Meadow Musings

This is a super-exciting website for us to announce because Old Shaw Farm is our most favoritest vegetable-growing farm. We have been part of their CSA for 4 years now, and it is a bit like Christmas every week when we go pick up our basket. This week we got a ton of greens and a big basket of strawberries (already gone!) and we got to chat with the always-wonderful Peter and Maryellen. They love their new site and the very first day it was up, before they had even told anyone about it, nine (9!) visitors who filled out their contact form. Seriously, I think that's a record.

The site has some basic stuff like a blog and a contact form, and also some snazzy stuff like a place to post CSA fliers (to answer the always-pressing question "Is it gazpacho time yet??") and a big section to share recipes. In fact, you can submit your own recipes! People are always telling Maryellen, "OMG, I made the BEST thing with the chard last week!" so now everyone can share their favorite recipes. Here is my super-special recipe for cherry tomatoes: 1) Put them in your mouth. 2) Eat them.

A big huge shout-out for this site goes to the wonderful Megan of Pixels & Pulp, who frankly kind of out-did herself on this one. We were all, "Hey Meg, can you throw together a simple little design for this site?" and she was all BAM! Emeril-style! And we were like, "Wo, orange, really?" and she was all, "DUDE it matches the carrots" and then we were all "Whoa. You're so right." And those pictures in the header? Peter and Maryellen can update those puppies themselves, so you are sure to see all kinds of great pictures of Waverly and Henry eating veg and hanging out around the farm.

How many babies can fit on top of The Mothership? I saw at least seven while I was taking these pictures.

It's time for baby chicks!  This year we had a broody chicken starting in mid-April.  A broody chicken is one who refuses to come outside and scratch and eat and drink and do all those things that chickens should do; instead she sits inside on a nest full of eggs and waits for them to hatch.

Never you mind that all her eggs were infertile (we don't have any roosters), or that Spruce Goose regularly kicked her off the nest to lay GIANT goose eggs in it.  She was determined.  So when it was time for us to get chicks, we decided that instead of raising them ourselves, we'd give them to the broody one.  We called her Broody McBrooderson.

She is the best mom ever.  When the chicks came, I went into the bird house and, while Aaron distracted Broody, I snuck out an egg and put two chicks in its place.  And then I did it again, until there were 21 (you read that right, TWENTY ONE) tiny babies underneath her.  They all fell asleep immediately.  We lifted up a wing to check that they weren't being smothered or anything, and they were all lined up like tiny fuzzy sardines. The next day we added 12 more (they came late), so she's got 33 little ones to take care of.

Notice the tiny foot sticking out under her wing. Now we call her The Mothership. She moves around like a tank and all the little babies follow her and sometimes they hop onto her head and when they get chilly they all disappear under her belly and she lies on top of them.

This chick is clearly giving me the stinkeye. She's a Buff Orpington (just like mom!). This year we also got 3 turkeys, some Barred Rocks, and some Araucanas, who have cheeks like chipmunks and apparently lay blue and green eggs.

More from Zeb the Wonder Employee:

Founded in Kittery, Maine by Sarah Brown, the Green Alliance is a collaboration of Seacoast businesses aimed at becoming sustainable. The businesses offer discounts to "Green Card" holders -- regular people who want to patronize local green businesses. Save Green by going green! (Horrible pun but someone had to make it. The things I do for you.)

Every GA business has a profile page on the site, detailing their green creds and information about the business and the discount they offer. There are lots of news articles written about GA members, so we were able to create a way to automatically link the articles to their respective businesses without the need for lots of double-entries on the part of the staff. This site has some super-cool features designed by our pals (and Green Alliance members!) Pixels & Pulp -- check out the cool logos in the footer, and the great polaroids (the site automatically creates a custom image for each business!) sprinkled throughout the site.

What do you do when you have an employee who breezes through everything on his to-do list in half the time you expected? Well, you have him tackle the ever-growing list of "blog entries we need to write". So sayeth Zeb:

Since Captain Planet was taken off the air, very few heroes have come to our aid in fighting global climate change, but now there's a new super group in town, and that's Recycle Together. The recently formed brainchild of The Climate Group is built up of some of the largest corporations today. Businesses like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nestle, and Snapple, with their powers combined plan to fight global climate change, one recyclable at a time.

This site aims to be the go-to place for any city or municipality who wants to jump on the recycling bandwagon, or even just to learn more about how recycling helps the environment. There are pages on how to get started, profiles of Model Cities that already have excellent recycling facilities and systems in place, and even information about venue recycling to deal with large-scale waste management.

RecycleTogether was designed by Pixels & Pulp and is built to allow the folks at the Climate Group to easily add new Model Cities, expand the FAQ section, and build the site into the City Recycling authority it is obviously destined to be.

Over on the other side of the country, the Transitional Age Youth Initiative was formed in San Francisco in order to improve outcomes for Transitional Age Youth (TAY) in the Bay Area. TAY are at-risk young people, often in the process of transitioning out of foster care, and TAY-SF's mission is to create interagency partnerships and programs aimed at systemic improvements for TAY.

Inspired by the amazing photography of Shane Powers, Rock + Feather created a great design for the site that appeals to both parts of TAY-SF's audience: transitional age youth and the organizations and agencies that serve them.

We built the site so that the folks at TAY-SF can easily update all of the content, including listings of all their partner agencies (with logos!). There's also an Event calendar and biographies of the staff and Young Adult Team. The Young Adult Team biographies also include audio files of each person telling his or her own story.

It has been busy around here! So busy I have been neglecting the blog! But we have not been neglecting the snow. I'll give you a rundown:

First we hiked up middle Sugarloaf. From the top, you can see the front of Mount Washington. On the way down, I lost my (brand new!) gloves, which is sad. But I lost them because they were in my pocket because it was so warm outside that I didn't need to wear them. So that was happy.

The top of middle Sugarloaf is flat and broad, which is nice because it is also a granite cliff which might otherwise be a dangerous place to be in the snow. While we were up there the sun had warmed the snow so that it took perfect impressions of anything pressed into it. It did not take long before that led to sillyness. This is what it looks like when you do a forward-roll (AKA somersault) in the snow.

Later we hiked down near the Dartmouth Skiway, which is crazy cute. We didn't realize that our trail took us directly to the top of one of the ski hills until we reached the top and found hordes of little kids in tiny skis pouring off the lift just to the left of our trail.

This week we went up the Starr King trail. It was a pretty walk, and when we got to the top we could see the other side of Mt Washington! Technically this is a picture of some of the other Presidentials (Jefferson, the 5 Adams, Madison), but Washington is just behind that tree on the right. It kept coming in and out of cloud the whole time we were on the peak.

At the top of Mount Starr King, miles from any sort of road, we found the remains of a cabin. Someone had thoughtfully left a duraflame log in the hearth, which made us feel oh-so-welcome!

We've been back from Panama for two weeks, but do you know what happens when you take time off? Apparently the work just piles up waiting for you to return. What is up with that, work? I thought you'd finish yourself while I was gone.

The weather was about 95F warmer there than it is here, and we spent much of our time hanging out on the beach. Around sunset each night, there was a specific tree (el arbol de los monos, we called it) where a herd (group? family? pack?) of white-faced capuchin monkeys would gather and hop around and make little squeaky noises and generally be adorable. There were also howler monkeys in the forest (hoo hoo hoooooo hoo) but we only heard them and never saw even one. And there were hermit crabs, oh so many hermit crabs.

We went to this great animal rehab center in Boquete called Paradise Gardens. They take in orphaned, injured, or otherwise sad little animals and nurse them back to health, then set them free again. They also are part of a world-wide bird breeding program (for nifty rain forest birds like macaws and toucans) to help endandered species with low numbers.

One thing that was totally awesome was that many of these animals are very social and because the whole point was to help them get healthy and happy again, interaction was encouraged! So the monkeys run over when you come near them and they untie your shoes and reach in your pockets and are totally great and awesome. There were also super-tiny Geoffrey's Tamarins, which are about the size of an orange. They zip around and will only stop if you have fruit for them, or if you pet their bellies. Otherwise they have no need for you.

We even got to pet a Margay, which is a big cat like an Ocelot, but they have extra-special ankle joints that allow them to climb down trees face-first! She purred and rolled over and kneaded just like a giant housecat. A giant killer housecat. (The Margay had a sad story which was that a farmer caught the kitten and thought it was cute until it got to be a giant cat. Then instead of just setting it free, they locked it in a tiny cage in the dark back of a chicken coop! So when she was brought to the center she couldn't even walk. Now she runs around and catches fish and any unfortunate birds who wander into her cage, and loves to say hi to the visitors.)

The best animal was the baby sloth. Her name was Temba. She wanted to be held, all the time, and she is soft and wooly like a lamb. If you tried to put her down, she would made the saddest little keen, like "ehn ehn ehhhhn" and then she'd crawl up the side of her cage and out the door and back into your arms. Oh man. Baby sloths can be fast if they are moving towards snuggles. Once she got settled on her little blankie then she just sat there and smiled. You may notice a very strong resemblance to a Muppet.

Sloth trivia: they only go to the bathroom once a week. In the wild, they climb down from their trees, do their business (and bury it so predators don't find them), then climb up another tree to spend the next week in. Temba's bathroom day is Sunday.

Last week we had cause to be in Vermont, so we went cross-country skiing at Osmore Pond.  According to trails.com, Osmore Pond is a "great" snowshoe and cross-country trail.  It is located in Groton Forest State Park, so we parked in a plowed campground and wandered through the campground roads until we hit the pond.

It was a beautiful day and the snow was awesome.  The trail, however, was quite possibly the worst cross-country trail we have ever been on.  It is a brilliant snowshoe trail, but it was incredibly twisty-turvey and also had a zillion little hillocks, both of which are hard to deal with when you've strapped 6-foot-long boards to your feet.  By the time we realized that it was a terrible trail, we were about halfway round the loop and so we were doomed to finish it.  I think we'll go back on snowshoes at some point, or on skis to wander around all the camp roads. 

In the meantime, webmeadow is closing for the next two weeks as we go to PANAMA!  We are super excited to see some sun and warmth and birds and fishes.  And if a baby monkey somehow manages to find its way home with us... well, I won't be complaining.

(And just to prove that travelling is always an adventure, the airline just called us and moved our flight so early tomorrow morning that we have to leave tonight, instead of mid-day tomorrow.  Sweet.)

Our first hike of 2009 was up to Lonesome Lake. If you have been reading this blog as long as I have, then you may recall that last year's Lonesome Lake hike was absolutely exhausting, on account of having 18" of fresh snow to slog through. This year, however, we actually ditched the snowshoes about 1/4 of the way up because the trail was so well packed. It is a much easier hike without snowshoes (though I still contend that it is not the easy-peasy beginner hike that all the books make it out to be).

It was a beautiful day, cold and clear, so at the top we had a lovely view across the lake. You can't really tell from this photo, but by the time you get to the lake, you're on top of a mountain. So the cloud-covered peak in the background (Mt. Lafayette) is extra-tall. And being at a lake on top of a mountain is pretty cool.

Once again, the AT hut was open with a caretaker (who was in the process of making some sort of baked good while we munched on our snacks). It's pretty fun to have a mid-walk rest inside a nice warm-ish building, listening to NPR. From the radio, we learned that we were going to have a dismal winter storm later that day, so it was a good thing we chose to hike in the morning.

Meanwhile, back at the homestead, the ducks have come to terms with winter. If it is really cold, they stay indoors, otherwise they spend time hanging out on the snow. If it is actively snowing but not too windy/cold, then they camp out under the chicken tree (so named because, though you can't see it in this picture, those branches are all full of chickens). The geese, however, have not come to terms with winter. They don't understand, they don't like it, and they'll thank you not to mention it.