Life update

Third week April, look over the barn on the right hand side of the picture and you can
see the snow in the mountains.  This is very late for us to have snow.  I wouldn't
mind it but for all the rain we keep getting.  The pasture likes all the rain!

The weather is totally hosing me.  I know I could not be a full time farmer.  I am already bald, I think the stress of the weather alone would do me in.  I have not really been able to do any real farm work.  It has either been raining, freezing or the wind is blowing 30-50 mph.  Wind is the issue today.  Actually, I am hoping the wind blows for the next four days and dries some of the ground out.  I could dig post holes this weekend if the wind will die down, no rain comes and I can rent a tractor for this Saturday.  That is a lot of ifs.  I am not holding my breath.  This is killing me and really pushing my schedule back.  I wanted to be done with the fencing by the end of June.  At this rate I won't even get started until the middle of May.  Mother nature is being naughty.

We decided to lock the sheep back into their Winter pasture area.  They were going all over the place which was not so bad, but they started to get out into the CRP (means I need to go tighten that gate and drive in a couple of metal posts) but the biggest problem was discovered on Friday morning by me.  I was opening the passenger door of my new car (to empty out the trash so the wife could ride with me) when I noticed these crescent shaped superficial marks on the side of my car.  The light had to hit the marks just right but there were lots of marks and they all followed the same path and were in a six inch swath.  It took me about five minutes to realize that the marks were rub marks.  Our young ram, Lucky, had been rubbing his new horns on my car to get the velvet off of them!!!  His horns are only about three inches long now.  The moron, doesn't he know that is unacceptable.  Use the fence like everyone else or the underside of the bridge.

On Monday we had a quail crisis.  My daughter called me on the cell phone to say the quail had something funny on one of its legs and wasn't walking.  I told her to clean it off so she could see what was wrong.  She was worried about causing the quail to die, I informed her that you cannot fix something if you don't know what is wrong, so she went out and did the inspection.  The quail had broken her leg.  After thinking for a while we think it was the cats.  The cats wander in and out of the coop all day.  They kill wild quail and this cage had a wire bottom so we think one of the cats jumped up and tried to get at the quail, it panicked and broke its leg.  So I had to put it out of its misery.  So now no more quail.  That just did not work out well.  So we are not going to do quail again.  I told Sarah she could have a rabbit (a single rabbit!) if she got her grades up and cleaned out the cage.  So we will see.

My chicken butler arrived and I am stoked.  I figure it will only take me a couple of hours to install it.  I am just going to add some spacers to move it away from the wall and in line with the door opening. I am going to do that this weekend.  The chicken butler is going to have priority.  If there is no wind I will cut the last two holes in the garbage can holder/outhouse.  There is so much dust with the wind blowing it is hard to see where you are cutting.  On a major positive note the garbage men just opened the door, emptied our can and put it back in the enclosure and shut the door!!  We have the best garbage men.

The baby chicks are starting to get big.  I even opened up the door so they could go into their own outside pen, but none of them seem interested in going outside yet.  Need a no wind warm day to entice them.   I planted grass in their yard this fall and it is already eight inches tall.  I figure that replanting the grass in there will end up being a yearly occurrence.  Our trees don't even want to leaf out yet it is so cold.  The only real color we have is the Winter pears are in bloom.  I am not sure who is going to pollinate them but they are really blooming.

Winter pears in bloom