Balmy February...

Sometimes the farmer has to play a little, especially when February feels like springtime...

Windblown, but having fun this afternoon in the MGB...

We had almost record setting temperatures again today...73 degrees...

Is it just us, or does spring seem to be coming early everywhere?

A Good Winter's Night Supper...

What do you do when you remember at 4:00 pm that it's not a food co-op night, and your family is going to be hungry for supper before you know it?

You go to the freezer and pull out a package of frozen Italian sausage from Costco...throw the links in the microwave for a few minutes to thaw...cut them into 1 1/2" pieces...cook them on the stove top in just a little bit of water for a few minutes...

Wash and cut up a couple of (unpeeled because it's easier and they taste much better that way!) potatoes into bite sized pieces...

Wash, trim and cut a package of brussels sprouts in half...

Toss everything together in a baking dish...drizzle with olive oil and seasonings of choice...

Set your oven timer for an hour at 375 degrees...

Come in from the barn to a delicious smelling and delicious tasting quick and easy supper!

(If you've never had roasted brussels sprouts, you simply have to try them! They are that good!!  Thanks to my sister Marge and her husband Hermann for introducing us to them!)

Roller Coaster Weather...

This has been one of the craziest winters I remember in a long time...

On Wednesday we had a record high temperature of 62 degrees F and were wearing short sleeves...yesterday we had snow and wind, with temperatures hovering around 32 degrees F.

Even the daffodils are confused...

...and they'll be confused again over the weekend, when temps are expected to rise back up above 50 degrees!

Crows, Crows, Go Away...

Crows.

I've written about them before...how they are such a nuisance to farmers. They scavenge just about anything, sometimes harmlessly, but sometimes they cause damage to growing crops or in this case to already preserved feed.  Here's a post written almost exactly two years ago about how they can damage a silage ag bag.

We don't put out silage ag bags any more, but we regularly have round bales of hay wrapped in plastic which are stored along the edge of the fields.  Jim then brings them into the barn as we need them.

Over the past couple of years, we've had problems with numerous animals damaging the bags.  We've had cats using them as scratching posts, and this year the damage has been from crows!

We've seen large flocks of them in the fields around us over the past few weeks, and last week we discovered that they'd been having a feast on some bales that we had stored along the edge of a field on some rental property.

This bale is laying on it's side now, but you can see all the tape that is covering up crow damage.  If you can imagine the bale rotated 90% counter clockwise, this would have been the top of the bale.  The birds sat on top and pecked away through the plastic until they reached the hay underneath. Once air gets inside the bag, spoiling begins quickly.  You can see near the middle of the picture, a hole that was either made after I initially taped the bale up, or one that I missed.  I think probably the birds came back because there was another hole pecked right through a piece of tape. Grrr...

They also sat on the ground around the bags and pecked away at "crow level"...anywhere from 8" - 12" from the ground.

This is one of the bales right after Jim opened it up...

You can see a bit of mold in the center right side of the picture.  Thankfully, Jim caught the damage pretty early, and the mold seems to be only on the first few outside layers.  A few days later and the bale could have been pretty seriously damaged, and into the gutters it would go, wasted.

I'm thinking back a few years to when flocks of crows were hanging around the local shopping mall, creating dirty messes on shoppers' cars and on the roof of the building.  In a letter to the editor in the newspaper, someone suggested that "the crows be sent out into the country into the farm fields where they could live in peace".

Hmmmmm....I'm glad that wasn't even a realistic option!