Scroll down for Glenn’s weekly story and updates from the ranch this week!

this week’s coupon cuts

Remember, only you newsletter readers have access to these discounts!

Next shipping day is May 22nd! Get your order in by Sunday at midnight to have it shipped the next day. *We will not be shipping Monday, May 29th due to the Memorial Day holiday.

And, new + recently restocked…

Restock on hot dogs! Stock up now on all the grillers for memorial day. This upcoming Monday will be our last shipping day until June 5th, don’t miss it!

If you have any questions, observations, or comments, just send Kelsey an email at help[at]alderspring[dot]com.

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This week on the ranch…

We had a cloudburst come over the ranch a few days ago. It brought some lovely moisture…and this rainbow!

That’s daughter Annie and ranch hand Brittany, and they’re smiling because they just loaded a mama cow into this trailer directly from the pasture. It takes a feat of some careful and quiet handling to convince a cow to hop into that trailer! They are loading this cow up to bring her into the barn. Her calf died a a few days before (we try to save them all, but occasionally a calf is born weak or something just goes wrong). But it’s a story that ends well, because the crew successfully convinced her to adopt a twin calf that needed a mom (the twin mom couldn’t care for both). Now the twin and this cow are paired up out on pasture, and it makes us happy to see them both thriving. 

Here’s Annie bottle-feeding another calf earlier this week. This calf has a mom, but he was born small and weak and didn’t have the strength to nurse. Annie was bottle feeding him to help him get started. Once he figured it out, she helped him connect with his mom and learn to nurse from her instead of the bottle. After a little more help, now the little guy and his mom are both out on pasture doing well.

From Melanie this week:
We’re fast approaching turnout on the range for the summer (Glenn is hoping for next week, grass and dependent!) As such, we took a bunch of our horses out for a tune up ride out on the BLM land behind the ranch. Some of these horses are well broke with only one summer on the range under their belts. Everything went well, with the exception of my colt suddenly blowing up and bucking me off on the hard pack dirt driveway coming back into the ranch after a good ride out. Not sure what happened there, but I do know I wasn’t ready and didn’t stand a chance, and that my face was the first point of contact with the ground! I have a pretty nice shiner to start the summer! Just the way it goes with colts sometimes.

~Melanie

Our sheep arrived this week. They’re lambed out by our friends on the Quality Organics ranch in Montana. We then finish them on our certified organic pastures. Daughter Becky is chief shepherd, placing them on great spring grass cutting the day and folding them at night in a safe (from coyotes and mountain lions) pasture enclosure near our home where Allie-Shacker, our Great Pyrenees keeps watch over them at night.

That’s Scott, manager of the Alderspring’s Tendoy Ranch checking out the latest acquisition. It’s a almost new ‘Sickle Bar’ mowing machine that he’ll use to clip weeds that compete with our regenerative cover crops. Most practitioners use herbicides which we have no interest in due to the fact that they have toxic effects on many more organisms than target weeds.

Want to follow along more day-to-day? Find us on Instagram and Facebook.

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Quote of the Week

“The sky,” he wrote on his slate, “is my living room. The woods are my parlor. The lonely lake is my bath. I can’t remain behind a fence all my life.”

―E.B. White, The Trumpet of the Swan

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Dear Friends 

It’s May 19, and forest fire smoke fills our entire valley. We can’t see the mountains. We’ve never seen smoke this early before. A tinge of panic is written on faces around town. Confused discussions in the checkout line ensue about the whereabouts of the fire. After all, it was a record snow year, and just before the smoke settled in, the mountains were still covered with the white left from a serious winter. 

Jet streams, La Nina and El Nino are the culprits, they say. It turns out that while we were getting hammered with winter snows, our friends in Alberta and British Columbia were simply not. It’s dry up there. 

And on fire. 

So here we are, with second hand smoke. It’s part of the natural cycle of things, and we don’t get too alarmed. Because even smoke and fire have fruits. And this story is about one of them…

Happy Trails,

Glenn

Read the story on our blog by clicking below!

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And that’s it for this week!

Thanks again for partnering in what we do!

Glenn, Caryl, cowgirls and cowboys at Alderspring.

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We’ve been crafting our pastured protein here in Idaho’s Rocky Mountains for nearly 30 years and delivering it direct to our partners for nearly as long. This is wild wellness, delivered from our ranch to your door.

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