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We were not expecting to have the season’s first blizzard before Halloween. It started innocently enough. Then it snowed harder and harder. By late afternoon we had a full-blown Nor’Easter.  It’s awful to have wet, heavy snow while the trees still have their leaves, particularly given how wet the ground has been — there’s just […]

We haven’t had a frost yet, and flowers continue to bloom in Jen’s garden. Yet it is peak leaf-peeping season. On Saturday we cleaned out our car, now officially totaled. Before soccer practice, Sarah gathered some of the prettier leaves from the yard.

Our biennial hickory nut harvest is upon us. We’ve gotten a bit smarter: we now know which trees produce the biggest nuts with the thinnest shells, and we’ve also learned that gathering two bushels of nuts is useful only if your goal is to have mice that look like Alex Rodriguez. Sarah maintains a laser-like […]

Here is the fair beater Hurricane Irene, as seen from the PondCam™ at 9:30 this morning.

We had a very pleasant, if occasionally rainy, Fourth of July weekend. Everyone waited patiently for the rain to stop. Our front-yard bunny found a nice dry spot. But it’s black raspberry season, so we could not stay inside forever. Jen and Sarah made a dozen or so jars of jam. Sarah made sure everything was […]

I was not a friend to the deer this weekend, having spent hours and hours mowing acres and acres of the high grass in which they like to make their beds.  I was, however, a Hero of the Barn Swallows: they love it when someone mows because it turns into a feast.  They swoop around […]

On Saturday, we visited the Northern Dutchess Botanical Gardens to buy a few plants for the garden. We got the essentials: peppers (bell and poblano); lettuce (oak leaf, red sails, and red romaine); arugula; peas (snow and sugar-snap); soybeans; broccoli; strawberries (everbearing, Junebearing and all-star); herbs (green and purple basil, Italian parsley, and lemon verbena); flowers (coneflowers […]

On Saturday, Sarah played first base in her first softball game, against Red Hook. Rhinebeck could have fielded 15 players, but the Red Hook coaches — rather churlishly, in my opinion — allowed only nine of them on the field at a time. Some of the Red Hook girls seemed quite a bit older. In […]

We had a great Mothers’ Day weekend at the farm, with lots of lilacs starting to bloom, and plenty of gardening by Jen. If the house appears a little odd … … it’s because we’re having it painted, and it looks a bit naked without its shutters. In addition to lilacs, we gathered lots of […]

Last year, we were surveying the damage from one of our annual 30-year ice storms. This year, however, we are leaving for Florida.  Sarah is very excited — she woke me up at 5:30 this morning to ask why it was still dark. It looks like we’ll have pretty good weather!