Random Signs of Spring – Farm Edition
I absolutely love spring. Days starting to warm, some years lucky enough to get rain instead of snow, everything greening up. The smell of sap rising and mushroom spores. Happy little dandelions. I start dreaming of flowers and what annuals I’ll plant this year. For the last several years we’ve also thought we’d put in a greenhouse, but haven’t quite managed it yet, so the only veg that gets grown so far are potatoes in containers and some random herbs for cooking. Actually, everything grown here is in containers due to those pesky pocket gophers that eat everything we put into the ground. (And I’d use a much stronger word than “pesky,” but this is a family publication.) I’ve learned to wait until Memorial Day weekend to give the flowers a fighting chance at not getting hit with a hard freeze, and so far this year’s patience has paid off.
Our first sign that spring has arrived at the farm is really closer to summer and it’s Shearing Day for the alpacas. Without a doubt, it is the number one day of the year that I’m happiest to have behind us. For us it’s always around Memorial Day, this year we totally scored with the weather gods and had a beautiful day. As we’re down to only 14 animals here and had only 7 others visiting for shearing, this may have been our mellowest and shortest day ever. (In years past at a neighboring farm we did as many as 80 in a single day, yowzah!) So this year we were done and having lunch by 11:45. That being said, it’s still about 4 hours of nonstop squats – up down up down up down. My knees did fine, but the muscles showed their age for the next 3 days. Every single year I think I’ll do some training ahead of time. Every single year I don’t. Every single year I whimper with every movement for 3 days straight and swear next year will be different. Every single year it’s not.
Our next significant sign of spring is also around the end of May and it’s when our neighbors bring the cattle in. Every year they bring in close to a dozen Black Angus (sometimes a Red one or two) and from my vantage point on the hill every morning during chores I can watch them graze and eat and stroll and moo and in general act like happy cattle. Which makes me happy. Now, I am definitely a meat eater, but am also the first to admit I’m as hypocritical about it as one can get. No names, no eye contact, no meeting, etc. So with my bovine neighbors, I love watching them all summer and in the fall, when they go away, I like to think they simply go to Arizona for the winter. And then I’m positive it’s those same boys that come back the following spring, a little thinner, like they went to weight loss camp. And if there’s a red one or two in the mix, well, then, they must have gotten sunburnt. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Birds and frogs are next on the list. We sit in the middle of an amazing mix of habitats for wildlife. Across the street is some pasture, a creek, and a lot of heavy timber (with a resident Great Horned Owl). On our side, we have pasture, trees, a pond and a creek. Chorus frogs at the pond announce that spring is here quite vocally and it’s always a sound that instantly takes me back to growing up in Michigan. The arrival of our mallard ducks is the next sign on the pond. Mallards mate for life, so I’ve named our returning couple Sir Francis Drake and his lovely wife Mary Newman and it’s such a treat when they come back every year. The red wing blackbirds also are regular tenants at the pond. We have a lot of cattails, which provide them with the best lookout perches to sit guard and make certain you don’t venture too close. They definitely get a little pissy if you do. Right now the swallows are in force at the barn, and given the number of bugs they eat, they are always welcome. Hummingbirds are just starting to show up and, of course, the robins and doves. Then there are the songbirds, which we are fortunate to have year round: chickadees, nuthatches, finches in every color, along with the grossbeaks, tanagers, towhees and more that just stop by for a few days on their way to somewhere else. Last I heard on the Audubon count for this area was over 100 species of birds. Some days we step outside and it’s like living in an aviary.
As I write this I’m sitting near an open window and just heard the doves coo. Interestingly enough, while spring is always my busiest season business-wise and this year has been even more so, I also seem to manage time better to allow for planting and walking the pasture and listening to the birds and hanging out with our furry gang and throwing toys to watch Baby Django run like the wind and see if he can work his brakes yet (he can’t). I hope you’re also enjoying spring and can make some time to slow down just a bit, listen to the birds, bury your face in a lilac bush for a deep sniff, and go see if you can find some frogs to sing you a song.