A three-generation hunting season

A young doe came down the hill about a hundred yards away from us.

It was late Thanksgiving Day morning as I spotted the deer from my stand where my son Ross and I sat. He had just joined me a few minutes earlier.

"I wish that deer had some friends," Ross wryly remarked as we watched it nibble on some brush.

Suddenly I saw the doe's friend. An 8-point buck was following the same path. It stopped near the doe in some thick brush.

"Ross, it's a nice buck," I whispered.

I had already filled my buck tag on opening day when I shot a 10-pointer with a 15-inch spread. The same morning my dad, Bob Hardie, bagged a monster 10-pointer with tall, thick beams and an 18-inch spread. Ross had taken a doe two days earlier but was still looking for a buck. Ross, 22, had shot quite a few does in his eight years hunting but had yet to shoot a buck. Opportunities are limited because we don't kill the young bucks on our farm.

Here was his chance.

Ross drew up his rifle, took aim and fired. The doe took off but the buck stood. Ross had missed. The buck ran back up the hill from where it came and stopped behind some trees.

"Ross, he's still there," I said, having a better vantage point.

My son took aim again and fired. The buck ran off. Our hearts sank - at least mine did.

"Stop and look at the last place you saw him," I said. "We'll go down and look for blood."

We walked down the hill and started scouring the leaves, looking for telltale traces of red. Thankfully there was a slight crust of snow and ice that would help make the blood more visible. Ross went to the spot where he had last seen the buck and found some blood.

The trail was pretty consistent and we followed it up a hill, across four fences and an open field. Shortly after the last fence we found the buck. He had fallen into the creek bed, where he died. He had been shot through the neck.

It was a special moment between father and son, just as it was 30 years earlier when I shot my first buck from my father's stand.

Killing a buck didn't make my son a man. He's already a fine man. Killing a buck helped complete a hunting circle that goes back at least four generations.

Hunting teaches you that no matter whom you are or what you have accomplished in life, in the woods you're just another hunter huddled under a tree hoping for the big buck to cross your path. Hunting has taught me humility, the virtue of patience and a deep appreciation for creation, bundled with the value of tradition and family.

This was my 35th gun deer hunting season in Wisconsin. I've never missed a year since I turned 12 and was able to join the redcoat army in the woods. It's my dad's 61st season. He too has never missed a hunt, even in the early days when deer were scarce. It was quite unusual when my grandfather Keith Hardie shot a buck on our family farm in western Jackson County in the late 1940s. Grandpa died in 1994, but my son became the next generation of hunters when he joined us in 2002 at the age of 14.

No, it's not the thrill of the kill that draws me to hunting, but the time I've spent in the cold November woods sitting by my father or grandfather, sharing a bond that transcends the pulling of a trigger.

I know my son - and his grandfather - feels the same.

Sheep breeding season at the inn

(Colonel Fitzwilliam, left, and Mr. Darcy, right)

September 20th began the same as every other day. I sat in the first window seat of the library, drinking my morning tea as I watched the sheep. I saw one of the Scotty girls riding Fanny or Emma – I couldn’t tell who from that distance. I thought it a bit strange but never gave it another thought – until I went to water the sheep later that morning.
To my alarm I saw that Mr. Darcy was cavorting around the barnyard with the girls. He had broken through the fence where he, Mr. Bingley and our new Suffolk ram Colonel Fitzwilliam were pastured. I realized it was Mr. Darcy, not one of the Scotty girls, that was on top of the sheep I saw earlier that morning.
I was extremely displeased because he had bred one of the Suffolk girls who were intended to be a part of the Colonel’s harem. I had been looking forward to getting some nice Suffolk lambs this coming year from the Colonel and what should have been his girls.
Mr. Darcy is a purebred registered Scottish Blackface ram and he has his own flock of that same breed to mate with. He has no business interfering with the Suffolk girls. I managed to get most of the ewes into the barn and chased Darcy into the pasture where I locked him out.
I found Chris’s father and Josh, our son-in-law, who were able to help fix the fence and get Mr. Darcy back where he belonged. Through the fence he continued to sniff anyone who would approach. Some of the ewes were definitely in heat and he was very determined to get to them. I feared some of the girls would be so obliging as to smash their behinds right up against the fence to help facilitate the illegitimate breeding.
The rams were all moved to the next paddock back to put some distance between them and the ewes.
Many sheep farmers would be breeding sheep at this time – we did last year. But this year we were deliberately delaying, hoping for our lambing season to begin mid-March, after the birth of our first grandchild who is thought to be due around March 3.
I don’t want to be busy playing midwife to sheep giving birth when the baby is arriving. Due to the unfortunate coupling I witnessed, I know at least one lamb is due on February 15.
We managed to keep the ewes safely separated from the rams for three and one-half more weeks. We separated the two flocks, placing the Suffolks in the lower pasture and the Scotties in the upper pasture. Then the appropriate ram was led to each pasture. The Colonel was fitted with a marking harness with a red grease paint type crayon. Whenever he breeds a ewe her backside is marked with the crayon, which eventually washes off. Each day we look for a new red butt, making note of it. The lambs are due five months later.
Last year, our old black ram bred Kitty less than one minute after being led into the girls’ pasture. A new crayon really colors the ewe well. Kitty’s whole backside was covered by the red marker. I had to laugh the next morning when I was preparing breakfast and an anxious guest told me over the café doors that he had just come back from a walk on our creek side trail – and he was afraid one of our sheep had been attacked! He thought her whole backside looked as if it were covered in blood!
I smiled as I confirmed to him that, yes, Kitty has been aggressively attacked yesterday – but not by a coyote. It was the ram. (I think he was a little embarrassed when I explained it all.)
Colonel Fitzwilliam was fitted with the harness and Mr. Darcy’s chest was manually chalked up with the crayon because we didn’t have a pin to hold the crayon for the other harness. Unfortunately he is too wild to catch every other day to mark him.
A sheep’s estrus cycle is around every 14 to 17 days. Three weeks in and our two best Suffolks – Kitty and her daughter Fanny – have not been marked, so I’m left with the awful suspicion that Mr. Darcy has impregnated both of them and the offspring of our two prize ewes will be crossbred mutts.
The colonel is only seven or eight months old so it is his first season working as a stud ram. We only have eight Suffolks he has to service. He has a gentle disposition with the ewes, nickering as he sweet talks them into complying with the call of nature. His father was of a gentle disposition which is a big part of why I bought him, hoping he would inherit his amiable demeanor.
Mr. Darcy, on the other hand, is much different. Unlike his namesake, he is no gentleman. When finally released into the Scottie girls’ pasture, he paced up and down the fence dividing the two pastures, pawing and snorting like a Brahma bull. He panted heavily like a rabid dog with his mouth open, his tongue hanging out. His idea of courtship with Marianne was to bash her violently into submission and have his way with her.
The guests are intrigued and fascinated with the goings-on in the barnyard and delight in counting red butts. The first five ewes (after the Valentine lambs) are due around March 9 or 10. Twin lambs are usually up to five days earlier.
Last weekend our daughter Jessica and her husband Josh visited. They brought a DVD copy of their baby’s sonogram, which was neat to be able to watch! (They’re so much clearer than when we were expecting Jessica.) And, oh yeah, it’s likely now that the baby could arrive around March 7 – just in time for lambing season!

The USDA (and one of their associates at the state health department) have egg on their faces

Last month Brambleberry B&B was featured in the Wisconsin Bed and Breakfast Association's electronic monthly newsletter called Ezine. The topic was B&Bs that serve slow and organic foods -- and people were paying attention -- in particular, an overzealous employee at the health department in Madison.
This woman was ALARMED to see that we serve our own farm fresh eggs to guests. (So do most other farm B&Bs, which is what guests want and expect from us.) She used a microscope to further examine our web site and contacted our local restaurant and B&B inspector to interrogate her. She was forced to call us and ask all the same questions she asked at our routine inspection a few months ago. The Madison inspector pointed out that it is ILLEGAL to serve anything other than USDA inspected eggs to guests. How ridiculous is that!!! Ironically, I can legally sell up to $5,000 worth of those same farm fresh eggs without a permit. Some guests suggested I sell them each an egg and they could have me cook it for them. The inspector also became concerned when she saw we were serving our own high-quality, natural, homegrown pork (which is slaughtered in a state-inspected plant), she perused our dinner menu and saw there was turkey on it! And chicken! (Yes, those are acquired from the grocery store, and are placed in an ice-filled cooler for the trip home.)
We simply don't have the volume of business (or the money) doing our weekend dinners to warrant hiring an expensive restaurant supply company to deliver the small amounts of food needed for a weekend dinner party.
"I see you have sheep." Yes, we do. But I don't serve lamb to our guests. I don't care for sheep meat myself, so I think it's not possible for me to prepare it to someone elses's liking either. And I love my sheep. They are all pets, but I do sell their male offspring (which I don't name) for other people to eat if they so choose. If I did have my own lambs slaughtered, it would be in a state-inspected plant. In the future we will do the same with our beef.
Fortunately, they're not concerned with our fruit and vegetables -- yet.
In short, they're mostly concerned that our eggs are the only thing on our menu that aren't "inspected and approved" by someone from the USDA wearing a white lab coat. But what meaning do those words have anyway? Absolutely none!
My local inspector said she may be calling us the following week to say the inspector in Madison won't allow us to use our own eggs. That was weeks ago, and we still haven't heard anything in light of the recent contaminated egg fiasco/recall going on involving -- you guessed it -- "USDA inspected and approved eggs."
My farm-fresh eggs are not inspected by USDA inspectors. Guess what? Neither are MOST of the eggs that carry that very label. Only occasionally does an inspector visit a plant. According to an Aug. 19 report on the CBS Evening News "Most eggs growers routinely inspect themselves."!!!
According to Mark Kastel of the Cornucopia Institute (a farm policy research group) 95 percent of all laying hens in the U.S. are owned by only 13 corporations. Of them, 192 companies have more than 75,000 birds in one facility! That's potentially a serious problem for everyone who eats USDA so-called inspected eggs. Chickens defecate from the same vent eggs roll out of. Sick birds and lots of chicken poop piling up lead to salmonella poisoning. When several thousand birds are kept in contained, cramped quarters as they are in the commercial egg-laying and chicken-slaughtering industries, animals are going to get sick and spread germs. And chicken poop is going to pile up fast. Some USDA commercial growers are not all that concerned about sanitation either.
We've got about 30 to 35 chickens here. Only about 20 of them lay eggs anymore. The rest are too old, and they are Chris's mother's pets. We do wash, sterilize and store our eggs per USDA standards. (I suppose I could don the white lab coat I still have from my days spent as a skin care specialist and a hair stylist when I do it.) Our eggs are safer and cleaner than what you can buy in the store -- no question about it. They are never undercooked either.
It's too bad an anal retentive inspector in Madison wants to stop us from doing what we do well -- giving our guests a pleasurable experience while enjoying pesticide free, preservative free, organic, safe, wholesome, healthy, REAL food grown here on site. It's one of the things guests most love about our B&B.
So let's get cracking people. Speak up! Don't let these jerks tell you what you can't eat.

A bumper crop of blackberries

Our bed and breakfast is named after brambleberries, which is what the Scottish call blackberries or any berries with briars.

Not that we’re superstitious or anything, but in summer of 2007 which was our first year of business, there was a huge blackberry crop failure. We couldn’t help wonder if that was an omen.

This year, we’re happy to report, that we’ve never seen a more prolific crop of rubus allegheniensis, otherwise known as the blackberries. We’ve had lots of rain this season, resulting in plenty of moisture for the wild crop. And like every other crop this year, the season started about two weeks ahead of schedule and as of this writing, Aug. 1, we guess the crop has already peaked, but there are a few weeks of picking left.

This prolific plant covers our hardwood forests; particularly where livestock aren't as prevalent and where timber logging has left openings. We harvest the berries to eat fresh, make jams and also wines. We have a port-style blackberry wine that was bottled earlier this spring that shows exceptional promise.

Here are some recollections from Chris about blackberry picking:

The challenge in hunting blackberries comes not as much from the chase but in conquering the tangled mass of thorns and briars in the quest to find the juicy, purplish-black berries. And best of all, they're absolutely free.

Summers on the farm are always a busy time, with plenty of hay to harvest and other chores to be completed. But growing up here, we always found time for at least a day or two of serious blackberry picking, usually sandwiched between the second and third cuttings of hay.

The premium berry patch when I was a kid some 35 years ago was on a homestead plot owned by my great aunt and uncle. Much of the 160 acres was woodland that was overrun by blackberries, but the premium patch was on the property's border, accessible only by an overgrown logging road through the woods.

We had an old Jeep that could make the journey, but we also had a '55 Ford or something in that vintage. All I remember was big tail fins, a musty interior, no exhaust and no brakes. We rode in style.

Supposedly blackberry vines can live for 25 years or more. This patch had towering vines, many that were at least an inch thick. It was a dense thicket of both pain and pleasure, as one had to battle the sharp briars in order to get at the berries, which were the size of my thumb.

Dressed in thick jeans and long-sleeved flannel shirts and armed with empty ice cream pails, we tromped into the patch to do battle. As a young kid I ate way more berries than what went into the bottom of the pail, as was evidenced by the stain of purple around my mouth.

My grandfather Keith made a harness out of twine that put his berry bucket about chest high, freeing up both hands to pick. Grandpa was a berry picking machine and would return often to the car, emptying his pail into the smaller quart-size berry baskets, stopping long enough for a swig of water before heading back into the patch.

By that time I had long grown tired of berry picking and would take a nap in the car or sit under a nearby shade tree. The time would pass painfully slow, as it always does when you're young, and I'd wait as patiently as I could for the rest of the crew to finish for the day. How I long for those long days now when the seasons and the years seem to pass too quickly.

Eventually the pails would be full or arms and fingers would be too sore or scratched to continue and we'd call it a day. The patch never seemed empty though and sometimes we'd return a couple of days later to harvest more of the berries, as they sweetened under the hot summer sun.

There are still berries on that farm, but the patch has become a memory, like many of the pickers I loved so well. Every blackberry season brings back fond memories of those pickers, the old Ford and what seemed like simpler times.

Sherry has made almost daily trips in to the woods to pick berries, which are served fresh to our guests. The time for eating fresh berries is waning, but we’ll look forward to blackberry jam or a sip of blackberry wine in the cold of the winter to remind us of the summer days in the berry patch.

We hope this year’s bountiful blackberry harvest is a sign of good times to come!

Harvest Dinners at Brambleberry

We’ve known about Jim Denevan and his organization “Outstanding in the Field” for a few years now. We applaud their efforts of bringing people together to really connect with their food source.
For about $200 a person, you can ride their bus to one of their gourmet dinners which are held at various farms or gardens across the country. The Outstanding in the Field crew works together to help prepare the sites for banquets which feature a combination of locally sourced foods as well as organic produce grown at the site.
Sometimes the banquet table is set up literally feet from the origin of the feast. Local chefs are brought in to create gastronomic delights with the seasonal, local foods. Sometimes local wines are offered to pair with the entrees.
We do something similar at Brambleberry B&B. Every Saturday evening July through November we offer special Harvest Dinners for our guests. The majority and very often all of the meat, organic vegetables, eggs, herbs and fruits are grown right here on our farm. And it’s a lot less than $200 a person!
Our dinners are only $30 to $40 – a huge bargain for fresh, healthy organic meals with zero miles (or almost zero) on it.

These four-course dinners are served in our dining room – not our garden though, because we only have a crew of two to harvest, set up, cook and serve (and farms do have insects outdoors!) But we’re always happy to offer farm and garden tours, so you can visit and touch your food source if you want to. You can also arrange to buy organic, gourmet grass fed lamb from us. In the future, we’re planning to sell our homegrown pork and maybe even beef to the public as well.
Our dinners this year are scheduled by what we think will be ripening in the gardens at that time. Next year we’ll have a better idea when things will be ready and expect to offer a bit more variety week-to-week.
Guests don’t have to partake of our harvest dinners to experience Brambleberry’s fresh, homegrown organic produce and other products. Everyday our delicious, generous breakfasts incorporate eggs, pork, jams, vegetables used in frittatas and fruit as starters. We serve maple syrup made right here on the farm for as long as our supply lasts. Each evening, anyone who wants to can sample our fruity homemade wines.
We’ve even got two beautiful nature walks for guests to enjoy – something not many B&Bs can offer.
Brambleberry is the first and only bed and breakfast in Wisconsin to offer homegrown harvest dinners on a regular basis. We’re leading the way, changing how Wisconsin eats. Buy local. Support local agriculture. It’s good for your health and our beautiful planet.
So if you’d like to experience one of our harvest dinners, you’ll have to stay here. Our licensed restaurant serves B&B guests only. We simply don’t have the time to serve the general public in addition to our guests. But one couple can have dinner, stay the night and have a wonderful breakfast for about $150 to $200 per couple, not per person, which is still far less than Outstanding in the Field charges for one person’s dinner!

The weather has been perfect for making hay.
If you have animals to keep year-round, you need to feed them in the winter. Hence the need for hay.
Chris and his Dad put up more than 800 bales so far, which is about 3/4ths of what we estimate we will need to feed the sheep when the pastures are dormant.
Hot weather that drives most people inside to air conditioning is perfect weather for drying hay. There always seems to be a direct correlation between the hottest days of the summer and the amount of hay that needs to be baled.
Sometimes when people complain about the heat, I (Chris) ask them if they've ever worked in a hay mow when it's 95 degrees outside. I usually get a strange glance and people quickly shift the topic of conversation.
Mow, which rhymes with cow, is the place in the barn where the hay is stored. When you're getting close to the top of a metal roof with very little air movement, 95 degrees outside seems refreshing.
In the old days - for me, that's early 1970s - baling hay used to require one person driving the tractor and one or two people riding on the hay wagon to stack the bales as they came out of the baler. We used iron hooks to grab the bales and stack them. Sherry also grew up on a farm and had to stack bales or pick up them in the fields before putting them in the barn.
I still have a scar on the top of my head from the day when the load shifted and my brother's bale hook found my skull instead of a bale. There is speculation the injury went far deeper, which explains why I became a journalist.
We became a more modern farm in the mid-1970s when we got a kick-baler, which fired the bales into the wagon. Most farmers today use big round balers, requiring heavy equipment to move around the bales.
On a good day we'd put up about 1,200 to 1,500 bales of hay. My cousins sometimes helped out.
In the old days between loads my brother, cousins and I would head to the milk house and consume copious amounts of water, sticking our heads under the faucet to cool off. We'd sprawl out on our makeshift furniture - bags of feed - and contemplate how many more loads we'd have to do that day and argue about whose turn it was to wash up the milking equipment or who had to stick around to help milk the cows while others went swimming in the creek.
Baling also is a chance to cleanse my pores and stack hay bales rather than pushing around paperwork. It also gives me a sense of satisfaction that although summer has officially not yet started, we're already on track to feed our animals this winter.

Mowing and groaning

One of the challenges of having a country property is keeping the grass mown. That’s sometimes much easier said than done when the areas we mow have been reclaimed from patches of weeds or former pastures.
We have several acres of lawn, pasture and hiking trails that we mow. At first we did it all with a walk-behind mower until Chris broke down three years ago and purchased a riding mower. That made the job go much faster and also expanded our mowing area. But there are still plenty of places that the riding mower can’t go and you still need the smaller mowers for trimming.
This spring the mowing season started early because of the warm and wet weather that was perfect for grass growing. Unfortunately the mowers weren’t ready for the season. Over the years we have accumulated quite a collection of walk-behind mowers – some ours, some belong to Chris’s parents – and they have gradually broken down. Last year we had 1.5 of them running. The 0.5 comes from one of them sometimes starting and sometimes not.
We were down to a shaky 1 when the 0.5 did not start at all several weeks ago. The 1 started and we got most of the lawn mowed before it quit. Unfortunately the grass that was starting to get a foot long was still growing.
What about the riding mower, you might ask? Good question. The answer is long, but here’s the condensed version. Last year Chris ran over a small steel fence post with the riding mower. The post wrapped around the blade. A trip to the shed and the use of a cutting disc freed the post and miraculously, the mower still worked. Sort of.
This spring when it came time to sharpen the blades, Chris realized that the only thing holding one of the blades on was a bolt. The mandrel that the blade fits over was completely rounded off – the result of the fence post accident.
Chris purchased an extended warranty when he bought the mower, but of course the part that broke “was not covered.” The labor to fix it would be covered, but it would take three weeks before an appointment could be scheduled.
Watching grass grow might be more interesting than listening to Chris’s parts tale of woe, but it took nearly four weeks and five orders of parts before the mower was fixed. Of course if he had listened to Sherry and had a “professional” repair the mower in the first place, the repair probably would have been done earlier but that’s not how do-it-yourself hobby farmers operate.
Meanwhile, the grass was so long Chris had to use a pasture mower pulled behind a tractor to mow some of it.
The other five mowers were taken to the repair shop to be fixed. Our plan is to have lots of back-up mowers to get us through the mowing season. We’ve stimulated the parts economy plenty. It’s time to cut grass. Even if we have to get out the scythe!

The war against quackgrass

We recently received some much-needed spring rainfall, so we decided to hit our fruit garden for some weeding. The moist soil makes the dreaded task of pulling weeds a lot easier. Sherry tackled our strawberry patch and Chris headed to the raspberry patch.

Actually, we have two raspberry patches. One is the established patch and the other is a new patch we started last year from some transplants. The second patch was started below our vegetable garden in what used to be cow pasture.

The problem is it "got away" from us last year and there was a thick mat of quackgrass growing between the rows. It was already a foot high.

Unfortunately, Chris did not do his research before deciding that some mechanical help was the way to take out the quackgrass. The University of Minnesota Extension in a pamphlet called "Controlling Quackgrass in Gardens" says, in bold print: "Never use a rototiller where quackgrass is growing." Why? Because it amounts to propagating thousands of new plants from the chopped-up rhizomes."

Rhizomes are what makes quackgrass such a nasty and invasive weed. Once a quackgrass plant goes to seed, it produces about 25 seeds which remain viable for up to five years in the soil, according to the UM extension.

Each plant then develops rhizomes with a node every inch or so. Each node is capable of producing a plant. And a plant is capable of producing 300 feet of rhizomes.

That is really scary. The only thing that multiplies faster than quackgrass is the promises of politicians during an election year. The unfortunate thing is you can count on quackgrass.

Our only options now are to use a herbicide, which would also take out the raspberries (and we strive to be chemical-free in our gardens), pull each plant up by hand and make sure we get each rhizome, heavily mulch (although rhizomes will push up through asphalt pavement they are so tough) or give up.

We're not ready to give up just yet. Perhaps there's some marketing opportunity here and we can find some value in selling quackgrass rhizomes. Perhaps we can offer any guests from Northern Africa some free rhizomes to take home to plant. There's lots of room to green things up in the Sahara Dessert, don't you think?

(University of Minnesota Extension photo)

Where there's smoke, there's fire

This will put a skip into your heart -- the day that you have a new gas stove installed in your kitchen: You find the fire department at your house when you come home from work.
That's exactly what happened last week. We had just finished installation of our new commercial stove -- a beauty (or monstrosity depending on how you look at it) with 12 burners and two ovens. (More about the commercial kitchen coming later ... that's great news!) It required six men to move it inside and a special gas line just to operate it. 350,000 BTUs -- that's a lot of fire!
After the installation, Chris went to work and Sherry started to acclimate herself to the gas fumes from 14 pilot lights (it has two ovens!). It had been about 25 years since Sherry had cooked on gas and she has a slight fear of it, imagining explosions and fires. Of course that's also because Chris bought the cheapest gas stove possible when we were first married, which hardly compares to the industrial strength restaurant model we have now.
Sherry was trying out the oven for the first time making a pizza. One of the recruits that we persuaded to help move the stove was coming over for some wine tasting. She happened to glance out the kitchen window to see Chris's 72-year-old parents dashing across the lawn trying to drag garden hoses. Upon looking again Sherry saw the large wood pile beside our outdoor wood-burning furnace was an inferno. Flames were lapping at the nearby chicken coop. She dropped everything to run out and help. (The oven had not been turned on yet.)
Sherry turned on our garden hose from the house and the folks ran a hose from the barn. Dad sprayed the fire with one hose while Sherry and Mom formed an emergency bucket brigade, as the other hose was a little short. After 10 minutes of battling the fire, which was fanned by gusty winds, Dad finally came to the conclusion that professional help was required.
"Will someone please call the fire department!"
Sherry ran into the house to dial 9-1-1. She got a three-toned beep and the message. "Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please try again." A second try to 9-1-1 went through. The Melrose Fire Department arrived within 15 minutes and other trucks followed.
The firefighters knocked the fire down with water and chemicals while Dad continued the trickle operation from the garden hose. The winds and the fire had devoured the stack of wood but fortunately roast chicken was not on the menu. The difficulty in fighting the fire was getting to the coals underneath the pile. Dad got a tractor with a loader and leveled the pile, spreading it out so the coals could be doused.
About the time things starting winding down, Chris came around the corner at the beginning of our road about one mile from home and saw a sign "Emergency vehicles ahead."
"Don't tell me it's the stove," Chris thought, immediately putting his foot into the accelerator. "Is our house gone?"
Chris came around the final corner to see four fire trucks and a bunch of smoke -- but our house was still standing. Our neighbor arrived soon after for our appointed wine tasting.
Apparently a spark from the firebox of the furnace had blown into the wood pile. The gusty winds fanned the spark and created a vortex of flames as the pile was stacked in a pyramid fashion.
Other than causing severe damage to next winter's wood supply, no harm was done. We were lucky the fire didn't spread to the chicken house or the barn.
By the way, the new stove works fine!

Maple syrup season a sour one

The maple syrup season has ended and will go down as one of the worst in recent memory.
That's the word I'm receiving from maple syrup producers around the state who know a lot more about the seasonal crop than I do.
This was the first year that my wife Sherry and I collected sap and made syrup. Our total for the year was about a dozen or so pints, so we've got enough for our own use and to serve to our bed and breakfast guests, but the sap collection was very slow.
Blame that on the weather. The unusually warm March was wonderful to put winter behind us, but the warm nights was not conducive to sap flow.
That's just the opposite of last year, which was one of the best seasons ever for Wisconsin syrup.
Gretchen Grape, the executive director of the Wisconsin Maple Syrup Producers Association, told me the people who used tubing did better as they suck the sap out of the trees. Those who use collection containers -- like us -- didn't do as well.
However the syrup we did get -- the result of hours of cooking on an old wood-burning stove in a temporary sugar shack that I set up outside -- tasted wonderful. Sherry finished the sap off on the kitchen stove and it had a rich, butterscotch taste.
I can hardly wait to sit down to a plate of sourdough pancakes and enjoy the fruits of our labor.