Rolling Dog Farm Blog

Well, it's not just Ella who gets to sleep in bed. Shirley L. in Oregon, who adopted wobbly Mink from us last year, just sent us this photo of the Schminkers with her husband James. Shirley says Mink sleeps between them at night, and she got out of bed on a recent morning to take the photo. Her email said, "First, Ella … now Mink."

We'd better stop posting these on the blog before our own animals wonder why they're not sleeping in our bed!

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Jennifer M. in Napa, California just sent us this video of blind-and-deaf Gabe rolling in their yard. Jennifer and her husband Paul adopted Gabe from us back in 2010, soon after Gabe had finished a lengthy period of cancer treatment requiring both surgery and weeks of radiation therapy. (Jennifer and Paul later adopted three-legged Ella, who you saw in a recent post asleep in Paul's arms.) 

When she emailed me this clip, Jennifer wrote, "Love this boy more than words can say! Finally got him on video!"  Some nice rolling followed by several contented snorts!

It was just three years ago when we found out in an MRI what kind of tumor we were dealing with in Gabe. Thanks to our donors, Gabe was able to get world-class medical treatment that truly saved his life. And to see how he's living now … wow.

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Weekly Winner and $1,000 for the Animals!

All of your faithful voting did it again and we just received another $1,000 check as a weekly winner in the Shelter Challenge — thank you so much!!!

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First, a quick "programming note": I will be taking a blog break next week in light of the Labor Day holiday and will resume posting the week of September 10th.

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I had posted a couple of months ago about our potato crop. Well, last weekend I started harvesting them, and wow, do we have potatoes. I took that photo with my cellphone on Sunday. I had harvested rows of Green Mountains (yellow) and Sangres (red) on Saturday; the potatoes in the photo are Salems I pulled up on Sunday. So far the Salems are the high yielders, producing about 50% more than the other two types. But I have many more rows, and types, to pull out of the ground again this coming weekend before I can hand out any ribbons!

We grew these without any chemicals — no fertilizers other than good old-fashioned manure, and no pesticides or herbicides. We controlled the major potato pest, the Colorado potato beetle, by handpicking the little devils. And there were a lot of them, even though we rotated this year's crop onto new ground that hadn't seen potatoes before. But the handpicking worked and the potatoes survived the beetles just fine.

Ever since reading in Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire several years ago how conventional potatoes are cultivated, we have only eaten organically grown potatoes. In a New York Times Magazine article that later became the basis for his chapter on potatoes in The Botany of Desire, Pollan recounted a conversation with a potato farmer named Danny Forsyth:

"I asked him to walk me through a season’s regimen. It typically begins early in the spring with a soil fumigant; to control nematodes, many potato farmers douse their fields with a chemical toxic enough to kill every trace of microbial life in the soil. Then, at planting, a systemic insecticide (like Thimet) is applied to the soil; this will be absorbed by the young seedlings and, for several weeks, will kill any insect that eats their leaves. After planting, Forsyth puts down an herbicide — Sencor or Eptam — to "clean" his field of all weeds. When the potato seedlings are six inches tall, an herbicide may be sprayed a second time to control weeds." 

But that's not all. The potatoes then received 10 applications of chemical fertilizers during the growing season, as well as 8 applications of a fungicide … followed by two applications of a chemical spray to control aphids. 

Pollan continued,

"…farmers like Danny Forsyth must spray their fields with some of the most toxic chemicals in use, including an organophosphate called Monitor.

'Monitor is a deadly chemical,' Forsyth said. 'I won’t go into a field for four or five days after it’s been sprayed — even to fix a broken pivot.' That is, he would sooner lose a whole [135-acre] circle to drought than expose himself or an employee to Monitor, which has been found to cause neurological damage."

You can see why we stopped eating conventional potatoes a long time ago! And yes, it's not just potatoes that get this kind of chemical drench, so we generally only eat organically raised food.

After pulling the potatoes from the ground, we let them "cure" for a bit and then put them in the root cellar. If the rest of the potato varieties yield like the Salems, our root cellar is going to be overflowing and we'll be looking for more places to store them!

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It doesn't matter how many Kuranda dog cots we have in the yards — if there's a good size hole in the ground, the dogs prefer it. And it doesn't matter what their disability is … they'd rather curl up in a hole. This is blind and deaf Spinner, who spends a lot of time these days in this deep hole right outside the front door. The cots are in the shade under the roof overhang, so it's not a question of one spot being cooler than the other — except the dirt itself can be cooler, or feel cooler, on a hot day. I took the photo above a few days ago, but this morning she was back in the hole, this time curled up tight in a ball and fitting entirely inside the hole!

So, while we have more than enough Kuranda cots, the one thing we don't seem to have enough of are holes in the ground. Which, judging from what's going in some of the yards around the house, is a situation the dogs seem to be resolving for themselves just fine.

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