While driving to an alpaca show in Kentucky a few years ago, Debbie Patonai and Spencer Reames decided to listen to music on their cargo van’s radio. Among the alpacas they were transporting that day was Phlint, a male who spontaneously started singing along with the radio. “Phlint sang all the way to Louisville,” says Patonai. “He kept making his humming noise, and whenever we changed the station, Phlint hummed differently.”
Belgians — those big draft horses with gentle dispositions — are beautiful. Just ask brothers George and Ted Barhorst of Fort Loramie. The Barhorst family was honored at the 2017 Ohio State Fair for 75 years of showing Belgian horses. Their grandfather, Bernard Barhorst, started the tradition, which continues today.
“I don’t ever remember a time when we didn’t raise, breed, and show Belgians,” Ted says. “We have 12 of them right now.”
A card table laden with amber honey, a small cart burdened with shiny rhubarb and lush green asparagus, a picnic table flush with tomatoes or peaches. Sweet! Your eyes settle on fresh picks but see there’s no one around — and there it is: a coffee can, a cigar box, or a little door with a slot and a sign reading “Money” or “Pay here.” Welcome to Ohio: the land of honest food and plenty of it.
Dairy farming is not an easy life — the hours are long, milk prices are volatile, and smaller farms are rapidly disappearing as the industry consolidates. Kyle Sharp, the owner of Stoutsville-based Sharp Family Dairy, knows this all too well. His day starts at 4 a.m., and it’s often past 8 at night by the time he’s finished milking his herd of just over 70 cows.
Kitchen gardens are sprouting up more and more as folks take the farm-to-table practice into their backyards — and now’s the time of year when the first signs of spring have many of us eagerly anticipating those tasty tomatoes, juicy melons, fresh salad greens, crisp cucumbers, and other fresh edibles that come from our own gardens. These tips will help power up your planting and maximize your yields for a tastier, more productive kitchen garden.
Color and texture are tried-and-true ways to add interest to your garden, but gardeners may not always stop to consider shapes. Contrast feathery with bold, tall and slender with wide and round, or any other variations you can imagine. Here are a few plants that just might inspire you.
Cannas are wonderful large additions to any garden, be it a border or a foundation bed. The many varieties provide gorgeous, exotic blooms in a variety of colors, but sometimes the leaves are the stars.
Along a narrow road that snakes through the woodsy hills north of Zanesville, Ripple Rock Farms sits on 15 country acres where Guernsey-Muskingum Electric Cooperative members Craig and Traci Bell have lived for several years.
By far, the question Kevin and Debbie Kleer hear most this time of year is, “Can reindeer really fly?”
The Kleers run Kleerview Farm near Bellville, Ohio, in southern Richland County, and kids are there with their parents mostly to pick out a Christmas tree and see Santa. The real attraction, however, is the Kleers’ small herd of nine live reindeer — Blitzen, Noel, Belle, Nicholas, Crystal, Jingles, Clarice, Felice, and Cherry — which obviously prompts lots of questions, from both kids and adults.
To Roger Rhonemus, it’s almost like a Christmas bonus.
Every year for about 20 years now, Rhonemus, who farms 800 acres of corn, soybeans, and hay in Adams County, looks forward to receiving his capital credits check from Adams Rural Electric Cooperative.
Two decades ago, Rhonemus, 60, used those annual checks, which typically go out to Adams REC members each November, to buy Christmas presents for his three children. Now that the kids are grown with families of their own, he uses it to buy presents for his eight grandchildren. And he couldn’t be happier.
