Country life at 7,000 feet
People have been dropping by casually, without calling, to make sure things are OK.
They talk business with Bob. I said, Rob, come see my iris. You’ll never catch these particular ones again.
There’s a local iris farm that bought part of a nationally known iris collection near Denver, so lots of people in this area have great iris.
Rob had time to talk business, but not to visit the flowers.
It’s warm by day and cold at night, so the growers don’t have much for market: flowers, greenhouse starts, bagged greens grown inside, asparagus, and not too much else.
Even so, lots of people make an outing of it.
I love the camo kilt and combat boots. See how the socks, tank top and hat tie the whole outfit together?
That kilt made me look at the styling of the booths. This has a thoughtful, science-fair ambience,
here we have the farm kitchen look,
and the willow baskets, hanging scale and chalkboard say country store to me. I said, Hey, can I take a picture of your beautiful baby?
She said, Sure,
and it’s plain to see that she’s the most beautiful baby in the world.
I found two chickens with their heads torn off.
They were inside the hoop house, and you can see they are becoming pretty birds.
The hoop house was ringed with layers of footprints, too many to get a good photo. But I think it’s a bobcat–on the right is a photo of a bobcat print from i.ehow.com.
I’m sorry to say that my first thought, when I saw those headless chickens, was: Compared to those guys, I’m having a wonderful day.
[shahd-n-froi-duh]
–noun
| satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else’s misfortune. |
Origin:
1890–95; < G, equiv. to Schaden harm + Freude joy
(Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009).
A few days ago Bob and Sam each, separately, had conversations with me before 8AM about how the chicks had to be moved. So I moved them (actually, Bob organized two friends and a trailer).
I’m almost done cleaning the stairwell.
We put the hoop house between the barn and the garage.
We could easily fence out a chicken yard between the two buildings.
Here’s their little world, with their water, their heat lamp, and their pile of fancy expired greens from the store. It’s still cold at night, and they form a ball under the light.
The biggest chicks are starting to grow their rose combs–see how the comb is short and bulbous?
This is the smallest chick by far, half the size of the others. It’s still a baby with no hint of a comb, and it stays very close to the heat lamp.
The US team members for the upcoming kayak world championship were chosen in Durango this weekend.
The dust storms earlier this month put a layer of soil over the mountaintops, and the snowmelt is peaking weeks early. The river is running high.
The top 50 kayakers in the United States came to race. Each gate is suspended from a cable that goes across the river, and you run the green gates with the river, and the red gates against the river. For some races, the gates are hung to make an easy course. Not for this race.
Each kayaker made several runs. Their points are based on time and faults.
In the simplest terms, kids rode down the river and walked their kayaks back up.
More holistically, people drove from all over their country in station wagons stuffed with gear, and a couple of kayaks strapped on the roof. This guy came from North Carolina. Since kayaking doesn’t have much sponsorship, he may be camping out.
And here’s why they came:
a shot at the world championships, and big water.
They had a good day
riding the spring run-off. An undammed river is a wonder of nature.
I took photos at the Farmer’s Market, and also at the kayak championships. But all I want to do is admire the flowers, so I took a series of photographs of multiple clumps of the same plant, or, a study of blossoms in and out of focus.
I transplanted these clumps last year from Suzy’s farm–they’ve gotten big. I think they’re a wild phlox.
These wildflowers–pale evening primroses–are threading their way through a flowerbed as groundcover
and here I have an extended family of related fancy irises. What a beautiful world.
I don’t have a post for today. Have a nice weekend!
Here’s my produce department. I had a shipment late last week, and got in nearly 1,000 pounds on Tuesday. I have organic asparagus from a farm in Montrose, some conventionally grown on-vine tomatoes, potatoes and pre-cut slaw, and the rest of my stuff is from a woman-owned, woman-run business based in San Francisco. Veritable Vegetables is an all-organic supplier with wonderful produce.
I don’t know if you can see how pretty everything is, but my potatoes are gleaming, my zucchini are exceedingly slender, my cukes are unusually firm and I have baby bok choy to die for.
(All of my most expensive tomatoes are gone.) I’ve prebagged and preportioned nearly all of the tender produce, from snow peas and snap peas to lettuces and baby spinach leaves. Dry climate and low volume is a killer, so I’m hoping people will learn to look within the bag.
Our neighbor sent this bouquet on the end of the coffee bar. It is the Granddaddy of all arrangements. I have been changing its water daily, and it gets more remarkable every day.
But not as remarkable as the fact that the store is filled with actual people buying food.
I spent half an hour in a prairie dog town a few days ago. The prairie dogs are out of hibernation and wary as ever. I have to photograph them from inside the car, because they don’t register cars as a threat. I thought I could use a tripod outside the window while I stayed inside, but the prairie dogs weren’t having any of it.
Then one took a wrong turn underground and popped out a hole fifteen feet away. It looked left,
it looked right,
and then it looked straight at my head sticking out of the car window, and ran away.
I could make a collage of out-of-focus pictures of animals running away, but today I’ll just stick to this prairie dog.
The chicks were so active that after a day they were jumping out of the paddling pool I used last year.
I found most of them and put them back in the pool, but two disappeared (I suppose I’ll find their tiny bodies in my office someday, but I don’t know where they went). So I put the chicks down at the landing of the stairs to my office in the barn, where they can’t run away and hide.
I change their wood chips every three days, their food twice a day and their water once a day. I’ve barely looked at them except to note yesterday that they’re ready to go in their hoop house (provided I refurbish it and move it near a plug for the heat lamp).
This is how they looked 14 days ago,
and this is how they looked today. They have the same faces, but their entire body has changed. The little white stripes on their backs are completely gone, and they have patches of feathers sprouting.
I put this chick out in the garden to get a photograph. He oriented himself, and then ran up the hill, across a driveway and up another hill before I finally caught him. He ran so far that it was beyond comprehension. The advertising copy on the brown leghorns said that they ranged far and wide and can take care of themselves.
So far, so good.
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