Saginaw valley

I had to drive through the beautiful Saginaw valley here in Michigan last week as I drove my husband to the VA hospital in Saginaw for his regular check up. I love seeing all the German –Dutch farms along the way, brick or white clapboard farm homes, big red barns with green roofs, often with hex signs or the farmers name on them, and always neat and tidy. Along this route you seldom see the type of farms with collapsing barns and hundreds of pieces of rusting machinery in the yard.

Sugar beets are being harvested now and we passed a piling station with huge flat topped mountains of beets. It’s strange to think that sweet white sugar comes from those huge brown ugly lumps. Sugar smells awful when it’s being refined too, sort of a burning sugar smell crossed with cooking cabbage smell. We have a refinery near us in Caro and this time of year the smell hangs over the town.

The farms in the Saginaw valley produce a variety of things from sugar beets to corn. Corn harvest is just starting around here. Winter wheat has already been planted and is coming up.

We had some light snow last night and some of it actually stuck long enough for me to see it as I went out to do chores in the barn. I need to get out and finish cleaning up my garden, composting the corn stalks and picking that last pumpkin. Its sunny today and the next few days aren’t supposed to be too bad but I think winter is closing in.

I had to rescue a hen this morning. We have one who won’t stay in the pen with the rest of the hens, she’s always out with the turkeys. This morning she had managed to get into a fenced off area where we keep junk- rolls of old fence, metal panels, timbers etc. This area is sort of a buffer area between the dog yard and the pasture in back of the barn. There is a metal panel 4 foot high along the bottom at the pasture side with 3 foot of wire at the top of that. The panel keeps the dogs from spending all day barking at the horses or chickens when they are let out.

Somehow this bird had managed to get over seven feet of fence into that space. The dogs could see her and they were going nuts. She tried to fly back over when she saw me but couldn’t make it. I had to go around through 3 gates to get her, carefully working my way through old junk once inside. Not a good way to start the morning. Once she was safe I returned to the barn to see I had left the door open to the hay storage area and Lily and Charley were in there happily munching away- they had found the mother load.

I am trying to teach Charley to lead. He does not like being told what to do at all. He’s little enough I can handle him but he can be a real stinker. We went for a short walk through the pasture today but all he wanted to do was rear and buck. The wind makes him frisky and it makes me cold and willing to quit early.

Tina, our youngest Jack Russell terrier also had an adventure. We bought her a new collar, hot pink, because her old collar had gotten too small and she had been running around for weeks without one. First time we put it on she ran outside and came back inside with it in her mouth to play with- too loose. So Steve added another hole.

Yesterday while I was at work he noticed Tina wasn’t with the other dogs. It was sleeting outside and everyone else was inside. He started to go take a nap then decided he’d better check outside. There was Tina, hanging from the fence. She is a fence climber and her new collar had snagged on a bit of protruding wire, leaving her dangling- her hind feet were just able to touch ground. If she had struggled much and twisted the collar it may have been all over for her. Steve rescued her, a little cold and wet but not harmed otherwise. Needless to say the collar is off again. Thank goodness Steve had a bit of intuition there- he’s not usually the one to act on a hunch.

And so go the adventures of the farm.

July in October

It’s hot here in Michigan- too hot. I like my seasons the way they are supposed to be, not summer in October. 90 plus degrees and humid is just awful. My poor sheep were getting their winter coats and are miserable. It is supposed to storm tonight and get cooler- I hope so. I don’t want winter yet but gee, fall would be nice. And we really need rain. All of my houseplants are still outside, I put them on the porch for 2 days in mid September but they have been outside since. That is a new record. I am picking ripe tomatoes and peppers, that’s got to be a record too.

I had to go into town this morning and I took the back road. There is a little color in the trees and all the fields are being harvested- dry weather is good for that. In town I came behind an Amish buggy going to the stock yards, it’s market day. I felt sorry for the poor sweaty horse and I wondered if the Amish family inside the buggy were regretting not having a faster ride, one that would at least give you a little wind as it went down the road. Their life seems hard, but sometimes I wish my life was more like theirs. An Amish boy from nearby was injured by a piece of horse drawn harvesting equipment last week. He was taken by ambulance to the hospital and then air lifted to Children’s Hospital in Detroit. How quickly his life changed, not only the severe injury but an onslaught of technology. I wonder how his poor parents get to visit him. Maybe one flew down with him.

I had to drive about 150 miles through mid Michigan Friday for a meeting. It was a pretty day and the county car I was using was air conditioned so the ride wasn’t bad. They are harvesting sugar beets all through this area and I saw numerous semi-loads of the big, ugly, lumpy beets on the road. I passed by several towns where they were cooking sugar- it’s amazing how something so sweet and tasty can smell so bad in the making. I passed through the Isabella Indian reservation, where the Soaring Eagle casino is located. The casino is very modern and nice looking as are several big hotels nearby- but the area surrounding them- where I was passing through- looked very poor. I have no interest in casino gambling and can’t imagine sitting inside on a nice day feeding my money to a machine.

Granny’s advice today is make something sweet out of something ugly. This hot humid weather means I don’t have to run the furnace or feed hay.