Dog named Blue

Dogs too can get the blues; then there's not much they an do but howl about it, but in a good way:

Chicken Dinner for One Chicken

Ghoulash of basil garlic pesto on organic, whole what spaghitti, mixed into a tortia, ricotta, spinach, garlic and braised pork, and olive putanewska casserole, sprinkled with frozen peas, frozen black berries, hemp seed, sunflower seed kernels, and rolled oats, heated to uniform temperatures in the micro wave, and served to the last lonely hen, Pinhead, or Penneoply as I have altered her name out of respect. Long Live Peneolopy!

scratching post

Very Annoying Dog

This was getting pretty serious, until the two finally ran out of energy and once again we have peace at Dog's Plot

I have here snowshoes , a pair ofd little ones and a pair of adult sized, made for my family by a North Country guide in gratitude for some legal counciling my father had given him…some eighty or ninety or a hundred years ago. Snowshoes are generally made, or best made, of Black Ash which grows in wet conditions and is friendly to the radical bending needed to make the frames, and is not used green when it is still flexible, but is first air-dried and then soaked for a good long time to make it flexible again. My friend Bob Neudorfer and I, back in the previous century, attempted to make a pair, starting with kiln dried commercial ash. First we steamed and soaked the ash….as well as we could with the avbailable eighty gallon steel barrels, and then we bent the pieces around a form, breaking one potential snowshoe before it was made. I don’t know what became of the sucessfully bent one…but who wants ONE snowshoe? Bob Neudorfer, however, learned the lesson and went on to manufacture snowshoes and bentwood furniture for the Vermont Tubs company. I never got any further with snowshoes myself, prefering skis made by professionals, but my virtual brother William independently made a unique pair snowshoes, inspired by his own special needs and abilities. And wow, he could fly on those things! Maybe you already know that William himself is unique in that he has exteremely short legs in relation to his body size. He was more at home in the trees than on the ground as a kid, and he liked to ride dogs. I have never seen a dog so big and tough that William couldn’t dog- talk it into carrying him….I guess it helped that he stood eye with most riding-size dogs. Then he discovered sheet- rocking stilts and they changed his life. First of all they made him tall as…as me anyway, and the stilts which strap on to the lower leg and are meant to make it feasable for a sheet-rock worker to tape and spackle a normal seven foot four inch ceiling without a ladder. And the stilts are are spring-loaded to prevent one from thumping around and that add a bit of lift, like with the newer, high-tech running shoes. The stilts didn’t bring William up to sheet-rocking heights, but he didn’t have to go through the check-out line riding in the grocery cart inorder to be seen, and he discovered, once he (very quickly) mastered the stilts, that he could actually run now, and that the springs were a definite boost. He customized his springs, upsizing them, and it was quite a sight to see him bounding in three foot high arcs through the hayfield out back. He always used his own shoes on the stilt feet and wore long enough pants that he looked more or less normal except for his impressive long stride. He is good that way on hard ground, but a foot or more of snow is a problem, and dealing with skis is not something he could maged. But he made himself a pair of snowshoes, using grapevine instead of ash and, as you can plainly see, he stuck it full of feathers….mostly primary wing feathers from a turkeys. Over deep drifted snow with a good sprigy crust, he can cross that meadow out back like some kind of bird you never heard of.

Hickory the Puke Makes a Transition

The last Dog's Plot indoor cat who was in the habit of eating from his little dish in the kitchen and then dashing out to feed with the other cats if he could get by me, and, after feeding there a bit, coming back to finish the undisputed food, what there was of it, in his little dish.....now just goes outside and eats as much as he can, which is a lot, because he gets in the community dish; and staying out there all day, he finishes it off and pukes and then eats again at night, while the possum joins them to eat his puke. That is what you can just about make out in this video, which you don't much want to see anyway, and anyway...I advise against viewing it. Hickory is now an outdoor, cat, day and night. He had already stopped pooping indoors, which is a low kind of habit anyway, so good riddance. But Hickory is like a tree....he's not going far.

pressure relief

Sit down, shut down, watch this for a while, and breathe deep. Everybody needs a pressure relief valve of some sort these days. I find it restful to sit silently, listening to and watching the pressure relief valve on the fermenting pear cider that exhales regularly every twenty seconds or so, like a hibernating bear. Be that way.

Hasty Crush and Press

Let's get this over quickly before the end of the world as we knew it, but if you use a toilet plunge instead of your hand to push the pears down, it should be a virgin. Then you will produce one nice pear pie, like you see here. I would have gotten a lot more juice out of this batch if I had not overloaded the press

Hurried Sundown

Gone so fast:

Training Deer

In Winter, in Summer, and at anytime it is possible without getting
shot, we try to train the deer who have high enough communicative
intelligence, to beware of humans, especially the mans part, and so not
to just stand there and stare, and for Pete's Sake, stay out of the wide
open spaces, there's guys with high powered rifles and telescopic
sights up on their portable steel towers; so I talk to them and then
instruct the dog to chase them away. The dog stops short always a few
feet into the woods if I don't follow. Scared of Coyotes, and SHOULD
be.

Hickory comes through

Hickory was the last indoor cat remaining after Pooka returned to the
wild, and as of the last few nights he too is an outdoor cat, sticking
close to the house most of the day and sleeping under it somewhere, and
shitting outdoors which, really, every cat prefers, but he still comes
in to ask that lunch be brought out for him and the chicken:

                                     .

Pinhead Cop Corn and I Don't Care

Pinhead copped my corn and I don't care; Georgia's gone away>

dog house frog

Still life in motion

At Dogs Plot, when the wind blows the pears they do rock

Georgia reads Natural Bone Chapter Two original version

How Georgia Got her Woowoo

I suggest that you leave off reading and wastch the video when you
become at all intrigued and then return to this text if you care to. But
before you listen it helps to know that Georgia had run a string of
local newspapers, bringing out up to seventeen localized iditions each
week, supplying most of the content and getting advertising, and she
began to think that she would like to publish her own, one and only
newspaper and one day, as she has written, it occured to her how she
could do that. At first she was going to start a newspaper for Civil War
battle reenactors…she would interview the participants, and sell
advertising to thems and the local businesses where the fairs are held,
But, other than being a theatre person and an actor, she had no
particular interest in or connection with military historical
re-enactments and that idea went no where. But it happened that one
of the advanced skills that Georgia had picked up was advanced,
traditional Hindu medical palm reading.mentored in her by a medical
doctor from India, with an Indian medical degree, who was earning a
living sweeping back stage at Kent State, I think it was there, or maybe
Oswego, trying to earn a living while waiting for a license to practice
medicine in the US. He had the basic modern medical knowledge, but, in
the Hindu tradition, includes a complex system of palm reading which
differs from the cartoon carnival form, for one thing, in involving two
hands and tries to be not at all a matter of mind reading or future
telling. But it occured to her that she could go to Psychic fairs, sell
advertising to the readers and tellers and seers, read a few palms and,
most important, collect money owned when she was there. So much would
get lost in the mail, or being schedualeewd to go out pretty soon. And
that worked except that people started to want more from her than what
she wanted to do…a straight by the book deep reading, during which she
didn’t want to be reading the client’s facial expressions or other body
language, much less read their minds, or just tell them what it is
obvious they want to hear. She didn’t want to be dispensing any of that
woowo nonsense, she just wanted….as she told somebody in this story I
secretly recorded her telling last year. Sure, she occasionally had some
pretty strange experiences…such as seeing a Mrs. Daugherty walk past
her table at a fair the day after she died, and being visited by her
later, and other unwanted visitors whom she had not meant to summon,
which she had not the power to summon, and didn’t want to summon, and
most certainly did not want a reputation for being able to do so. As
you will gather from listening to her tell the story, people just can’t
keep secrets. Also, I no longer need to hold back Georgia’s Secret
Woowoo tapes:

Georgia's Last Laugh

My wife Georgia Elizabeth, Cuningham Warren died unexpectedly here at our Dog’s Plot home, of an apparent heart attack Wednesday morning, August 5, 2020.  She told me and showed me dozens of times a day that she loved me, and there was no doubt of that, but  I never managed to tell her how wonderful she was, so now I’ll try to tell you.
  Georgia had  no heart problems that we were aware of, but she had been suffering from a series of leg injuries which made walking difficult and good health hard to maintain.  She was very happy here during the last seven or so years of her life and neither of us had much of a desire to go far from these four acres, so the pandemic lockdown did not affect us directly very much, except that like everybody else, the news and the revelations made us anxious, afraid, and sad.
  Working here for these last years, we gardened obsessively, cooked as if company were coming every night, fussed over several generations of chickens herded cats,  and  published many issues of the Metaphysical Times Magazine.
  Honoring Georgia’s extraordinay life up to and including her years with me deserves more than just a gathering, an obituary,  or this very long announcement; and so I will be telling Georgia’s story for as long as I live, including the story of a recent event which she did not want to make known during her lifetime because she did not want  people asking her to summon ghosts, but with her death, the ban has passed away.
 Georgia was not able to summon ghosts or induce visitations, but occasionally she would be visited by vivid, walking, talking visions of people who did not  appear to be   vaporous or spooky looking, most often people she didn’t know or didn’t know well, but usually with a friend connection of some sort. These persons looked so  like ordinary living persons, in one case she didn’t even know the person represented was dead until she learnd so later….which didn’t prevent that person from appearing again, once  at the Agway TruValue store one day when we were there for chicken feed and paint. There was no contact other than the signt of the woman that day, but   one day around the same time, she appeared here on our deck with a message for a mutual acquaintance who was immune to such visitations.
   In every case of these visitations, Georgia knew that, despite appearances, the vision was simply a vision and not a real person…I don’t know how, especially as to her they didn’t just look like people, they talked and presumably smelled like people.  All her senses were involved, and something more, but she always said that she did not believe in ghosts. Shadows, she would say.
 Occasionally she had been drafted to make contact with spirits that be, including the time shortly before the Covoid Pandemic when a friend called and asked her to come down the hill within the next half hour to the old Main building on the Wells College campus where someone had gotten permission to bring around one of those ghost-detection services that use some kind of technical lookoing equipment..
    Georgia went and I stayed home, so I only know what she told me about what followed, and others who were there can fill it in or correct me if they care to.    I know that, part way through the tour, or at the bottom of it anyway, they  came down to a room in the basement full of stored furniture.
    I suppose that a few people there did know that the storage room was where Aurora area victims of the 1918 pandemic came to be treated, and mostly to die..
Maybe not particularly because of the crowd of furnitre, noone cared to enter the room, including the ghost busters with their detection equipment. No one but Georgia, and I I dont know why, but I believe her Frends who had called her about the event, then  invited her to step in…or maybe she just stood in the doorway, and I don’t recall her saying to me that she SAW anything in this instance, but she spoke with a man who said that he had been the attending doctor there and that he was himself weighed down with guilt from having not been able to save those hundreds of people in his care.
 Georgia  reported this to the group there at the door, as I don’t suppose anybody else heard the doctor, and then I think it was that one of the friends who had invited her down there, suggested that she tell the doctor that he should let go of that guilt because it was now a hundred years later so that all those people would be dead now anyway.   This seems a llittle tricky, but Georgia passed that on and, according to her, it seemed to work. 

      But the last time Georgia experienced such a thing, it was much more personal.
She and I and I had both been very distressed lately, as a series of raids by unknown creatures   had been killing our beloved chickens two or three  at a time, in mid-day  right in the driveway and often carrying them off, all unseen and unheard by either of us.
     At last, we were down to one chicken. Pinhead, we called her. She was one of the older hens since she and a sister were the only chickens to survie a weasel invasion in the little immederate pullet house beween the chick pen in our living space, and the main chicken house down the path.  The two survived by hiding, or being burried under a pile of their dead others.       
   By the time we were down to three chickens, we no longer opened  the chicken house up until two or three in   the afternoon.  Ordinarily then Georgia spent those afternoons out under the Chestnut tree next to the house while our Pinhead  grazed around her and under the deck.   
   Georgia didn’t try to read while chicken-sitting, because she could fall right into books and be way too deeply involved to keep watch, or even remember where she was.  But she could keep watch while cleaning up some of my old tools crusted with grime and rust,, many of them having belonged to my mother’s father Herbert Augustus (Bert) Failing…including the old twelve-inch Stanley wood plane she was cleaning up, in the shade of the Horse Chestnutt   tree a few days before she died
   
           On that very hot day when I let Pinhead out of the chicken house, she ate some oats I had scattered for her, dashed the few feet down to the pond for a drink and then decided to      back into the chicken house, which stays quite cool.
    Georgia had stayed out in the usual chair to work on the plane anyway.  She asked me for a  screw driver to take the thing apart, so I brought her a couple from my handy indoor supply jumble: one philips-head and one flat blade, then I retired to the house for my nap or whatever.
         It was the flat blade screw driver that she needed in order to remove the plane blade and the blade clamp. It was more grungy than rusty. I had probabaly used it mostly for opening paint cans.
     As she was dismanteling the plane,  a man appeared comning up the driveway.  She was alarmed, because he had no mask.  He wore tan pants belted over a short-sleeved, knit shirt with a buttoned-up collar.  He looked to Georgia be about forty years old, and he somewhat resembled me…according to what Georgia told me later that day. He was vividly present, but she was aware right away that  he was not a real person.  I don’t know how that is or can be, and she has often insisted on her disbelief in ghosts ,but disbelief did not prevent her from humoring them.
   This man who was not there did not introduce himself, but first off as he approached asked her to be careful with that Stanley screw-driver of his that she was using.  Don’t let anybody stir paint with it, he said.
   Georgia asked him who he was, but he said that he was not there to answer questions.  He was there, he said, to ask her to tell “Davey” that he is proud of him…and especially to tell Davey’s daughter that he is proud of HER .  Davey would be me and my daughter  Mnetha   has taken on an old hardware store and the building it is in, added an aparment and turned the downstairs store space in to the Trader Rose Vintage shop.  My Grandaddy, told Georgia then, that had Mnetha not bought and saved the building, it would have passed to yet another owner who whould have it demolished.  And, Grandaddy added, it makes no difference that she is not exactly running it as the hardware store it was..
   
   According to family telling, my grandather H.A. Failing quit high school to help his Civil War-disabled father run the family store in Redwood, New York..
  Beforore walking away from Georgia,  Grandaddy asked her  to pass on the information that his back no longer hurt him, and also asked it to be known that he was NOT five foot ten. A strange thing to say, I suppose, partly because all the family knew he was just about six feet tall, as are some of our family now. .
    Right away then, Georgia went to work on the screwdriver with sandpaper WD40 and rags, after a half an hour, discovering on the ferule by the handle the Stanley trademark, which had not seen the light since before I had approptiated it..  I didn’t know that Stanley company ever made screwdrivers.
     After Pinhead went to roost, Georgia told me about the encounter and the his words about the screw driver,  about his back and his height, and of his pride in me and Mnetha. 
   I told Georgia then that my grandfther had died with cancer of the spine.  Maybe I had told her that sometime before.  I speak of him often here, and we have his wallet containing a  plastic catalog of identification cards, fishing licenses, and such, which Georgia then went through, reading everything., the insurance card listed him as being five foot ten.  I can’t imagine why he would have filled it out incorrectly….or why that should so concern him over all this time and distance.
       Georgia had finished cleaning up Grandaddys draw knives days before he appeared.  She began on his wood chisels the day after.
    Georgia’s work here was not done.  Together we still have more projects underway than projects we have finished, but in recent months as the world turned, she took on more projects more urgently and even as she obsessed over our last lonely chicken, she obsessed over the front garden, her fairy garden as she called it, where I had recently built a stone seat which she liked so much that she declaired that when the time came, I should throw her ashes under it. We had used to joke that when either of us died, we want the other to put our ashes down a woodchuck hole, of which we have plenty. But she was dead-set determined to keep me alive, insisting that I stay in the car while she did the grocery shopping. She worried more about me than she did about Pinhead or the whole rest of the world.
       We arrived at August fourth, around which day of the year, several members of her family had died, making  that time very  difficult  for Georgia every year, and more so this one.
  On the fifth of August  I climbed down from our loft earlier than her, as was usual. When she came down a half hour or so after I did, complainig that she felt “woozy”
      Half way through a cup of coffe she began breathing heavily, hyperventilating. She tried to rise from her chair and couldn’t, she asked me to help her.  I helped her to the bathroom.  She asked me for a paper bag. I brought her a big one, because I thought she wanted to vomit.  A small one she said.  I got a small one, realizing then that rebreathng with a paper bag is something one does to counter hyperventilation.  It had already slowed some before she used the bag, and afterwards I helped her to her chair.  I turned some Motzart on for her, and tired to stay quiet so that she could sleep for a bit.
 It occured to me then that she might have sunk deeper than sleep, but I didn’t want to jar her awake just to see if she was alive.  Let her sleep.  Also, being afraid that she might be dead, I really did not want to know.  I imagined saying to her later on, “Wow I nearly thought you had died!”
      Rather than shake and awake her, I drove down the hill to Aurora, walked Mnetha’s dog, and came back in under an hour.  She had not moved.  I felt her face and her hand; cold and stiff.  I sat on the arm of her chair, holding on telling her I loved her and appologized for never saying it or showing it enough; then I called 911.
     Soon enough a firetruck, an ambulance, half a dozen volunteer members of the Aurora and Poplar Ridge fire department arrived, plus two state police, a coroner,and the medical examiner, telling the story of that morning three times
   After several hours, a livery truck came and six men carried her out of the house, to be taken to Syracuse for an autopsy, as is the policy in the case of deaths which occur wihout a doctor present.
     The Syracue facility called and interviewed me, asking if I cared to submit Georgia to the organ donation program “Connect Life”, to which I agreed, as I knew Georgia would.
    Connect Life then called and interviewed me about Georgia’s medical history that was after eight P.M.  I had let Pinhead out to range before going in the house when I came back from Aurora.  She had stayed around and I had rembered to close her in when she went to roost around seven.  I finished cooking the chowder I had started the day before.  It was going to be a clam chowder, and I started it with clam bulion, but we had no actual clams, so Georgia had suggested that I use the frozen salmon, and I had agreed that was an excellent idea.  And I went ahead with it as I knew Georgia would have me do, as she was always encouraging me to eat because it seemed to her that my own life was so strenuous, though I don’t see it that way.  The chowder was real good and there was so much that I froze most of it for the coming days, along with the roasting pan of chicken, the most ever, that Georgia, who had taken over most of the cooking, had prepared several days before, as if she were going to be leaving for a while.
  I am not sure what day it is now, or when you are readig this, but the day after she died I met with a family friend who works for the Perkins funeral home in Dryden and very soon he will be bringing Georgia’s ashes and I wil work them into the gravel under her special seat, as directed.
   Now I have to tell her world of friends, then keep the chicken alive if reasonablly possible, maybe get another flock if I dare, and fiinish up some of our writing and publishing projects,
maybe never to put out another issue of the Metapysical Times Magazine (because Georgia who spent many years publishing local and syndicated newspapers was our I.T. expert) but most importantly, I am getting to work on what I used to tell her would be the Autobiography of Georgia, because she would never finish it and had told it all to me anyway.  And so, this is a start.
   And for now, this is her obituary.  I am posting it on her Facebook page where you are very welcome to comment with your memories of her.  You may magine that she will be reading it  all.
        
  

thistle eater

Suspicious activity at Dog's Plot

setting the jewel stone

In the ruins of the original homestead one of the most interesting stone
was this very large one, with a lot of crystal gems in it, so I wanted
to elevate it some, which I did against a lot of resistance.

roofers in the heat wave

Moth Madness

There are moths, and then there are moths; there are moths that go by
night and die of their attractions to light, then there are the day
moths, who are just as loony mad. Witness these fugged-up ,Buck Moon,
Cabbage Moths, rioting to the point of exhaustion over a native geranium
which they actually don't have much use for. We grow no cabbage at
Dog's Plot, so life is hard for them. And if it has all driven you all
crazy too, I guess you can do the crazy dance to. Go ahead, fling out
your arms and shout in mysterious tongues, just stay at home. But if
you grew too much cabbage and want to drop some off at our roadstand, go
ahead. Also Zuchini, believe it or not. Believe it. This season has
been hard on many ligving things trying to make a living and grow.

Dog Roses At Home

pinhead Tends the Seedling Rose

Chickens in the Orchard

This spring, as you see here, we had a lot of bloom in the orchard,
especially around the chicken house where wandered lots of chickens. As
it happened this year, we now have not so much fruit as we had bloom ,
except right around the chicken house, and only two chickens left after
raids by we don't know what, but the garlic is doing very well and we
the people here at Dog's Plot are still standing.

Tick- eating Vietmamese Pygmy Possums

My wandering brother William Bonaparte Warren seems to be in California still, as he sent me this pair of "Vietnamese Pygmy Possums" which are supposed to eat ticks like crazy, and to tolerate chickens, well .... but the chickens are not too accepting of THEM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHeCyPTq8Dk&feature=youtu.be

Quick Look Around Dog's Plot in Cherry-Plum Blossom Time:

Whether there are going to be any cherry plums, and whether they be
small on fruit and big on pits, or otherwise....no bird knows.

Still Life with Blizzard

Two inches of snow in ten minutes, and twenty minutes later; it was like
magic. The snow was gone! The pear blossoms are still there and they
have been unharmed by the freezing nights, but , while sitting in my
cherry plum tree, I haven't seen more than a few native bees , and,
though there are hives up the road, only ONE domestic honey bee, Even
the cats and chickens are sleeping most of the time. The peas are
ducking their little heads. Should I  nap before breakfast?
Afterwards, I think. And even with it this old, when the sun
shines bright, I like to get out in the afternoon and just lay there by
the Juniper.

pear fest 2020

All that white bloom is on pear trees, a foreign invasive species, for which you can  thank the French Jesuit missionaries who had missions near here well before the English presence.  The English brought the cattle.  These; black Herferds. No, not Angus.  Black Herferds.

wild and windy weather

It doesn't take Davey Weathercock or Moby Bone Bird to tell you which
way the wind blows, that the cherry plum is blooming, or the sky is
falling. Go home, chickens

Domestic Invasive Beaver

Adolescent beavers are sent away from the colony when they get to
plentiful and raunchy, like the young boy owls, skunks, racoons, and
most everything else. The beavers will make a pond by impounding a
water flow, or they will settle in your pond, if they like the trees in
your lawn. I have had most every natural critter show up in my ponds
here, including painted and snapping turtles, muskrats, and mink, but
never a beaver, although I have a lot of poplar and boxwood they might
like. The problem is that the ponds here are dug ponds without clay to
seal them, so they get too low in summer and during droughts. The
beaver you see here recently appeared in the pond of a family member of
ours which is a good steady well lined pond, but maybe without so much
natural food and lodge building materials. I have plenty and am
offering to send a supply, to keep the beaver from dragging away the
family lawn furniture.

snakes for chickens

We raise frogs for snakes that chickens eat so that we can have eggs until something eats our chickens.

Hello Oriel

Hot Damn ! The Oriels are back and singing spring !

Who are the chickens here anyway?

Do I have to tell them the sky is falling? Yes. Do they give a damn?
No. They just keep hustling around and eating grass. Do the fruit trees
listen to me and hold back the bloom? No. Did I heed what my mother
said? Well no, but now I'm pretty much a chicken, and these hens are
heedless, ungovernable, and doomed. Am I the only real chicken here or
what?

Spring Coon

Coon showed up in the day time, violating the age old daylight coon
quaranteen, which really outraged our roosters, who alarmed the hens,
except for the ginger on the well head.

Copernicu eats Sumach

I sat in a tree and told the orchard not to burst its buds yet because
April is a cruel sonofabitch, but only some trees complied. You can't
tell chickens what to do either, and at this time of year a roosters
fancy, or that of our fancy rooster Copernicus, is to eat some bitter
red things, Just watch as he seems to be savaging the bloody heart of a
large mammal. During our invasion of Iraq I remember Sadam Husane
saying that he would capture our soldiers and see to it that Iraqi
roosters tore their entrails out.

But on this day here at Dog's Plot our rooster is attacking the
fruit cluster of a Staghorn Sumach tree. Sumach berries can be used to
curdle milk in cheese making, balance flavors when making cider, and as a
tea. It is common as a spice in the Middle East. Most everywhere ,
since about always, Sumach has been used medicinally for (like many
traditional medicines) most everything: as an antifungal
anti-inflammatory
antimalarial
antimicrobial
antimutagenic
blood thinning
prevents tumors
antiviral

prevents hardening of arteries
Copernicus knows what is good for him and, Good Lord, he';is going to be
one healthy rooster
Maybe we should sit back on a day like this and have some sumach tea.

Life in the Watercress Flow

In these dim days it's good to know

there's life out in the watercress flow.

A big old beetle's swimming around

and sucking up all the air-bubbles though.

Wally the Chuck

Nobody here but us rocks

Last Snow

The recent snow fall ... and Pooka hopes it is the last of the season
because she has not gone out and about for months now, being
self-confined, for her own reasons, but when this snow stuff is pretty
much over for the season (no trusting the seasons these days) she will
be out of here and not seen again for weeks or months. Not sure where
she goes or what she does, maybe down into Aurora to feed on birds under
the town feeders, maybe just to be at play in the fields of the lord or
whoever. Georgia has a suspicion that she just moves to another
household. Anyway, Pooka has taken a strong interests in some Starlings
that seem to be nesting again in the hollows of the Horse Chestnut
tree, where they used to nest by the dozen in years before the cats came
along.

Hen Takes the High Road

This way to the high country:

Winter Run

Davey Weathercock and Olive the rowing hen report from Dog's Plot

Launching Nick's Island

Everybody needs a floating Island

cats totally nipped

Drugged Cats at Dog's Plot  

south slope flock

Gerald and his mother have this weird relationship

Guest Chef and Dog's Plot

Although Dog's Plot Restaurant is self-serving and not open the the
public, we sometimes invite a guest chef to give us a lesson: here the
very young chef Silas Clay, working with foraged ingredients in our
elaborate summer kitchen.

Guest Chef and Dog's Plot

Although Dog's Plot Restaurant is self-serving and not open to the public, we sometimes invite a guest chef: this one being a very young survivalist who gave a cooking demonstration in our summer kitchen, using foraged materials.

VineLand

The early European arrivals called this continent  "Vineland", because of the  grape vines that grew wild  over  just about everything and still do. The big old corn crib next door had its poles climbed right up onto theroof and had spread over the whole roof.  It was full of bats and swallows until the neighbor who had hoped to improve the barn sometime, cut the vines and they haven't remounted, but the grape vnes rule around here,.  They are all over the pop up Rose of Sharon trees that came here with me, and go up my Pear trees like they meant to eat the pears.  They would eat the whole tree, if I didn't cut them back...and then they creep along and under the ground. I have made jelly from the wild grapes but they are mostly seed and low on sugar.

So, of course, I decided early on that i had to plant grape vines, so I did: several vines, of several types, in several scattered locations, including beside the chicken house, hoping it would go right up, cover the roof, and mount the cupola. 

Which it did, but every season when we have had grapes ripening there and in the other places I had planted them, the birds coons and possums ate them before the fruit was ripe. I think the critters like them better than the wild ones.  I know that the remedy is fences , severe pruning, and nets over the developing fruit, along with a speaker system broadcasting the loud distress calls of the bird species currently feasting.

But I would rather have ... A WORM FARM! 

Anyway Dog's Plot is and will stay a low volume homestead.

A normal egg, an extra large elongated egg, and a tiny, wild-bird egg I found i the grass  ten months ago an have kept safe since.  I do not plan to look inside that one ...tough maybe we could "candle " it with a strong back-light, as they do to determine sex or fertility.  Which reminds me of old Aunt Sammy, who told my semi-adopted brother William that she was his real mother, having (she claimed) been pregnant for twenty or thirty year with the offspring of an Oswegtchie River guide ... whose name I can't at the moment remember. 

Dog's Plot Restaurant

 DOGS PLOT RESTAURANT

 

Here at our tiny Dog’s Plot Mom and Pop Up Restaurant (once the cats have been fed) our staff of two spends  most of the morning conferring over coffee -  first about the coffee, then about the day's menu -  after which  we move on to other food related subjects,  like today, for instance:
    Learning that  a camel hump is not actually a sort of water bag, but that it is mostly FAT; what good is a bag of camel fat when you are crossing the desert? 
    Which brings us to a lot of other questions we can't answer.
    By the time the questioning petered out this morning,  we had just about finished the coffee, so Georgia started to put together some of her famous banana-oatmeal- raisin-date-nut breakfast cookies and then chopped up the resulting  banana skins for me to take down to the chicken house with some spilled dry cat food from the kitchen floor for the chickens to breakfast on..
    Now that the hens have started noticing that the days are getting longer so that they have started laying again, one of the hens was on the nest yet, and missing out on the scratch, and, after  I put some layer ration in all the regular containers, I lingered to pile little on the rim of her nest box so she would miss out on the eats.
     I had left the orchard ladder standing down there under a pear tree I had not finished pruning yesterday, so I took care of some of it with the clippers I carry on my belt, then went back to get the pole handled pruner for some I couldn't reach with the ladder, then I had to check to see if the chickens had water, and by  the time I got back it well past most peoples lunch time, and I hadn't had what most would call a breakfast even:  only my usual oatmeal cookie, which is plenty the first thing in the day for me, and so good and healthy that I always carry them as s travel food. We could sell those cookies, they are so practical, and good but we don’t. 
    But of course it is not practical or even possible for us to serve breakfast or lunch to others here.
         And supper or dinner or whatever you call  the one meal one has if one is having only one, is a big deal for us: an intimate family function, not a commercial operation,.  In short, we are NOT your orfdanary sort of restaurant that serves the public. Dog's Plot Restaurant is  mostly a conceptual thing; you know. As a matter of fact, we don't even know what we are going to have now

When I returned from pruning in the orchard this afternoon, Georgia wanted to know what adventures I had out there, but all is chilled and still, and anyway, when I walk, or work, or just stand among the trees I have planted and the wild seedlings I have grafted on to out back here - some of them big as a house now - instead of just feeling kind of proud, I feel like my own grandfather, or my own grandson, or an ancestral ghost, or all at once, and nobody in particular at all. It is cold up on the orchard ladder and I came in early, to avoid turning into a tree, though it was very close. That would be quite an adventure and a tale I could never be able to tell, but it would be a good way to go.

Chickens in Snow Mode

The snow fell in rafts of flakes, and Gerald Rooster saw no reason to
stay out in it, but the hens persisted and sweetly accepted their snow
coats.

Alarm, Flock Chaos, and an Unfortunate Misunderstanding:

I was in the car and ready to pull out of the driveway, when Georgia got
in and said there was a general alarm among the chickens, so I ran down
to the chicken house, burt I have poor hearing in one ear as a result
of a recent infection, so I had to run around the plot,,,, a
lot...before I found the rooster Coperanicus up on the Sumach ridge
squalling, and in the grape vine tangle behind him, two hens: One was
squawking loudy with both wings hooked over vine crotches, and another
hen screaching and trying either to free her or peck her to death. I
broke through the tangle to them, and removed the hung-up hen from her
imprisonment, after which the other hen snuggled her, as you see here,
but after a short snuggling session the freed hen attacked her
comforter, if that is what she was; so then I pulled the freed hen away
by the feet, took her under my arm to the dog house, and left her in its
attic with some bread. As far as I can see down at the chicken house,
all is well enough with the hens, but I have not yet gotten over it.

ice fishing cat

The feral cat we called Snowbell went ice fishing but couldn't  figure out how to get through to the fish.