Barn
Be careful what you wish for! It has been so dry, we have wished over and over again for rain or snow. Looks like we got what we wished for. Now the digging out begins.
Chicken coop
East garden
Drifting by the south garden
Snow in the south garden
Car, half buried
Update: Neighbor just came by with a HUGE tractor and scooped out our driveway. : D
Filed under: Weather
I was reading the Farmer’s Almanac last year in which I learned that Ember Days were used to predict the weather for the succeeding season. Ember Days are part of the ancient western Christian liturgical calendar and they were penitential days that corresponded more or less with the change of season. I recorded the weather on last year’s winter Ember Days and on this spring’s Ember Days and it is not looking good for water if the predictor is true.
And just out of the blue the other day, a friend told me her mother said that potatoes needed to be in the ground by Good Friday. Yikes! I’ve got to get busy with that garden!
I find the gardening sources that make reference to religious feast days quite fascinating. I’d like to get hold of a monastic gardening book. Any of my readers know of one?
Poor Rosie. The day she calved her udder was so full the milk just dripped and sometimes sprayed out of her. Her skin was stretched so tight that I thought it would tear. Her udder looked like a blown up rubber glove with the teats pointed outward. She was so full we could only get a thumb and a forefinger on each teat and because they pointed away from her center, we had to milk one at a time. We were milking about a half gallon at a time out of a cow who was producing about 2 1/2 gallons of milk twice a day. Two days after she calved we had her in a stanchion for 5 hours trying to milk her.
The next day we reached our record cold temperatures for the year. (I hope anyway!) The high that day was -7 and the low -16 and the wind was howling at about 25-30 miles an hour. The guy we bought our cow from just happened to be in Colorado and just happened to call to see how everything was going. He offered to loan us a milking machine, and while I had been reluctant to use a milking machine, I decided to take him up on his offer. That is the smartest decision I’ve made in recent history. We drove 2 hours one way to where he was to pick up the machine, came home and milked out the cow. It took three people to work the machine but we made it happen and we did it again the next morning.
We brought the new calf into our kitchen because we don’t have the facilities to maintain calves at a toasty 40 degrees when the weather is like that.
We are continuing to keep her warm in our kitchen as the temperatures have been below zero and in the single digits at night, but we’re looking forward to relocating her tomorrow when we expect to have low temperatures in the 20’s. I really need to be convinced about this global warming thing…
Six days later, this is what it looked like here.
Morning after the blizzard
Snow drifted by the coop
Out the front door
Sunrise on Friday
Snow drifted in front of the house
Fall…We blinked; we missed it.
This is just wrong. We were less than a month into autumn when we had a wee little storm blow through. This is what it looked like this morning, two days later, after it had a chance to melt a little.
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- The corral after the storm
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- Hay rolls after the storm
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- This is what season?
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- North side of the house after the storm
Filed under: Weather
Rainy day
I woke up to the most pleasant and unusual sound this morning, rain on the rooftop. I miss the rain. Colorado is one of the sunniest states you can live in and most of our precipitation is the cold, white, silent type. Actually, it started as rain and then turned into slush. It rains slushies here. Juliana told me about an Indian concept of masculine rain and feminine rain. Masculine rain is accompanied by a storm of more or less violence. Feminine rain is the soft, soothing, soaking kind. This was a feminine rain. So nice….
This was really no big deal as we had over 24 hours notice. We just made sure we had groceries and battened down the hatches. It lasted for about 24 hours. Here are some pictures of what I saw when I went to check on the horses this morning.
A woodpecker warming himself after the blizzard
Mouse eating Jazzmin's hay. Barn cat must have migrated to Florida.
The girls in the corral
Snow drifted on the north interior wall of the barn
More drifted snow in the barn
Chicken coop in the background almost completely obstructed by a drift. The drift is covering the future garden area.
The cars
Thomas atop a drift
Looking south over the garden area
Filed under: Weather
After some snow
Normally when we have a bit of snow, it looks like this:
ice crystals on the gate
Cows across the street
Frost on the cottonwood
But today it looked a little different. We got up with the intention of going to church, looked outside, then at each other and realized we wouldn’t be going anywhere today. After about 5 hours of blizzard conditions the weather alerts finally started to come in. Apparently, they changed their minds after looking out the window. Brrrr! This is what it looked like this morning when I went to bust the ice in Jazzmin’s water trough:
It isn't always a winter wonderland
Miserable cows
And then there was poor Jazzmin. No longer able to graze in the pasture, she found her way to the barn where hay (oatmeal without sugar compared to the pasture grass) awaited her. Here is what she looked like this morning after giving up hope of finding any more fresh grass.
Poor snow-encrusted horse
The City Girl Farmer 