Took Merlin out for a soap delivery this week, a nice walk down the mountain road to a neighbors estate. I decided to walk with him, not ride, for the trip down the road. Merlin is getting older, grayer, but still game for some riding here and there. He is in good health in general with good feet, but I can sense our time as regular riding partners getting thinner. Once we arrived up at the home we had set out for I unloaded the 20 bars of soap—packaged well and safe in Merli

Good morning from Cold Antler Farm! It's hot, dry, and feels like a true ending of summer around here. Days are hot, sunlight is tired, and the garden is booming! The rains that made July pass like a foggy nap have subsided, and the apples are already ripe and falling from the trees. We've been canning, freezing, and harvesting from the garden daily. Apples collected for pie filling and sauce, sometimes given as a treat to the livestock. The grass is green and the stream stil

It's Fair Season. We've chosen not to attend any of our local fairs because it doesn't feel safe funneling thousands of people together in tight quarters with variants surging all over the rural US. I will miss walking among show cows and funnel cakes this weekend. I love the fair, and seeing everything from 4-H livestock shows to crafts to eating food fried 8 different ways. Sigh. Only half of Washington County is vaccinated and I doubt at this point those numbers will rise.

Hello, and apologies for interrupting your Internet time, but I have this steer named Ronaldo who needs to be adopted. He is very sweet, kinda lazy, but an easy keeper. He comes with some hay and apples for the journey to his new home. Adoption fee: $45 suggested but any fee accepted! Message to begin paperwork!

I often find myself remembering what true wealth is. It isn't, and never has been, what is in my bank account. Money is a tool I use to remain in the life I hold so dear, and besides paying bills and upgrading my backpacking kit, I don't really care to have it. You can't eat money. It only holds the import society and the federal reserve attach to it. But behold this! Behold a plate of roasted chicken and baked vegetables! This entire meal came from the farm and my eyes are a

This past weekend Shannon and I drove the 4.5 hours south to my hometown in Pennsylvania for my mom's 70th birthday dinner. I haven't been back to my hometown, or my parent's home, in over a decade. It's because of complicated reasons you can learn more about in my next book, but to summarize: family drama, politics, anxiety, and fear. Those four things can destroy a family, or in our case, strain it to the point of nearly cutting off a limb. This past weekend in PA was a big

Woke up to a very warm day and a very sluggish farm. I am not taking about the the animals and us, I mean the very ground we walk across. The grass looks tired, starting to brown from a week without the torrential rain it was used to. The trees' leaves look tired, less bright and starting to become brittle in your hands. You can take a green leaf off a maple or apple tree right now and break it between your fingers like a cracker. The light is tired, looking less like the lou

Good afternoon from a very hot and sticky day here in upstate New York. There’s a heat advisory and all of the animals are hunkering down. This is a nice change of pace from yesterday. It wasn’t as hot, but it did involve some farm drama! While working on some illustrations, I looked outside the glass doors on the side of the house and watched five pigs trot by across the grass. Shannon was in the kitchen making a large pot of vegetable-based pasta sauces from the garden. She

It is an honor to design logos for farmers and small businesses. The one shared here is fairly recent, made using a combination of vintage illustrations and elements from several sources, formed together to create a new logo that looks old! I am so glad to do this, and to continue doing it for the folks who want to help keep Cold Antler going strong! Over the years I have made this part of my daily work to help pay the hay, feed, and home bills. Right now I am soliciting for

In case you were wondering, onion flowers smell like onions.

The other day I stepped into the shower, which is the only way to properly clean yourself around here. The farm doesn’t have an indoor or outdoor tub. Our master bath ("master" because it is the only bathroom) is one toilet that needs a repaired base and a shower. And this is all fine. It’s absolutely all that I need. And as stark as that may sound to some of you, fear not. It's pretty tidy. Last summer it was repainted a happy shade of light blue a friend gave us after repai

It's almost time to start trapping a new hawk for the fall falconry season! I am very excited, as always, to sweep out the mews and start inventorying jesses and snaps and leashes and gear. Falconry has become as much a part of the end of summer as back-to-school shopping was for me as a kid. Only instead of trapper keepers and new jeans bought at the Vanity Fair Outlets in PA I'm searching frozen quail suppliers online to feed a tiny dinosaur. The details of life change but