Schoonover Farm Blog

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Rosemary, our Dexter cow, is due any day.  We are hoping for a bull calf.  We plan on butchering Dillweed, our Dexter steer, and Velvet, our Shetland yearling ram, later this month.  If Greta, our Highland cow, proves to be  infertile we plan on butchering her in November.  We plan on butchering our rooster chicks and our turkeys in November or December.  The piggies we will likely butcher in February.  The Araucana chicks will be butchered in 6 months if they prove to be difficult (my experience with Araucana roosters has not been good).  We sell our lamb, pork and beef so let us know if you are interested.

to Orondo to pick crabapples was a little different this year.  We started off by heading to my father’s burnt cabin to help clean up the debris.  We got all the rest of the metal collected into piles, and some of it was trailered away.  We also got the rest of the debris collected into piles ready for disposal.  This is the first time I had seen the devastation in person.  It was impressive to see.  There are a couple of things Tom had forgotten to take photos of the previous weekend.  One was the tree that my niece Loki is hugging in the slideshow.  It does not look like it is going to make it.

The other is a photo of the homestead cabin.  It definitely did not make it.

But the small graveyard in front of it did survive.

The time at the Snag Canyon burn was not all work.  I did find a little time to knit in the camper van.

Then we headed to Orondo to pick the crabapples.  Here is the camper van in the orchard.

We then headed home through the remains of the Carlton Complex fire.  Here are some of the burnt hills.

Here is one of the burnt down homes.

I brought home two morbid souvenirs of my father’s cabin.  One is melted aluminum from his machines, and the other is a melted plate.

The air had a crispness to it this weekend.  I am very ready for summer to be over and the rains to come.

I started working as a pediatrician at Skagit Valley Medical Center in Mount Vernon, WA.

There I worked with great people

In 2008 I became a pediatric hospitalist and began working at Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland and Providence Hospital in Everett.  I worked with amazing people at these facilities as well.

Last December I became fulltime as a pediatric hospitalist at Skagit Valley Hospital in Mount Vernon again.  Now I am working with several of the people I was with before 2008.

In these 20 years I have met amazing families and kids.  I have dealt with incredible sadness as well as happiness.  And despite my occasional grumblings I cannot imagine another “day job” for me.  And twenty years has gone by very quickly.

Now back to farming!