Dear Friends and Partners,
Welcome to Alderspring’s weekend edition newsletter!
In this letter is Glenn’s weekly story, a suite of pics about work on the ranch this week, what’s happening in our freezer, and a recipe to cook!
Want to follow along more day-to-day? Find us on Instagram and Facebook.
And, as always, if you have any questions, observations, or comments, just shoot us an email to Kelsey at help[at]alderspring[dot]com.
Next shipping day is Oct 18!
Place your order by Sunday at midnight to get it shipped out on Monday!
Looking for this week’s featured cuts? Head to the page below. Scroll on down for Glenn’s story and other newsletter stuff!
This week’s cuts include ground beef and Wild Hunter pet provisions! Also, lamb and chicken are both back in!!!
This Week on the Ranch
Firewood. It heats our homes. On Alderspring, 4 homes heat from wood and wood only, due to its great abundance in the rocky peaks that surround us. These forests have always had fire in them and insect damage, and we pick out dead trees for our home fires. If not burned, eventually, they will burn anyway, and if burned, removing them will make room for new starts to replace them, and prevent reburning them when a charred overstory falls to the ground and re-accumulates fuel loading.
Reburning can wipe out forest regeneration and “bake” forest soils into a lifeless pottery-like substance. Basically, the extreme heat kills all soil biota.
On a logging morning, we all load up saws, axes, dogs (eight on this trip) and trailers and pickups, and grab about 40 hot dogs and a dutch oven full of beans, and head for the mountains. We’ll make cowboy coffee, hot chocolate and tea, and cook over the open fire with hot-dogs on sticks served on hot coal-fired tortillas. The beans are almost half bacon and yellow corn.
And all of the fare is pretty much to die for halfway through a logging day. It is hard and a little brutal work, but so very rewarding at the end of the day when 9 cords is stacked high on trailers at dusk and the 30 miles of dirt road is illuminated by headlights of dusty pickups headed for home.
Someday, you should join us. Never is hard and extremely strenuous work so satisfying–and fun. -Glenn
Quote of the Week
“Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.”
―John Muir, Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, botanist, zoologist, and glaciologist.
The Echo of Bison
You could feel them with your back against the black prairie earth before you saw them, and even before you heard them. All else was silent, except for the occasional song of a prairie warbler. A stunning dome of cloudless blue azure sky filled your vision beyond the grassland horizon. The thunder of a million hooves spoke to you from deep within the soul of soil over miles of undulating and waving in the wind grasslands. Along with the rocks, the thigh deep grasses—little blue-stem, blue grama, and switchgrass of the short grass prairie offered cover to you and your fellow ambushers.
There were only a few of you stashed along the sedimentary badlands rimrock that lined this wide coulee. It led to water at the shallow river at the foot of the hill; you were all well-armed with razor sharp obsidian and chert arrow tips. These in turn were mounted on ends of shafts made of the ubiquitous straight stemmed red-osier dogwood that lined most creeks at your winter home at the foot of the mountains.
It was a mixed herd of prairie dwellers, you knew. You’d seen them before. They were likely bison, pronghorn, elk and deer. Often, they would travel separately when just searching for new grass. But when moved by predator, the animal groups would mix into massive herds on the move.
Featured Weekly Cuts
A quick summary of this week’s deals
(As always, only you newsletter readers have access to these discounts)!
This week you can get 10% off on both the following cuts:
- Organic pastured butter! Fresh from our friends at Lifeline Farm!
- New York Strips! (consistency, flavor, and tenderness in 1 steak)
- Magnum Fatty Grind (phytochemical and flavor-packed pasture fat!)
- Fattier Burger Patties (for the ultimate juicy burger)
Also note: Chicken and Lamb are both in stock!
Remember, our inventories are VERY dynamic! Our goal is to turn it over 2 times a month to offer you the very freshest product right off of Alderspring’s pastures.
Weekly Happenings: Photos from the Ranch
We spent a day last weekend out in the woods getting firewood for the winter! Our house is heated solely by wood, so going firewooding is absolutely necessary for us each fall. Luckily it’s usually a fun day with family and friends, some Alderspring hotdogs and coffee cooked over a campfire for lunch!
Here’s Glenn in his natural habitat (or one of them, anyway). He spent years as a forester before switching to ranching. He’s chopped down (and planted) a lot of trees over the years!
This is Matt, who rode the range with us this summer and came back last weekend for firewooding!
6th sister, Annie. She’s one of the hardest workers you’ll ever meet and does it all with a smile. Firewooding with her is inevitably filled with a lot of laughter and yelling (Annie is not the quiet type).
Montana, one of this summer’s awesome range riders, came back for a couple days to help with firewooding and hang out on the ranch for a few days!
Jeremiah has been with us for a long time, beginning way back in the early days of “inherding” our cattle on the range. He was one of the ones camping out in the rain with the cattle when we were still figuring this whole thing out and cow camp was a pretty primitive place! Now Jeremiah runs a lease ranch near Alderspring, and was luckily able to come firewooding last weekend and bring his chainsawing skills.
Caryl hung out with the 2 grandkids for the afternoon and kept an eye on them (and taught them how to put logs on the fire very carefully)!
We got quite a haul of firewood for our house, Jeremiah’s, and Abby and Ethan’s!
And that’s it for this week! Thanks again for partnering in what we do!
Glenn, Caryl, cowgirls and cowboys at Alderspring
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.
Your partnership in Alderspring helps us maintain what is unique in today’s agricultural world; Alderspring is a Carbon NEGATIVE and Climate POSITIVE operation. We ran the numbers, and our cows help us capture more carbon in the ground each year on our irrigated pastures than we release!
These newsletters are becoming the highlight of my email week. Absolutely love them! Who knew that a forester/cattle rancher could post so poetic? Now if only my retiree’s budget would permit me to acquire more of the wonderful meats.