Snowflake Images

I saw this article on http://spaceweather.com/
Beautiful, aren't they!

SNOW FLAKES: The industrial district of Marl, Germany, isn't known for its natural beauty or outdoor photo-ops. But maybe that's because people just haven't been looking closely enough. On Dec. 18th, resident Martina Borchert discovered this scene in her own backyard:

"These crystals landed on top of a rusty old bird feeder," she says. "Normally they would have melted instantly, but the temperature outside was -4 C, and that gave me time to arrange a photo shoot using my Canon EOS 350D and a 60mm macro lens. Two hours and one cold nose later, I stored more than 800 snapshots on my hard drive!" Here is a selection of the best: #1, #2, #3, #4

circumhorizontal arcs

A friend sent me these pictures of a beautiful rainbow phenomena that happened here on June 6, 2006. This one was taken Just over the Idaho border:
Here's a link to the other image:
http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/chaim8a.htm
This one was taken from downtown Spokane.

It made National Geographic news! You can read more about it here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/06/060619-rainbow-fire.html

It's Nice to Have Help Raking Leaves!

Around our house, one of the most fun of all chores is the annual raking of the leaves. Of course it usually takes 4 times longer than it should because of all the help we get! ...That will make sense when you watch this:

Spring Fats/ Fall Fats

This is an extremely good article!
http://health.msn.com/nutrition/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100245164
I'll quote part of it here:

"While researching a book on omega-3s, I realized that the essential fats—the omega-3s and their close cousins, the omega-6s—change with the seasons. It might sound like a small idea, but it may soon fundamentally change the way you think about food.
First, let's start with omega-3s, what I'll call the spring fats. These are likely the most abundant fats in the world, but they don't originate in fish, as many believe. Rather, they are found in the green leaves of plants. Fish are full of omega-3s because they eat phytoplankton (the microscopic green plants of the ocean) and seaweed. In plants, these special fatty acids help turn sunlight into sugars, the basis of life on Earth. The spring fats speed up metabolism. They are fats that animals (humans included) use to get ready for times of activity, like the mating season. They're found in the highest concentrations in all the most active tissues: brains, eyes, hearts, the tails of sperm, the flight muscles of hummingbirds. Because fish have so many of these fats in their diets, they can be active in cold, dark waters. These fats protect our brains from neurological disorders and enable our hearts to beat billions of times without incident. But they are vanishing from our diet, and you'll soon understand why.
Next up are the omega-6s, what I'll call the fall fats. They originate in plants as well, but in the seeds of plants rather than the leaves. The fall fats are simply storage fats for plants. Animals require both—omega-3s and omega-6s—in their diets and their tissues. But omega-6s are slower and stiffer than omega-3s. Plus, they promote blood clotting and inflammation, the underlying causes of many diseases, including heart disease and arthritis. Omega-3s, on the other hand, promote blood flow and very little inflammation, which may prevent things like heart disease. The proper mix of these two fats helps create tissue with the right amount of blood flow and inflammation. But because they're in constant competition to enter our cells, if your diet consists of too many omega-6s, your body will be deficient in omega-3s. And that is what's been happening to us as we've been eating more and more seed fats in the form of soybean, corn and other vegetable oils."

Continuing with this line of thought...
The notion of seasonal foods is certainly not new. Cycles and seasons have been celebrated and honored throughout the ages. It is only recently that we have forgotten why. Globalization has made any food available at any time, anywhere on Earth. Our modern heated houses mean our bodies are no longer stressed in the winter cold and so no longer burn winter fat. We have quite effectively removed the seasonal cycles from our lives and our bodies suffer the consequences. Artificial lighting has disrupted day/night cycles creating a sleeping disorder pandemic, lighting also interferes with lunar/menstrual cycles in women, and the seasonal lengthening and shortening of the days is obscured by modern artificial lighting. Chickens will lay eggs all year, cutting their life span in half as a result. In humans, it contributes to the growing (pun intended) obesity pandemic and high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, ...
How much healthier would we be if we simply brought our bodies back into the natural rhythms of nature?

Harvest is in

My mom just sent us a box of home canning that she had done this year. It was like Christmas in October! There were 2 jars of beans that were broken, but all the rest were fine and are very much loved and appreciated. Her pepper jelly is beautiful! I am so glad to get a jar for the holidays. I was going to make some but that was one of the things I just didn't get around to doing. We had a cold snap down to 18, so it killed our fall colors this year. We are so sad. :(
I brought in a ton of green tomatoes and have them all in the basement. I managed to grow a good many beans despite the late start and... I wonder ... the freeze hit before the beans were dry on the vines, so I brought in the beans I had for seed and hung them to go ahead and finish drying,.. as long as they look mature and black when they are dry, they should be ok as seed, right? A gardening friend gave me an All American Pressure Canner. (what a gift!) I didn't have enough beans to bother canning this year, but I'll hopefully get a better start next year. I did make a few pickles and some canned tomatoes with vegetables. I've already used over half the tomatoes though! *giggle* I add tomato paste and meat and have spaghetti sauce, or add it to Spanish rice mix for a hearty Spanish rice, or use it as soup base, or add meat and chili powder and make chili. I didn't make jelly this year, but we still have plenty from last year, so we're set on jelly. We harvested all the herbs and have them drying all over the kitchen. We had seven good size pumpkins, and a friend of ours gave us eight butternuts.



OH! I grew Ruby Queen corn- everyone agreed it was the Best corn they had ever tasted by far. It wasn't a bumper year, but I didn't do too bad, all things considered.

Chickens, Ducks, and Wolves... oh my!

Many critters have come and gone since my last post... er... the one before the 2 quail posts, that is. Back then I had chickens, so that's where I need to begin. As I feared, my family and neighbors were not fond of constant chicken chatter. These were some exceptionally noisy chickens. I honestly think a rooster would have been quieter! Warning- set your volume low before watching this one!



So I had to find them a new home. As luck would have it, a very nice couple from a farm in Rosalia (a small town to the south) came to pick them up. They have about an acre fenced off for their flock of chickens, they told me, with lots of grass and bushes and a small pond- sounds like chicken heaven!
So I have flat given up on the idea of chickens. But I have not given up on the idea of eggs! As you can see from my quail posts, there are other egg options out there for urban egg production. I found a source for quail, but we need to make an enclosure for them first. But we still had the chicken pen and barn....so I thought, Ducks! Like quail eggs, duck eggs beat chicken eggs for nutrition. So we bought a few ducks off of Craigslist to try them out. I had read that khaki Campbell ducks lay more eggs than any chicken breed- almost 300 a year! And that's without light supplementation! So I decided to get a few. Nope, not for me. They were as noisy as chickens! So they went. I had read that khaki's were developed from runner ducks, another type that lay 300 eggs a year, so we tried a black runner female. We had also gotten some Cayuga Ducks. These have since become my absolute favorite! They are exquisite! And they are Quiet! The runner was a bit noisier, but not too bad.
Now... unfortunately we learned the hard way that an Arctic wolf though not all that interested in a chicken is terribly interested in a duck!!! One day I had the ducks out of their pen in the backyard. The dogs were inside, the back door was locked. ... Or so I thought. Orio opened the door when no one was looking and went out in the yard to play. It didn't take him long to find that a duck made a great toy. I went outside to find him trotting across the yard with a dead duck in his mouth. He saw me and came prancing over to me to ask me to throw it for him. I fell to pieces! It was the Cayuga female! All I could do was just hold her and cry. Don made sure Orio knew he had screwed up royally! Afterwards I wouldn't talk to Orio for 2 days. But as if that weren't enough, about a week later, tragedy struck again. The ducks were put away in their pen, the dogs were out. No one was looking. Suddenly Dori came running to the door yipping and barking to tell us Orion was getting into trouble. No one realized that our Arctic wolf had had a taste of his natural food source and decided that was what he wanted for dinner. He plowed his way under the gate to the duck pen and killed my remaining 2 ducks! Luckily I only had 2 at the time, the Cayuga drake, and the runner. I was so furious I came frighteningly close to killing him!
So Don is going to rebuild the duck pen for me. It will be taller, thicker wire, and he will run it underground and fan it out so that if Orio tries to dig under it, he'll hit wire. Nothing is entirely wolf-proof, but we can at least slow him down enough that we can catch him before he gets too far. I now have 3 pairs of show quality Cayugas. They are absolutely beautiful! No way is that wolf going to get any more of my ducks!!!

Raising Quail

I found a very informative article on raising quail!
Click Here
From Backwoods Home Magazine which I highly recommend! Housing requirements, feeding, nutritional values of the birds, nutritional values of the eggs, great article!!