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February 21, 2008
Farm Report
I think I have to recognize that I'm only going to get this farm report post up maybe once a week or two weeks. I get distracted by other things.
On Sunday, we got about 8 inches of heavy, heavy snow. It was melting away nicely on Monday, but a cold front turned that slush to ice by Monday evening. The county road that goes through the farm was a sheet of ice, and I got stuck, and then in attempting to get unstuck, I slid into a very deep ditch.
Yesterday, I finally called a tow truck, and Bob winched the car out of the ditch, only then I could still not get enough traction to get up the hill to our driveway, so I had to back down to the bottom of the hill and gun it to get thru the icy spots.
Naturally, I have to haul hay out to the horses once or twice a day during this freeze. It's always a challenge to get the hay out without the horses fighting each other to keep it all to themselves. I alternate areas in the pasture where I put the hay - keeps them guessing, so I have a chance to spread it out in a wide enough area so each horse has his or her own space.
Lady, an aged horse, of sometimes bad temper, has a mean, mean kick - if anyone comes near her little pile of hay and grain, she can be pretty vicious. I watched her chase Petey down the other day - he slid and fell down hard on the icy/snowy ground, and scared the heck out of me because his legs ended up sticking thru the barbed wire fence - fortunately, he stayed calm, stood up and carefully extricated his legs from the wire without getting any cuts. I had no idea he was smart enough to do that!
But the horses seem to be doing mostly okay. Willy, though, my precious old horse, Willy, the best horse on earth, is having a hard time with this winter, I think. He stays away from the young horses, and whenever he sees me leaving the house, he whinnies for me. So I try to feed him separately whenever possible.
I tried getting him into the barn to give him a break from the brutal wind one night, but he actually kicked down one of the stall walls to escape - he wants to be in the pasture with the other horses.
Hopefully, when I get my angora goats, they will keep Willy company in the barn, and he won't do that again!
Chickens are fine, but I'm not getting any eggs right now. Seems that Helga has "gone broody", and as soon as any eggs are laid, she pulls them under her, and she seems determined to hatch these eggs, so I'm letting her do that. As cold as it is right now, if she was not setting on them, they would freeze and break before I can get to them, so maybe we can increase our little flock naturally.
Satchmo is still in the garage.
It's snowing again.
I think I'll work on starting some seeds today - I'll take pictures of my setup.
Posted by Beth at February 21, 2008 7:33 AM
Comments
If Vladimir Putin's climatologists are correct (and he's already running a Socialist nation, so has no need for Pope Algore and his minions), we are now getting into global cooling, and some indications of reduced sun output might indicate that the cooling is going to start off rapidly (it just did!) and drastically (might be a Year of No Summer).
Bottom line, you need to get used to hard winters, and you need to equip up for them. You may not have the luxury of waiting out cold spells any longer.
Study the way that farm folks up in MN, WI and the upper Peninsula of MI do animal husbandry. They typically get the winters that you are experiencing this year, but they get them EVERY year and are used to them.
At a minimum, it means training your animals to stay in the barn more. Wind chill affects them as much as us, and you wind up feeding much more high-value store-bought feed when they range, and it gets VERY expensive. Not to mention that is WAY easier ON YOU to feed animals in a barn than it is to feed them out of doors under those brutal conditions.
Bad news last: this evil winter can be expected to last a month longer than usual, so hang back on those veggie starts.
As a weather geek, my stock-in-trade rises during these changeable times....
Posted by: Rivrdog at February 21, 2008 3:14 PM