Spring is here! It came to stay I know, I heard the bluebird say “Awake!”

Spring has come to the farm: it came with trumpets and a marching band. Lightning flashed, thunder rolled, and the farmer’s wife sat in her cozy living room giving thanks for the good solid roof over her head. The cows, one believes, also sheltered in the barn…. But who knows? They may have been out there dancing in the rain with the best of them.

Our first calf of the year is a few days old now, and hale and hearty. She was born at the far end of the pasture during the night. Farmer girl came out in the morning to milk the cows and found only a select few virtuous ones lying in the straw. The rest were all out at the far end of the pasture with new mom Sophie, holding a big welcome to the clan party for newest girl Shirley.

Baby calves are supposed to have mom’s milk only for the first few days, as like human babies they are born with leaky gut syndrome and mom’s first milk, colostrum, triggers those holes to close. Hunter Jumper, being extra helpful and feeling motherly, offered to stand in for mom and give baby her first drink. Baby Shirley was hungry and the morning was chilly. She gladly took every drop she could get, with the result that Hunter Jumper marched into the milking parlor with an empty floppy bag. Farmer girl was not pleased.

This is the week we prep the fields for planting! The first week of the year, that is, as there is a continuous cycle of seedtime and harvest from springtime until frost. Farmer and Young Farmer cleaned out the cowstable, the horse barn, and the henhouse and spread the manure on the fields and on the garden plots. Both are on the run all day, ducking into the house for short snappy mealtimes, or eating in the field with reins in one hand and sandwich in the other. Farmer girl went spring-crazy and planted a whole flat (seventy plants) of basil. She excused herself with the reasoning that since the seeds were outdated, they might not come up, and therefore she might get only five plants of the seventy cells she sowed. So far she has no basil plants at all… but it’s early days yet.