More Winter Reading

M.C. Beaton is one of my favorite authors. She's also a prolific writer with several series of books to her credit.  One of my favorite is her Agatha Raisin mystery series. 

 

Beaton's books (pen name for Marion Chesney) are not great literature.  Her writing sometimes reads almost in outline form, but her story lines and mystery plots are  intriguing and I always  look forward to her next book. 

 

Her Hamish Macbeth mystery series about a policeman in a small village in Scotland is also pretty good. It was made into a British television series back in the 1990's.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'd love to see the Agatha Raisin books made into a television series.  The setting for the books is the English Cottswalds, so that would be beautiful. Agatha herself is a entertaining character and there are lots of other interesting characters in the books to make it interesting.

 

 If you are looking for a new mystery series with good plots and easy reading, give either one of these a try.

 

 

 

 

 



Salavating Over Seed Catalogs

Burpee's new sauce tomato

It's the week between Christmas and New Years and right on time the send catalogs have started to arrive in my mailbox - the one at the end of the driveway.  Jungs Seeds & Plants arrived on Wednesday and then on Thursday a whole bunch arrived including Gurney's, Henry Field's, The Cook's Garden, R. H Shumway and Burpee.

Burpee gets the award for the most eye catching. There on the front of the catalog is a big red tomato with a yellow sign proclaiming "Shown Actual Size".  Before I even opened the catalog I got out my ruler and measured the picture.  The tomato was five inches across and five and a half inches tall! SuperSauce is definitely not your average Roma type paste tomato and I don't think I'm going to be able to resist ordering it! 

The copy describing this new tomato, found on page three of the catalog, is effusive to say the least.
Burpee proclaims this is a "superhero" tomato, a "roma with aroma".

Just below the picture of the huge tomato is a picture of a large flower pot growing sweet corn.  This Burpee exclusive is called On Deck Hybrid and is the "first sweet corn bred for containers!".  Apparently you take a 24 inch pot and plant nine seeds in it and you can pick corn from your back deck!

Burpee boasts 80 new varieties this year including a pink raspberry, a white and purple striped potato and a heat resistant broccoli.

The Cook's Garden catalog has lots of pretty pictures and both Henry Field's and Gurney's offer big discounts on mostly standard vegetable offerings. Both Jung's and Henry Field's have a nice offering of perennials and shrubs.

But my favorite catalog to browse is the R.H. Shumway's Illustrated Garden Guide.  Shumway's is illustrated with old time looking drawings both black and white and colored.  They offer some hard to find heirloom varieties like Bohemian Horseradish, Howling Mob sweet corn, dark red Egyptian beets, sugar beets  and Shumway's Colossal Long Red Mangels (beets). The catalog says that mangels are "equal in nutrition to grain" and "relished by livestock, particularly milk cows".  I think I need to invest in some mangel beet seed! 

For 2013 they are announcing, beautifully illustrated on their back cover, Mr. Wrinkles Pumpkin and Mrs. Wrinkles Pumpkin.  Mr. Wrinkles is touted as a wonderful orange Jack O'Lantern type with a good barrel shape and large dark green handles.  Mrs. Wrinkles is a deeply ribbed orange pumpkin, growing 10 inches wide and only nine inches tall - like a Cinderella pumpkin I'm thinking. I might just have to get some of those too. 

As the days begin to lengthen etc.

As the days begin to lengthen, the cold begins to strengthen - so goes an old saying. And as old sayings go, this one always seems to be true!   Winter has roared in on its appointed day and seems determined to stay awhile.  The Old Farmers Almanac (www.almanac.com) and Success Farming magazine both predict a colder and wetter winter than average for our part of the country.

Zeke among the 800 pound round bales.

Snow, ice and strong winds have made life outdoors pretty miserable - or so my cows are telling me.  They are rapidly eating through my hay supplies trying frantically to produce enough body heat to keep warm.  Hay is very scarce this year and I've been parceling out the round bales on a strict schedule.  The Angus herd of 8 pregnant cows and heifers has been getting an 800 pound bale every four and a half to five days.  My Limousin herd of nine pregnant cows and heifers, two bulls and four calves has been cleaning up a 500 pound bale every two to two and a half days.  They are also sharing a 50 pound bag of crimped corn every three days.

This week the Limi's have eaten a round bale in a day and a half. The Angus however, went through two 800 pound bales in six days! By yesterday evening they had eaten the last of the second bale. My plan was to put a third out this morning. But by 5:00 pm they were lined up along the fence, staring at the house and hollering.  I was running the vacuum cleaner around in the living room and they could see me through the windows.

Happy cows with their big round bale of hay.

Finally about 5:30 I gave in.  It was a beautiful evening with a gorgeous big gold moon low on the eastern horizon, very Halloween like with a ribbon of cloud under it just so.  The temperature was just at freezing and the wind had died down. It was a lovely evening to be out doors.

I picked up a round bale with the tractor (I have a huge spear attached to the front of the tractor operated by an hydraulic lift mechanism).  The bale was sitting on a wooden pallet meant to keep it from absorbing moisture out of the ground.  With all the rain, then snow, then sleet, the bale was topped with a thick layer of ice topped snow and the pallet was frozen to the bottom.

The bales are wrapped in a fine plastic hexagonal mesh, which I usually easily unwrap from the bale just before I place it in the round bale feeder ring. This time however, I needed my big sharp knife to cut through the mesh in several places as it was frozen to the bale. The wooden pallet also frozen to the mesh so I had to cut both sides at the bottom and stomp on the pallet to free it from the bale.  The hardest part was pulling the mesh from the top of the bale, as the bale is taller than I and the snow was about five inches thick on the top.

I checked out the living room windows several times during the evening and out the bedroom window through the night and still again this morning. The feeder has never not been surrounded by cows all that time.  Of the 30 round bales the vet bought for his Angus herd and had delivered in late October and early November, 15 are left counting the one I put out last night.