This will be a continuing blog post, designed to let you know what is going on “out my window”. I will keep you up-to-date on happenings here at Ravens Rest Farm, what is coming along, what it is we are hoping to have coming along. Within that designation, I plan to keep you posted as to pretty much everything Ravens Rest. I will keep it farm related and perhaps occasionally get into the personal.
Just a little bit “inside my window”…you know, when you slow down and just take a minute to look out” your” window, the world could be large, encompassing many miles, or it could be minute, the size an ant colony moving onward in their organized chaos. When you take the time to look out “your” window”, you just may find that you spend more than just a couple minutes looking, watching, viewing, I find that educational, relaxing, informative and time transporting.
We moved from the rat race near Portland, OR to living outside a town of nearly 800 people, there are more deer in the field next door than passing cars on the road below us. I have moved my comfy chair closer to the window so as to not miss a beat…oh, the things that I’ve seen, heard and experienced, it could be national geographic right at the window with the coyote mom teaching her pups how to hunt, just like human children, kindergarten age has a low attention span. Then there was the deer, standing on hind legs boxing one another, females, no less. Then the two sets of deer, three deer in each set, nearly identical except in demeanor, one set of three, quite nice and would nearly eat out of your hand, I fed them, of course, right outside my window. The second set of three, nasty, to each other and also to the nicer set of three. Both sets had a mother, a yearling and a this-year fawn. It reiterated the fact that in nature, you can get more flies with honey than vinegar, being nice gets you the farmers treats and being nasty gets you nothing, which is as it should be.
So all is well…outside my window…as it should be, a metaphor for life.
25 March 2015…out my window…I see a fresh dusting of snow at elevations higher than we are, brought in from the last two days of rain. We received 1.22 inches of rain here at Ravens Rest, not a record by any means, but enough that the river exceeded the grasp of it’s banks. We need the rain, the soil moisture level is low and acts like a dry sponge, quickly soaking up the available moisture as it falls from the overburdened clouds. Mud puddles last no longer than a few hours, before being absorbed into the earth. It is my opinion that we cannot get enough rain at this point. The soil composition around this area is volcanic in origin, little hills and gullies that absorb water quite well as evidenced by the fact that this area is dryland agriculture.
I didn’t quite get enough of the white stuff this winter, nor last winter for that matter. Mother nature lays patterns, this is part of the pattern of life at Ravens Rest, the ebb and the flow. Come join us, won’t you, rejoice in our successes, heave a sigh at our failures, hopefully there will be more successes than failures, but that too is in the cards. Let’s hope they are stacked a bit in our favor.