most commercial farmers bought young hatchlings and raised them. Dad, of course had to try brooding his own eggs and a bit of cross breeding. We found that chickens were apparently more discriminating than we gave them credit for in selecting their roosters and they did a much more successful job of hatching eggs then any makeshift contraption we developed.

Everyone knows there are dog and cat shows, but did you know there are chicken shows? Not just the displays of chickens at fairs (yes, we had to carefully tour all of those as well), but honest to goodness chicken shows. Dad was fascinated by all the varieties of chickens. Not surprisingly, we ended up with a rooster and a few hens of lord only knows how many varieties of chickens. There were tall chickens with long necks, little Banties, white giants, black giants, Plymouth Rocks, Barred Rocks, Cochins… There were chickens with big crowns of feathers on their heads and chickens that looked like snow shoe hares with all the feathers on their feet. Some of these varieties produced weird eggs that couldn’t be sold-so we ate those too. Did I mention that new layers begin with little, so called pullet eggs which also aren’t very saleable so we ate those too. Some breeds, like Banties, naturally lay small eggs and we ate those too.

You know, I may finally be getting to the point of this story!
Remember the white giants? Well, if a male chicken is deprived of his gonads he becomes fat, lazy, indifferent to chasing hens and kind of a chow hound. They will grow to 10-12 pounds in a fairly short time and are notoriously tender. For a long time capons seemed to disappear from the market, but I am seeing them again. I’ll be darned if they don’t look just like our White Giant carcasses. Now, roosters don’t take kindly to this process so Dad devised a “surgery board” that secured a chicken’s legs and wings and pretty well immobilized him for any necessary procedures. Dad became quite skilled at this and we had a very low mortality rate- or so we tried to persuade the roosters. Surgery was done without benefit of anesthesia and none of the chickens really volunteered. It was amazing, I can’t recall a single chicken squawking during surgery. They might fight tooth and nail against being restrained, but they were quiet on the board. Their combs might flush from white to bright red and back, but nary a squawk. Thriving on success and repressed latent skills, Dad branched out into other types of surgery. We repaired broken legs, lanced abscesses, removed growths…. And then there was the Cornish Game Cock. We had a few gamecocks, of course. The roosters grew these wicked horns on the back of their feet. I suspect that they are just a modified back toe, but the spur might be an inch and a half long and taper to a razor sharp point. They fight with them and can inflict nasty wounds. Fortunately, Cornish Game Cocks are usually pretty laid back, but roosters are roosters. One of the game cocks developed an infection in a leg. Dad lanced and drained the leg at least a couple of times trying to save the rooster. The last time he tried to lance the leg the rooster got one leg loose and took a swipe at Dad. Dad was wearing a shirt, but the rooster created a razor type slice that started near the top of Dad’s breastbone, curved over to his left ribs, and back to near his belly button. It was a nearly perfect half circle and bled like the devil. It looked like someone had gone after Dad with a box knife. Dad carried that scar as long as I can remember. It grew fainter with age and was very thin, but I think the scar lasted all his life. Incidentally, the rooster survived the surgery and lived for some time. That the rooster survived Dad’s wrath was even more surprising.

So, kind of roundabout, that is the story of the caponizing tools.

Homo domesticus, Dah!

Farmers are supposed to be husbands of their flocks and herds and whatever you call a pile of pigs or a barn full of turkeys and the like. Yes, something amazing happened about 10,000 or so years ago when the first chicken walked in from out of the jungle and laid herself at the feet of some hairball human. I'm sure the first couple of these events ended up with chicken-on-a-stick over the open fire. Eventually, those hunter-gatherer types hesitated a moment before chuckin' the spear, looked at one another and considered Option B. You know, the one that contains the possibility of taking that old hen into the cave, throwing some grass on a ledge and seeing if she would lay an egg in exchange for some shelter from the storm and the 72,932 predators that like chicken as well as today's generation of McNuggetheads. Wow, what a time that must have been for those Asian nomads that figured that out. Can you imagine what the neighbors thought when they came over for a tug of charred saber-toothed tiger flank and saw a chicken on that ledge peering down toward the newcomers anticipating a spear-chuck any instant. Of course we have no idea how all the domestication of wild things happened, but we have proof today that it did happen and we get the benefits today of some long eons of the taming of the shrews and other beasts that feed, nourish and entertain us today.

The domestication of wildlife for our use came with a cost though. We had to give something in return or those first chickens and sacred cows and dog-like beasts would have stayed on the fringe of our fires and waited for their tidbits after night-night time don't you think? Hey, there's no doubt that Paleolithic Man did some serious exterminating before he figured out he was going to run completely out of big things to eat. There are bone piles all over the place suggesting we really didn't have much trouble spear chuckin' things to death. Remember there was no Endangered Species Act in 9999 B.C. We certainly put the fear into some beasts though back then, didn't we? We are still having a hard time killing some wildlife that figured us out. Once we had all the cuddly little mastodons wiped out things became pretty "gamey" and I suspect my great...great...uncles got pretty hungry and decided it was time to invent the sport of hunting or counting coupe or catch and release, etc. So now we end up firing laser guided 99 - 06 bullets with explosive tips from tri-poded rifles at a zillion yards to have a meal or two of warthog or three-toed sloth.

So, anyway, when we domesticated all those critters over the last 10,000 or so years we also in a very interesting way domesticated ourselves. Maybe that's what the women wanted. Maybe they had been scheming for the previous 5,000 years about getting some real houses, some appliances and some time off from chewing leather and making pots and stuff while the "boys" were out rolling their own out of jackpine needles, getting high and sick to their stomachs and complaining about the scarcity of mastodons that used to let them poke them in the ribs 440 times before they bled to death to feed the clan until the meat was so rotten or the coyotes had to run away with the offal.

Yes, we too are domesticated now. About 10 or 20 years ago the women got sick of being domesticated and took over our jobs so we could be stay at home dads. Remember when that happened? I'm getting off track here. What I really want to say about the symbiotic relationship we have with our farm animals now is that the trend is pretty clear. The guys on the farm miss their wives who are off to town making real money. The money that goes to paying for the big tractors and front loaders and all the other contraptions it takes for one guy to handle a gazillion farm animals and be able to send the kids to Stanford or Yale or Harvard Medical School so they can make a living. They sure as hell can't stay on the farm since the farm will only support the elders and one brother (hopefully the smartest one, but usually not...remember the smartest one went to Yale or Duke to be a Doctor)

So now we are Homo domesticus and we grow food for the even more domesticuses of the big cities where most of the humans now live. And they are so domestic they can't grow anything and don't want us farmers to grow "it" either cuz we might be cruel to "it" or package "it" so there's blood showing through the cellophane and styrofoam unit in the showcase unrepresentative of any animal ever evolved from anything . Geez, this post is starting to look pretty dim, don't you think? I mean, can you feel the leash here? Who's on the other end of my leash here, anyway?

I gotta go to bed, it's late and I don't want to have bad dreams tonight. I have to get up in the morning and feed the cows while Lyn feeds the chickens and the rabbits and we plan for our vegetable garden in May, well maybe June at the rate this winter is going here in Northwestern Minnesota.

Think Greenside Up. Solar. Windpower... something wild before they put us in a pen and feed us cultured algae or some such. Whoever "they" are. Heck with it, I'm thinking Doritos here as I hit the "Publish Post" button.

Poop Scoopin' the Chicken Coop

Lyn's chickens are great pals on the farm. They are a documentary on farming all by themselves. And like all free-ranging producers on this farm they have little time to pick up after themselves. Chores define themselves by the inability of our captive farmlings to clean up after themselves.

Chickens were our first farm critters. We've enjoyed their company on this farm for two years. Lyn is the "Chicken Mama" and I help where I can without being in the way. We started our flock in Spring 2008 with 25 day old chicks ordered from L & M Supply in Detroit Lakes. "Chicken days" each spring is a local ritual. a time to order new and replacement chicks. Going to town to see many kinds of the chicks at L&M Supply is fun. Watching the little kids squeal and jabber about the chicks and ducklings is worth the 32 miles drive.

We have culled numerous roosters and some hens since our start in Spring 2008. We wanted a mixed flock of about a dozen hens and one rooster and have that sized flock now. We were gifted some adult birds from my cousin Cookie that first year and worked to incorporate them into the flock. We kept some of each type of chicks we first brought home. Today we have Australorpes (2), two goldstars, five buff orpingtons, one California white, a barred rock, a rooster of unknown decent, probably a California white, but who really knows. Sophie is a mix of types from my cousins gift flock. She lays a pretty blue-green egg and loves to hatch eggs. She recently incubated four eggs and kept them warm this winter for five weeks old before she wanted back into the main flock.

There have been several coops for the chickens. An ice fishing shack used by our friends the Volt's for many years of ice fishing on Lake Bemidji worked well for a year of so. The Summer of 2008 we housed our future laying hens and our first 'meat' chickens or "broilers" in homemade 'tractors' that we skidded around the farmstead yard. This was 'free range' enough for us with our first flock of chickens. This approach all ensured they had plenty of greens and insects as grew and matured.

The layers have graduated from the Ice Fishing Coop to a stall in our garage. The 12 foot by 6 foot coop we \erected in the garage is a perfect place to keep chickens in the winter. I cut a little door for them in the garage wall so they can go outside anytime they see fit during daylight hours. The Ice Fishing Coop is insulated but our winters are nasty here in Becker County, Minnesota (latitude 37 degrees, longitude 98 degrees). We didn't feel comfortable leaving the chickens to occasional minus 30 degree weather. We stacked straw bales around the Ice Fishing Coop last winter and skidded the coop to the south side of our garage, but it still frosted their combs a little even with a heat lamp going all night near their roost. The decision to move them inside is better for them and makes clean-up and feeding/watering chores much easier for "Chicken Mama" Lyn.

The current housing for the hens and Swede the rooster involved building an enclosure in the southeast corner of the south stall our of our three car garage/tool shed/nursery/rabbit hutch/coop. The rabbits and chickens get sunlight through the south windows and we use some multi-spectrum lighting to enhance that light in winter. We store chick starter or layer/grower feed in a metal rack. We found some "recycle" plastic bins that work perfectly for 50 pound sacks of feed and other sacked nutrients, such as diatomaceous earth. Lyn manages to keep straw bales and wood chip bedding dry in this stall area as well. Rabbit pellets are kept in 30 gallon metal garbage cans. We've made places for miscellaneous tools and supplies on shelves, a work bench and a movable cart.

So far everything is working quite well. Instead of occasional temperatures way below zero, the rabbits and chickens live in 20 to 40 degree above zero temperatures in the garage-barn stall space. The rabbits are more comfortable even though they weathered outside quite well last winter in the hutch I made and surrounded with stacked straw bales on the south facing side of the garage.

Chickens are amazing in their ability to go scratching about the farmstead in the dead of winter. Usually it takes temperatures of about 20 above to get them fired up, but if the wind is not blowing up their 'skirts' they will take a stroll almost any sunny day that presents itself. Throw a little scratch outside their coop door and wait for them to stick their heads out, test the air and file out to roam about. Normally, they head right toward the house where bird feeders are located to scratch up seeds the birds drop. If the temperature drops a bit or the wind picks up, they line up and make their way back to the 'barn', always surveying for one last morsel to stash in their crop before entering the coop.

I hope this gives you a look into the learning process we are going though managing chickens on Blue Moo(n) Farm. I'll post more on these wonderful farm critters in the days ahead. Be willing to raise chickens if you get the chance. Our farm would be fairly lackluster and humorless many days if it weren't for the antics of our paranoid flock of chickens. Oh, did I forget to tell you about cleaning out the coop poop.

Well, I'm sure this picture of Lyn on cleanup day is graphic enough to imagine that chore. It really doesn't take that long and the manure makes great compost. More on that in future posts too. Until then, Keep looking for the green as spring approaches.

Ice Fishing the Buffalo River Headwaters

When the snow gets more than a foot deep on Tamarac Lake snowshoes and a sled are the only way out. No vehicles are allowed on Tamarac as it is part of the National Wildlife Refuge System. I can take a power auger out there, but even that takes a notch out of the Wilderness Applause Meter when it's cranked up.

So here's the plan. First, don't take too much stuff. From the farm it's about a 10 mile drive to Tamarac and 15 minutes will get you there with time to spare. A decent pair of these new fange-dangled lightweight snowshoes are nice. Mine are made in Canada (www.gvsnowshoes.com) and weigh abouut two pounds and clip on like a dream with standard ski type bindings. I have a ten-foot long pull rope on a medium sized Otter@ sled to haul gear to my fishing spots. I also hook a deer hauling double-shoulder sling harness to the rope so the pull is from my shoulders and not from my hands and arms. I have an old pair of Moon@ bamboo cross-country ski poles so my arms get to help pull. The poles do provide some stability as well. That is the hauling get-up.

For fishing gear I use an Aqua-Vu "VPG"@ graph (www.naturevisioninc.com) to locate fish. The"Vertical Picto-Graph" is a Nature Vision Inc. tool. A black and white readout, sonar type unit that tells me where in the vertical water column objects (fish I hope) are stationed when I drill a hole in the right place. As fish move in and out of the cone of the sonar signal they show up as narrow to wide bands on the depth labelled graph. Wide is nice if you want to catch and clean less fish for dinner. Get it?

My ice auger is a fourstroke lightweight machine made by StrikeMaster@ (http://www.strikemaster.com/power.html) of Big Lake, Minnesota. It runs best on non-oxygenated regular gas and is easy to handle and nice for drilling a bundle of search holes when fish have not been previously located. A tank of gas can last me all season. I carry a collapsible snow shovel (like the avalanche guys use) to clear snow/ice/slush around the hole and for creating a nice level place for my bucket and other gear. Makes a nice snow berm to deflect the wind from your hole and keeps some of the snow from blowing in it as well. I carry a cell phone and a compass with me too, just in case the blizzard hits and I'm sleeping on the bucket. If it gets too windy, I go home. Don't need to be an idiot. This kind of trek-fishing is full monte-outdoors and this is supposed to be fun, kinda.

Two small 24-28" long fairly flexible ice rods and open-faced ice fishing sized reels are all I take on a trip. When fish are biting one rig is all I can handle. I have a medium sized plastic lure box and it's too big. It only takes a few sizes and colors of lures for sunfish or perch if they are biting. It they are not biting I go home and call my friends Gale and Mike and talk about the weather. A container of live bait goes too. I prefer maggots, but in Northwestern Minnesota golden grubs seem the rule, so that's what I can find and what I use. I like to take some small minnow along for jigging for walleyes, but on Tamarac Lake the northern pike are pests and I leave the minnows home for other lakes in this headwaters region.

I use a five-gallon plastic bucket to hold stuff and a small backpack to take extra gear along, like gloves, a facemask for wind protection, a small thermos of tea, an ice scoop to clean out the ice chips from the augered hole, and a couple of lightweight rod holders to keep my rods off the ice and out of my hands all the time. Other stuff is up to you, but it's all weight in the sled. If you're pulling a half mile or so out onto a lake you don't want more stuff unless you want more work out. OK, throw in a bag to hold your fish if you want. If you like to go to lakes where you can use a snow machine or four-wheeler or your car to haul your stuff, bring an easy chair and the kitchen sink if you like.

Oh there's one more item. A stick about one inch in diameter and about six feet long. This is the official GPS of any Minnesota ice fisherman worth his salt. You'll need this stick to erect in the ice hole that produces the daily catch. You place the stick in the whole pointing to the stars and out of the hole about four feet. You'll need plenty of stick showing just in case you don't get out for a while again. This is your 'marker'. It will freeze in the hole overnight pointing to the Milky Way. It is your so called "GPS" locator for next time. Snow is the culprit. If it snows more than four feet before you get back, don't get back. Stay home. That's too much snow to trek through on snow shoes for ice fishing. Wait until spring thaw in late February or early March takes the snow down to the ice again and your stick will point the way to where you left off.

Tamarac is my ice fishing wilderness experience in Minnesota. There are no cabins on this lake and in winter there is no noise except an occasional raven or round of ice cracking to keep me company. Now and then there is another friend of the silence of it all out there too, but you can count on him or her being quite too. It's used in summer by boaters with outboard motors, but in winter it's all mine and the shushhh of my snowshoes. Sometimes I get to hear a fish flopping in my plastic bag to go home for dinner. Like a good boy scout I go prepared. But, who really cares about catching fish in a place like this.

So Where Is The Best Place to Start?

While we learn we will call ourselves farmers because we have to believe we are what we really want to be. We hope you will follow along on our journey to becoming farmers and "stickers" in this place we call "Blue Moo Farm". At first we called our farm, "Blue Moon Farm" because we felt finding it would occur "once in a blue moon . Once we decided to have cows on our farm we changed the name to make it more fun to say and to let everyone know we liked cows as well as the chickens and rabbits we raise and try to keep out of our summer garden.

Please feel free to ask questions or to ask us to write about some special part of farming you want to hear about. We'll do the best we can to help answer your questions. Along the way we'll post as many pictures as we can to show our progress and perspectives on farm life. We'll post about wildlife and wild plants, larger watershed subjects and issues and our amusement with the wonder of it all. Politics is local so there will be moments as opinionated pundits too.

Until next time, keep the green side up.