Another first for the little red barn

Hi all, before this installment, I wanted to give you this link to a wonderful little Etsy shop where you can find quality cotton fabric sewn face masks with ties rather than elastic. There is also beautiful jewelry that can be found here. Don't buy any old face mask from some nameless jojo on Amazon, support local artists.
https://www.etsy.com/shop/CandidasArtsStudio?ref=search_shop_redirect

This barn, I have always called it "the little red barn," was built by my Dad and my Grandpa when I was around 6 or 7 years old. There used to be a corral attached to the right hand side and its first occupants were Dandy, the gray horned cow, Bessie, the black Angus cow and Red, the beef steer that yes, had a red coat. This red barn has housed so many animals and has so many great memories for me. It had a hay manger built into the wall with a built in ladder leading up to the hay loft. Climbing up the ladder to the hayloft was one of my more daring acts as a child. Heights, crossing from the top ladder rung to the hayloft floor took a little finesse because of the open ended part for the hay manger. As I got older, the daring lessened, but the quiet pleasure of sitting up in a cozy loft that smelled sweetly of hay never went away and I spent hours by barn light reading, napping, daydreaming and playing with my imagination, sometimes moving lighter straw bales around to play house, or cafe or who knows what. I did this mostly while there were cattle below. I remember one rainy Sunday afternoon I spent hours up there with Elsie, and her calf cozy in the fresh straw below. Elsie was the largest cow we ever had. She was a Simmental/Charolais mix, looked like her namesake Elsie the Borden cow and probably weighed 2,000 lbs. When it's quiet near animals, all the sounds they make can be soothing. The munching of hay, even the licking of the calf's coat and swishing of tails floated up into my little hideaway.
Here is a picture of my Grandma Perdue, years after the barn was built by my Dad and her husband enjoying some bluegill fishing at the pond. When I was in the 6th grade, Dad and I decided to get in on the pot bellied pig pet craze and I traded a ton of NFL football cards for two pot bellied piglets. They were both incredibly shy for the first couple days, weaned from their mother but still very young. Dad and I would sit on the barn floor by the manger and gently place lettuce leaves on top of the bottom ladder rung. We would hear quiet shuffling and snuffling and before long one little charcoal gray snout would appear and daintily take the lettuce and disappear into the darkness below the manger again. The female we named Wilma but she was not pure bred and ended up weighing about 300 lbs. By the time we bred her and had a litter we could barely give them away. One went to our family doctor and for years the pig lived on a horse farm and literally thought he was a horse. He used to sit in the apple orchard in the fall and wait for an apple to drop then get up, eat it, and sit where he was to wait for the next one to fall. Wilma spent many years on our farm, enjoying belly rubs, leftover waffles, muffins, stale bread etc. and then eventually retired to the neighbors next door to enjoy a large horse barn of her own filled with llamas and she loved it. The red barn has housed rabbits during my 4-H years, countless cows and calves including my three cattle 4-H projects; Buttermilk the Jersey dairy calf, Hershey, my Angus/Limousin beef steer, and Annie a black Angus heifer. Buttermilk was stubborn. She would get tired of walking around the yard and just go down on all four legs and kneel and no amount of tugging would get her up again. Then she would set her jaw and grind her teeth so loud you could hear it. To add insult to injury, she went into heat the week of the fair and kept rearing up over me in the show ring and I had no idea what was going on. Annie, I took to the fair alongside Hershey and she jumped at every sound. Only she would jump three or four times without stopping and while walking her around the yard, I would find myself on the opposite side of each yard after she recovered from the sound of a car back-firing or a motorcycle going by. Dad would always want me to let go of the lead rope lest I lose my footing and get trampled but every time she landed, I landed on my feet, so I always hung on. Hershey garnered a bit of attention in the beef barn. A rich chocolate brown, the 3/4 Limousin bloodline set him apart from the usual Angus steers, he just looked trim and was built differently. I won my class with him and the beef show in Champaign county is pretty competitive. I still remember my shock as the judge pointed to me first to signal I was to take Hershey to the head of the line. Not bad for the little red barn. I also broke my only bone thanks to my misguided adventure with a friend who was a couple inches taller than me. It was Memorial Day weekend and I was in the fifth grade. We were keeping grain in a bin right beside the hay manger and she got the idea to climb onto the bin jump, and grab the floor of the hayloft a few feet in front of the bin, swing back and forth and then land in the soft straw below. I was never any good at the monkey bars and no gymnast. I did it once...barely then on the second time I just missed and landed on my wrist. My friend went home, I went to the Urbana emergency room and missed a season of softball. Later when I was out of the house, the red barn was converted into a very posh dog kennel for Belle, the English Labrador Retriever, and her pups Max and Diesel and before it was a kennel, it's where Belle raised all her puppies. And now the little red barn has been called into service again to house another kind of baby... And here is a video...a first for the blog:

Mid-May Round Up and Cannon Camera Roll

Okay readers, the love of my life has gently hinted that some of my posts require a bit more proofing. I blame this on the software and not my impatience to get on to other things. Still, I will work toward improving this what with the English degree and all. Additionally, I took a blogger tutorial and I only learned one critical thing relative to my blog so far and that is how to keep text from wrapping around images. Well, I thought that I had figured it out but it is still doing it. We will all just have to cope with my poor blogging skills for a while longer, I'm done fiddling with this one. First up, some pictures I've been taking with the Canon camera. None of these are show stoppers, but I'm trying to revive my photography hobby as well as this blog. I'm thrilled to report that we have cattle as neighbors again. I love when they arrive in the spring and am heart broken when they leave in the fall. Right now there are only three, a black Angus Bull and a cow (the cow has her head tucked against her side napping) and the short horn mix although that is a guess. This muffled gray cow is my favorite. I am pretty sure this isn't the same one that is usually in the field during summer as the shading on her nose is markedly different but maybe it's her daughter or granddaughter. I don't know why I love this coloration so much but I do. No calves yet. I'm hoping more cattle will arrive in the pasture but that's up to the cattlemen raising them. In April, I took Tutu walking quite a bit on some property with a lot of wildlife. We are taking a break though until paths can be mowed as more than a few ticks rode home with her. Even though her medicine keeps them from attaching to her, they can ride in and be found on the cats' tails, climbing the wall, on my pants, or even on the bed duvet! Tutu enjoys hunting and even flushed her first rooster pheasant! However, I did not have the sd card in the camera when I took the shot so, no pictures of her flushing the pheasant, much to my dismay and my Dad's disgust. I did get these lovely shots of a hawk being chased by a songbird...if you look closely you might see some unidentifiable prey in the hawk's talons, and I wonder if the songbird in pursuit was from a fatal attack on its mate.

And later that evening I got these nice shots of a drake Mallard duck.
We have more mockingbirds than usual around the yard this spring and for a while they were squabbling with the robins quite a bit but now everyone seems settled into their cares with their families. We have sparrows and bluebirds nesting in the nest boxes and we have Eastern Meadowlarks in the field with the cattle. I have a killdeer sitting on a nest with four eggs so the lavender will be completely overrun by weeds when they finally hatch. Killdeer love gravel and their eggs are camouflaged to blend right in. Every time they nest I watch and wait, hoping to get some killdeer egg shell for my nature collection but I can never find the remnants after they hatch. Unlike robins, sparrows and bluebirds, killdeer babies are ready to run as soon as they hatch, looking more or less like miniatures of their parents. I enjoy the mockingbirds very much. They are so distinctive with their white barred wings, long white and black tails, and their sequence of songs and other sounds. one year I had a mockingbird that could ribbit like a frog. In other news, Andrew has tried his hand at bread baking with the white sandwich bread recipe from Cook's Country. It toasts very well and is perfect for an egg sandwich. The cook in our family, Andrew also made this Cook's Country Recipe, Buttermilk Ranch Chicken with modifications of course for my lactose intolerance and the sweet potato corn bread was a tag team effort. The marvelous sheet pan pizza (foccacia style with rosemary from our own garden) that Andrew makes with pizza sauce from our own tomatoes also comes from Cook's Country.
The houseplants are all doing pretty well. A couple of my spider plants are beginning to throw up some really beautiful new leaves, long and light green. The pothos plant has recovered from a run in with Moxie and I'm hoping to train it to grow on either side of the bathtub rim as well as up this lovely makeshift trellis from Lily's Garden in Urbana.

As for books, I have two I've read in April and early May. One is going in the donation bag and the other one stays. This one I probably could have skipped, but once I started it I powered through thinking surely I would learn something new about Jane Austen, but no, it wall all stuff I knew. There was some commentary on themes in her literature but even those were more reminders rather than new ideas to me. This beautiful book on bees, is a keeper as I can see myself reading it again. The writer covers all aspects of bee life, by season as Sue Hubbell did but this is a much denser read. Longgood's voice is overall very good and compelling although I did tire of the occasional paragraph made up of half a dozen questions about the bees' life and motivations. However there were some great short sentences and passages like: For the bee, honey is the ultimate reality. It represents the fulfillment of her life mission, the triumph over her enemies, the continuity of the hive, the justification for working herself to death. Honey is to bees what money in the bank is to people--a measure of prosperity and well-being. But there is nothing abstract or symbolic about honey, as there is about money, which has no intrinsic value. There is more real wealth in a pound of honey, or a load of manure for that matter, than in all the currency in the world. We often destroy the world's real wealth to create an illusion of wealth, confusing symbol and substance. Throughout the book, Longgood revisits the question of the individual bee, her life, her tasks and contributions, in the context of the life of the colony as it's own living organism. The hive cannot exist without the individual contributions of thousands and thousands of bees and yet each bee in conscripted to an unalterable path of work and death depending on which kind of bee they are and born at what time of year and yet the colony endures. I also like this pithy line when talking about honeybees who turn to robbing other hives of their honey: In nature, where force and guile dominate, stealing is a fact of life, enabling the sly and quick to live at the expense of the industrious and dull.

A Toad in the Oregano and Other Garden Rambles

I've been doing lots of gardening as the weather gets incrementally better. This post will be a real hodgepodge of gardening photos (mostly.) The oregano had gotten out of control, taken over almost a third of the central section of my herb and butterfly garden. It's pretty hard to dig up and was the sole focus of two separate weeding sections. One afternoon this little guy jumped from the oregano near my digging...can you find him? It was a chill day when the clouds covered the sun, and he was slow to move. Both from cold I think, and from watching me. Eventually he graced me with this lovely pose. He did startled me for a few moments when he first emerged into the corner of my sight as I still have a frog/toad phobia, but he was little and didn't hop much but just sorta edged around. Shortly after I took this shot he disappeared underneath the leaves of this evening primrose. One year I was harvesting and pruning roman chamomile, the sprawling, fragrant, and close to the ground variety of chamomile, when a leopard frog leapt form the plants and man that scared the bejeebus out of me. Much larger than this little brown toad, the leopard frog landed on his back on the chamomile kindda like a kid sprawling on the floor of a half inflated bounce house. I remember when I shrieked, watching the pruning clippers fly out of my hand and over my head when I let them go mid-shriek like in a cartoon. Meanwhile the poor leopard frog was probably terrified by this giant booming what seemed to him subsonic screaming as he fruitlessly windmilled his spindly froggy legs trying to gain traction amidst the tangle of fringed steams and leaves of the plant. I finally had to ah, removed myself at from the garden for a while to let my heart rate decrease and give him a change to go somewhere else. I left my pruners, garden shovel and kneeling pad lay where they were at. I had several run ins with amphibians in the chamomile that summer and ripped the roman chamomile out in the fall...they didn't produce that many blooms anyway. In other garden news asparagus is here! I've been watching it since the library closed in late march and just started eating it this weekend. I have to pick it pretty early to beat the asparagus beetles from laying their little egg cases in them...blech! I'm not the "it's all just fiber" type. And cheerful chives from the herb garden to go with the asparagus in my eggs. I love chives. They are the first thing to really come on in the herb garden, with the oregano a close second. It's so cheering to watch the chives get bigger and bigger. I like their mild onion taste and their cheerful purple pom poms of blossoms. I just have to plant them every year to have an ongoing supply since they last two years after planting. Last night is the first of three nights we have a freeze watch on. I spent a portion of last night choosing which pot or bucket to place over which plant. I'll have to do this Friday before Mother's Day too as well as bring in a few pots we've already planted. The hostas are coming up, all divided plants given to me by a friend in Bexley. I love them where they are at as each year they provide more ground cover to block out the weeds. The crab apples in the neighborhood are blooming but I can't get a nice shot of our "shockingly pink" ones because the wind has been so strong. I still remember that after all these years, the tag on the trees reading "shockingly pink." In inside gardening news, my spider plants seem to be settling into their new lives in actual dirt quite nicely. And this is just an interesting shot I took while playing pokemon and walking around the track at the park. It's been a big week for Pokemon Go. Yes, I did get my Mewtwo this week, thanks for asking. Here is a picture I had to take for one of the research tasks and I just love it because it got photo bombed by a Pokemon that is the only way you can get it, is to take a picture of another Pokemon, and I got Tutu in the shot too so I just thought that was too cute. And speaking of Tutu, apparently she runs a coconut syrup empire that we never knew about. I've made my first recipe out of this book I got for Christmas. I wanted to make the blueberry buttermilk pie bars but didn't have enough cornmeal on hand. Then I wanted to make these ginger molasses brownie cookie things, but didn't have the crystalized ginger on hand so I tried the new classic chocolate chip cookie recipe. It's been in the news a little bit lately. The twist is that it features a tiny amount of coriander and nutmeg. Mom and I both liked them...but Dad and Andrew did not. So much so that neither Andrew not my Dad finished their first cookie. Blew me away. I think it would make a nice addition to a holiday cookie box since it has a warm, savory flavor. I would like to try it again without the added spices as I also just like the texture and mouthfeel of them. Be warned, they make 52 cookies. I have a sandwich bag of the doughballs in the freezer to make for later. I also made the roll out butter cookies, twice in as many weeks but I don't have pictures. I used the last of lactose free butter sticks and the cookies turned out perfectly. Then I whiffed on the icing recipe. I was out of meringue powder and used the two egg whites but apparently the chickens lay huge eggs and I should have just used one egg white. I had to keep adding powdered sugar, every last scrap I had in the house and then I had to keep both the cookies and the icing refrigerated. The icing will just stretch over two batches so I made another batch with butter flavored crisco and that was much harder to do. I've got most of those cookies in the freezer as well. I'm cooking up some other blog posts so as a good friend of mine often says, stay tuned!

Hunting for Mousies

I know that mousies isn't a word, but it's a word when I'm encouraging Tutu to hunt mice in the lavender. I was weeding the other night when it was nice weather and I had her on one of her little lines that gives her a radius of 20 feet or so. I noticed she was especially intent on something so I took a break and walked over. I was talking on the phone with a friend so I didn't get a chance to take a video but I did capture the videos below. Before I took these pictures Tutu was racing back and forth sniffing and listening right above a mouse path in the grass. I think the mouse has a tunnel that actually mimics the tunnel below. I encouraged her and then she showed me the entrance to the mouse hole and then began to dig. I drew the line when it appeared that she was starting to eat the dirt for some reason I can't even guess at. She didn't get the mousie this time but she has gotten them before and tomorrow is another day. She certainly wore herself out that night. Maxwell stays in the guest room a lot since I'm home because that means Tutu has run of the house a lot more. He still gets the whole house at night when Tutu is in the bedroom with us but he took advantage of Tutu visiting Mom and Dad the other day. In other news, if you have asked yourself, "I wonder if Julie is still playing Pokemon Go?" The answer is... In baking, I made this cobbler with some canned blackberries in the pantry clean up effort. This is the second recipe I have made from this title. The double lemon pound cake was amazing but a lot of work. I'm not a big blackberry fan, but I did like the cake part. It's very biscuit-y and I think it might be good with strawberries. In garden news, these two kale plants survived the winter after being planted late spring 2019. No mean feat considering they are living on a hill facing west. And I'll wrap up with a view from the lavender and another picture of Tutu.