September Vows

Cole and Anna were married the first week of September, when summer was at her most brilliant. What a beautiful time for a wedding, if the weather holds that is. And hold it did. In fact, we had cool weather right up until the week of the wedding. Then as the forecast unfolded it got warmer and warmer to peak on the Saturday of the wedding. We were sweating after dark on the dance floor.

Two days later it all came crashing down – literally - with rain and high winds that felled mighty limbs on the site of the ceremony.

Turns out the ranch fixes up pretty good. Our cow pasture was glammed up by lights strung between poles in Cole’s carefully set out arrangement. Linen was draped over straw bales, a dance floor leveled on the grass. Being a grazing enthusiast, I have to say the pasture, which had been harvested once and allowed to regrow, was gorgeous and emerald green, the perfect backdrop to Anna’s color scheme of cinnamon and navy. Our native cottonwoods shaded, sheltered and cozied us all in their steadfast manner. Even the strawberry clover, which the photographer called wildflowers, were featured as foreground in the sunset photos.  

As a writer I love words. The word that comes to mind is providence, but what does it mean exactly? God or nature as providing protective or spiritual care.  Ah yes. It felt like that. Like nature held off as long as it could to bless a couple of kids, then let loose just to show us her power. It was humbling, just as it was humbling to witness these young people pledge their futures to one another while basking in the warm embrace (covid friendly mind you) of their family and friends as they embark on what they know will be, at times, rocky seas.

Because of the pending festivities, Mark finally took the time to finish the steps and retaining walls off the back of the house. Now that he’s done the heavy lifting, I can fret and fuss over the plants that live there for the rest of my days. As you read this, Mark, consider being told again how much I appreciate it.  

My vegetable garden was part of the decor. There was a row of sunflowers on one side and random flowers throughout. I planted the cosmos one year and now they voluntarily come up wherever they want. This year I gave the seedlings a little more leeway and they were scattered around the cucumbers and beets with their pink and white blooms. Even the carrots and swiss chard knew to be pretty this year. A wedding was just the push I needed to get the dripline done as well.  

It was a precious experience, from the girl trip to Boise where we found the perfect gown in an out-of-the-way dress shop, to the last minute clasping of great-great grandma True’s pearls around her neck.

As I write this, Mark is in the kitchen putting some words together for his aunt’s funeral. She died the day before the wedding. My Mom died in September too. Actually, considering it all, September is a good month to pass over to the other side - and a good month to marry. As we put the finishing touches on summer, we celebrate another growing season’s production and store up for the future. One part is finishing up, maturing and cycling back into the soil. The other part is seed dispersal and the storing of energy in roots or pollen for food in the faith of chapters yet to come.

I have a line I use this time of year, “September breaks your heart.” And so it did again. Death always does, but a wedding does it as well. It breaks your heart wide open with all the love you can hold. It leaves bare the hopes and humility we always feel as parents. I know I speak for Cole's Mom and Dad as well, that as our children leave us and commit to a new partnership, the heaviness we feel is good and right, and only proves our rock solid support for their lives ahead. 

above photos by thistleandpinecreative

Taking our Turn

We spent a day in the hills checking the herd and putting out salt. I was the salt guy (gal?) and in my travels found what was left of an old homesteading cabin. The four walls were lying on the ground and in the middle was a dilapidated cookstove. The lettering on the stove said it was manufactured in St Louis, Missouri. That’s a long haul even before it got to the mountains of Idaho.

I had taken my wildflower ID book so I was able to identify a flower I hadn’t noticed before. It grows alongside yarrow, a ubiquitous white flower this time of year, and they look a lot alike. It never registered with me that it was a different species. My book said the new flower was yampah, and that the Native Americans had eaten the root tubers. I had my trusty shovel with me so I dug up some plants. The tubers tasted like carrots just like the book said. Mark said they were right tasty. 

How would anyone have survived living in a log cabin up here? And for the natives, how did they get the tubers without a shovel and for such little reward? We love this range and its many wonders. I have to keep in mind that we’re just taking our turn.

I stayed mostly inside today to avoid the heat. I went out for short spells and then back in to do housework, which is always waiting. I felt a little discombobulated until it occurred to me to bake a favorite of Mark’s, zucchini bread. If you like to bake, you’re probably making the recipe for two loaves which calls for 3 cups of flour and 2 cups of zucchini. Here’s a tip, use 3 cups of squash instead. The bread is more moist, healthier, and best of all it uses up more zucchini and that’s really the point, right?  

We're sleeping in the basement under a window and noticing the moonlight. I found a neat internet site called timeanddate.com that shows the times of the sun and moon rising and setting, and lots of other good information about day length, etc. What interests me most are the phases of the moon. It tells the exact illumination of the moon on the current day. Today is the new moon, but only 1.4% is visible, so we won’t be able to see it for another couple of days. Then it will be more correct to call it a young moon.  

My grandmother and great-grandmother both left behind diaries. They were very aware and appreciative of the natural world. Of course in those days, living off the land, they were absolutely dependent upon it, more so than us even though we derive our livelihood there as well. They listened for the first killdeer and meadowlark in the spring. They recorded the weather and the pulse of irrigating and harvesting on the farm. And they competed to be the first to see the new moon every month. I know to watch as the moon waxes to full, but know very little about the new moon. My ancestors didn’t have a website, they lived it. But I’ll take the help and try to catch up with them. 

yampah, so delicate and lovely

                                                             

they often have a double tuber

a tough way to live

Covid Gardening

I’ve been practicing - learning to change the things I can, and to accept the things I can’t. I’m also reminding myself that other people get to choose how they spend their days. I get to choose how I spend mine. We all need to practice personal responsibility of course and work in teams, especially a marriage, but there’s plenty of margin around the edges to choose.

Why that particular thought belongs with covid gardening, I’m not sure. I’ve always had a garden, but in a pandemic it’s stylish again. Oh, so that’s why I ought to learn how to grow my own food! It's one of the silver linings to our current situation. Apparently covid gardens can go by other names more like the victory gardens of WWI and II - hope gardens, good news gardens. I like the term solace garden.

Planting and tending a vegetable garden, then harvesting and preparing food for the table is as real as real gets. I’m lucky that Mark appreciates my home-grown produce. He tells me he can eat all the swiss chard I can grow. He also loves beet greens with little beets attached to the end. We eat it all, right down to the roots. Bitter on top, then almost sweet at the end. Summer itself.

I like to include flowers with the vegies as well. This season it’s a row of sunflowers. They were doing wonderfully until yesterday when one stout, glorious fellow just fell over. When I investigated, I found insects had bored through the stem right at ground level. Now my perfect row has a hole in the middle of it. Mark said what he always says, “things are seldom ideal.”

Speaking of less than ideal circumstances, I took a drink from Mark’s water jug he had left in the front seat of the pickup. I felt something slide in my mouth and swallowed it; thought I was imagining things and took another swig only to have more slip down my throat. When I tipped the jug back an earwig was crawling by the mouthpiece. Yuck. The neighbor lady overheard me calling Mark to complain and suggested I call a nurse because the earwigs might burrow into my intestines. Not likely. I’m still alive and feeling fine. So - lesson learned. A word comes to mind when speaking of earwigs – interminable – and they are, so I’m sure many people have ingested them in their drinking water by mistake and lived to tell about it. When I went to bed last night I envisioned them crawling up my throat in my prone position.

Other July adventures included camping with my extended family. We reserved a large campground and arrived with a variety of tents (pup and family), campers (rented, old, new, deluxe), and a repurposed school bus (take away the s and h and it reads cool bus). We do like most families I suppose. Young adults bike and hike and tend kids, little kids explore and play in the dirt. Oldsters, of which I’m a member, prepare food and sit around the campfire telling stories. I broke ranks by going on a mountain bike ride with Seth, but I do love the campfire conversations. My niece said that’s why she goes camping with the family – for the stories. Bless her.

Like I said, I'm practicing - practicing gratitude most of all. And though the swallows are staging a good fight to use the porch for nesting, bugs are crawling and chewing, the heat has slowed grass regrowth to a crawl and the weeds are calling my name, I still walk around in awe of the headiness of mid-summer. We all know it won't last. I have a Buddhist saying near my keyboard, the trouble is you think you have time. July is like that. 

my solace garden

its been a great year for wild primrose 

Thinnings for supper

I counted a dozen ladybugs feasting on ragweed aphid

climbing cucumber tendrils,
 so delicate yet so strong

Callie enjoying Rich's cowboy coffee

this cow pasture is pollinator paradise

Classifying July 2020

We have a pair of cedar waxwings nesting in the quakie outside our office window. They were building the nest one day while we watched. The male, we assume, held on to his beakfull of cotton from the cottonwood trees while the female got hers safely secured in the nest. Then they put beaks together as he transferred his bundle to her for proper placement. We’ve always loved waxwings - so velvety, so creamy - and to have them nest right under our nose is a treat. 

After a cold spell it’s turned off hot again for Independence Day. It’s been wet, and all around us plant life is exploding. We live in the middle of chaos. There’s a willow-lined canal on one end, a cottonwood forest on the other, brushy dry sandhills, irrigated pastures, and lots of weeds and grasses. In simplified terms, with a variety and abundance of plant life (flora which get their energy from the sun) comes a variety and abundance of animals (fauna which breathe and forage for nutrition). In the middle of manicured farms, cattle fill the big animal niche and birds and insects thrive. On our end table is a grass book, a bird book, one on wildflowers, and a well-worn one on weeds.

Cotton is floating on the air again today. I’m pretty tired of it getting in my nose. As we walk around the ranch, putting up and taking down temporary fence, changing water and moving yearlings, different fragrances waft in and out of our awareness. The perfume from the tiny yellow blooms of the Russian Olive trees is especially pungent right now. The mountains have their own plethora of scents. When Mark got home from the range last night he said it smelled like an Avon commercial.   

We’ve been grazing the yearlings around the house. It’s one of my favorite times of the year - two weeks of watching them forage for nutrition from wherever I am around the house, the porch, the deck, or the kitchen with my morning coffee. They’re tromping around the perimeter of my vegetable garden right now, kept out by a single strand of electrified string - nerve wracking!

When the cattle change paddocks they eat the forbs first, those weedy/wildflower-like plants. They also like tree leaves, and of course grass, of which we have a multitude of varieties, quack, orchard, brome, timothy, etc. Fred Provenza, author of Nourishment, What Animals Can Teach Us About Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom, talks about the value of diversity in our diet and in the diet of grazing animals. Animals are hard wired to pick and choose a diet that is healthiest for them. We have the same ability, but it has mostly been lost in our hyper processed/over analyzed food culture.

We celebrated the 4^th by sitting on the deck and watching the full moon rise above the cattle at work. Out of the blue Mark asked me, "what pleases you about your life right now?" I enjoyed exploring that one, and then asked him the same question. His response: "times like these."  

Sometimes I get comments from readers about our way of life. They're very nice and complementary, as if what we do is something to cherish - and I suppose it is. But, truly, it is just life – with all its beauty and all its imperfections. The pandemic has brought this fact front and center - if one has enough to eat, health, and a home with a dose of freedom and security, we’re all in the same boat. I can be as unhappy (or happy) as anyone. 

Mark reminded me about Willie's song, Good Times. The last verse goes like this:

Here I sit with a drink and a memory,
But I'm not cold, I'm not wet, and I'm not hungry,
So, classify these as good times.
Good times.

a string protects my butterfly garden

. . . . and my vegetables

build it (let it grow) and they will come

Commencement

The Trail, as it’s called here on Pratt Ranch, went fine this year. Well, except for that first morning when the calves decided to head back home en masse, tails in the air, sure that Mom was back in the pasture we’d left an hour before. We tried and tried to get them to keep walking ahead, but more calves kept looking back and joining the group that was challenging us, then some cows joined in. We finally had to admit defeat and let them fall back to where Seth and Gus had thrown up some panels against a fence to head them off. We stopped, got them settled, and started again. Whew, that hasn’t happened in a while.

Seth and Anna were with us every mile of the drive. There’s nothing like home-grown help. There’s one section of the route that is especially challenging. We crest a mountain, tumble down to a creek on the other side, then follow a narrow lane through a steep-sided canyon. At the end is a field with lots of grass and a good rest for the herd, but the route is fraught with obstacles, a rushing creek to dive in and out of, cedars and rocks to hide behind, and no easy way to keep the cattle from slipping back past us. As Seth and Anna and I were bringing up the rear on that final leg, knowing the worst was behind us, Anna commented how “bad ass” the event was. I’m not really sure what that means but I think we done good.   

With cattle delivered to the mountains, summer can commence. Only now we’ll wear the road out going back and forth tending them. Mark has been back almost every day since. He and Seth are up there today. They had a couple of bulls with sore feet to bring home and they’ll ride through the calves for sickness.

Before the cows could arrive, the fences needed repaired. Last winter was a heavy snow year leaving our fence in shambles with many broken wires. Mark and I, knowing we weren't much of a threat, asked our kids for help. We made a plan for Memorial Day Weekend. They had helped us tuck the cattle in to a pasture mid-route for just long enough to get the holiday campers in and out before our final push to the range.

I gathered up all the fencing supplies I could find - wire stretchers, pliers, staple buckets and splice wire for everyone, and made ground beef soup to reheat for lunch. There was a skiff of snow on the ground.  Callie even came from Boise and we finished before day's end. These young adults get along well and are a joy to work with. 

We don’t know how our kids and their spouses will fit into the future of the ranch. Making it work for them and maintaining our livelihood is top priority. We know it will look different from how we did it and that’s okay. The kids have a wide breadth of education and experience and a big world that needs them too. Their love of the land and animals isn’t under debate, however. They’ve assured us that caring for the land will endure past our short time here and for that I say a prayer of thanks. 

women at work

many, many bluebells

Anna and her Dad

Anna on Sis, with Stella (in training)

Looking for Like Minds (and grass)

I’ve been searching for a word to describe the switch from winter to spring on a ranch. In the best sense “thrilling” fits the bill. That’s how it felt about two weeks ago, anyway. I was full of energy, bird-watching and following each tree species in the leafing-out competition. I was enjoying helping Mark burn ditches and pitch the debris as they fill with water for the first time. I was cutting rogue olives and burning limb deadfall with abandon. It was all such fun. Now, not so much, “overwhelming” is a better description. A sore neck and an hour-long nap two days in a row told me I had over extended my thrill. And I haven't even started on my vegetable garden.

It feels good knowing the irrigation water is flowing. I took my binoculars one afternoon to visit a pond that the ibis had found. A big group were feeding, picking their way along with their long legs, sticking their curved bills into the water over and over. Others were sleeping, standing on one leg, their heads turned backwards resting along their backs. I have never noticed the iridescent colors of their wings before. Ibis are otherworldy, a friend told me. With a dearth of natural wetlands, ibis take advantage of flood irrigation and we're tickled to oblige.

We’re starting with the cows out of the valley tomorrow and heading for grass in the mountains. Even though we have good help lined up, the 45-mile walk feels daunting. I’ll feel better when we get a day or two under our belts. It has always been thus, the anticipation is worse than the event itself.

In other news, Seth announced his job had been downsized due to the pandemic and he would be taking a break from the professional world to be a full time rancher for a month or more. His comment was, "their timing couldn't be better." We’ve all heard about silver linings to the virus and this is one for us.

We beef growers are learning a lot about our supply chain through "these trying times.” The hourglass shape of our industry - cow-calf producers on the front side, consumers on the end side, and the meatpacking plants in the middle - makes for vulnerabilities we haven’t tested before. Turns out those valiant souls that harvest our animals are especially vulnerable to the virus. They are the essential workers in our world. 

An interesting coincidence to the beef supply shake-up is that this spring our kids launched their Pratt Family Beef direct sales business. Mark has always had a few grass-fed cattle that stay home in the summer for customers interested in an alternative to our mainstream outlet through Country Natural Beef. Pratt Family Beef is a stepped-up version of that, and is reaching folks outside our usual circle. It amazes me that people send deposits to hold a product which is months away from their freezer. That's where social media comes in, including this 10-yr old blog, to introduce our family to potential customers.

Resiliency, partnerships, stability and sustainability – these are the attributes we’ve been students of for a long time now. It’s what we need to focus on world-wide instead of bickering and blaming. Well, actually it’s only some people that bicker and blame. Most of us are in the grand middle, the unflappable middle that buy their toilet paper one large package at a time. Unfortunately it’s the bickerers and blamers that get all the attention.

See you on the other side of grass.

photo by Anita

white-eyed ibis at work 

starting irrigation water, our lifeblood here on the home ranch 

Seth, Dave, Leah and Anna, branding as low- stress as we can muster

Callie and Anna, a last feeding day

Working from Home

Caring for cows during a pandemic looks a lot like caring for cows any other time. I’m feeling blessed to do what we do. We get to go outside and work with animals that know nothing about ventilators or face masks. They don’t worry about falling markets, social distancing or zoom calls. They've got "working from home" down pat. They look for the feed truck every morning, trusting that tomorrow will be the same as today. Mark and I are as concerned about this virus as anyone, but the weather has more to do with what happens on the ranch than anything else.

Calving numbers have peaked and we’re on the back side of the curve. But - “there’s always something." It’s a phrase we use often. Yesterday it was another set of twins and two babies that were born and didn’t suck. We walked them in and got them suckled and going. Most days the cattle calve like clockwork, on their own as nature planned, but not so yesterday.  

One day, just at dusk, a cow that Mark knew was preparing to calve had not made any headway all day. Seth tried to get her in on foot, but she was having none of it. Mark was tending a heifer, so Seth called me to bring a horse, and said he would stay with the cow so he wouldn’t lose her in the dark. I put Seth's saddle on Jane and rode her with my toes just barely touching the stirrups until I found him. He got the cow in and checked her out. Sure enough, the calf was upside down, meaning the head, which was below the legs, would never have entered the birth canal - a sobering outlook for the pair if we had waited until morning.

We've been moving the cow-calf pairs away from the "drys" every few days. It's social distancing for cows so they don't pass any sickness to one another. Yes, there's good reason to cancel our human gatherings for a while.  

I looked at seed catalogs today. Should I try some eggplant this year? How about a row of sunflowers on the edge of the garden? A rainbow blend of carrots would be fun, and there’s a cylindrical beet that’s good for canning. We have a wedding in our future, so a row of Queen Anne’s lace would lend a nice touch to bouquets.

I felt so much like my Mom today, not only about the seed catalogs, but for the hardy noon meal I fixed - fried pork chops, red spuds from the garden (yes, they’re still good), flour gravy and creamed corn, which I had picked and frozen last summer. The only thing missing was Mom’s homemade bread, which left a pretty big hole if you think about it. I felt like her again this afternoon piling limbs to burn out under the big cottonwoods. She loved to work outside like I do.

Seth said this pandemic is likely the most globally disruptive event of his lifetime. I hope so, but I'm afraid we may be challenged again and some more. The loss of species across the globe isn't as front and center as coronavirus, but it's more deadly long run. The human race has always seen times of hardship, but now we experience those hardships globally. We depend on one another so much. It is our strength - and our weakness.

I believe our kids, and their young peers across the planet, are up to the task. I found a phrase in my daily reader that's very fitting. It said to switch from fear and uncertainty to faith and confidence. We can do that, right? The younger generation is talented, ambitious and courageous. They think collectively and believe we’re better together. Let's help them.     

Leah coaxing some babies across a ditch

a neophyte mom pretty excited with her baby