This year’s pinto bean field..almost weeded! Almost!
I don’t have much time left…the feelers are starting to grow shut!
That’s okay…I’m tired of weeding that huge field.
The ears are starting to form now…within each one is a tiny kernel of corn!
Summer…MY TIME!
Your friend on a western Colorado farm
Linda
Joe Cooper sent me a series of lightening photos he took with his IPhone and
Instructions on how to ‘capture lightning’ with your smartphone.
Hi Linda.
I use an iPhone, and this is what works for me.
Take a video of the thunderstorms, that way you’ll surely catch a good bolt of lightning at some point.
Then play that back on your phone. Pause it when you see a good bolt. There should be a scroll bar of your video at the bottom of your screen.
You can move that video forward and back frame by frame by touching the scrollbar of the video at the bottom. And while it is staying in pause mode, you might be able to find a good shot of a lightning bolt.
Once you have a good frame of what you would like for a picture, touch the screen again, but off to the side, so it does not come out of pause mode. This should remove the menus and show only the picture on the screen.
Then by pressing the home– then the power button — in quick, but not hurried fashion, it takes a screenshot picture.
After reading your post the other day I thought about it in relation to a thunderstorm that I had shot on video just a few days before. So I tried it, and it works.
The light at the bottom is the street light in front of our neighbors house.
This was a thunderhead of a storm at least 20 miles to the south of us, going like crazy. It was a clear sky above us. And there was not a sound coming from all the lightning!
Hope all is well, and good to hear Boomer is well.
Joe
Then in a couple of days he wrote:
“Staying downtown Chicago tonight, at friend of my wife’s. Caught this one.
Joe
How cool this all is! Thanks, Joe! Now those of us who have IPhones, can maybe get some good shots of lightening.
I think I’m going to try this on my regular camera to see if it might work the same way. One never knows!
Your friend on a western Colorado farm
Linda
The corn is starting to tassel out…
And baby ears of corn starting to form
The pinto beans are shooting feelers (last year’s photo–I lost this years somehow—I’ve been weeding the 16 acres early morning and late evening. Once the rows grow shut anything nasty growing out there—corn, cockleburs, ragweed, Pigweed, yellow sticker weed, scotch thistle….gets to grow. Not a good thing, but how it is.
My yard is doing
Great! The new railroad ties beds are softening up and looking ever so much better
The air smells lush and rich– full of sweetness
Summer — I can’t ask for anything more!
Your friend on a western Colorado farm,
Linda
Yesterday afternoon a slight cooling rain arrived
The air, the moisture…the whole experience was just lovely. I sat outside and watched the shower dampen the earth.
It was bliss.
Later that evening (Wednesday) around 9:30 an electrical storm arrived on the western rim of our world…Lightning flickered and slashed across the Uncompahgre (Un-come-pah-gray…accent on the pah) Plateau. Tiny booms of thunder rolled across the forest and into the canyons.
As time wore on, I thought possibly the hammer of this amazing electric storm would continue across the Plateau missing us.
By 11:30 the Crack of thunder had reached the Roubioux Canyon, which lays right below our mesa.
Sheet lightning split the clouds, while cloud to ground jagged lightning splintered the heaping massive clouds.
Thunder and lightening overwhelmed our part of the earth, causing our great trees to tremble in fear. (Boomer and both cats were so close to me I couldn’t walk. When I went outside to try to take photos they looked at me like I was crazy and stayed inside. 🙂 )
Try as I might I could NOT get a good photo of lightning! The great sheets of shimmering sheet lightning did not turn out very well either. The sky to ground lightning (although very bright and overwhelming) turned into a blur on the photo.
Gradually the thunder, the lightening, and what rain there might have been, moved on…heading toward the east.
Leaving all of us a little breathless.
Your friend on a western Colorado farm,
Linda
(ALL PHOTOS ARE FROM LAST YEAR–BUT THEY REPRESENT JUST WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE THIS YEAR!)
Our neighbors have started harvesting the sweet corn! Mountain Fresh is grown close to us on our side of California Mesa.
Olathe Sweet Sweet Corn is grown on the other side of California Mesa in the Olathe area.
Either way…our area’s delicious sweet corn is heading to a Kroger/Wal-Mart/or Safeway near you, even as I write!
And NO neither one of these sweet corns (nor any sweet corn) is genetically modified!
They are hybrids! Glyphosate will kill the sweet corn plants.
Hope you enjoy some and when you do…know the ears were harvested some place here on a farm in western Colorado!
Your friend on a western Colorado farm,
Linda
Last night was beautiful after a day full of heat and humidity
We sat water late. Very late, as the sun sank orange and blue in the west.
It was way past last light when we got back into the yard
Later, in the darkest hour when the shadow travelers tread the earth — Boomer and I went for a wee walk-about…Mindy didn’t know we were walking, she was on the hunt
We came upon a beautiful little kit fox hunting by itself, an owl hooting in the willow tree.
The night world trembling with small noises, which seem loud.
The wind picked up a couple of last years old corn leaves; flung them into the air… a tiny devil twister making the night air swirl…
A wee night walk… shadowed grass, starlit skies, night creatures, plus Boomer and I.
From my heart to your world,
Linda
When the wind was gentle
The sun blazed the western clouds, as it rose to warm the air
The screaming for FOOD! FOOD! FOOD!
Seemed to lessen
A stillness emerged from the little mud nest right over the back porch light
A group three of the little Barn Swallows raised themselves up; with two lifting their wings and ‘flew away’. The parents singing notes of encouragement and excitement.
All day they practiced. By evening they were gone.
Then there were only two screaming mouths…just two. But two is manageable for a spell.
I’m sure one day the parents will say, in a very gentle way: “Go now, little one…make your way in the world”.
We will wait expectantly for the next batch of little birds to go from egg to fledgling before the summer is gone.
Your friend on a western Colorado farm,
Linda
It is high summer the sky is a clear blue, the heat is elevated, afternoon thunder storms roll in cooling us down; the humidity causing us pant in desperation
Yet the summer has been good…all the hay is sold; first and second cuttings.
Blade helped…nice for him and for us!
The corn is starting to tassel out!
The pinto beans are growing right along…
The last cultivation of all crops is over for the rest of the year! 🙂
High Summer…the best part of the year.
Come winter I will be assailed by memories
Of these innocent heat filled days.
Come winter…
….I won’t think of that bleak time ahead. Instead I will enjoy this spot in time.
Your friend on a western Colorado farm,
Linda
A large portion of my day is spent on a ditch bank….somewhere, someplace, here on the farm
Morning, noon, evening…the earth, the sky, the water—moisture in the air..rain landing softly on the fields rich with good earth and lush plants
The sun captures so brilliantly the clift on the Uncompahgre Plateau where the Plateau starts to change and slope toward Grand Junction. It’s close to this cleft where a person can descend into Gateway, Colorado
Lately the air has been restless; shifting, rising, flowing–heavy with moisture
Sometimes the sun is suspended in the western sky…blazing the horizon into a dazzling display of red, orange and yellow
I have no true favorite time of the sky…I love the luminous eastern sky’s violet when the final stars are gone. The early sun turning from violet to pink then gold and
finally a robin’s egg blue
And the night-time full of the moon or the stars so brilliant it’s like being surrounded by diamonds
I (sometimes) think our lives have seasons…times when nothing seems to be happening…but, if we look close…there are many changes going on… we just forget to see them.
From my heart to your world,
Linda
We set the last set of water under the treat of an approaching rain storm
The wind whipped a series of fast moving showers all around us throughout the Uncompahgre (Un-come-pah-gray—accent on the pah) Plateau; along the canyons between us and Grand Junction–the Roubidoux, Esclante, Dominguez Canyons, then soaking the desert separating Delta from Grand Junction.
Stunningly beautiful fast moving rain!
At one point the late sun broke through just long enough to illuminate some of the rain drops south of us to look like a faint rainbow!
I’m not picky. I’ll take anything that looks like a rainbow, even for a few moments in time.
Then as nighttime arrived lightning whipped the Plateau, wind beat our area, and thunder hammered the heavens way over there on the Uncompaghre.
Boomer and both cats came in, to lay as close to me as possible.
Lightening slithered along the canyons and gullies on the Plateau, with distant drumbeats of thunder sounding loud [here]. It must have sounded like the roll call of the end of the world up there on the Uncompahgre.
Although rain seethed around us the skies only sprinkled on us—not even turning the ground to mud…just damp.
This morning we woke to rinsed skies, cooler temperatures, with thick gray clouds hanging in bunches, waiting to mush together at some future point in time.
They say by Friday this flurry of small intense storms will be gone from our area; the heat and sun will return.
These little reprieves from fierce sun and heat are good for the soul. (Just like warm/spring-like days in the middle of winter).
Your friend on a western Colorado farm,
Linda
Life on a Colorado Farm 