DryStoneGarden

Anyone want to buy some beef? The two cows that wander our property have outgrown the space and are heading to the butcher as soon as we have enough orders for the meat. It’s time. They’re full size, they’ve eaten pretty much everything there is to eat on the property, and recently they learned how to break through the fence to get to our neighbor’s literally greener pastures. I’ve had to track them down and drive them back onto our property half a dozen times in the past month. So as soon as the meat is spoken for, they’re going off to the abattoir.

Our landlord has found takers for quite a bit of it but not all. Two full-sized cows is a lot of meat. Anita and I will take some, though it will be strange to eat animals we’ve known by name. I don’t really want to, but I feel like I have to eat them on principal, either embrace the reality of meat or become vegetarian. We’ve bought shares of free-range, grassfed cows like this in the past. The flavor was good, but it was leaner than supermarket beef and we found we needed to cook all of the cuts like game, almost always braising even when that was not the traditional way to cook the cut. The ground beef made great burgers. Our landlord wants five dollars per pound. I’m not sure how the logistics would work but anyone interested should comment or email me at ryan at buenoluna dot com and we can figure it out.

Anita and I have been watercoloring on most Sundays since March. A couple times we went up to a reservoir above snow line, once we went to a bridge near our house, a couple times on sunny days we stayed at home and painted the landscape here. We’re at a nice elevation, a little below the point where the oaks give way to the pines, and it has felt like we’re perched on the edge of springtime. We can have winter scenes if we want, or sunny green landscapes if that’s our mood.

These two were painted a week apart and less than ten miles as the crow flies. It’s a bigger contrast than I see when I drive a hundred miles to the Bay Area. I’m not sure they belong side by side, but that’s what it’s been like around here. Straddling the line between winter and spring.

I haven’t posted since the turn of the year, but I took my first garden photos last week, and I’ll probably do some spring garden posts soon.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2018 at 7:20 am and is filed under sketchbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.